by Meg Wolitzer
“Talk about it? The appointment is Thursday, ten a.m. That’s nonnegotiable.”
She was right—it was time to start a family—and she was right, too, about cosmetology and auto mechanics. What responsible parent wouldn’t want the best for his child, whether that meant a stable home, top-flight nutrition, and the best private-school education money could buy, or tweaking the chromosomes in a test tube in a lab somewhere? Understand me: I was under duress. I could smell Allison on me still. I could smell my own fear. I didn’t want to lose my wife—I loved her. I was used to her. She was the only woman I’d known these past twelve years and more, my familiar. And there she was, poised on the edge of the couch, watching me, her will like some miasma seeping in under the door and through the cracks around the windows until the room was choked with it. “Okay,” I said.
Which is not to say that I gave in without a fight. The next day—Wednesday—I had to go into the office and endure the usual banalities of my coworkers till I wanted to beat the walls of my cubicle in frustration, but on the way home I stopped at a pet store and picked up an eight-week-old dogcat. (People still aren’t quite sure what to call the young, even now, fifteen years after they were first created. Kitpups? Pupkits? The sign in the window read simply BABY DOGCATS ON SPECIAL.) I chose a squirming little furball with a doggish face and tabby stripes and brought it home as a surprise for Connie, hoping it would distract her long enough for her to reevaluate the decision she was committing us to.
I tucked the thing inside my shirt for the drive home, since the minute the girl behind the counter put it in its cardboard carrier it began alternately mewing and yipping in a tragic way, and it nestled there against my chest, warm and content, until I’d parked the car and gone up the steps and into the house. Connie was already home, moving briskly about the kitchen. There were flowers on the table next to an ice bucket with the neck of a bottle of Veuve Clicquot protruding from it, and the room was redolent of the scent of my favorite meal—pipérade, Basque style, topped with poached eggs—and I realized that she must have made a special stop at Maison Claude on her way home. This was a celebration and no two ways about it. In the morning, we would procreate—or take our first steps in that direction, which on my part would involve producing a sperm sample under duress (unlike, I couldn’t help thinking, the way it had been with Allison).
We didn’t hug. We didn’t kiss. I just said “Hey,” and she said “Hey” back. “Smells great,” I said, trying to gauge her expression as we both hovered over the table.
“Perfect timing,” she said, leaning in to adjust the napkin beside her plate, though it was already precisely aligned. “I got there the minute they took it out of the oven. Claude himself brought it out to me—along with a fresh loaf of that crusty sourdough you like. Just baked this morning.”
I was grinning at her. “Great,” I said. “Really great.”
Into the silence that followed—neither of us was ready yet to address the issue hanging over us—I said, “I’ve got a surprise for you.”
“How sweet. What is it?”
With a magician’s flourish, I whipped the new pet from the folds of my shirt and held it out triumphantly for her. Unfortunately, I startled the thing in the process, and it reacted by digging its claws into my wrist, letting out a string of rapid-fire barks, and dropping a glistening turd on the tiles of the kitchen floor. “For you,” I said.
Her face fell. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You really think I’m that easy to buy off?” She made no effort to take the thing from me—in fact, she clenched her hands behind her. “Take it back where you got it.”
The pupkit had softened now, retracting its claws and settling into the crook of my arm as if it recognized me, as if in the process of selecting it and secreting it in my shirt I’d imparted something essential to it—love, that is—and it was content to exist in this new world on a new basis altogether. “It’s purring,” I said.
“What do you want me to say—hallelujah? The thing’s a freak, you’re always saying so yourself every time one of those stupid commercials comes on—”
“No more a freak than that girl with the dog,” I said.
“What girl? What are you talking about?”
“The one with the dog that bit me. She must have been six-four. She had an IQ of 162. And still she let her dog out, and still it bit me.”
