by Karen Karbo
Like many of the hip, he disapproved of many things. This, at the moment, being number one on the list.
His knot of anxiety tightened further when they reached his houseboat. After helping haul his luggage down the gangplank Mary Rose fired up his potbellied stove and kicked off her shoes, settling in. “Ward, I really really missed you,” she said.
“Not as much as I missed you.” His usual response. “I missed you, too” sounded rote, not creative enough for a Clio-winning director who prided himself on knowing how to talk to women.
“While you were gone I realized how much I love you. I do want to get married. I’ve decided.”
“I love you, too.” Rote, but impossible to improve on.
“Soon,” she said. “We can fly to Reno. Let’s go now.”
The stove, an antique, sat between the large front room, with its Adirondack furniture and plate-glass windows overlooking the river, and the small kitchen. Ward stood poised in front of the black refrigerator, a glass of club soda for Mary Rose in one hand, a goblet of red wine for himself in the other. We can’t go to Reno. I just got off an airplane.”
“What better time? You’re already packed.”
“We can’t go now, just like that. What about Audra and Big Hank? It would kill them, eloping. I’m not a traditionalist, you know that, but I can’t just, well, anyway, I’d like to meet your father. We’ll begin planning.”
“All right,” she said. “How about Valentine’s Day?”
“Valentine’s Day. That would be great.”
“We can get the license tomorrow.”
“Not two weeks from now you don’t mean?”
“Valentine’s Day. Yes.”
“I thought you meant a year from now. It takes time to plan a wedding.”
“You would know.”
Ward felt his intestines shift. His scrotum huddled close to his body. Batten down the hatches. He prepared himself for the onslaught of feminine fury. At last, Mary Rose knew. He had been bad and now she would get mad. It was axiomatic. It had happened dozens of times before. He was glad he had not handed Mary Rose the glass. Once, before, he had done something wrong and had spent the rest of the evening picking shards of crystal from his eyebrows.
“No wonder your parents weren’t pressuring us to get married. I just wrote it off to their being rich liberals.”
“I really wish you wouldn’t do this. It’s a really sucky habit you have, baiting me all the time. If you wanted to know about my past, you should have just asked me.”
“I keep asking and asking, Ward. I didn’t think to ask if you had an ex-wife until you let that one slip. Now it turns out she’s not technically your ex-wife. What should I be asking? Do you have any other wives? Any other children? A season spent with Up with People!? What, Ward? What else is going on with you that I’m supposed to be asking about?”
“It’s not fair. You set me up,” said Ward. “I’m trying my best. You don’t know Lynne.”
“Life is a cabaret, old chum.” Mary Rose folded her arms, tucking them into the slot between breasts and belly. She stared at him and waited.
“I haven’t seen her for five years. We’re married in name only. That’s why I didn’t tell you before. It’s just a legal thing. Not even legal. Clerical.”
“I know, I know. She’s in northern California at Seeing Eye Dog School.”
“She’s not interested in men,” said Ward.
“She’s a lesbian?”
“She likes Labrador retrievers.”
“Who can blame her?”
“There is nothing with Lynne, nothing. It’s like this houseboat. I love this houseboat. I live here. It’s my home, but the bank holds the mortgage.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Lynne holds the mortgage, Mary Rose. Lynne holds the mortgage, but I live in you. You’re my house, my home.” He put the glasses of club soda and wine out of sight in the sink in case Mary Rose got any ideas, and knelt before her on the unfinished wood floor, laying both hands on her belly.
“Sorry, no room in the inn,” she said.
“Please,” he said.
“All that about how ridiculous it would be to rush into marriage. The only thing you were worried about rushing into was bigamy.”
“You’re entitled to think less of me. Just don’t cut me out of your life. Please.” His voice became a smoker’s whisper. He laid his head in what was left of her lap.
“I hardly think less of you. I am impressed is what I am. I thought men these days didn’t want to commit. A wife and a girlfriend. Busy, busy.”
“So you understand?”
“Why risk endangering the baby? Stress causes the fetal lungs to mature at a faster rate. It can make the baby anxious and colicky. I’m not pissed. I am, however, going to go home and watch the rest of the Blazers-Suns game.”
