Monster Management

My evil side has been asleep for years, but today I felt it beginning to pump through my veins again.  The old werewolf muscles began to twitch and swell inside my clothes.  My eyes blackened. My nose lifted and circled around, sniffing the air with a sudden but familiar keenness. I hunched over my desk, fingers clamped the edge, and I asked myself—of course I did — did I really want this?

I’d been poking around at the periphery of an idea, the thought of going back to do some marketing for a friend and colleague who has had trouble finding the right person for the job. Yes, MARKETING. The evil trajectory. The thing that creates monsters. The lifestyle that slays mere mortals — boom, bang, bam! — left and right.

I’d been poking around the periphery, and then I got the nod:  Go for it. Do it. Start marketing.

Oh heaven above. What have I been thinking?

I am in the middle of a long, slow period at my regular day job and so am only working three days a week right now. This friend’s business is great. Deeply caring, of employees and the environment. People- and service- oriented. A nicely executed, 100 percent benefit to a sustainable community. In some ways, I can think of no better way to use a lot of pent up energy and idle creativity than to sell this living, breathing work of art. This beautifully choreographed, holistic business dance with so many fine people stepping together to make it work. I could use a few extra bucks, too.

When my friend was trying to fill the position before, I tried to warn him. Real, honest-to-goodness marketing people are a different breed. If you get a fake, then you’ve got a shyster on your hands. Peddling big words for big bucks, they will constantly try to convince you they’ve created something from nothing, and they will bill for lots and lots of hours before you figure it out.

But if you get the real thing, then you will have everything you wish for. Everything.

And be careful of what you wish for.

Because real marketing people are sickos. Mentally ill. They’re not sniffing the air for blood, or money even, but they’re driven by something so terrifying, so flat black — you don’t want to see it, and you damned sure don’t want to know what it is, deep down inside. Their drive for success is adrenaline addiction juiced up by terror of something — something huffing and quivering in the pitch. Fear of failure, I guess, but it takes on a life of its own. They’ll wreck themselves in the process, if they’re not careful. They’ll come home to their families needing incredible amounts of shoring up. And the other employees in your business? They might not be so fond of the extra work. They might resent the hell out of the relentless pressure from your new marketing machine:  “C’mon, you can do it! What are you, a man or a mouse?” “Hey—I put in 100 hours last week; you can work ten or twenty more.” “So this business has never tried anything like this before? How was that working out for ya?”

And most of all, as an employer of such a scary underworld creature as a real marketing person, you’ll hear this kind of thing, repeatedly:  “I have put my good name behind this business.” A marketing professional is nothing if not aware of this fact. The next job is dependent on the success of this one. And this one. And this one. Your real marketing professional walks into an executive office, or before a social club, or anywhere, anywhere at all, that might buy your product or service. And that marketing professional says, “Buy this. It’s the best there ever was, or my name is not Foghorn Leghorn.” (You get the point.)

And you, and all the dearly beloved, excellent support staff who run the business that is being sold — you all better shine, or Werewolf Heads will spin.

If I sound confident at all about it, I have failed utterly at explaining. My evil side has been asleep for years. I don’t have a decent graphic design program. I can make contacts again, but it will be harder, my having been so far away. Overall, my heart might not be able to take it — not the physical one, but the softer, kinder one I’ve developed in the last decade. And I actually like all these people I would surely piss off, at various points.

Most of all, what if I fail?

My New Boy

Nothing graceful or enchanted about the barn at all — nothing to suggest it housed a Fairy King, or a creature not of this world, or … something. A concrete corridor ran the length of a handful of stalls, dark as dungeons, then turned abruptly into a wash stall. I guessed that the proprietress had hand-drawn the layout for her husband, who executed the concrete block building without asking questions. She was, it seemed, far more into riding horses than the feng shui of housing them. I wanted to erase and redraw. Widen the corridor. Make everything bigger. Get some windows in. I saw through an open door that the office was directly next to the wash stall, opposite. All that paperwork and tack waiting to be blasted with the water hose stressed me.