“What are you saying? You’re not trying to back out on me, are you? We had a deal, Roy, and you know how I feel about people who renege on a deal—”
“Okay, okay, calm down. All I’m saying is maybe we ought to have a kind of trial or something before we—I mean, we’ve never even had a pet.”
“A pet is not a child, Roy.”
“No,” I said, “that’s not what I meant. It was just, I’m just—” The crowparrots started up then with one of their raucous dinnertime chants, squawking so piercingly you could hear them even with the windows shut—“Big Mac, Big Mac,” they called. “Fries!”—and I lost my train of thought.
“Are we going to eat?” Connie said in a fragile voice, tearing up. “Because I went out of my way. Because I wanted this night to be special, okay?”
So now we did hug, though the pupkit got between us, and, coward that I am, I told her everything was going to be all right. Later, after she’d gone to bed, I took the pupkit in my arms, went next door, and rang the bell. Allison answered in her nightgown, a smile creeping across her lips. “Here,” I said, handing her the animal. “I got this for you.”
Fast-forward seven and a half months. I am living in a house with a pregnant woman next door to a house in which there is another pregnant woman. Connie seems to find this amusing, never suspecting the truth of the matter. We’ll glance up from the porch and see Allison emerging heavily from her car with an armload of groceries, and Connie will say things like “I hope she doesn’t have to pee every five minutes the way I do” and “She won’t say who the father is—I just hope it’s not that a-hole from Animal Control, what was his name?”
This is problematic on a number of levels. I play dumb, of course—what else can I do? “Maybe she went to GenLab,” I say.
“Her? You’re kidding me, right? I mean, look at that string of jerks she keeps dating. If you want to know the truth, she’s lower-class, Roy, and I’m sorry to have to say it—”
I’m not about to argue the point. The fact is I tried everything I could to talk Allison out of going through with this—finally, to my shame, falling back on the same argument about the whole Übermensch-Untermensch dynamic that Connie used on me—but Allison merely gave me a bitter smile and said, “I trust your genes, Roy. You don’t have to be involved. I just want to do this, that’s all. For myself. And for nature. You believe in nature, don’t you?”
You don’t have to be involved. But I was involved, though we’d had sex only the one time (or two, actually, counting the night I brought her the pupkit), and if she had a boy and he looked like me and grew up right next door playing with our daughter, how involved would that be?
So there comes a day, sometime during that eighth month, a Tuesday, when I’m working at home and Connie’s at the office, and I’m so focused on the problem at hand that I keep putting off my bathroom break until the morning’s nearly gone. That’s the way it always is when I’m deeply engaged with a problem, a kind of mind-body separation, but finally the body’s needs prevail and I push myself up from my desk to go down the hall to the bathroom. I’m standing there, in mid-flow, when I become aware of the sound of a dog barking on the front lawn and I shift my torso ever so slightly so that I can glance out the window and see what the ruckus is all about. It’s the red dog, the Cherry Pit that set all this in motion, and it’s tearing around on my hybrid lawn, chasing something. My first reaction is anger—anger at the tall girl and her fixer father and all the other idiots of the world—but by the time I get down the stairs and out the front door the anger dissipates, because I see that the dog isn’t there to kill anything
but to play, and that what it’s chasing is being chased willingly: Allison’s dogcat, now a rangy adolescent and perhaps a third the size of the dog.
For all my fretting over the lawn, I have to say that in that moment, with the light making a cathedral of the street trees and the neighborhood suspended in the grip of a lazy, warm autumn afternoon, I find something wonderfully liberating in the play of those two animals, the dogcat especially. Allison named him Tiger because of his coloration—dark feral stripes against a kind of Pomeranian orange—and he lives up to his name, absolutely fearless and with an athleticism and elasticity that combines the best of both species that went into making him. He runs rings around the pit bull, actually, feinting one way, dodging the next, racing up the trunk of a tree and out onto a branch before leaping to the next tree and springing back down to charge, doglike, across the yard. “Go, Tiger!” I call out. “Good boy. Go get him!”
