by Karen Karbo
“It’s actually more like twelve weeks,” said Mary Rose.
“This place is really a dump,” said Dicky. “I think we need some new tile in the kitchen. Some of that nice Italian stuff. And the dog smell. That’s gotta go. I wonder if you get an exterminator for that, or what.”
Mary Rose still was having trouble accepting that it was not this nice man with the warm hands but Ward’s brother, Dicky Baron, moving into the bottom unit. Our city is small, but not that small. This was surely an impossible coincidence.
“Dicky, what are you doing here? I mean, what are you doing here?”
“Big Hank bought the building,” said Dicky.
“Big Hank bought this building?” Mary Rose couldn’t believe it.
“Its grandfather.” Dicky tapped at her belly. His grin was just this side of jeering. They were nearly the same height, Dicky and Mary Rose, and by this time probably close to the same weight. Without thinking Mary Rose gave him a shove.
“Didn’t that interfering cunt of a mother of yours ever teach you that pointing is rude? Anyway, it’s not an ‘it,’ it’s a ‘she.’”
Mary Rose, tipping the scales at two-hundred-something stomped back upstairs in her size 11 wooden clogs and hurled her front door shut. The windows in the front hall rattled, and the air that whooshed down the stairwell blew the hair from the foreheads of Dicky and Martin Baadenbaum and blasted through the mail slots, blowing open the metal flaps on the outside, which then slammed shut, bang bang bang. Dicky and Martin were alarmed, unnerved. They were then filled with distaste. Mary Rose wasn’t a dragon lady, she was just a dragon. And Mary Rose knew they thought this. And it bothered her.
She had no sooner flipped the deadbolt on her door when she began to feel terrible. It wasn’t Dicky’s fault his father had chosen this property, of all the rental properties available in our city, to buy.
And worse, she had called Audra a cunt. Mary Rose didn’t think she’d ever used that word aloud in her entire life. She didn’t believe in that word. Suddenly, her hands flew to the sides of her belly. She hoped the She-bean was asleep. She wondered if fetuses had the same ears for profanity that children did. Tell a child to eat his peas and he looks at you like you’re speaking Farsi. Say shit when he hoists the bowl off his tray and that will be the very next word out of his mouth.
Mary Rose called me to commiserate. “They’re trying to drive me around the bend,” she said.
“Who?”
“Big Hank bought my building. Dicky’s moving in downstairs.”
“Icky Dicky?”
“It gets worse. He touched my belly, that tap like you’re public property—”
“I know that tap—”
“And I called Audra an interfering C-U-N-T.”
“Wait, I missed something here. Dicky—”
“I’m still furious that Audra called the clinic about the baby’s gender. I took it out on Dicky. He’s never done anything to me.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said. “Dicky’s the most self-absorbed person I’ve ever known. It probably didn’t even register.”
“I called his mother a cunt, Brooke.”
“Just forget it,” I said.
“One day someone will tell my child I’m a C-U-N-T and I would like to think that that someone would have the decency to apologize.”
“I’m telling you, just let it go. Apologize if you feel the need, but don’t worry about it.”
“You’re always saying that.”
“There’s nothing else to say, Mary Rose. It’s the best advice there is.”
This was not what Mary Rose wanted to hear. She was a woman of action, and letting something go was for her rather excruciating, especially when she felt she was in the wrong.
I have several thoughts as to why the Barons felt the need to buy the house where Mary Rose lived. Setting aside for a moment their natural compulsion to invade, divide, conquer, rule, coerce, and squelch, the building sat smack in the middle of the best street in the hottest neighborhood in our city.
It was close in, artsy but not fartsy; you could buy hand-painted serving bowls from Provence at a number of shops within a two-square-block radius. The house looked dilapidated, but the foundation was sound. The plumbing, hot-water heater, and wiring were all new. A new coat of paint, a new porch light, we’re talking double your investment. And Big Hank was all for that.
The question is, had they installed Dicky in the bottom unit in order to keep an eye on Mary Rose? It’s the stuff of movies, isn’t it?
