Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me

by Karen Karbo

  She phoned me, on the verge of tears; after some inadequate consoling, I promptly hung up and phoned Audra, promising Mary Rose I would tell her what I found out. How had such a thing happened? And how had I wound up in the middle of it?

  Audra was businesslike. “Brooke. I take it you’ve heard. We really had no choice. It’s not entirely Mary Rose’s fault, although you won’t get me to say that in court. But our baby needs the best chance she can have. Life isn’t easy, you know.”

  “Thank you for drawing that to my attention.”

  Ward had done what a scion in trouble always does: He consulted his father. He dropped in one evening around dinnertime. Little Hank was milling around the kitchen in evening wear eating graham crackers and waiting for Big Hank, who was to be, that very night, master of ceremonies at a popular charity function held every year, an auction benefiting our city’s new museum of science and industry. Big Hank was a man of many talents, but public speaking was not one of them. He had consented only because the museum curator was friendly with a collector who was selling his cache of British railway watches, and Big Hank was hoping to buy them before they went up for auction.

  In any case, Big Hank was nervous and more preoccupied than usual. He came to the table in black tie, smelling of cologne, a computer printout clenched in his fist.

  “What’s on your mind, Ward?” Big Hank ate only crackers and milk to calm his stomach.

  Ward recounted the recent events with Mary Rose. He found himself laying it on a little thick in order to assure he had Big Hank’s attention, a nearly hopeless task in the best of circumstances.

  He told how Mary Rose (for her own amusement!) had tricked him into believing she’d had an abortion; how she had shown up once at the airport dressed as a chauffeur; how she wouldn’t spend the night with him on his houseboat because she didn’t want to miss a basketball game; how she blathered on about the most personal aspects of pregnancy to complete strangers; and the topper, how she had developed a habit of eating Comet cleanser. “I mean, doesn’t that practically qualify as child abuse?” asked Ward.

  Recently, Ward’s eczema had flared up—it was always worse in the heat—and the more Ward talked, the more he scratched, between his thumb and index finger, between his knuckles. The more Ward scratched the more he talked. The more Ward talked, the more desperate he felt. This is another good reason for refraining from expressing yourself. The sound of your own desperate voice resonating in a large cold room, such as the Barons’ teak-wainscoted dining room, might make you feel worse than you already do.

  And so Ward did. He was on the verge of tears. Big Hank nodded his head, never looking at his son, never taking his eyes from his speech. He wasn’t reading, however, his narrow blue eyes locked on a single line.

  “Woo! I never knew she was such a crazy bitch,” said Little Hank.

  “I’d thank you to mind your own fucking business,” said Ward.

  “And I’d thank both of you to watch your language in front of your mother,” said Big Hank.

  Presently, Dicky arrived in gray sweatpants and sweatshirt from Romeo’s Dagger, a towel tossed over his shoulder. As had become his custom, he would work out in the afternoon, then drop by for dinner, often staying until late to watch TV.

  He said, “You talking about MR? She’s a wacko. Nice going, bro.”

  “Dicky,” said Audra.

  “She bakes cookies and leaves them at my door. Then she stomps up and down the stairs all night long waiting to see if I’ve come out and picked them up. She talks to her television.”

  “Maybe she’s lonely,” said Audra.

  “I don’t want the woman carrying my child to be lonely,” said Ward. “It’s not good for the baby.”

  “The baby,” Dicky scoffed. “She doesn’t even want the baby.”

  “I knew it,” said Ward.

  “What are you talking about?” said Audra.

  “She told me.” It had been a long time since all eyes had been on Dicky Baron. The last time they had all been rapt like this was after he had returned from the Academy Awards. Romeo’s Dagger hadn’t won anything except the Best Actor Oscar for R—, but Dicky had had a nice talk with James Garner in the men’s room.

  “One day I’m coming out of my apartment and I see her on the parking strip raking up all those pink flowers from whatever trees those are that grow there. She’s raking like a maniac, and she’s all, like, this monster of sweat. It isn’t even hot and she’s soaked and she’s talking to herself, mumbling something. And I come out and ask how she’s feeling, just being polite. She looks up and stops raking and yells, “Fine!” like that’s the last thing she is.

