Accidentally on Purpose

by Mary F. Pols

  As for my father, he was in his eighties now, and thin as an old cat, but he still strode purposefully through the streets of our hometown, the way he had for the last five decades. He was as sharp as ever, which is partly why I wasn’t ready to share this news with him; he wasn’t likely to take it well.

  Instead I called my sister Alison, who lives just around the corner from my parents’ house. Eight years older than I am, she is the soul of efficiency and the ultimate dispenser of sound advice. She will not have to sleep on it or get back to you or check with someone else before she can answer. She does not mince words.

  “Wait,” she said. “Who have you slept with?”

  I told her about my evening at Finnegan’s Wake. She fell silent. I heard her microwave beeping. She was warming coffee. Clearly she needed caffeine to help her process.

  “I can’t say that I’m not happy for you on some level,” she said.

  I’d always had the sense that Alison disapproved of me. Our older siblings tended to regard both Benet and me as spoiled, the pets, the ones who got the benefit of my parents’ gradual mellowing. I’d tormented her as a child, listening in on her teenaged love affairs, poking around her bureau, teasing her about anything and everything. As we’d gotten older, she and I had grown closer, but I’d never been able to shake something my oldest sister Cynthia had once told me: “Alison thinks you’re flighty.”

  Nothing about Alison was flighty. The rest of the girls in the family had soft, rounded features and dark, messy hair, but she had my father’s strong nose and honey-colored hair, so straight and obedient you could swear you still saw the brush marks in it. Wouldn’t she think getting pregnant during a one-night stand was the ultimate demonstration of flightiness? So I probed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve wanted a baby for a while.”

  Well, this was true—but in a fairly quiet way, at least lately. After I turned thirty-five it had started to feel unseemly to talk about it. What if it never happened? In a few more years I’d become the sad woman who wanted something everyone knew she couldn’t have. My desires would no longer be appropriate, like a schoolgirl kilt on a gray-haired matron. I’d even tried to talk myself out of wanting kids, taking careful note of how much trouble my friends’ children were. “So-and-so’s kid punched a hole in the wall of their living room,” I’d report to another childless friend. “Nine years old. Can you imagine?”

  The fact that Alison was acknowledging my desire as something real and worthy suddenly made my predicament seem better. This was not a disaster the way it had been in 1985. This was something that made Alison happy for me. Moreover, Alison knew this territory. She’d split up with her husband so long ago that she’d practically raised their daughter, Katy, as a single mother. Katy was the oldest grandchild, in college now. She was my measuring stick. I had always kept track of my earlier, vanished opportunity for motherhood by counting back from however old Katy was. I could have had a child in college myself.

  MY MOTHER HAD GONE back to school when I was still a little girl, working her way through Bowdoin College—where my father taught philosophy—taking one or two classes at a time until she’d emerged triumphant, diploma in hand, at the age of fifty-seven. When I’d gone off to North Carolina to attend Duke in the fall of 1982, she’d gone to Austin, Texas, to get her graduate degree in art history. Completing her education was her goal, but if she’d done so early in life, I know she would have gone on to have her own career, probably as an academic.

  She had not been an active part of the feminist movement, but she was an admirer of the women who were, and she liked to remind me of my rights and of the opportunities available to me. She once sent me a postcard of a group of suffragettes being manhandled by the police. “I thought you’d appreciate these ladies,” she wrote on the back. Or on another: “Have you seen My Brilliant Career? You really must.” The messages she gave me, those that came from observing her life and those literally spelled out in letters and cards, weren’t strident, but they were forceful.

  My career choice, for example, could be traced directly to my mother. She never knew this, because by the time I made the change from being a news reporter to being a critic, her dementia was too advanced for it to register. But I felt the link. She had filled the house with the New Yorker for as long as I could remember, stacking up the old ones, wrapping twine around them, and pushing them under the crawl space below the entryway. She wrote notes to herself on the front in black ink, “V. good piece about Pentagon Papers,” “Funny Talk of Town, p 16,” just in case she might want to get back to them someday. As a nine-year-old, I wondered what she was talking about. The only things worthwhile in this magazine were the cartoons, the racing track column, and the movie reviews by some woman named Pauline Kael, who was funny and wrote in such a clear, direct way that most of the time I knew exactly what she meant, even though it would have been highly unusual for me to have seen anything she’d written about.

