Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me

by Karen Karbo

  “Sure,” I said. “We’re here. Come whenever.”

  At that instant, the bathroom door, momentarily stuck in its jamb, flew open, banging against the hallway wall. Mary Rose’s hands were still wet from the sink; she wiped them on the leg of her red sweatpants, tugged at her growing-out hair. “When is he coming? Did he say today?”

  “Sometime today.”

  “Derik’s coming today. I thought today was tomorrow already. He can’t come today. Where’s the phone?” Mary Rose tried to call Ward everywhere: home, office, pager, car, cell. “This is all I need,” she cried.

  “Look, think of it this way. Who’s Ward really? An old boyfriend. A friend, a well-wisher. And who’s Derik? Patricia’s dad, sure, but also really just a well-wisher. It’ll be like a little open house.” I was practicing this voice for when I would get to tell Stella that people are essentially good, and nothing bad will happen to you in life if you have positive thoughts.

  Naturally, they arrived within fifteen minutes of each other. It was that hermaphroditic time of day between six and seven, afternoon this time of year, but technically evening, when no one knew what to do with themselves. Too early for dinner, but too late to start thinking about anything beyond ordering out. We had just made some tapioca pudding. Stella had had a bath in the kitchen sink, which had steamed up the windows in the entire apartment, making the whole place smell like lavender.

  I heard the downstairs door open, and peeked out the window in the front door, down the stairs, to where Ward was hauling in a long box, one of those boxes about which is always said, “It’s not heavy, just awkward!” He couldn’t seem to get the box and his feet inside the entryway at the same time. I knew the box: It contained one of those wind-up swing things that swing so energetically you’re convinced your kid is going to be catapulted over the top, which will be her early training for roller coaster riding. He pushed the box up the stairs ahead of him. I opened the door, and Ward shoved it in, but the box was too long for the narrow hallway. It ran into the hall closet door, yet still hung out the front door. I was reminded of trying to force a queen-size box spring around corners.

  “Here, it’s for her,” said Ward. He smelled of the world, of rain, two-day-old cologne and cigar. He needed to shave. “I didn’t know what else to do with it.” He, and the box, took up the entire hallway. It was huge! Ward was huge! His leather jacket, huge! Outside, it was drizzling the usual existential drizzle. Ward stamped his big booted feet on the doormat. The windows rattled in their frames. The tapioca quavered in its bowl. We were all soft and small in here; we never got dressed, read paperback books, slept with stuffed animals, gossiped for hours without regard for topic sentences, drank cocoa in the middle of the day.

  Mary Rose pushed herself up from the sofa. Patricia was stowed in the crook of her arm, in a paper diaper and one of the tie-dyed T-shirts purchased for her by Audra, who, like Ward, in a spirit of either genuine largess or perverse upper-middle-class nose-thumbing—you broke our hearts, but we’re still classy—had also given Mary Rose the things she’d bought for Patricia. It is well known that white babies are as homely as baby birds, with their splotchy skin and broken blood vessels. Patricia, on the other hand, looked like she’d already spent a week on a Caribbean beach, her back and belly as smooth as the caramel wrapped around an apple.

  Ward looked, hands in his pockets.

  No one can resist a miracle.

  Patricia waved her arms at him, as if she were a panicked swimmer, something tiny babies do when they’re not wrapped snug in a blanket. They’re so used to being folded into a tight spot, that for a week or so after they’re born their arms misbehave, like curly hair springing free from a tight hat. “Do you think she recognizes my voice?” said Ward.

  I was moved by his display of vulnerability. I was moved by his bone headed narcissism and ignorance. Ward, I thought you’d done all that reading! She does not recognize your voice. You have to live with the gestating fetus for that. The truth is, you never read a word, did you? You surfed the Web one night when you were bored. But what business is it of mine? I smiled. He was making an effort, after all.

  “I’m sure she does,” said Mary Rose. Mary Rose the Practical, Mary Rose the Levelheaded, was also Mary Rose the Kind.

  Then, a knock at the door. A shave-and-a-hair-cut-five-cents! knock. Dut-dut-dut-dut-dut, dut-dut! We hadn’t heard anyone clopping up the stairs. Whoever was knocking had also tiptoed. I opened it, since I lived there.

