Chapter 17 Arthur Wren Stay in Bed All Day #2
“I have an idea,” Wren said. “Since we’re both here. Let’s call it a mulligan. We’ll take two minutes. I’ll pee, you grab all the supplies you think we’ll need, then we meet back in bed. Deal?”
“What kind of supplies—”
“Go!” Wren looked at the alarm clock: 10:04. “Ten-oh-six and not a minute later!”
Wren sought the sweet relief of the bathroom. Arthur slipped and slid his way to the kitchen in his socks, rooting through the pantry like a madman. Mere seconds before the deadline, they both dove back into the bed.
“We did it!” Wren yelled triumphantly.
“We? All you did was go to the bathroom. I was the one collecting rations to get us through the day.”
“What did you get?”
Arthur unfolded a ratty kitchen towel and revealed a treasure trove of snacks inside. Peanut butter crackers, a pack of Pop-Tarts, a lone banana, two bottles of water, a wrinkled protein bar, and a tub of room-temperature mayonnaise.
“Mayo?”
“I don’t know. I was just grabbing stuff. We can toss this.”
“I didn’t say toss it.”
Arthur began ripping into the pack of Pop-Tarts. “Are you sure we can do this? We still have like twelve hours left until we usually go to bed.”
Wren kicked back with the peanut butter crackers and grabbed the TV remote off her bedside table.
“My love,” she said, “this is why they invented Netflix.”
Eight episodes of Cake Island later, they were in the exact same place. And all the food was gone. Wren had even dared to eat a fingerful of mayonnaise and then gone back for another.
“Can we take a break?” Arthur said. “My eyes hurt.”
Wren flipped back to the Netflix home screen. “I feel so much stupider now. It rules.”
Seven straight hours of watching attractive bakers make complicated confections while simultaneously wooing and backstabbing one another had made her feel a few IQ points lighter. And it was glorious.
“Stupid people are way happier, I’ve always said.”
“So what now?” she said, laughing, stroking an extremely content Ferdie, who had curled into a little ball next to her, contouring himself perfectly to the shape of her body.
“I don’t know. We just…hang out?”
“Hang…out?” Wren said, imitating a caveman. “What mean?”
“Make words,” he said. “Talk.”
They’d been in constant motion these past months, even going back to the night they found out they were pregnant.
Wren had scrambled to pick up freelance work, they’d read books and made lists, picked out and assembled furniture.
And then there’d been everything that came after the shower.
The Ravens game and the house tours, the casino and the haunted house.
There’d been almost no time to just sit and reflect. Sit and enjoy each other.
“This is nice,” he said, finishing his thought out loud.
“Yeah, it is.”
“It seems so silly and so simple, but this might really be the last time we get to do this.”
“I thought babies were supposed to sleep all the time.”
“They do. But not on your schedule. They’re up and down again every couple of hours, all night long, to start.”
Wren sat up dramatically, as if he’d just delivered breaking news. “And you didn’t think to tell me this before we had sex?”
He playfully shoved her away. “I’m excited, though,” Arthur said. “Are you?”
She was getting there.
“I keep thinking about a little human being that we made running in here to wake us up and tell us he had a bad dream and that he needs me to hold him,” she said.
In truth, she hadn’t spent much time picturing what their life would look like.
What their child would look like. It had seemed better to avoid it, just in case…
But imagining it now was filling her with this incredibly glowing warmth.
“Or that he pooped the bed.”
“Way to ruin it!” She slugged him playfully.
She was usually the one who punctured moments with dark or sarcastic humor.
She thought about how they were so different, and yet how alike they’d become.
Intertwined, like the gnarled tails of a rat king.
No, something cuter than that. Two vines growing so close together you could hardly tell where one ended and the other began.
You couldn’t pick two people who were more the opposite of each other than them, different worldviews, different personalities, different energy batteries.
And yet somehow they were bringing all that together to build one life. It was fascinating.
“How’s the book?” she asked, breaking the silence. Her eyes had spotted its worn pages sitting on the nightstand behind him. “Is our baby the happiest yet?”
“Oh yeah. It’s kicking the asses of all the other babies on the block.” Then: “I know I should be studying, but I needed a little break.”
He’d been poring through it lately, making good progress. It felt good to be taking action, but it was keeping him up at night, that book, and he really should be banking sleep before the baby came. How could anyone be expected to do it all at once?
“You’re really going to do it now, aren’t you? The GREs? Grad school?”