Doug and I stepped in from a scorcher of a spring day and squinted to adjust to the sudden loss of light. The woman quickly grabbed up the horse she had for sale; he shimmied out and around the corner and into the too-tight wash stall, while my husband and I jostled around in the unfamiliar space. We were trying to figure out the limits of backing into a corner in the dark, while lifting our feet up and away from under the gigantic hooves that plodded by. When we all finally settled into our places, he and I found ourselves too close to judge the enormous animal being saddled up before us

What was that thing?

We could see his head far above, unusually intelligent, kind eyes, the way he cocked his countenance around to gather information (not “horse-like” at all) — ears at least five inches long? Neither horse nor mule, an equine crossed with a centaur, maybe? One quarter human? Moments later, we were out in a newly mowed riding ring, of sorts. I swung up on the giant and encouraged him to move out. His massive legs — thick bones connected by extra-large joints — reached into the super-long stride characteristic of his gaited breed. My husband would later comment on how strangely calm I was on such a big, young animal I knew nothing about:  “You looked like you were sitting on a chair. You didn’t seem to be paying attention to him, or what he might do.” Well, I already knew he had had no training whatsoever — he only has two gaits, and the most I could ask of him was that he would go forward in those two gaits, turn, and stop. But mostly, I sensed his brain just did not work like any horse’s I had ever known, and that somehow, for some reason, within that odd framework he was not easily rattled.

The next day, my trainer and his equally knowledgeable wife drove the hour away at my excited insistence, to give him a thorough, more critical examination than I could.  My trainer put him through all manner of tests for two hours, rode him, tried to make him freak out, stressed his joints, banged on his hooves so hard I winced for the horse. My trainer’s wife offered a running commentary through the process. They, too, were sure he was not drugged. In the final analysis they found him green but sound, with an extraordinarily sweet disposition. Very, very different in the way he thinks. My trainer’s wife tried to find the words. “Babified?” she asked. We all wondered if maybe he had been raised in a house, with humans, until he was too big to sleep in the guest room.

Continuing my long habit of being the Statue of Liberty of the domesticated animal world — “bring me your odd, your abused, your unwanted” — I bought him.

My horse experience is quite dated, and I don’t pretend to know much anymore. But I have always had an eye for conformation, which is really just aesthetics, defined. Form following function. And I can confidently say this about my new horse:  he is a big bony bag of conformation faults. But in ways I cannot explain, they work somehow, if you’re not absolutely committed to buying a horse.

I held my breath as my high school-age daughter approached him for the first time — my young artist who inherited a concentrated version of my eye for aesthetics, the same gnawing sense of annoyance when anything is out of balance, visually or spatially. She was already furious with me for having purchased him without "consulting" her, and she was having a big old time playing up her greatly inflated sense of self-righteousness. She was cocked and ready to shoot me right between the eyeballs with a stream of angry words — she needed only to lay eyes on the new addition to the family menagerie for confirmation of the mistake she was sure I had made.

But her tight-lipped bitch-look melted instantly instead. She grinned from ear to ear, completely unaware that she was giggling out loud from time to time. “Ohhh! He’s adorable!”

So now we start the process of figuring out what, or who, he is, exactly.

To begin: His name is Cosmo, and I think he is a Jim Henson creation.

Authority Always Wins

“It’ll be fine,” my 22-year-old daughter said, rolling her eyes at her mother’s paranoia. “They won’t go through your suitcase, and if they do, they won’t find it.”

Easy enough for her to say, one of my amazing world travelers  --  she who has never done a single “wrong” thing in her life. I felt a certain unease that she could not have understood, like I was being pressed by my drug-dealer boyfriend to cross an international border with his stash in my suitcase. In actuality she herself was also carrying, though neither of us concealed anything illicit, immoral, or dangerous to any country’s agricultural enterprises. The dried, processed foods we’d picked up in the Argentine indigenous hinterlands, however, were illegal in some South American countries, for unknown reasons. Like any good Americans told we couldn’t have something, by god, we were going to have it. In industrial-size packages, thank you very much, seeing as how we wouldn’t be back to the Southern Hemisphere for a while.

