I had all of New Year’s Day to stew and pace. I called when the pharmacy opened the following day, displaying a kind of barely contained rage for which I expected to be rewarded. Anything short of murder warranted a gold star. But their records showed I had picked up the medication. I explained the difference between paying for something and leaving with it. I was not trying to swindle them. I don’t need the extra needles for my side gig as a methadone addict. I barely wanted these needles. I threatened to take pictures of the empty bag. Still, they maintained the drugs were in there.
“There’s nothing here,” I said. “There was only an ice pack and I put it in—”
There are moments in life when one literally stops in one’s tracks. Usually you have to see a wild animal or a celebrity you thought was dead.
“Will you please hold?”
I opened my freezer and removed the foil pack. For the first time, I noticed a seam at the top. I ripped it open. Inside was a packet of ice the size of a playing card and boxes of medication stickered with the words HUMAN HORMONE. DO NOT FREEZE.
The reality of what I had done took no time to sink in. I, who only four nights prior had registered the wasted cab fare to Chelsea, had just destroyed fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of medication by tossing it into the freezer like a bag of peas.
One wonders what I would do with an actual child.
The pharmacy had neglected to sticker the foil pouch itself and kindly agreed to send me new drugs. My case was easy to make. Improperly labeling medication is not an offense I came up with. Still, how could two of these misunderstandings have occurred in forty-eight hours? Has anyone’s ambivalence ever run so deep? Before we hung up, I asked the pharmacist how many functioning adults had ever done what I did. He pretended to scan his memory. The answer was none. I was the “hot coffee” case of the reproductive-medicine world. Next time you think to yourself, “What kind of idiot doesn’t understand that coffee is hot?” know that the answer is: This kind.
*
In order to freeze your eggs, you must give yourself two different types of shots, one in the morning and one in the evening, always within an hour of the time you gave yourself the first shot. This is as elaborate as it sounds. Especially compared with every other medication I’d ever taken, for which I needed only a working esophagus. My boyfriend offered to do the injections for me.
“It’ll be a good bonding experience,” he said, afflicted as he is with a fondness for the bright side.
“It’s not like I have to take them in the ass,” I reasoned.
“I’m not even touching that rationale,” he said and backed off.
Some of the shots burn, others bruise, all of them force you to abandon your squeamishness around needles. The margin of error is significant. One day I didn’t mix in all the saline. Another day I managed to go through all the steps and somehow wound up with an unused needle, which is a bit like winding up with extra IKEA dresser parts, but slightly worse because you’re injecting the dresser into your body. Another day I sliced my finger open removing the sheath from a mixing needle. It was such a precise cut, it took a second to get comfortable with its existence before bleeding all over the place. Freezing your eggs is essentially a cheap way to become a registered nurse. But by the time you know what you’re doing, you don’t need to do it anymore.
Meanwhile, I went into the fertility center every day to get reacquainted with the wand. One morning, as I lay back and put my feet in the stirrups, I announced that it was the darnedest thing—the hormones were having zero effect on me. No tears, no mood swings, no irrational behavior. Finally, I was excelling at something. Then the doctor on duty turned off the lights as I was in the middle of reading from a list of questions. I cleared my throat.
“Can you just ask me during the exam?”
Perhaps I have mentioned that the exam entails a wand being shoved into your body. Not the ideal time for a Q&A.
“But you turned the lights out.”
“Don’t you have them memorized?” she asked.
“No,” I said, feeling my voice crack. “That’s why I wrote them down.”
I started crying. Hysterically. Inconsolably. People outside the door probably thought I’d lost a whole baby. The doctor removed the wand and flicked the lights back on.
“It’s the hormones.”
I sat up. I shook my head but was too busy sobbing to speak. It was, most definitely, not the hormones. The Venn diagram of financial, psychological, and physical strain was more of a total eclipse. What’s worse, I had subjected myself to all this voluntarily. I had reasons to cry. My problem was that, once triggered, I couldn’t seem to get it under control. And for argument’s sake, let’s say it was the hormones. It seemed borderline dangerous to point it out. Try asking a pregnant woman if she’s in a bad mood because of the hormones and see what happens.
*
My boyfriend was out of town but offered to come back early for the procedure. As a longtime mostly single person, I appreciated this relationship perk. This was right up there with going to the bathroom at the airport without having to drag your luggage into the stall with you. That and the general reprieve from being viewed by society as either threatening or pitiable. But I discouraged him. It’s fifteen minutes, I explained. A power nap. People go back to work afterward. I did, however, inform my parents that I was going under anesthesia. Which meant I had to tell them why.
