Children

Desdemona called me the other day.  Said, “Sterling, I need to talk to you.”  Now, don’t ask me why I thought what I’m about to tell you—and please don’t judge me for it, either—because while I consider Des a very close friend of mine, we have only ever been just friends, so I’ll admit it was a little odd that, as soon as she said those seven words, my mind immediately jumped to, ah, Christ, you’re pregnant, with that accompanying and gut-dropping dread that I had done the impregnating.  I don’t know, I think it must’ve been her tone, the way she’d said it, all matter-of-fact and you’re-the-father like.  And it didn’t help, either, that when I asked if everything was okay, she just said to “get down here” and hung up on me.  Didn’t even tell me where “here” was, but I assumed she meant the mall.  It was probably her lunch break, and I figured I could go for one of those pretzels that always smell better than they taste.

So, the whole car ride over there I was trying to convince myself that she wasn’t pregnant and that, even if she was, there was absolutely no way in hell that the kid was mine.  Hell, I’m not ready for a little Sterling Junior.  Just take the hazardous condition of my bachelor pad, for example.  I was on a health kick a few years back, and, during one of the high points, I bought this real intense Bowflex machine off of Craigslist.  I borrowed a friend’s truck and went and picked it up, but it wasn’t until after I’d gotten everything inside and laid out in my living room that I realized there were no instructions.  I only got the bench and tower parts set up before I had to call it quits, so now there are just plates and brackets and pulleys and cables all strewn about.  The thing looks like a medieval torture device, but it does come in handy when I’m doing laundry.  But useful towel- and clothes-rack aside, the thing is a straight up child murderer.  And that’s just the living room.  The entire basement is a no man’s land of dozens of undetonated weapons of mice destruction: the classic mousetraps, spring-loaded and ready to crush skulls; the little bricks of poison, in their appetizing but noxious neon green hues; and the glue traps, which I admit I’m not too keen on, but you gotta do what you gotta do.  Probably the least humane way to rid yourself of the little fuckers.  They say they’ll chew off their own feet to escape, too, but then what good are you at running away if you’ve got no feet?  I guess that’s why they’re mice with little mouse brains and we’re humans with big, smart human brains.  All that’s to say, my house is a no-kid zone.

Well, I got down to the mall, and Des surprised me by meeting me outside at the entrance.  She told me to shut up when I suggested we go grab a pretzel and sit in the food court, which wasn’t very polite, but I followed her to her car anyway, where she ultimately told me about this situation with one of her friends, a third-grade teacher at one of the elementary schools in town.  Turns out, a cataclysmic civil war had broken out among her students, the kids having chosen their respective sides for mysterious and juvenile reasons unbeknownst to her.  But the fighting had gotten worse in recent days, she’d said, making its way inside from the playground to the classroom.  For their size, the smaller ones were being enlisted to camp in the backpack cubbies and to pop out and exact spitball guerilla warfare.  The bigger ones served as the muscle, exacting vicious—and alliterative—titty twisters (or for those more partial to rhymes: purple nurples, nipple cripples), and wedgies of all classifications—atomic, subatomic, the dreaded nuclear.  Parents were starting to complain about the loads of ripped underwear.  One kid, Chives Birmingham, was still in the hospital after receiving a devastating wet willie. 

Yikes, I thought.  That must’ve been an especially wet wet willie.  I wondered how poor Chives was doing, whether he’d ever be able to hear the same way ever again.  When I asked Des what exactly had happened, if he’d ruptured his ear drum or something, how long the attacker’s fingers were, she threw up her hands and let out a puff of exasperation and said “she didn’t fucking know” and didn’t care about “fucking Chives Binghampton.”  I thought about telling her that she’d gotten her cities mixed up but decided against it, but I must’ve had a hurt look on my face, because she quickly apologized.  A little calmer, she said that she just didn’t have time to deal with her friend’s bullshit today, that she’d had an awful day at the trampolines.

I asked her if Rupert was there today.

“Rupert’s there every day,” she said, agitated again. 

I could feel my sails beginning to tatter, unsure how much longer they could continue to be buffeted and battered by the stormy and swirling maelstrom of Des and her feelings.  And it was the unpredictability of her emotions that reminded me of my own from earlier, only an hour or so ago, the fear that my time in bachelordom could be coming to a close, that, sooner rather than later, I’d have to learn how to tie shoelaces from the opposite direction, to cook for more than one, to relearn my multiplications tables.  Oh, God, I wasn’t ready for it, and I felt my own storm beginning to brew within me, and I knew the only way to quell it would be to flat out ask her: are you pregnant?  So, I did.  She sort of just shut down, like a computer that got unplugged, a blank stare on her face, and then she turned to me and smacked my shoulder really hard and told me to fuck off.  She laughed and seemed in a better mood after that, but she never really answered my question?