The problem was that we were making our ways back home to the States by different routes; she was headed to Brazil, land without laws, and I to Peru. Peru is extremely strict about contraband and will happily let you believe that you will be shot on sight for even thinking about something that is not allowed. When I’d landed there before, Delta flight attendants shook down passengers prior to descent for their own good, to make sure they hadn’t accidentally put any packaged peanuts in their pockets. Closed-circuit TVs all over the Lima airport ran scary looking ticker-type messages across the bottoms of their screens in all languages  --  as though news was breaking that a plane had gone down. What they warned instead was that each customs infraction would cost A MINIMUM OF 250 AMERICAN DOLLARS.

Descending into Lima this time, I was carrying, among other things, a series of connected, clear cellophane envelopes, each holding a different spice, like a parti-colored Jacob’s Ladder toy. Per infraction, I calculated that if each spice was considered a separate violation, this shebang would cost me at least $1,250. Difficult to explain, once I got back home. If caught, I might have asked customs officials, Can’t you just shoot me instead?

I landed. I started to sweat. I looked guilty as any drug dealer’s girlfriend on her way home with his stash.

All my luggage cleared customs without a hitch.

* * *

The paranoia is not my fault. I have guilt-baggage tracking all the way back to my teenage years. It was the time, kiddos. The day, the era. Having grown up in the border city of El Paso, I have a Pavlovian response to authority, greatly heightened at border crossings. (Keep in mind that Texas throws away the key for guilt by association.) When my daughters get pulled over by the police, as several have, they think, “oh shit, a ticket.” When Blue Lights tapped against our back windshields, we jumped sky-high for fear of jail time. Next move was going into survival mode: Quick! Arrange your face! Like all good prey animals, we had a keen sense for when the lions were moving past to find another shady spot, or creeping up and licking their chops. A police officer’s demeanor determined whether you 1) coolly handed over your license, 2) prepared to do some serious world-class begging, or 3) got out of the car and assumed the position without even being asked, eyes glazed like a doomed deer’s.

I am not describing some unique subset of the culture here. No young person anywhere in the 1960s through the 80s could think, No problem, I have nothing to hide. We either had something to hide, had just finished something to hide, or were on our way to partake in something that, momentarily, we would need to hide. So of course, around El Paso high schools, blockades were set up somewhat irregularly for “license checks” during lunch periods, and streets immediately surrounding were patrolled intensely the rest of the time. The purpose was not to protect us from guns or terrorism  --  ha ha, that’s funny. The purpose was strictly to bust teenagers if a police officer was so inclined. The pickings were good.

Lucky for us the pickings were good, because the size of the problem meant whether anyone actually got busted depended 100 percent on whether a cop felt like doing the paperwork. Things were different in this way, I think. A friend of mine, for example, was speeding his Camaro around the school one day when a patrol car nosed its way around from behind a hidden corner and signaled for him to pull over. This was a particularly bad time, as the friend had just sucked down a good hard hit from his bong, which just now contained water rancid enough to turn an iron stomach. In his panic, he tried stuffing the bong between the seat and console; spilled the water; got out, then remembered to exhale as the police officer was approaching; then locked his keys inside, with his wallet, while the car was still running. The weary officer took out his tools, wrestled the car door open by way of the raised window, got a thankful flash of my friend’s persuasive pearly whites, and told him to go home.

Such was life at that time, this story as common as dirt. The reader may correctly note I chose not to tell one of my own stories to illustrate. Some years back, I heard a striking wisdom about parenting:  “No matter what they say, children only aspire to be as good as their parents.”

If I did tell a story of my own here, though, it would be the one involving an exceptionally dumb drug-dealer boyfriend, a border crossing, and the Mexican police. Not that it really happened, of course.

* * *

I was considerably more relaxed leaving Peru. I carried nothing that would elicit so much as a whine from a drug-sniffing dog and, really, barring a theft of the national wealth, how much could they really care what you took out of the country, vs. brought in? Next hurdle was US Customs, 18 hours away. Imagine my surprise when, past security and boarding a flight for the US, I rounded a blind corner on the ramp  --  just a few feet from the plane’s hatch  --  to find Peruvian agents behind cheap folding banquet tables, searching carry-ons.

