Happiness Sold Separately

by Lolly Winston

  Elinor holds a pen poised over a pad of paper, but all she’s managed to write is: 3, 15, swapped, silverware. Little bits of information stick in her head: One in fifty thousand people. Fork in your spoon slot. And the words move on.

  She drops the pen. She and Ted shouldn’t go for genetic counseling. Not another consultation. Elinor pictures them sitting in chairs at another doctor’s desk, behind another closed door, looking across another wide expanse of blotter at another well-meaning medic in a white coat. She imagines her head dropping with a thunk onto the genetic counselor doctor’s desk, and how she might bang her forehead over and over until she’s got a goose egg bigger than Ted’s.

  “We’ll see,” she tells Dr. Kolcheck.

  “I know, you probably need some time to digest all this. You’re a good candidate to try donor eggs. The great thing about that is, time is less of a factor. You can wait until it feels right. I’ve had some patients who’ve been very happy with this choice.”

  “Uh-huh,” Elinor says weakly. She’s learned that it can be a mistake to wait for the right time. You have to be more spontaneous. And there will never be a right time for her and Ted to continue with these treatments. She can’t imagine Ted giving her another injection at their kitchen counter. She can’t imagine him stressing over producing yet another sample in a plastic cup at the clinic. They should adopt.

  Elinor should adopt. Ted would do it for her, but he’s wary, and she doesn’t want to have to convince him. It shouldn’t have to be a fight anymore. A fight to save the marriage. A fight to have a family. (Do you guys have kids? We’re trying! Trying, trying, trying!)

  Elinor should take that overseas assignment for her company in Dublin. She should find Oscar Wilde’s house and sit on the front stoop and drink a Guinness and wrap up the merger and then come home and adopt a baby. A flicker of fear seizes her. Will they let her adopt without a husband? Ted would go with her to Ireland, but she knows he would prefer to use his vacation time to scuba-dive in Australia. Still, he’d go to Ireland to try to make her happy. He’d do almost anything to try to make Elinor happy. Yet he deserves happiness, too.

  Dr. Kolcheck says again how sorry she is about this news, and she’ll be glad to see Ted and Elinor in her office after they visit the genetic counselor. Elinor thanks her.

  “I’ll make an appointment,” she lies, not wanting Dr. Kolcheck to feel bad. They say good-bye.

  Elinor looks at the telephone. Instead of calling the genetic counselor, she will call the mediation lawyer again. For a moment she isn’t sad about the prospect of a divorce. She knows she’ll be devastated later—probably as early as tomorrow. Perhaps even sadder than she felt about the miscarriage. But right now a clarity of vision places her outside of herself ten years from now. Oh, my first husband. He was a really good guy.

  She’s the one who has to decide they should divorce. Ted would stick it out, stick by her, no matter what. She looks at the pen and little pad on the counter. A year ago, if she were sitting in this chair at this moment, she would have started a list: Ted follow-up doc app’ts. Sked genetic counselor. Donor eggs? Research. Timeline? Buy books to get Ted interested in adoption.

  Elinor’s shoulders drop with a lowered sense of ambition that feels as liberating as a stiff drink. She’ll have to phone her mom with the news. Retrieving the pen, she writes: Dublin? Then she gets up and turns on the light over the kitchen sink and brings in the mail from the box. Overdue medical bills. The beginning of the onslaught of holiday catalogs. She dumps it all in the empty fruit bowl.

  In the bathroom, Elinor brushes her teeth, working to get the bad hospital coffee sludge off her tongue. Maybe foreign adoption would be best. Russia, perhaps. She hopes she can adopt more than one child. She already knows she’s going to be one of those mothers who lets the kids sleep in the bed. Kids, cats, toys, storybooks. She hopes they’ll all fall asleep together every night reading.

  In the meantime, if she’s going to be single, she wouldn’t mind sleeping with Noah again. She can imagine dating him casually. Are you allowed to do such a thing when you’re forty? It’s very likely that Noah has met someone else. If he has, she’ll wish him well. She wishes Noah well. She wishes Ted well. She wishes Gina would gain thirty pounds and develop a mammoth zit. “An oozy carbuncle,” she says to the bathroom mirror, narrowing her eyes, relishing this moment of pettiness. She does not have to like her husband’s mistress or whatever the hell she is or was or will be in the future. She combs her hair back with her fingers and flicks out the light.

  Returning to the bedroom for a sweater, she thinks about her conversation with Dr. Kolcheck. A balanced translocation. A fork in her spoon slot! She’s a screwed-up silverware drawer. Yet there’s solace in learning that something is tangibly wrong. A diagnosis other than you’re old. Ted will understand the translocation thing better than she does. He might even push for the genetic counseling. He’ll want to do it for her. She grabs a collection of Dave Barry essays from Ted’s nightstand. She’ll read them to him in the hospital. It is his favorite book. He needs to laugh. They both do.

  Acknowledgments

  First, thanks to my agent Laurie Fox, the most generous person I know. I am always grateful for her guidance and friendship. Thanks to my wonderfully smart editor Amy Einhorn, and to all the kind folks at Warner Books, particularly Jennifer Romanello, for always making me laugh, and to Karen Torres and Martha Otis for their unyielding support. Thanks, too, to Linda Chester for her cheerleading. Without these people I’d be eating burned microwave popcorn in a cubicle by day, and writing in a drafty garret by night.

  Thanks to my San Francisco writers group—the best readers and writers I know: Rich Register, Gordon Jack, Susan Edmiston, Cheyenne Richards, Karen Roy, Laurence Howard, and Julie Knight. And much gratitude to my writing partner Vicky Mlyniec.

  Thanks to Kim and Dr. Jim Ratcliff, to Julie Dunger Anderson, and to Wyatt Nelson. Without them I wouldn’t know anything about hammertoes, restraining orders, or the Xbox.

  Thanks to savvy readers Gail K. Baker, Eileen Bordy, Emily Griffin, Aimee Prall, Nicolle Henneuse, Cindy Walker, and copy editor Laura Jorstad. Without them this book would be filled with blunders and bloopers.

  As always, thanks to Karen Eberle, and especially to Anders Wallgren for his moral and technical support. Without him I’d still be writing with a Smith Corona and bottle of Wite-Out and living in a van down by the river.

  A special thank-you to Ellen Sussman, for always offering just the right balance of encouragement and ass-kicking. Without her, I’d still be writing chapter four of this book.

  Thanks to Popoki, Piglet, and Einstein, who are always willing to discuss the finer points of literature over turkey treats and tea.

  And always thanks to Frank Baldwin for that very first push of encouragement. Without him I’d still be writing Good Grief.

  Finally, thanks to the independent bookstores across the country for their support of new authors and emerging literature. Without them, reading wouldn’t be such a wonderfully diverse pleasure.