It's All Relative (23 page)

So we walked into Target one evening after work—Gary miraculously bypassing every endcap and table runner and flannel sheet with prancing deer—both of us expecting to stroll into the toy aisle, pluck a Barbie, and exit in under five minutes.

But we quickly discovered the world of toys had changed dramatically since we were children and dreamed of owning a Barbie. There were, seemingly, billions of Barbies: black Barbies and wedding-day Barbies, roller-girl Barbies and Hilary Duff Barbies. There were even career Barbies, brainy Barbies who—for some reason—did not find it fulfilling enough to live off their beauty alone; no, they had to attend med school and become surgeons and pet doctors, a notion that unnerved me greatly.

We kept searching until we finally found, sitting at the end of
the row with their tans, white hair, and electric-pink go-go outfits, the Barbies Gary and I had desired since childhood, the ones who were just fine getting by on their girlish looks, gigantic breasts, and fake smiles.

“Oh, my God! She's perfect!” Gary squealed, picking one who somehow managed to have even bigger boobs than the others.

And then he rattled the box. Hard. And held her out for me to see.

“Look, she's still smiling!” he said. “Even with a concussion! Barbie, I love you!”

Gary loves blondes.

He loves me.

But most of all Gary loves Barbie.

And so do I.

Gary and I had both been robbed as children. We grew up in rural America in the 1960s and '70s, at a time when boys were boys and girls just looked like boys. Which is why every Christmas and birthday I received a Daisy BB gun or train set instead of the Barbie doll I desperately wanted, and Gary got a baseball mitt or football instead of his cherished gal pal.

Our holiday photos showcase our disappointment: me, my hand on my hip, watching my dad cock my BB gun and fire at a beer can sitting on a fence in the distance; Gary, his baseball mitt firmly on his angled hip like a supermodel, watching the ball zip right over his head.

Over the years we held out hope that parenting had evolved, mostly because we had a very good friend who seemed like a hip and with-it dad. He bought dolls for his son when the little boy begged for them.

All of this gave us hope for the future generation.

Hope that grown men wouldn't have to sneak into a Target and buy a Barbie in their thirties.

And then our friend called to tell us, proudly, that his little boy was “over dolls.”

“I walked in and Junior had yanked all the hair out of Barbie's head, pulled off her legs, and was trying to crush her head in his underwear drawer. I'm so damn proud of that kid. And I think he's over all his issues, don't you?”

“I do,” I said, wondering how many years it would be before Junior was in juve hall for torching my car.

Unlike our friend's little boy, however, Gary and I never, ever seemed to tire of our new Barbie once we got her home, and we took immediate and great strides to make up for all of our lost years of enjoyment. We included Barbie in our everyday lives, as a parent would a baby, or one might a puppy.

Barbie joined us at breakfast, where she enjoyed something light and nonbloating, before Gary sat her in his passenger seat to ride along with him on sales calls.

Barbie tanned with us on our back porch and joined us on the couch to watch TV. (She loved Lifetime and anything with Susan Anton or Loni Anderson.)

We took Barbie to nice restaurants. When we were asked, “Table for two?” Gary and I would gently reply, in a tone of embarrassment and irritation, “No, three,” before yanking Barbie out of a pocket.

“Something to drink?” the waiter would ask a few moments later.

“Barbie?” we would say, looking over to our dinner companion propped up in the third seat. “Ladies first.”

People thought it was a joke so we had to act like it, too, but the reality was that we bought so many clothes for Barbie that she ended up with her own drawer in our dresser. Gary and I had to merge all of our underwear just to make room for her skirts and capes and boots and sunglasses and hats.

The thing Barbie loved most, however, was travel. Since she had lived most of her life on a shelf in a cardboard box with a dust-covered
plastic window, getting out in the world thrilled Barbie, just as it had us when we finally left rural America.

We showed Barbie her hometown of St. Louis first, taking her up in the Arch (she got dizzy), to a Cardinals game (she still wore pink instead of red), and then to the Mississippi River, where we removed her pumps and dipped her plastic toes in the water (too muddy).

