Accidentally on Purpose

by Mary F. Pols

  “Never do that again, Matt,” I’d said. “You have to tell me this kind of thing. I could have married you to get you on my health insurance. You can’t go around bleeding when you poop and not telling me.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m going now. That’s what matters.”

  Now he was taking a lot of different pills, but still seemed sick. Beyond saying it was stress-related, his doctor seemed blasé about the source. I kept thinking food had to be an issue, and I’d recently unloaded my doubts about his condition to my sister Alison. She’d asked if he’d been tested for celiac. Now, as I explained to Karen, we were waiting for the test results and I’d eliminated pasta and flour from our diet just in case.

  “Dr. Alison Pols is good with a diagnosis,” Liza said.

  “She is,” I said. “But my gluten-free cooking doesn’t seem to be helping, unfortunately. At least not yet. Probably because he eats sandwiches for lunch every day.”

  “I couldn’t think of anything else to get,” he’d say, and I’d just want to swat him. In terms of parenting, Matt and I were almost always in agreement—which I found both shocking and a great relief—but when it came to what he ate and drank, we never saw eye to eye. I’d threatened to start pulling out a tape recorder during our debates, because there were so many times when I’d heard him admit that beer seemed to bother his colitis, only to retract it a week later when he really wanted a cold frosty one. “But what about last week?” I’d say. “Oh, I’m sure that was the burrito I had,” he’d answer, popping open the beer. I’d glare and he’d say, “I’m having a good day, okay?” But I’d ceased to believe he was telling the truth about the good days; it seemed he was always disappearing into the bathroom. “Are you in denial?” I’d say. Then he’d do the thing that I hate, the sort of man-in-prayer gesture that signifies that I am driving him crazy. His knees bend, his eyes roll heavenward and he casts his hands out, as if begging God for mercy from my nagging self. “Just leave me alone, all right?” he’d say. Whether soft or firm, my attempts to nurture were so often rebuffed.

  “He never listens,” I said.

  Kir got out of the tub and sat on the side. She picked up the champagne bottle and topped off our glasses.

  “I think you’ve got to let him deal with his own health problems,” she said. “You should focus on Dolan.”

  “Definitely,” Karen said.

  “And I think you need to spend less time with Matt,” Liza said.

  But that was easier said than done.

  EVERY DAY, I rode my bike from the new apartment in Menlo Park onto the Stanford campus. It made me feel like a kid, both to be on the bike and to be on a campus, even though Stanford had to be ten times the size of Bowdoin. I took a side path that went right by the mausoleum Leland and Jane Stanford had built for their son Leland Jr., who died just before his sixteenth birthday. The heartbreak had spurred his parents to found the university in his honor. A few yards away from where all three are interred is a monument Jane erected in memory of her brother. It’s an angel, bent over a stone pediment, grieving. Even her wings sag with sadness. Whenever I went by her, I thought: She looks the way I feel.

  I suppose when people say, “It hasn’t sunk in,” what they mean is something is hovering at the front of their consciousness and they haven’t been able to push it to the background yet. I felt as if my brain was encircled with a layer of thought devoted purely to Edward Pols, a fog so dense I couldn’t think about much else. But I didn’t particularly want it to go away, because then there would be less of him in my head. Nor did I want time to pass, because that would put more distance between us. If he had just died, I could say, “Oh, well, I saw him just last week.” Part of me kept thinking this had to have been a practice run. As if he’d bounce back and announce, “Good job all of you, that was just the way I’d like this handled. When the time comes of course.” Then he might say: “Mary, that was a dreadfully maudlin thing you did, reading me my own poetry at the end. And for God’s sake, why read to me about death? What about one of the other poems? Something more cheering.” I’d be happy to take his criticism. I’d be happy to take anything more of him.

  The Knight Fellowship was the best distraction anyone possibly could have devised. There were twenty-one fellows from around the world, ranging from writers to radio and television reporters to editors. There was even a cartoonist. Most came with their spouses and a lot of them had children. Everyone had a study plan that related to the sort of journalism he or she practiced. I was the only critic in the group, and my goal was to take every film and film history class I could. But in a broader sense, creating an actual fellowship was our task for the year. From the first days of orientation, the fellowship was like being at the best dinner party in the world, one where you want to get to know everyone at the table. Since we’d have ten months together, we could relax, knowing we’d all have a chance to sit next to everyone eventually.

