Free Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me by Karen Karbo Page B

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    Mary Rose’s apartment was dark, though the Mowers and Rakers truck was parked in its usual place on the street beneath the branches of the ornamental plums. Maybe Mary Rose was napping. Maybe she had popped out to the store to pick up some snacks. This was not like Mary Rose. She was organized in a way that puts those of us who wander around carrying diapers and light bulbs to shame.
    I was let in by Frick or Frack, one of Mary Rose’s downstairs neighbors across the staircase from Mrs. Wanamaker. I could hear the game blaring through Mrs. Wanamaker’s door,Mrs. Wanamaker clucking to Elmo, her dog, about the Blazers’ disinclination to take it to the hoop.
    Frick and Frack were either Tom and Bob or Greg and Ted. Mary Rose, used to working with high school boys with exotic multisyllabic names, could never remember. They wrote for the local alternative newspaper. Mary Rose always knew when they were under deadline because she’d hear the buzz of their coffee grinder at four in the morning. They volunteered to pound in lawn signs for local political campaigns, held summer solstice parties, and seemed in all ways like good neighbors. Mary Rose said they were looking to move, however, so they didn’t wind up evicted when Mr. D’Addio finally unloaded the place. There was a rumor that someone had made an offer.
    Mary Rose threw open her front door before I reached the top of the stairs. Her raspberry V-neck sweater was stretched out at the hem as if she’d squatted and pulled it over her knees. An old trick. How to turn an ordinary cotton sweater into maternity wear.
    Mary Rose was just entering her fourth month but was already beginning to show. It is a myth that you never show until your sixth month. You “show” as early as six weeks. You show that a woman can look just like a filing cabinet.
    Mary Rose held open her door, pale and silent. Normally, she oohed and cooed over Stella, calling her the Perfect Wonderment and admiring her lavender-and-white-striped all-cotton sleep sack. Instead, Mary Rose stroked Stella’s fat wrist. Stella sucked her thumb and stared back at her.
    â€œWhat have I done, Stella?” her voice cracked.
    In the living room, scattered over the low coffee table, illuminated by a tensor lamp Mary Rose had dragged in from her night table, were dozens of photocopied articles on pregnancy, compulsively annotated in purple ink in a sinewy hand, the corers ferociously stapled a half-dozen times.
    They were from Audra, who’d collected them over the years. For future reference, apparently. Mary Rose had come home thisafternoon to find the padded envelope propped against the wall beside her mail slot.
    â€œHow nice of her,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
    Mary Rose sat on the edge of the table, her long hands between her knees. She told me how this morning she and Fleabo, her right-hand mower, had gone to pick up some zoo doo. Our city is very proud of its zoo. Besides offering jazz concerts in the summer they also give away, by appointment only, magnificent loaves of elephant manure to anyone who’ll come and haul it away. Mary Rose swore by zoo doo. It was cheap, easy on the roots of roses and radishes alike, environmentally correct. She collected a truckload of it once in the spring and once in the fall. Because Mowers and Rakers had been unusually busy since September, she hadn’t yet gotten around to it.
    Now, however, she was entering her fourth month of pregnancy. Now, her first thought when she opened her eyes in the morning was, When’s my nap? Day in, day out, she felt like a bumbling sleeping-pill swallower whose friends were forcing her to walk circles in her living room, slapping her cheeks and pouring black coffee down her throat. She raked with the wrong side of the rake, put the milk in the cupboard and the Cheerios in the fridge, mailed bills with no stamps.
    Mary Rose had wanted to skip the