Accidentally on Purpose

by Mary F. Pols

  “I don’t like strawberries,” he’d said, waving me off.

  “It has chocolate on it,” I said, not retracting the berry one inch.

  He finally took it and cautiously bit into it. I watched him. Then he nodded.

  “It’s good,” he’d said. “It doesn’t taste like strawberry candy.”

  Could it be? Had I just given the father of my child, a thirty-year-old man, his first strawberry? I’d stolen a look at Katherine, wondering what they ate in that house.

  Now, with his tearful mother at my breakfast table, I wondered, should I cut Matt free to sink or swim on his own? Everyone I knew was urging me not to engage in his problems. But I kept seeing such good qualities in Matt, glimpses that made me believe that with time and experience he could, if not outright blossom, at least be rooted in the ground. Not to offer a hand to my son’s father would ultimately be bad for Dolan. To be so harsh that I drove his father away would be worse. But I couldn’t turn into his enabler. I had to find a balance, and balances were not my specialty.

  KATHERINE LEFT, and Miles and Frances arrived two hours later. Cleaning up the house for another set of visitors, I wept with exhaustion. I might be single, but somehow I still had four quasi-in-laws to impress. And I did want to impress them all, to make them think their grandson, though he’d arrived unorthodoxly, was going to be fine. No, better than fine. Someday, he’d be eating the likes of cream of asparagus soup with an asparagus flan floating in the middle. When he had teeth, he could follow that up with crab cakes drizzled with a yellow pepper aioli. Because that is what I, insanely, decided to make for Miles and Frances for their first meal in the presence of their new grandson.

  If Matt had been happy to have his mother visit, he was beside himself over the prospect of introducing his father to his son. “This is your granddad,” he said tenderly to Dolan as he deposited the infant in Miles’s arms. Dolan lay there, sleeping, oblivious, while Miles chuckled over how little he was.

  “What are we going to have him call you?” he said to Frances.

  “How about Semi-Grammy?” she answered.

  I smiled to myself as I headed back into the kitchen to attempt to make mayonnaise. I liked the way Frances’s mind worked. It went a long way to diffusing the awkwardness in the air.

  I did have a selfish interest in their visit. I assumed that Miles, having just met his grandson for the first time, would be inspired to take Matt off for a heart-to-heart about manhood and responsibility. This was how it happened in the movies, right? The father led his now-grown son off for a walk, and the boy came back a man. At the very least, Miles could convince Matt to ask to be made full-time at the temp job. Then I wouldn’t have to.

  One day we all met for lunch at the Ferry Building in San Francisco, where Matt worked. He was wearing a blue shirt and he looked very handsome, cradling Dolan in his arms. Pictures were taken, lunch was enjoyed, pleasantries were exchanged. Then I walked Matt back to the elevator. He and his dad had been out alone together the night before.

  “So did you have a nice time with your dad last night?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Hold on, I’ve got to go to the mail drop and pick up the afternoon mail.”

  “Did you guys have a heart-to-heart?” I asked, hopefully.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, like a career talk or anything,” I said. “Did he give you any advice? Encourage you to try to go full-time at this job?”

  Matt looked distracted, and somewhat annoyed by my line of questioning. “No,” he said. He went off to get the office mail and I stood there, waiting for him. I was going to have to give him the father-son talk. Dolan started to fuss. I leaned against the wall and opened my shirt for him.

  “Matt,” I said when he reappeared with a heavy postal bag. “Let’s talk.”

  “I’ve got to go,” he said.

  “Just give me a minute,” I said, putting my hand on his chest. “Now listen. If this company is willing to keep giving you work and paying that temp agency a fee to keep you around, they are going to be willing to give you a full-time job. But it’s not going to happen unless you ask. Nothing in this world comes to you if you don’t ask.”

  He’d backed away from me, the mailbag slumped at his feet. His head was tilted back at an awkward angle, and I realized he looked like a boxer waiting for the next punch. His eyes were almost deliberately vacant, as if he’d pulled down the shutters so I couldn’t see in.

