Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me (11 page)

“Our African-American sisters wants to keyo him. It's a fact,” said Derik. He had cheekbones you could park your elbows on, long paisley-shaped eyes, dimples. His voice was soft, an inner-city accent difficult for this average white girl to understand.

“‘Keyo?' That hip basketball lingo or something?” I said.

“Kill,”
said Mary Rose.
This
average white girl anyway; Mary Rose seemed to hear the few things he had to say perfectly well.

“Black women get pissed at black men for being interested in white women, but they forget it takes two to tango!” I don't know why I said this. I
do
know why I said this. One, I wanted to hide my embarrassment by saying something outrageous. Two, I wanted to say something outrageous to hide the fact I was what I had never imagined I would be, somebody's
mother.

Lightning Rod laughed, displaying a set of stupendous porcelain caps and a large quivering uvula, a word I frequently confuse with vulva. It is uvula, isn't it?

“What you like so much about us?” asked Lightning Rod.

“You two personally or black guys in general?”

“Us personally?” Rod looked to Derik, but didn't give him a chance to answer. “Let's start with general. And don't say it's our humongous … wrist watches.” Lightning Rod cackled. I could see he was the kind of guy who could have fun in an empty room.

“In general we're scared to death of you,” I said.

“Oh, God,” said Mary Rose.

Lightning Rod flicked a glance at Derik. We got us some live ones.

“Even though almost all of the psychotic rapists and serial murder types out there are white, we're still terrified of you. Every black guy we run into on the street who's not in a coat and tie we're convinced is going to rape and murder us.”

“Should we rape ‘n' murder ‘em?” Lightning Rod asked Derik, who was rubbing his forehead, a ploy to hide his eyes behind his hand. The unexpected turn in the conversation had left him abashed.

“The problem is, the black guy in the coat and tie we dismiss. We got our own white guys in coats and ties. So that leaves you,” I said.

“What about the black auto mechanic?”

“Not interested.”

“Even with a free lube job?” said Lightning Rod.

“You guys are
gods.
You're rich, dress well off court, and look really good on TV. You give away toys to poor kids at Christmas and plead for kids to stay in school. You're the only ones anyone in the country looks up to anymore. It used to be athletes, rock stars, and actors, but everyone knows you don't need real talent to be a rock star or an actor. It's impossible to succeed at what you guys do without having talent. It's one of the last jobs left where skill matters. We
idolize
you! Do you have any idea how many women want to sleep with you?”

“At this table?” Derik ventured, trying to get in the spirit of things.

“In this city! In the country! The world!”

“Brooke,” said Mary Rose. She was embarrassed.

“Now you speakin my language, white girl.”

“Guess,” I said.

Lightning Rod strummed his lips, narrowed his eyes, the pose of someone doing math in his head. “Five thousand?”

“More.”

“Ten thousand?”

“A lot more. All those kindly, grandmotherly checkout counter clerks interviewed on television during the play-offs who issue public invitations to our players to come over for a good meal. You think a good meal is what they really have in mind?”

“Brooke! God.”

On like this it went, me shooting off my mouth and Lightning Rod laughing and scratching his freckled temples with his index finger. His forefinger was as long as the dowel we kept wedged in the kitchen window, our high-tech security system.

I was temporarily insane. Or nervous, or trying to insulate and protect the gooey new me, the non-wisecracking mom who sobbed at images on the nightly news of a shiny, tiny neonate struggling to breathe beneath masses of tubes and electrodes.

I was also trying to stave off the inevitable. Lightning Rod wanted some action. It wasn't me. Even in my delirium I knew that. I was a beating heart framed with the preferred body parts.

There was some phony talk of our going out to hear some jazz. He claimed he heard somewhere that our city had a lively music scene. He then insisted we go in search of a newspaper. We went to the hotel smoke shop, leaving Derik and Mary Rose behind.

Divide and conquer.

Passing the elevator he pretended to block my way, looped his fingers around my upper arms, pulled me close. I stared into his chest, a vast ocean of spearmint-green pique.