  Derik “The Comet” was taller than I remembered. Taller, with a bigger Adam’s apple, bigger wrists, bigger big shoes. He said, “Hey, how you doin’.” Then smiled.

  “Derik, come in,” said Mary Rose.

  He squeezed in beside Ward and the box with the swingy thing. I don’t think he stooped, but I seem to remember him like a nine-foot Christmas tree in an eight-foot room. In the ten months since I’d last seen him in person, he’d filled out in the chest, bought a reasonable gold watch, took one of those classes that they send professional athletes to, classes that teach you how to deal graciously with people who can’t help but act demented in your presence. He nodded his head at me, at Ward, then looked at Mary Rose.

  Without a word, she stepped forward, placed Patricia in his arms. He looked down, puckered his lips just a little.

  Ward, who looked like a foundling next to Derik, cleared his throat, then cleared it again. “She’s going to be a knock-out.”

  “She is pretty fine.” Derik looked at Mary Rose. “Good job, Mary Rose.”

  I was expecting Mary Rose to do her hair-tucking thing, to look grateful. Instead, she walked right up to where he rocked their baby, cupped the back of her sweet head with her hand.

  Derik turned to Ward and stuck out his hand. The hand that was responsible for landing the Blazers in the finals, against the mighty Chicago Bulls! I worried that I might be panting. “Derik Crawshaw,” he said. Duh! Is this what they taught you in celebrity school?

  “Ward Baron,” said Ward.

  “He’s my cousin,” I said, in an attempt to head off any conversational weirdness at the pass.

  “Actually, the guy I used to date,” said Mary Rose. Oh, I knew this impulse. Now that she was a mother, she wanted her life to be free of duplicity, subterfuge, complications inspired by cowardice. A noble impulse that always vanishes when faced with the specter of Santa Claus.

  “Just friends, now, though,” said Ward. “I hope.”

  Derik lifted up Patricia closer to his face, which hovered near the ceiling. Do babies get vertigo? “Where are the diapers? I think we have ourselves a situation.”

  Mary Rose lunged toward the diaper bag leaning against the other side of the coffee table, and I lunged toward the bedroom, where I knew there were diapers stacked beneath the changing table. We clunked heads, the Two Stooges. We tripped over stuffed animals, over the Portacrib shoved over in the corner. What was he suggesting? Was he suggesting what we thought he was suggesting? Was the Comet, the best sixth man the Blazers had had in a decade, with his 46 percent field goal average and record as the third best rebounder off the bench in the league, going to change a diaper? TV news, where were you?

  “I got three little bros I practically raised. I am the diaper changing king. I can do it left-handed in the dark. I can do two at once.” Mary Rose escorted him to the changing table.

  I realized we could never have our men visit us here for conjugal visits. This was a womb, a nest, a pouch. It wasn’t fit for any kind of entertaining, and finally, the reason we want to get out and be with our men is that we want to be entertained, and they are so entertaining. What I’m saying is, I had a sudden, overwhelming urge to debrief with Lyle.

  I went and found the phone, which one of us had left under an oven mitt in the kitchen. I called home and left a message that Stella and I were coming home, and that we wanted to be taken out for dinner. Preferably that Tex-Mex place. When I came back in the living room, Ward was holding Stella. She fingered the zipper
s on his jacket, then put her finger on his lips. “Duggie doo doo!” she said, and hit her own forehead with the palm of her hand.

  “I love a woman who laughs at her own jokes,” said Ward.

  Then something bizarre happened. Ward passed Stella back to me, cleared his throat, checked his watch. He really had to be going. There was an edit session, an appointment with the car guy to get his plugs readjusted.

  Tell Mary Rose and, uh, tell them I’ll catch up with them another time.”

  “It was nice of you to bring this by.”

  “What the hell, huh?”

  He opened the door, and there, standing on the top step, not four inches from the door, stood Dicky, eavesdropping.

  14.

  WE ALL KNEW DICKY WAS ODD, BUT NO ONE THOUGHT he was dangerous. This sentiment gets my vote for Top Cliché of the Modern World, what everyone always says when something like this happens. It’s because no one can bear knowing that someone is dangerous, but there’s nothing to be done about it. Life is simply dangerous, and there’s no one you can call and report it to.

