Family of Origin

by CJ Hauser

  Nolan took a breath. He stepped back.

  You don’t behave much like him either, St. Gilles said.

  Remy, Esther said. They’ve lost their father.

  St. Gilles scoffed but didn’t say any more.

  Let’s go, Nolan said. Elsa nodded, and they left the Reversalists to their huddle. Elsa saw Mitchell watching her as they went. He looked relaxed, unbothered by the commotion.

  Both children crowded into the same cube of revolving door space. They pushed outside and found Gwen smoking a Virginia Slim.

  I’m surprised you’re allowed to do that here, Elsa said.

  It’s not allowed on the main campus but fuck him, Gwen said. You want one?

  No thanks, Elsa said. Nolan shook his head.

  A whole generation has given up smoking overnight. If I weren’t already so freaked out about everything, nothing would freak me out more than that, Gwen said.

  The children shrugged.

  Not to harp, Gwen said, but it’s really not so far to my observation deck, and it’s a ridiculously simple test and—

  Nolan interrupted, I don’t really know if we’re comfortable—

  He looked at Elsa for backup, but Elsa was staring back through the revolving doors. The crook of her arm felt alive where Mitchell had touched her, and Elsa knew this kind of tingle was a message from her body’s early warning system. It was a bad sign.

  Come on, Elsa said. Let’s just get out of here.

  Follow me, Gwen said.

  * * *

  ——————·

  They followed Gwen and the land grew marshy, the perimeter muddy.

  Gwen had laid wooden planks across the deepest pits of mud, and they followed her to an enormous oak with boards nailed into the trunk in ascending ladder steps. Gwen went first, balls of mud dropping from her shoes as she climbed, her legs powerful in her spandex.

  The structure they entered was half tree house, half duck blind, at least twenty feet up and big enough that they could all fit snugly. Tacked to one wall was what looked to be an organ, butterfly-pinned and left to dry. It was musky with rot, and Nolan felt bile in his throat.

  Mitchell hates me, Gwen said. She was wound up, pacing the shack. He uses jargon about the intellectual trust to make himself seem like he knows what he’s doing, but it’s all a lot of shit. He’s playing scientist, and I won’t pretend otherwise, so he stuck me back in the swamp. Like I care. The boys are installing the new nesting pods halfway between here and my shack, so now I have two observation decks exactly where I need them.

  What exactly are you researching? Elsa asked. She’d been eager to get away from Mitchell, to weaken the magnetic something she’d begun to feel back at the Lobby. It was the feeling she got right before she did something reckless and stupid, and Elsa was done with that. But she’d just traded one sort of discomfort for another, because now Gwen was gesturing to the organ on the wall.

  Gwen’s project was a mapping of the female bufflehead’s uterus. A phenomenon that didn’t sound necessary unless you knew that ducks had one of the most complex and nonsensical uterine systems in the animal kingdom and that the undowny bufflehead’s was more complex than most.

  It’s a labyrinth in there, Gwen explained. These ducks, these female ducks, really, are making it harder and harder for the males to impregnate them. Making it harder for them to reproduce. Think about that for a minute. Years and years of evolution based on procreation and mating to ensure survival, and here’s a species that is physically, reproductively evolving to lower the chances of conception.

  Why would that happen? Nolan asked.

  It’s an arms race of ducky sex equipment, Gwen said.

  If this has anything to do with the test, I’m out, Elsa said. I am so far gone.

  Only indirectly, Gwen said.

  * * *

  ——————·

  Gwen wanted to have a baby. Really any baby, but they kept denying her adoption applications because Gwen was epileptic. She had intense full-body seizures where she clenched her jaw and rocked on the floor. She told the Reversalists, as she had told a train of roommates and colleagues before that: Don’t do anything. If I have a seizure, just leave me alone.

  But what about holding your head? What about putting a wooden spoon in your mouth?

  Nothing, Gwen had said. For fuck’s sake, why doesn’t anyone know anything that’s not on TV? If I seize, I need you to do nothing, and wait with me, and be calm.

  This is why they wouldn’t let Gwen have a baby.

  So Gwen began having sex with strange men. She did not ask them to use condoms. She was surprised at how few of them suggested it themselves. They came inside her. Sometimes they came in her mouth and she swallowed, but always Gwen thought about the waste of it. Life! She picked up men at bars and parties. She went to weddings she normally would have talked her way out of because there was always some groomsman loitering at the open bar as it shut down. She would take them back to her Holiday Inn Express room and they would fuck, Gwen bent over the mauve-and-gold polyester coverlet that scratched like everything synthetic in the world. Gwen would say, I want you inside me, I want you to fucking come in me, and they did, most of them. Gwen got no one’s phone number. She did not call or write. And neither did they. Sometimes Gwen thought about how, had she been interested in these men, she would be engulfed in sadness. Luckily, she had no interest in the groomsman with the dimples and vodka cocktails, or the karaoke-bar loner who sang Journey all night, or the man in loafers and khakis who’d seemed tame until he got her back to his house and threw her on the bed in a way that made Gwen think he did not like women very much at all.

  Gwen did not care. As long as they came inside her.