Into my ear he purred, “I could use some nasty. How 'bout you?”

Infants know when there is discord in the household. Do
babies know if their mothers have been fooling around? I would like a grant to study this. I would like to say this was the reason I did not go with Lightning Rod McGrew to his room.

It was more simply the thought of anyone touching me. I had not yet had my six-week postpartum check-up. Sitting down was still a bit dicey. The sight of a tampon brought tears to my eyes. I breast-fed Stella every two to three hours for forty-five minutes. My nipples were so tough you could use them to hang me from the ceiling. The nasty was the one thing I could not use.

“You know I like you, Lightning Rod, but I just had a baby,” I said.

“That's cool. Boy or girl?”

Gotta hand it to him, he was more interested than most men.

“Girl, but that's not the point, Rod. You don't mind if I call you Rod, do you?”

“That depends. We off to do the nasty or not?”

“Rod, I'm breast-feeding.”

A sure way to lose a man's interest is to remind him the true purpose of the female breast. Lightning Rod's long face, only minutes before limp with lust, hardened a little into resignation. It must have been the face he wore when there was less than thirty seconds to go in the game and his team was down by eight. He was decent about it, though. He shook my hand and told me good luck before disappearing back into the bar, the better to hook up with someone else before the night got too old.

This did not prevent me from allowing Lyle to suppose I had slept with Lightning Rod McGrew. I had stayed out longer than I had promised. I came home looking disheveled.

Lyle had been forced to change Stella's diaper four times,
four times,
and he was mad at me. Once, while transferring a dirty diaper from her bottom to the diaper pail some of her peanut buttery product dribbled on his white sock. She was a screaming head of purple cabbage by the time I got home.

“Where were you?” He was waiting at the front door. He dumped her into my arms. “All this baby does is eat and shit.”

“Mary Rose and I met some basketball players.”

“Basketball players! What were you doing with basketball players? You just had a baby.”

I shrugged. I began singing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” to Stella.

“What's that coy shrug all about? Did you, you didn't, did you …”

“Did I what?”

“You had an InfideLite.”

I didn't say anything. I didn't do anything. I don't know why. I do know why. He was pissing me off. “I just had a baby.” What was that supposed to mean? That there was something intrinsically icky about me? That motherhood precluded being sexual? I looked at him, just looked. Let him think what he wants.

“I don't believe this. I fucking don't believe this.”

“I am woman, hear me roar.”

Lyle left, slamming the door.

Lightning Rod McGrew wound up playing for the Milwaukee Bucks, and Derik Crawshaw, as you know, signed on with the Blazers. Lyle cannot bear to have me in the room with him when a game is on, so sure is he that I am not watching field goals and free throws, but all those round brown biceps, sweaty backs, delicate wrists, and heartbreaking collarbones. I'm watching both, of course, and therein lies the secret to women's love of basketball.

J. J. KNOX
, who was famous around the world for his computer-animated music videos, invited Ward to a party, and Ward invited Mary Rose. I was invited because J.J. had done the opening credit sequence for
Romeo's Dagger.
The party was held on the top floor of an old warehouse on Front Street. It was hideously drafty and classically chic, with a rickety freight elevator that had been condemned by the city, and a set of stairs that should have been monitored by some enterprising ambulance-chasing young lawyer. The guests were in their thirties and early forties,
almost-successful people who were at the point of remaining ambivalent for so long about the question of having children that it was on the verge of deciding itself.

It was March, and Mary Rose was beginning to look like an aircraft carrier. She could part a crowd as surely as the ship parted waves at sea. On occasion you could see the He-bean kick from across the room. In stores, strangers would look at her, twinkly-eyed, and say, “Twins?”

She was at the point in her pregnancy when the oversized shirts and sweaters that have been the staple of the American woman's wardrobe for nearly a decade would no longer suffice. The biggest size was not big enough. There was no turning back: In addition to the Jolly Green Giant ensemble, given to her by Audra at Christmas, she had a pair of fuchsia leggings that with each day got shorter and shorter, and a white mock turtleneck with some kind of yachting emblem over the pocket. This was in case the wearer wished to be mistaken for a member of the America's Cup team.

