Dual Citizens

by Alix Ohlin

  One day in the break room Matt, an intern, asked me what I’d done on the weekend.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Like, literally, nothing?”

  “Sat in my apartment. Stared at the walls until it was time to come back here.”

  He laughed uneasily. “Do you have a cat?”

  I glanced at him briefly, then took my yogurt out of the fridge. He was six foot two and gangly, his cheeks a riot of acne scars, his eyelashes long and feminine, the kind of boy who’d been cooed over as a child and still expected it.

  “We were, like, taking bets. You seemed like the kind of person who had a cat.”

  He meant, the kind of woman. A woman without a family must necessarily have a cat. I said nothing.

  “Got it, not talking about cats,” he finally said, and drifted away, listing with bad posture, like a street sign hit by a car.

  * * *

  —

  I spent long hours at the office, came home late, chatted briefly with Elena—though less so now that the nights were cool and she wasn’t out on the stoop as much—and then often resumed work on my computer at home. I was fiddling with the footage of Marianne. I kept editing pieces of her together, a word here, an offhand comment there. Though I lacked a specific aim for this project, I couldn’t leave it alone. I worried that it was cruel, a too-unflattering portrait, and yet it made me feel close to her. I felt I was composing a picture of my own memory, documenting my own tenuous relationship with her, the difficult mother I’d wanted so badly to leave behind. Now I found myself craving her, or at least her image, like a ghost I kept inviting to haunt me.

  * * *

  —

  I stopped dating or trying to date. At its root the longing I felt wasn’t to do with men, or sex, and perhaps this as much as anything had doomed any potential relationship from the start. My heart had never been in it, because what I most desired was something else. There was an ache in my body that felt physical, and I often woke up in the night to find my palms flattened against my abdomen, as if willing something there. To find a man who felt as I did might take ages, and I didn’t have ages. So one day, kneading my hands together nervously, I visited a clinic in Manhattan and told the doctor what I wanted. He waited for me to explain myself with a look of bored patience. The request, so hard for me to utter, was routine to him.

  “We can do that,” he said.

  I could’ve been buying a bicycle or a sofa. I flipped through information on sperm donors, weighing their educations and career goals and height, though I didn’t care about any of those things. All that interested me, all that I looked for in the questionnaires, was a man who wanted a family of his own someday. With Wheelock I’d lived for years in a dispassionate world and I wanted a man who felt warmth toward the idea of children. After a few days of deliberation I chose a man identified only by a number, which I committed to memory, like a password to a secret account. At night I dreamed of babies, round-cheeked and gurgling, arms that wound around my neck and heads that nestled against my chest, a dream-weight so real that I grieved when I woke to find it gone.

  The doctor’s office was decorated in shades of white. The front counter was built of sheaves of paper into which little alcoves had been carved; on each alcove rested a tiny, perfect, ceramic egg. At least I think they were ceramic; I never touched them, although I stared at them each time I visited and was fascinated by their whiteness and perfection. They were aspirational eggs, the eggs all of us, the female patients, wanted to have. There was no object representing perfect sperm. The male patients I saw in the waiting room didn’t linger; they quickly checked in and made their way to a room down the hall, where everybody knew and tried not to think about what they were doing. Meanwhile the women sat in our stretchy yoga pants, which were easy to pull on and off; we sat and stared at the eggs.

  My doctor was thin, with a luxuriant moustache and a ballpoint pen he clicked incessantly during the appointments, a nervous tic that was suggestively phallic, and I told him so. He looked down at the pen in his hand as if he’d forgotten it was there. “I can see how you’d interpret it like that,” he said neutrally, with the disengagement of a man who’d heard a lot of wild statements from hormonally turbulent women over the years. I didn’t like him much. But the same qualities I disliked—his arrogance, his statistically exact and carefully phrased answers, even the painstaking diligence with which he rubbed his hands with alcohol gel before examining me—seemed to testify to his medical competence, and were therefore reasons to return to him, even though month after month I failed, under his care, to become pregnant.

