Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me (10 page)

“Push-ups? Now that's interesting. How do push-ups help?”

“It's part of the whole Perry Neal thing,” he said.

“The Perry Neal thing?”

“System. Whatever.”

I started laughing. I started crying. I squeaked and wept. Ward, Ward, Ward, what an adorable idiot you are.

“It's
perineal,”
I gasped. “It's to get the 'taint in shape. Get it all limbered up and ready to be stretched as thin as parchment.”

Ward looked down at me, really down at me. I'd never noticed his nostrils before. They arched like that of a television aristocrat. “What, may I ask, is a 'taint.”

“'Taint pussy, 'taint asshole,” I said. “That stretch of real estate right in between.”

His eyes moved up and to the right, just a little. It was the
same look people make when confronted with any geography question. Which is farther north: England or Germany?

At that moment the doors hissed open, and there was Mary Rose. She narrowed her eyes, didn't look happy. “What are you doing here?”

“I'm on the way to get the car,” I said.

“I forgot whether you said meet you at the apartment or here,” said Ward.

“I already had it,” said Mary Rose. “Brooke, I can walk. You don't have to get the car.”

“God, I'm sorry. I was late, wasn't I? I thought for sure you said to meet you at the apartment. I'm sorry you had to go through it by yourself. Did it go all right? Everything okay in there?”

Mary Rose sighed, rubbed a finger over the furrow between her brows. “I stood you up, Ward.”

“You stood me
up?
Okay, you're still mad at me. You're bent out of shape that my divorce hasn't come through. See how little it means to me? I didn't even know I was still in trouble.”

“It's more than trouble, Ward. You're still married.” I could tell Mary Rose didn't have the energy for an argument, and Ward could tell, too.

“What's the fastest way to a man's heart?”

“Don't do this. This is serious. It's not the being-married part, it's the lying-to-me part.”

“Through his chest with a sharp knife.”

“Ha ha.”

“Anyway, it wasn't a lie, it was a technicality. Come on,” he said. “I'm not mad at you for standing me up, so you shouldn't be mad at me.” He opened his jacket and moved to wrap it around Mary Rose in a hug. She made a face, but stepped toward him, snaking her arms around his waist beneath the jacket.

“It's hardly the same thing,” I said.

“You have that aftershave on I like,” said Mary Rose, sniffing his collar.

Need I say Mary Rose went home with Ward?

ON A WINDY
, wet afternoon, three weeks and one day after Mary Rose had her amnio, the phone rang. The phone had been ringing a lot lately, mostly Audra, calling just to check in on the “not-so-little mother.” She even called from her month of madness in Puerto Vallarta.

“Well? Is it baseball mitts or baby dolls?” asked Audra.

“I haven't gotten the results yet,” said Mary Rose.

“And you're sure they couldn't tell with the ultrasound? I have a friend at the club who says you look for the third leg. That's a sure sign it's a boy,” said Audra.

“Unless it's a girl with three legs,” said Mary Rose.

“Don't talk like that. This baby is perfectly healthy. I don't know what you're worried about. There's not a thing wrong with our genes. We never had tests like these in my day. All they do is make doctors rich and new mothers nervous. Not that I'm advocating a return to ignorance. God knows we don't want a mongoloid. Anyway, there's nothing wrong with our genes. And after watching you cut down that quaking aspen I'm sure there's nothing wrong with yours. You'll call and let me know as soon as you hear anything. I'm going to buy the crib linen for you, so I would like to know.”

“I don't want to know the sex, Audra. But I will call and let you know if there's anything else.”

“I understand, honey. Keep it a surprise. When do you see the doctor again?”

“Tuesday.”

“What did you say his name was again?”

“Her. Janet Vertamini. At the Cascade Women's Clinic.”

“A woman? My, my, you are modern. In my day it was thought unnatural to have a woman doctor.”

On the day Mary Rose got the news, she had just returned from interviewing Sarah, one of her new Mower and Rakers, and was in the bathroom licking Bon Ami cleanser from her cupped palm. Yes, you read it right, Bon Ami. In addition to the powdery metallic taste, Mary Rose had developed a taste for the scritch
between her teeth. This hankering for cleaning powder was the only food craving Mary Rose had during her entire pregnancy. Mary Rose thought it was probably some need for extra calcium, and since there was nothing about eating Bon Ami in the literature she had amassed, she assumed it was harmless. Pickles and ice cream, you see, is largely a myth.