Barbie's first out-of-state trip was to Memphis to see Elvis's grave. We carried her around Graceland, photographing her in the Jungle Room and then at Big E's grave site. It was a hard trip for her (“They ruined my baby!” her blue eyes seemed to moan), so we took her to Beale Street to drink away her blues while she listened to some.

Barbie loved the all-inclusive at Punta Cana, though she barely made it through customs (“
¿Los muchachos tienen una muñeca?
” the airport security guard bellowed to his compadres, laughing, pulling Barbie out of my suitcase and then holding her high in the air like some sort of spectacle. “It's not a doll,” I exclaimed in horror, my four years of Spanish in college finally coming in handy. “It's Barbie!”).

Our new-age thripple traveled the world, went to plays and movies, and took baths together. Gary and I admired her hard plastic breasts and impossibly shapely body, her naturally blonde hair and sunny disposition, her too-white teeth and button nose. We both spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours with personal trainers and therapists to achieve that same body and outlook, only to fall woefully short.

And then, one night, about two years into our relationship with Barbie, Gary and I were having sex and rolled on top of our girl, who entered a part of our bodies where women had never gone. It made us finally realize, “You know what? This is kinda creepy.”

So we got a puppy, Marge, a new toy to obsess over and play with and dress up. It seems we had tired of Barbie; we had grown up; we had made up for our lost youth.

At first, out of guilt, we stuck Barbie in the dresser drawer with
all of her clothes, and then, over time, we needed the space back for our own stuff and Barbie moved into the basement, where a blue plastic crate from Organized Living became her new home. The last words I said to Barbie were, “Think of it as the
Sex and the City
singles pad you always wanted.”

I swear I could hear Barbie scream as I snapped the lid shut.

Gary and I didn't think of Barbie for years, until I heard on TV that she would celebrate her fiftieth birthday on September 6, 2009.

We had moved since we had last seen our girl, endured much stress and happiness, and celebrated numerous birthdays, too. I went down into our basement one evening, searching through our color-coded crates and bins, until, trapped there, under a mix of Fourth of July flags, Christmas lights, and some pink taffeta, I found Barbie.

Her clothes were a bit flattened, her hair a touch more ratted, and one leg looked as though it might have been truncated after being wedged under a concrete garden gnome for years.

Still, I dusted her off and took Barbie upstairs to our bathroom, where I held her under the strong light. I turned her toward the mirror so she could see her face after all these years, and even I was stunned to see that Barbie looked as fresh, young, and pretty as the day we tired of her.

“Happy fiftieth, Barbie!” I said. “You haven't aged a day.”

Her silent response—prompted by the reflected visage of my now forty-three-year-old head resting against hers—was not nearly as kind.

“D
uck, Mom!”

I was standing in Dillard's one fall afternoon a number of years ago about to throw a $150 crystal punch bowl down the escalator and into women's fragrances.

Luckily, a severe-looking woman with an asymmetric bob who was just about to assist her aged mother off the escalator sobered me up.

The punch bowl was going to be a wedding gift for a woman with whom I worked and despised. She used to sneer at me, for God's sake, something I hadn't seen anyone do since Alexis Carrington, and she always asked me condescendingly to “tidy the mess” after a staff luncheon. She lived in a hideous beige cookie-cutter condo near a mall, and she was marrying a man who told me once at a work party that he “gave generously to the Republican Party.” I Googled him, naturally, only to find he'd donated a whopping $50.

And yet their wedding registry contained pricier gifts than a Saudi princess's sweet sixteen.

The thought of this—along with the fact that the old woman and her daughter were now safely off the escalator and hiding in linens—reignited my rage.

“This is ridiculous,” I yelled at Gary, again holding the glistening punch bowl dramatically over my head. “Why don't we just get the vampire a garlic press?”

“We can't do that. We'll look like cheapskates,” Gary said in his calm voice, the one he used when I was enraged or on Ambien. “They're getting married, Wade. It's a special occasion.”

“I'm special occasioned out!” I yelled.

And I was.

