An Excellent Choice

by Emma Brockes

  I have been emphatic to my dad that I am trying for this baby alone, but I know he thinks that eventually L and I will end up in a conventional arrangement—that this is a drawn-out interim stage that has somehow survived the birth of her own baby. He is too diplomatic to say this, but it is practically a generational impossibility for him to think otherwise. The person to go to for the alternative view is my mother’s younger sister, Fay, a favorite among her siblings and the only person in her family I’m still in regular touch with. My aunt is well up to speed on news of L and the baby and, a few days after Christmas, I call her in Johannesburg to fill her in on my treatment.

  “I think it’s very enterprising,” she says airily. My aunt has a couple of dicey ex-husbands in her past, as do most of my aunts. “If I could have had my children without having any of them,” she says, “that would have been my preference.” Which is, of course, what I knew she would say and is precisely why I rang in the first place.

  These are the last days of frivolity. Two weeks into January, I get my period and, just like that, I sober up. I stop dissembling about needing more time to adjust. I switch to Coke at the bar. Overnight, the sense of what it is to throw money at something with no definite endpoint becomes sickeningly real and I can’t believe I was so cavalier in the first place.

  “OK,” says L, who is calm and sensible in the face of my panic. “So you’ll go another month and then you’ll see.”

  “Early days,” says Dr. B. We are in his office, where he is reviewing the results from the blood test. “Your hormone levels look good, everything looks good.”

  He exudes just the right ratio of confidence to uncertainty, but I still don’t trust large parts of this process. Like all for-profit industries, the fertility industry is set up to serve multiple interests, and at the back of my mind I have the uneasy feeling that when there is room for interpretation of the data, fertility doctors are incentivized to err on the side of positivity. (In America, that is. In England, it is the opposite: cost rationalization means that if you want a third, free cycle of IVF on the NHS, you have to lobby like hell to prove that you’re not a lost cause. I’m not sure which is worse in this instance, false hope or fatalism.) A doctor’s optimism needn’t even be cynical—it’s human nature to want effort to be met with reward—but it makes it hard for me to get a sense of what we are actually talking about. When Dr. B says my levels are “good,” does he mean good-good? Or does he mean good in the context of an overall bad business?

  “The unknown variable is egg quality, right?” I say.

  “Yes. Without IVF, there’s no way for us to determine the quality of the eggs.” We sit in silence for a moment and my face must fall because Dr. B gets up and goes to the Keurig machine in the corner of the room. “Coffee?”

  “I thought I wasn’t supposed to drink coffee.” He returns with two cups.

  “If you were drinking eight cups a day I might suggest you cut back. But otherwise it’s just . . .”

  “Needless masochism?”

  “Exactly.”

  I have to smile. Ordinarily, I’m a big fan of needless masochism. Show me an opportunity to deny myself comfort and I will show you a happy woman. But after my meeting with the guru in London, I made myself promise I’d resist superstition. I wouldn’t go nuts and buy raspberry tea, or start eating pineapple at certain points in the month, or sit in the Fertility Chair at work—a chair in the London office in which the last three women who’d sat had got pregnant. I would cut back on alcohol, but unless the doctor told me to, I wouldn’t give up coffee or make any other adjustments, and I’m delighted when Dr. B approves. From then on, every time I go into the clinic, I carry a large cup of Starbucks, to ward off the evil eye of fertility mania.

  In the weeks that follow, the rhythm of the clinic syncs with my own. The clientele grows familiar. There is the woman who comes in with her sister. There is the one who never looks up from her BlackBerry and complains at the desk about the clinic’s late running. At eight a.m., half of us still have wet hair from the shower and several sit with their eyes shut until the nurse comes to fetch them. I had wondered in advance if there’d be hostility among us, because statistically if one woman gets pregnant it would seem to lessen the chances for the rest of us. But this isn’t the case at all. With each passing week, we register one another’s ongoing presence with smiles of quiet solidarity.

  The worst thing about treatment at this stage is the time commitment. Timing is everything in fertility and if the timing is off—if your eggs aren’t ready to drop on the day you go in for the insemination—you are sent home and told to return the next day. Even when the timing is right, there is a lot of hanging around. It is like having a second job, one with irregular shift patterns and a lot of strip searches. Here I am, at nine-thirty a.m. on yet another cold Thursday morning, longing to be at my desk drinking coffee but instead lying half naked in stirrups while four people peer up my fanjo.

  “Imagine if, every week for a month, you went into an office so someone could stick something up your arse?” said a friend of mine to her husband recently when he implied that what she was going through for IVF wasn’t that big of a deal. She said he looked a little shocked; the penny had finally dropped.

  My actual job, meanwhile, gets crammed into the far corners of the day. It’s an advantage of being almost forty and doing this that I can tread water for a while without fear of slipping. I can’t imagine having had fertility treatment—or a baby, for that matter—during the years when I was still anxious about work. The only thing I hope is that no one cross-references the column I write with topics on the Today show, which in January through February become eerily aligned. Diets, figure skaters, sleep studies, winter Olympic backgrounders; for six weeks Matt Lauer’s producers do half of my work for me. (I never get a single idea from TMZ; thanks for nothing, guys.) The only items I don’t take up are the ones about babies. When they come on-screen, which they do at regular intervals—cute babies, miracle babies, sick babies, talented babies—all the women in the waiting room laugh or make cooing sounds to puncture the awkwardness of ten strangers whose thoughts suddenly align. Then we spin off into our own thoughts again.