  Trips to the movie theater were few and far between but always in the company of my mother. “Revolting,” my father would say. “Sitting with strangers, watching nonsense while your feet soak in sticky soda spills.” Her tastes ran far more to Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore than to Jaws. Bowdoin had movie night on the campus every month or so, and she’d drag us along occasionally. Perhaps she took Benet and me to Laurence Olivier’s Richard III for purposes of edification, although it could have had something to do with her refusal to ever pay for a babysitter. We were convinced she was trying to bore us to death. But I was more than content watching movies with her at home, hearing her gentle laughter all the way through It Happened One Night or her admiring sighs as Fred spun Ginger across the dance floor. We watched On the Beach together, and I turned to her and said, “You look like Ava Gardner.” That made her smile.

  As she sowed the seeds that would someday become my profession, she also passed on the craving for family. Not marriage necessarily, although in my twenties, I often opened letters from her to find they included clippings of marriage announcements of anyone from my hometown she thought I was even vaguely acquainted with. The examples set by my siblings weren’t sterling: Out of six marriages, only two had lasted. Yet my mother instilled in me the desire to be part of a whole.

  Some members of big families want to escape their crowded, claustrophobic surroundings. If you wanted to be alone in our household, climbing an apple tree or hiding in the upstairs bathroom (the only room with a nonpickable lock) was your best bet. But I never had that desire. Joining this big family last, I already felt I’d missed out on a lot of history, and I didn’t want to miss any more. By the mid-1970s, when Benet and I were the only kids still left at home, I viewed Christmas attendance as a must for all my older siblings.

  “What about Ade?” I demanded of my mother as we were making up the beds together. “Why isn’t he coming home for Christmas?” Cynthia had come the day before and was probably now over in the reading room at the Bowdoin Library. Wib would be coming that night from Smith, unfortunately accompanied by her boyfriend, Sean, who had a most disturbing red beard. Alison lived a few blocks away. Benet was outside, drilling a hockey puck against the side of the barn, leaving black marks against the white shingles. My father would come home from his office soon and be annoyed about this, making Benet want to hit even more hockey pucks against the wall. Or against our unmovable father, who thought hockey was not nearly as nice a winter sport as squash.

  “Adrian is staying in Charlottesville,” my mother said, stuffing a pillow into a case. “He has to work.” She sighed. I could tell she was sad too. We’d been party-planning for weeks, shopping the sale racks at Jordan Marsh together, ironing napkins and tablecloths, and debating our menus. (Roast beef or turkey for Christmas dinner? How many pans of Yorkshire pudding would we need?)

  Adrian was so much older than I that I barely knew him, but I always wanted him there. I assumed he had to be lonely without us, because I imagined that I would
be desperately lonely if I were away. Also, he could be counted on to raise a family occasion to the highest level of insanity. He’d arrive in a cloud of bluster with some girlfriend in tow, either too young or too old, too loud or too quiet, and proceed to drive my father to fits.

  “So I’m in the middle of getting fellatio when this guy walks in,” he bellowed at one memorable holiday dinner. The legs on my father’s chair shrieked as he backed up from the table and stalked out of the room to go poke at the fire.

  “What’s fellatio?” I asked, looking around the table at my siblings, half of them aghast, half of them laughing. Even Benet seemed in on the joke. My mother sat at the head of the table, twirling her wineglass between her long fingers, shaking with laughter.

  “You don’t know what fellatio is, little girl?” Adrian said, bending toward me with an almost courtly gesture. “Well, let me tell you…”

  “Adrian,” my mother said. “Silenzio per favore.”

