Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me

by Karen Karbo

  I ordered scotch on the rocks with a beer back. I drank quite a bit after Stella was born. Did then, do now. No one can use a drink as much as a new mother. Why the world is full of men drinking in bars is a mystery to me. What do men have to worry about? Money, manhood, the play-offs. The same basic things that bug them at fourteen bug them at eighty-four.

  But there you are, mother. For reasons having to do with selfishness and the cruel march of DNA, you have brought forth an innocent who will suffer and die, not to mention figure out that love fades, money can buy happiness after all, and diets don’t work.

  That’s one half. The other is what you’ve done to yourself. You realize within a week of the baby’s birth that you will be dismayed for the rest of your life, dismayed with love. Every day, all day, will be spent quivering with foreboding. You will ache with the effort of listening. For breathing, wheezing, the slam of a car door, the sounds of muffled crying. Stretch marks are nothing compared to this. You have discovered the fifth chamber of your heart, the cozy quarters where the dismay will reside until the day you die. Your child may die, it happens, but the dismay is unimpeachable.

  You will never not be a mother.

  And no one who isn’t a mother understands this, or cares, except when you do something spectacular like pick up a Volkswagen.

  “So it’s no wonder I drink,” I said. Mary Rose had eyed my scotch and beer with disapproval. She was then so far away from considering childbirth herself that she could afford to know everything.

  “I just heard it wasn’t good for the baby, that’s all,” she said, looking at the menu.

  “No, you’re right.” I didn’t want to disgust her further by confessing I had pumped a few bottles worth of milk earlier in the week in anticipation of our date.

  For this simple date—drinks, a light dinner, then a movie—I had looked forward to as eagerly as I had once anticipated a college trip to Brazil. The smells of cigarettes, perfume. The snatches of other people’s conversations. To sit quietly in a public place—look at the rows of bright bottles lined up against the mirror behind the bar!—and sip a drink. To drink the drink and eat the meal without interruption. To excuse myself and walk across the bar with my arms free, swinging at my sides. To walk into the ladies’, where I could sit on the toilet with the door closed. By myself. I could pee, or just sit there, for as long as I wanted. No one needed anything from me. I could take my time in front of the mirror, combing my hair, inspecting the circles beneath my eyes, rolling on lipstick. It was like travel to a foreign country. I felt a wave of homesickness in the form of longing for Stella. But it passed, and I was glad to be there.

  People not residing deep in the motherhood called this Life.

  Mary Rose’s Caesar salad arrived with unconscionably large pieces of romaine. She was very good at spearing them whole and tucking them into her mouth. All that raking, I suppose. I had ordered a pizza for one, topped with ingredients Lyle would scoff at: barbecued chicken and roasted red peppers.

  I did not dig in immediately, so happy was I just to sit. I twirled my ankles beneath the table, feeling them crackle. The only time I sat anymore was when I fed Stella or when I was asleep. Otherwise, I was rocking her, walking her, checking for a project and changing her, or just generally cajoling her, the latter of which seemed to require my marching around the house with my knees held very high.

  I put my elbow on the table, rested my cheek on my palm, sighed, stared. The best part of all this was being able to focus my gaze on something farther than twelve inches in front of my face. I have heard prisoners say this is one of the most wonderful things about being released; having a bona fide distance into which you can gaze. So there I was, flexing my long-distance eye muscles, or whatever.

  I swear this was all I was doing.

  What I was not doing was coming on to Lightning Rod McGrew. I may have been humming along with the background music, or maybe even doing a little lip-syncing. I talked to Stella all the time, narrating life for her as advised in countless baby books, and sometimes I got to talking aloud even when I was alone. If I was talking to myself surely Mary Rose would have said something?

  According to Lightning Rod McGrew, I was talking to him.

  Lightning Rod and Derik Crawshaw were clear across the room. I was ignoring my food, my head in my hands, gazing at him, mouthing something. I think it may have been something along the lines of “come on baby light my fire.”

  Lightning Rod was looking for company. Lightning and Derik Crawshaw. They sent over two bottles of our famous locally brewed ale.

  Mary Rose glanced up at the waiter, a flap of romaine between her lips. The waiter clutched the cold bottles between three fingers, an unwilling party to this nonsense.

  “I think you have the wrong table,” she said. “Those ‘gentlemen’ over there,” he said. He said gentlemen in quotes.

  Mary Rose sucked in her lettuce, craned around, and looked at two tall black guys in ice cream-colored shorts and polo shirts, hefty white high-tops, and white sweat socks clinging cutely to their coconut-colored ankles. Their hands were as big as our heads, their arms as thick as our legs.

  “Who are they?”

  They were obviously Somebody. By somebody I mean professional basketball players. No tall African-American male visiting our city ever seems to be anything else. I am sure there are six-foot-five African exchange students, six-foot-seven software salesmen. If there are, they are besieged with requests for autographs, questioned as to why they insist on taking the outside shot. This attests to both the limited opportunities of our little city and the many varieties of racism.

  Mary Rose turned back to me and gave me a look. Behind her, across the room, Lightning Rod hung one leg over the other and waggled his fingers at me.

  “They mean it.” The instant the sentence left my lips I thought I had said, “they mean us.”

  Mary Rose leaned back in her leather chair, crossed her bony forearms across her chest, tossed her head back, and giggled. “Us?” she whispered almost hysterically.

  It wasn’t that weird.

  They joined us.

  It was that weird. Of course it was. Lightning Rod McGrew and Derik Crawshaw were … I won’t say desperate. I will say they were in their mid-twenties, hot, bored, and tired of twirling the paper from a countless numbers of straws around their long, long fingers.

  They were feeling adventuresome, let’s put it that way. They were stuck here for two days, the purpose of their trip to discuss with the Trail Blazers the possibility of being added to the roster. Lightning Rod was a free agent, having just been freed from his duties warming the bench for the Miami Heat. Derik had been starting for a team in Italy for the past three years. We had never heard of them, which was just as well. Otherwise, we might have acted even more ridiculous than we did.

  “You was eyeing me,” said Lightning Rod as he picked up a chair from the empty table beside us and dropped it beside me. Our knees rubbed; all of our knees rubbed.

  “Eyeing you?” I said. “How do you know I wasn’t staring at that print of the duck hunters behind your head?”

  “You was looking me up and down. Like a pot of half-finished gumbo looks at a net full of fresh crab.”

  “A pot can’t look at anything.”

  “You white girls such sticklers for details. That’s what I like about you.”

  “I’m sure that’s the first quality you look for in a woman,” I said.

  “Tell this lady—what’s your name, sis?—tell this lady how I like white girls.”

  “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 perfec
tly 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 b
een 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.