Guy sank down — thoroughly emasculated — into his seat. The woman looked Japanese. Guy later told Evan that he had spoken so freely because he thought she couldn’t understand English.
Guy Chillwater had a chance to talk the whole matter over with his two oldest daughters — his teenagers Janie and Carol Ann — as the three stood in the audience line, waiting to be seated for a taping of that night’s Tonight Show. “Your mother says it bothers you two — the fact that I want to bring another kid into this family.”
“It does a little, Dad,” said Carol Ann, who was seventeen and wise. “Because of how much you want to give us a little brother. We don’t need a little brother. Really. It’s okay.”
“How do you feel, Janie? Wouldn’t you like to have a little brother?”
Fifteen-year-old Janie contorted her lips and nose into a look of mild annoyance. “Whatever floats your boat, Dad.”
“Don’t you want someone to carry on the family name? It’s not a very common name. It deserves wider distribution.”
“It’s a strange name, Dad,” said Carol Ann. “Sometimes people think I made it up.”
“I think it sounds Indian,” said Janie.
“You act like that’s a bad thing,” said Guy.
Janie shrugged. “I’m just saying.”
Carol Ann said, “I just think you need to respect women a little bit more, Dad. Men may have had all the power in this country since, like, forever, and look at where that’s gotten us. I think you need to give the women of the world some credit for trying to change things for the better.”
Guy thought about this while he was watching all the women chattering away in front of him on The Tonight Show soundstage. Johnny Carson had the week off; the substitute host for that afternoon’s taping was Joan Rivers. Her guests were Mary Lou Retton and Dame Judith Anderson, who was appearing on screens across America that summer as the Vulcan High Priestess T’Lar in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
Dame Judith Anderson, as Guy’s mother Edith would tell everyone that night as the two families and their matriarch gathered in Evan and Amy’s TV room to eat pizza and watch delayed broadcasts of the Olympic competitions they’d missed that day, was eighty-seven years old. She’d had a long and imminently rewarding career as an actress. Dame Judith had probably never thrown a baseball in her life, but no doubt made her mother and, yes, her father very, very proud. Edith pictured Dame Judith’s father watching her sinister portrayal of Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, mentally tormenting poor Joan Fontaine to the brink of suicide, then clapping his hands together and crying, “A capital performance, my dear girl! You nearly scared the wee out of me!”
Two days later, as two of Guy and Regina’s daughters and Evan and Amy’s two daughters, accompanied by Regina and Amy themselves, stalked shopping-minded celebrities up and down Rodeo Drive, Guy and his mother sat on a bench in the floral wonderland that was the gussied-up campus of the University of Southern California (and site of the McDonald’s Swim Stadium), digging into a single Wendy’s Frosty with separate plastic spoons.
“So what’s this all about, Guy? You know you can tell me. You’ve told me everything since you were a boy. Remember when you were twelve and you had that inflammation on your rectum? Other boys your age would have suffered in manful silence, but you came right out with it.”
Guy winced. His mother was only sixty-eight, but she had the habit, common among those a few years older than her, of turning the self-censorship switch to the off position when it seemed convenient.
Mother and son could hear, not too far away, the voice of the diving announcer giving the results of the previous hour’s finals. Nearby, a large group of Olympics spectators had gathered to trade pins. Guy’s youngest daughters, Jackie and Belinda, were among them. Belinda, at the young age of nine, Guy had earlier noted to his mother, was a skilled trader. She had even acquired pins from a couple of the boycotting countries — a commendable feat.
“I just remember Dad telling me once that the proudest moment of his life was the day I was born. Not Amy, I’m sorry to say, but me — his only son. He said it made him prouder than helping to defeat the Nazis. Even prouder than the month he was named top salesman at Holiday Motors.”
Edith leaned in and said in a mock confidential whisper: “I’ve got news for you, scout. It’s not such an accomplishment. Ask one of the biologists in that science building over there. Sometimes a man gives the woman he impregnates an X and sometimes it’s a Y. It’s all chance. There’s no skill to it at all.”
“I’m just saying that it made him proud to have a son.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why?”
“Why did it make him proud, Guy — except that this is the crack-brained way the world got set up, and your father was always one to follow the crowd. If there was one thing that I would have changed about him, it was the fact that he let too many other people—men—influence how he saw the world. You’re different from your father in that way. At least I’ve always thought you were different, because I’ve always believed that you had a little of your mother’s independent streak running through you. So let me ask you: have I spent my whole life moping around because I wasn’t born with a pud in the place of a Lady Slit? The world is what we make it, scout, and you have four wonderful daughters and a wife who makes me a proud mother-in-law every day of the week, and it breaks my heart that you and she and those lovely girls have to live all the way back in Connecticut and not here in Southern California, where I can dispense grandma-hugs whenever I get the notion. And here’s the other thing: Regina’s womb is tired. She’s almost forty-one. She doesn’t need to be having any more babies, just so you can roll the dice again in hopes of getting a boy. You need to give this up, honey, and be proud of what you have.”
Guy bowed his head. Without raising it, he said, “Regina and I made love last night.”
“Was that what you were doing? I heard moaning; I thought you’d eaten something that didn’t agree with you.”
“We didn’t use protection.”
Edith’s face fell. “Oh, honey, no.” Then Edith thought for a moment. “Let’s be realistic. What are the odds?”
The odds, as it turned out, were very good. Regina, still fertile into her forties, got pregnant. Regina said that she didn’t think she would — that she was throwing a bone to her husband, whose obsession with having a son was ruining the first really good vacation the family had had in years. Not to mention their enjoyment of the Olympic games.
There was no question that they would have the baby. Regina believed in reproductive rights for every woman; she also believed in her own right to give birth to whatever baby took it to mind to start growing inside of her — be it boy or girl.
Guy Chillwater didn’t want to know the sex of the child beforehand, so he didn’t look at the sonogram. Regina promised that she wouldn’t look at the sonogram either.
The obstetrician looked at it, but kept a very good poker face.
A little less than nine months after the closing ceremonies of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics — in which Guy and Regina, and Guy’s mother, Edith, and Guy’s sister, Amy, and her husband, Evan, and Guy and Regina’s four daughters, and Amy and Evan’s two daughters and one son sat in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and watched a nearly interminable sequence of fireworks to the tuneful accompaniment of multiple verses of “All Night Long (All Night)” sung by the talented Mr. Lionel Richie — Regina delivered unto Guy a precious little five-and-a-half-pound girl.