Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me

by Karen Karbo

  Lyle, who folds his shirts before he puts them in the dirty clothes hamper, looked forward to this from the day I confessed I was pregnant. Poor Lyle. Every time I put away the laundry he rushed to my side and said, “Is this it? The hubcaps on the Volvo could use a once-over with a toothbrush.”

  The closest I ever came was clipping and filing articles on Thailand from the travel section.

  Once the baby clothes began arriving, and Fate yawned, untempted, Mary Rose rolled up her sleeves and started dialing in earnest. The UPS man stumbled up the steps, hidden behind a tower of boxes and brown mailing bags.

  There were dozens of diaper wraps, a collection of matching plastic bibs. A play yard. A stroller. A tape to calm crying and a Geiger counter-like gadget designed to detect a wet diaper. This thing that had taken up so much space inside her would now take up space in the world. It was the beginning of Patricia’s leaving her. She marveled, teary-eyed.

  Ward, on the other hand, did what he pleased, then passed it off as something he had to do. The day after Ward suffered his whipping at the hands of Mary Rose, he never considered that he may have been, in part, responsible. Indeed, now that Ward could officially claim the title of Injured One, everything he had done to provoke Mary Rose had become preemptive actions he was happy to have taken. His custody suit, his parading Lynne in public when everyone in his circle and his parents’ circle supposed Mary Rose was his girlfriend, his final arrogant dismissive gesture that gave Mary Rose’s fury its head, all seemed entirely justified. For Mary Rose was the unstable one. He, Ward, was just trying to keep his life together and make a good home for his soon-to-arrive daughter. Even the nurse said so. The nurse with hands that smelled of roses, who instructed him on the wearing of his eye patch—the sharp end of one of the plastic sleeves encasing the licorice Super-Rope had scratched his cornea—had seen the attack on the nightly news, heard his side as she ministered to him, and said he was one brave guy.

  Even Lynne, who drove Ward’s Porsche back to his houseboat, where she put ice on his eye and stroked his brown curls, now rather long, said that if Mary Rose was one of her Labradors she would be put down, pregnant or not.

  Only Audra did not coddle and cajole. The next morning on the telephone, when Ward complained that Mary Rose had humiliated him, Audra said, “No, honey, you humiliated you. It was all over the TV. Mrs. Deets called this morning. So did Cubby Fleischer. They thought Mary Rose was upset because you had stepped out on her. They found it hugely amusing that you were so stupid to get caught like that. Right on television. Cubby said you could do with a few pointers.”

  “But Lynne is my wife,” Ward sputtered.

  “Spare me, Ward. Have you forgotten who you’re talking to?”

  “I’m only doing what I have to do,” said Ward.

  “I knew we shouldn’t have gone ahead with this lawsuit,” said Audra. “This is not the way people like us do business. No wonder Mary Rose is upset.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this women-sticking-together bullshit,” said Ward, and jabbed the END button on his cell phone. Cell phones have ruined forever hanging up in a huff.

  Ward was at Starbucks, having a midmorning cappuccino. I was sitting across from him, at a tiny table near the window. “Excuse me,” he said. “That was my mother.”

  “And that’s the way you talk to your mother? Tsk-tsk.”

  Stella sat next to me in a wooden high chair, pointing out all the dogs. Dog was her first word, her only word, and with it came the feminine need to entertain and grease the wheels of conversation. Every time she saw a dog she pointed and said, “Dug.” What kind of accent was that? It didn’t even have to be a real dog; dogs on billboards, on T-shirts, teapots, book jackets. Once she pointed out a pair of silver schnauzers dangling from the ears of a woman ahead of us in line at the market. “Dug.”

  She took her pruny thumb from her mouth and pointed at a coffee mug on display. Dug.

  Ward had phoned me. That was my excuse. Mary Rose wasn’t, at the moment, returning her calls as quickly as she once did, and Ward had called me. Ostensibly to see how Mary Rose was doing, since she had stopped returning his calls the day she’d been served with papers; really, to give me his own excuses. Is it still an excuse if you’ve managed to make yourself believe it? Or does your own gullibility, your ability to pull one over on yourself, transform it into a reason? In any case, I could tell he’d hoarded them, kept them like assets, like a stock portfolio. Stories for the future, when he would need them, and felt he needed them now.

