Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me (3 page)

The Barons owned one of those West Hills mansions whose grounds boasted 200 year-old trees. They had a foundation (the family, not the house, although obviously the house did too). They had hospital wings named after them. Why would Mary Rose be having Thanksgiving there?
I don't think Ward would mind my asking you
… What was
that
about? Audra and Hank's son, Ward, was one of those good-looking men—shoulders, jaw, a serious nose that takes your breath away—whose best qualities are visible at one hundred paces. Women see him, meet him, and know this instantly. But they are waylaid by his giddy jokes (“What's the last thing that goes through a bug's mind before he hits the windshield? His butt!”), thinking, hoping, that a third-grade sense of humor is an indicator of wit and character.

I decided that Audra and Big Hank were probably out of town, and Ward was having one of his parties. I remember having heard that he was living at home while his houseboat, moored ten miles west of our city in an anchorage full of artists, filmmakers, and nuts with money, was being refurbished.

It turned out to be nothing like that at all.

THE BARONS LIVED
high in the West Hills on a ridge of rudely verdant forest. The house itself was a local curiosity; built in the 1920s with money pilfered from the government by the owner of
our region's largest shipyard, it was a three-story Mediterranean villa with raked concrete walls and a terra-cotta tile roof. From the front windows there was a view of three mountains, two rivers, and our lovely downtown.

The only other time I'd had Thanksgiving at the Barons' was during the filming of my first movie,
Romeo's Dagger,
ten years earlier, when Audra was infused with the extravagant feelings of connectedness that always go with making a movie, then dissipate the morning after the wrap party quicker than a throat full of helium sucked from a balloon. Since then, I had seen very little of them, although I occasionally ran into Audra around town.

When Mary Rose and I arrived a little after 4:00 on Thanksgiving Day, Audra gave Mary Rose, Stella, and me a big flapping-hand welcome, kissing the air beside our ears.

“Brooke, it's been too long. And there's that adorable baby. Are you sure Lyle doesn't have any Asian in him anywhere? Little Stella looks as exotic as a little Tatar. Maybe it's just that black hair. From what I remember of your mother's side of the family they're
dishwater
.” She swooped down on Stella and left an orange lipstick butterfly on her temple. Stella gave her that furrow-browed baby stare, the same one you see every day on displeased senators on
CNN
. I thought I would pop with pride. No one has more dignity than a six-month-old.

Audra was impressively slim, with thick, highly managed auburn hair. She was one of a vanishing breed, a Lady of the House, who has never held a paying job but has worked herself silly putting food on the table every night for a passel of ingrates. Most people look at this kind of old-fashioned American woman with scorn; they should try getting a meal for five on the table every night for forty years. Audra was in her sixties now, and seemed even more frantic than I remembered. Frantic to do things right. Frantic to amuse. Frantic, of course, to look young. I don't think she understood that unless you could make yourself look twenty-four, the Herculean regimen and hocus-pocus involved in looking a mere ten years younger wasn't worth giving up the pleasures
of tanning and the occasional Twinkie. Or maybe she did understand. She had a waist, which she liked to emphasize by wearing wide, colorful belts.

“Where is the Sensitive Photocopier Repairman anyway?” Audra made her blue eyes twinkle. I felt my jaw clench.

The Sensitive Photocopier Repairman was Lyle. Or what I used to call Lyle behind his back, when my love for him felt as sturdy as one of the bottom members of a human pyramid. It was cute then, cute and teasingly half accurate. Drunken tiffs, flirtations bordering on infidelity, my backing his new truck into a phone pole, anything was a match for our love. We'd met just after Audra brought me the rights to the story that eventually became
Romeo's Dagger.
My life was insane with possibility. My first feature and true love, all in the same month. That my new man was fastidious to the point of pathology mattered not. It was adorable. Then, as now, every morning he went to work in a bright white button-down broadcloth dress shirt and returned home after a day of messing around the insides of copiers with nary a smudge of toner or streak of grease anywhere on him. How the sensitive part got in there, I couldn't remember. But I didn't like Audra using it now; it wasn't her joke to make.

