Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me

by Karen Karbo

  I pulled on Lyle’s sleeve. “Look, over there, who’s that?”

  Lyle was always quick; he was almost as good as a woman that way. He knew what I meant, knew I didn’t mean look there’s Audra. “Oh, jeez,” he said, “it’s Dicky Baron.” For that was exactly who Arne looked like.

  I walked Stella over to where Audra and Arne stood at the back of the crowd. She walked holding on to my fingers; I knew she was able to go it alone, but couldn’t bear to let that happen just yet.

  “Well, aren’t you a magnificent little thing,” said Audra, extricating herself from Arne. He turned to a couple on the other side of them. The conversation appeared to be about bullfights. Of course Audra didn’t see me yet. She was admiring Stella’s blue-flowered sundress. No one ever sees the mother of a beautiful child.

  “Hi, Audra,” I said.

  She looked not at all surprised to see me. “I told you this was a fantastic place, didn’t I?” We made the obligatory reference to the rain back home.

  “How’s Dicky?” I finally asked. I had to know. After Dicky had been released from the hospital last June, he’d moved back home, presumably to be taken care of by Audra.

  For a time, he’d entertained a few TV movie offers, much to Audra’s displeasure. Eventually, though, TV passed. The injury he sustained from the gunshot wound wasn’t great enough to warrant any real interest. Which doesn’t mean it wasn’t great enough to cause him real suffering.

  He was tried and convicted of attempted kidnapping. But since the jails of our city are horrendously overcrowded and Patricia sustained not a scratch, Dicky was given no jail time, and eighteen months probation. Judge Gardstein, who regularly golfed with and often beat Big Hank, claimed it was enough that he was going to spend the rest of his life paying for his “judgment error” as a semi-invalid.

  “Dicky is fine,” said Audra. “In that Dicky could ever be fine. He sees a lot of doctors these days. They think now that the bullet may cause problems. They’re saying it’s not as firmly lodged as they thought. Someday it may just decide to pick up and enter his circulatory or lymphatic system. Of course, they can’t remove it, either.”

  “But he’ll be all right? Besides the never-knowing aspect of it?” I didn’t really care if he was going to be all right or not, but Audra was his mother.

  “It’s the story of my life. You’ll think I’m superficial—you probably do anyway—but I keep thinking, this is the same problem we have with the house. The keys on the piano are going, but we can’t replace them with ivory because, well, you know the story with ivory. And if we switch to plastic we ruin, in Big Hank’s words, “the integrity of the instrument.” So, we just sit there, waiting for everything to collapse around our ears.” She sighed. “I got a letter from Mary Rose awhile back.”

  “She told me she was going to write.”

  “Telling me she wasn’t sorry for what she’d done. At first I thought it was sort of, I don’t know, pitiless. She wondered if I understood she had no choice. Patricia was her child. But, you know, Dicky is my child. Even now. She did apologize for calling me an interfering you-know-what. She wrote it on Mowers and Rakers letterhead, the ninny. It should have come on some nice creamy bond.”

  “That’s generous of you, Audra. After all that’s happened.”

  “Well. You’ll see. Stella’s still a tiny thing. It’s different when they’re all grown up and start ruining their own lives. You’re heart-broken, don’t get me wrong, but helpless. Heartbroken and helpless as the day they’re born.” She sighed, dabbed at her eyes.

  We made some talk about getting together once we got home, but we haven’t so far. Audra said something funny as Lyle, Stella, and I headed back to the hotel, Stella, now asleep and snoring on Lyle’s shoulder. “Call me if you’re ever in the motherhood.”

  Sometimes when I find myself driving up the narrow, shady streets of the West Hills, I see the Mowers and Rakers truck parked in front of someone’s house, and there is Mary Rose, Patricia a papoose upon her back, standing on a ladder wielding her pruners, or loping across a lawn with a bucket of compost, on her way to some far-flung vegetable garden. She has the energy of ten men, and always had. It helps, of course, that Patricia began sleeping through the night at five weeks.

  Ours is the friendship of young mothers, which resembles the rhythm of a fire fighter on the job: weeks go by and we don’t talk, then, suddenly, a flurry of mad phone calling when one of us finds we have a few hours free. We still have our basketball dates, but not as often. We also have the knowledge that if the other one doesn’t phone right back, or has to cancel a coffee date once too often, that it’s not personal, simply motherhood. We also have e-mail.