It’s true that Audra Baron had come to think of Mary Rose as a free electron whirring around the otherwise stable molecule of the great clan Baron. The girl was unmarried, unemployed (Mowers and Rakers had never really counted), untrustworthy, an orphan without a mother of her own to see that she took her prenatal vitamins, and bought a matching bumper and dust ruffle for the baby’s crib. God and Audra knew Mary Rose could use someone to watch over her. This took nothing away from the fact that Audra was also desperate to get Dicky out of the house.
For despite Mary Rose’s baby—a baby girl! Something Audra had longed for her entire reproductive life, but Y after Y after Y, why? after why? after why? had never gotten—some part of Audra had given up on Ward and Little Hank, almost as if, like women, their clocks had wound down and now, save a miracle, children were an impossibility. Her older sons, she was afraid, had become too old to change.
Dicky was only thirty-three, and might be considered good-looking to a woman whose standards weren’t too high. He needed a place of his own, but unless he was lured into a situation, in this case managing the new building, he would grow old and enfeebled in the moldy Mediterranean villa on Vista Drive. The job of managing the building also lifted from him the burden of having to find something to do, now that the last of his money from Romeo’s Dagger was gone.
Naturally no one had told Mary Rose.
She kicked off her clogs and paced. She turned on the TV, but there was no basketball on, not even high school ball on cable. She would have liked to have gone outside and torn out a leggy old clematis that crept up the east side of the house, but she would have to pass Dicky on her way out.
By the time it was dark Mary Rose had settled on a way to make it up to Dicky. She felt he deserved more than an apology. It was not just that she had been rude, the exact accusation she had leveled at him, it was that she had behaved in accordance with the stereotype of the hysterical pregnant woman, the woman at whom the world shakes its head in wonder and disdain. She hated that.
What she would like to do was build him a raised vegetable bed, as she did on Monday afternoons during the spring and early summer for housebound people who received help from one of our city’s programs to aid the working poor. But there was already a raised vegetable bed in the small backyard, one which Mrs. Wanamaker had never even used. It would have been ridiculous to build another one just for Dicky.
Remembering Audra’s anti-fat crusade, Mary Rose settled on baking Dicky some cookies. She had a recipe for oatmeal-chocolate-chocolate-chip that she sometimes made for her Mowers and Rakers. A handful left them in a stupor, unable to tug a single weed.
Some people are responsive to this type of offering and others aren’t. I could bake cookies until I was so weak with age I couldn’t crack an egg, and Lyle would still never forgive me for what he supposed was my InfideLite with Lightning Rod McGrew.
Around 8:30 Mary Rose went downstairs. She knocked on Dicky’s door with one knee, her hands full with a turquoise platter steaming with several dozen cookies. When there was no answer she knelt, placing the platter on the doormat. She grabbed the doorknob to pull herself to her feet. The door was locked, she noticed. She knocked louder, then when nothing happened, banged with her fist, as she used to have to do when Mrs. Wanamaker lived there. Obviously Dicky was not home.
Mary Rose debated. Should she take the cookies back upstairs? There she would either eat them or be forced to decide how to store them
, something she didn’t feel up to.
In the end she left them on the doormat, mainly in order to avoid having to kneel again. She went back upstairs, where she worried. Every time she heard a noise, she peeked out her front window to see if he had come home.
Twice, when she was sure it was him, she went halfway down the stairs to see if the turquoise platter was still sitting on his doormat. Once she retrieved the platter, then, halfway back up the stairs thought, “This is ridiculous! I’ve left them there for this long …” then back down she went.
Her vigil was interrupted during the sports segment of the 11:00 news. Thanks to an unexpected loss by another team in the Pacific Division, our basketball team was now tied for first place.
Afterward, Mary Rose reflexively went to her door and peeked out. The front door downstairs was wide open. She welcomed the excuse to go down and close it. When she did, she saw that the platter of cookies was gone.