  “I am not a bad guy.” He warmed his hands around the squat white cup. His eye patch made him even better looking. Before he was just average handsome; the patch made people stare, and staring, they realized what they were looking at. Movie-star hair. Small scar, a beguiling white parenthesis, on the chin. Pianist’s hands. A man in a leather jacket who reminded no one of Fonzie.

  “I admit, I didn’t get the divorce because it seemed easier not to. Lynne is high-strung—that’s a good word for it—she gets upset. Really upset. Threatening-to-jump-off-a-bridge upset. So why push it? I wasn’t seeing anyone seriously, wasn’t dating anyone. Plus, who wants a marriage to end? We seemed to get along when we weren’t living together, so we thought, well, maybe we’d give it a shot sometime in the future. If I’m guilty of anything here, it’s taking the path of least resistance.”

  “Did anyone use the word guilty? I think the only word we’re using here is dog.”

  “There was no reason for her to attack me. I haven’t done anything wrong. That’s the thing with you women. You accuse accuse accuse, so we figure, we guys figure, I might as well do it, since I’ve been accused of it.”

  “Do what? What are we talking about here?”

  “Then when Mary Rose and I got pregnant, there was no way I could tell Lynne. You knew she had a baby. It died.”

  “Oh, God, Ward, I’m so so sorry.” Why hadn’t I heard of this before? Audra, information specialist, certainly would have told me. Death of a child trumps everything, explains everything. Now Ward was not simply misunderstood, but tragic. Homeric. I thought I might have to fall in love with him myself. He was my third cousin, give or take. That could work.

  “Not my kid, no. It was with her first husband. Elroy, I think his name was. The husband, not the baby. He was in the film business too, come to think of it. Something below the line—sound, maybe? I think it was SIDS. Can’t remember.”

  Ward suddenly shrunk back into his pre-Homeric self. Old dissembling Ward. Not that the situation wasn’t terrible, it was, but it wasn’t his situation. Wasn’t his baby, wasn’t even his step-baby. Couldn’t even remember the poor thing’s name. He’d just remembered it recently, I could tell.

  “I don’t mean to be rude, here, but what’s your point, Ward?”

  “Lynne obviously wondered who Mary Rose was—”

  “You hadn’t told her anything?”

  “Dug,” said Stella, pointing over Ward’s shoulder at a Jack Russell being tethered by its owner, a woman in bicycle shorts and Gore-Tex windbreaker, to the bicycle rack just outside.

  “Dog, sweetie,” I said. “Dog.” I adjusted her blue felt beret and sighed. It was probably the last time in her life she’d look good in a hat.

  “Well, she knows now. She knows, and she wants a divorce.”

  “That’s convenient.”

  “I don’t think Mary Rose will have me, is the point.”

  “Ward, I gotta tell ya. This is none of my business. As Lyle has told me about a thousand times. But what in the fuck do you think you’re doing? You’re taking a woman you allegedly love, or want to marry, or whatever, to court for custody of her baby, a baby that isn’t even born yet. That’s hardly being a supportive birth partner.”

  “Mary Rose has been acting bizarre, Brooke. You have to grant me that. And I was worried. For the health of the baby. Don’t I have to do what’s right for the child? Isn’t that what all the courts are always going on about? Doing what�
�s best for the kid? Anyway, the suit was Big Hank’s idea.”

  “How old are you, Ward, forty?”

  “Brooke, it’s Big Hank. It’s my father.”

  “So wait, you want to patch things up with Mary Rose and sue her at the same time? I’m not following.”

  “I don’t know,” said Ward. “I thought maybe you’d have some ideas.”

  “Ideas? Like what? Like, don’t be such a jerk? That would be a good one for starters.”

  “Dug-dug. Dug-dug.” Stella laughed at her linguistic discovery, which made her laugh some more, which made me laugh, which made Ward smile, which made Stella’s eyebrows shoot up, surprised. “Duggie.” She pointed at Ward.

