Some mystic Mexican website says Grant's death is not due to happen until next February, but you can't fault me for anticipating. "Are you still around?" I said to him recently. "It's like I can't get rid of you."
"You called me," he answered.
"That's right. I think you should know I decided against having your baby," I informed him. "So I won't be growing your replacement after all."
"Your loss," he yawned.
"Coffee?"
"I'm right behind you."
And that was that. In the end I suppose I should have known better than to listen to my good friend talk about his impending death (as predicted by Mexican cyber mystics) and his years-old cache of frozen sperm while my uterus was sitting right there within catching distance, because the notion of a free fatherless baby is like catnip to a now-kinda-gal like me.
Luckily my brain grew back. I'll keep the awesome daughter I already have and walk away a winner, thank you. Yes, she is quite a lovely little sprogette, walking testimony to the benefits of alcohol. "You should name her 'Too Many Margaritas,'" Grant laughed when I first told him I was pregnant. He is a father himself, but by that time his kids were grown and he was four years into his gay phase, so to be absolutely certain I'd never need him for anything he made sure to be living on a tiny island in the Mexican Caribbean by the time I popped.
I don't blame him. New motherhood is not pretty. Lary practically banned me from the cement mausoleum he calls a home during this time because he worried I'd lactate all over his album covers or something.
Not that I would ever, for a second, as an actual mother, think to bring a baby into Lary's Cave of Wet Concrete and Rusty Rails, but Lary was used to me as he knew me. He was not aware of the replacement that had taken my shape after I'd spawned.
For one, though it took him awhile to notice, there was now a definite absence of alcohol during our interactions. Don't get me wrong, alcohol is very important. If not for alcohol, I wouldn't have had half the sex I did in my 20s, and I certainly would not have gotten knocked up with the lovely sprogette who is now my prodigy. But once you become a mother, booze looses its usefulness because you don't want to be the Mom on Cops who greets the squad car in a bathrobe and a beer in her hand, slurring, "Thass my baby bleedin' at the bottom of the stairs." So you replace booze with something else, like coffee.
That's what parents do, they make replacements. I remember my mother's old diabetic neighbor Tilly, who lived in the trailer next door and hung out on her patio all day to drink bourbon and air out the stitches on her leg stumps. One time she caught me as I took out the trash and invited me over to view her collection of crafts in her trailer, the atmosphere of which was so heavy with booze breath it smelled like an operating nerve-gas factory.
Her walls were lined with bookcases packed with nothing but homemade toilet paper cozies. The cozies were the half-Barbie-doll and half-yarn-knit-hoop-skirt kind, the idea being that the skirt would fit around an extra roll of toilet paper so it could be decoratively displayed in your bathroom. Tilly was pretty proud of her work. A tub of bisected Barbie doll parts spilled out from under her dining table, which itself was dotted with bourbon bottles. She wheeled over and fumbled with one.
"Drink?" she offered, and the bottle fell.
"Let me," I said, rising from my seat to help her.
The desire to escape was powerful — for one, it was obvious her cats had mistaken the tub of Barbie parts as their litter box — but Tilly needed company, and I was as good a replacement as any for the grown daughter who'd dropped Tilly off after her surgery and hadn't been seen since. Her name was Theresa, Tilly said, and she was studying at the same college I attended. The sorrow in her voice when she spoke of her daughter was so evident that I let Tilly dote on me until it was time to wheel her drunk ass back out to the patio. "Take these," she said as I left, handing me an armful of cozies. "You can never have enough."
Yes, you can never have enough toilet-paper cozies, especially if toilet-paper cozies are all you have. Tilly's daughter, Theresa, by the way, became a successful art broker and is a mother herself now. These days I often think about Theresa and how she fares when she thinks of her mother. Because before I became a mother myself it was no problem to remember Tilly as she was when I left her: alone, legless and ignored by a daughter. Now, though … now that memory is simply unbearable, and it has to be replaced. Instead I see Tilly holding her granddaughter on her healed lap, placing a bottle to the baby's lips.
"Drink?" she offers, and the bottle falls.
"Let me," Theresa says, rising from her seat to help her. Tilly smiles, her face crowned in cozies all around.
This article appears in Nov 22-28, 2006.