Babies R Us, in case you've never been inside and only seen its ridiculously recycled title from the window of a speeding car, is just like Toys R Us in that it's a massive, massive warehouse full of things no one needed until the last fifty years or so. There is a registry desk, almost like a check-in console at an airport, and a woman whose computer monitor cycles through a slideshow of anonymous, button-nosed baby faces will print out for you the registry of the mom-to-be with alarming swiftness. And then you're left standing there with a bundle of papers printed with tiny, grainy black and white pictures of products whose purpose and design are utterly baffling. A boppy pillow? A toss-away bottle set?
I tried a systematic search for the Princess bathing set, but soon gave up and just wandered. There is a whole section devoted to bondage-like undergarments meant to ballast your pregnant belly in an arrangement much like the back supports the guys at Home Depot wear. There are little wedge pillows to prop beneath the belly at night, and they're shaped just like the blocks I'm going to ram behind my back tires today when I rotate my tires. There are little pancake pads to shove in a bra to cover lactating nipples, whole shelves of special nipple salves, ad even a cunning little hook thing that allows you to walk around with your pants unzipped without them falling down around your ankles. It was bewildering and not a little unnerving, and finally I had to grab a friendly employee, an Asian guy who was carefully stocking some kind of brightly colored gasket-thing (no idea), and point to a reasonably priced item on the registry and ask, "What is this and where can I find it?"
Here's the thing: none of these items has a remotely explanatory or even adult-speak sounding name. What I finally found, the Floppy Seat, is actually a pretty floral quilty thing that covers the child seat part of a grocery cart and has two little leg holes cut out. It seems like quite a nice idea for the kid-- export the soft, floral comforts of home and drool on that instead of all the god-knows-what that accumulates on shopping cart handles-- but then mom has also got to lug the thing to the grocery store with her. The Floppy Seat boasts a "convenient built-in bag, so you will never lose it," but still. Add that to fifteen bags of groceries and a howling kid, and I could see myself punting it over the roofs of all the SUVs parked next to me.
In line at the register, a little blond girl, maybe two years old, sat facing me in her Floppy Seat-less cart. She was holding a little baby book and when I smiled at her, her face lit up and she threw both hands in the air to wave. She had Down's Syndrome, and when her mother took the book away to pay for it saying "It's not yours" (apparently it was a gift for someone named Shelby) her faced crumpled and she burst into tears. As her mom payed, she made little tapping gestures on her mom's back and kept trying to see her face. The longer her mother's back was turned, the more the girl seemed to panic. When her mom finally turned around, it was clear that it wasn't the book the little girl wanted back, it was some kind of reassurance. The mom smiled and said, "It's OK, I'm sorry I hurt your feelings," and immediately the tears stopped, and the girl smiled again and waved at me like the whole thing had never happened.
It feels weird to have this big baby gift on my dining room table with its accompanying pastel colored bag and tissue paper and card. I realize now that I got the wrong card, that there's a difference between a baby gift and a shower gift-- mine say something about "your new arrival" and technically the arrival's not here yet-- but I'm hoping this is a minor faux pas.
Last night stretched on in more solitude and boredom, and since it looked like the sun was refusing to set and let me off the hook for entertaining myself, I decided to take Abby out for a walk. Unfortunately, it was one of those beautiful evenings where everyone feels the need to be outside and making weird noises. At the world-class barbecue joint downtown, little girls on a makeshift stage were playing electric guitars and singing in this perfectly harmonized, but still really eery way. The acoustics of the surrounding buildings couldn't agree which direction to bounce the sound off to, so I was confused about where exactly the music was coming from until I was right in front of it. Abby is skittish by nature, and as we neared the music she kept trying to tug me off into different directions. She also hates people on skateboards and we came across about ten of them in the course of our travels. Finally I took her to the park and let her off the leash for a while to run. By then it was dark, and though I had a tennis ball with me, I couldn't see where I was throwing it. Abby could, so I just kept heaving it into the darkness and she kept bringing it back.
On our way home, we took a new route through some of the newly built and permanently stalled houses in the walled development north of the park. This place reminds me of the compound in Saudi Arabia because the raw edges of California desert are very clear beyond each newly laid patch of suburban lawn. The trees are all still twiggy infants and sprinklers tick like mad at night trying to fill in the gaps. There are lots of gaps-- home buying has stuttered and died here, and for every completed and occupied house there are three lots with foundations and a few standing pipes and nothing else. It's like seeing big gaps in someone's half-hearted smile.
Near the exit of the compound neighborhood (it has some pretentious name with Villas in it), are the model homes. Lights are on in every room and the windows have no curtains, only painfully dainty sconces, so you get a clear view of everything that could be yours, down to the precisely arranged dining room set and the model sailboats traveling east across the stately mahogany mantle. There are four of these homes, all in a row with less than four feet between them and fenced off with an open gate at the end of the row so that you have to start at one end and then mosey along and admire each in turn, most likely taking a big step up the value ladder at each new house. Walking past them last night made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I could smell the new house smell wafting out of them, maybe from an open window or an AC vent somewhere-- plaster and drywall, plastic wrap, varnish, new carpet. Expectation. Debt.
Do I want all of this was what I was thinking on the walk back home. The baby and the registry and all the separately packaged "convenient" gear and then someday the home and the mortgage and built-in this and marble-top that? What an awful lot of work, what an awful lot of decisions to make on the guess that maybe it'll all work out, maybe you chose the rights things and maybe you need it and can pay for it all. I was still thinking about it when I came home to an empty house, read a book, and went to bed.
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