Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me

by Karen Karbo

  “Pink and blue are out anyway,” said the set designer.

  “Which brings up something I’ve always wondered about,” I said. “Why are pastels the colors of motherhood? Girls who are already too old for little floral print dresses with a ruffled Peter Pan collar in second grade suddenly see nothing wrong with Laura Ashley the instant they become pregnant. The colors of motherhood should be purple, red, and black. Purple for fortitude, red for courage, and black because, hey, why shouldn’t I feel chic?”

  “Fuck the stretch marks,” said the set designer. Mary Rose and I must have looked surprised because she laughed, and added, I’ve got three.”

  “You?” we said together.

  “There should also be a theme song that brings to mind not the Teddy Bear’s picnic, but the scene where they cross the Sahara in Lawrence of Arabia,” said the set designer.

  “Anyway, I want the whole experience,” said Mary Rose. “Finding out the gender at the end is the icing on the cake. You go through labor and it’s nice to have the surprise at the end. Although I’m sure it’s a boy.”

  “That way you don’t have any expectations of the kid, either,” said the set designer. “You don’t have a chance to plan their whole life while you’re knitting all those socks they’ll never wear.”

  “If you find out when it’s born, all you have time for is to identify and purchase the correct package of Huggies,” said Mary Rose.

  This was all by the hors d’oeuvres table. The hostess, a caterer on the cutting edge, had put together a sweating buffet of IndoMex cuisine, all bright curries and ferocious salsa. Mary Rose stuck to tortillas slathered with sour cream. What she really wanted was some Bon Ami.

  The IndoMex food was the focal point of the party. The plates provided were quite tiny, so people were forced to return to the table again and again. Mary Rose and I posted ourselves near the hit of the evening, a platter of tandoori chicken quesadillas. This meant everyone who was hungry eventually found their way to within earshot of Mary Rose, who was being curiously chatty.

  Mary Rose was lonely, I think. Besides me she had few real friends. Frick and Frack had moved out, as had Mrs. Wanamaker. She was alone in the triplex.

  It was especially bad in late winter, Mary Rose’s loneliness. Day in, day out, she and Fleabo went their separate ways to rake and mow—the lawns remain green year-round in our city—and in general keep their clients’ yards as spruce as possible, considering it was still the drippy dead of a Northwest winter and the only thing that flourished besides the lawns were moss and toadstools.

  In the evenings she watched basketball or, increasingly, found herself at Powell’s Books, in the Pregnancy & Childbirth section, where she would peek at the books that showed pictures of the Actual Event. Powell’s stayed open until midnight. The store was the largest in the country, one of our city’s claims to fame, and no one knew or cared if you stood in the middle of an aisle reading a book from beginning to end.

  There were always other women there, at various stages of pregnancy, doing the same thing, like men lined up at a dirty-magazine rack. Besides the size of the women’s bellies, you could tell how far along they were by the expressions on their faces as they stared at the color glossy close-ups of a woman’s usually dusky Sharpei-like folds stretched taut by the emergence of what appeared to be a hairy bowling ball.

  The further along they were the less ashen-faced they were. Nature has arranged it so that just about the time the baby is ready to be born you’ll do anything to have it done. Even That.

  But Mary Rose never spoke to these women, each communing privately with the advice book of her choice, one not knowing how worried she should be about an impending Cesarean, another reading up on breast-feeding, the better to alleviate her disgust, and so when anyone at the party asked Mary Rose about her pregnancy she talked. And talked.

  “It’s really a fun biological adventure,” Mary Rose said to a ceramist who inquired when she was due. “Like a unit in high school science. They could have girls that get pregnant use their own pregnancies as a point of departure for the study of human physiology. Did you know, for example, that the uterus is the most powerful muscle in the entire human body, capable of pushing fifty pounds on its own?”

  “I, I didn’t, actually,” said the ceramist, clearly not a member of the sorority, nor likely to be one in the near future.

