That’s why they were having this dinner, she and Kyle, with this vegan woman, trying to impress her, to show how deserving they were. Diane had hoped the night would feel warm and bonding. She had lit candles and wall sconces, their oiled wicks flickering against the oak paneling of their dining room. She had set the table with embroidered serviettes and brass plate chargers, an added touch that she normally skipped out of lazy, daily convenience. Those niceties were for holidays and anniversaries.
Their plan had been to wow Cindy with the best food northern Mississippi had to offer. Diane had bought local grass-fed beef and set it on the counter to adjust to room temperature. The steaks were still sitting there when Cindy arrived and revealed that she was a vegan. The young woman had wrin kled her nose at the sight of raw meat and then apologized. “I should have warned you,” she had said. “I thought I said something at the gallery, but obviously this is my fault.” Diane was inclined to agree. She had played their interaction at the art exhibit on a memory loop, seeking the telltale of veganism, but there was no indication that she could have deciphered, and it had been so long since she’d lived in California or spent time with anyone outside of her culinary community that the question of dietary preferences had entirely escaped her.
Now Diane could feel Cindy watching her as she seared the bloody meat in the cast iron. She could feel the woman’s scrutiny, like the sensation of flies crawling beneath the crepe fabric of her dress. All they could feed Cindy now was a plate of roasted root vegetables. Cindy insisted brightly that the carrots, beets, and potatoes would be “more than enough.”
Diane tapped Kyle on the shoulder and murmured for him to take over. She leaned against the kitchen island that doubled as a bar, where she had left Cindy to sip on a crisp albariño in front of a spread of appetizers. Diane scooped up a dollop of caviar and deposited the marbled gray eggs directly on her tongue. She closed her eyes and let them sit there, firm spheres waiting to burst, until they did burst, her tongue pressing them against the roof of her mouth, releasing fresh oils with a hint of ocean, a primordial hors d’oeuvre. She opened her eyes to find Cindy smiling at her.
“That good?” Cindy said.
“Are you sure you can’t try the fish eggs? Don’t some vegans eat eggs?” Diane said, stroking the stem of the stone-white spoon that sat beside the caviar jar, her caviar — she’d harvested it herself. You couldn’t use a silver spoon on caviar. A lot of people made that assumption: that the symbolically fancy spoon would pair with the fancy delicacy of fish roe, but they were wrong. The metal interfered with the sharp salinity of the eggs, which needed to be presented on a neutral canvas, like ivory. Ivory, Diane suddenly realized with a plummeting twist of her gut, was an animal product — the worst kind of animal product. Shit, was this real ivory? It had been a gift from a client. Even fake ivory, Diane knew, could come from the bones of less-endangered species. She pulled her hand back and hoped Cindy wouldn’t notice the flat whiteness of the utensil.
Cindy shook her head. Her hair was loose and unbrushed; her face, unmade. She was so beautiful she could afford to forget herself, to let the usual tasks of grooming slip away from routine. Only the young could be like that, Diane thought. Her daily routine was now a fight against entropy, lotions to correct various signs of time and sun damage. Now she had persistent rough spots emerging on her stomach. The night before, as she undressed, she had discovered a couple of scaly blemishes near her navel. She had tugged at the skin, and although she could slide her fingernail beneath the edge of the gray scabby tissue, she couldn’t pull off the growth. She had called Kyle into the bathroom and held her shirt up for him to inspect the spots.
“That’s a nice look,” he had said, flirting in the way he always did these days, like it was for her benefit, to make her feel wanted, when they both knew their sex life had turned maudlin and perfunctory.
“What if they’re cancerous?” she had scolded.
Several years ago, her mother had a melanoma, a black scab blooming like cauliflower above her knee. She recovered, but a huge chunk of her thigh was indented now. Diane couldn’t understand how her mother still went to Orange Beach with her friends each summer, slathering on sunscreen, yes, but nonetheless lying for hours in a chaise, her freckled skin freckling more and more. The same mother had always warned her this might happen, that if she waited too long to try, the child might never be. Like the choice was easy, like the relationship had always been a sure thing, like the business had not been new and struggling.
