by Karen Karbo
“I drank tap water. I’ve been drinking tap water since day one. Eight glasses a day of lead and industrial toxins. No one told me I was supposed to drink bottled water. What am I supposed to do now?”
“Cut out booze, stay away from paint fumes, and stay away from all this crap.” I laid Stella between us on the nubby brown couch and began stuffing the articles back in the padded envelope.
“What if I’m carrying a monster?”
“You’re not carrying a monster.”
“No one knows that for a fact.”
“Mary Rose, no one knows anything for a fact. Haven’t you figured that out yet? These scientists writing all this don’t know what’s going on. They get grants and come up with these wacko statistics just so they’ll get more grants to study the thing further. All it succeeds in doing in scaring the bejesus out of us. Pregnancies continue on their merry way, just as they always have. Here’s the toxoplasmosis thing—one to three births in four thousand.”
“But somebody has to be the one to three.” Mary Rose stood in the middle of her small, dark living room cracking her knuckles. A few strands of her dark blond hair had escaped from her bun and hung down her back.
“Mary Rose. You absolutely cannot worry. I’m not saying this just because I don’t like to see you all worked up. It’s not good for the baby. Stress in the mother during pregnancy can cause the baby to be anxious and fussy.”
“Oh, great, there’s nothing worse than a two-headed baby with colic.”
“Try to relax.”
“So you’re saying if the hot tubs and the tap water and the exhaust fumes won’t get me, worrying about the hot tubs and the tap water and the exhaust fumes will.”
“Nothing will get you.”
I sat her down on the sofa, went into the kitchen, and made her some cinnamon toast. When I brought it back, she had Stella nestled in her lap, absentmindedly stroking her black hair while she watched the game.
I could not bring myself to tell her about Ward.
I had known Mary Rose at that time for exactly eight years. I remember because it was just after Christmas when I came up from Los Angeles to begin production on Romeo’s Dagger. I knew her well enough to know this fretting and cuticle-chewing was not like her. Mary Rose had her own business, don’t forget, her .25 ACP, her time-share and financial instruments. She was the most level-headed woman I knew, level-headed and self-sufficient. Poor her.
Normally Mary Rose went home to La Mirada, California, to celebrate Christmas with her father, Roy, but she thought boarding an airplane was surely courting disaster. What if the cabin suddenly lost pressure and the oxygen mask didn’t come down?
What if the person sitting next to her had been exposed to German measles?
She wound up spending the day at the Barons’. To her great embarrassment, she received more presents than anyone else. A green maternity top with matching leggings from Audra prompted Little Hank to call her the Jolly Green Giant. Ha ha! From Audra she also received an antique rocking chair and footstool for nursing. Ward gave Mary Rose a sapphire ring to match her eyes, which were dark brown. She put it on for the evening, then couldn’t get it off. The silver punch bowl brimming with non-fat egg-substitute nog prompted Mary Rose to stop for a milkshake on her way home.
I was wrapped up in test-driving some traditions with which to burden Stella, featuring an expensive felt Advent calendar, monogrammed stockings, midnight mass, and sing-along Messiah at a downtown concert hall.
Lyle participated—it was Christmas, after all—but begrudgingly. He said Stella was too young to remember any of this, and why was I exhausting myself even further. All Stella needed, he claimed, was a single present to open, so that she might have the pleasure of ripping the used wrapping paper and gumming the ribbon.
He turned out to be right, but what of it?
4.
YOU’VE PROBABLY FIGURED OUT THAT THINGS COULD be better between me and Lyle. Sometimes, when I’m walking Stella up and down our tiny living room, lifting my knees as high as an overachieving majorette, because that’s how Stella likes it, I wonder why I gave up Los Angeles for a life in this soggy burg with a man five years my junior who turns a cold shoulder to his daughter, preferring to wage war with monsters online, and poorly imaged monsters at that.
I don’t wonder too much, because all roads always lead to the existence of Stella. If I hadn’t had him, I wouldn’t have her.
