Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me

by Karen Karbo

  “I’m not taking her away. He knows I’m not taking her away.”

  “This is how the rich operate. They’re just showing you their muscles.”

  “They just want to reduce me to nothing. They’d prefer it if the baby didn’t have a mother, if she could be composed of forty-six perfect Baron chromosomes. Do you know how much I had to pay to retain a lawyer? Three thousand dollars! They’re supposed to be so concerned for the welfare of this child. I had to cash in some of my mutual funds.”

  “Mary Rose,” I said. “How can I tell you this? They’ve called me as a witness. I had to tell you. I don’t want you to worry, but I had to tell you. There won’t be a hearing until after the baby is born. By then it’ll probably all blow over. Maybe you’ll have even patched things up with Ward.”

  She just stared at me. There were circles under her eyes.

  The process server had arrived at my house at 7:20 the morning before. Mornings are not uneventful at our house. There was an “FBI! Open up!” kind of rap on our front door.

  I was startled. Stella was desultorily nursing, eyes on the TV, reaching for a Teletubbie, her hand opening and closing like a cartoon starfish scooting across the ocean floor. She was bored, but when I leaped at the sound of the door, she clutched at the lapels of my bathrobe.

  Rap! Rap! Rap! What to do? Unceremoniously unhook her, giving her more material for her eventual psychotherapy, or race to the door, bent over, baby held to my ribs, knees bent, like a participant in one of those wacky races popular at company picnics? Stella weighed more than twenty pounds. In the end I unhooked her and left her in front of the tube, where she sat, curiously untroubled, fingering the ear of a stuffed mouse.

  The subpoena said I should be prepared to be called to the witness stand after the birth of Mary Rose’s baby.

  Now I could feel Mary Rose’s gaze boring into the top of my head as I nervously separated my vegetable medley into oranges and greens. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “It just happened yesterday.”

  “A witness to what? What are you supposed to be a witness to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re not going to do it, are you?”

  “I have to. Otherwise it’s contempt of court or something.”

  Mary Rose stared at something over my shoulder. She plucked at her hair.

  “Your hair looks great, ‘Chic.’” I said. It sounded hollow and lame.

  Mary Rose pushed away her plate.

  “When I was about seven I told my mother I never wanted to have a baby, and she said, ‘Why? It’s the most wonderful experience you’ll ever have.’ And I said, ‘Because when I get really fat I won’t be able to run.’ And she said, ‘You won’t want to run, you’ll want to stay put.’ And I said, ‘What if someone’s chasing me?’ And she said, ‘That’s what your husband’s for, honey.’ Is that the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard? Someone’s chasing me and he’s going to run? What she should have said is that my husband, or in this case my baby’s father, would be the one chasing me.”

  Although Mary Rose was irritated with me, there was no question that we would leave the game. In our city people stay in hostile marriages rather than suffer the agony of deciding what to do with their season tickets.

  Our seats were high and situated so that we had a nice view of the bench players’ bald spots.

  “Look, there’s the Comet,” I said. “I think they should have just left it Derik. It always reminds me of something else, un-basketball-related.” The Comet was Derik Crashaw’s new nickname; he was the best sixth man the Blazers had had in a decade, which apparently warranted the name change. Like a comet, he shot in off the bench, destroyed the opposing team’s defense, then disappeared (i.e., was rotated back out). Since I’d last seen him (in person, anyway, we saw him on TV all the time), he’d gotten something big and swirling tattooed on his arm.

  “It reminds you of reindeers,” said Mary Rose. “On Comet, on Cupid—is it Cupid?—on Donner …” She lost interest in her own joke.

  The rows were so close together that when Mary Rose cheered she hit the back of the man’s head in front of her. Eventually he moved. Where, I have no idea, since, as I said earlier, home games for the past twelve years have allegedly been sold out.

  I am not a cheerer. I’ll applaud, sure, but do they really need to be told to play defense and watch for the open man? The men around us apparently thought they did. They screamed until they foamed at the mouth. We were down by fourteen after the first quarter, not the worst thing for our team, who only functions well under nearly impossible conditions. I bought a bag of peanuts from a passing vendor and tried to think whether I’d remembered to put in my nursing pads.