  “And the placenta? It can weigh up to three pounds! I imagined it looked kind of like a very red beret, or a huge piece of liver, but Brooke here says it’s like a hubcap. When it’s delivered the doctor has to hold it with two hands it’s so huge. Then he drops it in an aluminum pan like you’d cook a roast in.”

  “Ugh.” The ceramist moved away with her tiny plate.

  “You have to sign a release form for the hospital to dispose of it. Just like it was any other organ. Some people think it has great nutritional value, so they take it home.” Mary Rose was not so socially backward as to presume this was normal cocktail party chat. I don’t think she cared. I think she thought maybe she was being outré. These were artists, after all.

  What she failed to comprehend was that she was being outré in a manner unacceptable to the hipoisie. You could dine out on a really good butt-fucking joke, but mention cracked nipples in conjunction with breast-feeding and everyone moves to another part of the room.

  “No way,” said the girlfriend of an advertising account executive whom Ward had come to the party especially to smarm up. The girlfriend had caught the end of the placenta remark.

  “They don’t—” she said.

  “Eat it,” said Mary Rose. “They do.”

  “Mary Rose, Jesus,” said Ward, making a face.

  “It’s interesting,” said Mary Rose. “What’s your problem?”

  Ward said nothing, steered clear of the IndoMex buffet for the rest of the evening, preferring to suffer conversation in a corner with a young fan trying to get into commercial directing. I caught part of this conversation and knew it well. The young fan’s method was not to ask Ward point-blank whether Ward could help him, but to talk about Ward’s work as if it were poetry in motion, and even though Ward secretly thought it was poetry in motion, hearing it from an inexpert young sycophant was torturous.

  Ward kept glancing over at Mary Rose, chattering away in her big bright clothes, bumping people with her stupendous belly while simultaneously grossing them out. I wonder, looking back, if this was the moment he gave up on her. Why wouldn’t she shut up? Certainly her doctor must see that she wasn’t quite right. Her anxiety over the really very routine amniocentesis, her refusal to stay with him on the houseboat, her utter lack of interest in the progress he was making in his divorce, and now this, her yammering so inappropriately.

  Mary Rose excused herself and went in search of the bathroom. It was communal, shared with another animator who rented the space next door. The room had originally been used for storage. A toilet had been tucked into the corner, a roll of paper slung on the end of the plunger. The seat was very cold.

  As to what happened next, I know only what Mary Rose told me.

  The animator’s bread and butter was a popular children’s show. Piled in the corner of the storage room-cum-bathroom was a collection of interesting junk that might appear together in a Magritte: a snow tire, a five-foot plastic red chili pepper, piles of old telephone receivers, a green snarl of tinsel, a papier-mâché model of Mt. St. Helens.

  The volcano was unattached to its base, a slab of plywood covered with small trees made from pipe cleaners. Mary Rose picked it up and looked through the hole at the top. She rested it on the top of her belly, and it put her in mind of the cellist’s megaphone from the In Uteroversity.

  “Yo, He-bean …” Then she couldn’t think of anything to say, which made her giggle. She was in a silly mood, you understand. Just goofing around.

  On the shelf above the volcano model, near a pair of high heels covered with red rhinestones, was a gaggle of cleaning supplies. There was
no Bon Ami, but there was Comet, which Mary Rose had yet to try.

  “Try this on for size, Bean,” she said into the volcano, the base still propped on her belly. She tipped her head back and sprinkled some on her tongue.

  “Hmm.” She slid her teeth back and forth, testing for grittiness.

  The next thing that happened is the kind of evidence I use when arguing with my friends about the existence of God. If the world was run by blind fate and simple luck, there would not be the sort of staggering coincidences that befall us, which could only have been delivered by someone of superior intelligence with a taste for the practical joke.

  At that moment Ward walked in. Then promptly freaked. He threw himself at Mary Rose, landing on her naked thighs—for she was sitting on the toilet while talking through the volcano to the He-Bean and eating her Comet—grabbed the can of Comet and hurled it away as if it were a grenade.

  He had followed her to the bathroom, in hopes of having a word with her. In hopes of convincing her, in the most diplomatic way possible, to find another topic of conversation. Instead, he found her trying to commit suicide, talking loudly to herself through the crater of a papier-mâché volcano. Or so he thought.