She didn’t see Dicky for a few days, which made it all the more urgent in her mind that she see him, apologize to him, and, not incidentally, get her plate back. Finally, at the end of the week, on one of those miraculous hot spring days that make you itch to be fifteen again (that’s the miracle), Mary Rose parked the Mower and Rakers truck in its usual spot beneath the ornamental plums, which were bursting with nipple-pink blooms, and heard, through the open front door, a television set.
Dicky’s front door was open too, and Mary Rose walked right in, a twenty-pound bag of lime hoisted on one shoulder. Dicky was slouched on his new black leather sofa watching a basketball game, drinking an imported beer.
Together, they stared for a moment at the set. It was not the Blazers. They had six days off between games, and everyone in our city was talking about it. It was a suspiciously long length of time. Long enough for them to lose their playing legs. We were convinced it was a conspiracy between the networks, the network advertisers, and the NBA: Nobody wanted us to make it to the finals because we had such a small market share, compared to, say Los Angeles, New York, Boston, or Chicago.
“The Rockets and who?” said Mary Rose.
“Exactly,” said Dicky. He blew over the top of the bottle, failing to produce a whistle.
“I brought you …” said Mary Rose. “Did you get those cookies?”
“Yup, yup.” Dicky tipped the bottle at Charles Barkley, who was pacing during a time-out, wiping his forehead with the front of his jersey. “People would kill to be him. It was in a survey. They interviewed five hundred kids across the country. One of the questions asked, ‘Would you kill your parents if it meant you could be Charles Barkley.’ Sixty-three percent said they would. Even with his weight problem.”
“That’s unbelievable,” said Mary Rose.
“I know,” said Dicky.
“You’d have thought it would be more.” She was being facetious. Dicky took her seriously.
“Everywhere Barkley goes, people come up to him. Every restaurant, every golf course. They want to touch him. It’s like kissing the pope’s ring. Better, really. What can the pope do? Even if he pulls out his big guns, prays his biggest prayer, your life might still be shit. But if you go up and touch Sir Charles on the shoulder and go, ‘Hey, good luck on Saturday. I’ll be thinking about you,’ and then he has one of those monster forty-point games … think how it would be to have people think you were the most amazing person on the planet. To be stared at by all those eyes.”
“It sounds like a nightmare.”
Dicky looked up at Mary Rose for the first time since she’d walked in the door. She was still standing beside the couch with the bag of lime balanced on her shoulder, tugging at a bit of cowlicky bang.
“Those cookies were pretty good,” he said.
“I’m sorry about that afternoon,” she said. “When you moved in. I shouldn’t have said what I said. I’m about to become a mother myself and you’d think I’d be more sensitive. I wouldn’t want someone to say something like that about me.”
Dicky looked blank.
“I lost my temper. I called Audra, your mother … anyway, that’s what the cookies were for. To apologize.”
“What’d you call her?”
“You don’t remember?”
“You said she was a cunt or something.”
“I’m really, really sorry.”
“Well,” said Dicky, laughing, “she is.” Mary Rose noticed Dicky’s dimples. He wasn’t so bad when he smiled, she thought.
Mary Rose did not know what to say to this, but she didn’t feel she could leave on this note. She eased down the bag of lime and sat on the edge of the couch.
The apartment was very tidy, bare as a waiting room where few people had cause to wait. On the wall over the TV was tacked an 8-by-10 glossy of the comedian R—, autographed. It looked like the type of thing star-struck deli owners hung behind their cash registers.
Through the bedroom door Mary Rose recognized an expensive weight machine with a week’s worth of clothing slung over it.
“Why do you say that about your mother? I like your mother. There are a few things I don’t like that she’s done lately, things that are basically inexcusable, one thing, actually, but you don’t want to hear—”
“Yeah, I know,” said Dicky. “She didn’t tell me you were living here. She didn’t tell me this place was such a dump, either.”
“That’s not really interfering.”
“You can interfere by not saying something. Ward does it all the time.”
Mary Rose laughed. “Like how he conveniently forgot to tell me he had a wife?”