“Lyle had to host a plague,” I said. “He's one of the gamemasters on an online computer game and tonight they're having a plague. The idea was to keep people off the game over the holiday, so they thought if they had an epidemic, people would spend time with their families instead of subjecting their characters to festering pustules and dementia. But the gamemasters still have to work.”

“Well, I hope he feels better,” said Audra.

I cut a glance at Mary Rose, who looked uncharacteristically meek. I had never seen her in a dress; this one was burgundy rayon that had “special occasion” written all over it. She tucked her hair behind her ears with the tips of her fingers over and over. What she does when she's ready to tackle a big problem, like pulling out a hedge. This was not like her. This was not like her at all.

Somewhere around on the other side of the house, male voices could be heard, and a slapping sound, like someone beating out a wet carpet hung on the line.

“That
game!
” said Audra. “A Baron tradition. Every year the kids drink too much of their father's single malt and play basketball in the rain.”

The kids were Little Hank, age forty-two, Ward, thirty-nine, and Dicky, thirty-three. My cousins. I think.

If Mary Rose and I were other women, or still ourselves at a different time in our lives, we would have been out there with them: playing, pretending to play as a way of aligning ourselves with the good-times-having men (instead of the marshmallow yams-baking women), or standing under the eaves sipping imported beer. But I was happy to sit and hold Stella on my lap, and Mary Rose wanted to talk. We allowed Audra to park us in the study while she hustled back to the kitchen. The study was a grand, clammy room where the green marble fireplace gave off charm but no heat, and the heavy green velvet swag curtains hung like dried seaweed from their gold rods. The woodsy smell of the fire couldn't compete with lonely odor of dampness. It didn't seem as if anyone else was home. There was certainly no party.

“Brooke,” spluttered Mary Rose. “I have something to tell you. Ward and I. We're …
ack!
… I don't want to jinx it.” She put her big hands to her face.

“You're what. Not … that?”

“Not what?” said Mary Rose.

“There's only one
what
that's
that
,” I said. I felt suddenly as if I was channeling Dr. Seuss.

“Yes,” she said.

“No!” I said.

I couldn't believe it. I couldn't wait to tell Lyle. Lyle once said Mary Rose was the last living valkyrie. I enthusiastically agreed, then went and looked up
valkyrie
in the dictionary. Mary Rose, with her own business, vacation time-share, financial portfolio. She even had a .25 Colt automatic slung in a tiny hammock
behind her nightstand, which she'd learned to shoot for self-protection.

Mary Rose was too level-headed to fall for Ward. But this is how it is, isn't it? Simpering fools conquer men and nations, strong-headed women in seven-league boots, unused to being the love object, swoon and are lost.

Then I heard about it all. How they met (she was transplanting some perennials; he was bored and trying to find someone to play croquet with him). How Ward liked to chase Mary Rose around the fringes of the Baron property, tackling her and biting the insides of her elbows, the backs of her knees. How Ward composed love poems about Mary Rose's mastery of the sickly rhododendrons by the driveway that no one had ever coaxed into bloom.

The fire flickered exhaustedly in the green marble fireplace. Stella fingered my car keys, lost interest and dropped them on my foot, waved her hands up at the window frames, and babbled
aisle aisle aisle.
I nursed her on the right side. I nursed her on the left side. She slept. I heard how Ward invited Mary Rose to the set to watch him direct a commercial for flavored seltzer—Ward was a director of high-profile commercials that garnered fancy prizes—then, during a break, locked them in the greenroom, where they made love on the linoleum. How he sent Mary Rose not flowers, but slim books whose sole purpose in life was to charm. How he looked her in the eyes when she spoke, instead of around the room or at the spot on the wall just behind her head. How he made her laugh.

“What did the hurricane say to the palm tree? Hold on to your nuts, this is going to be one hell of a blow job.” Mary Rose slapped her thighs, wept with delight.

Oh no.

“In the poem about the rhododendron?” She knuckled the tears out of her eyes with no regard for the hyper-sensitive skin just beneath. She
was
in love. “He compared my way with shrubs with how I can mend an empty heart.”

“Shouldn't it be fill an empty heart? Or mend a broken heart?”
I bounced Stella, even though she was mewing in a way that said, “Cut it out or I'll shriek.”

