Accidentally on Purpose

by Mary F. Pols

  MATT AND I HAD WALKED only about one hundred yards beyond the Mt. Tam ranger station before Dolan started crying. It was overcast and chilly along the Marin coastline, and he was wearing a fleece hat that was about as tall as he was long. He looked like a really pissed-off court jester. Matt turned back to look at us. “Should we stop?”

  I shook him off. “I’ll nurse while we walk,” I said, unsnapping the baby Bjorn and starting to reach up under my sweater. “We’ll see if I can get him to sleep that way. If not, you can carry him until he falls asleep.”

  “I’ve got the pacifier,” he said, holding it up. One of the dads we knew had told Matt that his primary function as a parent in the first six months would be to keep track of the pacifier. Matt had been very dutiful about that so far, but every time we put it in the baby’s mouth, Dolan let it drop out again. I was fine with that. After my thumb-sucker experience, it would suit me if my child just skipped the oral stage entirely.

  We entered the woods. The mist was so heavy it dripped off the leaves. Matt turned up his collar. I watched appreciatively as his long legs covered the ground. Some people can drive you crazy on a hike. I have one friend who has a peculiar habit of walking at a slight angle across my forward path. She’s like a trucker butting into your lane on the freeway. My nephew picks up a stick and whacks every tree or bush that hangs close to the path. Adrian starts speed-walking at the thought of the beer waiting for him in the trunk of his car. Coming off a long hike with him on Mt. Whitney once, I ended up at least two miles behind him. I was so mad I barely spoke to him on the four-hour drive home.

  With Matt, even though there were always at least five things about him that irked me at any given time, I found not a single fault with him as a hiking companion. We never disputed how far to go or how fast to get there. He was eager to explore, but he wasn’t a daredevil or a show-off. When he was at my house he frequently whined about being tired, to the point where I sometimes wondered if he suffered from depression, but on the trail he never complained.

  As we left the woods and headed out on a grassy path that curved around the steep hillside, I wrestled Dolan back into the baby Bjorn. He was asleep now and barely stirred as I snapped him into it. “Do you have that blanket?” I asked. “I want to wrap it around him.”

  “How far do you want to go?” he asked as he handed it over.

  “I feel pretty good,” I said. This was my first attempt at exercise since the C-section. “I’d love to make it down into the enchanted broccoli forest part of the trail.”

  “Enchanted broccoli forest?” he said, looking at me blankly.

  Of course Matt, with his limited exposure to all things green and leafy, didn’t get the reference. I didn’t even like vegetarian cooking, but Mollie Katzen’s The Enchanted Broccoli Forest was ubiquitous in every shared household I’d lived in or visited in the nineties.

  “The trees,” I said. “They look like broccoli. Kind of short and then really bushy at the top. Forget about it. Haven’t you ever been out on this trail?”

  “Nope,” he said. “Aside from those other hikes we did in Marin when you were pregnant, I haven’t been out anywhere up here.”

  “Three years you’ve lived in San Francisco and you’ve never been out on Mt. Tam?” I asked.

  “Not having a car, it’s hard,” Matt said. “None of my friends are into this kind of thing. I used to ask, but they never wanted to go.”

  When I was thirty, I had a car and my friends and I were out exploring California every weekend. I’d cross-country skied at Tahoe, camped in Yosemite, and done mushrooms on a full-moon hike through Joshua Tree. I had exactly the kind of youth I had wanted, short of sharing it with a soul mate (whatever that was). I was torn between feeling sorry for Matt for all that he hadn’t had and frustrated by his own lack of initiative. He simply waited for things to happen to him, and I wondered: if I hadn’t come along on that June night, would he still be unemployed, living off his parents, and killing time at Finnegan’s Wake?

  We stopped at a rocky vista point to take a few foggy pictures of each other against the mountainside. Then I handed Dolan over to Matt to carry, helping him adjust the straps of the Bjorn. “Not bad,” he said. “I always thought guys looked so stupid in these. But it’s kind of nice having him up against my chest.”

