Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me (15 page)

11.

I INSISTED MARY ROSE GO TO THE E. R. I SAW THAT BUMP
she took on her belly. As she stalked away, back up the aisle, having dropped the five red SuperRopes, having not paid for them, the vendor not caring one whit—
get that crazy woman out of here!
—I saw her knees buckle slightly once, a move you might learn in a ballroom dance class, her hand fly to the spot she'd hit on the armrest when she fell. “Whoa,” she said.

Whoa
is not good news if your baby isn't due for six weeks. Except it turned out it wasn't six weeks.

It was Friday night, and you'd think the place would be crowded with car accidents, knife wounds, bums passed out in doorways, accidental poisonings, fraternity pranks gone awry. Television ER activity. There was one tiny white-haired lady, crocheting something in cheap yellow yarn. Her feet didn't touch the floor. The magazine covers had come unstapled from the magazines they belonged with, and sat around empty like peanut shells. The magazines themselves gave off that distinct hospital-waiting-room aura: thumbed through but never read by people who didn't want to be there.

A Vietnamese man in aqua scrubs raced out with a wheelchair. I was allowed to come back with Mary Rose because I might have been her partner. This might have been our baby. Our city was liberal that way. Waiting for the doctor, I said to her, “It'll be all right.”

Mary Rose gave me one of her black looks that said she had
no patience for hooey. She was in her third trimester and had no use for platitudes.

“I've been through this, remember?” I said.

“You haven't been through
this,
” she snapped. Mary Rose had had it with me.

The first doctor who looked at her was a resident or an intern—one of those almost-a-doctor doctors who seem to be there to gain experience not in the practice of medicine, but in the practice of dominating the conversation. He was tall and alarmingly lean, a physique that advertised his dedication to some grueling sport. He smelled, curiously, of bay leaves and garlic, beef-stewy; maybe there was a party going on in the staff lounge. Maybe it was his own going-away party. He stepped between the pink curtains the nurse had drawn around Mary Rose, took one look at her stupendous belly, and said, “You need to go up to maternity.” It was as if we were in the wrong line at the
DMV
.

“I'm not having the baby …” Mary Rose began.

“Then what can I do for you?”

“Other things do happen to pregnant women,” I said. “She could have fallen off a ladder. She could have broken her collarbone snowboarding.”

Before I could finish, the doctor backed out of the curtained cubicle. Minutes later another doctor stepped between the curtains, almost like a magic act. He introduced himself as Dr. Deluski. One of his electives must have been Bedside Manners 101. He was younger than we were, as small-boned as a ten-year-old girl. Looking at him, it seemed impossible he could ever have made it through medical school; he looked born to have upperclassmen pick him up and stuff him into a trash can. He wore a red bowtie.

“When's your due date?” He lifted the gown and stared hard at Mary Rose's twitching belly. When Patricia—the name Mary Rose had chosen—was not reclining on Mary Rose's bladder, or twisting and stretching to such a degree that her mother's belly took on the appearance of a Jell-O mold during an earthquake, she had the hiccups. Dr. Deluski touched the spot where Mary
Rose had hit the armrest. There was a faint mark, fig-shaped, not too alarming.

“June twelfth.”

“Hmmm.” Dr. Deluski rested his wrist on Mary Rose's pubic bone and felt for the baby's head. He then asked Mary Rose to pull up her knees, keeping her feet together, then drop her knees open. Mary Rose drew her eyebrows together, disapproving of this maneuver. She'd probably never been examined this way. I stared up at the curtain rings. It seemed altogether too informal. The good thing about stirrups was that no one ever mistook them for a good time.

Mary Rose sighed. “If everyone had a baby it would be the end of the civilized world because after you've gone through this you're never capable of feeling embarrassed again. Can you imagine a world where no one was ever embarrassed? The end of impulse control.”

“June twelfth, June twelfth. I don't think so. Could be wrong, of course. This one feels as if he's already turned. Which would mean you're at least in your thirty-fourth week.”

Dr. Deluski withdrew his finger, snapped off his rubber glove, dropped it in a metal trash can, the kind with a lid.