  Dolan had his own fellowship experience. There were two dozen kids in the program, and they had come with their parents from Poland, Nepal, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Korea, and South Africa. They all went to day care on campus together twice a week, during our group events. At first Dolan cried whenever I walked away, something he never did at his regular day care. Among the sea of self-sufficient eight-year-olds and five-year-olds, he looked so small and vulnerable. But as the year went on, he started to ask hopefully, “Knight kids?” whenever we passed that turnoff. We went everywhere as a pack, and the kids came with us, even to the graduate students’ pub, the only place where we could bring the kids and get a beer. “We go bar?” Dolan would say. I kept him up too late, rode him to school on my bike, and started taking him on mother-son “dates” to restaurants. I was meeting new people, luxuriating in film history, and spending more time with Dolan. This was the way I had wanted things to be different.

  THE MOVE DOWN to Stanford made for a longer train ride for Matt, but he still came to see Dolan two or three nights a week. He’d spend the night in Dolan’s room, then get up at the crack of dawn to go back to the city. It was by no means ideal for him. Most of the spouses and partners took classes with the rest of us. As someone who wasn’t technically my partner, and who needed to work full-time, Matt couldn’t participate. In order to give him a taste of the Stanford experience—and thinking of his résumé, of course—I’d paid for him to take a class at the business school at nights. But he didn’t seem to find it scintillating.

  On the other hand, his enthusiasm for Dolan was impossible to miss. That wide grin of Matt’s, the one I’d felt I didn’t get to see enough of before, I now saw every time they greeted each other. I’d watch him say good-bye or good night, and hear him murmuring, “I think about you all the time.” If they went three days without seeing each other, Dolan would begin to complain. “I miss my daddy,” he’d say. “I need my daddy.” When he’d hear Matt’s key in the lock, he’d go dancing over to the door.

  Matt had started talking about taking Dolan on trips to the East Coast back when I was pregnant. “I’ll take you fishing, buddy,” he’d say to my belly. “We’ll go to the lake.” I’d cringe. I knew full well his notion of male bonding over fishing was the equivalent of my fantasizing about picking out dresses for a baby girl, but still, it set off all kinds of alarm bells for me.

  “No boats,” I’d said. “Not unless I’m there.”

  “I’m not going to let him fall in,” Matt said indignantly.

  “Your father did,” I’d said.

  I’d heard the family story, the one about the time Matt was left on a dock, six years old, with a fishing pole in his hand, while Miles and Frances went out in a canoe. I imagined them in the sun, so in love, the way they still seemed to be. As they approached the dock, little Matt leaned out too far and fell in. A stranger fished him out as Miles and Frances raced toward him in the canoe.

  “That was my fault,” Matt had said. “I was trying to wave to them.”

  “It was not your fault,” I’
d said. “You were six. No one should have left you alone on a dock. The point is that dads can be kind of oblivious.”

  That had been the end of that discussion. But it had repeated itself every six months or so. While I’d been breast-feeding, during that first year, it was easy enough to keep Dolan by my side. But once that was over, once he was walking and talking, I had run out of excuses. After all the times I had taken Dolan to Maine over the last year, I could hardly have said no when Matt told me he wanted to take his son to his mother’s sixtieth birthday party in Baltimore. He had the right. And I had the obligation, not just to Matt and Dolan, but to Katherine. Not only had she not once uttered a disparaging word about our unusual situation, she’d stepped up to the grandma plate with gusto. I’d find myself at every major holiday, and many of the minor ones, opening the door to find yet another package for Dolan on the front step. “A Valentine’s outfit for a one-year-old?” I’d say to Matt, holding up a tiny red sweater. He’d shrug. “She likes to shop.” I wasn’t Hallmark-oriented myself, having grown up in a household of mannerless heathens, but I was touched by any and all manifestations of her devotion. Dolan meanwhile was too young to appreciate the packages, but he’d voted with his heart on the issue of Grandma from the very beginning. He’d never been anything but comfortable in her arms. So even though my heart trembled at the thought of all the terrible accidents that could befall him between San Jose and Baltimore, I had to let go.