  “What are you doing to our daughter!” he shouted.

  Mary Rose stared.

  “If you want to kill yourself, do me a favor and at least wait until she’s born.”

  Mary Rose stared.

  “I want you to see someone, a psychiatrist. It isn’t normal. Your behavior.”

  “Ward, where do you get this ‘she’s’?”

  “Oh God, oh God.” Ward leaned against the wall, slid down the wall so he was sitting on his haunches. He snatched the toilet paper from its perch on the plunger and began hitting his forehead with it.

  “You know?” whispered Mary Rose. “How do you know? You don’t know.”

  “How many lesbians does it take to change a light bulb?”

  “Ward, STOP IT!”

  “Mom called. My mother called, okay? She said she was you, and that you decided you wanted to know after all. Then, once she found out, she couldn’t keep it a secret. You weren’t supposed to know. She was going to buy you mint green and lavender. She’d hide all the pink shit until after the baby was born.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “You were the one in here eating scouring powder.”

  “You should be arrested. All you Barons.”

  “What ‘all you Barons’? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re the kind who conquers indigenous tribes and strips them of their natural resources.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. We’re Democrats and always have been.”

  “You’ve been on me since day one and I’m sick of it. If there was a way you could buy me, you would. We should forget pretending we feel anything for each other and I should make you sign a lease on my uterus.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “It’s true. You Barons are perfect candidates for getting some poor fertile woman to be a surrogate mother, except it would ruin what you like to think of as your reputation as a fine old family. Well, let me tell you, I’m having this baby and I’m having it alone.”

  Ward snorted. “It would take more than that to ruin our reputation.”

  He was right. It would.

  And it did.

  8.

  MARY ROSE STOOD AT THE RECEPTIONIST’S DESK AT THE Cascade Women’s Clinic, trying not to shout. It was the Monday after the party. She demanded to see her file. She wanted to see the double X’s with her own eyes.

  The increased circulation of pregnancy had had an odd effect on Mary Rose’s normally thick straight hair; it now grew in corrugated waves. In an effort to control the uncontrollable, she’d had it cut chin-length by a hair salon run like a drop-in shelter: open twenty-four hours a day, no appointments necessary, ten bucks a head.

  As a result, Mary Rose had spent the past few mornings in front of the mirror trying to fix what she supposed was simply a lousy cut. Her dark blond hair got shorter and shorter. She now looked as if her hair was cut by a peasant mother of the Middle Ages, determined to rid her child of head lice.

  The other women in the waiting room were round and serene as wrens.

  “I just want to know who gave out this kind of information over the phone,” said Mary Rose. She waved her file in what she supposed was a threatening manner. Several receptionists swam behind the wide desk, darting here and there on their steno chairs. They shrugged their narrow shoulders, avoided Mary Rose’s gaze. When Mary Rose asked to see Dr. Vertamini they said she was at the hospital on Mondays, as was her nurse.

  “I am not some lunatic trying to get in to see the president,” shouted Mary Rose. “I just want to talk to my doctor.”

  If there was one thing worse than a lunatic demanding to see the president, it was a pregnant lunatic demanding anything.

  It’s impossible to unknow what you already know, impossible to resnag innocence. We have children for this exact reason. To reexperience innocence, albeit vicariously.

  Mary Rose wept all the way home. She wanted to pretend the bean was still a He, but she could not. She knew what she knew, she saw what she saw. XX. Crossed snakes. Longer than any other chromosomes.

  Mary Rose wanted a boy. All women do. We want boys in order to spare them the misery of being female, even though we know in our hearts that girls are better. We know girls are better, and spoil our boys because, poor them, they are not girls. It is all very complicated.

  When Mary Rose got home she sat down at her kitchen table with a cup of chamomile tea and tried to make a list. Mary Rose disliked tea, but sitting down with a cup of it made her feel sane. Every time she leaned forward to write, she hit her belly. When she hit it, she felt her uterus contract slightly, like some helpless sea thing marooned in a tide pool that was the popular site of grammar school field trips.