  Mrs. Marsh rehired Mary Rose, as has Mrs. Ostly, and almost all the other West Hills neighbors of the Barons who’d let her go when they imagined she was too pregnant and too unmarried to be their gardener. Having the mother of a professional basketball player’s child working zoo doo into their perennial beds carried with it a certain cachet. They also enjoyed being viewed as open-minded and nondiscriminatory by employing the single mother of a mixed-raced baby born out of wedlock.

  Derik sees Patricia on the weekends when he’s in town, just as if he’s a normal noncustodial dad. Sometimes he accompanies Mary Rose on her rounds. He stands on some lawn, gently drapes the dozing Patricia over his long forearm, rocks her and rubs her back while patiently answering questions posed by this Lady of the House, or that Captain of Finance and Industry, lured from their homes to ask what it was really like playing with Ajax Green.

  Last month his contract was renewed for some obscene amount. He’ll start next season. I think he just turned twenty-six. Sports Illustrated had a brief article on up-and-comers and named Derik as someone who was maturing nicely, “quite possibly because of the birth of his first child.” So cozy and misleading, isn’t it? A harmless little remark like that in a magazine. It makes all the harmless little remarks in all magazines seem suspect, doesn’t it?

  Since Patricia and Stella’s birthdays are only two weeks apart, Mary Rose and I held a joint birthday party in our backyard. We invited a few children from the Indoor Play Gym, the Assistant D.A. down the block and her son, who was now almost three, the cellist Mary Rose had met in prenatal water aerobics. She’d had a daughter, too. Miraculously, the sun shone, the lilacs were in bloom, and none of the children were contagious for strep throat, which was going around.

  I also bought them a thirty-seven-dollar chocolate cake. Stella ate the purple flowers from around the edge one by one—she’s as meticulous as her father—then suffered a terrific case of diaper rash the next day. We got some nice pictures, however. Of the birthday, not the diaper rash.

  While Mary Rose and I were in the kitchen making fresh coffee for the moms and filling bottles with juice for the babies, she confessed that she’d started seeing Rex. Remember Blushing Rex, anesthesiologist? He turned out to be an outdoorsman, also newly divorced.

  “Mary Rose, Mary Rose. That is fantastic. Divorced guys are great because they’ve experienced the miracle of cause and effect.”

  She raised an eyebrow, said nothing.

  I told Mary Rose it would be good for Patricia to have as many adult males in her life as possible. I said it takes at least four adults to raise one baby, and wouldn’t I know?

  Mary Rose said there was Derik.

  I said, no, really in her life: refusing to change her diaper, holding her only when she’s happy. Remembering how much I championed poor Ward, Mary Rose didn’t think much of my ideas.

  Anyway, I believe a girl should have a father so, if nothing else, she can see what men are like, up close. I told Mary Rose that Patricia would come to idolize Derik because he was never around. Mary Rose shrugged her wide shoulders and lit a cigarette, blew the smoke out of the side of her mouth.

  “And what about you, what’s new with you?” She narrowed her brown eyes, looked at me very closely. “I think you’re pregnant. I’m a mother. I can tell th
ese things.”

  Acknowledgments

  FOR REASONS THAT ESCAPE ME, THE FIRST EDITION OF this novel lacked acknowledgements. It’s possible that since both my editor and I were living at the bottom of the rabbit hole that is new motherhood it may have slipped our minds. Now the sweet babe who inspired this story is all grown up and out of the house, and I have plenty of time to thank people properly.

  To Karen Rinaldi, then editorial director at Bloomsbury USA, who took a chance on me the first time around: I’m forever grateful for your humor, support, friendship, and general badassery.

  To Rhonda Hughes, publisher of Hawthorne Books, who finds my work timeless enough to invest in a second time around: thank you for your devotion, passion, cocktails, and bacon, lettuce, and avocado sandwiches at the pub.

  To Adam McIsaac, designer extraordinaire, who gave this book the cover it deserved (that arched eyebrow says it all): I’m in awe of your wit and taste. And also to Scott Parker, possibly the world’s most exacting copyeditor: thanks for taking the time to make sure everything was perfect.

  To Fiona Baker, my dear girl, it’s been my life’s joy and honor to be your mom.