by Mary F. Pols
“Yes I will,” I said. Matt had told me to come an hour after the procedure.
“We’re going to let him sleep for another hour at least,” she said. “He’s had a rough time. I stopped the procedure halfway through because I didn’t want to hurt him.”
Matt had been telling me, as usual, that his colitis wasn’t that bad, that he wasn’t in what they call a flare-up. I had doubted him, but he kept insisting that he knew what he was talking about.
“His colitis is very severe,” she said.
I had been smiling at her, the obsequious curl of my lips intended to let her know that she and I would be a team in restoring Matt to his former self. I stood there stupidly, the smile now frozen.
“I want to put him on some much stronger medications and up his steroids,” she said. “If he doesn’t respond to that, I’m going to have to recommend surgery.”
I started to cry. Surgery meant he’d have his colon removed, that he’d shit in a bag for the rest of his life. Even the most confident young man in the world would have trouble adjusting to that life. The thought of Matt’s beautiful young body torn apart was too awful. And this all started right after our son was born. What a toll our mistake had taken on Matt, even if he didn’t admit it. He’d gotten so used to his disease that he wasn’t even able to see how serious it was. I put my sunglasses on and walked around the neighborhood, crying for him.
I wore my own stress like a big black cape, flapping it in the face of anyone unlucky enough to cross my path. Matt wore his tucked away on the inside and it was literally eating away at his core. How much of this was my fault? How much had my badgering about everything from careers to trivial things like how he did the dishes contributed to his internal misery? I was so busy thinking about the stress of being stuck with him that I wasn’t thinking about his stress over being stuck with me.
When I returned an hour later I found Matt groggily walking the halls, looking for me. I took his hand and led him to the car. As I settled him on my couch to sleep the afternoon away, I found myself treating him as tenderly as I treat Dolan whenever he’s sick. I realized how much more elusive a solution was than I had thought, and how little my impatience was helping matters. On that day, I watched him eat the chicken broth I’d put in front of him and thought about what it would be like for Matt to get sicker. I told myself I would never again even think that I wanted Matt gone.
I WAS DRIVING Dolan to preschool a few weeks later when he asked from the backseat, “Daddy going to pick me up?”
“Yes he is,” I said, looking up to the mirror so I could see his face. “Mummy has to go to a movie tonight for work. You guys are going to have dinner together. Daddy is going to make you something nice.”
Matt was finally making some real headway through the Marcella Hazan cookbook I’d gotten him the previous Christmas. He was eager and careful in the kitchen, and I could see his confidence building. He’d announced to me the week before that he thought he’d made the best puttanesca he’d ever had. “Better than mine?” I’d said, raising my eyebrows at this new cockiness.
We drove on, turning onto the road that ran next to San Francisco Bay, where we frequently saw pelicans and hawks.
“I’m going to be a daddy someday,” Dolan announced.
He sounded the way some kids do when they talk about being a ball player or a fireman. Like being a Daddy was a Big Deal.
“Really,” I said.
“Yep,” he said. “I’m going to be a daddy, just like Daddy.”
Now I knew the significance of fathers—I was still weeping over the loss of my own—but why wasn’t I acknowledging deep, deep in my heart, how important not just “a father” was to Dolan, but this particular father? This man, who had never once said “No” when I’d asked him if he could take care of Dolan?
“That’s great,” I said. “Then I can be a grandmother.”
I watched his face in the mirror. He looked content, gazing out at the water, thinking about his daddy. To him, his parents were equals. He saw no incompetence or competence. He measured in love. Both of us gave it to him; both of us deserved it in return.
When people ask me to describe Dolan, I usually struggle for a minute, trying to sum him up. Should I detail his insane passion for baseball? Should I talk about his sense of humor, or the way he makes me feel? Invariably what I say is, “He’s just really nice,” which is so wonderfully true. Moreover, every time I say it, I think, He’s nice like his daddy. I observe that one niceness is the emulation of another, but I don’t think I’ve been grateful enough to the source.