Taking a deep breath and leveling my gaze, I stepped up and handed over my purse. An icy, uniformed woman in rubber gloves stared me right in the eyeballs and rummaged around inside, as though conducting an exam of a far more personal nature. I began wracking my brain for what all could be in that bottomless pit of a catch-all, wondering how much it could cost me and whether I would be willing to miss my flight to argue about it.

She pulled out a slender little pack of Virginia Slims and held it on the flat of her hand. “You have cigarettes. Do you have a lighter?”

Did I have a lighter? What, I rubbed sticks together, to smoke that pack of cigarettes? Blissed out on weeks of travel, I had completely forgotten the necessity of searching for and removing all the lighters that rolled around the bottom of my purse, alongside the lint, the old candy and the lost lipstick tops.

“Um...  No?”

She handed my purse back and nodded me toward the plane.

Postpartum

Disregard the psychopaths and the narcissists for this experiment. The biologically broken outliers. Why are there negligent mothers in the remaining numbers? The weak, the addicts, the whores? Why is loving another with earthshattering maternal abandon not enough to make a woman super-human? Whipping and slashing anew at whatever demons wait outside the hospital doors?

When all that matters is the heart in the effort.

Nothing is elemental, and everything is, in that white-hot chasm that opens to sweep in a new soul. Nerves are exposed. Does cool breath on a wound hurt, or help? Is the water cold, or hot? Shall we seek air and light or will we, my baby and me, heal 40 percent faster covered? Currents of emotion touch parts of brain untouched before. Labor is Annihilation of Self in Surround Sound.

Did she have a self?

She will never be more vulnerable than in childbirth. She will never be more pinned. The lucky arise with a life more beloved than their own in their arms. The unlucky have demons in the room.

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20110428/NEWS/304280046/Shackled-mom-wins-case?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

The Mother I Cannot Call on Mother's Day

There comes a point, in the process of falling in love, when it’s time to get down to brass tacks. You somehow have to get the difficult questions into the conversation, to figure out what it is, exactly, you’re getting yourself into. Taking advantage of a lull, you might press tongue to upper lip and look toward the sky as though a random question can be found there. So, um, what does a professor get paid exactly? How many children do you have? Any diseases I should know about?

And perhaps most important of all, for a woman, What kind of mother did you have, growing up?

“Flawless,” my husband-to-be answered, in a flash.

This was bad. The poor guy with the flawless mother was never going to find that again, most especially not in me. I’m not saying he or all men are trying to resolve an Oedipus Complex with their selection of partner, not at all  --  but for them a mother seems to set a certain baseline standard for what an adult woman is. I could have been a huge improvement over Depressed Alcoholic Mother, or Trapped Emotionally Distant Mother. Smother Mother would have been great, as I only rarely develop the clinginess of a baby monkey. But just my luck. “Flawless.”

Worst of all for me, she really was. Her Southern upbringing was evident in every word that she said, in that slow, comforting, throaty drawl that, really, who couldn’t love? Tall and regal, she had just the most perfect frame on which to hang 1950s fashion. Picture June Cleaver, except born and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee  --  for real. She was quiet and strong. Messes were cleaned up before the children looked over their shoulders to notice them, and she was reliable as the constant flow of new mornings since the dawn of time. Always found precisely where she was supposed to be. If Mama was not waiting at the bus stop as expected when the children got off, they freaked --  surely some terrible fate had befallen mankind and they were now standing on an evil alternative planet. For a whole lifetime, she steadfastly continued to wear classy, understated skirts and heels, preserving her boy’s vision of motherly loveliness decades and decades into his adulthood.

Well, I am tall.

