by Vendela Vida
You tell her there’s very little chance he’ll be excited to see you if he’s expecting her.
“He might be upset for, like, five minutes,” she says. “Tops. Then he’ll be happy to have a young woman to talk to.”
You look at the sky. You look at the pool.
“I don’t think I can do it,” you say.
“I think you can,” she says.
“I don’t know.”
“I think you can, Reeves, or whatever your real name is.”
You look at her, but she’s lying flat on the chaise longue now, staring at the hotel as though its profile is interesting. She’s threatening you, you’re sure, but she doesn’t look threatening. She is brilliant. You’re confused. You start to sweat.
“Okay,” you say. “I’ll do it.”
“Really?” she says, sitting up now. She acts as though you’re doing her a favor. She’s acting as though there’s no way in the world she could have implied she would turn you in if you didn’t agree. And she’s so convincing that for a moment you think you might have imagined that she would blackmail you.
“Promise you’ll make sure to show him a good time?”
You wonder what this means. “My clothes are staying on,” you say.
“Of course they are,” she says in a slightly reprimanding tone. “The car will be here at seven thirty. Just give him my regards and say I’m so sorry I got caught working late.”
She stands to leave.
“What’s his name?” you call out after her.
“Leopoldi,” she says.
You watch her and the bodyguards as they reenter the building. The Moroccan sky above you is pale blue and cloudless, like the sky in a musical production for children.
When you return to your room, you find a green silk dress on your bed. It’s lying flat with one sleeve down and the other raised up, as though holding a glass and making a toast. You shouldn’t be surprised she already has a dress picked out and has sent it to your room. It was most likely already lying here on your bed even before she approached you at the pool. It’s 8:30 A.M. You have to get to the van.
You shower and dress for the day on set. It’s a relatively simple shoot compared to yesterday’s scene in traffic. In today’s scene Maria enters a mosque to pray for Kareem, but she’s uncertain about how to position herself. At first she’s on her knees with her palms pushed together the way she readied herself for prayer during her Catholic childhood. Once situated, she furtively glances around and sees the Moroccan women are on their knees, but seated back on their heels. Their eyes are closed and their palms extended, as though holding open a book. Maria ends up sitting the way the women around her are sitting, and praying the way they are praying. She prays until she starts sobbing.
There are no lines in today’s scenes. The script supervisor has warned you that the director is very indecisive about today’s shoot; much of it will be improvised on the spot. So much of it will depend on how well the famous American actress can pull off the scene. There are tears involved: a risky proposition. The famous American actress was criticized for the last film in which she cried. It was an ill-advised romantic comedy set in Rome. Her chin quivered melodramatically. You have a vague recollection of a spoof of her crying scene on Saturday Night Live. But then your memory becomes clearer and you remember she was in that spoof; she went on Saturday Night Live to make fun of herself. And it worked to her advantage; the public forgave her, the public loved her for mocking her own performance. She has good PR people, the American actress does.
You wonder for a moment if it’s the PR people who have instructed her not to go on the date tonight. Maybe her cancellation on the businessman has little to do with her level of affection for him, and more to do with how it will look to anyone who sees them on a date and documents the sighting. Photos of her and the current young boyfriend on a sailboat named the Ooh La La have been prevalent in the weekly magazines as of late. One headline said: YO HO HO ON THE OOH LA LA!
You descend to the lobby and exit the hotel and step into the van, where the Indian producer and the twenty-five-year-old are already seated, waiting for you. You don’t know how you fell a few minutes behind. You blame the actress, and mention that she needed to talk to you about something important.
“Is she nervous about the scene today?” the Indian producer asks.
“No,” you say, and because you’ve already learned that he likes scandal, he likes gossip, you reiterate it. “No, she’s not at all nervous.”
“I’m nervous about the crying scene,” says the young American producer. “If it were up to me, she would not be shown crying. Not after what happened in that ridiculous Italian rom-com fiasco.”
You think he has a point, but you can’t say anything. You can’t betray her. This is the unwritten contract between the talent and the stand-in. Or at least in your case.
You arrive at the mosque and you think you hear yourself inhale sharply. Or maybe it’s the three of you—the Indian producer, the twenty-five-year-old, and you—who are collectively caught off guard at the same time. The mosque is enormous, and situated on the water—at first you think it’s on its own island. It’s white and turquoise with an intricately tiled minaret topped with a gold point as firm and narrow as the needle of a compass. There’s a short line of tourists waiting to get into the mosque. You’ve been told it’s one of the only Moroccan mosques that allows non-Muslims to enter.
The van pulls up to one of the trailers parked outside the mosque and the costume department outfits you in a long skirt and a long-sleeved blouse, and the wig. You are given a scarf to place around your hair. No shots of you in the distance will be filmed today, so they let you arrange the scarf yourself.
From the side of the mosque you see a series of double doors in the shape of pointed arches and framed by columns. Some of the doors are clad in bronze. The film crew enters through one of the bronze-clad doors and is escorted up to a room on the second floor.
