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“I did it,” Gretchen called to Ray, who was in scorpion pose on a sticky mat. “I finally told my mother how I felt.”

  “I don’t know where things went wrong,” Judy wailed to Rusty, who was yelling at the TV screen—championship bowling. “I mention bootees, and she’s offended.” Judy began to sob. “I offer to throw her a shower, and she accuses me of harboring an anti-feminist agenda. I don’t even know what that means. Where have I gone wrong?”

  The bootees had started it. Gretchen had found them on her doormat one Saturday evening when she returned home from yoga, sweaty but energized, having connected with that deep part of herself that was not Gretchen Glide but a new emerging self—part wild beast, part butterfly. The bootees—pink, blue, and yellow—were lined up in a clear plastic box, and though there was no card, Gretchen had known exactly who they were from. Her mother gave the same gift to everyone who was expecting and had, in fact, a case of them in her basement. She had picked it up one summer on special at Big Lots. The moment an impending fetus made a blot on her horizon, Judy routinely popped a package of bootees in the mail, along with a Hallmark.

  “She knows nothing of our lives,” Gretchen said, storming around the apartment in her leotard and sweats. Ray, who was busy working on his next show, took her in his arms and kissed her forehead, savoring the taste of her salt.

  “Bootees, Ray,” she said. “They’re like sugar cereal for the uninitiated; they’re like saying ‘Welcome to the world. Here’s your uniform.’” She tore open the box, flinging bootees around the room, creating what looked like a spray of colored marshmallows. Then she stuck her hip out, ran a hand over the prickly terrain on her scalp, and looked as if she might cry.

  “We’ve already decided,” Ray said, setting his hands on her shoulders and looking up into her pale gray eyes.

  “I know, I know, it’s just —”

  “I know,” Ray said, nodding slowly. “I know.”

  “You’re right,” Gretchen said, taking a deep breath. “I’m going to take the bootees and put them out on the compost.”

  Tired of the drama between his wife and daughter, Rusty finally rose from his chair and said, “Let me call. Time to put an end to this silly business.” In his mind, Rusty had removed any notion of a baby from the situation. What bothered him most was that his daughter was living with a stranger who, by all accounts, looked like a monkey and leaped around the house in a unitard. In his thoughts and even in casual conversation with Judy, he referred to Gretchen’s partner as “the Chimp.”

  “This Chimp—what kind of car do you suppose he drives?” Rusty had asked one night, standing in the bathroom doorway as Judy applied her night cream.

  “How should I know? He was very muscular.”

  “But he wasn’t masculine? He didn’t seem masculine to you?”

  “What are you talking about? He was streaking around in leg warmers while the vacuum cleaner was on.”

  “Leg warmers? You never mentioned leg warmers.”

  “I just remembered,” Judy said to the mirror, pressing her hips against the sink. She had on a long white nightgown with thin blue stripes.

  “What? Did they belong to Gretchen or something?” Rusty rubbed his stomach and studied the hall rug with a dyspeptic frown.

  “I never saw them before.”

  “You think they were the Chimp’s? You think he’s the kinda guy who goes out and buys leg warmers?”

  “I don’t know. He’s some sort of modern dancer. That’s what Gretchen made it sound like.” Judy dabbed her face with a hand towel and snapped off the bathroom light. Rusty followed her down the hall. Since the children had left, they’d taken separate bedrooms. Judy now slept in what had once been Gretchen’s room. Her single bed, which was covered with a bright patchwork afghan, was pressed up against teacup-patterned wallpaper.

  “He’s a fruit?” Rusty asked, standing with his hands limp at his sides as Judy pulled back the covers on her bed. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “I don’t know, okay?” Judy snapped. “It’s not exactly our business.”

  “The Chimp,” Rusty had huffed, milling in the hallway for a moment before he headed for his own bed in the room he and Judy had once shared. “No wonder Gretchen never brings him around. Who even knows what his name is?”

  “His name is Ray,” Judy called after him. “They’ve been dating for almost two years.”