She nudged his head off her thighs and struggled to her feet. She went home. Evidence, in Ward’s mind, that something was wrong with her. Barring a medical emergency, no woman who boarded the houseboat at night ever left until morning. That Mary Rose left in order to watch a basketball game …
This was not a ploy on Mary Rose’s part. Not reverse psychology or any of that. After I told her that Ward was still married, Mary Rose had responded in a more typical fashion. She was silent with hurt, then took it out on Mrs. Camanetti’s holly bush. She oiled up her chain saw and took the twelve-foot holly down to a stump, sustaining scratches up to her elbows despite long sleeves and suede gloves.
It was depressingly familiar, the story of her life. Of course Ward had other women, shorter and more agreeable. No man had ever put Mary Rose first before, why would someone like Ward Baron?
He wouldn’t. Except for one thing.
After Mary Rose recovered from wanting to take Ward’s head off, she saw that while Ward may have a wife, she had the He-bean, twenty-three chromosomes’ worth of precious Baronness, percolating along in the sixteenth week of pregnancy. A He-bean no longer a He-bean but an honest-to-God fetus, seven inches long and sucking his thumb. The first Baron grandchild.
Instead of torturing Ward, she decided to be a good sport.
A tactical mistake, of course. Ward, like all of us, felt more comfortable when expectations were fulfilled in the most clichéd manner imaginable. Where was Mary Rose’s rage?
Why didn’t she haul off and bean him with the wood stove poker? Do they even have wood stove pokers? I have never lived in a house with a wood stove, so I’ve no idea. At any rate, Ward expected fury and got wry amusement. First she met him at the airport in costume, then this. From movies and TV he knew that only the truly demented remained calm when they should be hurling unfair accusations and knickknacks.
Ward got up off his knees and let Mary Rose go, afraid of what she might do if he didn’t.
6.
AT SEVENTEEN AND A HALF WEEKS MARY ROSE WAS scheduled for an amniocentesis. She was in good spirits, considering she was about to have a seven-inch needle dropped through her abdominal wall and into her uterus with no anesthesia. After which the doctor would draw “a thimbleful” of amniotic fluid (is this really a unit of measure anywhere except in Rapunzel?), which would then be tested for chromosomal abnormalities, the main abnormality being Down’s syndrome, uncommon, but common enough to warrant this expensive and nightmarish procedure. Usually a woman invited her husband or the father-to-be to accompany her to the amnio. The man was there primarily to squeeze her knuckles until her rings bruised the bones of the adjacent fingers. Also to prove to himself that if he could stomach this, he could stomach the delivery.
Weeks before Mary Rose had invited Ward. He was supposed to meet her at her apartment and drive her to the hospital. But Mary Rose said she had had it with Ward. She loved Ward—how could you not love Ward?—but she had had it with him. Anyway, since when was pregnancy a spectator sport? She’d invited him to come because he’d begged to come, and now she was angry. When the day came, she invited me instead. We
left her apartment for the hospital an hour early. It was my pleasure to accompany her. I’m not being facetious. Mary Rose’s amnio reminded me of my own amnio, which reminded me of my own happy pregnancy. There was a sliver of time between Lyle’s adjustment to the unexpected news that he would soon be a father and the reality of Stella’s first soiled diaper when it looked as if we were made for each other.
Lyle was very taken with the ultrasound proceedings and would never miss “a viewing.” During the final weeks of my pregnancy there was some question as to whether Stella was in a breech position, and my doctor did an ultrasound in his office. Even though the blurry white image of her would appear for no more than a minute, Lyle rushed from work to be there.
After ascertaining that Stella had indeed turned head down, the doctor ran the transducer up my belly, stopping at a point below my navel. There, through my abdominal wall, through Stella’s own narrow back, we could see her heart. It looked like a shell, broken in half and worn by the sea, the four chambers outlined in white, her blood already lub-dubbing along its predestined course.