* * *

  

Doug’s mother is 85 years old, and has Alzheimer’s Disease. Much of who she is has been torn asunder. I want to cry when I think about it; I want to give her back "flawless." The magnificent managerial skills she had that kept her family's world running so smoothly for so long. Those who never have experienced Alzheimer’s in their families may not know: suffering is involved. Sometimes. It is not a disease that, “thank heavens,” takes the patient’s every conscious understanding away, so that he or she at least does not know what is happening. She has waking nightmares terrifying as any that anyone could imagine, without even a small child’s capability to realize she is awake and the dream is not real.

 

Her husband of 60 years, Doug’s father, is able to provide her with the very best of care. It is no small relief that we can trust in his complete devotion to her. That is a gift, from a father.

We can’t be in Doug's hometown on Mother’s Day, but I wanted to send this message in a bottle out into the virtual world. Much of who Doug’s mother is has been torn asunder, but the essence of her can always be found, even now. If she has difficult moments or even hours, the girl raised up with Knoxville manners will be back. Her blue eyes will crinkle again with a childlike joy that she has always had, in the company of her family, regardless of whether she recognizes us. She will fold her hands characteristically, quietly, in her lap, then lift one in a sideways motion swiping the air, as if to say, oh, you! The deep pitch and roll of her Southern drawl remains. Above all, the woman sitting in her chair in the nursing home is, and will always be, a mother. Nothing, but nothing, can take that away.

Not One For The Girls?

Today I face more than the usual trepidation staring at this blank page, which is staring back like a white-painted board ready to come out of the screen and clock me on the forehead.

First, fun as writing my last blog was, it seemed to have left me needing more than the usual recovery time. Then, the week’s events galloped away at breakneck speed, leaving me tied up in a stirrup, clanging along behind, sorting through the miles and miles of ideas with my face bouncing in the dirt. Idea-generation went something like this: Ow, no; ow, no; ow, no, not that one either ...  (To recap the week’s events, first there was a Royal Wedding and a sudden market for real rotten tomatoes to fill a void in the virtual world, that may yet bring nanotechnology into the present. Then, an EF3 tornado a few miles from my home killed three people and gravely injured many, many others. Then, the death of Osama Bin Laden. Enough said on that one.)

So imagine just how meekly I approach you, dear reader, and request that we return to the subject of the Royal Wedding. (Holy Mary, Mother of Nanotechnology, please protect me from future rotten tomatoes.) In the interest of not pushing weak stomachs and delicate sensibilities too far, I will keep my hypothesis short.

My question to all those who had a strong visceral reaction to the Royal Wedding is this:  If you loathed it strangely much, as though Justin Bieber were headlining, could it have been because it was too female? Maybe too gay? The kind of event little girls dream of ensconced in their pink canopy beds, and to which people like Alexander McQueen devote lifetimes of artistry and passion?

I am aware of all the good arguments that could be used to disagree with this inference, involving symbolism, imperialism, and a lot of dollar figures that, I suspect, would balance out in favor of local economies and small businesses, if the analyses were completely done. But these arguments were more rarely used than the “compare this wedding to so much other more important news” complaint  --  a postulation that has always failed a test of logic, in my opinion. I suspect if people really thought about it, many would sit back on their heels at the idea misogyny and other kinds of “hating” were largely the origins, somewhere, for so much disgust.

The response to the wedding reminded me often of a social networking backlash some months ago, involving Breast Cancer Awareness. Fulfilling a secret, online pact, women posted where they kept their purses using a prescribed innuendo. Mine went like this:  “I like it hanging from hardware specially installed on the wall.” The mystery of the meme would be solved at some later date  --  the “awareness” part of the equation. It took some time for the anger that followed to find its voice, to evolve into something that could become a counter-meme. At first men were curious, asking “what are these women up to?” Then, many were pissed, the vitriol sounding quite misogynistic. Finally the reaction caught on when the message sounded more reasonable, suggesting people do something “for real” to benefit breast cancer victims instead. Logic failure again: the purpose was to raise awareness, and the effort was working off-the-charts better than any billboards and brochures campaign that money could ever buy. (Note there was no such wholesale backlash for “Turn Your Profile Picture Purple” in support of gay rights  --  the real reason would be too obvious  --  or dozens and dozens of other attempts to use the status update to promote understanding.) All I could hear in the breast cancer backlash was, “Women, get back in your proper places.”

