Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me

by Karen Karbo

  If they left it I went somewhere else, in my 1979 Datsun with no car phone. When I took the project elsewhere, I presumed I was really taking it elsewhere, unaware this was a negotiating tactic. When the studio I had left called back and offered more money, more control, I said: “No. I’m sorry. I’m already talking to someone else. Thank you anyway.”

  No one had ever heard of such a thing. No one knew what to make of me. I was so middle-class, so resolutely un-shrewd, un-feisty, un-iconoclastic, un-all-those-other-adjectives used to describe brash up-and-comers that I was perceived as being shrewd, feisty, and iconoclastic.

  For a few weeks, everyone wanted to have a meeting with me just so they could tell their friends and associates how I never once said Romeo’s Dagger was a cross between this box office smash and that critically acclaimed success; how I drank Dr. Pepper and ate club sandwiches and seemed not to be watching my weight. My brand-new agent Melissa Lee Rottock performed the necessary arm-twisting and obscenity-slinging, and together we were able to get a deal set before people got bored with my style of doing business, which was no style at all.

  “In Dicky’s defense, I have to say that it was a pretty heady time. For all of us. But then, you know, we made the movie and moved on. But he’s never gotten over not being famous anymore. I think he even goes to a support group of other people who were also famous for something or other. There’s that Olympic athlete who got shot in the groin during a domestic squabble, and a chicken rancher who landed a 747 when the pilot had a stroke. On the set, we joked—it was cruel, I have to admit—that Dicky was already planning his next career move. Trying to figure out a way to deliver a set of quintuplets in the middle of a hurricane or unwittingly discover the gene for obesity.”

  “Also, of course, in the middle of a hurricane,” said Mary Rose. “Preferably the worst one in a hundred years.”

  “Now you’ve got it.”

  Mary Rose got up and turned on the tube; the game was a minute into the first quarter. We sat together in the dark on Mary Rose’s sleeper sofa, a Goodwill reject of nubby brown polyester fabric whose seat yawned open, jaw like, when no one was sitting on it. Stella dozed in my lap. The furnace kicked on. Outside there was the occasional roar of sudden rain.

  We watched while Ajax Green, the star of our team, missed both of his free throws.

  “One guy starts missing, then they all start missing,” I said.

  “They don’t want one guy to feel like a loser all alone, so they all join in,” said Mary Rose.

  “Here’s my prescription for the off-season: group therapy in the morning, free-throw practice in the afternoon.”

  “The other reason they don’t make their free throws is because it’s a free throw. They don’t feel like they deserve anything that’s free. They only feel happy overcoming a ten-point deficit with seven seconds left to play. They only feel happy if their situation is completely impossible,” said Mary Rose. “There’s Derik Crawshaw though. He seems relatively well-adjusted.”

  “Yeah, but he’s new.”

  We could go on like this all night, and often did. We thought we might be transverbalists: women who enjoyed not cross-dressing, but cross-talking, talking like men.

  By the end of the first quarter Stella was awake and fussing, the Blazers were down by four, and Ward Baron had decided to stop by.

  Stopping by was not something Mary Rose generally approved of. People who knew Mary Rose did not drop by. Whenever I waxed nostalgic about college, during which time I shared a huge old house with five other people, all of whom had issued open invitations for everyone they knew to crash whenever they wanted to, Mary Rose’s pupils dilated with anxiety. Needless to say with Ward, it was a different story altogether. At least a first.

  Ward and I had an odd relationship. He reminded me of Lyle: lanky, with unkempt brown curls and a deep voice that cracked with emotion at will, the compulsion to tell dumb jokes. When we were teenagers the Barons came to California to stay for a month with us in our rented beach house at Corona del Mar. Ward and I were on the verge of getting one of those cousin things going that are a familiar staple of nineteenth-century English literature, but we were both shy, and I was neither large enough nor hardy enough for his tastes. He fell for a five-foot-eleven sailing instructor instead.

