Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me (14 page)

It happened thus: Lyle and I were elbowing our way through a particularly crowded part of the market. It was a long covered aisle flanked on either side by merchants selling flowers, T-shirts, earrings, wind chimes, etc. Lyle mumbled something about wanting to check out something, then lost himself in the crowd. I was left there, in the middle of a crush of shoppers, with Stella, who occasionally reached out from her stroller and took a swipe at something colorful and, inevitably, breakable; Stella's two-ton diaper bag, which, as mentioned above, kept slipping off my shoulder, and Stella's cheap stroller, stricken recently with the wobbly-wheel disease that normally victimizes shopping carts. In addition, I was having my period and in dire need of a rest room with a handicapped stall so that I could take Stella and her disabled stroller in with me. It was also, lest you forget, 102 degrees.

When I finally negotiated my way through the crowd, stopping every so often to distract Stella with a toy from her bag so that I might extract from her sweet, iron grip a beaded bracelet
or crystal unicorn she'd dragged from its display, I realized that I needed a bathroom
now,
and that any bathroom would have to do, and found a public one, crowded, with no handicapped stalls.

I was forced to leave Stella outside my stall.

Until you have a child, the world of your nightmares isn't fully furnished. Anxiety manifests itself in those I-was-the-only-one-naked-at-the-party dreams, in those dreams where there is a final exam and you are unprepared. Once you have a child, your worst nightmare becomes leaving her in a public place, then turning around to find her gone. You never again dream of being naked at a party; in fact, the idea of being at a party, any party, naked or not, seems the stuff of lovely, voluptuous daydreams.

I went into the stall, and when I came out Stella and her stroller were gone.

For the first time since I first stood up after having given birth, I felt as if all my organs were going to spill out of me. Someone had taken Stella. I knew it as sure as I was standing there. A mother's intuition. I felt my throat close. This was going to be that famous moment, the moment all parents who have lost their children speak of, the moment after which nothing is the same.

On the wall beside the row of sinks was a paper-towel dispenser, beside which stood a short, round woman in a billowy blue-and-green muumuu, drying her hands. When she moved aside, I saw that someone had moved Stella's stroller into the space between the sink and the wall. Stella sat there, nonplussed, sucking her thumb, stroking her cheek with the old T-shirt of Lyle's she'd adopted as a blankie.

Someone had simply moved her there to get her out of the way.

I went to her, knelt down on the old white tile, tried to pull her to me even though she was still strapped to her stroller. My hands were shaking. I couldn't undo the strap, so I just wrapped my arms around the back of the stroller, hugging her to my chest, that large tender head between my breasts. She allowed me to do
this, didn't squawk or screech, suffering my love without complaint.

Minutes later, outside, I found Lyle and told him what had happened. How, when I saw she was gone I thought my banging heart was going to bruise itself beyond repair. How, seconds later, really it was only a matter of seconds, Fate decided not to deliver the worst life has to offer a mother.

Lyle has a slow burn, which he stokes by the habit of cleaning his glasses. First he goes
hah! hah!
on one lens, then the other, then hauls out his shirttail—the same wayward shirttail that first enchanted me—and rubs hard enough to start a fire. “I can't believe you left her. Anyone could have taken her.”

“Lyle, I had to go to the bathroom.”

“You couldn't have waited? That is stupid. That is really, really stupid.”

“No, as a matter of fact I couldn't wait. I had to change my tampon, if you must know.”

“God, is that stupid. That is
stupid,
Brooke.
Stupid.
What kind of a—” he stopped. He put his glasses back on.

“What kind of a mother am I? Is that what you were about to say?”

“No,” he said. “Yes,” he said. “What kind of a mother are you?! Anyone could have taken her. Just walked right out and be long gone.” At that moment Lyle did something he'd never done without my asking him to. He bent down, unhooked the safety strap and lifted Stella to his shoulder. By the curve of her cheek I could tell she was smiling out at the world. “I trust her with you. Or I did.”

