Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me (4 page)

Big Hank stood at the head of the table, methodically carving the turkey into disks with an electric carving knife. He hummed like a bored dentist. There was something with the turkey. It was white and shiny. All I could think of was a burn victim. Of course. Roasted without its skin. Audra's devotion to low fat extended even to the calorie-fest of the year. Around the table, bowls were passed: steamed carrots, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, whole-wheat rolls as heavy as billiard balls.

Only in sitcoms do women usually make quips and asides about the god-awful cooking of their hostess. Mostly, we smile and offer compliments; the worse the meal, the more effusive the compliments. I watched Mary Rose take a dry oval of charred bird and try to disguise it with two ladles of gravy, which turned out to be steamed and whipped rutabagas.

“Yum! This is a real taste treat!” said Mary Rose. She put the fork in her mouth, then took it out with the food still on it. “Mrs. Baron, meant to tell you, before I leave tonight let me take in the calla lilies for you. It's getting a little nippy out there.”

“I'll nippy
you,
” said Ward, walking his fingers up Mary Rose's side in the direction of her breasts.

“Ward.” Mary Rose squirmed, delirious as a fourteen-year-old on her first date.

“Ward! Stop it some more, stop it some more,” said Ward in a girly falsetto.

“For one thing,” continued Dicky, louder, “everyone wants murder. They prefer multiple murder. What was so good about
Romeo's Dagger
—and it was good, Brooke, don't ever forget what a fine job you did there, do you hear what I'm saying?—is that it had meaning. It was about love and courage. It was about more than how twisted people are. Although twisted is what sells. Twisted is money in the bank.”

“Audra, please, call me Audra,” said Audra to Mary Rose. “I suspect you're right about the calla lilies, and while we're on the subject, I don't think I've told you how much I love
Paraiso Mexicano.
It's absolutely inspired. I've had enough azaleas and rhodies to last me a lifetime. I adore it, and as I recall, not everyone agreed with me.”

“As I recall, Ma, no one agreed with you,” said Little Hank.

“Mary Rose did. She's the only truly creative landscaper in this entire city,” said Audra.

Paraiso Mexicano
was Audra's name for the subtropical garden Mary Rose had planted behind the four-car garage. Other gardeners had told Audra what Mary Rose should have: “Mrs. Baron, you cannot, I repeat, cannot grow bougainvillea in this climate.”

But where there was money—not to mention the beloved's mother—there was always someone to say, “If you want the impossible, I'll try to give it to you.” Mary Rose built a trellis for the
Bougainvillea sanderiana
against the south side of the garage, dropped some hibiscus and salmon-colored impatiens in the ground, and told Audra to keep her palms and calla lilies in pots, which could then be transferred to the sunroom in the winter.

“It was all your idea, Audra.”

“But you talked me out of the banana tree. That showed determination and vision. Not every landscaper has determination and vision.”

“I was just following your lead,” said Mary Rose. She was
anxious, I think, to be both agreeable while at the same time disavowing responsibility for the collection of exotic plants, some shipped from nurseries in Phoenix, that would no doubt be black and limp with rot come spring.

“You're not eating,” said Audra. “Have you been morning sick?”

You know that silence.

Suddenly, the weather, which no one had noticed for hours, seemed to be inside the room. The applause of rain against the Italian-tile roof. The candles sputtering in the heavy silver holders, victims of unseen drafts. Mary Rose slid a glance at Ward, who kept eating his carrots, sliding them between half open lips as if he was feeding a parking meter. She said nothing.

I thought I didn't hear this right. I busied myself trying to feed Stella mashed potatoes.

“You're right, Dick,” said Ward. “The fact-based movie is in decline.
Romeo's Dagger
was great. What did that one review call it? ‘Shapely and ironic'?”

“That's what I want on my tombstone,” I said.

“What was the last good true story you saw? Dad? What about you?”

Big Hank looked at Ward over his glasses as if he were mad. “The last time I was in a theater they still had ushers.”

“This is ridiculous,” said Audra. “I know you young people talk about everything. For God's sake, look what they advertise on television these days. So let's not stand on ceremony. Yes, Mary Rose, Ward told us the news. And we are thrilled, absolutely thrilled. This is ridiculous. I think we should be honest. I'm beyond thrilled. I thought I was never going to have any grandchildren. And since we're being honest, I might as well say it. Two healthy kids like you and Ward. I'm not racist. You know that about me. But with all those poor African-American girls having a dozen children or more, why, we have to hold up our end, don't we? Us poor old middle-class white people?”

“Speaking of which, who is someone who's never been mugged?”

