by Karen Karbo
“Look, Brooke! It’s the thing! It’s the thing!”
No one knew what she was talking about. I did. The appearance of the warmer meant Patricia was about to be born.
“C’mon, Mary Rose,” said Dr. Vertamini, “only you can do this. You’re almost there.”
Dr. Vertamini was quick and businesslike. I heard the snip-snip of scissors, heralding an episiotomy, the clip at the top of the perineum that enlarges the vaginal opening just before birth. Then, suddenly, rising up from between Mary Rose’s knees, glistening and black-haired, bellowing, one charcoal-gray eye open and squinting up irritably at Mary Rose, there she was.
Patricia Crowder was not what anyone expected. Dr. Vertamini cut the umbilical cord, shiny white and threaded with veins, strong enough to tow a boat, and laid her on Mary Rose’s stomach.
There is a type of expensive butter toffee made exclusively in England. It’s a rich, milky brown. This was the color of Patricia’s skin.
I stared. I knew. There was no Baron in her anywhere.
Mary Rose seemed not at all surprised. She was trembling. She stroked Patricia’s slippery brown legs with her fingers.
“Oh, Mary Rose, look how perfect she is. Her hands are just like yours, look.”
No one can resist a miracle.
I was glad Audra was alone in the waiting room. She sat huddled on the edge of her chair, arms folded, legs crossed, watching a Western on TV. She had one of her rich-lady cardigans draped over her shoulders. She stood up when I came in.
I said, “Everything is fine. Fine. Nine-point-seventy-five pounds, twenty-one and a half inches long.”
“Who does she look like?”
“Well,” I said. “That’s a tough one.”
“Like a little old man, right? Like Otto Preminger?”
“No, no. I would say … Well, Audra, I’m just going to say it. I don’t think … no … it’s not I don’t think. I know. I know for sure. Ward doesn’t seem to be the father.”
“What do you mean? How can you tell?”
“She’ll be in the nursery soon. See for yourself.”
Audra left the waiting room, her cardigan in a heap, her purse open on a chair.
In the nursery, one nurse fastened an ID bracelet around Patricia’s wrist, while another prepared to put in eye drops. Audra stared, her trembling hand held over her mouth. “She’s going to be a stupendous beauty. Betty, the labor nurse, already called it. She’s been birthing babies for twenty-seven years.”
“She’s … black,” said Audra. “Or, wait, we call them something else these days.”
“Well, brown. Technically.”
Patricia, of course, was the daughter of Derik Crawshaw. “She’s as lovely as a newborn can be, isn’t she?” Audra chuckled. She laughed and slapped her thighs. The tears ran down her face.
Stella, I can assure you, is the daughter of Lyle. Just look at her skinny toes.
13.
THAT NIGHT WHEN I LEFT THE HOSPITAL IT WAS DRIZZLING. Who knew how late it was. During daylight saving time, four o’clock and nine o’clock looked the same; the sky a never-changing hue of bunny-rabbit gray. The rhododendrons were all in bloom, hot pinks and purples, as garish as an aunt too old to wear such loud lipstick.
I thought of Mary Rose alone in her hospital room, the nurse bringing Patricia in to her every few hours. Patricia in her pink waffle-weave baby blanket, her tiny pink hat, toffee-colored hair and skin. I wondered if Mary Rose was hungry, ringing that damn button for a nurse to come with something, some saltines, some juice. It’s called labor for a reason, but for some reason they always fail to feed you. No bricklayer would ever be accorded such disrespect. Lyle brought me a Big Mac and a vanilla milkshake. Will Mary Rose call Derik? Will he bring her a milkshake? Or no, Derik would be in Utah with the rest of the Blazers. Derik, the father. Impossible to believe.
I could not go home. I could not talk to the back of Lyle’s head about this, not just yet. I decided to stop at Donleavy’s to pick up some things. Stella’s new favorite foods were yams and strawberries. I could get some of those. I could get non-fat milk, and Cocoa Krispies for Lyle.
