Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me (6 page)

I must confess, I then did something very unfriendlike. I gloated. This, Mary Rose,
this
is why you don't get pregnant with someone you've just met. If you want a joint project, build a gazebo, learn to swing dance, but don't,
don't
have a baby. I felt wise, suddenly, instead of like the judgmental curmudgeon I knew myself to be.

When Ward excused himself to use the bathroom, I told Mary Rose, “Ask to talk to him outside. Don't let him get away with this. You deserve some answers. You deserve them
now.
Don't give him a chance to put together a good story. That's what men do, you know, say nothing until they have a chance to put together a story.”

“I know,” said Mary Rose. “I know about men.”

“Well, clearly you don't,” I said, “or not about this one, anyway.”

Mary Rose zapped me with a glare that could cause radiation burns, but when Ward came back, she asked to speak with him outside. A deck ran along the front of the house and could be reached only through Mary Rose's bedroom, a cramped space with no insulation, big enough only for a double bed and the upended orange crate that served as a nightstand.

The rain had let up. Mary Rose sat in one of the rickety white plastic patio chairs, put her feet up on one of her window boxes. A huge parsley plant colonized one of the boxes. The other was a wasteland of twine-colored petunias that had long ago gone to seed. She left the door open. I hit the mute button on the remote, so I could hear everything.

Ward stood. “I should have told you about Lynne. I should have, but this all happened so fast and I never think of her. She never crosses my mind. You're the only woman who crosses me.”

“Crosses your mind, you mean. So how long were you married?”

“Long enough to know it wasn't going to work.”

“And that would be …”

“Fifteen months.”

“But who's counting, huh?”

“You have to make it difficult on me, don't you? I said I was sorry. I am sorry. I'm a schmuck, I admit it. I have an ex-wife, all right? But we were over long before I met you.”

“How long?”

“Over a year.”

“What happened? To the marriage, I mean.”

“I wanted kids, she didn't. We argued. She had an affair. We grew apart.”

“Wow, that just about covers all the bases, doesn't it?”

“I love you, Mary Rose. I love our baby. My mother and father, we all love this baby.”

I suspect it may have been the inclusion of Audra and Big
Hank in this love fest, but something made Mary Rose say something odd and, even to my ears, ambiguous. “There is no baby, Ward.”

Later, when she was telling me her version of events, she said that what she meant was, “I saw our baby in the ultrasound, and it's not a baby, but a tiny, pulsing bean with seashell ears and a gentle Martian face.” What she meant was, It's not a baby
per se.
It's a He-bean (she was already certain the bean was a boy).

Ward wet his lips. “You got an abortion?”

Mary Rose said nothing. She leaned forward and tugged out one of the dead petunias.

“You should have told me. I know it's your body and all that bullshit, but I
am
the father. There's half of me in there. It's not just you.”

“Why didn't you ever tell me you were married before?”

“This will kill my parents. I hope you know that.” Suddenly, he picked up one of the patio chairs and chucked it off the deck. It bounced down the front walk, coming to rest on the sidewalk, beneath the ornamental plums. “They were really looking forward to our having this baby.”

“I understand, Ward. There's just one thing.
We're
not having this baby. I am.”

“You said you got an abortion,” said Ward.

“You did,” said Mary Rose. “I meant that it's still technically a fetus, not even that. An embryo, really. It's far from being a baby yet, is what I meant. You jumped to conclusions.”

Ward looked over the railing as though suddenly interested in the fate of the eight-dollar patio chair. “Let's just forget this and start the evening over, can we?”

She let him kiss her. I watched though the doorway.

I'm not convinced that Mary Rose wanted to forget about any of it. I think what she really wanted at that moment was to call a time-out. She wanted the gestation of the He-bean to freeze so that she could think things over. But in making the choice to have the child, Mary Rose had sacrificed time-outs forever. Next to
gravity, bearing a child is the modern world's last unalterable fact. Marriages are easily dissolved, morality readily ignored, laws circumvented; an operation can be had to give a boy a vagina or a girl a penis. A fetus cares not whether its mother and father have argued; it cares not that you have lost your job, that the economy has collapsed, that you have been stricken with the flu. On it comes.

