Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me (13 page)

Remembering Audra's anti-fat crusade, Mary Rose settled on baking Dicky some cookies. She had a recipe for oatmeal-chocolate-chocolate-chip that she sometimes made for her Mowers and Rakers. A handful left them in a stupor, unable to tug a single weed.

Some people are responsive to this type of offering and others aren't. I could bake cookies until I was so weak with age I
couldn't crack an egg, and Lyle would still never forgive me for what he supposed was my InfideLite with Lightning Rod McGrew.

Around 8:30 Mary Rose went downstairs. She knocked on Dicky's door with one knee, her hands full with a turquoise platter steaming with several dozen cookies. When there was no answer she knelt, placing the platter on the doormat. She grabbed the doorknob to pull herself to her feet. The door was locked, she noticed. She knocked louder, then when nothing happened, banged with her fist, as she used to have to do when Mrs. Wanamaker lived there. Obviously Dicky was not home.

Mary Rose debated. Should she take the cookies back upstairs? There she would either eat them or be forced to decide how to store them, something she didn't feel up to.

In the end she left them on the doormat, mainly in order to avoid having to kneel again. She went back upstairs, where she worried. Every time she heard a noise, she peeked out her front window to see if he had come home.

Twice, when she was sure it was him, she went halfway down the stairs to see if the turquoise platter was still sitting on his doormat. Once she retrieved the platter, then, halfway back up the stairs thought, “This is ridiculous! I've left them there for this long …” then back down she went.

Her vigil was interrupted during the sports segment of the 11:00 news. Thanks to an unexpected loss by another team in the Pacific Division, our basketball team was now tied for first place.

Afterward, Mary Rose reflexively went to her door and peeked out. The front door downstairs was wide open. She welcomed the excuse to go down and close it. When she did, she saw that the platter of cookies was gone.

She didn't see Dicky for a few days, which made it all the more urgent in her mind that she see him, apologize to him, and, not incidentally, get her plate back. Finally, at the end of the week, on one of those miraculous hot spring days that make you itch to be fifteen again (that's the miracle), Mary Rose parked the Mower and Rakers truck in its usual spot beneath the ornamental plums,
which were bursting with nipple-pink blooms, and heard, through the open front door, a television set.

Dicky's front door was open too, and Mary Rose walked right in, a twenty-pound bag of lime hoisted on one shoulder. Dicky was slouched on his new black leather sofa watching a basketball game, drinking an imported beer.

Together, they stared for a moment at the set. It was not the Blazers. They had six days off between games, and everyone in our city was talking about it. It was a suspiciously long length of time. Long enough for them to lose their playing legs. We were convinced it was a conspiracy between the networks, the network advertisers, and the NBA: Nobody wanted us to make it to the finals because we had such a small market share, compared to, say Los Angeles, New York, Boston, or Chicago.

“The Rockets and who?” said Mary Rose.

“Exactly,” said Dicky. He blew over the top of the bottle, failing to produce a whistle.

“I brought you …” said Mary Rose. “Did you get those cookies?”

“Yup, yup.” Dicky tipped the bottle at Charles Barkley, who was pacing during a time-out, wiping his forehead with the front of his jersey. “People would kill to be him. It was in a survey. They interviewed five hundred kids across the country. One of the questions asked, ‘Would you kill your parents if it meant you could be Charles Barkley.' Sixty-three percent said they would. Even with his weight problem.”

“That's unbelievable,” said Mary Rose.

“I know,” said Dicky.

“You'd have thought it would be more.” She was being facetious. Dicky took her seriously.

“Everywhere Barkley goes, people come up to him. Every restaurant, every golf course. They want to touch him. It's like kissing the pope's ring. Better, really. What can the pope do? Even if he pulls out his big guns, prays his biggest prayer, your life might still be shit. But if you go up and touch Sir Charles on the
shoulder and go, ‘Hey, good luck on Saturday. I'll be thinking about you,' and then he has one of those monster forty-point games … think how it would be to have people think you were the most amazing person on the planet. To be stared at by all those eyes.”

“It sounds like a nightmare.”

Dicky looked up at Mary Rose for the first time since she'd walked in the door. She was still standing beside the couch with the bag of lime balanced on her shoulder, tugging at a bit of cowlicky bang.

“Those cookies were pretty good,” he said.

“I'm sorry about that afternoon,” she said. “When you moved in. I shouldn't have said what I said. I'm about to become a mother myself and you'd think I'd be more sensitive. I wouldn't want someone to say something like that about me.”

Dicky looked blank.

“I lost my temper. I called Audra, your mother … anyway, that's what the cookies were for. To apologize.”

“What'd you call her?”

“You don't remember?”

“You said she was a cunt or something.”

“I'm really, really sorry.”