“My psychic says it’s my family’s tragic flaw, thinking we don’t have to account for our actions.”
“Wow, she really said that?”
Together, they watched the rest of the quarter in silence. The panic Mary Rose felt when she realized Dicky was to be her new neighbor subsided. He seemed cool and disinterested, the exact opposite of the rest of the warm and nosy Barons. He was hardly ever home. When he was, he was quiet. Sometimes she ran into him in the morning—he was going to his club to work out, she was going to work—and when she did they exchanged a minute’s worth of pleasantries. For a few weeks, it suited Mary Rose fine.
Then she began to think it was weird.
“I am, after all, pregnant with his niece,” Mary Rose said to me.
“He doesn’t care. I told you: Dicky’s only concern is Dicky.”
“There’s no one living in the other unit. You’d think Big Hank would want to rent it out as soon as possible to keep the bucks rolling in.”
“Maybe he’s fixing it up.”
“Why are you taking their side on this?”
I then said something I shouldn’t have, but I had grown weary of the conversation. I said, “Mary Rose, I think this pregnancy has made you a little paranoid.”
It was the first time she’d ever hung up on me.
9.
OUR CITY LIES IN A VALLEY EQUIDISTANT FROM OCEAN and desert. When the wind blows from the west, it brings with it chill marine air; when it blows from the east, dry and hot, the unending rain for which we are famous suddenly ceases and we suffer an equally relentless heat. The valley is transformed from verdant cradle to lung-singeing sauna.
It often happens in spring, for reasons beyond my meteorological ken, and tricks our gullible, pent-up citizenry into thinking summer has arrived. We are fools for this sort of heat. We throw off our clothes, the better to blister our pale, sun-starved shoulders. We cannonball off slippery rocks into local rivers that are running high and cold with melted snowpack, and often drown. Shootings escalate, as do beer brawls and car thefts. Local news reports feature the elderly perishing in their stuffy, ill-ventilated apartments and, in the same breath, small dogs left to fry in closed cars. Our normally subdued northern city, a city of readers, recyclers, and basketball fans, becomes, overnight, a place of irrational behaviors and erupting passions.
During this time, on an unusually smoggy Saturday, I asked the back of
Lyle’s head if we could get out of town. Something terrible had happened and I felt I needed to get away. Mary Rose had been served with papers.
THE NIGHT BEFORE I couldn’t sleep, even after I had put Stella down and sung a few rounds of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Mary Rose, so big in her final months she looked as if she would tip over, like an ill-weighted sculpture created by an enthusiastic yet inept art student. She had been pruning the Ostlys’ wisteria, a noble old vine that had been trained no less seriously than a German gymnast to grow in a manner that entirely covered the lattice above the Ostlys’ side patio. When in bloom the dangling blue blossoms created one of those rare settings that look as if it has sprung from a children’s book.
April is not the proper time to prune wisteria, but during a boisterous, pre-heat wave hailstorm a few runners had been damaged.
Mary Rose stood with her hands on her hips, her fingers tapping out a ditty on the sides of her belly, trying to trace the broken runners to their source in order to avoid the disaster of clipping the wrong one, when a plump young woman, pantyhose swishing beneath the skirt of her periwinkle linen suit, minced across the lawn.
“Are you Mary Rose Crowder?”
Only the guilty, who have reason to suspect a process server may be paying them a visit, know to say, “Nope, sorry, Catherine the Great here.”
“I am,” said Mary Rose. She read the summons twice, waddled to where her gloves lay on the patio, knelt on one knee, placing the summons beneath the gloves to keep it from blowing away, struggled back to her feet with the aid of a redwood chaise longue, then returned to the wisteria, where she proceeded to accidentally cut one of the largest runners, as well as the Ostlys’ phone line. The plant was half dead, the phone, fully dead. Mary Rose was fired, something Mrs. Ostly, a friend of Audra Baron’s, had been meaning to do for some time anyway. It was unseemly for Mary Rose to be working this late in her pregnancy.