“It doesn't matter.”

I just looked at her. I wanted to say,
Mary Rose, it will matter. It will!

This wasn't entirely true. It will matter, until you have a child, then it won't matter again. Look at me. I have eyes for no one but Stella. I am moved to tears by the thought of Stella's feet, those rosy toes as round as marbles, the soles of her feet like the faces of two little eyeless old men. One time I put her entire foot in my mouth, just to see what it was like. The foot tasted like Stella smelled: Downey, Desitin, and clean baby. I was planning for a day in the future when she would be an eye-rolling teen and accuse me of sticking my foot in my mouth and I would say, “No, but I stuck your foot in my mouth—when you were about six months old!” Dumb, dumb, dumb beyond belief. But it's one of the wonders and powers of motherhood: It pleases me, so who cares?

“It's ready!” cried Audra, rushing from the kitchen with mincing steps, the kind meant to represent hurry. “Mary Rose, honey, I hope you can stomach my parsnip and clam stuffing. I've had some people complain that the parsnip is too rooty and the clam is too gooey, but I think they complement each other perfectly. Just like you and Ward.”

I followed Mary Rose into the dining room. To the back of her head I said, “Rooty and Gooey sitting in a tree,
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
.” Maybe I am not simply a terrible mother; I may also be a terrible friend.

Mary Rose ignored me, sat where Audra told her to. The walls in the vast dining room and breakfast room were painted with gold leaf that had blistered and buckled in the dampness.

Suddenly, hubbub! Or rather hubbub, Baron style. Little Hank, Ward, and Dicky rolled in, beating their sleeves to warm up, stamping their feet, as if they'd just come in from a dogsled race in a blizzard instead of basketball in the driveway. They
behaved like an overzealous amateur theater group given the improvisation
hectic!
causing Audra to rush back into the kitchen to find a corkscrew. One was found. Much to-do about the wine, opening it and pouring it.

“Where's the
GD
corkscrew?” said Little Hank. “Dad, did you leave the
GD
corkscrew on the boat?” Little Hank, in a kelly-green polo shirt and madras slacks, always looked like he'd been beamed up straight from a fraternity kegger, circa 1964.

I got the feeling Little Hank was trying to change the subject, something they'd been talking about before being called in to dinner. Or maybe I was simply projecting, based on what I know about Dicky:
Romeo's Dagger
was the high point of his life, The Big Game meets The One That Got Away, and was a topic he could flog to death. Dicky dropped into his chair. He was wearing a huge blue plaid flannel shirt, exercise pants with stripes up the side. Unlike the other Barons, who were of medium height and build, Dicky was tall and curiously wide. He had hips. Next to his brothers and parents, he looked as if he was gestated next to a nuclear power plant. Chernobyl Dicky, I thought, everything about him big and pink.

“Nowadays a simple life crisis isn't even good enough,” he was saying. He fiddled with the silverware, hit the prongs of the salad fork with one finger and sent it flying into the middle of the table. “You've also got to be training for the Olympics. Your life has to have a hook, is what I'm saying. The crisis itself isn't even good enough anymore. Do you hear what I'm saying? Who was that little girl in Texas who got stuck in the well and had to have that guy with no collarbone rescue her? That story would never have been made today. Not even for TV.”

“Have another drink, Dick,” said Ward, winking at Little Hank. Little Hank winked back too enthusiastically, grateful to be in on one of Ward's jokes. I sighed. Other people's family dynamics.

Audra brought in a high chair from another room. I assumed it had belonged to her boys, even though it looked too new, with
a special nontoxic glaze and padded with a seat cover trimmed with a yellow ruffle. Once Stella was tucked into the chair, she popped a crinkly red thumb into her mouth. When she was unsure of her surroundings she never cried, just became as uninteresting as possible. Maybe she would grow up to be a spy.

Ward pretended to sit in the air right next to Mary Rose, then scooted her over with his hips so he could share the chair with her. “Not enough chairs, Ma. Guess I'll have to share with Mary Rose.” He wrapped his arms around her arms, laid a photogenic cheekbone on her shoulder. Ward also has one of those forever-boyish forelocks around which decades-long Hollywood careers have been built. What is it about a man with good hair?