  She let her tea bag drift until the tea was cold.

  The list—why she was glad her bean was a girl after all, read as follows:

  Stella.

  Girls are easier.

  If you give a 2-year-old girl a telephone she will pretend to have a conversation. If you give a 2-year-old boy a telephone he’ll hit you over the head with it.

  Girls are more fun to dress. Like I care.

  With boys you worry about prison and AIDS. With girls you only worry about pregnancy (only!) and AIDS.

  Mary Rose remained unconvinced. She laid her head on the table.

  For the past two weeks she had been feeling as if she just might survive pregnancy after all. Silly her, supposing she had a grip on the situation, simply because she had passed the hurdles of the first trimester and the amniocentesis. Even the craving for Bon Ami had mercifully passed.

  For no reason at all she suddenly remembered something she had read in a magazine. Studies had shown that fathers of sons were less likely to abandon their families than fathers of daughters; fathers of sons felt more compelled to make an effort to keep a marriage together. That Mary Rose and Ward were not married, and that she had technically done the abandoning—all weekend long she had refused to pick up when Ward called, except once to say, “Don’t call me again, you weasel”—did nothing to alleviate what this study implied: Even in this day and age, sons, not daughters, commanded more respect from their fathers.

  Mary Rose rubbed the sides of her belly, which was supposed to reassure the fetus. Of what, Mary Rose didn’t know. Being a six-month-old fetus in utero was already the cushiest set-up she could imagine.

  Suddenly, Mary Rose heard what sounded like popcorn popping in the distance. Outside, it was hailing. She gazed out the window to see what looked like bits of gray beach glass bouncing off the driveway below.

  Spring in our part of the country is not lusty but indecisive. All week there had been sleet, hail, freezing rain, sometimes in combination, sometimes mixed with snow. Sleet is rain freezing into pellets of ice as it falls; f
reezing rain is rain freezing as it hits the ground; hail is precipitation that starts as ice pellets and ends as ice pellets. Mary Rose was the kind of woman who knew such things. What came down now was a confused mix of all three. Then the sun came out, and it was quite warm.

  Then Mary Rose heard something she had not heard in weeks: the slam of the front door, followed by footfalls, the rattling of a key in the lock of Mrs. Wanamaker’s apartment, or what she continued to think of as Mrs. Wanamaker’s apartment.

  She got up and went to her front door, where she pushed aside the batik cloth hanging over the glass panes. For a minute there was nothing, then a small man, middle-aged, in an expensive green field parka came from Mrs. Wanamaker’s apartment, leaving the front door ajar behind him.

  She flung open her own door and went downstairs …

  Where she ran into Dicky Baron. He was wearing red sweatpants and a pair of huge white shoes with the laces unlaced. In his arms was a box of other big shoes, a roll of aluminum foil, and some mail.

  “Ward’s not here,” said Mary Rose. It was the first thing that came to mind.

  “I didn’t think he would be. It’s the middle of the day and he’s got to be out moving and shaking and making his shitty television commercials.”

  “What can I help you with?”

  “Nothing, M. R. I’m here to help you. I’m the new landlord.”

  At that moment Martin Baadenbaum, the man in the green parka, trudged up behind Dicky. Remember Martin? The South African gynecologist? In his arms was a box of new pots and pans. White V’s of spittle crouched in the corners of his mouth. “This weather is right schizophrenic! And who are you?”

  “I live upstairs,” said Mary Rose.

  Martin put down the box, wiped his hands on his pockets, and took Mary Rose’s hand in both of his. “I’d say you’ve got about seven more weeks left. Too bad there’s not some office pool I could get in on.”

  “Seven weeks of what?”

  “Before the baby! I’ve delivered thousands in my time, so I know what I’m talking about. I like the looks of you. Here’s some free advice: Do everything you want to do while you still have time to yourself. Especially activities which involve sitting for long periods of time in quiet places. Go to the library, the movies, church. Your life will never again be the same.”