  But there was no baby. She was as empty inside as a scooped-out melon. No matter how many times she felt the hot twist of possibility, inside, there was only what had been there before. Only herself. And that was the magic, after all, she knew, to make something out of nothing. From so little.

  Gwen was forty-seven. She had waited too long. She knew this, of course. She had a Master of Science degree in breeding and genetics from the University of Florida and a PhD in the physiology of reproduction from Texas A&M University. She worked as a consultant to cattle ranches and bull breeders for a decade before being wooed by her alma mater’s Department of Meat Sciences. She lasted only a year because she could not bear to see the title printed on a business card.

  The year she turned forty, Gwen went back to school at UC Davis to become a large animal vet. Gwen’s clients were a strip of dairy operations and small farms. She delivered calf after calf in the night. She saw how people, strapped for money, kept breeding their cows even when they were too old, and how the older they were, the more the calves came breech, were still, were strange, were needing to be killed so shortly after they’d made it into this world. So yes, Gwen knew. She had understood the clock of sand that held her eggs, and yet, she had waited. Stupid old cow.

  When Gwen was young, she’d thought that because she knew all this, things would work themselves out. Her boyfriends would eventually become the right boyfriends and her work would calm down and start paying enough money—all these hoped-for factors would just materialize and then she would go off her birth control because then she would be ready and would decide to make a baby happen and then it would happen. She was a scientist. She was in control of her fate.

  But after she and the last boyfriend had broken up, she did the math—how long it would take her to meet someone new, and how long after that they might be ready to have children, and how, by then, it would be too late. And this was when Gwen started sleeping with strange men.

  She lost most of her vet clients after repeatedly showing up hours after she’d been scheduled. After not answering late-night phone calls when she was needed. She was a vet out of work.

 
Gwen found a new job at a petting zoo in a local park, and this was where she learned about ducks. As a large-animal specialist, they had never been in her purview before. But now, here she was, in her terrible khaki safari outfit helping children feed quarters into the animal-feed dispensers, and here were the ducks, and what Gwen learned was that ducks were really big on rape. That a male duck has a penis three times the length of his body in the form of a corkscrew. That he wedges himself inside a female and that the corkscrew shape is such that, once he has mounted her, there is no way for her to get free until he is no longer erect.

  This phenomenon in the males, historically, caused female ducks to evolve some tricks of their own. The uterine passageways of an adult female duck were designed to not let the wrong sperm in. The uterus was essentially booby-trapped. There were dead ends that a male might enter, thinking he was impregnating the female, only to be shooting into an empty decoy vagina. There were many passageways that led nowhere and only one that led to life. The female duck had a keen sense of this, so if the wrong duck mounted her, she could wriggle and manipulate him down the wrong road, often avoiding egg fertilization, until the right duck came along.

  All this meant, of course, that it was more difficult for the duck’s eggs to be fertilized. It meant that fewer eggs were laid and baby ducks born. It meant too that more of the baby ducks that were born were the product of pairings desired by the females. And Gwen knew that this likely had to do with mate preferences such as size and dominance and had little to do with power, but when she watched the female ducks being brutally mounted in the petting zoo, she could not help but think that, maybe, they understood the difference between the children you wanted to have and the children born because that’s who happened to come inside of you that day.

  Gwen became obsessed with the idea of a species evolving toward a more difficult path to procreation. She talked about it to the other petting-zoo workers. She talked about it to people who came to the petting zoo (who grimaced and led their children away from Gwen’s fenced pond). She talked about it to her friends until they said they couldn’t hang out with Gwen anymore unless she stopped talking about phantom duck vaginas.

  But Gwen could not stop talking because Gwen had no baby. She had done everything else right. She had done well in school and worked hard and gotten a good job because she lived in a world that told her she could have it all. But by the time Gwen looked up from achieving everything she’d been told was good, she’d missed out on the one thing she’d really wanted. Because everyone told her that being a mother was an unremarkable thing that anyone could do. It was so easy, teenagers did it by accident. She had been told that smart professional women waited.

  And when Gwen thought about it, it was women who had told her this. Her mother. Her mentors in school. Her colleagues. Her bosses. It was women who pushed her to lean into her career. And it was women Gwen found in the online fertility forums and adoption message boards she trolled late at night. A whole generation of women who had cheated each other out of using their own bodies.

  So Gwen called Diana, one of her professors from veterinary school. Didn’t it seem crazy, like evolution was running backward, that a species would evolve to become less fertile? Did it seem like a sign that everything was falling apart? The end of humanity?

  Diana pointed out that it wasn’t necessarily a step backward; it was just a more selective step forward, a choice for more intentional procreation.

  No, Gwen said. That’s not how evolution is supposed to work.

  So you’re an evolutionary biologist now? Diana said. You specialized in ungulates.

  But isn’t it about life? Gwen said. Any life? Let all the selection in the world take place afterward, so long as life found a way in first?

  Are you talking about ducks or are you talking about women? Diana asked. You’re oversimplifying. Talking metaphorically. You sound like one of those fringy Reversalist people.

  Gwen said, Who?