  “This is Ray,” came a man’s voice over the telephone when Rusty finally made the call, Judy sniffling on the couch. Rusty had expected to hear Gretchen on the end of the line and had been prepared to give her something of a lecture, similar to the one he often delivered on courteous driving—a rap he always imposed on his customers, his own small contribution to the betterment of society. Only, he’d planned to revise the speech for his daughter so that the rules of the road applied to families.

  Ray’s deep voice left him flummoxed, and, caught off guard, he became almost cordial. They would agree to a shower, Ray said, as long as Rusty could abide by a few simple demands.

  “Coed,” Ray said. “I’d like to be a part of this, and I hope you’ll be there, too, Rusty.”

  Ray’s familiar tone gave Rusty pause. “Okay.”

  “And there’s something I’d like to give you.”

  “Give me? The shower’s for you two.”

  “In a sense,” Ray said. “Don’t think of it so much as a shower. Think of it as a life-affirming ritual. In Bora Bora, when a couple is pregnant, the whole village meets them with roots, and seedpod necklaces are exchanged among the men.”

  “Necklaces, huh?”

  There was a long pause. Judy flashed Rusty a stern look from the couch.

  “One more thing,” Ray said. “We prefer black clothing. No pastels, nothing pastel.”

  “Fair enough.” Rusty sighed. Talking to Ray was like reasoning with a kidnapper. Rusty imagined driving a Cadillac to the Illinois line, waiting in a poorly lit parking lot to hand over a suitcase full of dark little onesies—in order to gain what? The Chimp’s affection? His daughter’s respect?

  Ray’s voice came softly through the line. There was a little tremor to it. “I mean it when I say this, Rusty,” Ray whispered. “It means everything to me that we can talk like civilized people.”

  At the end of the conversation, Rusty set the phone down and crossed the living room to where Judy was sitting on the sofa. The sofa was velvety, covered with ducks— flying ducks and stolidlooking ducks, their feathers preened. Judy, who had on a long beige bathrobe, looked like a piece of driftwood against it. She turned to him with a disconsolate look in her eyes, searching his face for some tenderness, some reassurance.

  Rusty shrugged, hands in the pockets of his gray slacks. “No pastels,” he said, rocking on his feet before her. “No big deal, Judy. They’ve just got their own way of doing things, same as us.”

  Judy turned her head slowly to the window, focusing her gaze on the bird feeder, where a robin kept stopping with bits of straw in its beak before flying off to the neighbor’s shag bark hickory.

  “Judy.” Rusty put a hand out to touch her wrist but only caught her sleeve as she pulled away.

  The shower started out well enough, a breezy afternoon in early July, the last of the Shirley Temple peonies clinging in big, creamy blooms to the side of the house, like blots of Kleenex. Judy and Rusty invited a few friends from the neighborhood, mainly old bridge friends and women from Judy’s book club. They came bearing deviled eggs and ambrosia salads, which they set out on the dining room table around a bouquet Judy had made herself from a gathering of rusty foxglove. She’d thrown in some baby’s breath and a couple pink- and blue-tipped carnations she hoped might offset the mood.

  Six months’ pregnant, Gretchen arrived in overalls and a cotton tank that seemed much too light for the unseasonably cool weather—Judy fretted she would catch cold without a sweater, but Gretchen refused to put one on, disappearing into the bathroom for a long period of time while guests arriv
ed. Ray, to his credit, went around introducing himself. He was dressed in baggy linen pants and a loose batik shirt. His hair, Rusty was quick to note, was spun into a tight bun on the top of his head, held in place with a chopstick.

  It was all Rusty could do to keep his cool while folks gathered in the living room. He was glad he had plenty of snow handy and took every opportunity to root around in his ice chest, pretending to search for soda brands he knew he did not have.

  Judy fluttered around in an effervescent peach dress she’d bought in Sarasota with the idea of wearing it to one of her children’s weddings. That morning, she’d unearthed it from her closet and unwrapped it from its plastic sheath, saying she guessed today was as a good a day as any to debut it. To dress it down, she wore a string of amber beads Carson had once left hanging in her bathroom.

  A few of Gretchen’s old college friends showed up, one of them carrying a baby in some sort of rawhide papoose. The gifts they carried with them were wrapped in newspaper, brown grocery sacks. They were tied up with twine and fraying ribbon, dried flowers instead of bows.

