“Sorry,” Kyle mumbles, nuzzling his face into my chest. He’s finished. I pet his damp forehead and his curly hair.
“I’m sorry,” I apologize. “Sometimes it’s weird for me at work.”
Going back on set when I know I have semen inside of me reminds me of that urban myth about a chemical that will turn all the water around people’s legs purple if they pee in the pool. I kind of expect that one day, while walking across the Rainbow River Bridge over to the Sharing Seat, I will look down and realize my crotch is flashing like a police siren due to some product that detects seminal fluid on the sets of children’s shows.
Kyle very sweetly helps redo my ponytail and screw my mask back on. The inside of the mask is disgusting; it almost looks like the hide from a real animal. I’ve never asked what it is. I can imagine the producer looking me straight in the eye and saying, “We recycled some old Nazi lampshades.” It smells kind of like a cellar, if the cellar were filled with the musk of adolescent deer.
Kyle gives me a kiss on my mouse cheek and turns to leave when Missy appears out of nowhere like something from The Shining. Before she even opens her mouth I know that it is going to be horrible; I can feel the psychic energy she’s drawing from my brain being sucked out the left side of my head underneath my ear.
“Why won’t you give Ratty a baby? Is something wrong with your seeds?”
Kyle shoots me a betrayed look at first, and I shake my giant mouse head “No,” as if to say, I never told a child that your sperm might be deficient, but then reason seems to soften into him—he does know Missy, after all.
Kyle puts on a horrific fake smile that is so scary; it’s like he’s wearing invisible clown paint. He squats down to be eye-level with the demon. “That’s none of your business, is it cutie?”
I decide it’s best to intervene. “Bye, Kyle,” I smile, motioning for Missy to follow me as we leave my dressing room. Missy grabs my tail a little too tightly and uses it to pull me to our start positions for the “Goodbye Should Just Be Called Catch You Later!” dance.
“What do you see in him anyway?” asks Missy. Then she giggles.
When Missy’s mother called me for help, she caught me at a weak moment. I hadn’t been able to sleep all night, and around three a.m. I got up and watched a horrific birthing show on television. They showed babies coming out of crotches and then big jellyfish afterbabies, again coming out of crotches. The odd part was how I was more jealous than disgusted. I wanted to be the one screaming inside of a hot tub while Kyle rubbed my back and my cartoon stomach morphed and dropped out our very own child. Suddenly it was six a.m.; I’d been secretly crying since about four.
“Hello?”
Even as I picked up the phone, I wondered why I was picking up the phone; it was six in the morning. The answer, of course, was that I hoped it would be a tiny fetus calling on some human tissue receiver, asking if it could please leave its mommy and crawl into me.
“Hello?” There was a pause and then the strained voice added, “Blessed day.”
“I don’t go to church.” I started to hang up, but there was the sound of protest.
“No, wait—this is Mrs. Gowers, Missy’s mom. I’m sorry to call so early but I have a bit of an emergency.”
Apparently two of her other star children (she has three, Missy and a set of twin boys, all of them on television, all Village of the Damned genetically engineered-looking) had a callback and Missy’s nanny was sick. “When I told Missy that I didn’t know what to do with her, she specifically asked to spend the day with you.” Mrs. Gowers paused. “She likes working with you I suppose.”
Mrs. Gowers does not like me. I’m not beautiful and therefore am not a good role model for Missy.
“Sure,” I agreed. At first I thought we could spend the day like her siliconeasaurus mother would want us to: get mani/pedis, buy some pink things with ruffles, practice walking. But when Missy arrived she was very curious about the size of our house (“Are you poor? How poor are you? Are you ever, like, hungry but you can’t eat because food costs a lot to you?”), and these questions gave me a better idea.
Munchkin Burger touts itself as “the finest mini-burger palace in the land.” Missy was the only child there who wasn’t morbidly obese.
“Mom wouldn’t like it if she knew I was here,” Missy giggled. The skin around her mouth had taken on a greasy sheen.
“It’s called pigging out,” I said. This was Missy’s good side. Even though I knew she would tell her mother all about it later, pretend she hated it and make me out to be a total villain, here she was: my partner in crime. Eater of the forbidden fruit.
As the day went on, my urge to defile her perfection grew extreme. I had the thought of driving her down to some cantinas in Mexico to see if they’d let me drink free in exchange for Missy washing dishes.
“What now?” I asked. “Television?” Missy’s mouth dropped open. I suddenly realized that even though Missy is on television, she’s not allowed to watch it.
“I don’t want to get fat,” she said. “Do you think I’m fat?”
“Do you think I’m fat?”
Missy didn’t respond.
We did watch television. During each commercial, she immediately began to critique aspects of the actor’s performance and physical appearance, which I deeply appreciated. She is completely brutal. If someone’s right eye is even slightly higher than the left, she will not let this slide.
When her mother came to pick her up, Missy gave me a mini-hug, but then she ran screaming to the backseat of their deluxe SUV to see if her brothers were hired for the part. “My whole week will be ruined if they got it,” she told me. Apparently the Gowers children have a competitive streak.
I watched as they drove away down the road. When her mother finds out about Munchkin Burger, she will probably make Missy get a colonic.
A few hours later when Kyle got home, the contrast was nice. Adult World. It seemed a little amusement parky—sex, alcohol, swear words. I tried to take in the sudden quiet. It was so quiet. I told myself that there was something furious and wrong about the constant sound, color, and stimulation that children crave, their habitual need to celebrate and have a party. Life is not a party. I actually said this to Kyle: “Life is not a party.” I took it back as soon as I said it. It made him look sad.
“I don’t get people who have children as a move towards immortality. So that they can feel better about death or something.” He sipped his drink.
I made Kyle take me to a romantic restaurant to talk about the subject. It seemed more theoretical that way, like we were making conversation rather than having a conversation. Plus, if I felt myself starting to get upset, I could take a sip of martini in a slow, calculated manner, like a robot mannequin in a commercial about robot mannequins who enjoy martinis the way real, elegant people do.
“I would like to feel better about death though,” I admit.
“It’s just death. You’re not going to care when you’re dead.”
I want to write Kyle off as a simple person, but I know him and he is not simple. It’s unfair though, how he can have so much clarity about difficult things. Why have children? Why fear death? “I mean you and I certainly don’t have to have a child for the sake of our species. I think mankind is pretty set.”
“Well, Kyle, I wouldn’t want to have a child to benefit mankind. That would take all the fun out of it.” My hand finds my martini carefully, straightened, like a mission payload specialist guided it there. Grip. Sip.