  Maybe the problem was me and my imperfect, non-ceramic eggs. Maybe they wouldn’t accept my donor’s sperm, despite the warmth he had expressed in his file, indicating that he wanted to share the gift of life.

  Maybe I’d waited too long.

  What began as a simple set of procedures grew in complexity and cost. At the doctor’s direction I took pills, then hormone shots, and my belly ballooned, taut against my clothes like a sausage in its casing. Javier, over lunch at a Japanese place, suggested I lay off carbs. “I don’t even miss bread,” he murmured unconvincingly, chopsticking his sashimi. I said it sounded like a good idea. I didn’t tell him why my breasts and stomach were so swollen, or why I’d given up caffeine. I didn’t tell anyone anything. I felt embarrassed by my body, as if it revealed to anyone who looked my yearning to have a child, my weird relationship with Wheelock, my particular and error-filled life choices. I excused myself from the table and gave myself a shot in the abdomen in the restroom, swabbing the skin, pinching it, feeling the needle prick. There was something satisfying in this action, the tiny metal instrument disappearing into my body for a moment. It was an offering I made to a greater pain: it said I was ready for more.

  I got used to the ultrasounds quickly, and the invasion of the doctor’s wand grew mundane; we both examined the black-and-white follicles inside my body with academic interest. He measured; we waited. After days of injections and monitoring, my eggs were ready for retrieval. The nurse said I would be anaesthetized and asked who would take me home afterward. “I’ll take myself home,” I said. Without raising an eyebrow she made a notation on my chart. I’ll always love her for that, this nurse named Natalie whom I never saw again, for not thinking it was a big deal that I’d be going home alone.

  I slept through the procedure, woke up, ate applesauce, went back to the apartment. Several days later the doctor called to inform me that we’d created some beautiful embryos, top-grade, a phrase that reminded me of the sirloin at The Meat Market’s restaurant. His voice was warm at last. I listened on the phone for the click of his pen, but didn’t hear it. Which seemed, at that moment, the most exciting development: the news was so good that he’d put down his pen.

  23.

  Sometimes, as I charted my monthly cycles and injections in a little notebook, I thought about Marianne, who’d had her children so casually, so accidentally, and I was consumed by jealousy, a feeling that seemed all the more powerful because it was irrational and unfair. In these moods I was more angry at her than ever for her unhappiness as a mother—she’d felt burdened by a situation that I would’ve given anything to undertake—and I spent hours mulling over the injustices of my childhood, Marianne’s temper and frequent absences, her lack of interest in Robin’s music or my schoolwork. I began to wonder if her disinterest in us had had long-reaching consequences. Other women our age had families and lived in houses with spouses and retirement accounts, whereas I had a swollen belly, bruised at the injection sites, and Robin had wolves and a barn full of pianos. Why did we live these strange lives? It must be our mother’s fault. My concern for Marianne’s state of mind shrank, as blame bloomed in its place.

  In the vigorous, almost buoyant state of this anger—for which I can see now the hormone treatments were at least partly responsible�
��I’d call my mother and render accusations, spilling them over the phone in partial and stuttered sentences that were greeted with silence. Marianne didn’t react, she didn’t defend herself or even seem upset; she had no idea what I was talking about. It was as if I’d called to give her the weather forecast for a place far from where she lived. What did she care about a blizzard in Montana, rain in the Philippines? It had no bearing on her life. She responded, if she did at all, with complaints about the upstairs neighbor whose footfalls were too loud or the landlord who wouldn’t fix the leaky faucet in her bathtub.

  After these calls I inflicted myself on my sister, wanting her to join me in my anger, share my victimization. Robin only occasionally answered the phone, and when she did pick up she was often out of breath. I hadn’t told her about my fertility treatments, or even my desire to have a child, and I understand now how puzzling and irksome my behavior must have been without this context—or even might have been with it. She must, I realize, have shown great patience with me. She listened to my complaints and never told me to shut up, or that I was wrong.

