Jake’s seriousness evaporated at the first sight of Rock. He flat-out loved the guy. He even stole chocolates from his mother’s supply (she noticed, of course), to press, only slightly melted, into Rocky’s pocket. Rocky in turn brought firecrackers and comic books.
“For me?” said Jake, hopeful.
Rocky flopped on the ground and tiredly pushed his hair off his forehead so it would flop right back down, juvenile-delinquent style. “I dunno. You like these things?”
Jake nodded cautiously.
“Whattya got to trade?”
“Hey,” I said. “Are you gambling with my child?”
“I am bartering,” said Rock. “I am trading away these very fine, hardly thumbed comic books for your house. There is no gambling involved.”
“The house is pretty big,” Jake offered. “You don’t have too many comics.”
“I’ll just take your bed,” Rocky told him, “and I’ll throw in the fireworks. The kid owns his bed, right?” he asked me.
Rock sat in the front row for all of Jessie’s recitals — usually just our kids clowning around for our friends — and applauded loudest. I couldn’t figure out how he could have been so often married without kids of his own. When we went to visit Tansy and his wife and children — talk about a fertile crescent! they had seven — Rocky brought individual presents. It took some talking to wrangle an invite, though.
“Why are you keeping your kids from us?” Rocky asked.
“Who says I’m keeping them from you?”
If Tansy himself was small, Mrs. Tansy could hardly be seen with the naked eye. Rocky said that Jessica and I looked ready to stand on top of a wedding cake for a full-sized couple; the Tansys could have stood on ours.
Small, small people, Mr. and Mrs. T. A screen door wouldn’t keep them out of your kitchen. The children seemed normal sized, though there were so many of them it was hard to keep track of ages.
“How do you manage?” I asked Mrs. T., a good-humored, slouch-shouldered woman who loved to feign grumpiness and absentmindedness.
“Who manages?” she said. “I just figure we keep production at this level, we’re bound to turn a profit eventually.”
“Aren’t there seven kids in your family?” Tansy asked me.
“Sure, but that’s different.”
“Why? We like children. They keep showing up. We should send them to the pound?”
“I’ll take your surplus,” Rocky said. There was a set of twin Tansy girls, and they were riding around on Rocky’s feet, one twin per shoe, holding on to his belt.
“When are you going to have your own?” said Tansy.
“These’re good. They match each other, and I think they’ll spruce up the living room. I’ll take them. Fifty cents a pound sound okay?”
“We’re using those,” said Mrs. Tansy.
“We all have to pitch in, Mrs. T. I have no kids, you have extras.”
“Stop bothering Tansy’s wife,” I told him. “Bother your own wife. That’s where babies come from.”
“You better not bother me,” said Mrs. Tansy.
Later, when Mrs. Tansy had gone to put the kids to bed, which involved rounding them up as though she were a Border collie, Rocky and Tansy and I went to their dining room to smoke. The table was covered with white rings from the kids’ milk glasses, burn marks from hot dishes — the Tansys took everything casually. We sat at one end. Rocky poured himself a glass from a decanter that wore a little nameplate that said Gin, though the liquid was brown.
“Don’t think I don’t want kids,” he said. “It’s just not working out that way for Lillian.”
“Oh,” said Tansy.
“She gets pregnant, but then. .” He sighed with the hopeless mystery of it. “Four times. Probably we should—”
“You leave that poor girl alone!” said Tansy. His passion surprised both of us, probably the way Rocky’s casual confession had surprised him, and me. Rocky and I stared at him, and finally I cleared my throat and said, “You’re a fine one to talk, Mr. T.”
“The sadness, I mean.” Tansy settled back in his chair. His feet didn’t touch the ground. “No woman should have to bear that sadness.”
It hadn’t occurred to Rocky to blame himself in any way until Tansy yelled at him. What was he if not an innocent bystander? Nevertheless, within a few months, Lillian and he had adopted Rocky junior, a fat, chortling black-haired baby. Rocky senior joked to the press that in order to keep up with the Sharps, he and Lil had considered taking home half the ward at the Marymount Orphanage, but for now they were just keeping up with Rocky junior.
“We picked out the one who’ll laugh at anything,” Rocky told me. He’d brought the baby over so Lillian could get some beauty rest. She required a great deal of beauty rest, apparently — she turned down all invitations that involved leaving her own house, though she liked throwing theme parties. Rocky made it sound as though she spent hours every day rearranging the furniture.
Junior was ten months old when they brought him home, an excellent age for a baby. Our own baby, nine months older, was fascinated by him. They sat together on the grass where our back lawn sloped down toward the gated swimming pool I’d had installed for Jessica, shaped like a heart because in California you couldn’t have a swimming pool shaped like a mere swimming pool. (I’d suggested the state of Iowa, itself nearly swimming-pool shaped, but Jessica vetoed that.) Our two babies poked at each other and laughed — our baby, like Rocky and Lil’s, was a prodigious giggler.
“This kid—” said Rocky. But then he stopped. “He’s a good kid. Probably above average, but I don’t care if he’s a dope. I hope he is one.”
“He’s not a dope,” I said.
“I just hope he doesn’t remember too much, you know?”
“No,” I said. “You mean whoever his actual mother was? Who remembers that far back?” Rocky junior turned over in the grass and began to graze. His father seemed unconcerned, but I went and flipped him back sunny-side up.
“Me,” said Rocky. “I remember the crib, sure. My father once dropped a slice of meat loaf on my head. You know, that’s my problem. No, no, don’t say it, not the meat loaf: I just remember too much. Everything, every single embarrassing thing I ever did, every rotten name anyone ever called me, every rotten name I ever called someone else. .”
I sat back down. “Comes in handy, that memory.”
“I’d trade it away in a minute if I could. That’s why I want the kid to be forgetful. Happy.”
“He won’t have any bad memories to wish away,” I said, “his childhood will be milk and chocolate cake—”
“He’ll find a way to fuck it up,” said Rocky. “It’s human nature. All’s that matters is how quick you get over it. If you’re lucky, you’ll forget what you need to and revise what you can’t.”
“What a philosophy!” I said. I looked at our kids, both now dozing in the shade of a midget palm tree. Maybe he couldn’t tell, but I knew they were both geniuses, beloved, as lucky as a pair of loaded dice.
Compared to Rocky junior, our own baby was not really a baby anymore: she was nearly two, though she was still as plump and milky as an infant. One day you look at your kid and see that she’s become a child, a little person, but it happens to every kid at a different time. Thinner arms and legs, a more muscular mouth, hair that needs cutting. The whole world of noninfant expressions: babies do not smirk, but toddlers can. Our baby had not outgrown her baby ways, though her older brothers had become actual little people by the time they were one year old. Betty — I love that name, the way it sounds like Hattie but luckier — did not talk much. She gestured. She waved like a starlet. And then there was her giggle, God how she giggled, slow at other things but at laughter a genius!