Lyle was not always insensitive; or else he kept his insensitive tendencies hidden until the time came when he no longer cared what I thought. He no longer cared what I thought around the time Stella joined our household, when, to tell the truth, I no longer cared what he thought, by which I mean there were days when the voluptuous round of nursing Stella, changing her diaper, bathing her, cuddling her, walking her, prevented me from ever getting out of my bathrobe, which Lyle interpreted as an act of hostility directed against himself. Once he said it was like I was having an affair. I acted shocked. Of course, he was right.
This is an old story: how a couple goes from quaking love to sluggish indifference. Lyle and I met at a film seminar hosted by the media bigwigs of our city. It was a gala event, or so I was told when they invited me to come and speak. The other guests were writers, directors, and producers who were famous to aspiring writers, directors, and producers. The seminar was apparently not prestigious enough to attract writers, directors, and producers famous to the movie-going public at large.
Still, it was nice. It was April, a time in our city when the rhododendrons explode and the weather skids from bright sun to thundering hail in minutes. Double rainbows arch over Mt. Hood.
Romeo’s Dagger had just finished principal photography. I spoke to a crowd of three hundred and fifty on the difficulties of making the independent feature, showed a reel of dailies, answered questions, left out the part about the role of pure, glorious, sad, simple luck. I wanted the seminar people to feel I was worth what they were paying me.
Between sessions there was scheduled forty-five minutes of schmoozing over coffee and cookies in the foyer. This gave the aspirants who had paid a considerable amount to attend the seminar a chance to hound the participants into reading their screenplays. I had three tucked under my arm when Lyle approached me.
He had nothing in his hands besides a paper water cup chewed around the rim. I engaged him in conversation the better to exclude the aspirants of prey who may have wanted a favor. I stood closer to him than was absolutely necessary. He wore a yellow button-down shirt that smelled fresh from the wash.
Here is a tip: If ever you go to one of these things and feel too shy to approach the keynote speaker during the event itself, just wait. After the coffee and cookies are cleared from the foyer and the microphone is disconnected and the lectern shunted to the wings, the special guest turns instantly into a nobody at loose ends in an unfamiliar city, with nothing but the prospect of a room-service dinner and a night of cable TV ahead of her.
Unless, of course, a Lyle approaches you. My hotel was eight or so blocks away, not too far to walk on a melon-colored evening in early spring. Lyle’s car was parked in the same direction. We walked, bumping shoulders. I was aware of behaving in a very friendly manner, more so than I might have normally. He struck me as very green. Youngish, if not young. I took him seriously only in that by making it appear as if I knew him better than I did, the people at the seminar whom I did take seriously—a director I thought I might one day work with, for example—would see that I had something to do, that I was not alone in this city. How embarrassing it would have been. Me, alone, here. Of all places. For don’t forget, Romeo’s Dagger was shot here, the exteriors anyway. By all rights I should have been surrounded by local people who had worked on the production. I don’t know where they all were. They had gone back to Los Angeles, or did not care to cough up the price of the seminar. Maybe it was the fine weather. Maybe there was a basketball game.
The Barons should have been there, Dicky and Audra at least. But Dicky wa
s in New York, doing something infomercial-related. He had left a message at my hotel along with a funereal floral arrangement starring a dozen salmon-orange gladioli.
Audra was still miffed. She had not been 100 percent pleased with the actress cast to play her. Actually, she had been pleased at first. Then came a story in the local paper. A reporter had spent a day on the set. The story appeared on the front page of the Living Arts section, with a picture of the actress playing Audra and a drop quote beneath it saying she had captured perfectly “a woman of a certain age frantically clutching at the last strands of youth.”
Lyle had a navy-blue nylon knapsack from which he took a small brown notebook, a cheap pen that you might pick up at one of those old-fashioned kinds of businesses, a shoe-repair shop perhaps, threaded through the spiral. He kept stopping and writing down things I said. Things not worth remembering, clichéd observations about movie-making that I hadn’t myself experienced but had gotten from a book on Francis Coppola.
I was flattered that I was so quotable, but it was that cheap blue-and-white plastic pen. It was like a homely kitten rescued from the pound. He was left-handed, and wrote with the notebook propped against his thigh, his hand curved, crablike.