  Hanging above us were a half-dozen scoreboards whose sole existence was to offer corporations willing to donate money to the organization a chance to advertise. There was the Budweiser Hustle board, the Dutch Boy Points in the Paint board. Hanging over center court was the Amerivision board, the main scoreboard and giant-screen TV where you could catch the instant replays and where, during time-outs, dedicated fans who’d brought homemade signs could see their own hopeful mugs beneath their often misspelled urgings.

  For Mary Rose and me the most arresting sight during a timeout at the beginning of the second quarter was a boy, his face painted half black, half red, holding up a sign that said: WERE #1! One row down and two people over sat Ward Baron in his big leather jacket, his long legs crossed, his arm around a thin woman with a lot of wavy brown hair, struggling not to lose the chocolate coating off her ice cream bar.

  “Is that …?” Mary Rose gasped.

  Ward, noticing himself on camera, cracked a grin and flashed a peace sign.

  “What’s he doing here? And who’s that he’s with?”

  Oh, dear. I knew. From a picture I’d seen once somewhere. In a silver frame on the Barons’ grand piano? I couldn’t remember. But I knew.

  “I think it might be … now, I’m not sure, I’ve only seen pictures so I can’t say for sure.”

  Mary Rose gripped the armrests on either side of her and launched herself from her seat. Our neighbors happily leapt to their feet, relieved that this woman was taking her pregnancy and risk of imminent delivery elsewhere.

  For me, they were not so kind. I bumbled over their knees, stepping on toes and coats and a handbag in which I heard the distinct crunch of broken glass. Somehow I knew Mary Rose was not possessed with a sudden urge for a souvenir program.

  Ward and Lynne’s seats were across the arena, much better than ours. Yes, it was Lynne Baron, estranged wife of Ward, trainer of Seeing Eye dogs, visiting our city to talk about her marriage with her husband, who suddenly thought he might want a divorce.

  I chased the stampeding Mary Rose out through the doors opening onto the concourse and around to the other side of the arena. She was running, but I could only bring myself to walk quickly. I was not about to make a scene.

  Mary Rose flung open the door leading to the O section and disappeared.

  Lynne and Ward were about twenty rows off the floor, behind the visiting bench. The Baron season tickets. Lynne sat on the aisle, Ward beside her. Lynne was pretty, with the kind of thick hair you can’t buy, a cleft chin, grape-green eyes. Her hands were folded in her lap.

  “I’d like to have a word, please,” said Mary Rose.

  “My God, Mary Rose.” Ward sat forward in his seat. He hid his shock by throwing a grin up on his mouth, the same way a person caught naked grabs the nearest article of clothing.

  Lynne looked over with mild interest, as if Mary Rose were just some friend of the family, no one of concern. It was clear that Ward had told his wife nothing. She reached up and put her hand on her husband’s leather-jacketed shoulder. A cautionary hand, I thought. I saw she still wore a gold band.

  “Please,” Mary Rose said. “Ward, please.”

  “I, uh, I can’t right now, Mary Rose.”

  There is a gesture that only the lik
es of Ward Baron can make. The hand is relaxed but not limp, held level with the shoulder. There is a slight flick of the wrist, the forefinger leading ever so slightly. The universal gesture of dismissal it is, bred into potentates and dukes, czars and American men of a certain color and class. Ward did not even know he knew it.

  Mary Rose grabbed him by the collar of his leather jacket and hauled him over Lynne’s scrawny lap and into the aisle. “What was that? You don’t do that to me. You don’t brush me off like I’m some, some—”

  She dragged him into the aisle, big hands still clinging to his collar in a way that brought to mind the way you might hang on to the reins of a bolting horse. The fans around us clucked a little, but it was too much to ask of them to divide their attention between domestic drama and a little run the Blazers got going right before the half. There were a few heys! and a look out!, but no one really heard anything over the blare of the music during a time-out and the announcer’s ear-splitting blather.

  Then Ward shoved Mary Rose. Later he would say he was only trying to get her to let go of his collar. She was pinching the skin of his neck, he claimed. The shove sent her landing smack on her butt, but as she went down, I saw her hit her belly against the armrest of the seat on the aisle.

