“Lyle had to host a plague,” I said. “He’s one of the gamemasters on an online computer game and tonight they’re having a plague. The idea was to keep people off the game over the holiday, so they thought if they had an epidemic, people would spend time with their families instead of subjecting their characters to festering pustules and dementia. But the gamemasters still have to work.”
“Well, I hope he feels better,” said Audra.
I cut a glance at Mary Rose, who looked uncharacteristically meek. I had never seen her in a dress; this one was burgundy rayon that had “special occasion” written all over it. She tucked her hair behind her ears with the tips of her fingers over and over. What she does when she’s ready to tackle a big problem, like pulling out a hedge. This was not like her. This was not like her at all.
Somewhere around on the other side of the house, male voices could be heard, and a slapping sound, like someone beating out a wet carpet hung on the line.
“That game!” said Audra. “A Baron tradition. Every year the kids drink too much of their father’s single malt and play basketball in the rain.”
The kids were Little Hank, age forty-two, Ward, thirty-nine, and Dicky, thirty-three. My cousins. I think.
If Mary Rose and I were other women, or still ourselves at a different time in our lives, we would have been out there with them: playing, pretending to play as a way of aligning ourselves with the good-times-having men (instead of the marshmallow yams-baking women), or standing under the eaves sipping imported beer. But I was happy to sit and hold Stella on my lap, and Mary Rose wanted to talk. We allowed Audra to park us in the study while she hustled back to the kitchen. The study was a grand, clammy room where the green marble fireplace gave off charm but no heat, and the heavy green velvet swag curtains hung like dried seaweed from their gold rods. The woodsy smell of the fire couldn’t compete with lonely odor of dampness. It didn’t seem as if anyone else was home. There was certainly no party.
“Brooke,” spluttered Mary Rose. “I have something to tell you. Ward and I. We’re … ack! … I don’t want to jinx it.” She put her big hands to her face.
“You’re what. Not … that?”
“Not what?” said Mary Rose.
“There’s only one what that’s that,” I said. I felt suddenly as if I was channeling Dr. Seuss.
“Yes,” she said.
“No!” I said.
I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t wait to tell Lyle. Lyle once said Mary Rose was the last living valkyrie. I enthusiastically agreed, then went and looked up valkyrie in the dictionary. Mary Rose, with her own business, vacation time-share, financial portfolio. She even had a .25 Colt automatic slung in a tiny hammock behind her nightstand, which she’d learned to shoot for self-protection.
Mary Rose was too level-headed to fall for Ward. But this is how it is, isn’t it? Simpering fools conquer men and nations, strong-headed women in seven-league boots, unused to being the love object, swoon and are lost.
Then I heard about it all. How they met (she was transplanting some perennials; he was bored and trying to find someone to play croquet with him). How Ward liked to chase Mary Rose around the fringes of the Baron property, tackling her and biting the insides of her elbows, the backs of her knees. How Ward composed love poems about Mary Rose’s mastery of the sickly rhododendrons by the driveway that no one had ever coaxed into bloom.
The fire flickered exhaustedly in the green marble fireplace. Stella fingered my car keys, lost interest and dropped them on my foot, waved her hands up at the window frames, and babbled aisle aisle aisle. I nursed her on the right side. I nursed her on the left side. She slept. I heard how Ward invited Mary Rose to the set to watch him direct a commercial for flavored seltzer—Ward was a director of high-profile commercials that garnered fancy prizes—then, during a break, locked them in the greenroom, where they made love on the linoleum. How he sent Mary Rose not flowers, but slim books whose sole purpose in life was to charm. How he looked her in the eyes when she spoke, instead of around the room or at the spot on the wall just behind her head. How he made her laugh.
“What did the hurricane say to the palm tree? Hold on to your nuts, this is going to be one hell of a blow job.” Mary Rose slapped her thighs, wept with delight.
Oh no.
“In the poem about the rhododendron?” She knuckled the tears out of her eyes with no regard for the hyper-sensitive skin just beneath. She was in love. “He compared my way with shrubs with how I can mend an empty heart.”
“Shouldn’t it be fill an empty heart? Or mend a broken heart?” I bounced Stella, even though she was mewing in a way that said, “Cut it out or I’ll shriek.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
I just looked at her. I wanted to say, Mary Rose, it will matter. It will!
This wasn’t entirely true. It will matter, until you have a child, then it won’t matter again. Look at me. I have eyes for no one but Stella. I am moved to tears by the thought of Stella’s feet, those rosy toes as round as marbles, the soles of her feet like the faces of two little eyeless old men. One time I put her entire foot in my mouth, just to see what it was like. The foot tasted like Stella smelled: Downey, Desitin, and clean baby. I was planning for a day in the future when she would be an eye-rolling teen and accuse me of sticking my foot in my mouth and I would say, “No, but I stuck your foot in my mouth—when you were about six months old!” Dumb, dumb, dumb beyond belief. But it’s one of the wonders and powers of motherhood: It pleases me, so who cares?
“It’s ready!” cried Audra, rushing from the kitchen with mincing steps, the kind meant to represent hurry. “Mary Rose, honey, I hope you can stomach my parsnip and clam stuffing. I’ve had some people complain that the parsnip is too rooty and the clam is too gooey, but I think they complement each other perfectly. Just like you and Ward.”
I followed Mary Rose into the dining room. To the back of her head I said, “Rooty and Gooey sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.” Maybe I am not simply a terrible mother; I may also be a terrible friend.
Mary Rose ignored me, sat where Audra told her to. The walls in the vast dining room and breakfast room were painted with gold leaf that had blistered and buckled in the dampness.
Suddenly, hubbub! Or rather hubbub, Baron style. Little Hank, Ward, and Dicky rolled in, beating their sleeves to warm up, stamping their feet, as if they’d just come in from a dogsled race in a blizzard instead of basketball in the driveway. They behaved like an overzealous amateur theater group given the improvisation hectic! causing Audra to rush back into the kitchen to find a corkscrew. One was found. Much to-do about the wine, opening it and pouring it.
“Where’s the GD corkscrew?” said Little Hank. “Dad, did you leave the GD corkscrew on the boat?” Little Hank, in a kelly-green polo shirt and madras slacks, always looked like he’d been beamed up straight from a fraternity kegger, circa 1964.
I got the feeling Little Hank was trying to change the subject, something they’d been talking about before being called in to dinner. Or maybe I was simply projecting, based on what I know about Dicky: Romeo’s Dagger was the high point of his life, The Big Game meets The One That Got Away, and was a topic he could flog to death. Dicky dropped into his chair. He was wearing a huge blue plaid flannel shirt, exercise pants with stripes up the side. Unlike the other Barons, who were of medium height and build, Dicky was tall and curiously wide. He had hips. Next to his brothers and parents, he looked as if he was gestated next to a nuclear power plant. Chernobyl Dicky, I thought, everything about him big and pink.
“Nowadays a simple life crisis isn’t even good enough,” he was saying. He fiddled with the silverware, hit the prongs of the salad fork with