I was ready to let him have it, fling words I knew I'd regret, but his eyes were tearing. He was starting to cry. Now this was interesting. I stared.

“If you're so upset, and obviously you're upset, why don't you take more interest in her? Why all the fuss about her diapers?”

“I do take care of her.”

“When. Name three times. Name once.”

“I did when she was four weeks old.”

“Oh, God, I'm going to hear about this for the rest of my life. Look, Lyle, nothing happened that night with Lightning Rod, although I'm sure you'll think whatever you want to think. I let you think something had gone on because you were pissing me off. I'm sick of doing this all by myself.” I wrestled Stella from him—using the child as a prop in an adult argument, something I swore I would never do—and left him burdened with the stroller, which, without Stella in it, seemed a pointless nuisance.

10.

THE GAME WAS THE SECOND-TO-THE-LAST HOME GAME
of the season, Blazers versus one of those expansion teams named with a non-count noun, i.e., the Heat, the Magic. This has always bothered me. A person cannot be a Heat. Once, I felt compelled to write the NBA and tell them I thought they should feel more of a custodianship for the English language and stick to count nouns, i.e., Warriors, Blazers, Cavaliers.

They sent me a chipped mug thanking me for my attention to this matter.

Unexpectedly, Mary Rose had been given a pair of tickets by a client. It was the happiest I'd seen her since Thanksgiving, when I'd found out she was pregnant. The tickets were not only to the game, but also to the pregame buffet, hosted by the franchise for the team sponsors. Held in the vast basement of the arena, it featured an astonishing array of high-grade dorm food, including a Pontiac-sized white sheet cake urging the team to Ruin the Magic, and a fatty shank of prime rib on a spit carved by an unsmiling chef in a deflated toque.

“What am I going to do? Can you believe this? It's unbelievable. Sometimes I just flat out don't believe it,” said Mary Rose. We sat down with our plates. The room was decorated with four big-screen TVs, providing a direct feed to the action upstairs. Currently, that was three ten-year-old boys in team colors pushing dust mops across the floor. I watched them, preoccupied.

Stella was home with Lyle. It was typical post-fighting
behavior. For a week or so he would try to prove that he was as good a father as I was a mother. Read: He would occasionally offer to baby-sit. I had visions of him cybering with Lil Plum while Stella tumbled down the basement stairs in her walker.

“It's the Barons, Mary Rose. Believe it.”

“I do believe it,” she snorted. “How can Ward
do
it is what I'm saying.”

“The Barons are the kind of people who keep legal counsel around like other people keep candles in their junk drawer.”

“Meaning what?”

“You and I may think it's serious, but Ward's probably just letting you know the only way he knows how that he's in this, too. Not to get any funny ideas. About, say, taking the baby away or something.”

“I'm not taking her away. He knows I'm not taking her away.”

“This is how the rich operate. They're just showing you their muscles.”

“They just want to reduce me to nothing. They'd prefer it if the baby didn't have a mother, if she could be composed of forty-six perfect Baron chromosomes. Do you know how much I had to pay to retain a lawyer? Three thousand dollars! They're supposed to be so concerned for the welfare of this child. I had to cash in some of my mutual funds.”

“Mary Rose,” I said. “How can I tell you this? They've called me as a witness. I had to tell you. I don't want you to worry, but I had to tell you. There won't be a hearing until after the baby is born. By then it'll probably all blow over. Maybe you'll have even patched things up with Ward.”

She just stared at me. There were circles under her eyes.

The process server had arrived at my house at 7:20 the morning before. Mornings are not uneventful at our house. There was an “
FBI
! Open up!” kind of rap on our front door.

I was startled. Stella was desultorily nursing, eyes on the TV, reaching for a Teletubbie, her hand opening and closing like a cartoon starfish scooting across the ocean floor. She was bored,
but when I leaped at the sound of the door, she clutched at the lapels of my bathrobe.