“Ward, quit trying to change the subject,” said Audra. “But there's one thing. And I hope you hear me on this, Mary Rose. I know you're kind of the earthy type, and will probably be into all that modern-day homeopathic nonsense, but please,
please,
I beg of you. I've heard of women saving their placentas—good God, how far we've come! Talking about placentas at the dinner table—”

“You're the only one talking about them,” Ward said into his Brussels sprouts. “And, yes, I would like to change the subject.”

“You little devil,” said Little Hank, pitching a roll across the table.

“Don't interrupt—my
point
is that I do not, I repeat, do not, want you saving the placenta to fertilize the roses. I've heard of that happening. I will absolutely not have your placenta decomposing, or whatever it does, under my “Billy Graham” or “Melodie Parfumee.” Mrs. Eldon's daughter-in-law froze her placenta, then when it was time to use it to plant under a tree or something, it wouldn't come out of the Tupperware—”

“Mother! You've made your point!”

“And she had to microwave it. Ward, I'm just trying to show you I'm modern, and that I support you.”

“We understand, Mrs. Baron,” said Mary Rose, tucking her hair behind her ears.

“Please, call me Audra!”

Mary Rose looked at Ward, who was busily smearing whipped rutabaga on a pile of curling meat. He smiled a weak, closed-mouth smile, gave his shoulders a little shrug. “The answer is: a liberal. To the question, Who is someone who's never been mugged?”

Mary Rose cleared her throat. “I know you're family and have every right to know, Audra, but we had originally planned on keeping it to ourselves. Until we've had time to adjust.”

Audra giggled, clapped her hands together under her chin. This was easily the most amusing thing she'd heard in ages. “Mary
Rose, you are so adorable. There's no adjusting. Don't you know that? I still look at these boys and say to myself, ‘I can't believe
you
came out of me.'”

2.

FOR A WOMAN, THE TRUE ADVANTAGE OF MARRIAGE IS
not having regular sex, but having an on-site partner with whom to debrief. In this day and age anyone can get laid; try finding someone who'll listen to dish at midnight. Before Lyle discovered Realm of the Elf, he was just such a man.

I was eager to get home after Thanksgiving dinner. Wait until Lyle heard about Ward Baron and The Last Living Valkyrie. Lyle does a great improvisational chromosomal analysis, wherein he imagines both the best baby and the worst baby two people could possibly produce. Of the offspring of a software mogul and a runway model he might say:
What if the baby gets his height and her math skills! His lips and hips and her sense of the absurd!
We entertained ourselves for hours with this when Stella was gestating, and haven't laughed so hard since. Then she was born, and was completely herself, and made fools of us both.

I managed to successfully transfer a sleeping Stella from her car seat to her crib without waking her, then tromped down to the basement stairs to Lyle's Lair. A previous owner had had a Space Odyssey decor in mind: The basement walls and unfinished ceiling were spray-painted silver. Lyle had his computer set up against one of the silver walls, on a big square of old dog-brown shag. Next to the computer was a futon, one that has been passed from soon-to-be-married friend to soon-to-be-married friend, until it wound up in Lyle's Lair. Itchy Sister, our thirteen-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback, sleeps on the futon, where she snores and
silently, endlessly farts. On top of the computer Lyle always burns an aromatherapy candle, Seduction, to combat the odor.

“You won't believe this one,” I said to the back of Lyle's head. “Mary Rose and Ward are an item. Not just an item, but an expectant item.”

I am an expert on the back of my husband's head. Like a character in an experimental play, I talk to it all the time. Lyle's hair is cut by an envious, straight-haired stylist to emphasize his cherubic curls. His best ones—shiny, self-assured—are just to the right of the crown. To the left, they can't decide if they want to be curls or waves. There are four gray hairs, and a black mole on the back of his neck I will one day have to pester him to have checked, if our marriage survives his passion for Realm of the Elf.

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“We can talk about this later,” I said, and started to walk away.

“I'm listening. I'm always listening to you. Uh-oh, now I'm really not feeling well.” He sat forward, attacked the keyboard. Mozart on a particularly frenzied day.

“Do you have a headache? Have you eaten anything?”

“I just got my arm cut off.”

I stared over his shoulder, feigning interest. Realm of the Elf was one of those online role-playing games where you create the persona of some magical Hobbit-like creature, then go around getting mortally wounded in imaginary sword fights and finding precious gems in the virtual bushes. I will never understand the appeal of this or any other text-file computer game. White letters scrolling up a black screen, a cyber ticker tape.

I read, “A marauding troll has just malevolently and with vim chopped off your arm! Your hand is being eaten by deadly acid. Otherwise your soul is full of life. He takes a misshapen trunk from your dove gray pack. Your neck wounds look better.”

“And people say screenplays are poorly written.” I wanted to say,
I'm worried about you! Can't you be into bondage or something more normally deviant?

He said nothing. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. “I'm just … about” Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

“I don't know how you can read this stuff hour after hour.”