The phone rang. Mary Rose dusted her palms off in the sink and gave the bowl a quick swipe with the sponge.

The voice said, “Hello, it's Geenie Burns from the Cascade Women's Clinic. Good news. Everything looks normal.”

“Normal?” said Mary Rose. Normal was good, right? Why didn't Geenie Burns say great? Everything looks great!

“You said you didn't want to know the gender?”

“Oh, God, I'm pregnant,” said Mary Rose.

“Isn't this Mary Rose Crowder?”

Geenie Burns, Geenie Burns, don't you know this makes It official? The advent of prenatal testing has made it possible to be only a little bit pregnant. Mary Rose patted the He-bean twitching beneath her belly button. He was a prodigy of gestation after all.

“Ha ha!” She slid around the wood floors in her rag socks, snapping her fingers. She called all of us: Ward, Audra, even Fleabo. By the time she got to me her mood had deteriorated.

“Labor,” said Mary Rose. “Now I have to go through labor. You get over one worry hurdle, then there's another. Just like you said.”

“Wait'll the first time you take him out to practice for his learner's permit,” I said.

“Describe the pain to me again. Don't say it's indescribable,” said Mary Rose.

“It's like being screwed onto a fence post,” I said.

“Not really.”

“No, I made it up,” I said.

MARY ROSE HAD
heard that labor and delivery was like an
athletic event. It's not unlike an athletic event, but the event it most resembles is bronco riding, where the main thing is just hanging on until it's over. Nonetheless she thought she should be in even better shape than she already was and, as I mentioned earlier, had enrolled herself in a prenatal water aerobics class.

It was a little silly—bouncing up and down in the water to show tunes was what it amounted to—but silliness was a small price to pay to be weightless for forty-five minutes three times a week. Some days there were two other pregnant women in the class, sometimes a dozen. The teacher was a twenty-three-year-old who had two children and not a mark on her. Mary Rose suspected this was her main qualification for teaching the class, since she repeatedly had trouble keeping the beat of “Everything's Coming Up Roses.”

Mary Rose was on the verge of finding another class when she made the acquaintance of a soft-spoken, doe-eyed cellist in our city's symphony. Mary Rose liked the cellist because she enjoyed imagining what she looked like playing the cello at nine months along. As with many aspects of pregnancy, the difficult part was not what you might expect: It was the calluses on the ends of the cellist's fingers that were giving her pains; new blisters formed with every incremental readjustment of the instrument, made to accommodate her expanding belly. Mary Rose was amazed. It was the same with her and her rototiller.

Halfway through each class, when the paddleboards were distributed, Mary Rose would find herself paddling to the other end of the pool and back with the cellist, whose name she learned the first day, then forgot, then was too shy to ask again.

One day, Mary Rose mentioned that the cellist was lucky. Her baby would come out knowing Mozart while Mary Rose's baby would come out familiar only with the sounds of lawn mower, chain saw, and the announcer's voice on Blazer cable. The cellist wasn't totally without a sense of humor, but she was one of those people who needed ample warning that a joke was on its way.

“I'm also reading her the Civilization Series,” said the
cellist. “We're on
The Age of Reason Begins.
” She went on to tell Mary Rose about In Ùteroversity, an institution of “prelearning” based in northern California and available by subscription. It provided week-by-week “lesson plans” based on fetal development and the kind of preknowledge you might like your child to have.

“How does she hear you?” asked Mary Rose. “Being a fetus is like living inside a washing machine.”

“They send you a special device that fits over your stomach, like a megaphone. It amplifies the sound in such a way that your words are quite clear.”

Mary Rose doubted it. She was hardly going to become a subscriber herself, the “in tuition” being quite expensive. But Mary Rose thought it couldn't hurt to talk to the He-bean a little more, get him used to her voice.