“Well,” said Dicky, laughing, “she is.” Mary Rose noticed Dicky's dimples. He wasn't so bad when he smiled, she thought.

Mary Rose did not know what to say to this, but she didn't feel she could leave on this note. She eased down the bag of lime and sat on the edge of the couch.

The apartment was very tidy, bare as a waiting room where few people had cause to wait. On the wall over the TV was tacked an 8-by-10 glossy of the comedian R—, autographed. It looked like the type of thing star-struck deli owners hung behind their cash registers.

Through the bedroom door Mary Rose recognized an expensive weight machine with a week's worth of clothing slung over it.

“Why do you say that about your mother? I like your mother. There are a few things I don't like that she's done lately, things that
are basically inexcusable, one thing, actually, but you don't want to hear—”

“Yeah, I know,” said Dicky. “She didn't tell me you were living here. She didn't tell me this place was such a dump, either.”

“That's not really interfering.”

“You can interfere by not saying something. Ward does it all the time.”

Mary Rose laughed. “Like how he conveniently forgot to tell me he had a wife?”

“My psychic says it's my family's tragic flaw, thinking we don't have to account for our actions.”

“Wow, she really said that?”

Together, they watched the rest of the quarter in silence. The panic Mary Rose felt when she realized Dicky was to be her new neighbor subsided. He seemed cool and disinterested, the exact opposite of the rest of the warm and nosy Barons. He was hardly ever home. When he was, he was quiet. Sometimes she ran into him in the morning—he was going to his club to work out, she was going to work—and when she did they exchanged a minute's worth of pleasantries. For a few weeks, it suited Mary Rose fine.

Then she began to think it was weird.

“I am, after all, pregnant with his niece,” Mary Rose said to me.

“He doesn't care. I told you: Dicky's only concern is Dicky.”

“There's no one living in the other unit. You'd think Big Hank would want to rent it out as soon as possible to keep the bucks rolling in.”

“Maybe he's fixing it up.”

“Why are you taking their side on this?”

I then said something I shouldn't have, but I had grown weary of the conversation. I said, “Mary Rose, I think this pregnancy has made you a little paranoid.”

It was the first time she'd ever hung up on me.

9.

OUR CITY LIES IN A VALLEY EQUIDISTANT FROM OCEAN
and desert. When the wind blows from the west, it brings with it chill marine air; when it blows from the east, dry and hot, the unending rain for which we are famous suddenly ceases and we suffer an equally relentless heat. The valley is transformed from verdant cradle to lung-singeing sauna.

It often happens in spring, for reasons beyond my meteorological ken, and tricks our gullible, pent-up citizenry into thinking summer has arrived. We are fools for this sort of heat. We throw off our clothes, the better to blister our pale, sun-starved shoulders. We cannonball off slippery rocks into local rivers that are running high and cold with melted snowpack, and often drown. Shootings escalate, as do beer brawls and car thefts. Local news reports feature the elderly perishing in their stuffy, ill-ventilated apartments and, in the same breath, small dogs left to fry in closed cars. Our normally subdued northern city, a city of readers, recyclers, and basketball fans, becomes, overnight, a place of irrational behaviors and erupting passions.

During this time, on an unusually smoggy Saturday, I asked the back of Lyle's head if we could get out of town. Something terrible had happened and I felt I needed to get away. Mary Rose had been served with papers.

THE NIGHT BEFORE
I couldn't sleep, even after I had put Stella down and sung a few rounds of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Mary Rose, so big in her final months she looked as if she would tip over, like an ill-weighted sculpture created by an enthusiastic yet inept art student. She had been pruning the Ostlys' wisteria, a noble old vine that had been trained no less seriously than a German gymnast to grow in a manner that entirely covered the lattice above the Ostlys' side patio. When in bloom the dangling blue blossoms created one of those rare settings that look as if it has sprung from a children's book.

April is not the proper time to prune wisteria, but during a boisterous, pre-heat wave hailstorm a few runners had been damaged.

Mary Rose stood with her hands on her hips, her fingers tapping out a ditty on the sides of her belly, trying to trace the broken runners to their source in order to avoid the disaster of clipping the wrong one, when a plump young woman, pantyhose swishing beneath the skirt of her periwinkle linen suit, minced across the lawn.

“Are you Mary Rose Crowder?”

Only the guilty, who have reason to suspect a process server may be paying them a visit, know to say, “Nope, sorry, Catherine the Great here.”

“I am,” said Mary Rose. She read the summons twice, waddled to where her gloves lay on the patio, knelt on one knee, placing the summons beneath the gloves to keep it from blowing away, struggled back to her feet with the aid of a redwood chaise longue, then returned to the wisteria, where she proceeded to accidentally cut one of the largest runners, as well as the Ostlys' phone line. The plant was half dead, the phone, fully dead. Mary Rose was fired, something Mrs. Ostly, a friend of Audra Baron's, had been meaning to do for some time anyway. It was unseemly for Mary Rose to be working this late in her pregnancy.

