the truck, Mary Rose stood on the top rung of a twelve-foot ladder, pruning a fig tree that grew on the adjacent property. Her back was to me, her blond hair held up in a bun with a green pencil. She wore baggy plaid shorts and a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, even though it was forty degrees and raining. Mary Rose was six feet tall and lanky, with broad shoulders and large feet. She was my age, thirty-five, and was a teenager at a time when any woman over five-eight had a cruel nickname, always a variation on the theme of Amazon. As a result, Mary Rose slouched. She sang along with her Walkman, her pruners flashing around among the big, wet leaves, swaying along with the music. This was so Mary Rose. Not simply standing on the top rung of a ladder, but further pressing her luck by rocking back and forth.
To say Mary Rose was a gardener would be selling her short. Yard maintenance in our city was no luxury. In the spring, blackberry shoots grew eight inches a day and the conscientious mowed their lawns every seventy-two hours. Failure to routinely clip, prune, thin, and weed meant a yard reclaimed by forest, a house under attack by wild clematis and morning glory. In our city, it really was a jungle out there.
I admired Mary Rose, and Mary Rose’s life. She was smart, resolute. She kept her own hours and got to work outside. I kept my own hours, too, but as a producer, I spent most of them trying to talk people into things they didn’t want to do. I had to deal with Hollywood people, which had to be much worse than coping with housewives worried about the health of their delphiniums.
This is what I was thinking as I went into Donleavy’s: how Mary Rose was a modern-day … who was the goddess whose named started with an A, the one who was independent and sporty and said what she thought? I didn’t bother with a shopping cart, I could carry what I needed.
Mary Rose wasn’t like any other woman I knew. She never perched on the edge of the sofa with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, wondering why she didn’t have a man, or if she was seeing someone why, in the end, he would prove to be wrong for her. She didn’t worry that she spent too much time working, or not enough time working. She didn’t fret about whether she should have an eye tuck, then worry that she was superficial for worrying about whether she should have an eye tuck. Was it Aphrodite?
I took a turkey from the display in the small meat department. A life-size scarecrow cutely pointed at the stack of birds. They were free-range or had never been frozen, or both.
I didn’t bother with the beautifully calligraphed fine print. I picked one up, cradled it in the crook of my arm. Eleven pounds eight ounces, about like Stella.
Aramaic? No, that was a dead language. Or an aftershave. Lyle would know the name of the goddess, except I was irritated with Lyle, was always irritated with Lyle these days, and would punish him by not asking him when I got home. What about cranberry sauce? Did Lyle like the kind with the berries or without? The kind that retains an imprint of the inside of the can when you slide it onto the dish, or not? Aramis? No that was the aftershave. Maybe I’d just skip the cranberry sauce altogether. Lyle didn’t care about Thanksgiving one way or the other, so why was I even bothering? Lyle thought we should take advantage of the fact that Stella was still clueless, as he liked to put it, and go to our favorite Tex-Mex restaurant on Thanksgiving, where there was usually an hour and a half wait but would be empty on the holiday.
Outside, it was drizzling. I started to run, so Stella wouldn’t get wet, then heard someone behind me yelling. “Miss, oh Miss!” I turned to see a police officer—blond brush-cut, forearms the size of my thighs—trotting up behind me. His gold nameplate said Beckett. “You haven’t paid for that.”
“Paid for … oh, oh! I thought …” I looked down, expecting to see Stella in her little red fleece jacket and cap, but there was the turkey in my arms instead. The fleshy, nonfrozen breast stared blankly up at me. It seems I was also patting it in a reassuring manner. “I thought this was my baby! I mean, I mistook her … it …” I started to snort. Lyle calls it my grandmother laugh. “This is only the second time I’ve been out of the house without Stella, so naturally, it was just habit… Stella is much prettier than …” I couldn’t stop laughing.
Beckett said he also had a six-month-old. We swapped war stories. He said his wife had inadvertently given him a black eye during a particularly hairy patch of labor.
I said, “Hate to break the news, but it wasn’t inadvertent. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I’m sure your wife appreciates you very much. I’m sure you’re one of those guys who makes ‘involved father’ sound like God’s truth instead of an oxymoron.”
Beckett gave a hardy PR laugh, the kind that displayed his molars to their best advantage, but he didn’t take his eyes off me.
“Oh! The turkey. Let me just get my wallet. Do I pay you—or no, I just probably go get back in line …” I pawed around inside my shoulder bag. No wallet. “Let me just …” I moved the turkey to the crook of my left arm, so I could check my jeans pockets and the pockets of my coat. I have an informal banking system where I leave five-dollar bills in rarely visited pockets, for moments just like this. Two nickels and a penny. This was not good. This was starting to look like shoplifting. “I must have left my wallet at home.”
Beckett took the turkey from me and stuck it under his arm. You could tell he used to play football. A few shoppers in the parking lot dawdled over unlocking their cars, allowing them to stare. Beckett clapped me on the shoulder. “I’ll let it go this time with a recommendation: Get more sleep.”
I had the presence of mind not to blurt out “Easy for you to say!” which is, I suppose, a testimony to my fundamental sanity. I kept quiet, felt my face get hot, then, as I watched him turn around and go back into Donleavy’s, thought I might cry. Tired, that’s all. Tired, and now turkeyless.
At that moment Mary Rose came over. “What was that all about?” She was pulling a waterproof anorak over her head. Around her waist she wore a tan leather holster, where she kept all her clippers and such. I told her what happened. She lit a cigarette, listened, blew smoke sideways out of her mouth. “Shake it off. I’m sure the cop sees stuff like this all the time. It’s no big deal. Where is Stella, anyway?”
“Home with her father. He can’t get enough of her, you know? I practically have to wrestle him to the ground to get her away from him, just so I can feed her. Joined at the hip. Fathers and daughters, you know how they are. From birth they’re that way. Joined at the hip. Wait, did I already say that?”
I heard my voice go wobbly. Is this what motherhood had reduced me to? Weeping in the parking lot of Donleavy’s, wiping my nose with the cuff of my sweater? I tried to remember who I was: a producer of independent films, a baker of berry pies, an occasional runner, the world’s only adult lover of the knock-knock joke. A sometimes skier. A collector of funny ashtrays. The wife of Lyle. The mother of Stella. Brooke Stellamom.
Mary Rose considered me from beneath her bangs. Artemis. That’s the goddess I was thinking of. The virgin goddess of the hunt. The no-time-for-nonsense goddess.
Mary Rose was not one of those women who believed housekeeping extended to tidying up conversations, filling in all the awkward moments with decorative remarks. “You and Lyle should come with me to the Barons’ for Thanksgiving. I don’t think Ward would mind my asking you.”
I said it sounded like fun! I said I’d ask Lyle and give her a call tomorrow. I hopped in the Volvo (pumpkin-colored, formerly owned by someone with a thing for incontinent cats and vanillascented air fresheners), buckled up, gave a goofy wave, and sped off, the Volvo fish-tailing as I hit a patch of soggy maple leaves. I have a peculiar habit. The more bizarre a situation is, the more I’m compelled to pretend it’s as normal as can be.
Mary Rose