I'm guessing, but I imagine it was the knowledge that on or about June 12, Mary Rose would be having Ward's baby, or so she thought, that urged Mary Rose to give Ward the benefit of the doubt. Lynne or no Lynne.

Either that, or she was a fool. Strike that. Who am I to talk?

3.

ONE DAY IN EARLY DECEMBER I BUMPED INTO AUDRA AT
our city's most prosperous health food store, where you can buy seven different types of organically produced chutney but are looked upon with scorn if you happen to need a simple can of green beans. The winter rain had set in for good. Any flirting with crisp, late-fall weather was over; nature had had her way with us. It would now rain for months, never varying in intensity or degree from day to day. As a suicide-prevention technique, newscasters kept claiming we needed the water.

The store also carried expensive organic potato chips, which, once inside your mouth, broke into unpleasant gum-stabbing slivers. I had stopped here on my way home from the Children's Indoor Play Gym to pick up a bag of these to eat during Stella's next nap. If I took time to drive to the regular supermarket for the less expensive, periodontally friendly chips, Stella would fall asleep in the car. If she fell asleep in the car, she would not take a nap when we got home. Why a five-minute catnap in the car prevented a ninety-minute snooze in her crib was a mystery, and would remain one throughout her infanthood.

By the cash registers was a large notions section where you could buy scented candles, woven Guatemalan bracelets, water-purifying systems, books on everything from organic farming to curing Candida, watercolor greeting cards by local artists, and an assortment of tie-dye.

As I staggered up to get in line, chips in one hand, Stella
leaning away from me to grab a whisk hanging from a hook in the other, I saw Audra.

She was holding up a small hot-pink tie-dyed T-shirt, her fox-eyed gaze fastened on a point past the registers, past the wire rack stacked with alternative newspapers, past the uncertain present and into the phantasmagorical future, where she was struggling to calculate the size her unborn grandchild would be a year from now. She was dressed in a pleated denim skirt, white turtleneck patterned with tiny acorns, penny loafers, and pantyhose. Audra's head shot up at the sound of Stella's babbling. “Oh, my, and who have we here? Do you smile? Are you a smiler? Aren't you a stunning brute?”

She didn't see me. No one does, of course. Being the mother of a beautiful baby is the next best thing to being in the Witness Relocation Program. This was my chance. I could have, should have, turned my head, slunk away. I didn't think I wanted to get into it with Audra. I was afraid we would fall into talking about Mary Rose, and as much as I felt the need to ask someone—rhetorically, of course—what in the hell Mary Rose thought she was doing, dishing with Audra would be a betrayal.

“You remember Stella,” I said. “Hi, Audra.”

She looked not at all surprised to see me. “You know, I didn't realize until Thanksgiving that you and Mary Rose were such good friends.”

Audra had a way of saying things to which there was no response. I bounced Stella on my hip, something I did when I was nervous. “Yup. Even went to different high schools together.”

“So you're best friends, then. Tell-each-other-everything kind of friends.”

“I guess so.”

She asked nothing about me, not how I'd been, nor what I was up to. Audra was incurious about anything that didn't affect her directly, a trait the rich share with the toddler. Still, I always felt I owed her. She gave me my start, and my stop: I saved some money from
Romeo's Dagger
and another film I did right after it—the
one directed by the twins, set in the Yukon—so that when I finally had a child, I could take a year off to be with my kid. I couldn't escape the feeling I had Audra to thank for this.

Audra held the tie-dyed T-shirt on the palm of her hand. “This is for my grandbaby. Is it cute or bizarre? I can't decide.” She peered at the stitching along the neck. “I seem to have to buy everything I lay eyes on. Was it like that for your mother with this one?”

“My mother's idea of the perfect baby present was a three-year supply of baby wipes, which, of course,
is
the perfect baby present, but it's not very romantic. Then, neither is having a baby, I guess.”

“But I should indulge the urge now, don't you think? I don't think Mary Rose appreciates my interest, but this child is my flesh and blood too, isn't she? My attorney assures me there's such a thing these days as grandparents' rights.”

“Of course,” I said, moving to pat her forearm, forgetting I had no hand to pat it with. I wagged my elbow in her direction.