  “She’s a narcissist,” I said once, remembering as I said it that Marianne had once claimed the same of my sister. “She should never have been a mother in the first place.”

  “Then where would we be?” Robin asked drily.

  She didn’t defend Marianne. But neither would she add her own criticisms, and the only time she argued with me was when I talked morosely about how our lives were off track, how with different parents and a different childhood we might have been successful, might have been happy.

  “Speak for yourself,” she said testily. “What are these terms you’re using—happiness, success? You want to have a home in the suburbs, and a husband in a business suit? Go find one.”

  “Everyone is married already,” I said, starting to cry, as the phrase home in the suburbs conjured for me images of women who spent their days strollering children to the park, hauling them in and out of grocery store carts and whacking their hands away from sugary choices in the cereal aisle, lives that during my time in Briar Neck would have struck me as banal and that now seemed perfect and full.

  “Then steal someone else’s husband,” my sister said. “People do it all the time.”

  I laughed, though I was pretty sure she meant it as a serious suggestion. On the other end of the line the silence was preoccupied. Once she was actually on the phone, Robin was always doing something else at the same time, and if there was a pause in the conversation I never knew whether she was taking her time to respond or hadn’t heard me in the first place. This time I heard the subway-like swoosh of wind, indicating that she was outside, and a sputtering rumble that sounded like her truck engine. “What’s happening?”

  “It’s Catherine of Aragon,” Robin said. “She’s hurt.” My sister had named a number of the wolves after Henry VIII’s wives. A different pack was named for deadly plants (Nightshade, Belladonna, Oleander) and still others for weapons (Blade, Arrow, Spear). She spoke of them as if about friends: Blade caught a rabbit today, or Jane Seymour has a limp. When I asked why the names she chose were so dark, she told me I had no sense of humor, which, at the time, was probably true. Now her voice lifted with concern—for the wolf, not for me. “Last week I noticed she wasn’t putting weight on her back right leg. Today it seems her back left leg too.”

  “Do you think her legs are broken?” I said, not knowing what else to suggest.

  My sister’s breath chugged in my ear, suggesting that she was moving fast in some direction I couldn’t guess. “We don’t know. I have Michel up here”—I didn’t know who Michel was, and didn’t ask—“to shoot her with tranquilizers. We’re taking her down to a large animal vet in Montreal. Tu es prêt?” she finished, evidently speaking to Michel. There came a sound of heaving and scraping, presumably an animal crate, and muttered remarks and instructions, and truck doors opening, slamming shut again.

  “Well,” I said, deflated. “Keep me posted. Good luck to Catherine.” There was no more noise; I didn’t know if Robin had hung up or just shoved the phone into her pocket or if the spotty mountain reception had cut out. She wasn’t, as a rule, one for goodbyes.

  24.

  I was excellent at making embryos. Having embryos made for me, behind closed doors, by the embryo elves. I’d outsourced the most basic form of production, become a mogul with a factory assembly line. The doctor showed them to me through a telescope, their surfaces marbled and foreign, like pictures of the moon. “These are grade-A blastocysts,” he told me. “You should be proud.”

  I blushed, weirdly, shy in front of a man who had probed inside my body for months. I said, “Thanks,” as if I’d done the work of creating them myself, although I hadn’t; he had done it, in his lab, so really, he was complimenting himself. My work had been to learn the vocabulary of blastocysts and retrieval, to haunt internet bulletin boards where women talked about their partners having good swimmers or poor swimmers, where they wished one another baby dust, where beneath their optimistic screen names (rainbow412, momtobe16) ran a ticker of acronyms and symbols that summarized their journey, ever-continuing, toward motherhood. TTC 2 yrs, angel baby 11/10 10 wks, always in my heart, IVF #2 scheduled April!