This was what Mary Rose wore to the party, where she found herself in a conversation with a set designer who seemed interested in her to a degree that transcended politeness. Ward was off networking—do they still call it that?—and I hung with Mary Rose. I wasn't very interested in mingling, I wasn't very interested in being there, but I'd thought I should go out, since for some reason Lyle had agreed to watch Stella, and I didn't want to waste his largess.

“Do you know the sex?” asked the set designer, a rail-thin redhead who wore her freckles as fashion.

“I don't want to know. Everyone says it helps with the shopping, but please,” said Mary Rose.

“Pink and blue are out anyway,” said the set designer.

“Which brings up something I've always wondered about,” I said. “Why are pastels the colors of motherhood? Girls who are already too old for little floral print dresses with a ruffled Peter Pan collar in second grade suddenly see nothing wrong with Laura
Ashley the instant they become pregnant. The colors of motherhood should be purple, red, and black. Purple for fortitude, red for courage, and black because, hey, why shouldn't I feel chic?”

“Fuck the stretch marks,” said the set designer. Mary Rose and I must have looked surprised because she laughed, and added, I've got three.”

“
You?
” we said together.

“There should also be a theme song that brings to mind not the Teddy Bear's picnic, but the scene where they cross the Sahara in
Lawrence of Arabia
,” said the set designer.

“Anyway, I want the whole experience,” said Mary Rose. “Finding out the gender at the end is the icing on the cake. You go through labor and it's nice to have the surprise at the end. Although I'm sure it's a boy.”

“That way you don't have any expectations of the kid, either,” said the set designer. “You don't have a chance to plan their whole life while you're knitting all those socks they'll never wear.”

“If you find out when it's born, all you have time for is to identify and purchase the correct package of Huggies,” said Mary Rose.

This was all by the hors d'oeuvres table. The hostess, a caterer on the cutting edge, had put together a sweating buffet of IndoMex cuisine, all bright curries and ferocious salsa. Mary Rose stuck to tortillas slathered with sour cream. What she really wanted was some Bon Ami.

The IndoMex food was the focal point of the party. The plates provided were quite tiny, so people were forced to return to the table again and again. Mary Rose and I posted ourselves near the hit of the evening, a platter of tandoori chicken quesadillas. This meant everyone who was hungry eventually found their way to within earshot of Mary Rose, who was being curiously chatty.

Mary Rose was lonely, I think. Besides me she had few real friends. Frick and Frack had moved out, as had Mrs. Wanamaker. She was alone in the triplex.

It was especially bad in late winter, Mary Rose's loneliness.
Day in, day out, she and Fleabo went their separate ways to rake and mow—the lawns remain green year-round in our city—and in general keep their clients' yards as spruce as possible, considering it was still the drippy dead of a Northwest winter and the only thing that flourished besides the lawns were moss and toadstools.

In the evenings she watched basketball or, increasingly, found herself at Powell's Books, in the Pregnancy & Childbirth section, where she would peek at the books that showed pictures of the Actual Event. Powell's stayed open until midnight. The store was the largest in the country, one of our city's claims to fame, and no one knew or cared if you stood in the middle of an aisle reading a book from beginning to end.

There were always other women there, at various stages of pregnancy, doing the same thing, like men lined up at a dirty-magazine rack. Besides the size of the women's bellies, you could tell how far along they were by the expressions on their faces as they stared at the color glossy close-ups of a woman's usually dusky Sharpei-like folds stretched taut by the emergence of what appeared to be a hairy bowling ball.

The further along they were the less ashen-faced they were. Nature has arranged it so that just about the time the baby is ready to be born you'll do anything to have it done. Even That.

But Mary Rose never spoke to these women, each communing privately with the advice book of her choice, one not knowing how worried she should be about an impending Cesarean, another reading up on breast-feeding, the better to alleviate her disgust, and so when anyone at the party asked Mary Rose about her pregnancy she talked. And talked.