When we are cuddling at bedtime Dolan says, “I like you forever.”
“And I love you,” I say back.
“I love you too,” he says. I kiss him ferociously, on his forehead, on his cheeks, again on his forehead. He kisses me back, the same way.
“I have to go,” I tell him.
“No,” he says. “I’m keeping you.”
I soften. “One more minute,” I tell him.
“Two minutes,” he tells me. And so I relent.
He snuggles into me, stroking my hair. “I like your hair,” he says. “It’s like chocolate.” His round little face is pressed up against mine, his eyes open, his smile enchanting. His combination of innocence and beauty is almost too much to be believed. In the softest voice I could possibly imagine he says, “I’m petting you.” He makes me so happy I can hardly stand it.
AS I WAS BRUSHING my teeth that night, I thought about what Dolan had said. “I want to be a daddy, just like Daddy.” I looked in the bathroom mirror. In the time since the end of the fellowship, something new had appeared on my forehead, a lump where I had been knitting my brows together. I realized that I looked peeved so much of the time that it was ceasing to be an expression and starting to just be my face. I rubbed the lump, but couldn’t get it to go away.
Had I assigned myself the role of shrew?
There’s a line in The Philadelphia Story I keep thinking about (that Katharine Hepburn, she haunts me). Hepburn, as society belle Tracy Lord, tells Mike, the journalist played by Jimmy Stewart, “The time to make up your mind about people is never.”
When had I made up my mind about Matt? Was it when he’d made the crack about not cleaning my cat litter? The first time he’d said “her and I” instead of “she and I”? Or even earlier, on that first night, when he’d confessed to needing a J-O-B? My objective in maintaining a good relationship with Matt had been on behalf of Dolan, who I thought would do better with a father who was around. But somewhere in there I’d also made a judgment about Matt. I’d scrutinized him in those first months of knowing him, and I’d found him lacking. I disapproved of him. I disapproved of everything about him that was not like me, and not like the man I thought I might end up with. I’d felt it was up to me to make him better. And when I wasn’t trying to figure out how to make him better, I was chafing against the fact—or rather, my perception—that this was my job.
It probably would have taken a psychologist only five minutes to determine that the disapproval that came so easily to me was a direct result of having a father who disapproved of everything from raglan sleeves to children who weeded crabgrass the wrong way. But wherever it came from, holding on to it was not doing me any good. If this disapproval campaign I was running succeeded, the end result would be Matt completely undermined. He was not some movie I was trying to persuade paying audiences to stay away from. He was the father of my child, and my child thought he was perfect.
There I was in the mirror, lumpy brow and all. Far from perfect myself. For instance, I’d been so furious with Matt for letting the car run out of oil, but the truth was, seven years before, I had done the exact same thing to my trusty old Volvo, which my dad had bought for me when I got out of graduate school. It had seized up in the middle of a tunnel. I even knew how to change that car’s oil, part of a female empowerment tutorial I’d given myself, but I’d gotten busy and distracted and ignored my old girl’s needs. W
hat was the difference between Matt’s not checking the Mercedes’s oil and what I had done?
As for the Miele, yes, I had made a production about moving the vacuum cleaner off the grate. But I’d recently used some of my inherited money to hire some housecleaners to come twice a month. They hadn’t been there for the ceremonial move of vacuum from furnace to living room; maybe they had innocently put it on the grate after using it. Maybe I’d forgotten and put it there myself. All Matt had done was turn on the heat. Yet my first instinct had been, on seeing my roasted appliance, to hang him over the fire. I realized how much I wanted to blame him for any and all mishaps, particularly ones that involved money.
I had to look away from myself at that moment, and as I did so, I caught a glimpse of a photograph of me with friends at an oyster bake in Pt. Reyes fifteen years ago. Was it a Proustian leap that made my mind go from oysters to another shellfish, scallops? Or had the events of the last few weeks just been leading me to this moment? Because what about those three pounds of scallops I’d purchased for a family dinner that summer? Never the sensible choice for me, always the indulgent one. Again, who was I to cast stones? Was Matt so different from how I had been at his age? Were the things about him that struck fear into my heart fears about his lacks, or my own?