  Between me and the drama stood a vendor. “Just a minute there!” he said.

  It was the same vendor from whom I’d bought my peanuts earlier in the game. He sold small red-and-white-striped bags of old popcorn. A curtain of foot-long red licorice SuperRopes hung from the front of his metal box.

  Mary Rose reached back to break her fall and found herself grabbing a handful of licorice. They were encased in thin tubes of brittle plastic wrap. They crackled in her fist. She held four or five. She brought her fist around and began whacking Ward around the head and shoulders. A cat-o’-five-tails.

  This is amazing, I know, but check any highlight reel for the season and you will see it. TV adds ten pounds. Mary Rose looked so stupendously pregnant that it seemed impossible she was not carrying a full-grown teenager. Ward cowered. He covered his face with his hands, shiny with pinkish scales of his eczema.

  Lynne stood up and said, “Ward! Stop! Now!” as if she was reprimanding one of her dogs.

  Someone on the other side of the aisle said, “She’s having her baby.”

  “She’s losing her baby,” I thought. All this conveniently videotaped evidence.

  Have I mentioned this game was televised?

  11.

  I INSISTED MARY ROSE GO TO THE E. R. I SAW THAT BUMP she took on her belly. As she stalked away, back up the aisle, having dropped the five red SuperRopes, having not paid for them, the vendor not caring one whit—get that crazy woman out of here!—I saw her knees buckle slightly once, a move you might learn in a ballroom dance class, her hand fly to the spot she’d hit on the armrest when she fell. “Whoa,” she said.

  Whoa is not good news if your baby isn’t due for six weeks. Except it turned out it wasn’t six weeks.

  It was Friday night, and you’d think the place would be crowded with car accidents, knife wounds, bums passed out in doorways, accidental poisonings, fraternity pranks gone awry. Television ER activity. There was one tiny white-haired lady, crocheting something in cheap yellow yarn. Her feet didn’t touch the floor. The magazine covers had come unstapled from the magazines they belonged with, and sat around empty like peanut shells. The magazines themselves gave off that distinct hospital-waiting-room aura: thumbed through but never read by people who didn’t want to be there.

  A Vietnamese man in aqua scrubs raced out with a wheelchair. I was allowed to come back with Mary Rose because I might have been her partner. This might have been our baby. Our city was liberal that way. Waiting for the doctor, I said to her, “It’ll be all right.”

  Mary Rose gave me one of her black looks that said she had no patience for hooey. She was in her third trimester and had no use for platitudes.

  “I’ve been through this, remember?” I said.

  “You haven’t been through this,” she snapped. Mary Rose had had it with me.

  The first doctor who looked at her was a resident or an intern—one of those almost-a-doctor doctors who seem to be there to gain experience not in the practice of medicine, but in the practice of dominating the conversation. He was tall and alarmingly lean, a physique that advertised his dedication to some grueling sport. He smelled, curiously, of bay leaves and garlic, beef-stewy; maybe there was a party going on in the staff lounge. Maybe it was his own going-away party. He stepped between the pink curtains the nurse had drawn around Mary Rose, took one look at her stupendous belly, and said, “You need to go up to maternity.” It was as if we were in the wrong line at the DMV.

  “I’m not having the baby …” Mary Rose began.

  “Then what can I do for you?”

  “Other things do happen to pregnant women,” I said. “She could have fallen off a ladder. She could have broken her collarbone snowboarding.”

  Before I could finish, the doctor backed out of the curtained cubicle. Minutes later another doctor stepped between the curtains, almost like a magic act. He introduced himself as Dr. Deluski. One of his electives must have been Bedside Manners 101. He was younger than we were, as small-boned as a ten-year-old girl. Looking at him, it seemed impossible he could ever have made it through medical school; he looked born to have upperclassmen pick him up and stuff him into a trash can. He wore a red bowtie.

  “When’s your due date?” He lifted the gown and stared hard at Mary Rose’s twitching belly. When Patricia—the name Mary Rose had chosen—was not reclining on Mary Rose’s bladder, or twisting and stretching to such a degree that her mother’s belly took on the appearance of a Jell-O mold during an earthquake, she had the hiccups. Dr. Deluski touched the spot where Mary Rose had hit the armrest. There was a faint mark, fig-shaped, not too alarming.