  One Saturday midway through my second cycle, I go in for blood work, and because we’re en route to Costco in her car, L comes in with me. If this story were Greek myth, going to Costco would stand in for our archetypal journey; some part of us is, has been and ever will be on the road to Costco. It’s where we have our best conversations, looking not at each other but out of the window, absolved of the need to make eye contact. That morning, however, I’m anxious. When L brings the baby into the waiting room, it feels undiplomatic. (There are, I know, fertility clinics with signs on the walls asking visitors not to bring in their kids, which strikes me as even more embarrassing for the patients than the presence of an actual child, like having a sign up at a funeral home saying DON’T MENTION THE DEAD.) As it turns out, the other women couldn’t be nicer, cooing and spoiling him, and then Dr. B comes out to shake L’s hand and greet her warmly.

  “That was weird,” I say afterward, as we head out of town in the car.

  “Yeah,” she says.

  It was quite touching, too, the efforts made by the doctor to chivy us together, and afterward, I feel bad for him. Then I feel bad for us. The failure, it seems to me, is less in the nature of our relationship than in our ability to give an adequate account of it, and as we wander around Costco, L pushing the cart, me hauling stuff into it, I wonder again how we look from the outside. Within a few weeks, Dr. B has stopped referring to “you both” in my posttreatment debriefs and started addressing his remarks uniquely to me.

  “By the way,” I say to him. It is a Friday morning, the final ultrasound before my second insemination.

  “Hmmm?” he says, eyes on the screen.

  “You never told me what the three Gs were.”

  His eyes z
ip across to meet mine and for a moment he looks at me, as if trying to figure out whether he can trust me. “Go on,” I say.

  “It’s kind of a joke.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not being entirely serious, so don’t—.”

  “WHAT?”

  He grins. “Guns, gold and a getaway plan.”

  * * *

  • • •

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I’m in the waiting room looking at the Christmas cards still tacked to the wall and texting Oliver a link to a piece about “sweat shaming.” (It’s for a fantasy Web site we operate called ThankYouForYourContribution.com, an anthology of the world’s worst opinion pieces, and the fact that it exists only in our minds doesn’t stop us from lovingly curating it.)

  “Good luck today!” says Oliver. “If that is the appropriate statement of support. You may think luck has nothing to do with it.”

  “Thanks.”

  When I go into the treatment room, Olga, the nurse, is at the desk leafing through a large book. I like Olga. She has been working in IVF since the 1980s, at the very dawn of the technology, and is due to retire any day. A few weeks earlier, I’d been waiting to go into the ultrasound room and heard a woman crying on the other side of the door. “Ach, it can be hard,” said Olga, with an air of deep tragedy I found somehow consoling. The expression on her face, which is etched with compassion, implied what does any of this matter, we’ll all one day be dust.

  The book Olga is reading is a photographic account of life inside the womb, featuring vivid color images of babies in utero and which, as I undress, she holds up to show me. I murmur appreciatively but inside I recoil. Those pictures of pink fetuses, curled over themselves like shrimp, have been so co-opted by the antiabortion lobby that you can’t look at them now without visualizing some spit-flecked nutter waving a placard outside a clinic in Wichita. In any case, I don’t want to think about the “miracle” of conception; the whole enterprise is improbable enough without adding a supernatural dimension to it. Olga shuts the book and we chat for a few moments before Dr. B comes in, followed by a nurse, who, once again, holds up the vial of sperm for my inspection. This checking protocol has been in place for two decades, ever since a lawsuit was brought against the clinic by a white couple who unexpectedly gave birth to a black child. “So you’re waiting nine months to see if you’ll have a baby of the wrong race,” I say to Oliver later that day.

  “Now, then, Brockesy,” says Oliver. “I think we both know there’s no such thing as the wrong race.”

  The procedure feels like nothing at all; a tiny bit of cramping and then, “Can you see them?” says Dr. B, indicating the screen. Sperm are, apparently, surging across my system like deer on the Serengeti.

  “Oh, wow!” I say. (I can’t see them.)

  “All you have to remember is not to get your period!” He sweeps out of the room, taking the nurses with him.

  You are supposed to keep still for ten minutes after the insemination and I lie in the semidarkness, looking up at the dusty collection of fertility dolls arranged on a shelf above the desk. One has a bow and arrow. One is dressed in some kind of folk costume. All look as if they have the potential to come alive at night. I think about the Christmas cards in the waiting room, which feature family photos from grateful former patients. That’s nice, I think. All those success stories. Although there is something a little proprietorial about the montage, a little preening. From the clinic’s point of view, I don’t like the egotism of that wall—look at what we made!—and I don’t like being lumped in with a bunch of people on the basis of fertility. This isn’t a church, I think grumpily, it’s a business; they should be grateful to me.