The wedding was breathtaking, from an artistic point of view. Color, scale, symmetry, all spectacularly executed --  yes, the parts of my brain- and heart- neural pathways that respond to beauty lit up like fireworks in the sky. I make no apologies. And if anyone dares ask for my participation in a future breast cancer awareness campaign, I will do it. I may be the only one, after that last slap to countless women’s faces, but I will. I love a good wedding, and I love to refuse to get back in my place.

The Loser's Circle

Ben was banging his head lightly on the thick glass wall of the skybox overlooking the track. Cars were hurling themselves around the oval speedway, attended by more than a hundred thousand revelers. The muffled sound of engines thrummed against the glass, like a B-movie hive of bees revving up to get in.

“Knock it off, Ben,” Shirley hissed into his ear. He felt her fingers press hard into the crook of his arm. “Everybody knows you don’t want to be here. Suck it up.”

He stopped banging but the terrific reverberation continued, even without his forehead keeping time. He gazed downward to hide tears that were gathering, uncontrollable as ball bearings in a bowl. An unfathomable sea writhed in the stands, a parti-colored body of Budweiser t-shirts and rebel flags and mirrored glasses and beer coolers. Harsh sunlight cast the masses in an odd, blue relief on the other side of the window glazing. A constant blast of cold from the air conditioning held the shimmering heat at bay, like magic. Countless dots of baseball caps in the haze shifted together, aimed like magnetized toys at a mysterious "lead car" somewhere in the pack. Big corporate money had paid for the skybox engineering that filtered out so much of the noise, but, partly out of habit, Ben worried whether the vibration could affect the baby that Shirley carried.

He could not speak, for the painful lump that was forming in his throat and chest.

“Shirls!” a male voice whooped from near the bar. Ben's wife swung her enormous belly in the direction of the voice. “Mark, baby!” she called, throwing her arms wide, palms up, trotting her Betty Boop heels across the room. She tucked her head in her "signature" way  --  saying with her body language I’m coming to get you. Her spiky platinum hair was a halo under the spotlights of the luxury skybox; Ben did not have to turn to see it in his mind’s eye. He remembered the first time he watched her lean into the bathroom mirror and use her thumb and forefinger to pull half-inch long curls down onto her forehead. “My signature look,” she grinned at him with a sideways glance. Every move she made wrecked him back then.

If he altered his depth perception, he could see his own, faint reflection in the skybox wall just now, instead of the crowds below, the curly copper hair, his John Lennon glasses. Kind, sleepy blue eyes that his mother had always told him would win him any girl he might want. The state park anthropologist and the hospital foundation fund raiser—how had Ben missed that he was to be a main character in a story Shirley made up in her own head? What a perfect rom-com, she would have giggled to her girlfriends. Watch this, she would have said, setting her Appletini down and moving in to pluck him from his quiet life.

Nothing in his studious history had warned him to steel himself against someone like her. Nothing told him to arm himself that night with something more sturdy than a field jacket and a Powerpoint presentation for the Chamber of Commerce crowd. He had been the evening’s specially scheduled 25 minutes of cultural entertainment, unusual to them all as a zoo animal. How dangerous could it have been? He thought he would pack up his things and head home, unmolested.

It had been plenty dangerous. Two months into their marriage, Ben's quiet, unprying mother had startled him with an uncharacteristic commentary. "That woman wants everything under the sun," she muttered to the sandwiches she was making, in the belief that Ben could not hear. Now, he wondered how an elderly woman who’d devoted her life to raising two sons could have known so much, so quickly, about her new daughter-in-law.

Except that his mother was only partly right, he thought. Shirley didn't want everything, she only wanted one singular something that, now, was very, very simple to understand. All eyes on her. If a man squinted and held her in a certain light, she could seem to have succeeded, to have captured the luminescence she worked so damned incredibly hard to attain. All that guileless want in and of itself made a man ache, at first  --  made him want to encourage her like she was a tap-dancing little girl. Yes yes, keep trying, you'll get it right! It made Ben a little sick to think about it, like he'd awakened from amnesia to find he'd been a pedophile or purveyor of porn in a previous life.