  “Better take it easy,” I say. “I don’t want to have to get out the newspapers and hot water”—that’s a joke, like I’m going to have to deliver the baby or something—and she starts to go back to raking, but when she does the rake part of the rake, the prongs, come off the stick. It’s broken. She throws it and says, ‘I wish I wasn’t even having this baby!’”

  Carrying a baby to term requires nerves of steel. For you male readers it must be similar to how a soldier feels when first under fire. He wants to turn and run, but it’s too late. He’s stuck in his foxhole. He must suffer through. For you male readers who have never been under fire, you may think what Ward and Dicky and the Hanks, Big and Little, were beginning to think: Mary Rose was certifiable, endangering herself and her baby. Endangering their baby.

  Now Audra, mother of three, was in the motherhood. She knew that Mary Rose did not mean what she said, that it was frustration talking, frustration and fear of pain. It was clear to her, she of the thirty-eight, thirty, and nineteen hours of labor, respectively, that Mary Rose was simply turning the corner into her third and final trimester, when what looms suddenly ahead is the appalling fact that the only way out of the predicament of pregnancy is giving birth.

  I can imagine Audra sitting there, her thin legs in red cashmere slacks folded one over the other, wrists perched on the edge of the table, auburn waves shining beneath the dusty crystal chandelier, knowing she should defend Mary Rose, yet unable to forgive that crack about being interfering. The other half of the remark, the tasteless half, she could forgive. The C word was anger speaking; but interfering … that was the product of careful thought.

  For Audra was a liberal, a real liberal, as she liked to think of herself. She believed in “live and let live.” She had spent her life training herself not to interfere. She looked around the table at her sons. Hadn’t she let her beautiful, sensitive Ward live when he had dropped the ball, failing to get his divorce from Lynne? Hasn’t she let Dicky live, even though he had helped a young girl—someone’s baby daughter!—kill herself? How much tolerance, empathy, patience, and prayers had been required then? She had let them live, and loved them still.

  With Mary Rose, the situation was trickier. Mary Rose was not her own, but what was inside Mary Rose was. Audra had tried to be there for Mary Rose. To offer advice, companionship. Some might say Audra was trying to rescue Mary Rose, but what of it? She thought briefly of all the presents she had bought for Mary Rose.

  “What am I going to do?” asked Ward. “I don’t think she’s fit to raise a kid.”

  Audra said nothing. She would not interfere. She excused herself to make some tea.

  Big Hank brushed his crumbs from his fingers. He took off his half glasses and laid them carefully beside his plate. “In our day, children just were. There was none of this nonsense. I have three sons, three sons. All your mother’s friends were envious.”

  From the kitchen, there was the sound of a teapot being filled with water.

  Big Hank sighed, fished in his pocket for his watch. “I’ll telephone Ron Toblin.”

  Ron Toblin was the Barons’ lawyer.

  I relayed all this to the back of Lyle’s head. “Why do I feel like a lot of this is my fault?”

  “’Cause you’ve made it your business when it isn’t,” said Lyle. To my surprise,
his head turned, and I was treated to the sight of his face, the straight, slightly pointed nose, the brown eyes made large behind his glasses.

  He said: “The game’s down and no one knows when it’s going to be back up. Why don’t we go to Seattle? Spur of the moment. Remember when we used to do spur of the moment?”

  That this entailed a three-hour car trip with an infant in a car that had no air-conditioning and a black interior somehow escaped us. We’d missed each other.

  Lyle drove while I sat in the cramped backseat singing “Billy Jean” to keep Stella from screaming. She hated the windows rolled down; too much noise, too blowy. But with the windows rolled up, we baked. Better to bake than go mad with three hours of eardrum-shattering shrieking.

  By the time we arrived, Lyle had that tight-lipped murderous look that men get when their lives are inconvenienced by the exact things women are supposed to be born to manage and, nay, enjoy. On top of it, Stella had one giganto project, which, in the enclosed, heated car … well, you can imagine.