I sighed, went over and petted Itchy Sister behind an ear. Her black lips turn up at the corners when she gets some attention, even in her sleep.

“Mary Rose and Ward are going to have a baby!” I told the back of his head.

“Let me just see if I can find someone to get my arm on, and I'll be right with you. There's a healer in the next village who owes me a favor.”

I went upstairs to check on Stella, then went to bed.

A WEEK AFTER
Thanksgiving, when I arrived at Mary Rose's house with Stella to watch the Knicks versus the Blazers, Mary Rose wasn't home. Like many people in our city, Mary Rose and I never missed a basketball game. Our city endured drippy falls, drenched winters, drizzly springs, and no major professional sports teams save basketball, which made for a civic fanaticism rivaling that of the rampaging hordes who follow soccer in Europe. Mary Rose and I pitched in for a special cable package—not cheap—that broadcasted all home games that weren't carried on network television. When a game was carried only on radio, we huddled around Mary Rose's boom box, set in the middle of her coffee table, like would-be war widows listening for news from the front. Mary Rose would undercook a frozen pizza. Sometimes I brought an aluminum tray of take-out nachos.

Mary Rose lived in a bile-green bungalow that had been converted into a triplex, in a part of the city where the streets were lined with old Victorians groaning on tiny lots. It was the homeliest house on the block, but Mary Rose had a deal with the landlord. Mr. D'Addio gave her a break in the rent in exchange for her mowing the lawn and keeping the sidewalk free of the smashed plums that fell from the three ornamental trees that grew on the parking strip. The plums, while beautiful, were a nuisance. They
stained the pavement a bloody maroon, as well as attracted a ferocious species of wasp that could sting you through your shoe.

I stood in the entryway of the triplex, talking to apricot haired Mrs. Wanamaker, who lived in the unit downstairs. The entryway smelled of wet dog and the perfume inserts of magazines. Mrs. Wanamaker was fascinated to hear about Stella's affection for avocados and taking off her own diaper. She also admired Stella's black-and-red Blazer jump suit. The true mates of this world are not husbands and wives, but lonely old women and exhausted young mothers.

Mary Rose bounded up the front steps, apologized for being late. First, there was Mrs. Marsh, wanting all her dahlia bulbs dug up for the winter, then Hotlips Pizza lost her order.

“Pepperoni double cheese,” she said, flying the cardboard box over my head as she jogged past me up the stairs. So much energy for someone newly pregnant, I thought.

I dragged myself upstairs behind her, Stella's car seat banging against my shins, the strap of her diaper bag cutting into my shoulder. My knees ached. Once inside, I dropped the bag—twice as heavy as the Perfect Wonderment herself—stuffed to the gills with powders, ointments and sunscreens, Q-Tips and mittens, a change of clothes, rattles and teething toys, books for several different age levels (in the event she started to read while away from home and proved to be a genius), and a half-dozen empty plastic bottles, designed in Denmark according to some enlightened Scandinavian feeding principle, lint stuck to the milk-encrusted nipple.

“If I have one piece of advice for the woman looking to get pregnant, it's train for a decathlon,” I said. “It's amazing to me how everyone always wants to help a pregnant woman, when the baby is all nice and tucked away in utero, but then once the kid is born, and your life as a schlepper begins in earnest, no one thinks to lend you a hand.”

“Was I supposed to help you?” said Mary Rose. “I didn't know I was supposed to help you. You always seem like you've got everything
under control.” Mary Rose set the pizza in the middle of the coffee table, then glanced around the living room to make sure there was nothing Stella could get into. Stella wasn't crawling yet. She sat where you put her. Nevertheless, Mary Rose was under the impression that a baby, once freed from the confines of the womb, was biologically programmed to seek disaster, compelled to stick her fingers into sockets, choke on a dusty bead found beneath the couch.

Even if this were true, a baby would be completely safe at Mary Rose's. The only time Ward had ever ventured upstairs, according to Mary Rose, he'd said that if Mowers and Rakers didn't work out, Mary Rose could always get a job doing interior design for a monastery. The living room was tiny, the walls toffee-colored with three windows on one side. Opposite the windows were two doors, one that gave off onto the front hallway, the other to the back hallway that led to the kitchen and the huge bathroom which, due to the architectural gymnastics involved in the conversion from charming house to funky triplex, was bigger than the living room. There was nothing on the walls.

Acquisitive Ward, he of the Arts and Crafts-style living room set, collection of vintage neon beer signs, and three complete sets of Fiesta Ware, jokingly (or maybe not, Ward had a way of saying things that were more hurtful than funny, then trying to pass the insult off as a joke when you got annoyed) said her spare quarters were an affectation.