  “Look how beautifully these are wrapped,” Gretchen said when she and Ray got down to the business of opening gifts so that everyone could finally relax. They took turns opening jars of diaper-rash poultices, hand-sewn bibs, cloth diapers. Judy presented them with a dark patchwork quilt she had tearfully made, all brown and black with—she couldn’t help it—some pale pink stitching.

  Finally, Donald and his wife, Celeste, exchanged glances and handed Gretchen a large gold bag overflowing with shredded Mylar. “Oh,” Gretchen exclaimed, pulling out two hand-stenciled signs, one that read IT’S A GIRL, the other: IT’S A BOY. Donald, who had just retired from Miller, had gotten handy with the woodworking tools in his garage.

  Gretchen looked at Ray, then at Donald and Celeste—neighbors she’d grown up with. Rusty could read the dismay on Gretchen’s lips. To himself, he said, Let it be, Let it be, as he lifted the lid of the cooler to check for a Fanta lime cola.

  Gretchen took Ray’s hand, and the two of them sat forward on the couch, shoulders touching. Gretchen cleared her throat. “Ray and I,” she said with confidence, though a twitch in her eyes belied nervousness, “Ray and I have decided to raise a gender-neutral baby.” She turned to Donald and Celeste, holding out the signs. “Thank you, but I’m afraid we won’t be needing these.”

  The room was quiet. The ceiling fan hummed, blowing at the petals of some peonies on the coffee table. Donald leaned forward on a dining room chair and let out a polite laugh, moving a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “Made those signs in my woodshop,” he said proudly, rubbing his hands together. “See now, say it’s a girl, you put out the ‘It’s a girl’ sign in the yard, and that way you don’t have to hassle with people asking. If it’s a boy, same thing. It’s easier this way. You won’t be bothered.” Satisfied with his explanation, he sat back, adjusted his ball cap.

  Gretchen ran a hand through her hair, which was short and bristly—but at least her natural color, Rusty thought. He let his fingertips linger in the snow, working up a tiny snowball between his thumb and forefinger.

  “It was thoughtful of you to make something by hand, Donald,” Gretchen began. Rusty closed his eyes as she launched into a speech about how patriarchy began at birth and how she and Ray were part of a new dawn, how they were going to change the world with their new method of parenting.

  Rusty leaned back in his recliner and popped the small snowball into his mouth. He let his eyes glaze over and close. What had he ever done to deserve such an absurd scene in his living room? Surrounded by his friends, their neighbors, he could just imagine the tales they would go home and tell their families. “Rusty and Judy,” they would say, “they’re so nice, but their kids—you wonder how they can all be kin.”

  Then, just as Rusty was pressing the last of the snowball to the roof of his mouth, concentrating on the coolness spreading through his neck and shoulders, there came a sound from the kitchen—the sound of bells and gongs and what sounded like tribal chanting. When he opened his eyes and craned his neck around the headrest, he saw the Chimp fly through the room in a purple unitard and what looked to be some sort of sarong. The Chimp slid under the coffee table in a single fluid thrust and landed at Gretchen’s feet. From the tape deck in the kitchen came the slow beat of drums, which steadily increased in volume and tempo, until the Chimp stood in the middle of the room, his body pulsing.

  Rusty did not dare meet anyone’s eyes. He looked down at his own hands, which were red and large as lobsters fresh off ice. He fought the urge to lunge forward and clamp them around the Chimp’s wrists, to drag him outside, force him back into whatever girly car he drove, and kick the bumper as it backed out of the drive.

  A gong sounded, and suddenly the Chimp was on his knees before Rusty’s chair. There was a silence; then the Chimp bowed his head and slowly began uncoiling his hair into Rusty’s lap. Rusty could feel the Chimp’s heart beating wildly against his calf. The Chimp gave off a beasty smell, sweat seeping through the elastic fabric of his unitard, all around his hairy chest.

  When the Chimp had draped his long hair across Rusty’s knees, a pair of scissors emerged from the folds of the Chimp’s skirt. These he slid into Rusty’s hands, making a motion that Rusty should cut.