  “You’re probably right, Stella-girl.” He took her pointing hand, her thumb shiny from sucking, smoothed it out flat, then turned her wrist so it was facing skyward. She stared at him, fascinated. He tiptoed his first two fingers around her cushiony little palm.

  “All around the garden walked the little bear. One step”—he took one giant tiptoe to the inside of her elbow—“two step”—he took another tiptoe to the top of her arm—“tickle under there!”—then swooped his fingers around and tickled her in the armpit. Stella shrieked with glee. People turned and looked; those in the mood to, smiled. I wonder if they thought we were a family. I felt that weird pang: Ward was a schmuck, but Ward was good with kids. He wanted to be a father.

  Stella offered him half of her gummed biscotti.

  AT 8:00 A.M. a week after the game, Mary Rose and I went to the Vivian Clair School for Girls annual rummage sale.

  The Vivian Clair rummage sale is hugely popular in our city. In other cities with less rain, the wealthy put their five-thousand-dollar damask sofas out on the street with the garbage. Here they donate it to the Vivian Clair rummage sale. Mary Rose was hoping to find a solid wooden crib for under a hundred dollars. I was hoping to find a van Gogh that someone had inadvertently given away with their daughter’s Spice Girls poster.

  Mary Rose was in a quiet, crabby mood, almost as if she was hungover. She sat in my car, her callused hands upturned on her thighs. Her china-blue leggings were now halfway up her calves. Her socks were mismatched, her shoelaces untied. The sight of her untied laces made me suddenly sad. When you live alone there is no one to tie your shoes.

  Mary Rose leaned her head against the window, then drew hatch marks in the oval of grease left by her forehead.

  Apropos of nothing she said, “Do you think Dicky is dangerous?”

  “Other than dangerously dull, you mean?”

  “I opened the door the other day and he was standing there, right on my front mat, just standing there. Didn’t look like he was about to knock or anything. I had been on the phone with Dr. Vertamini, telling her about what Dr. Deluski said. I’d say he was eavesdropping, but why should he care?”

  Icky Dicky. I was happy to gossip about poor Dicky. It distracted me from worrying whether I should tell Mary Rose I’d seen Ward. I opted for a one-woman show, instead. I told her about the time Dicky got caught stealing a tape at a local video store.

  The store was a one-time Tastee Freeze with black wrought-iron bars on the windows. Dicky had stopped to see if they had any copies of Romeo’s Dagger. This was apparently a regular practice. The few seconds of joy he felt at seeing three copies of the film in stock were dampened by the fact that none was rented out. The clerk, a blond girl with greasy plum-colored lipstick, was talking on the phone. He slipped one of the tapes from behind the box and put it in the pocket of his raincoat, thinking that when they did their next inventory they would say, “Wow! Someone thought this movie was so fantastic it was worth stealing!”

  “He went through the metal detector and the alarm went off. The rent-a-cop on duty came over and expected Dicky to have a copy of May the Breast Man Win in his pocket or something sleazy, but there was Romeo’s Dagger. The rent-a-cop laughed, laughed. Dicky told him he was just trying to further his career. Is that pathetic or what?”

  That was how you always ended a Dicky story. Is that pathetic? Pathetic!

  Mary Rose sighed and rubbed her eyes with the knuckles of her index fingers. “Boy, I could use a cigarette.”

  At the Vivian Clair rummage sale, Mary Rose and I went our separate ways. I found a plastic giraffe rocking horse for Stella, and Mary Rose found her crib.

  It was painted white with spool-turned slats. It had been taken apart down to washers, bolts, and unidentifiable parts destined to be left over when the crib was reassembled. It leaned against the end of a long table of baby and toddler clothes. A ripped cellophane bag with all the hardware was taped to the headboard. I found Mary Rose kneeling beside it on the concrete floor. On either side of her, women pawed through stacks of beautiful dresses, barely worn, dresses they would buy for their girls, who would also never wear them. Mary Rose was carefully counting out all the screws and springs. Suddenly, I felt bad. She should buy Patricia a new crib. Ward should buy Patricia a new crib.

  “You’ll need an instruction manual to put that thing back together!” I said.

  12.

