Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me (19 page)

Officer Splevak, whose poly-blend slacks pulled at the back of his pumped-up thighs, asked Mary Rose to reenact what happened. Mary Rose showed how she reached for her weapon behind the orange-crate nightstand, then held the gun on Dicky until he turned his back on her and started to leave.

“Did he really think this would work?” Mary Rose asked again and again. “How could he think this would work?”

The officers pretended not to hear her, which I thought was verging on inhumane. They muttered between themselves. Officer Evans was a woman, and therefore the scribe. She dutifully wrote down Mary Rose's version of events, then scraped some of the blood from the floorboard. There was very little. I was surprised. Mary Rose was grateful. Somehow the fact of there being relatively little to clean up meant that she would not have to move.

Officer Evans saw me take
Mary Ellen's Helpful Hints
from my bag and said, “White vinegar should do the trick.”

It did.

I pleaded with Mary Rose to stay with us for a few nights, but she refused. When I drove off she was standing on her deck, one foot up on her wooden planter boxes, beautiful Patricia plunked on her hip, looking like a pioneer.

I arrived home from Mary Rose's apartment to find a message from Dicky on my answering machine. He was in the hospital and he wanted to see me.

He was alone in his room, chuckling at something on
MTV
.
He, or someone, had combed his thinning blond hair. An IV drip was taped to the back of his fat hand.

Dicky never really looked much like Nick Nolte, despite the now ancient rantings of the Associated Press. He was square and blond with light close-set eyes, but there was never anything about him that suggested he could battle evil or win anyone's heart. Still, against the toothpaste-colored sheets of his hospital bed, Dicky looked tanned and … the word I keep wanting to write is
content.
It was eerie. He was animated in the way people are when they've survived a great disaster.

Dicky's wound was not, apparently, very serious. Or rather, it was serious, but in an unusual way. Mary Rose shot him in the upper portion of his butt. The bullet had missed all his major organs, and, due to either the small caliber of the bullet, or the dampness of the powder, had not quite reached his spine, but rather sat, according to the X-rays, within centimeters of it, pressing on the subdural mater that surrounds the dura, the tough but precious stuff that makes up the spinal cord and brain. Removing the bullet was out of the question. The most experienced neurosurgeon wielding the finest instruments might incur permanent damage working that close to the spine.

I stood as far away from him as I could and still be in the room. “What is this all about?”

“This is even better than I ever imagined. Don't you think? I wasn't going to hurt it anyway. What's its name? The baby? Then, BOOM, she blows me away.”

It didn't seem appropriate to point out that had he been truly blown away, he would hardly be lying there channel-surfing. I said nothing.

“I was doing it for my brother. Just because Ward isn't the real father doesn't mean he isn't the true father. He wanted it more than Mary Rose did. I know. I lived downstairs from her. All she did was hold her back and complain, complain, complain. I was being heroic.”

“She said you were going for the kidnapping-the-famous-athlete's-child angle.”

“That was another idea I had. Right there, working in the moment. Isn't it a gas working in a creative medium? I just thought of it, just like that, when I saw she was going to plug me. But now that I have been shot, do you think there's anything in this? That we could sell. Story rights. It seems like a good hook. It could be a part of
As I Lay Down the Dagger.
Here I am, trying to live a quiet life, a post-fame life, minding my own business, but my brother, who's always wanted a kid is denied at the last minute. Denied, humiliated. And I think, This isn't
right.
The real mother doesn't want the kid, the real father really doesn't want the kid, and here's my brother, hurting. It's kind of wild, huh? Kind of Dostoyevskian, huh? And brother movies are very big this year.”

I looked at him and said nothing. I don't think I'd ever seen him this happy, his big cheeks hiked up around his little eyes in a delirious grin. My feet trembled. My ears were cold. Toxic digestive acids powerful enough to eat through an I-beam sloshed around my stomach.

Presently, Audra and Big Hank walked in. Only weeks before they looked like advertisements for early retirement or iron-fortified vitamins. Now Big Hank looked desiccated and bent, rather than trim and toned. Audra's face was rice-cereal pale, her auburn hair rudely bright.

“I'm glad to see you're feeling well enough to talk to reporters,” said Audra, her voice the quaking whisper of the truly seething.

I glanced at the paper she laid on Dicky's knees. Our city's major newspaper likes to liven up its front page with stories of its citizens. It dutifully covers skirmishes and economic summits above the fold. Below the fold is traditionally reserved for preteen entrepreneurs who earn money for college selling silk-screened T-shirts or, in this case, the misguided behavior of our city's first families.