  So there were murky feelings swirling around our relationship even before Romeo’s Dagger. Ward wanted me to hire him to direct. He thought, perhaps rightly so, that his mother had given me my break, so I should give him his. As savvy as Ward imagines himself to be, he thought what all people who are not in the movie business think: that a producer is like the immigrant owner of a Vietnamese restaurant who has a job for every family member who wants one. In truth, the most powerful person involved in the production is the star, in this case the cuddly cute comedian R—,who (in his first serious role) played Dicky Baron, and got to pad the crew with as many family members, chefs, and favorite kung fu instructors as he wanted. Likewise, cuddly cute R—had his pick of the litter, director-wise. But Ward was persistent. He thought, as men typically do, that I could be softened up, worn down, stone-washed, whatever. First, he tried to appeal to my cousinly instincts, sending me pictures of Audra and Big Hank vacationing in Milan along with a copy of his director’s reel. When that didn’t work, he came to L. A. and took me to dinner at the beach, hoping the salt air and overcooked swordfish would rekindle our romance manqué of twenty years earlier.

  When that didn’t work out, he resorted to good-natured bullying.

  “You don’t know how many people would sell—well, maybe not their souls, but their houses in Montana”—to work with me. Who’s executive producing this thing, anyway?” he said.

  “I am,” I said. It was a lie, but he was getting on my nerves. “Anyway, I’ve showed your reel to R— and he thinks you’re too slick.”

  “You mean stylized,” he said.

  “I mean facile,” I said.

  “Perfect, then, for your movie,” he said.

  “Hiya, baby,” he said now, to Mary Rose. Ward moved closer to kiss her cheek, then made a last-minute detour and swooped down to plant a peck on her brown wool sweater in the region of her belly button. He wore one of those enormous black leather jackets that crackled with every breath. “Oh, and hello to you too, Mary Rose.”

  Ward scooted Mary Rose over, and the four of us sat squashed on the couch, like people on a lifeboat. Ward gently placed a Styrofoam take-out carton on Mary Rose’s lap. “I remember you liked these.”

  Mary Rose clapped her hands over her heart and sighed, “Oh.” Ward’s hair curled over his collar. She reached up, almost shyly, and combed it with her fingers. He closed his eyes, let his head drop back into the palm of her hand. I watched this out of the corner of my eye—it was really very sweet—when suddenly Mary Rose yanked her hand out from under Ward’s head, which snapped forward like that of a crash test dummy. The Styrofoam container slid to the floor and popped open.

  “Oh, come on!” yelled Mary Rose. She gestured at the TV. “Where I come from, getting your mouth guard knocked halfway across the floor is a foul.”

  “Baby, franchise players never foul,” said Ward.

  “What are you talking about, sweetheart? Pippen’s got two,” said Mary Rose. “Everyone else has four. Guys coming in off the bench get called for tucking in their shirts.”

  “My point exactly, sweetie.”

  Then Mary Rose spied the container on the floor, inside the square white clam was a handful of pale brown cookies. She leaned forward, peered closer. “What are those?”

  “Peanut-butter cookies. Left over from the shoot. I remembered they were your favorite.”

  Mary Rose cupped one long hand over the other, continued to peer down at the cookies as if they were some poisonous animal devouring its prey, interesting to watch but lethal to touch. “Not my favorite.”

  “Since when? Is this some kind of pregnancy food thing?” Ward looked at me and rolled his eyes.

  �
��She’s allergic to peanuts,” I said.

  “You are? You never told me that. Why didn’t you ever tell me that? I would never have brought these, if …” He leaned over and snapped the Styrofoam case shut, as if the mere sight of them might cause Mary Rose to go into anaphylactic shock. “I must be thinking of the ex-wife.”

  “You have an ex-wife?”

  Ward was silent. He popped the container open again, then snapped it shut. Open, shut, open, shut. “How can you tell your husband is dead? The sex is the same, but you get the remote.”

  “You never told me you have an ex-wife.”

  “You never told me you were allergic to peanuts.”

  We all turned our attention to a free-throw shot. We watched, rapt, as the ball twirled around the rim. Lynne Baron! I’d forgotten about her. She and Ward were just separated when he and I had our acrimonious overcooked swordfish dinner. She did something in the movies. I remember, because he told me she was getting out of the film business and into training Seeing Eye dogs. “She wanted to get out of the blind leading the blind and into Labrador retrievers leading the blind,” he’d said. Then I remembered: She’d been a Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie model who threw in the thong to become a food designer. She was well-known in food-design circles. She did for a plate of deep-fried Cajun jumbo shrimp what the makeup artist, hair stylist, and wardrobe consultant did for the actress eating it.

  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 o
ther, 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.