  “You have got to be your own advocate,” I said, thumping his chest. Dolan was wedged between us now. “You have got to ask, do you understand? There is no reason in the world why they shouldn’t hire you.”

  Then I thought I saw moisture in his eyes. He was afraid. My own eyes filled with tears.

  “I believe in you, Matt,” I said. “I do. You just have to ask. And soon. I’m going to pester you about it once a week until you do it.”

  “Mary,” he said, helplessly. “Okay. Not this week. The boss is out. But okay.”

  I watched him get on the elevator, headed upstairs with the mailbag over his shoulder.

  THE NANNY TOOK DOLAN out of my arms with utter ease on that first day I went back to work. He went to her without protest, too little to offer any reproach to his mother. I expected to cry. Everyone had told me that was unavoidable. As I drove away, I did shed a tear or two, but they were over the sadness of saying good-bye to this person I’d just spent eleven weeks with. I didn’t feel guilty. There wasn’t an option not to work. And the truth was I still needed my job for reasons beyond the paycheck and the health insurance. I was looking forward to writing again. With the exception of one short freelance piece I’d written while Dolan wailed from his bassinet, I had touched the computer only to e-mail photos of the baby to his grandparents and my siblings.

  Motherhood is so often described as a transformative experience that when you’re on the outside, looking in, you wonder if you’d even recognize yourself after it. I didn’t expect I’d suddenly decide it would be better to stay at home with my child. But when so many moms are exchanging knowing looks in your presence and remarking on how they’d never thought this or that, but now it was all different, you start to question how you’ll react in the face of this all-powerful motherness. What if the sea of mommyhood swept over me and writing about movies just became the obstacle between me and my true love? I was relieved to discover, as I got back into my job, that my transformation into a mother didn’t subtract from the pleasure I had always taken from work. I think I’d assumed that something good had to go away from the old life, to be replaced by the everlasting glory of the baby, because life was supposed to be about balancing. You didn’t just suddenly get more, I reasoned. But actually, you did.

  In the end, the adjustments in my working life were all logistic. I used to breeze out of the house with only a notebook. Now the breast pump went with me everywhere. I was supposed to send Dolan off to day care with at least two full bottles, and it took a long time to fill them. So I learned to use the pump while driving, plugging it into the car just like the phone charger, and then sticking the suction cup up under my shirt. On the freeway, this was easy, although in traffic, I’d find myself anxiously edging up to avoid being right next to any other drivers who might notice that woman cradling her breast in the black Jetta. The noise the pump made was mournful and dreary, like the sound life-support machines always make on TV shows, but with attitude: Whha, whha, you’re, whha, whha, such a, whha, whha, cow!

  I’d always had a highly scheduled workweek, but now, with the structure of day care pickups and drop-offs, and only two full days a week when Dolan was with the nanny, there was no room for error. On the upside, with less time to write, there was also less time to procrastinate, and I got sharper and faster out of necessity. All in all, I thought that first month back at work went fairly well—tiring but not unbearable.

  Then Marlon Brando died. It was late on a Thursday night, but the news didn’t start to break until Friday
morning. Technically this was my day off, and I didn’t have day care. When my editor, Karen, called, I was still in my bathrobe, worn out from successfully making it to all my screenings that week and hitting all my deadlines.

  “No choice, sweetie,” Karen said when I reminded her of my Sunday-to-Thursday workweek. “Not when the executive editor wants it. And after Katharine Hepburn, there’s no way he’s going to take no for an answer.”

  I always liked Katharine Hepburn. My mother and I had watched Bringing Up Baby together every time it showed up on television. But now I’d forever associate her passing with the day I peed on a stick and said no to an assignment.

  “Can’t I do it Sunday?” I asked. “We could run it Tuesday. It would be more thoughtful then. He was one of the greatest actors that ever lived. I want to take some time with it.”