Lyle is quite far-sighted, and in his rush to make the appointment had left his glasses on the seat of the car. He pushed his way between the doctor and the screen, grasped the sides of the monitor with both hands as though taking someone by the shoulders. I can see him even now, bent over, his perfectly ironed white button-down coming untucked, his face two inches from the screen, his collie eyes wide, frantic to see, tears on his cheeks. “Is that our heart?” he whispered.
“The baby’s heart. Yes, it is,” said my doctor.
Lyle misspoke, but of course he was right: It was our heart. Half mine, half his, wholly hers. It is not marriage that joins people together, but this. And it is this knowledge, and the memory of that day, that makes it difficult to leave Lyle. It does not, however, affect my desire to throw something really big and breakable at his head.
Friends who’d been through an amniocentesis and the men who’d watched all told Mary Rose that it was nothing. They said it the way vets talk fondly about their time in Nam. This was meant to be reassuring. Mary Rose knew it was a lie; getting poked through your abdomen with a seven-inch needle while wide awake could hardly be nothing. In fact, two days after the procedure she was still sore.
The culprit was not the needle, nor the doctor wielding it, the kindly Dr. Karlbom, who looked like an anchorman with good ratings. It was rather the grim, overly lip-glossed ultrasound technician who caused the trouble. Women like to assume that female health professionals are kinder and gentler than their male counterparts. This is simply not true.
Mary Rose and I sat beside the watercooler in the wide hallway outside the genetic counselor’s office, Mary Rose inflating her bladder with water from a pointed paper cup.
When we went into the surgery where the amnio was to be performed, the technician came in sour-faced, flipping through Mary Rose’s file. The surgery was not in an operating room at all, but rather a storage room. The boxes of medical supplies had been shoved into one corner and a gurney had been rolled in and abandoned.
Mary Rose, trying for levity, said, “So, how many of these do you do a day?”
“God, it feels like a hundred,” said the tech, rolling her head around on her neck, as if she was already past fatigue.
“So you really enjoy your work?”
Ms. Surly-to-Bed, Surly-to-Rise did not deign to respond. She desultorily flipped through Mary Rose’s file, while Mary Rose lay on the gurney in her hospital gown, palms sweating, still believing that the tech wouldn’t hurt her if she was cooperative and made her laugh. “I’ve got a fibroid. I brought a copy of my first ultrasound so you could see it. Kinda like telling a water-skier where the rocks are.”
“A fibroid? Oh great. Is it huge?” The tech waved the report away.
“You mean bigger than a bread box, or what?”
The tech mumbled a number in centimeters, which meant absolutely nothing, our punishment for refusing to learn metric.
The direct reward for submitting to an amnio, is the prenatal ultrasound. At seventeen and a half weeks the fetus is completely formed and the technician will usually take you on a guided tour of torso, skull, and limbs, pausing to allow for thunderstruck ohhs and ahhs as the baby rolls and kicks.
This dominatrix rolled the transducer back and forth over Mary Rose’s satiny belly without pausing to allow us to enjoy even a flash of a view. Occasionally she would linger over some hank of flesh, “That’s the spine, or no, an arm.”
“Oh,” Mary Rose gasped, trying to crane her neck to see, “look there’s the … wait … what’s … look, he’s waving at us!”
The tech was busy measuring the cross section of the torso when a skeleton hand, dime-sized, floated into view. The baby seemed deliberately to wave its hand in front of its face, as if brushing away a fly.
“There’s that fibroid.” The tech clucked.
“When you get a minute, we would appreciate another view of the World’s Cutest Human.”
“Who?”
“The baby,” I said.
“We don’t have time. What with this fibroid.”
“Do you really need to press so hard? You’re killing my bladder.”
“Yep.”
She rolled the transducer up above Mary Rose’s navel, throwing an image on the screen of the baby curled away from us. It was easy to over interpret. Who wouldn’t roll away from the ministrations of the Marquess de Sade?
The tech left without a word to summon the doctor. Mary Rose began to cry. “That teeny hand!” she said. She was thinking of the unteeny needle about to disrupt the He-bean’s perfect uterine home. Or of the fibroid, looming, threatening, an anvil on top of the doorway, a boulder balancing atop a cliff.