  “He’s pretty snuggly,” I said. “Especially when he’s not howling.”

  I remembered Matt telling me, after his trip east at Christmastime, how his friends with a newborn had handed the baby to him and how uncomfortable he’d felt. “It was weird,” he’d said, sounding disgruntled to have been tested so. “I didn’t know what to do with him. And he cried.”

  I’d said at the time, “I’m sure it’s different when the baby is your own,” but inside I’d felt a stab of panic. What if he wasn’t capable? Now such doubts seemed absurd; he could be clueless about most practical matters, but his natural parenting instincts were solid. One night very soon after Dolan was born, when I was desperate for sleep, I had told Matt to take him out for a walk. Cool night air was supposed to help babies sleep. “Just fifteen minutes,” I said. “If I even slept for fifteen minutes, I’d be more sane.” I buried my head in the pillows and listened to Dolan’s cry recede into the night, thinking, I should have told Matt to dress him for an outing. Then I went to sleep. I woke up to the sound of the cry coming back up the block. I stumbled out of my room and found Matt in the living room. He’d wheeled the stroller right into the apartment and was bent over the baby, unstrapping him. Dolan was wearing a hat and a coat and was swaddled in blankets. “You remembered,” I’d said stupidly, thick and slow with my exhaustion. “Of course,” he’d said.

  I made Matt pose under the trees with the Bjorn on and took a bunch of shots to send to his mother and father. They’d have to like those. And Dolan would like them someday too. His very first hike, during which he’d gone a good six miles with only minimal complaining.

  “We’ll have to bring him back when he’s older,” Matt said as we strode down the path toward the car.

  When the future came up, at peaceful moments like these, I felt jarred, the way you do after a minor earthquake in California, one so small it doesn’t even shake a dish off a shelf, but it reminds you that fault lines are everywhere, under your feet. Our future was so ambiguous. I had no idea if we’d be taking family hikes together in a few years. We could both be married to other people by then. Or one of us might be married and the other might be resentful. There were so many possibilities, all of which made me nervous.

  “Listen,” I said from behind him. “I’ve been thinking we need a rule for dating.”

  “What kind of rule?” he said, with evident trepidation.

  “I’m not planning on dating anyone anytime soon,” I said. “But when it happens, I think we need to agree to tell each other about it once it becomes serious enough to mean we’d want to introduce that person to Dolan.”

  “Okaaaay,” he said, still uncertain.

  “Then, if you’re still seeing that person six months after the notification, then an introduction is permitted.” He kept walking. “Wait, would you stop?”

  He obliged, but didn’t look at me, choosing instead to adjust Dolan’s hat.

  “Does that seem reasonable to you?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “I just don’t want a lot of random people traipsing through Dolan’s life,” I said.

  Now he looked up at me, his green eyes serious. “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Neither would I,” I said.

  We continued on down the path, with me feeling vaguely unsatisfied with the conversation, but glad at least I’d got it on the record books. Later, though, when I loaded all the digital photos from Mt. Tam onto the computer, what struck me was how similar Matt’s and my expressions were in the shots where we were holding Dolan. We looked like the people in that other emotional landscape, the one that Sam had made me think I wouldn’t be privy to. Blissful. We both looked as
though we were in love. Except not with each other, but with the baby. I knew I was going to keep being neurotic about the future—I couldn’t help that—but we did have common ground. And values. That was a good start.

  That’s not to say I didn’t still feel inappropriately, freakishly jealous. The next weekend, when he went to play softball, I went with him. I made him point out that girl to me. I shot daggers at her until she skulked to the far end of the stands. Then when Dolan let loose with an enormous poop, I put him down in front of the whole team, called Matt over, handed him the wipes, and made sure she saw us changing the vile diaper together. We might be a fucked-up version of a nuclear family, but nonetheless, that’s what we were: family.