  WHEN MARY ROSE REALIZED PATRICIA WAS GOING TO BE born in three weeks, not seven, she got quiet. I thought it was the shock. The Mother of All Pain would be upon her much sooner than she had expected. She wasn’t ready, but she had no choice.

  Month Ten. It’s not nine months we’re with child, but ten. Forty weeks.

  Force ten from Chromosome. I want someone to make a movie.

  Month Ten, when, like a prisoner of war being driven berserk by the most subtle of tortures, you are afforded no comfortable position.

  When standing is worse than sitting is worse than lying down.

  When sleep, so desperately needed, is out of the question, tormented as you are by the need to pee and the twisting and rolling of the baby, who wants to party the instant you are still.

  When the Braxton-Hicks contractions, the alarming and painful warm-up exercises performed by your uterus day and night, no less enthusiastic for its upcoming task than a linebacker in a Nike commercial, strike terror in your heart, convincing you This Is It (it isn’t; far from it).

  When you can no longer fit behind the wheel of a car.

  When, after the baby drops, your belly button is dragged from sight, staring eyeless down at your newly splayed toes. When the baby’s heels sometimes kick between your breasts to a degree that put you in mind of water brought to a full boil. When, during increasingly frequent trips to the loo, tearful with the urge to go, you are able to squeeze out three drops (your bladder, wedged into a teeny corner of your torso, has also gone into shock).

  When you realize once and for all that you did not sign up for this, and could you please return to your old self as soon as possible? You refuse to believe it is a one-way turnstile; or if it is one-way, that you can’t simply turn around and hop back over. Your old self is of course just that: your old self. You are at the brink. You are at the shores of motherhood. You are about to hit the beach. You think you will die. And you will. You will never be yourself again. Motherhood is for women what war is for men. When they had more wars, more men knew what it was like to be a woman on the verge of being a mother, to be at an absolute point of no return.

  Mary Rose, who supposed she was only in Month Nine, would now go into labor without the psychological advantage of arriving at the brink. She would imagine there was still perhaps some way she could finagle her way out of what lay ahead.

  She must have been terrified.

  Then, of course, May 2, Mary Rose’s revised due date came and went, and still Mary Rose did not go into labor. She was going to be early; now she was late. This opened her up to advice from mothers and involved fathers from far and wide.

  Eat spicy food, then run up a flight of stairs.

  Go dancing.

  Drink olive oil.

  Drink castor oil.

  Fleabo, in an uncharacteristically frisky moment, leered beside her as they stood in a drizzle pinching the
spent flowers from Mrs. Lemann’s prize pink azaleas. He said he heard that intercourse did the trick. He tried to tickle her.

  “Another male fantasy bites the dust,” she said.

  May 3. Nothing.

  Once, she was awakened in the night by a serpentine cramp that surfaced in her lower back, wrapped itself around her abdomen, then squeezed down her thighs. That was all.

  In the books they say that being late is cause for despair. Such a limp emotion never touched Mary Rose’s heart. Murderous, was more like it.

  Mary Rose had her usual prenatal appointment on Wednesday, May 6. So far she had gained a total of forty-six pounds. Her blood pressure was 143/86. Patricia was nine pounds, at least, and growing by a pound a week. Mary Rose’s belly was no longer balloonlike, but looked more like a piano covered by a blanket; the baby all knees, elbows, heels, and head.

  “Let’s get this show on the road,” said Dr. Vertamini finally, and scheduled Mary Rose for an induction.

  There were risks.

  Mary Rose was admitted into the hospital at 12:16 a.m., Thursday, May 14, an hour normally associated with red-eye flights to the other side of the country. The curiously late hour was not for Mary Rose’s benefit, a soon-to-be-laboring mother with a top-of-the-line health insurance policy for which she had paid astronomical premiums for many years, but for the benefit of the insurance company. Of course. The hospital charged by the day, as do all American hospitals. Woe to the woman in active labor who asks to be admitted at 11:30 p.m. She will just have to keep her knees together until 12:01.

  But Mary Rose was not in active labor when she was admitted at 12:16 a.m. She was grumpy and restless. It was a cool and misty night, raining in fits and starts.