Kyle had suggested the scabrous growths might be a delayed reaction to her injection sites, but that was nearly a year ago. Nonetheless, it seemed fitting, albeit unscientific, that signs of her trauma would rise to the surface, leaving tally marks.
“I don’t eat any kind of eggs,” Cindy said, shrugging. “Nothing with a face, and nothing from anything with a face.” She laughed. “But don’t worry. The vegetables look lovely.”
Diane could see Kyle falter as he ladled the autumnal medley of veggies into a bowl for Cindy. They had been meant as a side, a small portion for each, but in order to offer a substantial meal to Cindy, Diane had to convince Kyle to sacrifice each of their own servings.
“Do fish count as having faces?” Kyle asked.
“Yes,” the women said, in unison, and Diane was grateful for this moment of agreement despite their dietary conflict.
Diane ushered them into the dining room. She had hung floor-to-ceiling cream curtains, which she liked to keep closed in the evenings, when the windows became mirrors against the deep darkness of their rural acreage. She’d grown up in Bir mingham, in the suburbs, and she could never shake the feeling that someone could pass by and notice you, without you even knowing. She had done it herself, as an adolescent girl. When dinner was over, when her father was in his office and her mother would draw a long bath, she would go for walks around the neighborhood and see the other families, the ones who had left their curtains undrawn, watching their televisions and finishing their late dinners. There was one house down the street where the parents would sit with the children, doing homework, the pendant light shining brightly on the tops of their heads.
Now she had a row of simple pendant lights, rustic exposed lightbulbs running the length of their farmhouse table. She set the plates on one end, so that she could face Cindy, leaving Kyle between them, at the head.
Once seated, they all stared expectantly at each other.
“You can dig in,” Kyle said. “ We’re not religious.”
“Or pray if you’d like,” Diane added. “That’s okay too.”
“Thank you for this meal,” Cindy said, then stared down at her plate for a moment so that Diane could not tell if she was praying or simply waiting.
“We’re happy that you came,” Diane said, hearing the intensity in her voice and reminding herself to tone it down.
Cindy was a maker of nests, or nest art, or, as she worded it for the gallery flyer, she recuperated nests as mixed-media projects: the nest as found object with strategic enhancements. She would take actual nests — abandoned, usually found after they’d been dislodged from some branch or gutter — and weave cut-out words and trinkets into the twigs and grass. The manmade matter that the birds themselves wove into the natural fibers was often shocking — strips of plastic grocery bags, cigarette butts, holiday wrapping paper that had somehow not disintegrated. One nest contained a piece of barbed wire. That was the first thing Diane asked Cindy: was the barbed wire her own addition? But no, the barbed wire was chosen by the bird.
This rhyming of the nests and the caviar, it was not coincidence. In a speech at her exhibit, Cindy explained that she was drawn to the representation of the Anthropocene, it was true, but she couldn’t avoid the effect of her surrogacy upon her subject matter.
“Yes,” Cindy had said with a self-deprecating laugh, “I was a surrogate, and I collect nests. I will leave it to you to connect the dots, my friends.”
Standing in that small-town galle
ry, a plastic cup of cheap wine in hand, Diane, who historically had scorned the idea of fate, felt that things were finally clicking. When Diane had the miscarriages, when miscarriage pluralized into two, then five lost pregnancies, she secretly began to wonder if the fish had cursed her. She didn’t believe it in the front of her mind; she just acknowledged that a hidden part of her worried, the same way she still couldn’t bring herself to walk beneath a ladder.
But whether it was a curse or not, the effect was indisputable: she couldn’t carry a baby to term. One doctor told her that she and Kyle shared similar genetics, and they therefore bestowed their embryo with genes so similar to her own that her body was failing to produce the right antibodies for pregnancy. She imagined a shared ancestor. She questioned her subconscious and the nature of her attraction. She even began to notice similarities in their phenotype. Did they share the same divide between their brows? The same pronounced pinching of the nasolabial fold?