I remembered what Liza had said to me, kept saying to me, every time there was a fresh disaster. “Let it go.” Whenever she said it, the words bounced off me, barely registering, an impossibility, as impossible as learning how to swim properly or accepting that I would never get to speak to my parents again. Could I let go? I was in charge, steering what I perceived as a fragile ship of a family forward. If I let go, things would fall apart. Or maybe not. Maybe they would reshape themselves. Maybe my brows would unknit.
“Let it go,” I told my reflection. “Just let it go.”
MANY YEARS AGO, when Kir and Sam were first settling into marriage and establishing a home together, I went over to their new apartment to see a couch and chair they’d gotten at a thrift store. It was a matching set, upholstered with emerald green velvet. The legs were dainty, the wood frame nicely carved. It was a sweet set, and I’d have bought it too. But it wasn’t exactly masculine.
“I love it,” I said. “But I’m surprised Sam went for it.”
“Well, I had to let him think it was his idea,” Kir said.
I looked at her with bafflement.
“I showed it to him and said I thought I liked it,” she explained. “Then I started looking at some other ones, none of which I liked at all. I wanted this one. But I had to play it cool, tell him, I don’t know, do we really want something so green? Then he got on the couch’s side and started defending it and here we are.”
“Huh,” I said. “That’s some strategy.”
“You’ve got to do that with men sometimes,” Kir said. “They need to feel like they’re in charge.”
Fine for you, I thought, but I’m never going to cater to a man’s ego that way. Isn’t it kind of disingenuous? Don’t I have to stand up for my voice as a woman with just as much right to make decisions as a man?
Twelve years later, I stood in my kitchen, and as Matt asked whether I wanted the Pinot Noir or the Merlot with my pork chops, I remembered Kir’s green velvet couch. I could continue to coast on the scraps of wine knowledge I’d retained from waitressing days, or I could let it go. Matt had been reading the wine book his father had sent him. He’d already come a very long way from the boy who believed Safeway’s bargains were not to be passed up. “You decide,” I said. It was easy. And every little thing I let go of made the bigger ones seem easier as well.
Habits aren’t broken overnight, of course. I think back to the first half of my pregnancy, when I could still catch myself calculating my years of fertility and daydreaming about whether I’d ever get to be a wife and mother. I was so used to the absence of these things in my life that I could, for a few minutes, forget that the baby, at least, was right there, in my belly, and this was no longer something to fret about. The same was true of my new attitude toward Matt. Even after the final results of those lessons in impermanence—recognition of reason as it were—I still had to fight to remember to keep those old, familiar frustrations in check. I had to focus not on being Matt’s boss, but rather his partner in co-parenting.
As I tried to be gentle where once I was sharp, I found that it not only helped in the way Matt and I got along, it brought me peace. Letting go felt good, like putting my face in the water when I swam.
Around that time, Matt started changing aspects of his life. What came first, the chicken or the egg, I don’t know. I only know that when I was no longer anxiously hanging over his shoulder, he very quietly went out and got a new, better-paying job at a good company, without ever so much as telling me he’d interviewed for the job. He bought a fat stack of books about coping with colitis and began quoting them to me. It seemed to me that his self-confidence grew. Or maybe it was just that without me squashing it, it had room to breathe.
I knew things were truly different when it came time to move Dolan to a new preschool. I’d gone by myself to have a tour of a nearby Montessori school, planning to make that decision as I had all the others, without him. I liked what I saw, but I wasn’t sure my instinct was right. I realized I wanted Matt’s input. So I asked him to come with me on a second tour.
“What’d you think?” I asked him as we stood on the sidewalk afterward.
“It’s great,” he said. “We should absolutely send him here.”
And just like that, my doubts were gone.