  BENET SENT AN E-MAIL in the first week of May with the subject heading “Sperminator.” When I opened it up, all it said was “I am.” No way, I thought. Not another one already. His daughter Julia wasn’t even two yet; Isabella was about to turn four. Was he going to have a third kid? I called him. “Yep,” he said. “Wow,” I said.

  My father went into action immediately. He wanted to sell our family house to Benet and Beth. They’d need more space than they had in their cramped old brick house in the next town over. He was ready to move into a retirement community, only a few blocks away. Conveniently, he’d just managed to get my mother into the dementia wing there, so he no longer had to drive eight miles to visit her every day.

  But he wanted our approval first.

  “Just in case you yourself had some interest in ending up in the family homestead,” he said on the phone.

  “It’s not that I wouldn’t love living there,” I said. I had sometimes had that fantasy. But that dream had nothing to do with the new reality. “But I certainly can’t see it now. Careerwise. And I don’t know that I could take Dolan so far away from his father.”

  “Well, I hope you’re not going to be too beholden to that young man’s choices of where to live,” my father said. “You aren’t married, after all.”

  “No,” I said, not wanting to get into my complicated feelings. I wanted to be free to do whatever the hell I wanted. But my priority was Dolan, who deserved to be near his father. “I love the thought of Benet raising his family in the house,” I continued. “But Dad, are you ready to move into some apartment? Aren’t you going to go crazy in a retirement community? You can’t stand socializing.”

  “I didn’t say I was going to socialize,” he said. “I’m just going to live there. And it’s quite a civilized place. I won’t take all my meals there, but the dining room is very good.”

  “Well, if you’re really okay with it,” I said.

  “I am,” he said. “I’m weary of all the upkeep.”

  “So when I bring Dolan home to visit you all this summer, will I still be able to stay at the house?” I asked.

  “You’ll have to ask Benet, but I don’t imagine he’d turn you away,” he said. “But to be clear, it will be his house. I know that may be strange for some of you.”

  “Better than it being some stranger’s house someday,” I said grimly. “You’re not getting any younger.”

  “I’m getting quite ancient,” he said. “But I’m in good health. Except for this aggravating hernia. I did tell you about that, didn’t I?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I thought you were going to have it fixed soon.”

  “My doctor wants to do some blood work first,” he said. “To make sure I’ll be okay with the general anesthesia. I was a bit gripey last week so we put it off for week.”

  My father was the only person I knew in the world who used the term “gripey” in place of diarrhea. He was like the fussy old Victorian bachelor in Trollope novels. Except with six kids.

  “I hope you’re taking care of yourself,” I said. “You were such a bag of bones last summer. Are you still so skinny?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I do miss you, though, my dear. And I’m eager to meet my namesake.”

  I promised to bring Dolan in August and signed off. The idea of home not being home anymore was unsettling. It was the only house I’d ever lived in as a child, other than the sabbatical years we had had in Europe. I always thought of wherever I lived in California as “my place.” My true home had always been the white house on Columbia Avenue, with the black shutters and row of hemlocks out front. Would Benet want us to stay there at Christmas, or would that be too much for him and Beth to take on?

  But at forty, wasn’t it silly to be anxious about such things? Your childhood home was what you hung on to until your own life began in earnest, until you created your own home. I looked around at the Alameda apartment. It did seem like a temporary stop. But I couldn’t deny that my life had begun. Finally.

  EVERYONE WHO CAME to see us told me that I was lucky, that Dolan was a breeze compared with a lot of babies. At first I had been dubious. One day I’d taken him up to Kir’s house, and he’d literally cried for forty-three straight minutes on the drive, practically the whole way from Alameda to northern Marin. I’d wondered whether I should get off the freeway and nurse him, but I’d fed him right before I’d left the house. I eyed him nervously in the rearview mirror. The reflection was not pretty. His face was red, his eyes looked mad, and he was exhaling a steady stream of irate howls. They slowed only when he had to catch his breath.