  There is a famous waterfront market in Seattle that appears regularly in tourist brochures and commercials for Levi’s and other products aimed at young people with disposable income. It is bustling and lively, and a stroll around it gives people the illusion they are savoring the simple things in life. There are bakeries and flower stalls and blocks of fruit stands selling baseball-sized strawberries year-round. There are outlandish fresh fish marts, where the shopper in search of a modest fillet of sole is sent rushing into the arms of vegetarianism by the sight of humongous glassy-eyed squid lying prone on a bed of ice, buckets of knobby whelks, and tanks of the living Freudian nightmare that is the geoduck, our region’s specialty, which resembles a two-foot-long engorged penis sprouting from between the lips of an ordinary-looking clam shell.

  I changed Stella’s diaper on the backseat—no easy feat; the seat tilts downward and Stella kept rolling off the changing pad—and hauled the stroller out of the trunk and, while holding Stella, unfolded the stroller with one hand, snapping with my foot the joint that keeps it from collapsing, the straps of the changing bag—full of, as you know, useless things that I nonetheless felt it was my job to lug around—slipping down off my sweaty shoulder and catching in the crook of my elbow, thereby pulling Stella away from my chest, where I had balanced her with my other forearm and hand.

  Meanwhile, Lyle stood on the sidewalk, reorganizing his key ring.

  I felt myself start to grit my teeth. Same old thing, only in a more picturesque location.

  It happened thus: Lyle and I were elbowing our way through a particularly crowded part of the market. It was a long covered aisle flanked on either side by merchants selling flowers, T-shirts, earrings, wind chimes, etc. Lyle mumbled something about wanting to check out something, then lost himself in the crowd. I was left there, in the middle of a crush of shoppers, with Stella, who occasionally reached out from her stroller and took a swipe at something colorful and, inevitably, breakable; Stella’s two-ton diaper bag, which, as mentioned above, kept slipping off my shoulder, and Stella’s cheap stroller, stricken recently with the wobbly-wheel disease that normally victimizes shopping carts. In addition, I was having my period and in dire need of a rest room with a handicapped stall so that I could take Stella and her disabled stroller in with me. It was also, lest you forget, 102 degrees.

  When I finally negotiated my way through the crowd, stopping every so often to distract Stella with a toy from her bag so that I might extract from her sweet, iron grip a beaded bracelet or crystal unicorn she’d dragged from its display, I realized that I needed a bathroom now, and that any bathroom would have to do, and found a public one, crowded, with no handicapped stalls.

  I was forced to leave Stella outside my stall.

  Until you have a child, the world of your nightmares isn’t fully furnished. Anxiety manifests itself in those I-was-the-only-one-naked-at-the-party dreams, in those dreams where there is a final exam and you are unprepared. Once you have a child, your worst nightmare becomes leaving her in a public place, then turning around to find her gone. You never again dream of being naked at a party; in fact, the idea of being at a party, any party, naked or not, seems the stuff of lovely, voluptuous daydreams.

  I went into the stall, and when I came out Stella and her stroller were gone.

  For the first time since I first stood up after having given birth, I felt as if all my organs were going to spill out of me. Someone had taken Stella. I knew it as sure as I was standing there. A mother’s intuition. I felt my throat close. This was going to be that famous moment, the moment all parents who have lost their children speak of, the moment after which nothing is the same.

  On the wall beside the row of sinks was a paper-towel dispenser, beside which stood a short, round woman in a billowy blue-and-green muumuu, drying her hands. When she moved aside, I saw that someone had moved Stella’s stroller into the space between the sink and the wall. Stella sat there, nonplussed, sucking her thumb, stroking her cheek with the old T-shirt of Lyle’s she’d adopted as a blankie.

  Someone had simply moved her there to get her out of the way.

  I went to her, knelt down on the old white tile, tried to pull her to me even though she was still strapped to her stroller. My hands were shaking. I couldn’t undo the strap, so I just wrapped my arms around the back of the stroller, hugging her to my chest, that large tender head between my breasts. She allowed me to do this, didn’t squawk or screech, suffering my love without complaint.