“I told you so,” said my mother. “You do have a uterus!”
I asked my friend Sara to retrieve me. Hospitals won’t let you walk out the door by yourself, which really makes you wonder if they’re fixing people in there. Before I went under, I asked the anesthesiologist what would happen if I didn’t fall asleep. Most people, she said, wondered what would happen if they never woke up. I told her this seemed like a nonsense question. Who cares? You’ll be dead. Your concerns are minimal.
Again, one wonders how I would speak to an actual child.
I don’t remember waking up from the procedure—“harvesting,” if you’d like to lose your lunch—but apparently I was less than pleasant. When Sara tried to force-feed me a saltine, I told her to “eat it.” From a padded chair, I watched other women sign their discharge papers and go, flying away to their lives. Eventually, a doctor came over and pulled a chair up next to mine. I lolled my head in her direction, waiting for her to do something insidious like ask me to take a sip of apple juice.
The doctor was younger than I was. Triangular pink diamonds swayed from her earlobes. Definitely a gift, but from whom? She was young enough for the answer to be “Daddy.” As she scooted forward, the concern on her face came into focus. She looked like the kind of lady who might refuse to operate on her son.
I knew it, I thought. I knew that my body would not behave as it should, that all my inklings about not being a real woman had been correct.
“Something a bit unusual happened during the procedure,” said the doctor.
Unusual? I rolled the word around the padded walls of my brain. Like they had to give me more drugs than expected “unusual” or they staged a revival of Gypsy over my unconscious body “unusual”?
Evidently, my eggs were fine, now crowded cozily together in a petri dish. But at sixty-seven, the club was at capacity.
“What?!”
I was awake now. I looked at Sara to make sure she had heard the same thing. Sixty-seven is not within the range of numbers listed in pamphlets. It’s a gaudy amount of eggs for a human to produce. On some core level, I was thrilled. To go through all this and get three eggs is like reading all of Ulysses only to discover the last page has been ripped out. But I was also disturbed. I felt disconnected from my body, as if it had been trying to tell me something for years and I hadn’t been listening. Or I had been listening but had heard the wrong thing. Because I was right. I am not a woman—I am a fish.
Sara promptly told me that I had “ruined caviar” for her.
“How often are you sitting around, eatin
g caviar?”
“Often enough.”
How, I wondered, had the daily wand molestings failed to see this coming?
“Because they were so packed in,” explained the doctor, cupping her hands to approximate the shape of an egg, “like a vending machine.”
“Gross,” Sara and I said in unison.
*
One of the benefits of having gone through something so specific is the ability to rehash the details with other people who have gone through that same specific thing. We may be done with our subcutaneous injections but our subcutaneous injections are not done with us. But I learned quickly to keep my mouth shut about my egg number. If it came up, I changed the subject or indicated that the procedure had gone fine. It’s a pass/fail world and I passed. Number disclosure is considered as gauche as bragging about your massive pay increase for doing the exact same job as your coworker. Many women find it insensitive. It’s how I feel about straight-haired beauties who get a thrill out of humidity. Know your audience, I think, tallying up a lifetime of hair products, keeping my hands in my pockets so I don’t throttle these shaggy-banged bitches. Seeing as how we’re dealing with the potential for human life, the throttling urge is that much stronger.
To so badly want a baby and not be able to have one is a peerless brand of devastating. Everyone knows this. Fictionally, it turns women deranged (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle) and men monstrous (The Handmaid’s Tale). In real life, it just makes everybody sad. I am not in the habit of making people feel bad about themselves when they can do that on their own. And if it were just about hurt feelings, I’d continue to stay mum. I wouldn’t even have revealed my number here. But there was something rotten in the state of Denmark.
By freezing my eggs, I had stuck my toe into the world of competitive female biology. Women who had plenty of eggs retrieved (but still within the realm of reason) confessed something like pride in their number. They flaunted their results under the guise of relief. I want to distinguish myself from them. I was not so lucky as I looked, I explained. My big payout had come at a high cost. Mo’ eggs, mo’ problems. After the procedure, I was treated to a panoply of medical complications including a Tales from the Crypt–style syndrome in which one’s abdominal region retains multiple liters of water in ten hours. For me, this also resulted in a bonus surgery. Boy, had I been through the wringer!
I listened to myself recite all this, trying to fend off judgment. Was it really necessary for me to drag out stories of additional specialists in order to justify telling the truth? I won the lottery but my dog exploded, so, you know.