  I loved the sprawl of us, the noise of us, the way we filled a house. There was comfort in numbers, more of everything: more jokes, more drama, more presents under the Christmas tree, more people to play with, more siblings to give me quarters to be quiet during dinner. Whether by chance or circumstance, the books I read all seemed to be about big families. From the Pevensies of C. S. Lewis to the sailing Walker family of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series, I kept getting the message that large families were somehow magical. You needed four for true excitement, I’d tell myself, and here we were, with six.

  I certainly never thought I’d have six of my own. But I do remember thinking it would be nice to have three or four children. As soon as I could do simple math, I fixated on what life would be like in the year 2000, a date that hung in the future like a giant punctuation mark. I’d be thirty-six and, I believed, already a mother several times over. Given my mother’s fecundity, maybe later when I was the ripe old age of forty, I’d throw another one into the mix, just for fun.

  But here I was, ten months from being forty. A little more than eight months away from being a first-time parent. With a man I had spent less than twenty-four hours with, half of them sleeping.

  “I’VE GOT TO TELL MATT,” I said.

  It was late afternoon on the Day of the Magic Wand. I’d told both Alison and Benet. Even my boss knew. Katharine Hepburn had just died, and Karen, not just my editor but also a close friend, had called to tell me I had to come in to work, to write an appreciation. “I just can’t,” I had told her. “I just did an EPT and I’m pregnant. There is no way I can think about Katharine Hepburn right now.”

  Hugh, Liza’s estranged husband, had been informed. She’d called and asked him to come over and take care of the kids while we brainstormed our way through the drama. I’d been a bridesmaid at their wedding ten years ago, but I didn’t really know Hugh until he and Liza moved to San Francisco five years before. Liza had been itching to get out of Maine, and so he’d found a job as the chief financial officer for an old Bay Area company. Now he was definitely part of my West Coast family, and the fact that they were separated hadn’t changed that.

  Hugh shook his head at my situation.

  “How old is he? Twenty-nine?” he said. “He’s going to freak out. Wait for a few weeks, until you’re really sure what you’re going to do.”

  Hugh had a tendency to think the worst of other men.

  “Mary needs the information,” Liza said. “She’s got to know what he thinks.”

  “He’s going to think, I’m fucked,” Hugh said. “He’s going to think, Why the hell didn’t I use a condom? and How fast can I get out of town? How is that going to be helpful to her?”

  “That’s what you’d think,” Liza said. She tended to think the worst of Hugh. “Not all guys are like you.” She slid the cork out of a bottle of wine and poured herself a glass. “Thank God.”

  “Please,” I said. “No fighting. Not right now.”

  I couldn’t imagine waiting two long weeks to tell Matt. I’m an information gatherer by trade, and if he was going to tell me to get lost and never darken his door again, I needed to be able to start processing that information as soon as possible. He might get on a Greyhound and leave town. He didn’t have a job, after all. He had nothing tying him to the Bay Area beyond enjoying the place. But my gut told me that he wouldn’t leave town and that he wouldn’t tell me to beat it. He seemed too decent for that.

  Decency aside, however, there was no getting around how skimpy our relationship was. Make that our acquaintance. We’d spent exactly two nights together, a drunken one-night stand followed by a booty call, with a press screening of The Incredible Hulk in between, a night that had ended with him getting out of the car and bidding me good night with not so much as a handshake. I wasn’t sure Matt knew my last name (or cared to), and here I was, heading off to what would be our fourth meeting, to break the news that I was having his baby.

  Morally, I felt Matt had a right to know that I was carrying his child, despite any temptation to keep it to myself and ensure total control over the situation—meaning no interference, no scary custody claims down the road. But the even bigger moral issue was denying my child the right to know his or her father. I’d be making the assumption, based on a few fleeting encounters, that the child’s father wasn’t worthy of being a part of its life. Who was I to make that judgment? If Matt had been someone I’d slept with but hadn’t liked at all—and honestly, there were a couple like that in my past—I might have felt differently. But I doubt it. Already I had started thinking for two, and I felt my child deserved the chance to have a relationship with his or her father.

