Evie, the Baby and the Wife

by Phyllis Rudin

  The facile ageist out that Evie tendered on a salver was shoved aside by its intended recipient. “Let’s just say there was a lot of blaming going around. He was certain it was me, that it was my equipment that was defective, shall we say.”

  Evie wasn’t sure if pushing the gynecological line of inquiry was going too far but apparently she was her mother’s daughter in the end. She snapped on a pair of latex gloves and dove right in. “Was it true?”

  “We never had tests. Can you believe that? Nothing so practical. We just yelled louder. That was our way. Who knows, maybe we would have worked it out eventually. But once he wrote the play, well, that was it. What was private became public.”

  “You could have denied that it was true, given a few of those our life together is just peachy interviews. That’s all it would have taken. Spared yourself the humiliation.”

  “That’s exactly what Jean wanted. For me to lie. Just like you, he said it would serve me well. Serve both of us well actually. But I preferred to crawl in a hole. Another example of my mature thinking.”

  “You never married again?”

  “No. I never met anyone else who I was willing to take a chance on after that. I never reconciled with my family either. But the worst was that I never had the kids I’d always longed for. And that’s about it for me. I cope.”

  It was an ugly example Amélie held up to her, looking back to see your entire existence defined by nevers. It cut dangerously close to the bone, threatening to dump Evie back into the funk of headstone mode, where she had a tendency of late to wallow, picturing the feeble inscription that would sum up her no-account life. Suddenly all the remaining questions she’d had at the ready dried up; all those petty whys and wherefores were overshadowed by more fundamental issues that seized control of her brain.

  The meeting was unravelling just as fast from the Amélie end. Shedding the reticence of a lifetime had taken its toll. Her composure was starting to crack around the edges. Evie recognized the signs. It was as if she were looking in a mirror. Though she’d barely arrived she already sensed that she’d overstayed. She was struggling to conjure up a plausible exit strategy but Amélie was quicker on the draw. She reached behind her to grab the wicker moses basket that was sitting on her stoop and then pointed toward the garden plot by the back fence that was apparently calling out her name, demanding her attention on a matter of some urgency. Surely her guest understood her obligation as first responder. She left Evie alone at the table with an apologetic shrug.

  Amélie knelt down at the far bed in a practiced garden crouch that her knees were only lately starting to resist. She cast her eyes over the gathering of plants before her. They went way back together, Amélie and her shrubs and flowers. They were tight. She’d grown them from seeds and slips, most of them, nursed them along in her tumbledown shed until she adjudged them ready to stand on their own two feet in the outside world. She knew their characters inside out. There were the bullies who would take over the whole bed if she didn’t play hall monitor, the diva bloomers who dropped their petals any old place; the maid would come along to pick up after them, and then there were the old guard perennials who nervously peeked out from behind their curtain of blossoms as the first nervy annuals started to move in to the neighbourhood.

  There wasn’t really much to be done at this time of day, but since she had an audience she made a show of deadheading a couple of roses and pulling the straggler dandelion that she’d missed on her early morning bed check. She was satisfied. Everyone looked comfy, watered and clean. They’d all gone beddy-bye in the afternoon sun. Amélie took her sweet time loading her basket up with strawberries, checking over each one for imperfections. Then she turned to her blueberry bush over in the corner and repeated the one by one inspection routine that served to separate her all the longer from her visitor.

  Her visitor didn’t mind the separation. She sat in welcome solitude at the table, unwinding just enough to let herself fully appreciate the spectacle of colour and perfume that was Amélie’s thumb-print garden. Evie’s own talent for gardening was nil, her earlier admission to her host unexaggerated. She’d once given it a stab at her parents’ house, a backyard dilettante with a designer straw hat and a spade who was aiming to outbloom Giverny behind the carport. Her parents, supportive as always of her whims, gave her carte blanche. The way it went, she was industrious enough in the sunshine, but neglectful in the damp or when she had a better offer. She didn’t last out the season. Marilyn called a halt once she discovered that her daughter had somehow managed to kill her precious rhubarb plant whose resilient root ball dated from the big bang.