  I don’t know how long I’m lying there, but when Sophia, one of the nurses, comes back in she looks surprised to see me. “Hey,” she says, tapping me lightly on the knee. “You can put your booty away now, honey.”

  I get up, redress, put on my snow boots which are standing in a puddle under a chair in the corner and leave the ultrasound room. On the way out, I glance at the wall of Christmas cards again and notice something I had failed to see earlier, even though it is the most prominent thing about the display: the sheer number of photos with more than one baby in them.

  SEVEN

  Drugs

  IT IS THAT EVENING, a few hours after the insemination, that I feel it starting to happen. At first, it is an impulse to wander up Atlantic Avenue to the health-food store, just to see if they have it. Then, browsing the store’s overlit aisles and failing to find anything, it is the urge to run into Manhattan to the store on Fourteenth Street, no big deal, I’ll be back by nine p.m., it is pitch-black and raining but I have no other plans. Then I find it (a sign!), pay twelve dollars—one buck per raspberry tea bag, or “nature’s aid to conception,” as the packet informs me—and go home to drink what tastes like a cup of hot flowers. By the end of the week, I am going to the corner deli and buying precut pineapple that is more expensive than flying to Puerto Rico and picking it myself.

  This is how it begins. What harm can it do? Why wouldn’t I try everything? I mean, of course it won’t work, but what if it does? I mean, it won’t, but what if it does? It won’t. But what if it does? If athletes win races based on a matter of milliseconds, mightn’t raspberry tea close an even more infinitesimal gap? I have been trying to get pregnant for precisely six weeks but already I can glimpse the outline of the monster coming over the hill. Each failed attempt will get harder to shrug off. Expenses will mount. My life will go on being indefinitely on hold. Given this forecast, most of us would rather feel the shame of doing something illogical than the powerlessness of doing nothing at all.

  “I bought the raspberry tea,” I say to L on the phone later that night and wonder how she will take it. L believes in drugs not vitamins, but she has an unlikely artisanal streak. Long before classes at Fleishers, the butcher in Park Slope, became a staple gift item at Christmas, she wanted to learn how to butcher her own meat. She might look like a corporate American, but she’ll buy cheesecloth to make her own yogurt. She almost certainly knows more about granola than you do. When we first met, one of my favorite things was to take her to a dinner party and watch her baffle the hipsters. “I’m proud of my country,” she once said, startling the public radio producer to her left who’d just been banging on about how awful America is. He commenced sniggering, until L invited him to consider the possibility that if his family, like hers, had emerged from the concentration camps after the Second World War he mightn’t take America for granted, either.

  “You’re an idiot,” she says about the tea bags.

  I retreat to my bed and my own form of patriotism: watching British sitcoms from the 1980s on YouTube, then calling up the opening credits to Question Time. (Question Time: a dowdy British panel show in which government ministers interact with awkward members of the public in a way that somehow sums up the essence of home. When I first came to the United States, one of the things I noticed was the ability of the average American to be stopped on the street, asked about practically anything and effortlessly summon a credible sound bite. There is something endearing about the average Briton’s complete lack of competence when a microphone is shoved in his face.)

  The fact is that within a week of the second insemination, I have caved in entirely to crank remedies and the crank rationalizations that go with them. I’m sure I feel little peckings in my abdomen and lie down for hours on my bed, willing the cells to divide. I avoid bending, shaking or making any sharp movements lest I kill the incipient baby. Online, I get tearful over cynical marketing campaigns.

  “Is it terrible that I liked the Lily Allen / John Lewis Christmas song?” I ask my friend Leila by e-mail. It’s a soppy ballad by a midlist pop star that ran over a Christmas commercial for a London department store—the equivalent of being moved by a billboard for Macy’s.

  “Fuckinlilyallenjohnlewis . . . you�
�ve gone proper expat.”

  A week later, Leila is stretched out in my living room, visiting from London for a few days while she hosts a panel at a human rights forum in the city. L and the baby have come down from Manhattan to have lunch with us and while L does things in the kitchen, Leila plays with the baby on the sofa. I watch them from across the room. It looks so simple, a woman playing with a baby. Not just a woman, but my friend, and not just any friend, but one of my oldest and best friends, interacting with L’s baby with the kind of license and ease with which I would expect her to interact with my own.

  There is a short story by Harold Brodkey called “The State of Grace,” the last lines of which I think about that afternoon and return to a lot in subsequent days. In the story, Brodkey looks back on himself as a thirteen-year-old, babysitting a much younger child and shying away from the child’s tacit request for affection. The last line, uttered in despair at the inadequacies of a life underlived, is “Love him, you damn fool, love him.” I look at Leila, giggling with the baby on the sofa, and consider whether, in spite of the endless bickering between L and me, the constant anxiety over whether what we’re doing is right, this is the last line. Is this only ever the last line? And if so, does it make what we’re doing terrifically complicated, or incredibly simple? Love him, you damn fool, love him.