I haven't gone off on a tangent here. I'm telling you this so you can understand how it was that Ward came to think that Mary Rose had finally cracked. No one uses the term “gone mad” anymore. Most people think it's the word
mad
at fault—too dramatic. I think it's the
gone
that's ruined the phrase, and lay it at the feet of jet travel. It's too easy to come back from wherever you've been, even madness.
Cracked
implies someone irrevocably damaged, and that is the word Ward would use to describe Mary Rose to his lawyer, whom he would bring in to sue Mary Rose for custody of the as-yet-unborn Baron baby.

Now I am going off on a tangent.

7.

I'M NOT SURE WHAT GOT INTO ME, WHY I FELT THE NEED
to torment Ward in front of the hospital the day of Mary Rose's amnio. There's always the He Deserved It rationale, but was I the one to dish it out? No. What went on between Mary Rose and Ward had nothing to do with me. I think it was simple jealousy. Ward, feckless though he may be, still raced to the hospital to meet Mary Rose, still wanted to be a part of this birth. He may have been legally married to someone else, but he was absorbed in Mary Rose and the baby. Marriage, like the original definition of the word
gay,
has lost its meaning. Lyle and I are married, and even though I just went on at length about how endearing he was at my amnio, now that Stella was here, he'd checked out. If I had a choice between absorption (despite its paper-towelish connotations) and a marriage license, I don't think I'd take the license, although they are very lovely in our state, with a filigreed blue-black border and an embossed covered wagon at the bottom.

Lyle's hours at work had been cut back just after Stella was born, and now he spent most of his time online. He got home from work around two-thirty, and played Realm of the Elf until midnight. I think he had a girlfriend online. Like everyone else, I couldn't decide whether this was cheating or not. Her screen name was Lil Plum. I know about her because one time I was talking to the back of Lyle's head just as he was booting up Realm of the Elf, and an instant message popped on the screen:
I love you, Rtist, where have you been?
Rtist is Lyle's screen name, chosen, I presume,
while he still fashioned himself a painter and not a computer geek.

“Who's Lil Plum?” I asked. It leapt from my mouth like a feisty fish.

Why do women ask this question? We might as well just say, “I'm feeling in need of being lied to. Any chance you could help me out?” The back of Lyle's neck reddened.

“A friend from the game. She plays a healer. She's awesome with head wounds.”

“Lucky you.”

“Every time a musk hog gouges my eye out, she's always right there, always ready to help me out.”

“Is this an InfideLite here, Lyle, or what?”

InfideLite was a word we'd invented when cheating on each other was as likely as income-tax reform. Thus, we could afford to be cavalier. We had philosophical discussions in bed, after having nearly concussed ourselves making love. We'd agreed that a full-blown affair was unforgivable, but an InfideLite could probably be overlooked, in time. An InfideLite, as we defined it, is what used to be called a one-night stand. It happens furtively. There are no illicit meetings at noon in a downtown hotel, no phone numbers changing hands. There are no meals or bottles of anything from France. Marriages remain intact, if strained; hearts remain unbroken.

“She lives in Blue Mound, Illinois, Brooke,” Lyle said, annoyed, not wanting to go along with our old joke.

“Is that supposed to reassure me that you're not having an affair, or what?”

In some ways it would have been better if he were having an affair in RL—an affair in Real Life, to use the proper net terminology. For one thing, he would never be home, which means he wouldn't be underfoot, leaving his wet towels on the wood floors of our bedroom and forgetting to put the milk back in the refrigerator. He would be out, and he would feel guilty, which would encourage him to bring me flowers, take me out to dinner, offer
to take Stella so I could get out myself. Since it was only an online fling, however, Lyle felt no need to make amends. He still expected to be fed and watered. He expected me to allow him this, since, as he pointed out whenever I made noises about how much time he spent on his computer, at least he wasn't out in bars with other women …

The unsaid part was, like I had been with other men.

When Stella was just four weeks old Lyle took care of her while I went out and did a bad thing. Actually, it wasn't really bad. In our world really bad, Dicky Baron-variety bad, gets you celebrity, with its attendant television shows and book deals. What I did was more sort of cowardly and craven: I lied about having been bad.

In a way, it explains everything: why Lyle professes to have no interest in basketball; why he has withdrawn; why he allows Lil Plum of Blue Mound, Illinois, to minister to his virtual head wounds.

