Wonderment had been up seven times during the night, but still wasn’t sleepy. The dishwasher was my secret weapon. The whir-whoosh whir-whoosh of the water sloshing around was better than any lullaby. I could hear Stella in her crib, doing one of her Stella monologues in which she seemed to fall back on a word that sounded a lot like intaglio.
“Are there even any dishes in there?” said Lyle. He stood in the kitchen frowning at the dishwasher, as if it were one of his computer problems, his collie eyes made slightly larger by his glasses. He’d lost weight since Stella came, mostly because dinner now was us standing in the middle of the kitchen, eating whatever straight from the refrigerator: cheese, peanut butter on celery, Nestle chocolate-chip cookie dough straight from its yellow tube.
“If you don’t want to help, don’t criticize.”
“I’m not criticizing, I’m just saying. It’s a waste of water.”
“If Stella sleeps, and I get to take a nap some time before the new year, then it’s not a goddamned waste of water.”
“I thought we agreed we were going to lay off the profanity. You know, in front of Stella. And I do want to help. I said I wanted to help.”
“As long as it’s something convenient, you’re all for helping. If it’s a gorgeous day and Stella needs a little air, you’ll walk her around the block. That’s your definition of helping. It’s like when you’re playing on the computer and you tell someone you have to get off and go baby-sit. Baby-sitting is what you do for kids that aren’t your own. It’s what you do when you’re fifteen and want a chance to make a few bucks and see what there is to eat in someone else’s kitchen. You don’t babysit your own daughter.”
“Well …” He pinched the end of his nose, something he always did when he wondered if he should say what he was thinking … “guys do.”
“You know what it’s like, what you do? And probably all men for that matter. It’s like the difference between a deaf person signing as a means of communication and a lovely, well-intentioned hearing person signing as a show of solidarity.”
“You’re starting to go off, Brooke.”
“I am not going off. Why do you say I’m going off whenever I’m trying to make a point?”
“Why don’t you just go get the turkey?”
“Why don’t you just go get the turkey.”
“I thought that’s what this was all about. You wanted to get out of the house and you wanted me to baby-sit Stella, and I asked—just asked, so sue me—when you’d last changed her diaper.”
“So you could be sure you wouldn’t have to change one. Look, you think I enjoy changing diapers?”
“Yeah, I do.”
Okay, he was right. I did tend to rhapsodize about the wonder of Stella’s “projects.” Steam and cut a carrot into bite-sized bits and a mere twelve hours later there they are again, bright and square as ever, cradled in her diaper amid an aromatic little dollop of guacamole-ish doo. I don’t expect the mailman to find this amazing, but I’d like to think that Stella’s own father would take an interest. Is that asking too much? I already know the answer.
The dishwasher did the trick, as I knew it would, and I went out to buy the turkey. Donleavy’s Market is beloved by every impractical person in a ten-square-mile radius. It sells huge, pale bars of French soap and bottles of olive oil for every occasion. (Lyle and I used to like to joke that “Extra Extra Virgin” should be repunctuated to reflect modem sexual reality—Extra Extra: Virgin!)
When I pulled into the driveway behind the market, I saw the lavender Mowers and Rakers truck parked near the back fence. It was hard to miss. It’s a civic institution. The sides were smartly painted with a Gauguin-inspired profusion of red passion flowers, pink hollyhocks, marigolds, irises, and cosmoses, green vines creeping up the M of Mowers, the R of Rakers.
A few yards to the right of 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