  While they were gone, I felt the luxury of free time for about a day. Then I felt aimless for the next two days. Driving to the airport to pick them up, I was like a woman about to meet her long-lost love. I spotted them in baggage claim and sped up, trying to sneak around the side of the stroller and surprise Dolan. He was buckled in, but craning his neck around to see the conveyor belt. He looked absolutely content, as if he hadn’t missed his mother at all. As I squatted down in front of him, he gave me a half smile, the kind of polite smile you give someone you aren’t sure you know. Then he redirected his gaze to the conveyor belt.

  “Oh my God,” I said, burying my head in his tiny lap. I was instantly crying, like an idiot. “He doesn’t even remember me.”

  “Of course he does,” Matt said. “Don’t be ridiculous. He’s just a little tired. He didn’t really have a nap today, did you, sweetheart?”

  Dolan twisted in the chair to look up at Matt. He smiled big for his father.

  “Dols,” I said, taking his hand. “Mummy missed you so. Did you miss me?”

  “Yes he did,” Matt said. “We were talking about you on the plane, weren’t we, Dolan? You were saying Mummy’s name.”

  Dolan gave a bashful smile. I kissed him all over his face, inhaling his Dolan smell, his beautiful essence. “Look, Mummy,” he said, pointing at the conveyor belt.

  Matt slipped me a worn-looking bag of M&M’s. “I told him you’d have some candy for him when we got here,” he whispered.

  I was struck by Matt’s tone of voice. He sounded so at ease, and so much more confident than I was used to him being. And the M&M’s—that was one of my travel tricks, to make sure that Dolan gave his father the time of day whenever we’d been away for two or three weeks. Now Matt was doing it. I might feel sad that Dolan hadn’t needed me desperately, but whatever had gone on between him and his father in the course of that long weekend had been important for both of them. They’d become a team, and even if I had to watch from the sidelines, I had to admire how they looked on the field together.

  THIS SPORTS METAPHOR could also be extended to my dating life. Or lack thereof. Since Dolan’s birth, I’d essentially sidelined myself, and apparently this worried Karen.

  “I want to fix you up,” she said.

  “Oh, Karen,” I said.

  “Now don’t say no before you hear me out,” she said. “All that talk in the hot tub got me thinking you need a date. You haven’t met anyone on the fellowship, have you?”

  “Just a bunch of wonderful married or otherwise taken men,” I said.

  “No cute professors?” she said.

  “Married or gay,” I conceded.

  I couldn’t stand the thought of going back online to look for a man; my time and energy were far too limited already. But I had hoped that a change in environment would introduce me to some new men. When that hadn’t happened, I felt some relief that I wouldn’t have to worry about negotiating a fourth party into our delicate family arrangement. I was, for the first time in my life, ambivalent about the matter of having a man in my life.

  Karen was persuasive, though. “Dave is such a doll,” she said. “Totally smart. And he’s so sensitive. I would go out with him if I was single and ten years younger.”

  Dave was another writer, someone I already had a passing acquaintance with, and who I knew to be a nice person. So I agreed to make an effort. We had a very pleasant dinner together; he was easy to talk to. His father had died recently too, and both of us teared up as we compared our tales of loss. He gets it. So different from Matt. I thought, maybe, just maybe, I could do this again. But as the night seemed to be drawing to a close, he mentioned he’d brought a movie with him, an imported copy of a new Korean film he thought I should really see. “I love this movie,” he said. “It’s the best film I’ve seen all year. By far.”

  I don’t much like having movies pushed upon me—I get enough of that when I’m working—but I said I’d certainly watch it sometime.

  “I thought we could watch it together,” he said. “If you’re not too tired.”