  Carleton College

  NORTHFIELD, MINNESOTA

  TEN YEARS BACK

  It wasn’t the way Nolan thought it would be. He had chosen Minnesota because of Elsa, but of course his parents had suspected this and fought him. Yet Nolan had all the Carleton brochures, the pictures of the labs and resources that would be at his disposal as a biology major, and so they had caved. It was almost four hours away from Park Rapids, after all. His parents moved him in that fall.

  He had been calling Elsa since he got accepted to school. At first, she’d sounded panicky and tried to get off the line with him as quickly as possible. It had been almost five years since they had spoken, but he was older now and he wanted to talk about it. His parents wouldn’t talk, and who else could possibly understand?

  Once, he’d caught her asleep, and she’d been too drowsy to yell at him and they had talked for twenty minutes about nothing, really. A dream Elsa had been having. And they’d felt almost like real siblings until she told him to stop calling her, to forget about her and just go to college like a normal fucking kid.

  I’m not a kid, Nolan had said. I’m not normal, he might have said, had Elsa not clicked off the line.

  Nolan wouldn’t call Elsa again for a little while, he told himself. He wanted to grow older first. The objectionable and boyish parts of him would be shed in those first weeks of college, he was sure. He was going to have sex with girls. And then he would call Elsa.

  But instead, every night, Nolan found himself traveling the campus in packs of young men. The women had their own packs. They roamed campus in their enormous coats and hats and scarves in the relative safety of their respective herds and the burbling warmth of new alcohol. Every trek was the same cold shuffle, terminating in a dorm, behind whose metal door was only another pack of boys. Games with beer in red plastic cups. Admiring the posters they also had in their own dorms. Door after door opened and never were there any women. Never was there any promise of him feeling any more adult any more quickly.

  Nolan wondered if he had allied himself with the wrong pack too quickly, but everyone Nolan met seemed the same. Nolan felt sure that he was different. Nolan came from twinkling, urban San Francisco, and his parents were brilliant, and then there was Elsa, an experience that he was sure the other boys could not even imagine. Nolan held his own life close to his breast and felt superior and disappointed in the other boys for not being more interesting or grown than they were.

  They were all of them nineteen.

  It was November, and they were on the trek, and it was freezing already, and Nolan was taking off his scarf as one of the members of his pack pushed open the dorm door to yet another night of trying to pretend they were living exciting young lives—then Nolan smelled perfume. The door opened and the warm radiator stink that came from all the dorms in winter hit him first, but then he could smell something…gardenias…Nolan’s mother had taught him about flowers. And sure enough, when they pushed into the dorm, too eagerly, their fat plush coats squeezing each other together, there were the girls. All the girls were wearing skirts and stockings; a few even had bare legs. Clothes that could not possibly keep them alive outdoors. They had shed their coats like chrysalises. There was a heap of jackets on a bed in another room and they smelled like all kinds of different shampoos and perfumes, and as Nolan took off his own coat, he inhaled. He still made out something of gardenias, and he stiffened a little in his pants, imagining taking someone into that nest of coats. It was possible.

  He loitered near a wall with a cup of bad vodka and orange juice.

  There was a girl sitting on the arm of the couch. She was wearing a swingy black skirt and black stockings with rips in them. It was the rips that got Nolan. They were so neat—clean lines, flaps hanging open. It was like she had done it on purpose. On one very white knee there was a bright pink Band-Aid.

  Nolan sat on the couch. He touched her cold knee. The Band
-Aid.

  What happened? he asked. He could not believe he was saying anything. That he was touching her. But this was an emergency. He could feel that it must be tonight or the girls would be lost back into the frozen campus, never to be heard from again.

  I cut myself, the girl said. She leaned over and took the edge of the Band-Aid between her fingernails, sloppily painted. She peeled the Band-Aid away. There was a red line there, a small, totally straight cut. The flesh was dewy and sticky-looking where the Band-Aid had been.

  How? Nolan asked.

  She shook her head, embarrassed. Her hair, short to her chin, dyed a deep bottle red that was almost purple, danced around her face and Nolan smelled it. Gardenia. It was a perfume they sold at malls, strong and cheap, that Elsa’s mother wore. Elsa was forever stealing sprays of it so that when she visited, she wafted into the house smelling of her mother in a way that made Ian look unhappy.

  I was cutting the holes in my tights and I slipped, the girl said.

  It looks pretty janky, Nolan said.

  Thanks.

  But I can help, he said. He pinched the rim of the ripped hole and tugged, the long expanse of her calf visible in the gape, until the edge of the tear gave way and a run sprouted and laddered its way to her shin. Now, he said. That looks right.

  * * *

  ——————·

  Later, as they picked their jackets from the mound, he said, Don’t you just want to crawl inside and sleep there?

  What? she said.

  Nolan never-minded her because everything he said sounded strange and wrong these days, and he’d found that repeating himself seldom solved problems. The problem was the things he said in the first place. The problem was him.

  They walked in silence, bundled in their enormous coats, back to Nolan’s dorm. He’d left his roommates at the party, ensuring the room would be empty. The sidewalks were icy, so they had to high-step through deep snow, and by the time they’d gotten back to his dorm, they were exhausted.