Or she was thinking, I have no business bringing a baby into this world.
Dr. Karlbom was as kind as rumor had it. He shook my hand, willing to accord me the respect reserved usually for the father, in the event that I was in some way related to the baby. He then took Mary Rose’s hands in both of his and said, “They call me Dr. Painless.”
“Unlike your lovely assistant on the floor by the box where Carol Merrill is now standing.”
Dr. Karlbom smiled warmly. He had no idea what she was talking about, but recognized hysterical pre-amnio spluttering when he heard it.
Before Mary Rose could complain, the lovely assistant returned. She was suddenly perky and accommodating. Had she been one of Lynne Baron’s Labrador retrievers she would have been gamboling beside Dr. Karlbom, her pink tongue lolling, her wet brown eyes desperate for approval.
Though billed as a simple out-patient procedure, amnio has in common with brain surgery nasty tea-colored antiseptic wash, the necessity of a sterile field, and rubber gloves that go snap.
I took Mary Rose’s hand between both of mine and started talking about the Blazers, the cement of our friendship. Or rather, it was the two free agents in town looking to sign with the Blazers, but I’ll get to that later.
Dr. Karlbom found a triangle of amniotic fluid on the monitor. He tapped along Mary Rose’s abdomen with two knuckles, eyes never leaving the screen, until he found the corresponding spot, just to the left of Mary Rose’s navel. The technician handed him a blue paper tablecloth, with which he covered Mary Rose, collarbone to knee.
Dr. Karlbom then told Mary Rose to take one short breath in, a long one out, then long lazy breaths. She stared straight up at the ceiling, counting the holes in the acoustic tiles. What would we do without those holes in the ceiling, the pregnant woman’s best friend?
I watched. My duty.
“I really think Mark McDaniel has come alive this season. I used to think he was just a bruiser, but he’s really improved at the line,” said Mary Rose. Her voice quavered.
Dr. Karlbom held the needle like a dart, and with a flick of his wrist sent it plunging into her. He attached a syringe to the end of the needle and slowly pulled up the plunger, filling the shaft with a clear bou
rbon-colored fluid. It took much longer than the thirty seconds Mary Rose had anticipated.
“He is a bruiser,” I said, “which is what they need. Our front line is too effete, too gentlemanly.”
The tendons in Dr. Karlbom’s hand stood up with the effort of getting the syringe to draw.
“There is Derik Crawshaw, though. Have you noticed his left-handed hook? It takes my breath away, that left-handed hook. You add that to the fact he’s not afraid to bump heads. That’s his one true gift. Whereas by the end of the game the other guys will get tired of getting thrashed, he keeps taking it to the basket and taking it to the basket. Doesn’t he, Brooke? Doesn’t Derik keep taking it to the basket, no matter how beat up he’s getting?”
“He does, Mary Rose.” I patted her hand. Dr. Karlbom filled two syringes.
Thimbleful, schmimbleful. The instant the second syringe was filled he plucked out the needle, disposing of it blindly beneath the table. He bowed slightly and applauded Mary Rose. See? All gone. Nothing in my hands or up my sleeve.
He looked at me over Mary Rose and said, “If we had babies, Cain and Abel would have been the last of the race.”
I laughed obediently, presuming by “we” he meant men. It was obviously the line he trotted out for expectant fathers to reassure them that their wives or girlfriends were troupers.
We were again left alone with the sadistic technician. She licked those shiny lips and rolled the ultrasound transducer one last time over Mary Rose’s belly. Mary Rose eagerly watched the screen for a final glimpse, certain that since she had survived he had survived.
She was mildly alarmed when his grainy gray-and-white image appeared. The tech held the transducer on the top of Mary Rose’s belly, giving us a side view of the He-bean, his back lying along Mary Rose’s front, his feet and hands curled up, facing Mary Rose’s spine. Only they were not curled up. As the technician rolled the transducer an inch this way and that, pressing hard to circumvent the fibroid, which seemed to always be in the way, the He-bean madly paddled his hands and feet, a crab scuttling across the ocean floor, trying to escape a squid.