I scanned the story. There was no comment from Derik, who was in San Antonio.

“Words fail me,” said Audra.

Dicky nodded his head. “Okay, we can work with that. Brooke, are you writing this down?”

Audra rolled her eyes heavenward. Tears tipped out of her eyes and onto her cheeks. She whispered: “I can't believe you came out of me.”

“Aw, Ma,” said Dicky. “You're so dramatic.”

An intern appeared at the door. He grinned beneath a ginger-orange moustache. He obviously knew this was not just another body in a bed.

Before asking us to excuse him, the intern checked the time, drawing from his pocket a large tarnished silver watch. Big Hank, who had been standing beside Dicky's bed, as inert and pained as a schoolboy in church, perked right up.

“Say, is that an old Elgin you've got there?”

Audra could not contain herself. Decorum may have prevented her thwacking her injured son up the side of his head, but this was too much.

“Hank, goddammit. This is your son here.”

Hank looked up from the watch cradled between his thumbs. His perturbed expression beneath his blond brows said, “Oh?”

15.

WE HAVE AN ALCOVE OFF OUR KITCHEN THAT I HAD USED
as an office while I was pregnant with Stella. One day, several weeks after the business with Dicky, I came home from Donleavy's to find Lyle in the alcove, blowing dust from the keyboard of the computer. The monitor sat on the small table. He plugged it in.

“Uh-oh, what's wrong with the basement?” I set the groceries on the counter. I had visions of flooding, infestation, one too many dog farts.

A white plastic bag sat on the chair. From it he pulled a mouse pad.

“Witty pop cultural reference.” He displayed the pad as if he was standing before a large audience eager to see: on it was a picture of Mickey Mouse. He passed it to Stella, who was sitting on the kitchen floor amid her favorite pots and pans. She stared at the mouse pad, waved it in the air like she was waving at Daddy.

“Come watch while we unlock the wonder pony and hitch a ride on the magical carousel.”

He scooped up Stella and propped her on his thigh in front of the monitor. She did not want to let go of the mouse pad. He booted up, and the computer went through its bumps and grinds.

“What about Realm of the Elf?” I said.

He snorted. “Do you know what they're doing now? In the Realm? They've added some features. Now you can buy a house and get married.”

“I thought elves lived in old tree stumps or something.”

“Yeah, well they did. None of my buddies want to go out and fight monsters anymore. They all meet in the town square and talk about their crummy water pressure. I can do that in real life. In fact, I can do better in real life. We have inch-and-a-half pipes in this house.”

Goofy music filled the kitchen. A character named Reader Rabbit and his buddy Mat the Mouse appeared with a cartoon pop and yattered on about guiding us to the musical meadow. Stella pointed and said something that sounded like
ebullient.
She bounced herself up and down on Lyle's leg. He put her hand on the mouse and clicked it. She laughed, wanted to click it again.

“I have to say, this is a lot more fun now that she's a little older.”

“I've heard about this. The second a kid gets out of diapers the Dad suddenly realizes there was actually a human being sitting in all that shit.”

Lyle gave me a hurt look.

“Sorry,” I said, “that was a little … emphatic. So, anyway, what will you do with yourself? I mean, I presume what you're telling me is that you're giving up on your elf.”

“I thought I'd do some painting.”

“Pictures?”

“No, the bathroom. For starters.”

I put my hands on my thighs and stood up. It was the first time in two years that I was wearing zip-up pants. A pair of inky blue jeans made of stiff, high-quality denim. Elastic waistbands are for the very young, the very sick, and the permanently postpartum. I wasn't quite ready to go back to work yet, but I was ready to get out my bathrobe, metaphorically speaking.

I said, “I think it's time I started making some phone calls.”

He said, “Hollywood-type phone calls?”

I said, “Something. Maybe someone's got something in production up here and needs a line producer.”

He said, “Anything I can do to help?”

I said, “Dump Lil Plum. Now.”

“Ha. Lil Plum turned out to be a fifty-two-year-old guard at a state correctional facility—it gets better—on permanent disability with a crippling case of gout.”

“Ooh, baby. Hold me back.”

I made a list of old film contacts. I called Melissa Lee Rottock, my agent, and the executive who had been in charge of producing
Romeo's Dagger
(she had left the film industry and was now selling real estate). I called the local film commission to see what was shooting in town.