Relatively speaking, it came as a relief when a new doctor told Diane that she had a “hostile uterus” — his clinical diagnosis, those words. He told her she could go through another round of IVF and blood thinners for a slim chance of success, or she could consider surrogacy. Kyle wanted to keep trying IVF, but Diane had begun to resent her body, to think of it like a house filled with carbon monoxide, a silent killer, and no opening of windows could vacate the noxious fumes.
Then she’d met Cindy, a curator of fertility symbols and a former surrogate. It was as though fate had advertised the art walk, pinned the flyer for her exhibit on the bulletin board of the local bookstore where Diane had sought solace in the testimonies of formerly barren women. At the gallery, Diane had asked Cindy more than a dozen questions about the nest art. Each time Cindy finished answering, her eyes drifted to a spiky modern light fixture or the table of cheese cubes and magnums of wine. Diane had felt panicked that she had not secured enough of a connection with this woman. Not yet, she had thought, scrounging for one more question, then another, and another, no matter how inane. Finally, when she could no longer deny Cindy’s cornered exasperation, she revealed that she was going to buy one of her pieces.
“Which one?” Cindy had asked, suddenly revived.
“The one I first asked you about,” Diane said, no longer recalling the title of that particular nest.
Cindy had offered to pack the nest that night, to hand it to Diane in a baker’s box, but Diane had insisted that the nest remain on display until the end of the evening. Even as she had said it, she flushed at the realization that the exhibit was nearly over. A couple of stragglers sipped their drinks near the snacks, no longer paying attention to the art. But she wanted an excuse to see Cindy again.
“I really am happy to give it to you now,” Cindy had said, already reaching for the nest, careful to avoid the thorns of the interwoven barbed wire.
“I noticed that you put the wall-mounted ones on driftwood,” Diane had said, pleased with her improvised request. “Would it be possible to do the same thing with this one? I would pay you extra, of course.”
Cindy had looked down at the nest in her hands. “All in all.”
“Excuse me?”
“The title of this one: All in all.” She held it up like an offering, and Diane could see the carefully clipped newsprint half buried by metallic fibers.
“I love it the way it is,” Diane had said, suddenly concerned that she’d offended Cindy. “I just know I want to hang it on a wall.”
Cindy nodded. “I understand. It’s fine. I’ll get it ready for you.”
A week after the exhibit, when Cindy had emailed her, Diane insisted that she come over for dinner, to compensate her for her trouble. “That’s really not necessary,” Cindy had responded, forcing Diane to reveal something adjacent to complete honesty. That was when she called her and told her that she wanted to “pick her brain about surrogacy.”
Now, in the foyer, there was a piece of driftwood with a nest, pinned by a nail, like a wreath, to the branch. Now, in the dining room, there was a vegan eating carrots as Diane struggled to swallow her achingly rare meat. She mulled over how to make surrogacy sound like a light topic, a casual exchange of chitchat, when such a topic could never be anything other than the sequel to a tragedy.
“What is that picture, with the dark circular things?” Cindy pointed with her fork to the wall behind Kyle where Diane had hung a gallery of photos in gold frames.
“It’s a picture of our fish tanks, from above.” Kyle had taken the photo from the roof, through a skylight they later removed in order to better regulate the temperature and lighting schedule of the tanks below.
“They live in those circles?”
Kyle shot Diane a look, as if to say, I got this. She saw it through Cindy’s eyes. He reclined in his cane-backed chair, indulging in that masculine tradition of luxuriating in physical space to broadcast complete assuredness, and said, “Our operation actually saves the lives of fish, might even save an entire species from extinction. So, if you’re worried about the ethics, we’re on the same page. That’s why we do what we do.”
“Don’t you shank them in the ovaries?” Cindy said, adding in a subdued tone, “I saw a video once.”