“It’s looking like it,” he said.
He was stroking her foot with his, rough calluses on his feet and all. It tickled.
“What were your parents like when you were a kid?” Wren asked suddenly.
“What do you mean?”
“Did they have a parenting style, you think? You know, like monkey style or dragon?” She mimed a karate chop and a high kick that wasn’t very high, stifled by the covers. “You turned out sort of OK, I guess. I want to know how they did it.”
“Wow, thanks.” He reached over and gave her a playful tap on the arm.
“I guess I would call them authoritarian if I’m remembering the term right—I feel like I’m being quizzed on my reading right now, wow.
That was probably a cutting-edge word then.
They were loving but not particularly affectionate.
Very heavy on teaching and setting a good example, very demanding.
They had firm boundaries, followed through on consequences, which could be severe at times. ”
“Authoritarian.” Wren frowned. “What’s the one where you just let them do whatever they want and you shower them with affection?” she asked.
“I think that’s called lazy.”
“Whatever. Boundaries and consequences are gross. I just hope they like me,” Wren said.
“Me too. But they have to respect you, too. It’s a tough balance.”
“Eh.” She shrugged. “Respect is overrated. If we like each other and we’re honest with each other I think everything will work out just fine.”
“OK.” Arthur paused. “Here’s a hypothetical. Baby’s old enough to sleep in a crib, in his own room, but he won’t stop crying—”
“Irrelevant. He can sleep with us forever,” Wren cut in. “I would literally love that.”
“Forever?”
“Forever!”
“Doesn’t it get weird at a certain age?” Arthur protested. “Also, I like to stretch out.”
“Families in other countries share beds all the time! It’s only weird because America is filled with uptight prudes.”
It occurred to Wren that this would have been a good conversation to have roughly seven years ago, before moving in together.
But when were people meant to talk about this stuff, if not too late?
Maybe it should be mandatory after the first time you slept with someone, she figured, just in case.
That was fun, and also what are your thoughts on gentle parenting?
“I like that we’re different,” Wren said, as if cutting off her own internal argument. “It’s what makes us a good team.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. Don’t you? You can be the cold, distant one who drives them into my warm, unconditionally loving arms. Yin and yang.”
“I am not cold and distant.”
“I’m just teasing,” she said. “You’re going to be amazing.”
“I hope you’re right,” he said. “And so are you.”
Another lull. They stared googly at each other in the complete dead silence of their bedroom. Somewhere in the background, Netflix wanted to know if they were still watching.
“Hey, so I wanted to talk to you about something,” she said suddenly and without warning.
“Me too, actually.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I keep waiting for the right opportunity,” Arthur said. “It’s about the house.”
“Oh, so is mine,” she said. “I guess I’ll go first.”
He nodded, as if offering her the floor.
“I know how excited you were about that house, or the idea of that house anyway, and how I kind of crapped on it. But I don’t think I did a good job explaining why.”
“Oh. OK. I’m listening.”
“I think I’m…afraid of who we’ll become if we live in a place like that.”
“I know,” he said. “You don’t want us to become obnoxious HOA people. I get it.”
“Not just that. We’ll never discover anything new there.
We won’t find new coffee shops; we’ll just go to Starbucks.
We’ll buy everything we need from Target and Prime.
Go to the same park every weekend. Take trips to the same beach the same week as all our neighbors.
I feel like I could map out the next thirty years of our lives and tell you every single thing that will happen. ”
“I’ve never thought about it like that,” he said.
“Oh,” Wren added. “And I’m afraid we’ll become Republicans.”
“We would never.”
“It’s happened to better people than us.”
Arthur said nothing, his face falling into that blank, slightly serious expression that betrayed nothing except for the fact there was something to betray.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing. It’s just…you’re sure I can’t change your mind? What if I promise we can do all our shopping at Trader Joe’s? Screw the kids, you never have to join the PTA. We’ll drive forty-five minutes so we can buy Fair Trade coffee from local cafés. Whadya say?”
She rolled her eyes at him. “You’re making fun of me.”
“What I mean is…we’ll keep it interesting, I promise,” he said, squeezing her hand now.
“It’s not even really that.” She sighed. “It’s that I know there will always be a next thing, you know? We’ll be house poor, scrimping and saving everything we can to make the mortgage, then for college, and then retirement. I’m afraid it’ll never end.”
“And we’ll forget to actually…live.”
“Exactly,” she said.