Accidentally on Purpose

by Mary F. Pols

  This sounded to me like a defense of his grandson, and I wasn’t about to argue with that.

  “Okay,” I said meekly.

  The thirty-seventh place I looked at was just right. It had two bedrooms, with washer and dryer hookups—my friends with children assured me that having laundry on premises was second only to the epidural on the list of motherhood “must haves”—and it was plunk in the middle of the better of the two good school districts. As I cruised through the neighborhood, my belly pressing closer and closer to the steering wheel, I saw a little boy on a bike, rattling along the sidewalk with his training wheels on, his dad running behind him. Pleasantville, I thought. It’s exactly what I need.

  On the day of the move, the crew I’d corralled, Hugh and John, were scheduled to pick up Matt at his place. But he called me in the morning, panicked, saying he had stayed over at a friend’s house and was running late. I could hear female voices in the background. In an instant, I convinced myself that he had slept with someone else. We’d been together a few times since Thanksgiving, but it wasn’t as though he’d given me a promise ring. And his tone was apologetic, which was unusual.

  When he arrived, sheepish and hung over, I could barely look at him. He stank of hard liquor. At the storage place, I sat down on an empty cart and put my hands on my belly. I felt completely forlorn. We’d been doing so well lately. But here he was staying out all night. With girls. John sat next to me.

  “I have this gut feeling that he slept with someone else last night,” I told him. “He looks guilty, don’t you think?”

  “He’s definitely incredibly hung over,” John replied. “He barely spoke on the way here. Actually, he still seems kind of drunk.”

  I shot John a look of disbelief.

  He shrugged. “We were asking him about what he does at work and he didn’t seem to know.”

  Matt was still temping at the bond trading company. From what I knew, the job was purely clerical. I alternated between optimism that it would become permanent and curiosity about what had kept Matt unemployed for so long.

  “That’s my baby daddy,” I said glumly.

  John gave me a pat on the shoulder and then got up and went back to the U-Haul, where Hugh and Matt were wrestling with my antique sea chest. It had been mine as a child, and I planned to use it for Dolan’s toys. I sighed and got to my feet. I could still carry lamps and light boxes.

  I drove the U-Haul to my new apartment with Matt beside me. Hugh and John followed in Hugh’s car.

  “So what did you do last night?” I said. “You still reek of alcohol.”

  “Oh, I was with Terry at the bar and she had some friend with her. Then we went back to her place.” Terry was a regular from Finnegan’s, but I assumed, since she was engaged, that she was harmless. He rubbed his head. “Stayed up too late. I fell asleep on the couch.”

  “Did you sleep with one of them?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, sounding a little indignant. But where men are concerned, indignation is hardly a harbinger of honesty.

  “You have to tell me if you did,” I said. We were at a stoplight. He looked me full in the eyes. “I didn’t,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. I decided to believe him.

  “I feel like crap,” he said. “I could use a Mountain Dew.”

  MY JEALOUSY MAY HAVE SEEMED ILL-PLACED, given how much I complained about Matt’s shortcomings. But the fact was I was newly obsessed with sleeping with him. The joys of pregnancy sex had been well advertised to me over the years. “Mythic orgasms,” one friend said. “There’s so much blood there already. It’s just insane. I’ve never had anything like it.”

  She was right. What no one had told me was that I would want it constantly, that in the last months of my pregnancy few thoughts would enter my head that weren’t about either the baby’s room or fucking. I thought about Matt’s penis once every ten seconds for every waking hour and for many of my sleeping hours as well. His penis became like a religious totem to me. The rest of him wasn’t bad either.

  On some level I knew it was a delusion, some biological urge to keep the father of my lion cubs around. But that didn’t stop my passion. Matt began sleeping over a lot, generally at my behest, and generally because I had some “task” I needed help with. Usually that task was getting his pants off.