That night, the three of us—four of us, including Itchy Sister, who hogs the sofa—sat down and watched the finals. The Blazers had to win this one to stay alive. Lyle made some of his killer chicken salad, with lots of pepper and dill. We fed some to Stella, her first chicken salad, and she made that face that makes us want to lie down and laugh till we suffocate. Despite the dazzling play by the Comet (twenty-one field goals, eleven rebounds), the Blazers lost, leaving us, and our city, feeling jilted once again.

SIX MONTHS LATER
we ran into Audra Baron in Puerto Vallarta. It was January, her annual month of madness, and Lyle, Stella, and I were there on one of those three-night/four-day package tours, before I began preproduction on a movie-of-the-week about mermaids. The tour was booked solid with people who wore name tags and never ate anywhere but the hotel for fear a friendly Mexican waiter would press a salad upon them. Their eventual sunburns forced them to lie in the shade of the hotel
palapas,
their arms and legs paved with white washcloths taken from their rooms. We didn't care; our fellow tourists were uncomplaining and thought Stella was the most precocious, winsome baby they'd ever seen.

Arne was the recreation director of the hotel, arranging scuba tours and horseback-riding expeditions to hidden waterfalls. He sold his packages mostly around the pool and at the swim-up bar. For his opening gambit he sidestroked up and named the
perfume you were wearing. Quite a feat, considering the amount of chlorine in the pool.

He introduced himself as Arne from America, though there was the sound of northern Europe in his voice. He was German but had grown up in Chicago. Burly and brown as a nut, he reminded me of someone. He wore his striped Speedo bikini without a trace of self-consciousness, had gold-rimmed teeth and a huge laugh, a huge scar running down his side that spoke of shark attacks and adventure. He sold Lyle and me an all-day snorkeling package off a beach accessible only by boat, nanny for Stella included.

There is a strip of sidewalk called the Malecon that runs along Puerto Vallarta's main beach, the natural destination of tourists and locals alike. Here, you could watch the food chain in action; pelicans diving for fish and Mexican teenage boys flirting expertly with their breathtaking girlfriends. Also in evidence was the slightly older version of the couple, sitting on the wrought-iron benches overlooking the sea, she pregnant, with a toddler in a frilly pink dress scampering about, he nowhere to be seen.

At the end of the Malecon there was a spray-paint artist who regularly drew a crowd. He painted singularly hideous seascapes and other-worldly sunsets, inspired by third-rate heavy-metal album covers. The templates for his futuristic planets were old jar lids and cheap plates. To dry the paintings he would spray a stream of paint parallel to the surface of the paper, then ignite it. Tricky business; also quite a show. He wore a bandanna over his nose and mouth and listened to ancient cassette tapes of Pink Floyd.

People from my tour, sharp enough to know that serapes and piñatas were not the real Mexico, thought this was it, and bought the paintings to go in the den, on the wall over their pull-out sleepers.

It was here, the last night of our vacation, I saw a woman who looked like Audra, with Arne, his jungle vine of an arm wrapped around her, his brown hand attached beneath her breast,
just so. I was not a new mother anymore. Far from it; Stella was walking, played peek-a-boo, sang to the dog. My wits were sharp. There was no mistaking my aunt, with her auburn hair and full cheeks, her nose splashed with freckles. I could tell from the way she leaned into Arne that this was no winter fling. They stood among the circle of onlookers, their faces illuminated by the sudden zot of blue fire. She wore a loose dusty-pink linen shirt tied at the waist, walking shorts, sandals.

I pulled on Lyle's sleeve. “Look, over there, who's that?”

Lyle was always quick; he was almost as good as a woman that way. He knew what I meant, knew I didn't mean look there's Audra. “Oh, jeez,” he said, “it's Dicky Baron.” For that was exactly who Arne looked like.

I walked Stella over to where Audra and Arne stood at the back of the crowd. She walked holding on to my fingers; I knew she was able to go it alone, but couldn't bear to let that happen just yet.

“Well, aren't you a magnificent little thing,” said Audra, extricating herself from Arne. He turned to a couple on the other side of them. The conversation appeared to be about bullfights. Of course Audra didn't see me yet. She was admiring Stella's blue-flowered sundress. No one ever sees the mother of a beautiful child.

“Hi, Audra,” I said.

She looked not at all surprised to see me. “I told you this was a fantastic place, didn't I?” We made the obligatory reference to the rain back home.

“How's Dicky?” I finally asked. I had to know. After Dicky had been released from the hospital last June, he'd moved back home, presumably to be taken care of by Audra.

For a time, he'd entertained a few TV movie offers, much to Audra's displeasure. Eventually, though, TV passed. The injury he sustained from the gunshot wound wasn't great enough to warrant any real interest. Which doesn't mean it wasn't great enough to cause him real suffering.