That’s when I become aware of Allison, in a pair of maternity shorts and an enormous top, crossing from her front lawn to ours. She’s put on a lot of weight (but not as much as Connie, because we opted for a big baby, in the eleven-pound range, wanting it—her—to have that advantage right from the start). I haven’t spoken with Allison much these past months, but I still have feelings for her, of course—beyond resentment, that is. So I lift a hand and wave and she waves back and I watch her come barefoot through the glowing grass while the animals frolic around her.
I’m down off the porch now, and I can’t help but smile at the sight of her. She comes up to me, moving with a kind of clumsy grace, if that makes any sense, and I want to take her in my arms but can’t really do that, not under these conditions, so I take both her hands and peck a neighborly kiss to her cheek. For a minute, neither of us says anything, then, shading her eyes with the flat of one hand to better see the animals at play, she says, “Pretty cute, huh?”
I nod.
“You see how Tiger’s grown?”
“Yes, of course, I’ve been watching him all along . . . Is that as big as he’s going to get?”
The sun catches her eyes, which are a shade of plain everyday brown. “Nobody’s sure, but the vet thinks he won’t get much bigger. Maybe a pound or two.”
“And you?” I venture. “How are you feeling?”
“Never better. You’re going to be seeing more of me—don’t look scared, that’s not what I mean, just I’m taking my maternity leave, though I’m not due for, like, six weeks.” Both her hands, pretty hands, shapely, come to rest on the bulge beneath her oversized blouse. “They’re really being nice about it at work.”
Connie’s not planning on taking off till the minute her water breaks, because that’s the way Connie is, and I want to tell Allison that by way of contrast, just to say something, but I notice that she’s looking over my shoulder and I turn my head to see the tall girl coming up the walk, leash in hand. “Sorry,” the girl calls out. “She got loose again. Sorry, sorry.”
I don’t know what it is, but I’m feeling generous, expansive. “No problem,” I call out. “She’s just having a little fun.”
That’s when Connie’s car slashes into the driveway, going too fast, and all I can think is she’s going to hit one of the animals, but she brakes at the last minute and they flow like water around the tires to chase back across the lawn again. It’s hard to gauge the look on my wife’s face as she swings open the car door, pushes herself laboriously from behind the wheel, then starts up the walk as if she hasn’t seen us. Just as she reaches the front steps, she swivels around. I can see she’s considering whether it’s worth the effort to come and greet our neighbor and get a closer look at the tall girl who hovers behind us like the avatar she is, but she decides against it. She just stops a moment, staring, and though she’s thirty feet away I can see a kind of recognition settle into her features, and it has to do with the way Allison is standing there beside me, as if for a portrait or an illustration in a book on family planning, the XY chromosomes and the XX. It’s just a moment, and I can’t say for certain, but her face goes rigid and she turns her back on us, mounts the steps, and slams the door behind her.
When the CRISPR technology first came to light, governments and scientists everywhere assured the public that it would be employed only selectively, to fight disease and to rectify congenital deformities, editing out the mutated BRCA1 gene that predisposes women to breast cancer, for instance, or eliminating the ability of the Anopheles mosquito to carry the parasite that transmits malaria. Who could argue with that? Genome-editing kits (“Knock Out Any Gene!”) were sold to home hobbyists, who could create their own anomalous forms of yeast and bacteria in their kitchens, and it was revolutionary—and, beyond that, fun. Fun to tinker. Fun to create. The pet and meat industries gave us rainbow-colored aquarium fish, seahorses that incorporated gold dust in their cells, rabbits that glowed green under a black light, the beefed-up supercow, the micropig, the dogcat, and all the rest. The Chinese were the first to renounce any sort of regulatory control and upgrade the human genome, and, as if they weren’t brilliant enough already, they became still more brilliant as the first edited children began to appear, and of course we had to keep up . . .