  We’d lie on the couch together, watching television or a movie, me hideously aware of his proximity and dying for him to touch me and then finally, sick of waiting, turning to him and making the first move. He always responded, happily, but the next night, I’d be back on the couch with him, like a teenager wondering if the guy I liked was ever going to kiss me. My desire tortured me, and any release was welcome, no matter how lousy it might make me feel that I had to ask for it every time.

  I couldn’t figure out how to label our relationship. Hardly boyfriend and girlfriend, but still, when he needed a ride to the airport at Christmas, I considered it my role to take him. I was staying in California, saving all my vacation time for maternity leave, but Matt’s mom had bought him a ticket home to Baltimore. When I picked him up he handed me a shopping bag, festooned with ribbons. “This is for you,” he said. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might buy me a present. It had certainly never occurred to me that I’d open the bag and find a scarf in there that I knew I’d want to wear every day.

  “This looks like Casco,” I said. Casco was my tortoiseshell cat, brown and black and shaggy.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said.

  The scarf wasn’t some obligatory token; it was a present with heart. When we said good-bye at the curb, I felt shy. “Merry Christmas, Mary,” he said as he shouldered his bag and walked away, and just his use of my given name—a rarity—made me feel, at least just a little, cherished.

  We spent New Year’s Eve together; I’d invited him to join the annual party my friends and I held and he seemed pleased to be included. On his thirtieth birthday a couple of weeks later, I baked him a triple-layer chocolate cake and brought it to the party his friends were throwing for him in the city. I was nervous about meeting them all, nervous that they’d be painfully young or drunken barflies and that the gulf between Matt and me would widen again.

  They surprised me. Some were at least my age, and they were a sincere, sweet crowd, most of them far more professionally oriented than he seemed to be. They clearly cared about him, having brought in tons of sushi and filled a table full of presents. The party wound down with a plan to troop off to Finnegan’s, the bar where Matt and I had met, and I expected he’d go too. Instead he took me back to his apartment and we lay together on the bed. “You were really great tonight,” he told me. We’d touched a lot at the party. “I think you being there made that party.” He was grateful and drunk and I was, as usual, on fire for him and excited about the notion of being back in the bed where we had made this baby in the first place. It was actually romantic.

  I wouldn’t call myself old-fashioned, but some part of me—the dominant part at that point, I confess—felt that it was just right that Matt and I were together during the pregnancy. I remember a friend asking me, when I was about six months’ pregnant, whether I was “dating.” I was offended. How could I expend energy toward anyone but the baby and his father? Every time we had sex I was flush with the knowledge that I was with the father of my child, the source of my baby. It was a rush I couldn’t possibly have understood beforehand and one I’m not sure I entirely grasp in retrospect. The emotion was unique to the time.

  “You know what my favorite thing about being pregnant is?” I asked Matt, flopping back down on the bed after another amazing session of penis worship. We looked at each other from our respective pillows. He shook his head. His eyes looked very green in his flushed face.

  “The fucking,” I said. “Having sex with you.”

  He smiled, a wide, pleased smile, the kind I didn’t often see on his face.

  “Me too,” he said. “It’s better than the heartburn, huh?”

/>   While the origins of my attraction to Matt were clearly primal, it wasn’t always easy to dismiss it as mere biology. I could tell my friends that’s what it was, but there I was in the supermarket, wanting to hold hands with him. Or contentedly cooking him dinner and fondly kissing him on the top of the head as I served it. We’d lie together in bed, watching the baby romp across my belly like something out of Alien. In late January, we went to a full-day Lamaze class together, and as he sat behind me to massage my back, he put his arms around me and kissed my head. It felt as though we were a couple.

  He had seemed so completely insensitive in those early months, but I was starting to see a more thoughtful side of him. One Sunday we went out for brunch at Rick and Ann’s in Berkeley, a place that always has a long line, but for good reason. We were sitting outside on a bench waiting for our table when a family walked by. The mom had a scarf on her head, and her two boys, maybe around six and eight, were being tugged along by a new puppy.

  “She must have cancer,” Matt said. “They must have got the boys the puppy to make them feel better.”