  Karen wasn’t just my boss, she was one of my best friends, and I knew she hated telling me it had to be done that day. And by 4 P.M. It was going on the front page. I couldn’t call Matt; the bond trader didn’t give its temporary employees days off or sick leave.

  I started to cry. “I’m a single mother. I’m breast-feeding. I have no day care.”

  “Look, you’ve just got to rally,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. Just get it done.”

  This felt like a test. I checked the clock: 10:15. I had five hours and forty-five minutes.

  I put the baby down on a blanket and dug furiously through my DVD collection. Somewhere I had a copy of On the Waterfront, the movie that first showed me what Brando was all about. He has a scene walking through a park with Eva Marie Saint. She drops her glove and he picks it up, but instead of handing it back, he begins to play with it. He’s so manly that the white glove looks ridiculous in his hand, almost as if he’s mocking her. But it’s also flirtatious, as if in touching her glove, he’s touching her. She reaches for it, sort of ineffectually. He ignores her and eventually wedges the dainty thing onto his own meaty hand. Her character is flustered and so is the actress; Brando was improvising. That bit of business with the glove made all the difference in the scene. I played it twice, my bathrobe open, Dolan on my breast.

  “Go to sleep,” I told him. “Just fall asleep on the nipple. Chew it if you want. Just sleep, I implore you.”

  Instead he grinned at me, his hand patting my breast. His face was so eager. His eyebrows would go up and he’d pump his legs as if he had something very important to say. He reminded me of the baby pictures I’d seen of Benet.

  “Let’s try this bouncy seat thing, Bunny,” I told him. The bouncy contraption seemed very high-tech. This was my first attempt to get it up and running. It had headphones, which I didn’t understand. Could it play music? I wasted seventeen minutes turning it upside down and inside out and looking for a screwdriver to pry open the tiny door on its underside, which turned out to merely house the batteries.

  Four hours and fifty-two minutes. Dolan started crying.

  I brought out the blanket with the pop-up toys on it and moved him to that. Then the phone rang.

  “Hey,” Karen said. “Listen, deadlines are going to be really tight today. There’s a homicide out in East County, and Metro is going nuts about it. So we’re talking more like 3:30 instead of 4 for moving your story over. Can you do that?”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. Four hours and nineteen minutes. Newspapers are not just the first draft of history, they are the rough first draft of history.

  “One more thing,” she said. “Don’t forget The Godfather.” She lowered her voice. “You know they all get hard for The Godfather.”

  “They” were all the male higher-ups, who liked to debate the greatness of Robert De Niro versus the greatness of Al Pacino over lunch in the cafeteria.

  “Check,” I said.

  I needed to spend some time looking at Brando. I had The Godfather and A Streetcar Named Desire. But something was missing. I threw on my yoga pants, my nursing bra, and a T-shirt, and then wasted four minutes looking for my clogs. Dolan had resumed crying in the living room. He stopped briefly while I was driving to the closest video store on the island—eleven minutes!—then resumed just as I walked up to the counter, the handle of the car seat resting in the crook of my arm.

  “I need Last Tango in Paris,” I said to the clerk. “Can you tell me if it’s in?”

  He looked me up and down and then turned to his keyboard. “Did you say Save the Last Waltz?” he said.

  “Last Tango in Paris,” I said. “You know, the one with the butter.”

  “I don’t know that one,” he said. I hated big chain video stores. He went tap tap tap on the keyboard. “Oh,” he said, looking from me to Dolan with some concern. “We don’t stock that here,” he said. “It’s considered pornographic.”

  By the time I got back from my trek to the independent video store, where Bernardo Bertolucci is not considered a pervert, I was down to three hours and twenty-nine minutes. On the upside, Dolan was yawning. All that yelling had worn him out.

  As I watched chunks of the movies, I pored over the indexes of books from my film library. Whom could I quote? What did Pauline Kael say about Brando? Manny Farber? Agee? Wait, was Agee already dead by the time Brando came around? Or just thoroughly pickled? God, pickled and done with film criticism before Brando became “Brando.” And then dead at forty-five. Now there’s a cautionary tale. What about Ebert? No one cranks out more copy than that man.

