Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me by Karen Karbo Page A

with seven seconds left to play. They only feel happy if their situation is completely impossible,” said Mary Rose. “There’s Derik Crawshaw though. He seems relatively well-adjusted.”
    â€œYeah, but he’s new.”
    We could go on like this all night, and often did. We thought we might be transverbalists: women who enjoyed not cross-dressing, but cross-talking, talking like men.
    By the end of the first quarter Stella was awake and fussing, the Blazers were down by four, and Ward Baron had decided to stop by.
    Stopping by was not something Mary Rose generally approved of. People who knew Mary Rose did not drop by. Whenever I waxed nostalgic about college, during which time I shared a huge old house with five other people, all of whom had issued open invitations for everyone they knew to crash whenever they wanted to, Mary Rose’s pupils dilated with anxiety. Needless to say with Ward, it was a different story altogether. At least a first.
    Ward and I had an odd relationship. He reminded me of Lyle: lanky, with unkempt brown curls and a deep voice that cracked with emotion at will, the compulsion to tell dumb jokes. When we were teenagers the Barons came to California to stay for a month with us in our rented beach house at Corona del Mar. Ward and I were on the verge of getting one of those cousin things going that are a familiar staple of nineteenth-century English literature, but we were both shy, and I was neither large enough nor hardy enough for his tastes. He fell for a five-foot-eleven sailing instructor instead.
    So there were murky feelings swirling around our relationship even before Romeo’s Dagger. Ward wanted me to hire him to direct. He thought, perhaps rightly so, that his mother had given me my break, so I should give him his. As savvy as Ward imagines himself to be, he thought what all people who are not in the movie business think: that a producer is like the immigrant owner of a Vietnamese restaurant who has a job for every family member who wants one. In truth, the most powerful person involved in the production is the star, in this case the cuddly cute comedian R—,who (in his first serious role) played Dicky Baron, and got to pad the crew with as many family members, chefs, and favorite kung fu instructors as he wanted. Likewise, cuddly cute R—had his pick of the litter, director-wise. But Ward was persistent. He thought, as men typically do, that I could be softened up, worn down, stone-washed, whatever. First, he tried to appeal to my cousinly instincts, sending me pictures of Audra and Big Hank vacationing in Milan along with a copy of his director’s reel. When that didn’t work, he came to L. A. and took me to dinner at the beach, hoping the salt air and overcooked swordfish would rekindle our romance manqué of twenty years earlier.
    When that didn’t work out, he resorted to good-natured bullying.
    â€œYou don’t know how many people would sell—well, maybe not their souls, but their houses in Montana”—to work with me. Who’s executive producing this thing, anyway?” he said.
    â€œI am,” I said. It was a lie, but he was getting on my nerves. “Anyway, I’ve showed your reel to R— and he thinks you’re too slick.”
    â€œYou mean stylized,” he said.
    â€œI mean facile,” I said.
    â€œPerfect, then, for your movie,” he said.
    â€œHiya, baby,” he said now, to Mary Rose. Ward moved closer to kiss her cheek, then made a last-minute detour and swooped down to plant a peck on her brown wool sweater in the region of her belly button. He wore one of those enormous black leatherjackets that crackled with every breath. “Oh, and hello to you too, Mary Rose.”
    Ward scooted Mary Rose over, and the four of us sat squashed on the couch, like people on a lifeboat. Ward gently placed a Styrofoam take-out carton on Mary Rose’s lap. “I remember you liked