When I went to see the movie Knocked Up, I laughed so hard I could barely hear some of the dialogue. It was our story in so many ways, except that Katherine Heigl was way prettier than I and Matt was way cuter than Seth Rogen. Also, we didn’t fall in love the way they did, which would have made everything so much easier. We were messier because we were real. And our story didn’t end on the day our baby was born. Our story goes on, but one part of the story, the part where I am at war with the circumstances that brought me my son, is over.
Dolan has given both of his parents a purpose in life. Together, he and Matt have taught me about the limitations of all my old expectations. Where or how your child comes to you doesn’t matter. How you feel about the résumé of the father of your child should not matter at all. All that’s relevant is what’s written on his face when he looks at his son. I do know what color Matt’s bones are.
EPILOGUE
Now
WIB IS IN TOWN, getting groceries for dinner, and Dolan and I are alone at the Boathouse. After readings of Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse, his current favorite, and The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, my current favorite, he has been persuaded to nap. As I luxuriate in the hammock on the screened-in porch, I amuse myself thinking of the way Old Mr. Benjamin Bunny—who had no opinion whatever of cats—wallops Mr. McGregor’s unfortunate cat. I watch as Mr. Bigelow comes down to the dock. He rows to his motorboat to bail it out. He spends fifteen minutes getting everything shipshape, and then returns, carefully tying up his dinghy and disappearing up the ramp with his oars on his shoulder. This is about as exciting as it gets in an afternoon in the Cove.
I go downstairs, into the dark room that I’d always imagined would be my wedding chapel. The floorboards creak. Wib was right; this is no place for the old and infirm. Of course, they are both gone now, our old ones, our infirm ones. But even still, there’d be no way of airing out the damp, or warming up the constant chill. This was an impractical place for a wedding. I slide the heavy door open. The old ramp is just a few jagged pieces of wood sticking out of the water. Another couple of winters and it would be gone altogether.
I watch as a lobsterman pulls traps out in the deeper water. I remember my younger self, so desperate for answers, so ready to blame myself, and feel both fond of and sorry for her, for all the time she spent fearful her future would not be the right one.
I suppose I would like to have a man in my life. But because I’
ve beaten the biological clock, on my own terms, the pressure is off, and with it, the inclination to put myself out there. Something easy, something fun, something natural may come my way in the future. In the meantime, it no longer feels as though anything is missing. I have never been so productive, or fulfilled. All the energy that I used to waste on my love life is channeled into the life Dolan and I have together.
Out in the Cove, the sandbar is growing. I hear a shout from upstairs. Naps, even short ones, will soon be a thing of the past.
“Mommy,” Dolan yells. “Come get me. I need you.”
I find him on the bed, trying to peel off his diaper.
“I want to go see the ocean,” Dolan tells me.
“Sure,” I say. “You’ve got to wear your Tevas, though.”
“No Tevas,” he says knowingly, as if he were trying to correct a misstatement on my part.
“Yes, Tevas,” I say, firmly.
I carry him down the steps to the Cove. The water is only up to my ankles when I step off the last step. At high tide, the last nine steps are usually under water.
“Almost warm,” I tell Dolan.
“Let’s go to KoHo,” he says.
KoHo is Sean’s little day sailer. She is drifting at anchor, out in the shallows. I wade toward her, pointing out the hermit crabs to Dolan on the way. They scuttle away from my feet as fast as they can go, and Dolan laughs. “They’re going to bite us,” he says gleefully, gnashing his teeth next to my nose.
At moments like this, I ache for my parents, for my mother particularly, who would have gotten such a kick out of the clever, funny grandson she never got to know. Then I look into his merry face, and inside his eyes, so much like hers, I find my memories of her, laughing at Benet’s and my antics, poring over some battered old Michelin guide, tearing up at an old movie, lifting her face to the sun. She has not left me entirely, I think. And as I smile back at him, I feel her within myself—and him, my Babbo, my Grinch, my father—reproduced in the act of loving a child. When I am holding Dolan’s hand, I often realize that my thumb is idly stroking his soft skin in exactly the same gesture she used to use on my small hand. The sensory memory has been retained and is now cast back, a mirror reversed. She is in my body.