  I turned and looked at him. He had on a big sweatshirt and was resting his forearms on his thighs, like a basketball player observing the game.

  “The scarf,” he explained, gesturing to his own head. “She looked like she must have lost her hair. And she was so thin.”

  “I bet you’re right,” I said. “I didn’t notice.”

  I’ve waited outside many cafes with many boys in my day, making up stories about the people waiting with me as I anticipated my eggs Benedict. But I’d never thought of Matt as someone who played that game. He didn’t seem observant. He was the person who had to ask what an avocado looked like when I sent him to the store, even when I’d made guacamole in front of him the week before. His sensitivity reminded me that he had been a little boy who had ridden airplanes by himself to go visit his dad, sometimes returning with a check for his mother. There were sad things he’d lived through that I knew nothing about.

  But there was still such an innocence to him. One day, as we were driving across the Bay Bridge together, I asked him when was the last time he’d been in love. Because we’d never technically dated, we’d skipped over all that getting-to-know-you chitchat.

  “I never have been,” he said.

  I turned to look at him and then had to correct the wheel as I started to veer into the next lane.

  “Never in your thirty years?”

  “I said it, with one girl,” he said. “But I realized later that I didn’t mean it.”

  It was starting to dawn on me that maybe he’d had only one real girlfriend, someone from college that he’d been with for a year or so. He called her “she” whenever he brought her up. “I did some yoga in college,” he’d say. “She wanted to, so I went along.” If I said, “Your hair is so soft,” he’d respond with something like “She thought so too.”

  I felt terrible for him. To have never been in love, and now to be having a baby. It seemed so wrong for him to be in our complicated, adult situation without ever having had a love story of his own.

  “I’d like to fall in love someday,” he said. “That would be nice, I think.”

  Our conversations often had this kind of tenor, a remove, as if we weren’t sleeping together, as if we were merely in limbo together, a limbo that involved sex and a baby.

  Along with the pregnancy sex came pregnancy dreams, intense and completely neurotic ones that were appallingly easy to interpret. In one, Matt left me for J. Lo, who was desperate to have his baby and had stolen him out from under my nose. I couldn’t blame him for hooking up with J. Lo; even in the dream I acknowledged that he’d made no declaration of love to me and was unlikely ever to do so. But I was afraid for our son, afraid he’d be cast aside in favor of J. Lo’s beautiful honey-colored child. I told Matt about that one. He was silent.

  “I don’t know why I’m having these dreams,” I said to him. “It’s not like we’re even dating.” I had just picked him up at the BART station and was driving us back to my place. “Not dating exactly.” I looked over at him, at his placid profile. Conversation opener. No response.

  “I never remember my dreams,” he said. He was maddening.

  I tried to broach the subject again a few days later.

  “I hope we keep doing this,” I said. I’d had one of those orgasms that make you think, Now what’s my name again? I was lying on my side, the lump of baby between us, with my hand in Matt’s hair.

  He’d smiled, but didn’t respond.

  I liked the thought of us continuing to sleep together after the baby was born. For one thing, I was eager to have sex on my back again, to look in the eyes of the person inside my body. All that great sex with Matt, yet he was so mysterious, back there behind me. What was written on his face as he made me come, as he came? Once, I twisted around and saw him yawning. I didn’t know whether to cry or slap him.

  At thirty-nine, I had had plenty of Big Talks with men. I was good at it, having long ago stopped throwing objects or insults. I specialized instead in astute interpretations of our situation, rendered so rationally that sometimes I wondered at my own remove, wondered how, if I was in this relationship, I could see it so clearly from an outsider’s point of view. The men rarely argued with anything I said, but what I still hadn’t learned was to “hear” what their nonresponsiveness meant. I could go wild trying to decipher it, coming up with a dozen interpretations: he was afraid, he was intimidated, he had a secret he wasn’t ready to share, his mother didn’t love him enough, his father wasn’t around enough, he was trying to get his head around the idea of commitment, he knew I was right but wasn’t quite ready to admit it. That was all just hopeful bullshit on my part. What the nonresponsive male meant was no. But as I barreled through the last few weeks before my son’s birth, I ignored Matt’s telling silences.