Rap! Rap! Rap! What
to do? Unceremoniously unhook her, giving her more material for her eventual psychotherapy, or race to the door, bent over, baby held to my ribs, knees bent, like a participant in one of those wacky races popular at company picnics? Stella weighed more than twenty pounds. In the end I unhooked her and left her in front of the tube, where she sat, curiously untroubled, fingering the ear of a stuffed mouse.

The subpoena said I should be prepared to be called to the witness stand after the birth of Mary Rose's baby.

Now I could feel Mary Rose's gaze boring into the top of my head as I nervously separated my vegetable medley into oranges and greens. “Why didn't you tell me before?”

“It just happened yesterday.”

“A witness to what? What are you supposed to be a witness to?”

“I don't know.”

“You're not going to do it, are you?”

“I have to. Otherwise it's contempt of court or something.”

Mary Rose stared at something over my shoulder. She plucked at her hair.

“Your hair looks great, ‘Chic.'” I said. It sounded hollow and lame.

Mary Rose pushed away her plate.

“When I was about seven I told my mother I never wanted to have a baby, and she said, ‘Why? It's the most wonderful experience you'll ever have.' And I said, ‘Because when I get really fat I won't be able to run.' And she said, ‘You won't want to run, you'll want to stay put.' And I said, ‘What if someone's chasing me?' And she said, ‘That's what your husband's for, honey.' Is that the stupidest thing you've ever heard? Someone's chasing
me
and he's going to run? What she should have said is that my husband, or in this case my baby's father, would be the one chasing me.”

Although Mary Rose was irritated with me, there was no
question that we would leave the game. In our city people stay in hostile marriages rather than suffer the agony of deciding what to do with their season tickets.

Our seats were high and situated so that we had a nice view of the bench players' bald spots.

“Look, there's the Comet,” I said. “I think they should have just left it Derik. It always reminds me of something else, un-basketball-related.” The Comet was Derik Crashaw's new nickname; he was the best sixth man the Blazers had had in a decade, which apparently warranted the name change. Like a comet, he shot in off the bench, destroyed the opposing team's defense, then disappeared (i.e., was rotated back out). Since I'd last seen him (in person, anyway, we saw him on TV all the time), he'd gotten something big and swirling tattooed on his arm.

“It reminds you of reindeers,” said Mary Rose. “On Comet, on Cupid—is it Cupid?—on Donner …” She lost interest in her own joke.

The rows were so close together that when Mary Rose cheered she hit the back of the man's head in front of her. Eventually he moved. Where, I have no idea, since, as I said earlier, home games for the past twelve years have allegedly been sold out.

I am not a cheerer. I'll applaud, sure, but do they really need to be told to play defense and watch for the open man? The men around us apparently thought they did. They screamed until they foamed at the mouth. We were down by fourteen after the first quarter, not the worst thing for our team, who only functions well under nearly impossible conditions. I bought a bag of peanuts from a passing vendor and tried to think whether I'd remembered to put in my nursing pads.

Hanging above us were a half-dozen scoreboards whose sole existence was to offer corporations willing to donate money to the organization a chance to advertise. There was the Budweiser Hustle board, the Dutch Boy Points in the Paint board. Hanging over center court was the Amerivision board, the main scoreboard
and giant-screen TV where you could catch the instant replays and where, during time-outs, dedicated fans who'd brought homemade signs could see their own hopeful mugs beneath their often misspelled urgings.

For Mary Rose and me the most arresting sight during a timeout at the beginning of the second quarter was a boy, his face painted half black, half red, holding up a sign that said: WERE #1! One row down and two people over sat Ward Baron in his big leather jacket, his long legs crossed, his arm around a thin woman with a lot of wavy brown hair, struggling not to lose the chocolate coating off her ice cream bar.

“Is that …?” Mary Rose gasped.

Ward, noticing himself on camera, cracked a grin and flashed a peace sign.

“What's he doing here? And who's that he's with?”

Oh, dear. I knew. From a picture I'd seen once somewhere. In a silver frame on the Barons' grand piano? I couldn't remember. But I knew.

“I think it might be … now, I'm not sure, I've only seen pictures so I can't say for sure.”