He invited me to his loft. A man with a loft—is there anything sexier than that? There, I saw the huge Hawaiian Punch murals. I knew nothing about art, but I saw that he had framed his smaller canvases and had then painted over the frame, as if it wasn’t even there. I pronounced this witty and brilliant, not knowing he had snatched the idea from a local street poet, also a self-described artist, known mostly for a poem in which he compares an overgrown zucchini to his own penis.
When we made love that night in my hotel room—they put me up in the same place where the NBA put their teams when they came here to play—in his ferocious passion he kept bonking what I took to be one of my ovaries with his hip bone. Maybe it was not an ovary, but considering all that would happen to us I like the metaphor. My bed was large as an ocean-going raft, and part of the thrill of being with Lyle was wondering whether Michael Jordan had ever had this room. The thrill for me, anyway.
The thrill for Lyle, I suppose, was that I was a producer from Los Angeles. I wore a black linen jacket, thigh-length, jeans, and a bright white T-shirt. My chic producer’s costume, created for me by an assistant who had told me, no offense, that I dressed like an aging sorority girl and how did I expect to get anything going, looking like that?
Lyle was at that time considering switching from being a would-be painter to being a would-be guy-having-something-to-do-with-film. (Later, he decided that he wanted to be a would-be guy-having-something-to-do-with-the-Web, but while in the research stage, discovered Realm of the Elf, which is where we find him today.)
Like me, Lyle had no special talent but had stumbled upon a handy situation. In his case it was a modest settlement from a law suit. He had accidentally driven off a low cliff while three-wheeling in Colorado, and his lawyer had squeezed sixty thousand dollars from the Japanese company that made the three-wheeler, citing a failure to notify the consumer that driving a three-wheeler over a low cliff could be hazardous. Lyle had broken his arm in three places, then leased the loft.
I knew nothing then about Lyle’s accident and settlement. All I saw were his lowriding faded jeans, the upper thighs stained with swipes of paint where he had obviously wiped his hands in a distracted moment. An artist. Sigh. The occupation is to our generation what soldiering was to a previous one. The romance lasted three perfect days. We rented a bicycle built for two, ate double-scoop ice cream cones in a downpour, and did just about everything else you can think of that appears in a montage of two people falling in love. He failed to mention that he was also a photocopier repairman. Not that it would have mattered.
It helped that I lived at the bottom of the country and he lived at the top. Being apart fed flames that may have otherwise petered out in a matter of weeks. There’s no telling, of course. Only after we were married did he tell me about the settlement. By then, the money had run out. I found myself married not to a successful painter but to a photocopier repairman, owner of Itchy Sister, the ancient, tumor-filled Rhodesian Ridgeback with chronic allergies and huge vet bills. He found himself married not to an independent film producer in a black linen blazer but to a pregnant woman.
I discovered my condition five weeks after the wedding. In a heated moment he accused me of using him as a sperm donor, to which I replied that there may be a shortage of many things in this world, but sperm was not one of them.
When I was able to pry Lyle from the computer, he made a lot of noise about how we should go out more, just like the old days.
“You mean before Stella,” I always said, hurt.
One thing Lyle and I agreed on was Chinese food. We shared a passion for limp greasy “American” Chinese food—chow mein, chop suey, and egg foo young—and indulged as often as we were speaking, knowing that soon Stella would be of an age when we would be forced to order more respectable dishes in the interest of setting a good example. Or at least I knew this. Who knows what Lyle thought.
Judy’s Ho-Wa, our favorite restaurant, was in Chinatown. In our city this consists of three blocks of Chinese restaurants and one shop that sells cheap vases, plastic chopsticks, and still, as advertised in the window, GENUINE MT. ST. HELEN ASS.