She phoned me, on the verge of tears; after some inadequate consoling, I promptly hung up and phoned Audra, promising Mary
Rose I would tell her what I found out. How had such a thing happened? And how had I wound up in the middle of it?

Audra was businesslike. “Brooke. I take it you've heard. We really had no choice. It's not entirely Mary Rose's fault, although you won't get me to say that in court. But our baby needs the best chance she can have. Life isn't easy, you know.”

“Thank you for drawing that to my attention.”

Ward had done what a scion in trouble always does: He consulted his father. He dropped in one evening around dinnertime. Little Hank was milling around the kitchen in evening wear eating graham crackers and waiting for Big Hank, who was to be, that very night, master of ceremonies at a popular charity function held every year, an auction benefiting our city's new museum of science and industry. Big Hank was a man of many talents, but public speaking was not one of them. He had consented only because the museum curator was friendly with a collector who was selling his cache of British railway watches, and Big Hank was hoping to buy them before they went up for auction.

In any case, Big Hank was nervous and more preoccupied than usual. He came to the table in black tie, smelling of cologne, a computer printout clenched in his fist.

“What's on your mind, Ward?” Big Hank ate only crackers and milk to calm his stomach.

Ward recounted the recent events with Mary Rose. He found himself laying it on a little thick in order to assure he had Big Hank's attention, a nearly hopeless task in the best of circumstances.

He told how Mary Rose (for her own amusement!) had tricked him into believing she'd had an abortion; how she had shown up once at the airport dressed as a chauffeur; how she wouldn't spend the night with him on his houseboat because she didn't want to miss a basketball game; how she blathered on about the most personal aspects of pregnancy to complete strangers; and the topper, how she had developed a habit of eating Comet
cleanser. “I mean, doesn't that practically qualify as child abuse?” asked Ward.

Recently, Ward's eczema had flared up—it was always worse in the heat—and the more Ward talked, the more he scratched, between his thumb and index finger, between his knuckles. The more Ward scratched the more he talked. The more Ward talked, the more desperate he felt. This is another good reason for refraining from expressing yourself. The sound of your own desperate voice resonating in a large cold room, such as the Barons' teak-wainscoted dining room, might make you feel worse than you already do.

And so Ward did. He was on the verge of tears. Big Hank nodded his head, never looking at his son, never taking his eyes from his speech. He wasn't reading, however, his narrow blue eyes locked on a single line.

“Woo! I never knew she was such a crazy bitch,” said Little Hank.

“I'd thank you to mind your own fucking business,” said Ward.

“And I'd thank both of you to watch your language in front of your mother,” said Big Hank.

Presently, Dicky arrived in gray sweatpants and sweatshirt from
Romeo's Dagger,
a towel tossed over his shoulder. As had become his custom, he would work out in the afternoon, then drop by for dinner, often staying until late to watch TV.

He said, “You talking about MR? She's a wacko. Nice going, bro.”

“Dicky,” said Audra.

“She bakes cookies and leaves them at my door. Then she stomps up and down the stairs all night long waiting to see if I've come out and picked them up. She talks to her television.”

“Maybe she's lonely,” said Audra.

“I don't want the woman carrying my child to be lonely,” said Ward. “It's not good for the baby.”

“The baby,” Dicky scoffed. “She doesn't even
want
the baby.”

“I knew it,” said Ward.

“What are you talking about?” said Audra.

“She told me.” It had been a long time since all eyes had been on Dicky Baron. The last time they had all been rapt like this was after he had returned from the Academy Awards.
Romeo's Dagger
hadn't won anything except the Best Actor Oscar for R—, but Dicky had had a nice talk with James Garner in the men's room.

“One day I'm coming out of my apartment and I see her on the parking strip raking up all those pink flowers from whatever trees those are that grow there. She's raking like a maniac, and she's all, like, this
monster
of sweat. It isn't even hot and she's soaked and she's talking to herself, mumbling something. And I come out and ask how she's feeling, just being polite. She looks up and stops raking and yells, “Fine!” like that's the last thing she is.

“Better take it easy,” I say. “I don't want to have to get out the newspapers and hot water”—that's a joke, like I'm going to have to deliver the baby or something—and she starts to go back to raking, but when she does the rake part of the rake, the prongs, come off the stick. It's broken. She throws it and says, ‘I wish I wasn't even having this baby!'”