Mary Rose gripped the armrests on either side of her and launched herself from her seat. Our neighbors happily leapt to their feet, relieved that this woman was taking her pregnancy and risk of imminent delivery elsewhere.

For me, they were not so kind. I bumbled over their knees, stepping on toes and coats and a handbag in which I heard the distinct crunch of broken glass. Somehow I knew Mary Rose was not possessed with a sudden urge for a souvenir program.

Ward and Lynne's seats were across the arena, much better than ours. Yes, it was Lynne Baron, estranged wife of Ward, trainer of Seeing Eye dogs, visiting our city to talk about her marriage with her husband, who suddenly thought he might want a divorce.

I chased the stampeding Mary Rose out through the doors opening onto the concourse and around to the other side of the
arena. She was running, but I could only bring myself to walk quickly. I was not about to make a scene.

Mary Rose flung open the door leading to the O section and disappeared.

Lynne and Ward were about twenty rows off the floor, behind the visiting bench. The Baron season tickets. Lynne sat on the aisle, Ward beside her. Lynne was pretty, with the kind of thick hair you can't buy, a cleft chin, grape-green eyes. Her hands were folded in her lap.

“I'd like to have a word, please,” said Mary Rose.

“My God, Mary Rose.” Ward sat forward in his seat. He hid his shock by throwing a grin up on his mouth, the same way a person caught naked grabs the nearest article of clothing.

Lynne looked over with mild interest, as if Mary Rose were just some friend of the family, no one of concern. It was clear that Ward had told his wife nothing. She reached up and put her hand on her husband's leather-jacketed shoulder. A cautionary hand, I thought. I saw she still wore a gold band.

“Please,” Mary Rose said. “Ward, please.”

“I, uh, I can't right now, Mary Rose.”

There is a gesture that only the likes of Ward Baron can make. The hand is relaxed but not limp, held level with the shoulder. There is a slight flick of the wrist, the forefinger leading ever so slightly. The universal gesture of dismissal it is, bred into potentates and dukes, czars and American men of a certain color and class. Ward did not even know he knew it.

Mary Rose grabbed him by the collar of his leather jacket and hauled him over Lynne's scrawny lap and into the aisle. “What was
that?
You don't do that to me. You don't brush me off like I'm some, some—”

She dragged him into the aisle, big hands still clinging to his collar in a way that brought to mind the way you might hang on to the reins of a bolting horse. The fans around us clucked a little, but it was too much to ask of them to divide their attention between domestic drama and a little run the Blazers got going
right before the half. There were a few
heys!
and a
look out!,
but no one really heard anything over the blare of the music during a time-out and the announcer's ear-splitting blather.

Then Ward shoved Mary Rose. Later he would say he was only trying to get her to let go of his collar. She was pinching the skin of his neck, he claimed. The shove sent her landing smack on her butt, but as she went down, I saw her hit her belly against the armrest of the seat on the aisle.

Between me and the drama stood a vendor. “Just a minute there!” he said.

It was the same vendor from whom I'd bought my peanuts earlier in the game. He sold small red-and-white-striped bags of old popcorn. A curtain of foot-long red licorice SuperRopes hung from the front of his metal box.

Mary Rose reached back to break her fall and found herself grabbing a handful of licorice. They were encased in thin tubes of brittle plastic wrap. They crackled in her fist. She held four or five. She brought her fist around and began whacking Ward around the head and shoulders. A cat-o'-five-tails.

This is amazing, I know, but check any highlight reel for the season and you will see it. TV adds ten pounds. Mary Rose looked so stupendously pregnant that it seemed impossible she was not carrying a full-grown teenager. Ward cowered. He covered his face with his hands, shiny with pinkish scales of his eczema.

Lynne stood up and said, “Ward! Stop! Now!” as if she was reprimanding one of her dogs.

Someone on the other side of the aisle said, “She's having her baby.”

“She's losing her baby,” I thought. All this conveniently videotaped evidence.

Have I mentioned this game was televised?