  That experience wised Evie up. Now she understood the infinite patience it took to nurture plants to maturity because she didn’t have it. And she understood to her shame the tenderness and devotion a thriving garden demanded of its custodian. So while she lingered at Amélie’s, it interested her to observe an expert at work, someone sprung from the opposite end of the cultivating continuum to herself. Strangely, it didn’t actually seem to be work to Amélie whose pinched shoulders disengaged as soon as she knelt down, as if she were safely bowered among old friends. Evie was intrigued by how touch-y she was with her plants, fondling them, tickling them, nosing them. Maybe that was one of the many ways she’d muffed it in her parents’ garden. Evie’d only handled her plants on an as-needed basis, to plunk them into the soil or to pinch them back. She wasn’t one for kitchy-coo, at least not with begonias. But Amélie stroked the velour ground cover with her open palm for the pure pleasure of the sensation. She jiggled her fuchsias to set their cascade of flowers dancing, and she waved her fern fronds lazily back and forth in front of her face as if she were fanning sahib.

  The lush greenery, the radiant blooms, the boughs pendent with fruit; all of them conspired to give Evie a jolt of inspiration. In the time it took Amélie to run her harvest under the hose and bring it back for them to share, the idea grabbed hold of her with full force. It was a snap decision, but Evie was convinced of its essential rightness. She was rolling in cash. She could make it happen.

  Chapter 12

  “DOES ANYBODY KNOW how you’d go about buying a baby?” Evie’s contributions often sheered off towards the loopy so no one in the Friday night crowd found her question any farther out of left field than usual.

  “You could check out the ads in the Penny Saver,” Dany offered. “That’s what the kid did in Juno when she was preggo, remember? And she wanted to find a good set of parents for her baby?”

  The silver screen was Evie’s Wikipedia, her first point of consultation whenever she needed information or advice, so her friend’s suggestion amounted to cinematic coals to Newcastle. Evie’d long since gone the Juno route and paged through all the pulp circulars that were delivered to her door in the weekly Publisac, but she came up empty. Nothing but deals on blade roasts and Rice-Chex. Just to cover all the bases, though, she borrowed Moshe’s bike and made a tour of the Island, collecting a copy of every community newspaper printed in a decipherable alphabet until her pannier was crammed to bursting. None of them had a child trafficking column. Go figure.

  The regular adoption process was out. The waiting lists were light-years long, and besides, there was probably a proscription in the agreement you signed against flipping babies like you would a residential triplex. Evie’s plan, so promising, seemed stillborn.

  Even with Jean-Gabriel’s personal ATM at her disposal, her hands were tied. But then, in an Evel Kneivel leap of logic that had her sail cleanly over all the negatives lined up bumper to bumper on the infield below, she landed on her solution. It was deliciously simple. She would have the baby herself. Evie’s mother had made one grand humanitarian gesture in life, and this was going to be hers.

  So her plan was a bit out-there she had to admit. Maybe more like way out-there. And it wasn’t what you’d call a quick fix. She was signing her uterus on for the long-haul. In the extended histo
ry of their acquaintance, Evie’s womb had never pegged her as an extreme do-gooder. And it certainly never expected to be so intimately involved in any philanthropic mission. That wasn’t in the owner’s manual. But it was in no position to resist. With this decision Evie had found peace, so they were going forward as partners.

  Evie determined to keep draft two of her birth scheme a secret until she was too far along for anyone to try to sway her from her chosen course. Once her side view announced full occupancy it would be too late to turn back. How exactly she’d field the eventual questions her bump would provoke she hadn’t quite worked out, but she’d have concocted some sort of cover story by then. In the meantime she was taking a one-step-at-a-time approach, and step one was implantation.