  Minutes later, outside, I found Lyle and told him what had happened. How, when I saw she was gone I thought my banging heart was going to bruise itself beyond repair. How, seconds later, really it was only a matter of seconds, Fate decided not to deliver the worst life has to offer a mother.

  Lyle has a slow burn, which he stokes by the habit of cleaning his glasses. First he goes hah! hah! on one lens, then the other, then hauls out his shirttail—the same wayward shirttail that first enchanted me—and rubs hard enough to start a fire. “I can’t believe you left her. Anyone could have taken her.”

  “Lyle, I had to go to the bathroom.”

  “You couldn’t have waited? That is stupid. That is really, really stupid.”

  “No, as a matter of fact I couldn’t wait. I had to change my tampon, if you must know.”

  “God, is that stupid. That is stupid, Brooke. Stupid. What kind of a—” he stopped. He put his glasses back on.

  “What kind of a mother am I? Is that what you were about to say?”

  “No,” he said. “Yes,” he said. “What kind of a mother are you?! Anyone could have taken her. Just walked right out and be long gone.” At that moment Lyle did something he’d never done without my asking him to. He bent down, unhooked the safety strap and lifted Stella to his shoulder. By the curve of her cheek I could tell she was smiling out at the world. “I trust her with you. Or I did.”

  I was ready to let him have it, fling words I knew I’d regret, but his eyes were tearing. He was starting to cry. Now this was interesting. I stared.

  “If you’re so upset, and obviously you’re upset, why don’t you take more interest in her? Why all the fuss about her diapers?”

  “I do take care of her.”

  “When. Name three times. Name once.”

  “I did when she was four weeks old.”

  “Oh, God, I’m going to hear about this for the rest of my life. Look, Lyle, nothing happened that night with Lightning Rod, although I’m sure you’ll think whatever you want to think. I let you think something had gone on because you were pissing me off. I’m sick of doing this all by myself.” I wrestled Stella from him—using the child as a prop in an adult argument, something I swore I would never do—and left him burdened with the stroller, which, without Stella in it, seemed a pointless nuisance.

  10.

  THE GAME WAS THE SECOND-TO-THE-LAST HOME GAME of the season, Blazers versus one of those expansion teams named with a non-count noun, i.e., the Heat, the Magic.
This has always bothered me. A person cannot be a Heat. Once, I felt compelled to write the NBA and tell them I thought they should feel more of a custodianship for the English language and stick to count nouns, i.e., Warriors, Blazers, Cavaliers.

  They sent me a chipped mug thanking me for my attention to this matter.

  Unexpectedly, Mary Rose had been given a pair of tickets by a client. It was the happiest I’d seen her since Thanksgiving, when I’d found out she was pregnant. The tickets were not only to the game, but also to the pregame buffet, hosted by the franchise for the team sponsors. Held in the vast basement of the arena, it featured an astonishing array of high-grade dorm food, including a Pontiac-sized white sheet cake urging the team to Ruin the Magic, and a fatty shank of prime rib on a spit carved by an unsmiling chef in a deflated toque.

  “What am I going to do? Can you believe this? It’s unbelievable. Sometimes I just flat out don’t believe it,” said Mary Rose. We sat down with our plates. The room was decorated with four big-screen TVs, providing a direct feed to the action upstairs. Currently, that was three ten-year-old boys in team colors pushing dust mops across the floor. I watched them, preoccupied.

  Stella was home with Lyle. It was typical post-fighting behavior. For a week or so he would try to prove that he was as good a father as I was a mother. Read: He would occasionally offer to baby-sit. I had visions of him cybering with Lil Plum while Stella tumbled down the basement stairs in her walker.

  “It’s the Barons, Mary Rose. Believe it.”

  “I do believe it,” she snorted. “How can Ward do it is what I’m saying.”

  “The Barons are the kind of people who keep legal counsel around like other people keep candles in their junk drawer.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “You and I may think it’s serious, but Ward’s probably just letting you know the only way he knows how that he’s in this, too. Not to get any funny ideas. About, say, taking the baby away or something.”