“Or maybe it's not a matter of never being embarrassed again. Probably what happens is that from the moment of your first prenatal visit on you live in a state of perpetual embarrassment. Breast-feeding. I can't even imagine what that's going to be like. Then it's on to bringing the forgotten lunch to kindergarten.”

“I suspect you're due May twelfth or thereabouts, not June twelfth. Maybe more like May nineteenth.”

“That's a full month earlier,” I said. Duh.

“Back in the fall, the date you gave as the first day of your last period, were you one hundred percent on that?”

“I just sort of guessed,” said Mary Rose.

“You're a big woman, so there was no reason for your doctor to question the size of the fetus. I'm going to send you upstairs for a fetal survey.”

“What's that?”

“Ultrasound. They'll measure the lungs, torso, heart. We'll see what's going on here.”

Mary Rose got dressed in silence, her back to me, modest, out of habit. I imagine she was counting back, counting back and wondering. Back not to when she was in the throes of lust with Ward Baron—you'd think that's what she'd be thinking about, but she wasn't—but back to when she could turn over in bed and not drag all the covers with her. Back when she was able to turn swiftly without knocking over a lamp. To when she was alone, able to read a book in the tub without having it booted into the suds. To when she was a simple individual and not a host organism. She thought back to when there were clothes in this world that fit.

Now nothing fit. I mean nothing. In our city we have several malls groaning with women's dress shops, as well as Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom downtown. There was nothing at all for Mary Rose to wear except one pair of china-blue leggings, elastic-less, and one XXL black T. Mary Rose wore this ensemble to mow, she wore it to hoe, she wore it to do everything else. She washed it every night and dragged it from the dryer every morning. What's love got to do with it? Indeed.

A MAN'S GOT
to do what a man's got to do?
Didn't Gary Cooper say that in
High Noon
? I hope not, for his sake. I hope it was some bit player who died of his own stupidity. For it has never been men who have to do what they have to do, but mothers.

Children must eat, they must be dressed, bathed, tickled, read to. That you have just been evicted or diagnosed with a fatal disease matters not. Like the tide, the needs of children never stop.

Mary Rose was a mother, or going to be one soon, and so she had to do what she had to do, which meant getting up the morning after she had behaved in a way that made her wish she could hide all day under the covers, and going out to find a car seat for baby Patricia. You're thinking I've trivialized my entire
argument. Car seats! The truth is, it is a law in our state that you must prove you have a car seat or else the hospital will not let you leave with your baby. You don't have to prove you know which end of the baby the food goes into, but you do have to show your car seat. The hospital cares not that your life is going down the tubes.

The car seat and a crib were the last things Mary Rose needed. Although she was worried that buying for the baby was tempting Fate, during the past month, Mary Rose had finally screwed up her courage and began ordering things for Patricia. Tiny pink-and-green-striped T-shirts and short baby pants, caps and socks, a set of hooded bath towels. This may have been Mary Rose's first twitch of the famous nesting urge. Not everyone experiences it.

Lyle, who folds his shirts before he puts them in the dirty clothes hamper, looked forward to this from the day I confessed I was pregnant. Poor Lyle. Every time I put away the laundry he rushed to my side and said, “Is this it? The hubcaps on the Volvo could use a once-over with a toothbrush.”

The closest I ever came was clipping and filing articles on Thailand from the travel section.

Once the baby clothes began arriving, and Fate yawned, untempted, Mary Rose rolled up her sleeves and started dialing in earnest. The UPS man stumbled up the steps, hidden behind a tower of boxes and brown mailing bags.

There were dozens of diaper wraps, a collection of matching plastic bibs. A play yard. A stroller. A tape to calm crying and a Geiger counter-like gadget designed to detect a wet diaper. This thing that had taken up so much space inside her would now take up space in the world. It was the beginning of Patricia's leaving her. She marveled, teary-eyed.