One night, when Lyle was feeling less defensive than usual and, to be fair, I was feeling more talkative and less resentful than usual, I teased him, which he liked. Watching Lyle try to slurp down beef chow mein without splattering any on his pristine white Oxford button-down or blue silk tie was endlessly amusing. His overdeveloped sense of order forbade him from removing his tie or tucking one of the stained red cloth napkins into his collar. He would thrust his chin out over his plate, pinch a few gray noodles between the plastic chopsticks, then slowly lift them straight from the plate to his mouth. It was like watching a crane at work on a construction site.
“Why not just live for the moment and stick that napkin under your chin?” I asked. “No one’s watching.”
“I wouldn’t be here in a shirt and tie if I didn’t live for the moment.”
“I do have one of Stella’s bibs in my purse,” I said.
“Is it the one with the green hippos on it?”
“I think so.”
“I was hoping it was the one that says ‘Princess of Wails.’ That one I like.”
We could banter like this for hours, which was a useful technique for avoiding discussing our problems, which … hey! when we nattered on like this, we didn’t have any problems! It was like being so exhausted you didn’t have the energy to know you were exhausted. We were laughing, we were chatting, so what was the problem?
Suddenly, at the back of the restaurant, at a huge round table, the kind only Chinese restaurants seem to specialize in, I saw Dicky Baron. He was wearing the same heavy, blue plaid flannel shirt he’d worn on Thanksgiving, the same baggy exercise pants with the stripe up the side. I knew that outfit: It was the outfit of the person who had gained weight and didn’t fit comfortably in anything else he owned, but didn’t want to buy any new clothes because that would mean accepting the bigger body.
I knew this because I was also this person. I’m referring, of course, to the toll of motherhood. I imagine you’re a few sentences ahead of me here, thinking I’ll reveal interesting if vaguely repellent tales of stretch marks, swinging breasts, and snaking varicosities that strike everywhere you can imagine, not just behind the knees.
You’re thinking maybe I’ll bemoan the fact that never again will I stroll down the beach in my thong bikini. The truth is, even in my most nubile days, I never strolled anywhere in a bikini; I lay on one side, flipped hurriedly to the other, then rushed headlong into the ocean, hoping my behavior would be misinterpreted as reckless abandon and not a desire to take advantage of the world’s largest bathing suit cover-up.
But giving birth causes things to stretch, sag, droop, and dangle a lot less
than you may imagine. What happens, mainly, is that your top priority ceases to be maintaining that little indentation on either side of your tush. You don’t care. You have become an anarchist of the flesh, a truly dangerous woman.
Until, of course, the day you begin worrying that your child will be ostracized at nursery school because her mommy is a tubola. Then it’s back to carrot sticks and sit-ups; the world once more safe for democracy. I am not there yet. I asked Lyle to pass the spring rolls, please.
Dicky was with a party of a dozen or so, deep into solving the only story problem from high school math that ever rears its head in real life: ciphering who owes what from a single, scribbled ticket. Our booth was near the cash register; Dicky would have to lumber our way.
There was still time. I hissed, “Lyle, don’t turn around, do not turn around. There’s Dicky Baron. Switch places with me.”
“What?”
“Switch places with me! He won’t recognize you—oh, hi, Dicky.”
“Hey, hey, hey! It’s my producer! Dot, Martin, come meet my producer!” Dicky plunked into the booth next to me, snatching a piece of spring roll from my plate and lobbing it into his mouth. His breath smelled like whiskey and, beneath that, something sour. “Brooke, you look as if you’ve lost, what, twelve to thirteen pounds since Thanksgiving? And you’re still breast-feeding right? You look great for a woman who’s still breast-feeding.”
Dot and Martin, who seemed anxious to get on with things, nevertheless allowed themselves to be introduced. Dot was a former Olympic silver medalist who now sold toilet paper to large institutions; Martin was a South African gynecologist who enjoyed months of airplay for having gone to prison for inseminating infertility patients with sperm from the same donor: his own father.
This took longer for Dicky to explain than I have here, but Dicky, as I’ve said, had a tendency to go on and on, and why duplicate his conversation here? Dot and Martin cracked open their fortune cookies, read their fortunes, then traded and read the others, before the slot in Dicky’s monologue appeared in which they could mutter “Nice to meet you” and be on their way.