“I don't imagine she'll let me help much with the wedding, either. I know she lost her own mother when she was very young. So you'd think …”

“Absolutely …” I said. What wedding? Mary Rose and Ward? Only a week earlier he was lying to her about his ex-wife and hurling patio furniture over the deck railing, and now they were getting married? Of course. The laws of the physics of love dictate that for every unpleasant furniture-hurling argument there is an equal and opposite delirious sheet-twisting, headboard-thumping reconciliation. This one apparently included a marriage proposal as well.

“I think a baby needs two parents,” Audra continued. “I don't go for all these women in their thirties just deciding to go ahead and have a baby on their own.”

“True. It's much better to have an audience watch you do all the work,” I said.

Audra looked at me blankly, then laughed. “I forgot you were funny.”

She wound up buying the T-shirt in hot pink, turquoise, yellow, and multi. Tossed in a few board books for good measure. Also, a silver teething ring.

I left without buying anything, had suddenly lost my appetite for the organic gum-stabbing chips, knew it was a waste of money anyway. Stella had snatched a loofah from the bath display and I wrenched it from her grip. She looked shocked, opened her mouth in preparation of a scream.

Getting Stella into her car seat day in, day out was starting to make me feel as if I were part of some army special forces training program. I performed a moderate deep-knee bend—
crickle crackle pop
—unlocked the car door, ground down into a full deepknee bend in order to release the lever that allowed the front seat to flip forward with a
thropp!,
then raised myself up just until I felt my thighs quiver—tell me some Olympic alpine ski team could not benefit from this—at the same time bending forward into the backseat while resting my chin on the roof. Only when I felt as if I was in a position that would give Houdini déjà vu did I blindly drop the jitterbugging Stella into her car seat. Of course, I couldn't see a thing, because Stella had pulled my hood down over my eyes.

It was raining. My feet were soaked. I got in the car, slammed the hem of my jacket in the door. Stella, I could tell from the ripe smell, had a project. I felt, suddenly, like a prisoner on a chain gang. Do they have chain gangs anymore? Or is it considered cruel and unusual punishment? They still have motherhood, and fifteen-pound near-toddlers with dirty diapers who need to be hauled around. No one's seen fit to call that cruel and unusual, I noticed.

Stella had a cry that sounded like a cross between an opera star in deep mourning and an engine that wouldn't start. Aaanh-aaanh-aaanh-aaanh-
AAANH
/ Aaanh-aaanh-aaanh- aaanh-
AAANH!

“Stella, stop it! Stop it! Shut
up!
” I covered my ears with my hands. Even then it seemed overdramatic, but there you go.

This wasn't the worst of it, telling my precious, my dearest, to shut up for no good reason other than my feet were wet and I had lost my patience. I hated to admit it, but I agreed with Audra. How square is that? It does takes two people to raise a child. Actually, I agreed with Hillary Clinton even more. It takes a village, a village of grandmothers willing to use a Gold Card to buy a wardrobe of cheaply made baby T-shirts that the child would outgrow after wearing each of them exactly once. It took the village treasury.

I felt myself getting teary-eyed, told myself to knock it off, which only made me feel worse. While being with a child may make you young again, allowing you to experience the world through a child's perceptions—have the burnished, catcher's mittsized maple leaves of autumn ever seemed so splendid? When was singing ever so much fun? Yawning, belching, the swamp-like gurgles of the empty stomach: has anything ever been so hilarious?—
raising
a child makes you old old old. By old I mean responsible, and by responsible I mean stodgily concerned with money. Suddenly you need money for everything, none of which is Donna Karan or a day of beauty at a local spa. None of which is even, in my case, a decent pair of underpants, or a trip to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned.

You peer at the tender pink gums of your little one and try to read them as you would tea leaves: Is major orthodontia in your future? You watch him toddle across the living room, pitch a Beanie out of his crib, and find yourself wondering: Is there a God, in the form of a full-ride sports scholarship to some prestigious university?

