My Name is Mary by Mary Fisher

Author:Mary Fisher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

We honeymooned with gleeful abandon—two of the most perfect weeks of my life.

• • •

We were home from the Caribbean less than a month when my hunch was confirmed: I was pregnant. It really had been the perfect honeymoon. Max Harrison (for Papaharry) Campbell was born in West Palm Beach’s Good Samaritan Hospital at 8:17 A.M. on October 13, 1987.

It had been a fabulous pregnancy. On April 6, my birthday, I heard Max’s heartbeat for the first time. On May 30, I felt him kicking for the first time—“like bubbles inside,” according to my journal. On June 16, Brian was cupping my tummy with his hands when his unborn child delivered the cleanest kick imaginable. I’d never been happier, or felt better, in my entire life.

Brian and I were spending more and more time in Florida, doing artwork in our apartment. Palm Beach provided a lucrative market for art. Brian and my mother talked about opening a gallery. Although both Brian and I loved New York City, neither of us had been raised in so urban an environment. We felt more confident that we could raise a child in the suburban warmth of Florida. We began to look for a house.

When the sonogram gave unmistakable evidence that I was to have a son, I was frightened. It had never occurred to me that I might have a boy; I was going to have a daughter and, being a woman, tell her everything I’d learned about this feminine, womanly life. “Must be wrong,” I told the attending doctor during the sonogram. I feared being unable to answer a boy’s questions.

I was rescued from my fears by Joy (Chiles) Anderson. We’d met during my days in the White House when Joy was a secretary in the press office. Like Brian, she’d been raised as an “army brat” (her father was a general). When she decided to marry Dick Anderson, then playing for the Miami Dolphins and later a Florida state senator, she made the commitment to be a full-time mother. She’s never wavered.

By the time I was pregnant, Joy’s son, Ryan, was already seven and her daughter, Katherine Mary (for me), was six. Joy had faced both a boy’s and a girl’s questions and answered them all with that sweet, unflappable calmness that I first heard in her voice during noisy, chaotic moments at the White House. Joy was and is the mother who makes all other mothers feel inadequate and amateurish about their mothering. She’s also the one who taught me, “Do not, ever, say ‘My child has never done that,’ without adding the word ‘yet.’ ”

My days were spent more and more in the company of my other “Joy,” the incomparable Joy Prouty. My sister Julie had attended an exercise class at Elizabeth Arden’s salon on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach sometime in the early 1980s. She came home and announced, “I just met someone just like you.” I wish.

Joy Prouty is a former Rockette turned professional fitness instructor (who went on to own fitness centers and become an international fitness consultant).

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