  As Karen said, the story didn’t have to be a masterpiece, but it was so hard for me to let go of that aspiration. I wanted to make people pause in their morning ritual and stay with my story from beginning to end. I wanted to offer them some insights that they wouldn’t get otherwise. This wasn’t just some movie star; this was the greatest natural talent of the twentieth century, the man who inspired a veritable acting revolution. I wished I’d read that fat Brando biography sitting on my desk in the office, eighteen miles to the east.

  The story ended up getting great play on the front page, with a huge photo of young Brando smoldering in black and white. I’d spent plenty of time on the front page in my hard news days, but for a critic, there isn’t much cause to get on page one, so this was a nice reward. You have to be pretty jaded to feel nothing when you see your name on the lead story of the day. I was pleased. But at what price? In order to get it done, I had actually wheeled my child into the living room and closed the door, leaving no one but my two alarmed cats to supervise him. In the course of the day I’d been a puppet, at the whim of my employers, feeling barely adequate as a journalist and less than attentive as a mother. I took out a blue marker and wrote on my desk, just below my keyboard:

  JULY 2, 2004: ONE YEAR FROM NOW, IT WILL BE DIFFERENT

  I had no idea how it would be different, or how I would make that happen, but somehow, I had to. I felt somewhat embarrassed by my own gesture; it seemed so desperate for self-empowerment, so unlike anything I would normally do. But what was normal anymore? In my frantic search through the movie books, I’d come across one that quoted Pauline Kael, a single mother herself, saying that there was nothing like the need to support a child to jump-start one’s ambitions. I hear you, sister, I thought as I picked up the DVD boxes that were littered across my floor.

  PART II

  One Year from Then

  CHAPTER 13

  The Red Cable-Knit Sweater

  DOLAN RAN AHEAD OF ME toward baggage claim, his long pale legs churning in his little denim shorts. At seventeen months he was so fast and so eager to run that in public spaces—shopping malls, department stores, sidewalks—he made me nervous. But the airport in Portland, Maine, is so small that I knew he couldn’t get very far. Plus I felt sorry for him; cooped up in a plane coming across country once again. He’d made five round trips between San Francisco and Portland in the last year, and at this point, he probably knew exactly where he was going. He certainly would recognize our big red suitcase if and when it rolled out onto the baggage carousel. When I caught up with him he was
standing transfixed, watching as a lone bag trundled round and round.

  “Ours is coming soon, Boosty,” I said. The harder I fell in love with him, the more ridiculous the nicknames got. Then again, Benet survived a childhood of being called Bendy-boodledy-do. I laced my fingers through his tufts of blond hair, longer now and getting wavy. “But where’s Aunt Wibby?”

  He grinned up at me. “I’m going to see Wibby,” he said in the reverential tones he usually reserved for discussing ice cream and cookies. The adoration of Wib had not skipped a generation. Benet had three kids now, and with the exception of his newest, baby Sid, who was only six months old, Wib’s nieces and nephew would happily deck one another just for a chance to sit next to her at the dinner table.

  It was almost midnight before she pulled the Subaru up to the sidewalk. I’d had time to change Dolan’s diaper, reclaim our bag, wheel it out front, and compulsively check my cell phone at least four times to see if she’d called. It was like her to be late, but not when it came to picking up a toddler coming in on an evening flight.

  “Look how much Dols Pols has grown,” she said, stooping down to admire him. He played bashful, hiding his head against my thigh, and my hand went automatically to the top of his head. This was my mother’s gesture, one that I could feel her doing with me and picture her doing to Benet, another beautiful blond boy. “Are you going to say hi to Aunt Wibby?” I asked him.

  “I so happy to see you,” Dolan said.

  She stepped back, hands over her heart. “I’m so happy to see you too,” she said, then looked at me. “Slay me.”

  “I know,” I said. “That’s his latest thing. I can’t get over it.”