Under any other circumstance, he would not have been here at the track, even outside of the fact he was with a woman he no longer loved. This place bloodied his humanist heart. In the stands below, he saw nothing but lack of education and the blind patriotism and conservatism that it allowed. All around him, he saw nothing but the men making millions by controlling worldviews with the spectacle outside. Surprisingly, they had little interest in the actual race. They were completely focused on the bar, the catering handled by tuxedoed waiters, and the decorative women they'd invited. Like Shirley.

The speedway Christmas party almost nine months before had been hellish enough. "Shirley, you're too sick to go," Ben argued. "You've haven't stopped having morning sickness, and it's way past dinner. Let's rest. This can't be good for the ba--"

He broke off while she shimmied into a length of royal blue sequins.

"Stay home if you want," she said, checking her figure in the mirror, and that was it. That was the beginning, middle, and end of her concern for her husband's wishes, or her child. She was going, and under those circumstances, like these ones, so was Ben. He played her game that night, of hiding their news at any cost, including at the cost of his dignity. Once, in the jumble of a sudden panic of getting caught, he'd made it look like he was pissing while she threw up in the Country Club topiary pots outside. She could make him do something that completely out of character. Her glittery gown and the noise, of course, drew attention to her retching despite Ben's widely planted limbs. Only the valets saw, and they thought she was drunk. Which was OK, because “they” did not matter.

"But why?" Ben asked. "Why not just tell everybody?"

She never would say. In that signature way of hers.

No one could have been more shocked by her pregnancy than he had been  --  he had thought Shirley didn't want children. Yet she seemed completely fine with the idea. He guessed she had work reasons for not telling and kept quiet. And something magical seemed to happen between them, in that time of the shared secret. They fell into a more contented patch in their marriage  --  she was too tired to run all day and all night for her work, and she seemed to want to stay close to him for a change. After years of shunning any mention of Ben's work, of scowling if he brought up a find in the park, she listened attentively. She needed him, she mewled at his affections. He rose to the occasion under her approving gaze. She was even interested in Ben’s own family for a change, in the speech he was working on for his brother's wedding, for example. She curled into the armchair in their office; she looked over his shoulder from time to time, and rubbed his back. Her morning sickness had gone by the time Ben recited it in his rented tux; she beamed at him in a way he had never seen.

When he was finished, she got up and took the microphone from him. "Ladies and gentlemen!" she purred, throwing one arm wide, palm up. "Ben and I have an announcement to make!"

In a split second, a sickening thud sounded in his heart, as though she had dropped the mic. His face reddened with searing embarrassment  --  not for what Shirley was doing, but for the sudden realization that just about everyone watching had always seen what he had not. It was surely painfully apparent, if you were not in love with her. Every single move she ever made was a pose. Every one. Even in the privacy of their own home she drifted through a practiced choreography in every waking moment  --  laying a hand here just so, coming to a stop there to cock a foot behind her, turning dramatically to lean against a counter and stretch her arms wide behind her. He knew that instant that his sister-in-law didn't call her "The Little Teapot" because she was so small, but for the way that she posed for every family photograph: one hand on hip, the other hand held palm up, as though she was about to lead the church choir in song. The rest of the family smiled normally around her while she positioned herself to the sound of a movie score only she could hear.

It was a kind of psychosis. If he cared more, he might try to look it up. He didn’t though, not after grasping finally that the entirety of their marriage was an act. One that had needed an unwitting, studious male anthropologist type, with curly copper hair and John Lennon glasses. How lucky Shirley had been, even before him, that life had placed her in a perfect position for her particular talents, a role in the high-society hospital foundation that called for a glorified Mistress of Ceremonies.