  Across the room, Gretchen’s old friends looked on almost gleefully. Rusty caught Donald White staring out the window, where the Seville Rusty had sold him sat next door in the drive. The Chimp breathed deeply and seemed to enter a kind of trance as the drums started up again. “Cut,” he whispered.

  “What?” Rusty spat.

  The Chimp pointed to his hair and pressed the scissors firmly into Rusty’s hands.

  It made a terrible sound, like static, but the Chimp did not flinch. He picked up the coil of hair and carried it around the room like a snake for all to see.

  Afterward, when everyone was gathered in the dining room eating cake, Rusty caught the Chimp coming out of the kitchen. “You got me” was all Rusty could think to say.

  “I did it for Gretchen,” the Chimp said, still breathing heavily. He took the meat out of a little sandwich and ate the mayonnaisey bread.

  Rusty felt dizzy from champagne and the smell of perfume. “She’s a good girl,” he said. “You got yourself the deluxe model.” He didn’t know then why those words came out of his mouth. They just did. He felt stupid in that moment, stupid and mortified that this was what his life had come to, that a new generation had entered his house and made him feel dumb. What he really wanted to do was beat the Chimp senseless, he thought to himself as he stood in the waning light of the hall, watching the Chimp lick crumbs from the corners of his mouth. In his younger days, he would have done just that.

  The Chimp must have sensed this. “Whoa,” he said. “Careful there.” His eyes flashed, and Rusty could see that behind all that soft fur, there was another side of the Chimp, something a little wild waiting to be let out.

  “Listen,” Rusty said to the Chimp, leading him down the hall by an elbow, “I know you and Gretchen have been to college and you’re full of new ideas. I applaud that, but what you said there about the genderless baby, that seems a little —” He let his voice trail off, hoping the Chimp would fill in the blank, hoping a rational approach might gain him the Chimp’s confidence. But the Chimp stood motionless, breathing deeply through his nose, his eyes opening and closing rapidly—a sign perhaps of pity or exasperation.

  “Everyone comes from nothingness,” the Chimp said very softly before whirling around on his heels to go. Rusty watched the muscles in the Chimp’s back shift through the fabric of his unitard, the way he flipped his head as he rounded the corner of the hall toward the voices in the dining room. He left a gingery smell in his wake, a murky specter in Rusty’s mind. Who was this guy? What did he do? Rusty withdrew to his bedroom to hide. Down the hall, he could hear Judy carrying on: “Who cares if it’s a boy or a girl, as long as it’s healthy! I just
want everyone to be happy, happy and healthy!”

  From his bedroom window, a while later, Rusty watched his daughter heading down the front walk, her belly hanging off her like an igloo, and he wondered what could possibly be taking shape inside her body. She and the Chimp held hands, his arm dark and tangled-looking, like a vine. Their arms swung a little as they crossed the grass to a red Ford truck.

  “A Ford,” Rusty said to himself, rocking back on his heels. “Could be worse.” But it was the one nice thing he could think to say. A bitter taste rose in the back of his throat, like charred earth, like sour compost. He’d given his daughter no gift that day—no rattle, no car seat, not even a card. She, in turn, had hardly looked his way, gazing, between sips of too-sweet punch, out at the bird feeders that swayed from side to side in the boughs of the old oak, spraying seed into the wind.

  Down the hall, Rusty could hear Judy washing the dishes from the baby shower. He thought he could hear her humming, trying to relax. Tomorrow, he knew just how Judy would act. She remembered only the good. She would tell her friends in the teachers’ lounge at school that her quilt had made a splash, that everyone had loved the shrimp dip and toast points, and she would call Gretchen “glowing” and deem Ray “unique and interesting” without ever disclosing a hint of her frustration, a twinge of her own grief. She would not mention that most of the baby clothes were black or that Gretchen had given Donald’s signs back.

  Judy was always one to croon when others brought out their bragging books full of carefully posed grandchildren. But what would she do now? When the baby came, what would she tell people when the first thing they asked was “Boy or girl?” Would her face register the pain, the estrangement she’d carried around since the day she found out that Gretchen had called Rusty with the news? Would Judy remain silent about the birth, hoping people forgot, letting them assume the worst? Or would she hold on to the hope that this was just some fad that Gretchen would eventually abandon?