  The half-dozen times in my life I’ve been the recipient of a middle-of-the-night phone call, it has always been a breather, or a brat asking if my refrigerator was running (go catch it!). Now, however, there is too much television news. Also, I’m a mother. So even though I’ve never answered to anyone but the brat, I always expect The Worst, even though Stella sleeps in the next room, not seven steps away from me, our tiny house double-key dead-bolted and patrolled by the geriatric Itchy Sister, who spends her nights pacing, when she’s not scratching and biting her butt.

  When the phone rang at 3:37 a.m.—what did we do before the digital clock?—I grabbed it on the first ring, afraid it would wake up Stella, who had slept through the night for nine nights running, a record. It was about three weeks after Patricia was born.

  The voice on the other end was soft, flattened by shock. Mary Rose. “Oh God, is it Patricia?”

  “Who is it?” Lyle muttered, curling into my back.

  “I’m okay. I’m at the hospital,” she said. “They want somebody to drive us home.”

  “What’s going on? What’s happening? Did she stop breathing?”

  “Oh, God, no, nothing as horrible as that. It’s Dicky. He tried to take Patricia.”

  “I’m coming right now.”

  The odd thing about Lyle is that despite his fastidiousness, he does like a good emergency. It is the drama, of course. It was the drama of our speedy courtship and frantic lovemaking in hotel beds previously slept in by the top players of the NBA that led to the altar and, eventually, to Stella. This may be what accounts for his dedication to Realm of the Elf, where every day he gets a chance to chop up an ogre, and, on a good day, avoid bleeding to death.

  When I told him what happened, and that I needed to go to the hospital, he bounded from bed, pulled on a pair of hiking shorts, threw on the kitchen lights and started making coffee. He reassured Itchy Sister, blinking nervously from the depths of her plaid dog bed. He said he would watch Stella as long as I needed and wait by the phone in case there was anything he could do. If need be, he would call in sick to work. (Like many people, for Lyle this was not an unpleasant prospect. Having a chance to miss a day or two of a job you despise for a genuine calamity makes the calamity itself feel like a holiday.)

  “Don’t forget your jacket. Think you should grab one for Mary Rose? And some change for the pay phone.”

  The hospital closest to the triplex was affiliated with the Episcopal Church, and was thus in every way like a five-star hotel. It sprawled over several blocks, connected by a sky bridge of smoky glass.

  When I arrived Mary Rose was in the waiting area, flipping uncomprehendingly through the recent issue of Travel & Leisure. A movie played on the big-screen TV. Patricia slept beside her in her car seat, making little sucking noises.

  Mary Rose was wearing her red sweatpants, a T-shirt advertising an apple-tasting festival at a local nursery, and a pair of old, laceless pink high-tops. Her right hand was wrapped in gauze, which made it difficult for her to sign her release forms. A police officer, a black woman with long red nails, a daisy painted on the end of each one, and a waist so tiny her holster wrapped around her almost twice, said they would be in touch.

  I brought the car around and asked about the hand.

  “Powder burn.” She waved it off. “Patricia almost slept through the entire thing, thank God.” Even under the best of circumstances I look at her and think, “Mary Rose, you have created a hostage to fortune. Shame on you.” Her eyes leaked tears.

  Mary Rose is a terrible reporter. It’s one of the things I admire most about her; she somehow escaped the feminine need to explain, expound, tease out, overanalyze. I am an archivist, a collector of data. I feel guilty if someone asks the time and I don’t have it.

  As I understand it, what happened was this: Mary Rose had gone out to the grocery store at around 10:30 for some diapers. It was the usual new-mother thing; she had gone to the store earlier in the day for the express purpose of getting diapers, then had forgotten to buy them. She put the only one she had left on Patricia at about 8:30, and knew it wouldn’t last until morning. She bundled Patricia up, put her in her car seat, put the car seat in the car, drove to the store. There was no more popping out to the store for her. She was exhausted.

  Driving home, Patricia fell asleep. When Mary Rose got in the apartment, she thought, “Patricia will be up in a few hours anyway, I’ll just wait until she wakes up,” then kicked off her shoes and fell on her bed.