  “I think it’s better if she goes to him with a game plan,” Hugh said.

  “She can’t have a game plan without knowing what he’s going to say,” Liza said.

  “Her game plan should have nothing to do with him,” Hugh said.

  They could bicker all night. I’d been watching them do it for years now.

  “You know what, guys?” I said. “I’m going to sleep on it.”

  “That’s good,” Liza said. “You go home, you get into bed with the kitties, and you just think about it. What do you have to do tomorrow?”

  “I’ve got a screening in the afternoon,” I said. “And I should write a review in the morning.” I wanted to do nothing. I wanted to call in sick. But movies come out every week, whether you want them to or not. It was summer blockbuster season, and I was seeing at least five films a week and usually reviewing three. My daily calendar was marked up in multiple colors of ink indicating screenings, interviews, deadlines. I often felt like a waitress in a diner that never closed: you’d serve a meal, clean up, reset the tables, and people would sit right back down and expect another meal. I never felt caught up, and there were no opportunities to coast.

  But I never, ever got tired of going to the movies. I got tired of getting there: running an obstacle course of traffic, parking, and dodging pedestrians to get to San Francisco on time (critics don’t pick what time they go to the movies; we get usually one or two opportunities to see a film at a special screening, and if you miss the beginning, you’re screwed). But once I slide into my seat and the lights go down, I am completely content.

  If I use the word “mindless” in a review, it’s usually an insult. But on the day after I found I was pregnant, I was thrilled when I realized I was seeing Legally Blonde 2: Red White and Blonde. Mindless was just what I needed. For ninety minutes, I could shut my brain off and stop outlining the conversation I was going to have with Matt. This wasn’t like those state-of-the-relationship conversations I’d had in the past. There was no template. I needed to blurt out the news and see what happened.

  WHEN THE MOVIE WAS OVER, I went to Liza’s for a final pep talk. Then I hit Matt’s number on my cell phone. He picked up right away.

  “Hi Matt,” I said. “It’s Mary. There’s something I’d like to talk to you about. Can I come over?”

  There was a pause. But not a long
one.

  “Sure,” he said, sounding more cheerful than cautious. You should be cautious, I thought. I’m about to change your life. Maybe wreck it.

  I felt sick walking up his steps. His sexy grin of a few days before was replaced with something much milder; friendly concern perhaps. He held the gate open for me. His place looked even worse in the afternoon light. His room smelled. The lacrosse sticks in the corner were no longer cute; they were frightening symbols of his boydom, his utter lack of readiness to be a dad. I sat on his bed. He sat in a vinyl desk chair and put his elbows on his knees. His hands were together, almost in a prayer position, and he looked at me seriously and with sympathy, but without obvious fear.

  “What’s up?” he said.

  I slid to the floor. I needed to be closer to the earth, to be on the most solid ground I could find. I put my hand against my forehead and looked down at his filthy filthy rug.

  “I’m really sorry to tell you this,” I began. “I know that you probably expected that I was on the pill or something, but the thing is, I wasn’t on the pill and now I’m pregnant. I mean, I’m pretty sure I’m pregnant. I haven’t been to the doctor yet, but I’ve taken a couple of tests.”

  I took a quick look at him. He didn’t look alarmed. He hadn’t moved. The rest of it came out of me in a rush.

  “So, I think I told you, I’m thirty-nine. Which means this could be my last chance to have a baby. I can’t even believe that I got pregnant, and so easily. I expected that if I ever actually tried to get pregnant at this point, it would take months and months, if it would even happen at all. So I just can’t believe this. But I think I’m going to have this baby. Your baby.”

  His expression still hadn’t changed. Probably shock.

  “So I’ll do it on my own, and I’ll take care of the baby on my own, but I did want to see what you thought and offer you the opportunity to be part of the baby’s life, if that’s what you want.”