Donleavy’s has the small, narrow shopping carts of yore, not the wide-bodied models proffered by supermarkets, where a pair of second-graders can sit in the basket quite comfortably, with room to spare for groceries. I went up and down the aisles, feeling like I was playing grocery store, shopping for plastic fruit, clot-red apples, and curvaceous bananas that looked related to the boomerang.
How long had Mary Rose known? She must have known, must have lain awake at night, must have speculated. Then again, in a lot of ways Mary Rose was like a very young girl, or a woman nearing menopause; the fact of pregnancy didn’t seem to have much to do with her. She probably put it in the same category as taking a cruise, or hosting a foreign-exchange student. She never dated, and probably presumed love, like purchasing a winning raffle ticket, would happen to someone else. (Love, that is lust, that is the result of lust, which was Patricia.) She probably didn’t even keep track of her period. She probably thought, if she thought about it at all, that it was once with Derik, and dozens of times with Ward, so what were the odds?
I felt partially responsible. After telling Lightning Rod McGrew that I had just had a baby, that sitting down was a dicey proposition, much less what he was suggesting, I was too humiliated to go straight back into the bar. I went outside and walked around. Remember, this was the first time I had been out of the house since Stella was born. The world was new. I wandered into a popular boutique that sold adorable merchandise no one needs—ceramic salt and pepper shakers, light-switch plates shellacked with tiny pictures of cowboys and silver stars, candlestick holders, curious implements of massage that looked like three-dimensional renderings of things found in deep space—and spent a good hour happily trying on earrings. When I returned to the hotel bar, Mary Rose and Derik were gone. I assumed they’d gone to hear some jazz, like we’d discussed. Later, when I asked her where they’d disappeared to, she’d said they’d gotten something to eat.
Which was probably also true.
Mary Rose probably never suspected, until, of course, she was given a new due date; then she must have known. Which accounted for her benevolent attitude toward Ward while she was in labor: You want custody of this baby? Good luck.
I stopped, there in Donleavy’s, inspecting a particularly arthritic-looking yam, realizing how much I loved this kind of thing in a story. The twist that causes you to have to go back and rethink everything that’s come before. I loved it like a keepsake, like an ordinary ring worn by someone beloved who’d died. Or like a Christmas carol, not one of the overplayed ones. On the heels of this I felt homesick, not for Stella, like I usually did, but a wallop of longing for the inane business of getting a movie together. I’d forgotten about movies, how much I’d once loved them.
On the heels of this was the realization that I hadn’t thought about Stella in at least a half an hour. I was here having my life, musing about Mary Rose and the size of the modern-day shopping cart, and Stella was home with Lyle, probably playing with her stacking blocks. She was having her life, which was a life apart from me. The idea was devastating. What did this remind me of? It was like getting over losing someone; you missed them every day—every minute as long as an hour—then a day dawned where you only missed them for twenty-three hours and fifty-two minutes, and you realized you were moving on.
This was Stella growing up. First she was a neonate, then she was an infant, now she was a toddler. In a week she would have her first birthday. She was already weaned. Unlike many children who will nurse until it’s time to run off to take the SAT, once Stella found solid food she never looked back. This was me getting over the birth of her. This was how it happened. It explained women like Audra, who’d had three sons and could still become obsessed with subtropical gardens and someone else’s pregnancy, and now, women like me. You loved your children forever, but you got over the wonder, the marvel,
of having had them. Nature only allows you to stagger around lovestruck for so long, your heart so enlarged with love it’s on the verge of being a medical condition.
THE NEXT MORNING, when I went to the hospital to pick up Mary Rose, she was sitting on the edge of the high hospital bed in her Jolly Green Giant leggings and XXL black T-shirt, dropping all the tiny and mostly useless samples of soy formula and Pedialyte, something invented to regulate infant electrolytes—whatever those are—doled out by the hospital into a plastic bag.
Patricia was apparently already famous. I was surprised. I heard the nurses talking about her as I passed their station on the way to Mary Rose’s room. Word had gotten around that her father was the Comet. As a result, Patricia—suddenly everyone was admiring her long limbs, her big feet and hands—got an extra dose of rocking and cuddling in the nursery. The nurses, all Blazer fans, peered into Patricia’s unfocused charcoal-gray eyes to see if the spark of victory glistened there.