  I was taken aback. I was not the slightest bit interested in watching a movie that night. Especially not alone with a guy who might try to grope me. Having given my body to Dolan for so long, between gestation and all that breast-feeding, it no longer felt solely mine.

  “I’ve got to get home,” I said. “Babysitter.” I gave a shrug with the last word, which I hoped would convey, Babies. What can you do? This is a world you know nothing about, so take my word for it and back off.

  But he persisted. “I was thinking we’d just go back to your place. Let the babysitter go home. Make some popcorn. Drink some wine. Watch some awe-inspiring Korean violence.”

  Right, I thought. Sounds great. After almost two years out of the dating pool, I no longer felt any obligation to pretend I wanted to spend my evenings watching awe-inspiring Korean violence. On a grainy bootleg tape.

  But even if I had wanted to bring this guy home, what kind of scene would that be? My babysitter was Matt. I hadn’t spelled it out for him that I was going on a date, but I figured he suspected as much. I hadn’t picked up any vibe of jealousy from him. But I still couldn’t walk in the door at 11 P.M. with a guy in tow and a movie in hand and tell him he was relieved of his duties for the night. Logistically, it would be impossible; he couldn’t drive off and leave me cuddling with my date on the couch because he didn’t have a car. And the bus stopped running at that hour. The next time I ventured out socially with a man, I’d have to find myself a real babysitter first.

  But more than just the awkwardness of such an encounter, it also would have seemed unnecessarily cruel, walking in that door with a guy, as if I were saying: Here’s the one that might replace you in the daddy role. Maybe early on, when Dolan was tiny and I resented Matt’s lack of romantic interest in me, I’d imagined “replacing” Matt in some manner of speaking. But as their bond developed, those selfish thoughts had faded, and I didn’t want him worrying about it any more than I wanted to be worrying about him introducing another woman into our lives.

  I resolved not to bother dating again for a while. I didn’t have to be a nun, but there was no urgency. The man of my dreams was fast asleep in his crib.

  GRIEF IS UNREASONABLE and has a terrible sense of timing. Walking down the frozen food aisle at the supermarket, I found myself stopped dead in front of the Sara Lee pound cakes, starting to sob. My mother used to slice strawberries on top of them, then spoon fresh whipped cream onto the berries. I’d refuse the strawberries and the cream and t
hen try to peel the butter crust off the top. At the dinner table, I always sat just to her right, Benet just to her left. She’d still be wearing her apron, and she’d be twirling her wineglass. I took a pound cake out of the freezer case. At home I thought how much loftier the loaf used to look when she’d taken it out of the package. Then I devoured three slices, hoping to find the taste of my mother’s company.

  I held out a piece to Dolan, who looked at it skeptically. It was not chocolate. Why bother? He was standing in his high chair, behavior I kept forgetting to discourage. “It’s cake,” I said. “This is the kind of cake your grandmum gave me.” He turned his back to me, standing with his hands on the top of the chair’s back. He began to sing. I ate his slice too.

  He might not want pound cake, but whenever I dipped downward into overwhelming gloom, Dolan could pull me back up. He’d always been a merry baby, but as he gained vocabulary, his sense of humor became more evident. One day, when I was changing his diaper, he twisted and squirmed so much that I had to push him back down on the bed and hold him there with the flat of my hand. He looked up at me with my mother’s eyes and my round face. He was wearing the crazy love expression, the one that says he can’t decide whether to yank my hair or throw his arms around me.

  “Be still,” I told him. “I have to get this diaper on. Stop squirming.”

  I caught one of his legs in one hand and used the other to smooth down the diaper underneath him.

  “Dolan,” I admonished. “Cut that out.”

  He looked up at me, clasping his hands together. Lately I’d taken to telling him, “I’m serious” when I needed to be the enforcer.

  “Are you serious?” he shouted, his eyes filled with merriment.

  I tried to swallow my smile, but couldn’t. I couldn’t believe how much this little boy already had my number.

  Not long after that, I was driving him to day care on a gray and overcast morning, one that felt almost like winter. I peeked at him in the mirror. He had a book open in his lap and I loved the way he looked, so absorbed, as though he could actually read, even though of course he couldn’t.