  A few days later, Sara stopped by for a visit.

  “Sometimes he seems so angry,” I said to her. “Really furious. I worry that he’s an angry baby.”

  Dolan was lying on the changing table, blinking up at us angelically. He was doing what your car does when you bring it into the mechanic: refusing to misbehave in front of someone who might actually know how to fix it. I felt as though I was asking Sara to listen for some rattle that wasn’t going to start up again until I was on the freeway home.

  She laughed. “He’s perfect, Mary.” She was changing his diaper—gently, carefully, and so much more efficiently than I did. She cooed at him, and he answered her with a soft, cheerful noise. “Look how sweet he is.”

  “But he cried about nothing on the way to Kir’s,” I said. “He was fed and changed and cozy and still he cried.”

  “He’s just freaked out by being in the world,” she said. “Think how nice it was for him in there, all warm and content. He didn’t have to work for his food or do anything. Being out here is a major adjustment.”

  As for me, I hadn’t been out in the world by myself since he’d been born. I’d had this expectation that motherhood would be something I’d need to escape from on a regular basis—like the friend who went out into the garage to do bong hits—but that wasn’t the case. When I did finally go out by myself, around the time Dolan was eight weeks old, I felt strangely naked without him, as if I’d forgotten my purse. And my bra. And my shoes.

  The occasion was the wedding of an old friend from Maine. The last time I’d seen him, we’d been commiserating over the perils of online dating. While I’d gotten pregnant, he’d soldiered on and made a match with a divorced mom with a young son. I made a mental note of that. It was good to be reminded that single moms still got laid and found love.

  I didn’t expect to see Nancy at the wedding. I’d practically forgotten she existed; she felt like a person from an entirely different life I’d led. A skinny Canadian with a thing for horses, she was one of those six-degrees-of-separation people. Not only had she been Benet’s roommate in Washington, D.C., for a brief time, she’d also been mine. Our original common link was the bridegroom, but Nancy was also the person who had set me up with Peter. They had gone to college together.

  At dinner, we were seated next to each other. I was wearing a loose-fitting top and had wedged myself into a pre-pregnancy skirt. After having been so eager to shed my capacious maternity clothes two months before, now I missed them.

  “So, Mary,” she said. “What have you been up to for the last fifteen years?”

  Her Canadian accent always sounded slightly British, and her tone naturally veered toward the condescending
.

  “Mostly journalism,” I said. “A lot of journalism. And I just had a baby.”

  “Oh!” Nancy said. “I had rather wondered. You always used to keep yourself so slim. I thought you must either be pregnant or have recently had a child.”

  Nice. I agreed that I was fat, although this was an overstatement. Of the thirty-five pounds I’d gained during the pregnancy, twenty had vanished right away. The other fifteen had not melted off during breast-feeding, the way so many relentlessly cheery veteran moms had promised me. That hadn’t bothered me until now, but suddenly, out in the world again and facing down a part of my past, I felt fragile. All it took was a reminder of how I had once been a woman in control—a woman who kept herself so slim—to make me feel as though my life was now totally out of control. Because, as soon as I put it out there that I’d just had a baby, all the other old friends at the table wanted to know all about my husband, and I had to come clean about my lack of one, trying to joke my way through it. None of my jokes seemed funny, though. I thought I’d come to terms with the situation, but with Nancy next to me, I wished I had a slightly happier ending to crow about. I hated to think of her telling Peter: “I saw your old girlfriend Mary in San Francisco—looking quite plump—and she still seems to be having trouble finding someone who wants to be with her.”

  I wanted to be cool enough not to ask about him. I made it until near the end of the salad course before I brought him up. I had to. I hadn’t heard a word about him in a good ten years.

  “Oh, he’s doing wonderfully well,” she said, forking up a tomato wedge and a big leaf of radicchio. “He went to business school, you know.”

  I never would have pictured him at business school. It didn’t quite fit with the holier-than-thou, save-the-world intellectual I’d been tortured by.