Mary Rose wasn’t quite sure how they found out.
“I was grilling some nurse about diapering—why does it take the tenacity of a war correspondent to get them to tell you about basic infant care? They should know new moms have spent the last nine months worrying about labor and have no clue about burping. I mean, I’m leaving the building with another human being in a matter of hours, and you think they’d be interested in my knowing a few basic facts. What was I saying? Oh, and these came. I think the nurse who brought them in had already peeked at the card.” Mary Rose nodded toward the window ledge, at a crystal vase of pink tulips nodding on long, pale green stems. “From Derik.”
“Wow, those are really beautiful.” They were elegant, sent straight from some upscale nursery. Some thought—not to mention cash—had gone into their purchase. I’m ashamed to say it, but at that moment it struck me: The father of Mary Rose’s baby was a millionaire. I was itching to ask what the card had said. “How’d he know?”
Mary Rose gave me a look. “The miracle of the telephone.”
“Mary Rose, I’ve got to ask …”
“No, I thought it was Ward all along. When I found out I was due so much earlier, I put two and two together. I can count. I’m not that much of an idiot.” She rolled her eyes but smiled. Those polished bathroom-tile teeth of hers. “I guess whoever is up there in charge of getting souls into bodies will use whatever means available, huh?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She tipped onto her feet, wincing, then fed her feet into her clogs. “To be honest? I thought you might be tempted to run and tell Audra. You know, one thing no one prepared me for is standing up. I assumed that sitting down wouldn’t feel so hot, but standing up is worse.”
“I never would have said a word,” I said. I was probably lying.
“Yes, you would have. You would have told Lyle, at least.”
“Yeah, and Lyle would have told all the other elves.”
At that moment a nurse came in brandishing a clipboard. There was paperwork. I put the plastic bag of samples into Mary Rose’s tote. Another nurse brought in Patricia, who was still asleep, and dropped her into Mary Rose’s arms. A peppy volunteer, who looked like the kind of woman who never turned down the chance to be in a talent show, appeared at the door with a wheelchair; the only real help a new mother gets from the hospital is a lift to the front door.
Stella and I moved in with Mary Rose. Mary Rose didn’t know it, of course, and neither did Lyle. I didn’t even know it. At first, Stella and I were just going to stay overnight, but once installed, there seemed no reason to leave. It was much nicer than living at my own house. I slept on the nubby brown fold-out sofa and Stella slept next to me in her Portacrib. Patricia slept in a white wicker bassinet next to Mary Rose’s bed in the next room. During the day we napped, read, cooked, played with Stella, took the girls out for a walk. Patricia slept a lot, as do all newborns, making motherhood, which is reputed to be so hard, seem astonishingly easy. Piece of cake. It is the last time it is a piece of cake. It is the bachelor party of parenting, that first week. When Patricia was awake we undressed her, inspected her folds, her toenails, the way her hips sat in their sockets, as if she was something ordered from a catalog, an expensive, fragile item that we’d only glimpsed in a picture and now needed to examine thoroughly. Then we had to each have a whiff of her neck.
Mary Rose was a much better roommate than Lyle. The only attention she paid her computer was to check her e-mail twice a day. She cleaned out the tub after she used it. We were the new family model. Two mothers and two babies. Or maybe we were the ancient family model. I’m reminded of all those countries, whose names I don’t know, but I’m sure they’re out there, where the women and the children live together, and the men show up once in a while for their conjugal visits. Men are always whining about being roped into commitments they don’t want to make. This could be a happy alternative.
“But in those countries,” said Mary Rose, walking Patricia back and forth across the living room, which was about five giant steps, “isn’t the husband always the same guy?”
“Maybe what I’m talking about is more like a sorority.”
We ate Ben & Jerry’s at night—we each had our own private pint—and watched basketball, our daughters cuddled in our laps. Stella gave no signs of walking yet, which put her behind the developmental curve. Her pediatrician said it was because she began talking early, and rather than walk to get something for herself, she would rather sit and issue orders. “Like mother, like daughter,” Lyle had remarked. This was the kind of thing I didn’t have to put up with at Mary Rose’s. That, and Mary Rose managed to be able to put a dirty glass in the dishwasher without having to be asked.