The day I was bad had been a suffocating day in late summer, humid and smoggy, the pollen count off the chart. Downstate they were field-burning or spraying, something that made the doomsday-red sky smell like burnt hair.

Mary Rose and I met for a drink in the bar at the same hotel where I had stayed during the film seminar, the hotel where Lyle and I had fallen in love. It had expert air-conditioning, comfortable leather chairs, and fond memories. It was the first time I had been out of the house since Stella was born.

The bar was not crowded. Despite the fact it was 6:30 and still nearly ninety-five degrees, no one seemed interested in escaping the heat. People preferred to sit outside. As I said above, we in our city would rather suffer dehydration, sunburn, and heat stroke than appear inhospitable, for fear that next year our few weeks of real heat would go somewhere else. Mary Rose and I, of course, were originally from California, and therefore ingrates. We took heat for granted.

What an odd pair we were. I was then at the very peak of
postpartum exhaustion and confusion, fuzzy of mind, limp of soul, doughy of everything except my stupendous corn-silo-sized breasts. I was pale, smelled of sour milk, and didn't care. I had Stella. As I waited for Mary Rose, I held the thought of her in my mind as one might the image of a lover.

Mary Rose had come straight from work. I remember thinking how tall and strong she looked; if she were an actress, she would only ever be offered the role of the beautiful alien from some technology-bereft planet where women rule in teeny outfits, with big weapons. She strode through the dim bar in a grass-stained pair of canvas shorts and a black tank top. She was brown as a brick, her damp blond bangs pushed off her face. She was wearing her Swiss pruners in their hand-tooled holster. No, I must be misremembering the holster. Surely she would have left it in the Mowers and Rakers truck. It's the tough-gunslinger image of her I'm conjuring up. She sat, casting her long legs out straight beneath the table.

I ordered scotch on the rocks with a beer back. I drank quite a bit after Stella was born. Did then, do now. No one can use a drink as much as a new mother. Why the world is full of men drinking in bars is a mystery to me. What do men have to worry about? Money, manhood, the play-offs. The same basic things that bug them at fourteen bug them at eighty-four.

But there you are, mother. For reasons having to do with selfishness and the cruel march of DNA, you have brought forth an innocent who will suffer and die, not to mention figure out that love fades, money can buy happiness after all, and diets don't work.

That's one half. The other is what you've done to yourself. You realize within a week of the baby's birth that you will be dismayed for the rest of your life, dismayed with love. Every day, all day, will be spent quivering with foreboding. You will ache with the effort of listening. For breathing, wheezing, the slam of a car door, the sounds of muffled crying. Stretch marks are nothing compared to this. You have discovered the fifth chamber of your heart, the cozy quarters where the dismay will reside until the day
you die. Your child may die, it happens, but the dismay is unimpeachable.

You will never not be a mother.

And no one who isn't a mother understands this, or cares, except when you do something spectacular like pick up a Volkswagen.

“So it's no wonder I drink,” I said. Mary Rose had eyed my scotch and beer with disapproval. She was then so far away from considering childbirth herself that she could afford to know everything.

“I just heard it wasn't good for the baby, that's all,” she said, looking at the menu.

“No, you're right.” I didn't want to disgust her further by confessing I had pumped a few bottles worth of milk earlier in the week in anticipation of our date.

For this simple date—drinks, a light dinner, then a movie—I had looked forward to as eagerly as I had once anticipated a college trip to Brazil. The smells of cigarettes, perfume. The snatches of other people's conversations. To sit quietly in a public place—look at the rows of bright bottles lined up against the mirror behind the bar!—and sip a drink. To drink the drink and eat the meal without interruption. To excuse myself and walk across the bar with my arms free, swinging at my sides. To walk into the ladies', where I could sit on the toilet with the door closed. By myself. I could pee, or just sit there, for as long as I wanted. No one needed anything from me. I could take my time in front of the mirror, combing my hair, inspecting the circles beneath my eyes, rolling on lipstick. It was like travel to a foreign country. I felt a wave of homesickness in the form of longing for Stella. But it passed, and I was glad to be there.

People not residing deep in the motherhood called this Life.