The stairway itself has multiple arches and decorative woodcarving. You are told that they lead to the Women’s Gallery, which is hidden from view from the enormous prayer hall below. When you enter the Women’s Gallery you are overcome by the size of the room—it could easily fit five thousand women. Chandeliers hang in a row down the center of the room, between a series of high scalloped archways. The floors are tiled, keeping the temperature of the room cool.
The film crew takes half an hour to set up their equipment. The director paces, looking apprehensive about this scene. He holds his head between his hands as though to suggest the vise grip on his brain.
The extras are Moroccan women of all ages, wearing clothes appropriate for a mosque. You watch as they store their shoes in the small shoe compartments that have been built into the prayer rugs and kneel toward Mecca. You wonder if they are actually using this time to pray.
The director calls you over and instructs you to enter this room of the mosque as though in awe. This is not difficult. You enter the room and admire the architecture. You walk over to where the women are praying. You remove your shoes and store them in the prayer rug’s compartments. You adjust your scarf around your head, making sure you’re more than adequately covered, and sit back on your heels. You assume the same position as the women around you.
One of the younger extras is carrying a baby in a sling. You cannot see the baby’s face, but still you stare.
As you relax on your heels in the mosque you are thinking of your sister’s nine-week-old baby. Your niece.
You think of your sister, of how she invited you over to her home that early spring morning, over a year ago now, when the flowers in her garden were the colors of Easter. You sat on her deck, in matching deck chairs with red pin-striped cushions. She worked an as interior designer and had directed immeasurable attention toward the purchase of everything in her home. She turned toward you and cried as she told you that after five years of miscarriages, it was definitive: she and her husband, Drew, had resigned
themselves to the fact that they would not be parents. All she ever wanted was a child, she told you. “I just know it’s because of that hatchet job of an abortion I had my senior year.” Of course you remembered it: you had told her you couldn’t drive her to the clinic because you were meeting with a recruiting coach, but it was a lie. You were tried of always bailing her out of trouble. Your sister drove herself, and for this, you have always felt terrible.
She moved herself to your deck chair and positioned herself so she could literally cry on your shoulder—which you also now realize was part of her dramatic ploy. At the time you fell for it, though: you offered to help her however you could.
She lifted her head from your shoulder and said, “Really?”
Later you would think about how quickly she said this. Later, the alacrity of her response would make you question whether her crying was calculated, would make you wonder if she had been manipulating you all along. Her relationships were as well choreographed as her home—no vase had been set down temporarily on a table, no throw pillow was accidental in color, no rug was a square inch too big or small. She designed and selected everything according to her specifications. On this particular Sunday morning she sought your pity, she wanted you to sacrifice your body for her needs. She preyed upon the fact that you had always wanted to be closer to her than she wanted to be to you.
The following day you accompanied her to her fertility doctor, but instead of examining her, the doctor performed tests on you. It was established that you would be a suitable surrogate for her child. “A gestational carrier” was what he called you. If you had been identical twins he could have used one of your eggs, but because you were fraternal twins your sister wanted to use hers. You knew this choice of hers had to do with the fact that she felt her genes were better than yours, but you tried not to be insulted. Her superior beauty had always been a given. IVF would be used to fertilize your sister’s eggs in the laboratory. If fertilization was successful, the doctor said he would transfer two or three of the resulting embryos into your uterus. He said this, and then removed his examination gloves, balled them together, and threw them in the trash.
Your husband rolled his eyes when you told him about your decision to carry your sister’s child. This should have been a sign. The rolling of eyes is rarely an appropriate response for any momentous announcement, and certainly not for an act of sisterhood as profound as the one you had decided to embark on. He accused you of doing anything for your sister, and you wondered if the subtext of that comment was that you did little for him. You and your husband had previously and repeatedly discussed whether you wanted to have children together, and you were both ambivalent and swore to each other your ambivalence had nothing to do with your feelings toward each other. But of course it did.
After the second attempt at IVF with your sister and her husband’s embryos, you became pregnant. They both accompanied you to the checkups, first on a monthly basis, and then on a weekly one. You read the books on pregnancy, and tried to skip over the sections on motherhood. You read in a newspaper that peppers were healthy for the fetus, and after that you couldn’t stop eating them. You ate red peppers, yellow peppers, orange peppers. Every week at the grocery store you’d buy a dozen. You read poems aloud. You sang simple songs your mother had sung to you and your sister. You felt more alive than you’d felt at any time during your twenties, when you didn’t have a career. You still didn’t have a career, but now you had a purpose.
“Isn’t there anything else you could be passionate about?” your husband said to you repeatedly during the pregnancy. You explained that helping your sister was the first thing you’d felt strongly about doing since diving. And you couldn’t exactly make a career of diving. “You can’t make a career of carrying your sister’s baby either,” he said.
Your sister’s husband was kinder to you than your own. In the second trimester your husband had stopped trying to sleep with you altogether, and at night you wrapped yourself around the large body pillow the midwife suggested you use. You and your sister could never agree on the proper possessive pronoun for the midwife. Your sister called her “my midwife”; you called her “our midwife” or referred to her by her first name. You hoped your sister would start doing the same but she didn’t.