  Minutes later (it turned out to be a little over an hour), she woke up. She thought she’d heard Patricia stirring, but Patricia was still asleep, her little body bent over forward in the seat, folded over like a sleeve. Mary Rose worried she couldn’t breathe in this position, propped her back up, and went to the bathroom. She was still struggling on that front. She sat on the plastic blow-up doughnut they gave her at the hospital, and read an article in a horticulture magazine on the return of the pansy. Mary Rose was intrigued; she was unaware the pansy had gone anywhere.

  She didn’t know how long she was in there. She came out, walked through the living room, where the lights were off. The only light on in the apartment was the one on her bedside table, and she saw through the doorway that Patricia and her car seat were not where she’d left them, and as she ran to the bedroom, she passed someone there in the dark, in the hallway by the front door. It was Dicky, standing in the dark, one hand on the doorknob, the other gripping the handle of Patricia’s car seat. What was this? This was not right. Was this some arrangement she had made but forgotten about? Had she asked him to baby-sit at midnight, then lost track of the time? It couldn’t be what it looked like, Dicky Baron walking out the door in the middle of the night with her baby.

  “Mary Rose!” He practically shouted. She’d obviously surprised him. “I was going to leave a note. Actually, I was going to call. Calling was a better plan. I’m taking this baby to my brother. You broke my brother’s heart. He wants this baby more than you do, so I’m taking her. To my brother.” Later, Mary Rose would tell the investigating officer that it sounded as if he was delivering a speech.

  Mary Rose the Levelheaded, Mary Rose the Practical. Mary Rose had, as you know, prepared herself to spend her life alone. Tacked to the back of her orange-crate nightstand was a hammock that looked not unlike Stella’s waterproof nylon bath toy bag attached by suction cups to the wall over our tub. In the hammock was the .25 ACP, the type of small-caliber automatic about which gun lovers say, “It’s the perfect weapon if you don’t want to hurt anyone.” It had been given to Mary Rose by her father, the best he could do after her mother died, to help prepare her for life.

  But now Mary Rose was the mother, something Dicky hadn’t counted on. To Dicky, mothers were forgetful, fat, and milky. They were that, but they were also something else. Dicky was surprised Mary Rose had said nothing. That’s the other thing mothers are: chatterboxes. They give
birth, then never shut up. But she had nothing to say to him. She took three longs steps into her room, reached behind her nightstand, and pulled out the gun. She pointed it at his nose.

  “Put her down, Dicky.”

  “Whoa! Look, listen to me here. Listen to what I have to say before, before you go all postal on me. Just listen.”

  “Put her down or I will shoot you. I will kill you and I won’t care, and no one will blame me. Put her down now.” She didn’t think she would do it. Not really. Shooting the place up was something a guy would do. She thought the gun was sort of more of a bargaining chip than a weapon of destruction, a conversational gambit.

  “Jesus, Mary Rose. Relax a little here. Look, I’m going to level with you. All right? I need a break here. I need to get something going. Let me just take her downstairs for the night. You can call the cops now. Actually, count to ten, let me get downstairs first. They’ll swarm around for a day or two—”

  “Put her down—” said Mary Rose. What was with the outfit? It was the middle of June and Dicky was all bundled up. A black Blazers cap on backward, one of those billowy oiled dusters that looked as if they’d keep you dry in a typhoon, and a brand-new pair of L.L. Bean boots. Do you know those boots? With the rubber sole and leather upper? Mary Rose knew those boots. She had a pair. They were boots for slogging around the mud in the rain, when you expected to be outside for a while. If he was just taking Patricia downstairs, what was he doing in these clothes?

  “I know I just said a night, but really I’ll need two or three days. No one would buy it if it was just a night. Kidnapping a big basketball star’s baby. That’s what I’m going for. Do you see the appeal? He’s a millionaire, but nothing can replace his little girl. You’re one of those bossy women who waited too long to have kids, but now you’ve got her and you’re dying with love? Just think about what a positive statement this will make to the world. All about the power of love. It’ll be like that Mel Gibson movie, Ransom. In fact, here’s an idea, here’s something I’ll offer you—you can find her! How would that be? Then you’ll have a story, too. You’ll be a hero, too. I won’t hurt her, Mary Rose. In fact, just tell me what she eats, and I’ll make sure she gets some food.”