  I always read and never posted, couldn’t bear to assign myself a name, to join the parade of superstition and optimism and failure. But I studied the chat rooms with the same obsession I’d once brought to my schoolwork and to films; I collected the tidbits of knowledge there and did what I could with them; I took whatever supplements people recommended. I drank green tea, and then I abandoned green tea and ate pineapple and yams. I read about the importance of reducing stress, which would poison my body and make it hard for the embryos to implant—they could sense stress, the embryos, as dogs smelled fear.

  “You’ve got a great yield here,” the doctor had said. “We can work on this for a while.”

  My days were spent between the editing office and the lab, structured by doctor’s appointments and hormone supplements, by blood tests and measurements of the thickness of my uterine wall. I’d never been so closely monitored, so attentive to my body’s shifts, never had blood so frequently drawn. One day, in a fit of self-pity, I confided the situation to Elena, who shook her head without any sympathy at all.

  “Oh, chicken,” she said, “what a waste of time. You want a kid, go sign up for one. They’re bursting with them at social services.” She shook her hands in the air, to indicate all the rooms bursting with children. She thought I should adopt and do something right for the world instead of spending my “rich person’s money” on grade-A blastocysts. Later, she came downstairs to my apartment clutching a New York Post article about Romanian orphanages where babies suffered cruelty and neglect.

  “If you’re so determined to be a mother,” she said, “choose one of these babies who needs it. Or an older kid. Nobody wants the older ones. You could have five of them by tomorrow. Or so I’m told.”

  “Who tells you?”

  “People,” she said. “The news. Everyone knows about the older kids.”

  Part of me thought she was right. I lingered over the article for a long time. Those poor Romanian babies tugged at me, left alone in their cribs, their heads flattened against the mattresses, their cries ignored. Meanwhile I ran through the embryos like a gambler on a losing streak. The yield shrank to nothing. I signed up for a class on adoption. Increasingly the doctor was away, on vacation or at conferences, and somebody else filled in for him at my appointments. I believed this was because he didn’t want to see me and my unlucky body that wouldn’t accept his beautiful blastocysts. In the waiting room I sat silently with other women as we leafed through magazines and checked our phones, everyone yawning because we weren’t drinking caffeine. Nobody made eye contact because we didn’t want to see our sadness embodied in another person, where it was so stark and hard to ignore.


  I filed an application with an adoption agency and tried again with the doctor; this time the yield was moderate but respectable. I thought perhaps my body would be less intimidated by the bounty this time, freed of too-high expectations. We still had some lovely blastocysts, said the doctor, admiring them like pageant contestants. But my body said No thank you to the lovely blastocysts, expert by now in refusal.

  I read a news article about surrogacy in India, how Europeans and Israelis and North Americans were paying Indian women to carry their babies, a fraction of what it cost elsewhere. In the accompanying photo, a young, beautiful woman sat in a chair by a window, looking at something we couldn’t see, her expression serene. Or maybe she was exhausted. Or else quietly miserable. Exploitation or opportunity? read the caption. I pictured my embryos on a plane to India, off to meet a stranger whose bodily climate was more receptive than my own, and I felt a deep disturbance, the unstable shifting of tectonic plates. Sometimes I wanted to escape on a plane myself, to ignore as if they’d never mattered my body, my fever for motherhood, my moods. And yet my craving remained, circulating in my blood, and each month I returned to the doctor’s office, unable and unwilling to leave my hope behind.

  25.

  My sister called to ask me for money. I was trying to meditate when my cell phone went off. I hated meditating, it was the least calming part of my day, and I grabbed at the phone on the first ring. As I said hello I could feel the irritating rub of some little silver balls my acupuncturist had glued to my ear, whose purpose I’d forgotten. She’d also tried moxibustion—affixing a little stick to my belly and then lighting it, so that it smoked, incense-like, over my belly button—and cupping, sticking heated glasses on my skin. I disliked our sessions intensely, but at least she never talked about my yield.