On top of the computer Lyle always burns an aromatherapy candle, Seduction, to combat the odor.
“You won’t believe this one,” I said to the back of Lyle’s head. “Mary Rose and Ward are an item. Not just an item, but an expectant item.”
I am an expert on the back of my husband’s head. Like a character in an experimental play, I talk to it all the time. Lyle’s hair is cut by an envious, straight-haired stylist to emphasize his cherubic curls. His best ones—shiny, self-assured—are just to the right of the crown. To the left, they can’t decide if they want to be curls or waves. There are four gray hairs, and a black mole on the back of his neck I will one day have to pester him to have checked, if our marriage survives his passion for Realm of the Elf.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
“We can talk about this later,” I said, and started to walk away.
“I’m listening. I’m always listening to you. Uh-oh, now I’m really not feeling well.” He sat forward, attacked the keyboard. Mozart on a particularly frenzied day.
“Do you have a headache? Have you eaten anything?”
“I just got my arm cut off.”
I stared over his shoulder, feigning interest. Realm of the Elf was one of those online role-playing games where you create the persona of some magical Hobbit-like creature, then go around getting mortally wounded in imaginary sword fights and finding precious gems in the virtual bushes. I will never understand the appeal of this or any other text-file computer game. White letters scrolling up a black screen, a cyber ticker tape.
I read, “A marauding troll has just malevolently and with vim chopped off your arm! Your hand is being eaten by deadly acid. Otherwise your soul is full of life. He takes a misshapen trunk from your dove gray pack. Your neck wounds look better.”
“And people say screenplays are poorly written.” I wanted to say, I’m worried about you! Can’t you be into bondage or something more normally deviant?
He said nothing. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. “I’m just … about” Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.
“I don’t know how you can read this stuff hour after hour.”
I sighed, went over and petted Itchy Sister behind an ear. Her black lips turn up at the corners when she gets some attention, even in her sleep.
“Mary Rose and Ward are going to have a baby!” I told the back of his head.
“Let me just see if I can find someone to get my arm on, and I’ll be right with you. There’s a healer in the next village who owes me a favor.”
I went upstairs to check on Stella, then went to bed.
A WEEK AFTER Thanksgiving, when I arrived at Mary Rose’s house with Stella to watch the Knicks versus the Blazers, Mary Rose wasn’t home. Like many people in our city, Mary Rose and I never missed a basketball game. Our city endured drippy falls, drenched winters, drizzly springs, and no major professional sports teams save basketball, which made for a civic fanaticism rivaling that of the rampaging hordes who follow soccer in Europe. Mary Rose and I pitched in for a special cable package—not cheap—that broadcasted all home games that weren’t carried on network television. When a game was carried only on radio, we huddled around Mary Rose’s boom box, set in the middle of her coffee table, like would-be war widows listening for news from the front. Mary Rose would undercook a frozen pizza. Sometimes I brought an aluminum tray of take-out nachos.
Mary Rose lived in a bile-green bungalow that had been converted into a triplex, in a part of the city where the streets were lined with old Victorians groaning on tiny lots. It was the homeliest house on the block, but Mary Rose had a deal with the landlord. Mr. D’Addio gave her a break in the rent in exchange for her mowing the lawn and keeping the sidewalk free of the smashed plums that fell from the three ornamental trees that grew on the parking strip. The plums, while beautiful, were a nuisance. They stained the pavement a bloody maroon, as well as attracted a ferocious species of wasp that could sting you through your shoe.
I stood in the entryway of the triplex, talking to apricot haired Mrs. Wanamaker, who lived in the unit downstairs. The entryway smelled of wet dog and the perfume inserts of magazines. Mrs. Wanamaker was fascinated to hear about Stella’s affection for avocados and taking off her own diaper. She also admired Stella’s black-and-red Blazer jump suit. The true mates of this world are not husbands and wives, but lonely old women and exhausted young mothers.
Mary Rose bounded up the front steps, apologized for being late. First, there was Mrs. Marsh, wanting all her dahlia bulbs dug up for the winter, then Hotlips Pizza lost her order.
“Pepperoni double cheese,” she said, flying the cardboard box over my head as she jogged past me up the stairs. So much energy for someone newly pregnant, I thought.
I dragged myself upstairs behind her, Stella’s car seat banging against my shins, the strap of her diaper bag cutting into my shoulder. My knees ached. Once inside, I dropped the bag—twice as heavy as the Perfect Wonderment herself—stuffed to the gills with powders, ointments and sunscreens, Q-Tips and mittens, a change of clothes, rattles and teething toys, books for several different age levels (in the event she started to read while away from home and proved to be a genius), and a half-dozen empty plastic bottles, designed in Denmark according to some enlightened Scandinavian feeding principle, lint stuck to the milk-encrusted nipple.
“If I have one piece of advice for the woman looking to get pregnant, it’s train for a decathlon,” I said. “It’s amazing to me how everyone always wants to help a pregnant woman, when the baby is all nice and tucked away in utero, but then once the kid is born, and your life as a schlepper begins in earnest, no one thinks to lend you a hand.”
“Was I supposed to help you?” said Mary Rose. “I didn’t know I was supposed to help you. You always seem like you’ve got everything under control.” Mary Rose set the pizza in the middle of the coffee table, then glanced around the living room to make sure there was nothing Stella could get into. Stella wasn’t crawling yet. She sat where you put her. Nevertheless, Mary Rose was under the impression that a baby, once freed from the confines of the womb, was biologically programmed to seek disaster, compelled to stick her fingers into sockets, choke on a dusty bead found beneath the couch.
Even if this were true, a baby would be completely safe at Mary Rose’s. The only time Ward had ever ventured upstairs, according to Mary Rose, he’d said that if Mowers and Rakers didn’t work out, Mary Rose could always get a job doing interior design for a monastery. The living room was tiny, the walls toffee-colored with three windows on one side. Opposite the windows were two doors, one that gave off onto the front hallway, the other to the back hallway that led to the kitchen and the huge bathroom which, due to the architectural gymnastics involved in the conversion from charming house to funky triplex, was bigger than the living room. There was nothing on the walls.
Acquisitive Ward, he of the Arts and Crafts-style living room set, collection of vintage neon beer signs, and three complete sets of Fiesta Ware, jokingly (or maybe not, Ward had a way of saying things that were more hurtful than funny, then trying to pass the insult off as a joke when you got annoyed) said her spare quarters were an affectation.
“He accused me of being self-consciously minimalist,” said Mary Rose. “I told him it was called “the less you had, the less you had to clean.” I’m not a minimalist, I’m practical.” Like everyone newly in love, she reported this humdrum exchange with pride and astonishment, as if to say, See how we know each other? See how we tease each other? Already,