"A glorified Mistress of Ceremonies!" she wailed  --  Ben remembered those had actually been her words, on the drunken occasion of her 35th birthday. How strange they had sounded coming from her; she had never to his knowledge suffered one moment of insecurity. He stood in the middle of the room and scratched his head at the maelstrom whirling around him. “I hate this place!” she screamed. “I hate this stupid, little, piss-ant place! Nobody recognizes talent! And oh, shit, me 35 years old!”

Now, with her 37^th birthday coming up, she seemed very happy with “this place,” very happy indeed. She was hell-bent to be here today  --  one week overdue and climbing into the stratosphere to get to the top of the grandstands. Working the room for the job like not even childbirth itself would slow down her career. She had turned everything regarding the baby over to him  --  the search for an obstetrician, scheduling appointments, checking out the pregnancy and delivery books at the library and then reading them. Studying up on what, exactly, new parents were supposed to do with the helpless being they would bring into the world. Even the baby's name. When she showed no interest whatsoever, he demanded  --  needed  --  some kind of commitment. Some indication she understood that this was real. "How about Melissa?" he said. "I know it sounds crazy from a guy, but I've always loved it, since high school."

"Sure," she said.

Baby girl? he wondered now, pressing his forehead to the glass in the hopes the sound vibration would ease his headache. What made him so sure it was a baby girl? Because that was what Shirley wanted. Statistical probabilities and his scientific background be damned, the likelihood was 100 percent. The size of her "want" in this case would be so great, he thought, her body would accept nothing but an X chromosome.

His next question was purely force of habit, as though his mind was a nurse checking a perfectly healthy man’s pulse. Had Shirley slept with every man in the room? Two years into their marriage the crazed worry disappeared from his being like he'd been touched by the fingertip of God. He had figured out, with absolute certainty, the answer was no. She had slept with no man in the room. Each man here  --  from the mid-level, ladder-climbing Mark to the rich track owners  --  thought he was the only one she had not yet taken to her bed, and each one was wrong. Because for Shirley, when the moment came for the silky underthings to come off, for the lacy wrap to be cast aside, for the dirty talk to stop and for pure, raw desire to rush in  --  her fantasies fell apart. Sex turned into an almost painful, restless, frustrating string of demands: Do this! No that! Can't you just, just ... damn it!

Just what, Shirley? Ben almost said aloud, to the glass inches from his lips. Say it, Shirley, and I'll do it. Can't I just help you keep your fantasy going? I don't even know what it is, but I know that you are the only one in it.

He drew in a deep, ragged breath. Gathering tears escaped and dripped down his nose.

She was not the only one, not exactly. There were two people in her fantasy now, and he was not one of them. The baby was his, he was sure, yet not his, not for long. He would endure this NASCAR hell to have whatever small role in his daughter's life that he could, to bring her safely into the world. Then, because he would have no other choice, he would turn his child over to this woman who would no longer need the frustrations of a man, to have 24-hour company if she wanted it, and an orbit around herself. Once the baby-care was finished and Melissa was toddling on her own, Shirley would wreak any havoc to get him out of the way. He would step aside so that his daughter would not be drowned in the maelstrom.

"Dude!" the suddenly sober Mark called. "Shirley's having the baby!"

The tears stopped and Ben ran to her side. He saw phones coming out to snap pictures, was ready to punch someone to stop them, but the men who owned the speedway knew how to use a blanket to hide bloody scenes, a body or a birth. In the tent that was created, Ben found himself alone with his wife, in a strange timelapse, unsure if minutes or hours were passing.

“Hey Shirls!" Mark barked out over the blanket, breaking the spell. "What do you say we name him after whoever wins the race today?” A riff of male laughter slopped over the blanket behind his joke. Toasts were made.


By the time the rescue squad traveled up so many flights with all of their gear, the baby was crying in Shirley’s arms. An announcement had been made over the loud speakers, and the roar of more than one hundred thousand people vibrated through the skybox glass. The two men at each corner dropped the blanket-curtain so that it covered mother and child. Ben’s “perfect” little family was snapped by an Associated Press sports photographer.

“Danica!” Shirley announced then, pulling the well-practiced 100-watt smile from her pose-repertoire. The story that went 'round the world. Their baby’s name would be Danica.