These are the times that try women's souls, especially the soul of the enlightened woman, the good, competent woman, who chose her mate because he picked up his socks, put down the seat, could cook a decent piece of fish and wash a wool sweater without shrinking it, laughed at her jokes, appreciated the fact she could do a swan dive and he couldn't. Nice guys no longer finish last; they are snapped up by women who need a mate and not a
meal ticket. Until there's a baby, who
does
need a meal ticket, not to mention someone to feed her the meal, then wipe the rest of it off the wall.

I couldn't follow the line of this reasoning much further than this. All I knew was that I suddenly had the feeling that Mary Rose had—how retro this sounds, but I can't help it—landed a big fish. Ward was in love with her, wanted this baby, made six figures a year—

Suddenly, there was a knock on the window. I leapt, shrieked, which stopped Stella crying instantly. Audra's face, dewy, recently facialed, peered in at us. She waggled her eyebrows and blinked her eyes madly at Stella. She had single carat diamond studs in her ears, I noticed. I rolled down the window, which always stuck halfway down. I peered out over the edge of the glass, like a freedom fighter peering out of the bunker.

“We should have lunch sometime.”

“We should?”

“Let me phone you next week. We need to catch up.”

“Those are lovely earrings, Audra,” I said.

“These?” Her hands flew to her earlobes, where she twirled the studs around as if she were adjusting the dials of a ham radio. She leaned closer. “They're CZ,” she stage whispered. “Don't tell Hank. He thinks he bought them for me for our fortieth. He did buy diamonds. Then I took them back and bought these instead.”

I didn't ask why she didn't want the diamonds, or what she did with the extra cash, but it brought to mind something that, I'm ashamed to say, made me feel much better. I remembered something about Ward, something I'd thought I should tell Mary Rose, then forgot about because it didn't seem terribly important, something I heard Ward say that night they'd been arguing about Ward's ex-wife out on the deck. It may have been nothing. It may have been Ward misspeaking. It may have been an honest mistake. Don't imagine it was me mis-eavesdropping; no one hears better than a new mother. When Mary Rose asked Ward how long he had been married to Lynne, he said fifteen months. It had been
closer to fifteen years. I said nothing then, didn't want Mary Rose, who is so private, to know I'd been listening. I thought, Fifteen months, fifteen years, what's the difference? Anyway, it's none of my business.

Maybe Ward wasn't the Catch-of-the-Day after all. This is the uncharitable thought that perked me right up and made me tell Audra I would love to have lunch with her.

A FEW DAYS
later the Blazers played the Spurs, the game carried on network TV. Why a network broadcast was so important to the basketball fans of our city is unclear: Our team seemed to enjoy losing before a national audience and the sportscasters inevitably spent most of their time talking about our collective lack of self-esteem. Our feelings were always hurt. The local press would then rail for days about an East Coast bias, even though the Spurs were based in San Antonio.

Before I went to Mary Rose's for the game, I consulted the back of Lyle's head. He had washed his hair that morning and it smelled like mint. The basement was cold, mildewy. Itchy Sister slept on the futon in front of the space heater. Lyle refused to watch basketball, claimed his disinterest in professional sports made him less doltish than the average guy, said I should be grateful he wasn't glued to the TV all weekend long. “You're just glued to the computer.”

Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. He didn't even hear the insult. I looked over his shoulder, white letters jerkily scrolling up the screen. “Rangor's ethereal shield shimmers slightly in the setting sun.”
Yeccch.

I bit my lips to keep myself from shrieking, “How can you take this stuff seriously?!” I was already five years older than Lyle, and didn't want to sound like his mother.

“The thing is,” I said, “I keep feeling like I should say something to Mary Rose. It seems like no big deal, but Ward intentionally didn't tell her about Lynne in the first place, then he tried to minimize the marriage by making it sound as if it was so
disastrous it only lasted a little over a year. I know I would think twice before getting involved with someone like that. I mean, yes, I know, she's already involved, in that she's going to have his baby, but why compound the problem?”

“Sounds like you've already got it figured out.”

“No. I don't. That's why I'm asking you.”

“God damn rock trolls,” he said to the screen. “Let me just cast a spell here and I'll be right with you.” Lyle stared into the screen, tap-tap-tap.

“Knock knock.”

Tap-tap-tap.

“
Who's there?