Diane cringed. They weren’t set for life. The business could still fail. She might have to start over, yet again, building up from nothing, but they were part of a world where fine dining was an extension of their expertise, and she liked to believe there was artfulness, an elevation of experience, that they offered. But what must they look like? Her little black dress and statement necklace. Her husband’s crisp blazer. Kyle never dressed up except for dinners with prospective clients and investors. He dressed up tonight because she asked him to. “We need her,” she had said to him, his face in her hands, his stubble grazing the calluses she’d developed from years of caring for the fish, years of chemicals, the many harvests.
“That’s not really accurate,” Kyle said. “We can show you the procedure. The hatchery is just down the street, down our driveway, really.”
The procedure. That morning, Kyle had cradled the flailing sturgeon against his chest as he carried her from the tank to the milking trough, the metal cradle designed to hug the supine body as they took all the eggs from her swollen belly. He had held the head in place as one of the hatchery employees prepared the collection bin. Even after all these years, Diane couldn’t shake the impression that the sturgeon, at this angle, had human faces with upturned noses and surprised mouths, which is why she spoke to them sometimes when it was time to slide the catheter into the oviduct inlet, a term that made her think of the ocean, and therefore of all the eggs roiling around in this internal sea of a fish belly. During the procedure, she would slide her hand down the pearl white underside, over and over, guiding the inky beads out of the sturgeon in gushing rivulets.
Most nights, Diane would dream of them, a drifting slideshow of the sturgeon in their tanks, prehistoric, older than dinosaurs, with bony scutes scarring their sides. If you sliced open the ridges, rings would mark the age of their bones, just like the trunk of a tree. Recently, perhaps spurred by this fact, she would dream of the fish in cross sections, their heads detached with mouths still gulping as eggs fell thick from their partitioned bellies, spilling to the concrete floor, into the Cloroxed muck, and down the drain. Unconscious, she would flail, displacing Kyle to the couch. Often, she woke to her arms stretched over her head, like she was reaching for the window.
It was Diane’s idea to convert the hatchery from catfish to sturgeon, to farm sustainable caviar. She researched the method, the nonsurgical use of the metal tube paired with the deep massage. In little over a year, the fish would heal and grow more eggs for the next harvest. The reproductive irony was impossible to miss. There was a horrific symmetry to the proceedings: the stealing of their eggs for a nice family business, something to pass on to generations that might never come. Used to be, everyone just killed the fish. They killed so many that they nearly eradicated sturgeon from t
he Black Sea. You would cut out the ovary and slide it back and forth over mesh to separate the eggs. What was left looked like broken pieces of placenta. The entire life of the fish reduced to a tin of caviar and silken pink membranes, washed down the drain.
“What we do,” Diane said, “it’s the gentlest way possible.”
Cindy was cutting her carrot into tiny pieces, dicing all of her vegetables, her jaw visibly clenching and unclenching.
“We’ve upset you,” Diane said. She felt her hope being masticated in Cindy’s mouth.
Cindy put her fork down with a big sigh. “Look, I’m used to seeing things differently than most people. I try not to force my views on others. But no one needs to eat caviar to begin with, do they?”
“I’m sorry you feel that way. I really am,” Diane said. “Obviously, I didn’t bring you here to discuss caviar. But you know how worried you are about the fish being poked and prodded? I’ve lived it. I’m sure you think that’s some sort of karmic retribution. I know I do, most days.”
Even at the thought, she could feel the skin beneath her dress itching, the feeling of a thousand flies landing, their proboscises touching, tasting, looking for sweet rot. She scratched through the rough fabric, feeling it scrape against the barnacled scabs beneath. Tears sprang hot but she widened her eyes, willing the excess fluid to sink beneath her lids, to reabsorb, disappear.
Across the wide expanse of table linen, Cindy looked horrified, keeping her eyes downcast as she said, “I empathize. Really, I do.”
What Makes You Think You're Awake? Page 4