He was tried and convicted of attempted kidnapping. But since the jails of our city are horrendously overcrowded and Patricia sustained not a scratch, Dicky was given no jail time, and eighteen months probation. Judge Gardstein, who regularly golfed with and often beat Big Hank, claimed it was enough that he was going to spend the rest of his life paying for his “judgment error” as a semi-invalid.

“Dicky is fine,” said Audra. “In that Dicky could ever be fine. He sees a lot of doctors these days. They think now that the bullet may cause problems. They're saying it's not as firmly lodged as they thought. Someday it may just decide to pick up and enter his circulatory or lymphatic system. Of course, they can't remove it, either.”

“But he'll be all right? Besides the never-knowing aspect of it?” I didn't really care if he was going to be all right or not, but Audra was his mother.

“It's the story of my life. You'll think I'm superficial—you probably do anyway—but I keep thinking, this is the same problem we have with the house. The keys on the piano are going, but we can't replace them with ivory because, well, you know the story with ivory. And if we switch to plastic we ruin, in Big Hank's words, “the integrity of the instrument.” So, we just sit there, waiting for everything to collapse around our ears.” She sighed. “I got a letter from Mary Rose awhile back.”

“She told me she was going to write.”

“Telling me she wasn't sorry for what she'd done. At first I thought it was sort of, I don't know, pitiless. She wondered if I understood she had no choice. Patricia was
her
child. But, you know, Dicky is
my
child. Even now. She did apologize for calling me an interfering you-know-what. She wrote it on Mowers and Rakers letterhead, the ninny. It should have come on some nice creamy bond.”

“That's generous of you, Audra. After all that's happened.”

“Well. You'll see. Stella's still a tiny thing. It's different when they're all grown up and start ruining their own lives. You're heart-broken,
don't get me wrong, but helpless. Heartbroken and helpless as the day they're born.” She sighed, dabbed at her eyes.

We made some talk about getting together once we got home, but we haven't so far. Audra said something funny as Lyle, Stella, and I headed back to the hotel, Stella, now asleep and snoring on Lyle's shoulder. “Call me if you're ever in the motherhood.”

Sometimes when I find myself driving up the narrow, shady streets of the West Hills, I see the Mowers and Rakers truck parked in front of someone's house, and there is Mary Rose, Patricia a papoose upon her back, standing on a ladder wielding her pruners, or loping across a lawn with a bucket of compost, on her way to some far-flung vegetable garden. She has the energy of ten men, and always had. It helps, of course, that Patricia began sleeping through the night at five weeks.

Ours is the friendship of young mothers, which resembles the rhythm of a fire fighter on the job: weeks go by and we don't talk, then, suddenly, a flurry of mad phone calling when one of us finds we have a few hours free. We still have our basketball dates, but not as often. We also have the knowledge that if the other one doesn't phone right back, or has to cancel a coffee date once too often, that it's not personal, simply motherhood. We also have e-mail.

Mrs. Marsh rehired Mary Rose, as has Mrs. Ostly, and almost all the other West Hills neighbors of the Barons who'd let her go when they imagined she was too pregnant and too unmarried to be their gardener. Having the mother of a professional basketball player's child working zoo doo into their perennial beds carried with it a certain cachet. They also enjoyed being viewed as open-minded and nondiscriminatory by employing the single mother of a mixed-raced baby born out of wedlock.

Derik sees Patricia on the weekends when he's in town, just as if he's a normal noncustodial dad. Sometimes he accompanies Mary Rose on her rounds. He stands on some lawn, gently drapes the dozing Patricia over his long forearm, rocks her and rubs her back while patiently answering questions posed by this Lady of
the House, or that Captain of Finance and Industry, lured from their homes to ask what it was really like playing with Ajax Green.

Last month his contract was renewed for some obscene amount. He'll start next season. I think he just turned twenty-six.
Sports Illustrated
had a brief article on up-and-comers and named Derik as someone who was maturing nicely, “quite possibly because of the birth of his first child.” So cozy and misleading, isn't it? A harmless little remark like that in a magazine. It makes all the harmless little remarks in all magazines seem suspect, doesn't it?

Since Patricia and Stella's birthdays are only two weeks apart, Mary Rose and I held a joint birthday party in our backyard. We invited a few children from the Indoor Play Gym, the Assistant
D.A
. down the block and her son, who was now almost three, the cellist Mary Rose had met in prenatal water aerobics. She'd had a daughter, too. Miraculously, the sun shone, the lilacs were in bloom, and none of the children were contagious for strep throat, which was going around.