In a room at GenLab, Connie and I were presented with an exhaustive menu of just how our chromosomes could be made to match up. We chose to have a daughter. We selected emerald eyes for her—not iridescent, not freakishly bright, but enhanced for color so that she could grow up wearing mint, olive, kelly green, and let her eyes talk for her. We chose height, too, as just about everybody does. And musical ability—we both love music. Intellect, of course. And finer features, like a subtly cleft chin and breasts that were not too big but not as small as Connie’s, either. It was a menu, and we placed an order.
The tall girl is right beside us now, smiling like the heroine of a Norse saga, her eyes sweeping over us like searchlights. She looks to Allison, takes in her condition. “Boy or girl?” she asks.
The softest smile plays over Allison’s lips. She ducks her head, shrugs.
The girl—the genius—looks confused for a moment. “But, but,” she stammers, “how can that be? You don’t mean you—?”
But before Allison can answer, a crowparrot sweeps out of the nearest tree, winging low to screech “Fuck you!” in our faces, and the smallest miracle occurs. Tiger, as casual in his own skin as anything there is or ever was, erupts from the ground in a rocketing whirl of fur to catch the thing in his jaws. As quick as that, it’s over, and the feathers, the prettiest feathers you’ll ever see, lift and dance and float away on the breeze.
KEVIN CANTY
God’s Work
FROM The New Yorker
Sander loves his mother. He walks a few steps after her, wearing a new black suit that has room for him to grow into, carrying a big black valise of pamphlets. When his mother goes to the front door, rings the bell, waits for an answer, Sander stands behind her, looking over her shoulder, with an expression on his face that he means to be pleasant.
It’s the second day of his summer vacation, but it still feels like spring. Lilacs bloom in every yard; irises wag their pink and purple tongues at him.
His mother is plain. She wears a gray sweater, despite the sun, and a black skirt that reaches nearly to her ankles. No lipstick, short, practical hair. Her name is Anna. She makes up for her plainness with a big galvanic smile. People are on her side right away, though they rarely open the screen door and almost never take a pamphlet. Nobody new ever comes to Fellowship. Anna doesn’t take this as permission to stop trying. She thinks the men and women and children in these sleeping houses will lose the chance to live life as God intended unless they take the message she brings them in the pamphlet. Sander thinks she is lovely and brave and admirable. Every day, she tries to save strangers. Selfless. Sander loves his mother.
Today! is the name of the pamphlet.
Sander has just finished his sophomore year. At the first breath of spring, the girls all started to dress like prostitute
s. With his own eyes he has seen a pretty junior bicycling in a tank top with one pale breast riding free. In his dreams he sees the delicate tuft of blond pubic hair he witnessed poking out of a pair of low-slung jeans in study hall. This is what Sander thinks about as he walks behind his mother, feeling the hot sun wherever it touches the black fabric of his suit. That and the bad haircut he got yesterday.
The haircut! He feels tears start again at the thought of it. Some friend of his mother’s, in her kitchen. When she brought out the mirror: death. As if every single thing in his life were there to disqualify him.
A nice enough street, anyway. Lots of students from the college. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, so nobody much answers the door. Those who do are mostly wearing flannel pajama bottoms and flip-flops. Some of the men don’t even have on shirts. His mother rings the bell, and a college girl comes to the screen door, and if she came outside Sander could tell if she was wearing a bra under her thin little shirt. But she says no, thanks, not interested, thanks, and closes the inner door on them, though it was open before.
Another soul misses out on eternal life in an earthly Paradise.
Why can’t he be like his mother? Why can’t he just be good?
Immense transparency of light, the sky a luminous blue. He takes a deep breath and lets God’s grace fill him. All this great gift, this flowering world. It is not Sander’s place to question why a God so generous can also be so exacting. Why do they have to work so hard to come to Him? Sin is everywhere, the path to goodness narrow and sometimes hard to find. But this is nothing next to His generosity.
“Another block or Taco Bell?” his mother asks.
“I don’t know,” Sander says. “I don’t care.”