Carrying a baby to term requires nerves of steel. For you male readers it must be similar to how a soldier feels when first under fire. He wants to turn and run, but it's too late. He's stuck in his foxhole. He must suffer through. For you male readers who have never been under fire, you may think what Ward and Dicky and the Hanks, Big and Little, were beginning to think: Mary Rose was certifiable, endangering herself and her baby. Endangering
their
baby.

Now Audra, mother of three, was in the motherhood. She knew that Mary Rose did not mean what she said, that it was frustration talking, frustration and fear of pain. It was clear to her, she of the thirty-eight, thirty, and nineteen hours of labor, respectively, that Mary Rose was simply turning the corner into her third and final trimester, when what looms suddenly ahead is the
appalling fact that the only way out of the predicament of pregnancy is giving birth.

I can imagine Audra sitting there, her thin legs in red cashmere slacks folded one over the other, wrists perched on the edge of the table, auburn waves shining beneath the dusty crystal chandelier, knowing she should defend Mary Rose, yet unable to forgive that crack about being interfering. The other half of the remark, the tasteless half, she could forgive. The C word was anger speaking; but
interfering
… that was the product of careful thought.

For Audra was a liberal, a
real
liberal, as she liked to think of herself. She believed in “live and let live.” She had spent her life training herself not to interfere. She looked around the table at her sons. Hadn't she let her beautiful, sensitive Ward live when he had dropped the ball, failing to get his divorce from Lynne? Hasn't she let Dicky live, even though he had helped a young girl—someone's baby daughter!—kill herself? How much tolerance, empathy, patience, and prayers had been required then? She had let them live, and loved them still.

With Mary Rose, the situation was trickier. Mary Rose was not her own, but what was inside Mary Rose was. Audra had tried to be there for Mary Rose. To offer advice, companionship. Some might say Audra was trying to rescue Mary Rose, but what of it? She thought briefly of all the presents she had bought for Mary Rose.

“What am I going to do?” asked Ward. “I don't think she's fit to raise a kid.”

Audra said nothing. She would not interfere. She excused herself to make some tea.

Big Hank brushed his crumbs from his fingers. He took off his half glasses and laid them carefully beside his plate. “In our day, children just were. There was none of this nonsense. I have three sons,
three sons.
All your mother's friends were envious.”

From the kitchen, there was the sound of a teapot being filled with water.

Big Hank sighed, fished in his pocket for his watch. “I'll telephone Ron Toblin.”

Ron Toblin was the Barons' lawyer.

I relayed all this to the back of Lyle's head. “Why do I feel like a lot of this is my fault?”

“'Cause you've made it your business when it isn't,” said Lyle. To my surprise, his head turned, and I was treated to the sight of his face, the straight, slightly pointed nose, the brown eyes made large behind his glasses.

He said: “The game's down and no one knows when it's going to be back up. Why don't we go to Seattle? Spur of the moment. Remember when we used to do spur of the moment?”

That this entailed a three-hour car trip with an infant in a car that had no air-conditioning and a black interior somehow escaped us. We'd missed each other.

Lyle drove while I sat in the cramped backseat singing “Billy Jean” to keep Stella from screaming. She hated the windows rolled down; too much noise, too blowy. But with the windows rolled up, we baked. Better to bake than go mad with three hours of eardrum-shattering shrieking.

By the time we arrived, Lyle had that tight-lipped murderous look that men get when their lives are inconvenienced by the exact things women are supposed to be born to manage and, nay, enjoy. On top of it, Stella had one giganto project, which, in the enclosed, heated car … well, you can imagine.

There is a famous waterfront market in Seattle that appears regularly in tourist brochures and commercials for Levi's and other products aimed at young people with disposable income. It is bustling and lively, and a stroll around it gives people the illusion they are savoring the simple things in life. There are bakeries and flower stalls and blocks of fruit stands selling baseball-sized strawberries year-round. There are outlandish fresh fish marts, where the shopper in search of a modest fillet of sole is sent rushing into the arms of vegetarianism by the sight of humongous glassy-eyed squid lying prone on a bed of ice, buckets of
knobby whelks, and tanks of the living Freudian nightmare that is the geoduck, our region's specialty, which resembles a two-foot-long engorged penis sprouting from between the lips of an ordinary-looking clam shell.

I changed Stella's diaper on the backseat—no easy feat; the seat tilts downward and Stella kept rolling off the changing pad—and hauled the stroller out of the trunk and, while holding Stella, unfolded the stroller with one hand, snapping with my foot the joint that keeps it from collapsing, the straps of the changing bag—full of, as you know, useless things that I nonetheless felt it was my job to lug around—slipping down off my sweaty shoulder and catching in the crook of my elbow, thereby pulling Stella away from my chest, where I had balanced her with my other forearm and hand.

Meanwhile, Lyle stood on the sidewalk, reorganizing his key ring.

I felt myself start to grit my teeth. Same old thing, only in a more picturesque location.