Mary Rose's Caesar salad arrived with unconscionably large pieces of romaine. She was very good at spearing them whole and tucking them into her mouth. All that raking, I suppose. I had
ordered a pizza for one, topped with ingredients Lyle would scoff at: barbecued chicken and roasted red peppers.

I did not dig in immediately, so happy was I just to
sit.
I twirled my ankles beneath the table, feeling them crackle. The only time I sat anymore was when I fed Stella or when I was asleep. Otherwise, I was rocking her, walking her, checking for a project and changing her, or just generally cajoling her, the latter of which seemed to require my marching around the house with my knees held very high.

I put my elbow on the table, rested my cheek on my palm, sighed, stared. The best part of all this was being able to focus my gaze on something farther than twelve inches in front of my face. I have heard prisoners say this is one of the most wonderful things about being released; having a bona fide distance into which you can gaze. So there I was, flexing my long-distance eye muscles, or whatever.

I swear this was all I was doing.

What I was not doing was coming on to Lightning Rod McGrew. I may have been humming along with the background music, or maybe even doing a little lip-syncing. I talked to Stella all the time, narrating life for her as advised in countless baby books, and sometimes I got to talking aloud even when I was alone. If I was talking to myself surely Mary Rose would have said something?

According to Lightning Rod McGrew, I was talking to him.

Lightning Rod and Derik Crawshaw were clear across the room. I was ignoring my food, my head in my hands, gazing at him, mouthing something. I think it may have been something along the lines of “come on baby light my fire.”

Lightning Rod was looking for company. Lightning and Derik Crawshaw. They sent over two bottles of our famous locally brewed ale.

Mary Rose glanced up at the waiter, a flap of romaine between her lips. The waiter clutched the cold bottles between three fingers, an unwilling party to this nonsense.

“I think you have the wrong table,” she said. “Those ‘gentlemen' over there,” he said. He said
gentlemen
in quotes.

Mary Rose sucked in her lettuce, craned around, and looked at two tall black guys in ice cream-colored shorts and polo shirts, hefty white high-tops, and white sweat socks clinging cutely to their coconut-colored ankles. Their hands were as big as our heads, their arms as thick as our legs.

“Who are they?”

They were obviously Somebody. By somebody I mean professional basketball players. No tall African-American male visiting our city ever seems to be anything else. I am sure there are six-foot-five African exchange students, six-foot-seven software salesmen. If there are, they are besieged with requests for autographs, questioned as to why they insist on taking the outside shot. This attests to both the limited opportunities of our little city and the many varieties of racism.

Mary Rose turned back to me and gave me a look. Behind her, across the room, Lightning Rod hung one leg over the other and waggled his fingers at me.

“They mean it.” The instant the sentence left my lips I thought I had said, “they mean us.”

Mary Rose leaned back in her leather chair, crossed her bony forearms across her chest, tossed her head back, and giggled. “Us?” she whispered almost hysterically.

It wasn't
that
weird.

They joined us.

It was that weird. Of course it was. Lightning Rod McGrew and Derik Crawshaw were … I won't say desperate. I will say they were in their mid-twenties, hot, bored, and tired of twirling the paper from a countless numbers of straws around their long, long fingers.

They were feeling adventuresome, let's put it that way. They were stuck here for two days, the purpose of their trip to discuss with the Trail Blazers the possibility of being added to the roster.
Lightning Rod was a free agent, having just been freed from his duties warming the bench for the Miami Heat. Derik had been starting for a team in Italy for the past three years. We had never heard of them, which was just as well. Otherwise, we might have acted even more ridiculous than we did.

“You was eyeing me,” said Lightning Rod as he picked up a chair from the empty table beside us and dropped it beside me. Our knees rubbed; all of our knees rubbed.

“Eyeing you?” I said. “How do you know I wasn't staring at that print of the duck hunters behind your head?”

“You was looking me up and down. Like a pot of half-finished gumbo looks at a net full of fresh crab.”

“A pot can't look at anything.”

“You white girls such sticklers for details. That's what I like about you.”

“I'm sure that's the first quality you look for in a woman,” I said.

“Tell this lady—what's your name, sis?—tell this lady how I like white girls.”