When you suspected you were in labor, you called your sister and she came over, and when it was time, she and her husband drove you to the hospital. Your husband wasn’t home; he was in Indiana on business and couldn’t make it back in time. You did the math to see if he was lying and your conclusion was indecisive. Your sister’s husband waited outside the delivery room while your sister knelt beside you and the midwife and the doula. Your sister soaked washcloths in cold water and placed them over your forehead. She whispered reassuring words to you. “You can do this,” she said. “You can do this.”
It wasn’t pain so much as the most intense sensation you had ever experienced. First the feeling of the baby trying to crawl its way down and come out into the world. Why did it feel as though it was crawling through your back? “It’s trying to come out of my back,” you told the midwife.
The midwife and the doula decided that to ease the pain you would be moved into the shower. They turned down the bathroom lights. The doula used her hands to massage your back while you stood in the shower. At one point, the doula asked your sister to take over massaging; she wanted to involve your sister in the delivery. Your sister’s hands were not as effective.
You felt something pass through you quickly, and you screamed. The baby was coming out! You tried to catch it with your hands—it was an unwieldy shape but it fell to the shower floor and you felt an explosion of liquid on your feet. You screamed. Your sister screamed. The midwife came running back into the bathroom. “I think the baby just dropped on the shower floor,” you yelled. The lights were turned on. It was explained that your water had broken.
The midwife told you you were close. You were toweled dry and moved out of the bathroom and onto a mattress that had been pulled off the bed and placed on the floor. Your sister held your hands during what no one had prepared you for—the intense burning sensation.
You tried to picture the baby. You hoped you would love it after it had tortured you so, but you immediately erased the thought. You knew you would love her.
You screamed a sound that you had never heard come from your throat. The midwife used a rag to cool off your face, to wash away your sweat or tears, or some mixture of the two. You gave one more push. The burning came again—a part of you was on fire—and then you felt the oddest sensation of your life: a person passing through your body into the world.
The midwife took the baby and counted ten toes and ten fingers. “It’s a beautiful girl,” she said. There was a snipping of the umbilical cord—your sister held the scissors—which was more painful than you expected. You thought the cord was not capable of sensing anything, but as she severed the cord your stomach felt as though it had been punctured by a knife. And then you were told you would have to wait for the placenta to come.
You assumed that would be easy; you had been told it would be just like menstruation—that something would slide out of you and you would be done. But it was like another child! Was it another child? You asked the midwife. With fertility treatments weren’t multiples more likely? And besides, your sister’s egg had been used and you were twins. An idea passed through your mind, an idea that had never occurred to you before but now seemed brilliant: if there were two babies, maybe you could keep one? You knew better than to voice this thought.
No, it wasn’t another baby, you were told. It was the placenta. “The afterbirth,” the midwife called it. And then you were pushing all over again, pushing this dreaded afterbirth out of you. “It’s done,” the midwife said.
It was over. It was done. And all you could hear were cries. Her cries. They were so soft. You looked at the midwife and doula, these women who had seen you at your most bare and compromised moment. You stared at your sister,
not believing the intimacy you had all shared. You felt tears rolling down your cheeks and you knew they were tears of exhaustion, and tears of disappointment: you wished you had never dreamed of the possibility of giving birth to twins.
“This is the biggest gift you could ever give someone,” your sister’s husband said to you as he held the little baby girl. Their daughter. Not yours. Theirs.
You thanked him for thanking you and he laughed and told you that you should not be the one saying thank you.
Because the birth took place at a hospital, a nurse was required to be present in addition to the midwife and doula. The nurse wore blue scrubs and white puffy Reeboks. She carried the baby to the scale and recorded her weight, and then, using a floppy tape measure that she stretched from heel to crown of head, announced her length. The nurse in the Reeboks carried the baby back to the side of the bed where you were recuperating. She held her out for you and your sister to see. “She is exquisite. She looks like Cleopatra,” the nurse said.
The nurse was about to hand the baby to you when your sister intercepted. “I think it’s for the best if you don’t hold her,” she said to you.
While the film crew is adjusting the lighting you are thinking about this, all of this—the pastel flowers, your shoulder wet with your sister’s tears, the body pillow, the burning sensation. You are sitting on the floor of the mosque, rocking back on your heels, with each of your palms over the opposite arm’s elbow. You hear sobbing and only after a minute do you realize that it’s you who’s sobbing. You are the one making the wailing sounds. You open your eyes.
You notice something happening on the set around you. Or rather, you notice the absence of anything happening and your ears sense the unusual quiet. You look to your right and see the director has loosened his vise grip on his head and is staring at you. For the first time since you were introduced, he’s really looking at you as a person and not as a stand-in.
“I’m sorry,” you mumble. You know you’ve been distracted; you know you’ve done something wrong. No one has been this silent on set before. You wipe your face. You reposition your palms.