  For sober second thought she had no leisure. Amélie wasn’t getting any younger. Evie moved ahead full throttle and set herself up with an appointment at a donor bank she’d once read about in a magazine at her dentist’s office. The name had stuck with her, J-Sperm: For the Infertile Frum. Okay, so her choice of clinic made no sense. This she acknowledged to herself even though woo-woo decisions had become her stock in trade over the past few days. The baby, after all, wasn’t destined to a Jewish home. Still, the surrogate mother-to-be, as unreligious as she was, felt a certain queasiness at the prospect of having one of her kosher eggs mating with traif. It was like the ham and cheddar on a bagel they sold at the paper’s staff cafeteria; there was something fundamentally wrong in the commingling. Evie didn’t want her kishkes harbouring a fetus at war with itself; a fetus that come December would be nagging her to buy it a Chanukah bush. Maybe Evie was non-practicing, but she was still a non-practicing Jew. She didn’t hold with those phony baloney mashup holidays that cherry-picked the best bits from different traditions. Even though she presumed that Amélie would raise the child as a Catholic, if indeed she raised it churchy at all, at least the peewee Crypto Jew Evie handed over gift-wrapped would be all of a piece.

  The waiting room was crowded with couples. They sat on the couches, quietly conferring, filling out the medical questionnaire on a clipboard. Often they referred to files they’d brought along, heart-wrenchingly thick. Only Evie was all alone and without a paper trail. She made short work of her form and handed it in to the receptionist. When her name was called she was led into a small consultation room and settled in at a desk.

  The walls were papered in baby pictures, OU-certified graduates of Evie’s chosen stud farm. The receptionist handed her one of the binders from the bookcase to browse through prior to her meeting with the doctor, and invited her to help herself to further reading material if nothing in the first binder appealed.

  Evie turned eagerly to page one. The entries were arranged spreadsheet style. The first column assigned a unique code to the sperm posting its candidature. The next provided a brief biographical note (with all identifying details redacted, comme il faut). The remaining columns, C through Q, were devoted to the father’s physical attributes; eye colour, hair colour, straight hair vs. curly, righty or lefty, swarthy or fair, lanky or runty. None of the notations regarding appearance mattered much to Evie who wasn’t in the market for a bespoke baby. She accorded them only a cursory glance. Whether the baby was likely to emerge freckled and pudgy or blue-eyed and lean was to her irrelevant. Her goal was not to match the baby up to the parent, coordinating them like drapes to the wall-to-wall, so that one day off in the future the checkout girl at Provigo could remark to Amélie, “Oh Madame, your baby looks just like you.” Only the column with the potted biographies piqued Evie’s interest. Her profession had turned her into an aficionado of the genre.

  She began to read the vitae in column B. Evie worked her way down assiduously, but after a few pages she had the distinct impression that she hadn’t advanced at all, that the character sketches had cloned themselves. Maybe it was just that the clinic was using some buggy version of Excel with a duplicating fetish, but it gave her pause nonetheless. Alarm bells started to go off in her brain concerning the quality of the donor pool. Now that she belatedly stopped to consider it, what future doctor or lawyer (and they were all future doctors or lawyers according to the listings) would present himself at a clinic and pump out his plutonium grade semen benevolently? He had to have a screw loose somewhere. Any normal guy would write a cheque as a charitable donation, not jerk off into a cup. Evie shifted gears. She’d shifted gears so often in the last few days that she barely know if she was coming or going. But at least now she knew this much; she’d flip through her personal Rolodex to find her donor, someone who would upload his chromosomes onto her welcoming placental shores using the old-fashioned method.

  It had not escaped Evie’s notice that Moshe kept his eyes trained on her in a hankering kind of way, but she’d never given him any encouragement. Why exactly she wasn’t sure, except that withholding was its own aphrodisiac. Moshe didn’t deserve it, but somehow for him she’d never lowered the drawbridge that would have permitted the crossover from friend to lover. God knows she’d been a lackadaisical gatekeeper in the past, allowing to pass unchallenged an embarrassing number of iffy types, yet before Moshe, the most worthy of pretenders, Evie was determined to play the martinet.