Within this very same calendar year, Gary and I had attended three weddings, a christening, four children's birthday parties, two anniversary parties, and three baby showers. This on top of the innumerable coworkers' birthday parties and baby showers we had been required not only to attend but also to support generously.

When I got home, I yanked out our calculator and did some cipherin', as Andy Griffith used to say. Between the boxed sets of Baby Einsteins and the gift cards and the crystal punch bowls, we had spent a few
thousand
dollars.

“Can you believe that amount?” I yelled, coming down the basement stairs, in a distressed voice better suited for saying, “The sky is raining Skittles!”

I found Gary sitting knee-deep in wrapping paper. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“The department store paper is just tacky,” he said, encasing the punch bowl in a blanket of expensive, thick white paper featuring blue velveteen wedding bells. “I'm sorry, but what's your point?”

I stared open-mouthed at Gary, who was now scooting a pair of scissors down a foot of satiny, pastel ribbon.

“Didn't you hear me? We've spent thousands of dollars on people—many that we despise—and we have never gotten anything in return.”

Gary yanked some foil ribbon out of another drawer in his “Martha desk” and began making his own bows.

“I mean, just look at you! You're creating a work of art for a woman who hands me her dirty coffee cup at the end of every staff meeting.”

“But that's a reflection on her,” Gary said. “This is a reflection on us.”

“Have you been reading Deepak Chopra again?”

“Wade, we live in middle, red-state America. We live in a flyover zone. We work mostly with straight people and have mostly straight friends. I'm sorry, but that's the price of our conformity. We have decided to live as window dressing in straight America. When are you going to realize that gays will never be treated equally?”

Gary's speech stunned me, to say the least. Perhaps because it came from a man who typically preferred watching
Facts of Life
reruns over CNN, or perhaps because it was the shockingly emotionless way in which it was delivered.

We went to our frenemy's wedding, where we were served chicken that smelled like a condom. There was actually a
cash
bar. Between the punch bowl and the dry cleaning and the new tie and the liquor it took to get me drunk enough to do the macarena with a bridesmaid wearing a ruffled rose-colored dress with a giant bow on the belly that made her look like she had a painful goiter, I figured I came out four hundred dollars in the red.

“When do we get
our
day?” I screamed to Gary while “Eye of the Tiger” played in the background. “And you
cannot
dance to this song, people! It's impossible!”

Yes, I was drunk. Crazy, room-spinning, pull-my-pants-down drunk.

Gary grabbed me by the shoulders to calm me.

“Everyone gets their big day except the gays,” I slurred. “We don't get ‘societally accepted' weddings, or baby showers, or anniversary parties. We don't get big stuff, like each other's social-security or health-care benefits. We don't even get little stuff, like blenders and toasters. We get nada. I want my stuff. I'm sick of buying silk scarves
for women who have Rush Limbaugh stickers on their SUVs. I'm sick of buying baby gifts for babies we'll never be allowed to hold. I'm sick of buying anniversary gifts for couples who despise one another.”

Gary dragged me out of the Charles Lindbergh Room and into the lobby of the Holiday Inn.

He hugged me.

I looked over his shoulder, and an old couple sporting tight perms and matching
FREEDOM ISN'T FREE!
T-shirts looked at us like we'd just grown forked tongues.

“I … WANT … MY … SHIT!” I screamed at them as they retreated into a sixtieth high school class reunion. “I … WANT … MY … HUNDRED-AND-FIFTY-DOLLAR CRYSTAL PUNCH BOWL BACK … SO … I CAN … PUT IT IN OUR CORNER CABINET … AND JUST STARE AT IT! I … WANT … YOU … TO GET EMOTIONAL ABOUT OUR LIVES AGAIN!”

This time, instead of talking me off the ledge in his calm voice, Gary stared into my eyes and said, “You want your shit. I'll give you shit. We're going to adopt a puppy and throw the most fabulous puppy shower ever known to man. And we'll ask for gifts … It'll be better than any wedding the straights have ever thrown.”

So the next day—hungover, seeing double, my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth—Gary and I had a baby, just like most couples do the morning after their wedding night.