  I WAS ON MY WAY to an afternoon movie, driving across the Bay Bridge. The sky was full of high clouds, and in the distance, the Golden Gate Bridge stood out against all that oyster gray, a rich rusty red. I felt good. I picked up the cell phone. Kir and my friend Sara had just thrown me a baby shower, and I wanted to tell my dad about it.

  “Sara made the most amazing chocolate bread pudding,” I told him. “With cherries in it and some sort of creamy sauce drizzled over the top. You would have wolfed it down.” Then I went on about the diaper bag Liza gave me, the beautiful bedding Dolan would have in his crib, his miniature toiletry kit. He listened quietly as I recounted the generosity of my friends. My pregnancy had been so different from what I’d ever imagined, but the joyousness of the shower had made me feel almost normal.

  “This is a wonderful thing you’re doing,” he said.

  I blinked as the tears hit my eyes.

  “Really?” I said. “You think so?”

  “I was just talking to your Aunt Elizabeth,” he said. “Or rather, listening.”

  Aunt Elizabeth was a talker. She had three children, all older than I. None of them had biological children, although her son had recently adopted a little boy from Guatemala.

  “She was telling me that your cousins would have been happy to have such a thing happen to them,” he said. “She reminded me that if you were married, we would all be celebrating this, or certainly hoping for this.”

  I was grinning now, trying not to breathe too hard, wishing the car were quieter. I wanted to hear every word of my father’s blessing.

  “There’s nothing better I’ve done with my own life then to have you children,” he said. “I’m so happy you’re going to have this experience.”

  Thank you, Aunt Elizabeth, I thought. Thank you for being such a talker.

  ABOUT A WEEK LATER, a package arrived from Kesiah, Aunt Elizabeth’s older daughter. I opened it and found a letter on top. Kesiah was the firstborn in our generation, and so the first grandchild. My grandmother was also named Elizabeth, and it was she whose maiden name I was using for my son. In the letter, Kesiah explained that she h
ad always told our grandmother that if she had a child someday, she’d name it Dolan, whether it was a boy or a girl. Grandmother had liked the idea, and she’d made a patchwork quilt for Kesiah. In a demonstration of classic 1960s fashion sense, she had elasticized the top of it. “You can wear this as a skirt now,” she had told her, “and when you have your baby, you can use this for a coverlet.” Thirty-five years later, the elastic was gone and the quilt was finally ready to be used by a child named Dolan. I unfolded it and spread it across my lap. “This came from your great-grandmother,” I told my belly. “Made with her hands.”

  I always thought of heirlooms as antiques, things that increased in value the farther they got away from their own era, becoming the kind of treasures that made the experts on Antiques Roadshow rock in delight. To say you had your great-great-grandmother’s hope chest was to say you had something that dated back to before the Civil War. But as I looked forward to the thought of my child and my grandchildren, I realized that an heirloom gains all its true, lasting value from its physical connection to our past. My grandmother would never touch Dolan, never even know he existed. But she had created something of cloth and thread that had now come to him. And her past, her name before marriage, her father’s name, would be carried forward by a little boy made accidentally one night in San Francisco in the first years of a new century.

  CHAPTER 9

  Arrivals

  “I’D SAY HE’S ABOUT EIGHT POUNDS,” my doctor said. Dolan was due in three days. She was feeling around the outside of my stomach like someone trying to shape dough into a loaf. “He’s a good size. But not too big. I think you’re going to do just fine. Do you have your birthing plan ready?”

  A birthing plan is a strategy you come up with during Lamaze classes. I had typed mine up and had multiple copies, including two in my packed suitcase. I was contemplating pinning it to the only jacket that still fit me and wearing it all week, like Paddington Bear, so there would be no doubt about what to do with me.