Ward, on the other hand, did what he pleased, then passed it off as something he had to do. The day after Ward suffered his whipping at the hands of Mary Rose, he never considered that he may have been, in part, responsible. Indeed, now that Ward could officially claim the title of Injured One, everything he had done to provoke Mary Rose had become preemptive actions he was happy
to have taken. His custody suit, his parading Lynne in public when everyone in his circle and his parents' circle supposed Mary Rose was his girlfriend, his final arrogant dismissive gesture that gave Mary Rose's fury its head, all seemed entirely justified. For Mary Rose was the unstable one. He, Ward, was just trying to keep his life together and make a good home for his soon-to-arrive daughter. Even the nurse said so. The nurse with hands that smelled of roses, who instructed him on the wearing of his eye patch—the sharp end of one of the plastic sleeves encasing the licorice Super-Rope had scratched his cornea—had seen the attack on the nightly news, heard his side as she ministered to him, and said he was one brave guy.

Even Lynne, who drove Ward's Porsche back to his houseboat, where she put ice on his eye and stroked his brown curls, now rather long, said that if Mary Rose was one of her Labradors she would be put down, pregnant or not.

Only Audra did not coddle and cajole. The next morning on the telephone, when Ward complained that Mary Rose had humiliated him, Audra said, “No, honey, you humiliated you. It was all over the TV. Mrs. Deets called this morning. So did Cubby Fleischer. They thought Mary Rose was upset because you had stepped out on her. They found it hugely amusing that you were so stupid to get caught like that. Right on television. Cubby said you could do with a few pointers.”

“But Lynne is my
wife,
” Ward sputtered.

“Spare me, Ward. Have you forgotten who you're talking to?”

“I'm only doing what I have to do,” said Ward.

“I knew we shouldn't have gone ahead with this lawsuit,” said Audra. “This is not the way people like us do business. No wonder Mary Rose is upset.”

“I don't have to listen to this women-sticking-together bullshit,” said Ward, and jabbed the
END
button on his cell phone. Cell phones have ruined forever hanging up in a huff.

Ward was at Starbucks, having a midmorning cappuccino.
I was sitting across from him, at a tiny table near the window. “Excuse me,” he said. “That was my mother.”

“And that's the way you talk to your mother? Tsk-tsk.”

Stella sat next to me in a wooden high chair, pointing out all the dogs.
Dog
was her first word, her only word, and with it came the feminine need to entertain and grease the wheels of conversation. Every time she saw a dog she pointed and said, “
Dug
.” What kind of accent was that? It didn't even have to be a real dog; dogs on billboards, on T-shirts, teapots, book jackets. Once she pointed out a pair of silver schnauzers dangling from the ears of a woman ahead of us in line at the market. “
Dug
.”

She took her pruny thumb from her mouth and pointed at a coffee mug on display.
Dug.

Ward had phoned me. That was my excuse. Mary Rose wasn't, at the moment, returning her calls as quickly as she once did, and Ward had called me. Ostensibly to see how Mary Rose was doing, since she had stopped returning his calls the day she'd been served with papers; really, to give me his own excuses. Is it still an excuse if you've managed to make yourself believe it? Or does your own gullibility, your ability to pull one over on yourself, transform it into a reason? In any case, I could tell he'd hoarded them, kept them like assets, like a stock portfolio. Stories for the future, when he would need them, and felt he needed them now.

“I am not a bad guy.” He warmed his hands around the squat white cup. His eye patch made him even better looking. Before he was just average handsome; the patch made people stare, and staring, they realized what they were looking at. Movie-star hair. Small scar, a beguiling white parenthesis, on the chin. Pianist's hands. A man in a leather jacket who reminded no one of Fonzie.

“I admit, I didn't get the divorce because it seemed easier not to. Lynne is high-strung—that's a good word for it—she gets upset. Really upset. Threatening-to-jump-off-a-bridge upset. So why push it? I wasn't seeing anyone seriously, wasn't dating anyone. Plus, who wants a marriage to end? We seemed to get along when we weren't living together, so we thought, well, maybe we'd
give it a shot sometime in the future. If I'm guilty of anything here, it's taking the path of least resistance.”

“Did anyone use the
word guilty
? I think the only word we're using here is
dog.
”

“There was no reason for her to attack me. I haven't done anything wrong. That's the thing with you women. You accuse accuse accuse, so we figure, we guys figure, I might as well do it, since I've been accused of it.”