“He accused me of being self-consciously minimalist,” said Mary Rose. “I told him it was called “the less you had, the less you had to clean.” I'm not a minimalist, I'm
practical
.” Like everyone newly in love, she reported this humdrum exchange with pride and astonishment, as if to say, See how we know each other? See how we tease each other? Already, it's come to that.

I felt a prick of irritation. Before I could trace it to its roots I said, “Practical, unless you count having a baby with a man you hardly know.” That sounded meaner than I meant it to. I backpedaled. “I mean, not that
knowing
the man you have your baby with
makes any difference. Actually, maybe knowing the father is worse. Then you don't have any excuse for perpetuating his genes.” I was starting to go off. I laughed too loud, startling Stella.

Mary Rose retrieved her backpack from where it hung on the hall-closet doorknob, then fished around inside. “Look at this.”

It was a handout given her by Dr. Vertamini, her
OB/GYN
. A list of symptoms that signal impending miscarriage: pain or burning on urination; vaginal spotting or bleeding; leaking or gushing fluid from vagina; uterine contractions; severe nausea; severe vomiting; abdominal pain; dizziness or light-headedness; severe headache; swelling of face, eyes, fingers, or toes; blurred eyesight; reduced fetal movement; absence of fetal movement for twenty-four hours (from the twenty-eighth week of pregnancy on).

“What do you think it means by pain, exactly?” asked Mary Rose.

“Are you experiencing any pain?”

“No. I figured it has to do with malpractice laws or something. Dr. Vertamini probably gives one of these to everyone, don't you think? She just didn't print it up for me.”

“Oh, no, I think she printed it up just for you.”

“So I shouldn't worry, is what you're saying.” Mary Rose manufactured a smile. Her teeth looked like bathroom tile installed by a perfectionist.

“Get used to worrying is more like it. You'll get past the first trimester, then there's the second, then the third, then the birth. No sooner is the baby born then you start worrying about can she hear all right? Is she retarded? And this new thing I read in the paper. Children who
don't
go to day care have a higher rate of leukemia. Children who
do
go to day care wind up sociopaths. It's a prison sentence of worry. No parole.”

Mary Rose dropped the handout on the table, dragged a slice of pizza from the box, pinching off swags of cheese with her long, nail-bitten fingers. I got the feeling she didn't like my answer. Or maybe just my sermonizing. I do have a tendency to go on a bit. But she knows this about me, so why did she bother asking?

“What was all that business at Thanksgiving with Dicky?” she asked abruptly. “I asked Ward, and he just rolled his eyes.”

“Poor old Dicky. It would kill him that you didn't know all about it.”

I was happy to get off the subject of motherhood and told Mary Rose probably more than she wanted to know about poor Jennifer Allen, whom Dicky had fallen in love with when he was at U.S.C. They became acquainted because they were both from our city, had gone to rival private high schools. She had a head of sunny curls that compensated for all of her shortcomings. Jennifer and Dicky loved each other in the dedicated, impractical way of the well-off. He bought her a yellow Vespa for her birthday. She convinced her parents to allow Dicky to accompany them on their annual two-week Christmas pilgrimage to St. Croix.

After two terms at school, Jennifer got sick. Or it was presumed she was sick. She began falling asleep in class. She was pale as a mushroom. It was all those weekend ski trips to Mammoth, those late nights with Dicky, the midterms, beer bongs, glee clubs. It was the anemia typical of the earnest, nutritionally ignorant vegan whose idea of saving the planet involves subsisting on a diet of Coke Classic and Cool Ranch Doritos. All Jennifer Allen really needed was a vacation from being a nineteen-year-old college student with no worries, but because all this collegiate carrying-on is presumed to be a normal upper-middle-class child's birthright, nobody thought anything of it.

When Jennifer came home for the summer, her mother took her to one of our city's most well-respected specialists, where she was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive form of cancer: leukemic reticuloendotheliosis, also known as hairy cell leukemia. It had already invaded her marrow, spleen, and blood.

The shock felt by Dicky Baron and Jennifer Allen almost stopped their young hearts there and then. Who had ever heard of such a thing? Hairy cell leukemia. How could something so ridiculous-sounding be fatal? If she chose to accept treatment, there would be useless operations, followed by a round of
expensive, nausea-producing chemotherapy that would not, in the end, postpone a death both painful and tedious. In the meantime, it would spell the end of the sunny curls. It would mean a life of valiant hat wearing.

Jennifer wept. There was not much hope. There was, however, the romance of dying while you were still young and pretty, featuring the interesting delusion that you can somehow experience the benefits of death without actually ceasing to exist. One day, while Dicky and Jennifer were alone in the house, Dicky found Big Hank's .45 semi-automatic while he was going through Father's bedside table, looking for something interesting to pinch. Dicky and Jennifer believed it was fate.