  “June twelfth.”

  “Hmmm.” Dr. Deluski rested his wrist on Mary Rose’s pubic bone and felt for the baby’s head. He then asked Mary Rose to pull up her knees, keeping her feet together, then drop her knees open. Mary Rose drew her eyebrows together, disapproving of this maneuver. She’d probably never been examined this way. I stared up at the curtain rings. It seemed altogether too informal. The good thing about stirrups was that no one ever mistook them for a good time.

  Mary Rose sighed. “If everyone had a baby it would be the end of the civilized world because after you’ve gone through this you’re never capable of feeling embarrassed again. Can you imagine a world where no one was ever embarrassed? The end of impulse control.”

  “June twelfth, June twelfth. I don’t think so. Could be wrong, of course. This one feels as if he’s already turned. Which would mean you’re at least in your thirty-fourth week.”

  Dr. Deluski withdrew his finger, snapped off his rubber glove, dropped it in a metal trash can, the kind with a lid.

  “Or maybe it’s not a matter of never being embarrassed again. Probably what happens is that from the moment of your first prenatal visit on you live in a state of perpetual embarrassment. Breast-feeding. I can’t even imagine what that’s going to be like. Then it’s on to bringing the forgotten lunch to kindergarten.”

  “I suspect you’re due May twelfth or thereabouts, not June twelfth. Maybe more like May nineteenth.”

  “That’s a full month earlier,” I said. Duh.

  “Back in the fall, the date you gave as the first day of your last period, were you one hundred percent on that?”

  “I just sort of guessed,” said Mary Rose.

  “You’re a big woman, so there was no reason for your doctor to question the size of the fetus. I’m going to send you upstairs for a fetal survey.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Ultrasound. They’ll measure the lungs, torso, heart. We’ll see what’s going on here.”

  Mary Rose got dressed in silence, her back to me, modest, out of habit. I imagine she was counting back, counting back and wondering. Back no
t to when she was in the throes of lust with Ward Baron—you’d think that’s what she’d be thinking about, but she wasn’t—but back to when she could turn over in bed and not drag all the covers with her. Back when she was able to turn swiftly without knocking over a lamp. To when she was alone, able to read a book in the tub without having it booted into the suds. To when she was a simple individual and not a host organism. She thought back to when there were clothes in this world that fit.

  Now nothing fit. I mean nothing. In our city we have several malls groaning with women’s dress shops, as well as Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom downtown. There was nothing at all for Mary Rose to wear except one pair of china-blue leggings, elastic-less, and one XXL black T. Mary Rose wore this ensemble to mow, she wore it to hoe, she wore it to do everything else. She washed it every night and dragged it from the dryer every morning. What’s love got to do with it? Indeed.

  A MAN’S GOT to do what a man’s got to do? Didn’t Gary Cooper say that in High Noon? I hope not, for his sake. I hope it was some bit player who died of his own stupidity. For it has never been men who have to do what they have to do, but mothers.

  Children must eat, they must be dressed, bathed, tickled, read to. That you have just been evicted or diagnosed with a fatal disease matters not. Like the tide, the needs of children never stop.

  Mary Rose was a mother, or going to be one soon, and so she had to do what she had to do, which meant getting up the morning after she had behaved in a way that made her wish she could hide all day under the covers, and going out to find a car seat for baby Patricia. You’re thinking I’ve trivialized my entire argument. Car seats! The truth is, it is a law in our state that you must prove you have a car seat or else the hospital will not let you leave with your baby. You don’t have to prove you know which end of the baby the food goes into, but you do have to show your car seat. The hospital cares not that your life is going down the tubes.

  The car seat and a crib were the last things Mary Rose needed. Although she was worried that buying for the baby was tempting Fate, during the past month, Mary Rose had finally screwed up her courage and began ordering things for Patricia. Tiny pink-and-green-striped T-shirts and short baby pants, caps and socks, a set of hooded bath towels. This may have been Mary Rose’s first twitch of the famous nesting urge. Not everyone experiences it.