  Still, she knew without reservation that it was Moshe who would ante up her egg’s better half. He was a mensch, Moshe was, a good man. If she were hired to ghostwrite his bio for the binders at the clinic, that’s all she would say. His sperm would fly off the shelf. So maybe he was on the shy-ish side, Moshe; so maybe he was a lunch-pail type, no doctor or lawyer; so maybe his authorial talents didn’t run to sonnets or novellas. The only writing he did, as far as Evie was aware, amounted to piping happy birthday onto chocolate ganache, but she wasn’t in the least disdainful of this hole in his résumé the way she might have been before her recent disenchantment with a certain member of the writing profession led her to radically revise her rule book.

  And even if not bookish, Moshe was cerebral. He was a flour and water intellectual, one of those baker-philosophers as revered in the Hexagon as the deconstructionalists and the phenomenologists; a new-world offshoot who, once he started in on the subject of bread, inevitably ended up linking it to life, the universe, and everything. Evie went on to consider her choice on a more earthly plane. Moshe was as solid as the day was long and funny in his quiet way. And hadn’t he lifted her out of the dumps more times that she could count? Yes, here she had the beau idéal of a donor, and one who had always shown himself pliable to her desires to boot, a veritable Gumby. She was about to offer herself up to him holus-bolus on a silver platter, a Pippin stuffed in her mouth. He’d jump at the chance.

  “I’ll have to sleep on it,” Moshe said.

  Sleep on it? That wasn’t what he was programmed to say. Moshe’s backbone, never much before in evidence, had taken its good old time in making an appearance. Evie had invited Moshe over for drinks in order to decant the plan in which he was meant to play a seminal role. He listened without interruption while she backed up to the beginning of it all, her meeting with the notary, the letter, the cheque. If Evie were adhering to a strict chronology, her discovery of the file on Jean-Gabriel’s computer would come next. It had a certain big-picture relevance she supposed, but she stuck with her initial inclination to hold the play in protective custody. In her bowdlerized recounting of the events for Moshe, Jean-Gabriel’s unfinished scenario bit the dust. Evie picked up her account with her visit to Amélie, and her ultimate decision to acquit her moral obligation to Jean-Gabriel with the fruit of her own loins. It was the first time she’d shared the secret of the bequest with another soul, and it was clear to Moshe, who was attuned to her every shift in tone, that Evie had suffered in the burden of its sole ownership. He absorbed the story as it unrolled, first over sips of his wine then over slugs.

  That JGM had left Evie a bankroll with a cat’s cradle of strings attached wasn’t all that much of a surprise. The guy always struck Moshe as a taker. But the naked fa
ct that Evie had singled him out to father this child had him reeling. He tried not to betray his shock, administering to himself a couple of mental slaps in the face to bring himself around to the job immediately at hand. He knew what he had to do, but his heart wasn’t in it. The baker wanted nothing more than to acquiesce to Evie’s off-the-wall proposal. How often in his dreams had she opened his bedroom door and slid between the sheets beside him, and now that it was on the verge of happening in the flesh he felt compelled to resist, compelled to force her to see reason. What a nuisance a conscience turned out to be.

  Her plotline was so full of holes he hardly knew where to start in. “Evie, come on. This plan you’ve cooked up is way beyond the call of duty. Way beyond, I’m saying. It’s a minefield. Don’t you see that? And on top of everything, it’s all just based on a guess, a feeling you have. How can you presume to know Amélie wants a baby?”

  “She told me so.”

  “But that was years ago, back when she was still with Jean-Gabriel. What is she now, fifty?”

  “No, she’s only thirty-nine. Plenty young enough for a baby. My cousin Andrea gave birth at forty-three. You know how it is with women now, they wait till their clocks are almost at their last tick and then they jump for it. Thirty-nine, that’s nothing.”

  “Well if she did want a baby so desperately all this time like you say, wouldn’t she have done something about it herself? Why does she need you, a perfect stranger, to come along and do it for her?” This line of reasoning Evie had difficulty countering in so many words since there was no actual reasoning involved in her calculations. She was simply convinced that she had decoded the signs correctly during her visit, that Amélie’s longing for a baby was undiminished, but her barrenness had withered her to the point that she had no strength to fight against it. She was trapped, it seemed to Evie, in some kind of reproductive catch-22.