But even the complications couldn’t get me out of jail. When I told a friend who’d always been dyspeptic about having kids, she was unable to hide her disgust.
“See?” she said, assured of her own choices. “This is why it’s not worth it.”
Which is a bit like critiquing someone’s e-mail to their ex after they’ve sent it.
When I told one mother of three, she replied with: “Well, now you know what it feels like to be pregnant.” Not quite. Being pregnant is a natural occurrence. You don’t become six months pregnant over ten excruciating hours. It is my understanding that you also get a baby out of it. Now whose turn was it to be offended?
This was getting ugly.
The thing is, even if I had produced two eggs, I like to believe I would have been forthright about it. It’s impossible to say. But I know for certain that focusing on the math as the defining moment of one’s life only perpetuates the idea of fertility as identity. This isn’t the seventeenth century. Nor is it the dystopian future. There doesn’t have to be social meaning. There only has to be personal meaning. Tell everyone, tell no one. Read the articles, don’t read the articles, find kinship or alienation in them, it doesn’t matter. By virtue of them being written by someone else, none of them are prescribed for you and you alone. When it comes to your own life, there is only one location in the world where the right decisions are being kept. Which, come to think of it, is the kind of thing I would tell an actual child.
*
The children are coming, the children are coming. I would have sent that intuitor his tip if I hadn’t just broken the bank proving him right. My transcendental Paul Revere had succeeded where a magic wand had failed. But his prophecy felt less ominous now. The children are en route, okay, but they could always change their minds. My eggs are frozen in a cryobank in Midtown—they don’t have any travel plans. For months after the procedure, I would get automated updates from the cryobank using language that made me feel as if I’d arranged to freeze my head.
Then one day I was walking up my apartment stairs, flipping through junk mail, when I came across an envelope with the cryobank’s logo. My eggs had never sent me actual mail before. Camp is fun. We are cold. The letter explained that enclosed was “a representative photomicrograph of your oocytes frozen during the cryopreservation cycle.” I mean, they really go out of their way to make it sound like you’re freezing your head. I moved the letter aside to reveal a piece of paper with a black-and-white photograph of my eggs. They looked like the marks that would appear if you pressed a pen cap into your skin sixty-seven times. Or craters on the surface of some very distant moon.
They are just floating fractions of an idea. I know that. But I had never seen a part of my body exist outside my body before. I felt such gratitude. My eggs had held up their end of the bargain. They had saved me from having to think about them, which, for the first time in my life, made me want to think about them. This doesn’t mean I know what will become of them. Maybe I have a baby. Maybe none. Maybe eight. Maybe I sell them all on the black market, buy a townhouse and forget this whole thing ever happened. But sometimes when I’m alone, I run my fingers over the photo, even though it doesn’t feel like anything. I focus on one egg at random, imagining this will be the one my body uses to make a person, a person that grows up and reads this, and I think—Oh girl, I hope you set the world on fire.
Note
Cinema of the Confined
1. I would apologize, but it’s definitely going to happen again.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Jay Mandel, Sean McDonald, Jonathan Galassi, Jeff Seroy, Kimberly Burns, Sarah Scire, and everyone at FSG. And to my friends and family, whose love is a steady reminder that this life is the very best one I’ll ever have.
BY SLOANE CROSLEY
FICTION
The Clasp
NONFICTION
Look Alive Out There
How Did You Get This Number
I Was Told There’d Be Cake
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sloane Crosley is the author of the novel The Clasp and two New York Times–bestselling books of personal essays: I Was Told There’d Be Cake, a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and How Did You Get This Number. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair, she lives in Manhattan. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Wheels Up
Outside Voices
A Dog Named Humphrey
You Someday Lucky
If You Take the Canoe Out
The Chupacabra
Up the Down Volcano
The Grape Man
Right Aid
Relative Stranger
Brace Yourself
Immediate Family
Cinema of the Confined
Wolf
Our Hour Is Up
The Doctor Is a Woman
Note
> Acknowledgments
By Sloane Crosley
A Note About the Author
Copyright
MCD
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2018 by Sloane Crosley
All rights reserved
First edition, 2018
These essays originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in the following publications: “A Dog Named Humphrey” in The Believer; “Up the Down Volcano” as an e-book; “Immediate Family” in The New York Times. “A Dog Named Humphrey” was published when Gossip Girl was still on the air. May she rest in peace. xoxo
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71180-1
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This is a work of nonfiction. However, the names and identifying characteristics of certain individuals have been changed, some timelines have been altered, and some of the dialogue is more exact than some of the other dialogue.
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