Because it was the play-offs, there was never a night without basketball on TV. The Blazers had advanced to the Conference Finals, against the Utah Jazz. We hooted like idiots when the camera lingered on Derik sitting on the bench, elbows on his knees, white towel slung around his handsome celebrity neck. Patricia, there’s Daddy! With no men around, we wore rag socks under our bathrobes. We clapped with our feet. Stella yowled with delight, then forgot why she was yowling, which she sometimes did, and started to cry.
Once, while Derik was on the line for a free throw, the TV announcer called him “a fine young player who just became a father.” Mary Rose’s hand flew to her mouth. It was as if she had a crush on him, and now the whole school knew! I realized I had to revise my whole thinking about having children. Maybe getting pregnant is a good project for a young couple after all. Mary Rose and Derik weren’t dating, but who knew? Maybe becoming parents together was the equivalent of enduring law school or the Peace Corps, or something. Calamity brings people together, after all, and what provided a greater sense of on-going calamity than raising a child?
A week after Mary Rose came home from the hospital there was a crisis, the likes of which only a woman who has given birth can appreciate. It’s the true unspoken challenge of childbirth. Labor and delivery have nothing on this, and yet, it remains cloaked in secrecy. There are no coaches for this. No one has seen fit to market a soothing tape of Amazonian waterfalls and humpback whale song to ease the way. How can I put this? There are no genteel ways. There are coarse ways and there are awkward ways. Mary Rose had not gone to the bathroom since Patricia was born. She had peed, but not the other. It was time for the other. Just when everything was beginning to heal up, tighten up, return to its rightful size and place.
Mary Rose was in the bathroom, bleating. I had just made us some marshmallow Rice Krispie squares. Stella was in the middle of the kitchen floor, playing with the vegetable steamer. I heard Mary Rose crying and knew what was going on. Ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch. When men talk about how passing a kidney stone must be like giving birth, they’ve got it wrong; passing a kidney stone is more like this.
The phone rang, and since I lived there, or felt like I did, I answered.
“Mary Rose?” It was Ward. Ward! Is it possible that after all this I’d sort of
forgotten about Ward? After Patricia was born, he’d dropped out of sight. I had expected a scene, thought that once he got a look at the baby who was not his daughter, he would have stormed into Mary Rose’s room, demanded to know the meaning of this. That seemed like Baron-ish behavior to me: Life doesn’t go according to plan, and so an explanation is required. Someone must be held accountable for such disappointment. Instead, Ward did nothing. Folded up his tent, Bedouin-like, and disappeared into the desert of making a commercial about a new candy that turns the inside of your mouth green. Now he wanted to come over.
“I have some things for the baby. Things I bought. Before.”
I padded to the bathroom. It was two o’clock and I was still in my bathrobe. I had put a special intensive conditioner in my hair, then forgotten to take it out. On the other side of the bathroom door there were the same sorts of sounds you might hear in a movie about demonic possession. Poor Mary Rose! I clenched my teeth, abs, bowels, asshole, and everything else clenchable, in solidarity. “Who is it?” she moaned.
“Uh, Ward. Ward wants to come over.” Into the receiver I said, “I don’t think it’s such a good time.”
“No,” said Mary Rose, “it’s fine. Tell him it’s fine.”
“Are you sure?” I said through the door.
“God damned! God damned!” she screamed. I have been through this myself. All mothers have. In fact, it is this very thing, and not the specter of going through labor again, that has limited family size. Labor you may forget; this you never forget.
“It’ll only be for a few minutes,” said Ward. “Just to drop off a few things.” He sounded piteous. I remembered the day he played with Stella at Starbucks, and all those push-ups he said he did in preparation for the Perry Neal massage. From the bedroom I heard Patricia meowing, awake and needing to be fed. From the living room floor, where Stella was surrounded by books, I heard her say, “Stellamammobook.” She wanted me to read to her.