Moonface

by Angela Balcita

  “Now, these babies, they are really cute. Just look at those little noses,” she says, pointing to a toddler with a high afro. “Ethiopia has been a really easy country for us to get the babies and get their paperwork in order.”

  Seeing the faces of those beautiful babies makes me want to bring them home right now, but I get a creepy feeling from this woman, who speaks about acquiring the children as if they were merchandise. “I don’t know how I felt about her delivery,” I tell Charlie as we make our way down the florescent-lit hall.

  Charlie says, “It felt like I was being sold a car.” He cringes and shakes, as if to get the woman’s hard sell off him.

  I know what he means. This is different from what we had imagined they’d tell us—stories about the children and what they were like, and how we could open our home to them. But deciding on a country and basing our decision on what the babies look like—it just doesn’t feel right.

  “So, maybe we should just hold off on this for now?”

  “Having a baby?” Charlie asks.

  “No, adoption.”

  “Um, okay.”

  “We should just see if I can get pregnant.”

  Then, boom! Before he has a chance to agree, Charlie is sitting next to me in a clinic for high-risk obstetrics. The OBGYN is an old man. He is wearing a navy bow tie with bright red squares all over it, but I can’t take my eyes off his ears, with their long, low-hanging lobes. The old man wears thick glasses, and he doesn’t look up from them. His eyes focus on the folder in his hands, which, among other things, includes a letter from my nephrologist as to the reason we are there.

  The doctor doesn’t read the words aloud but mumbles through the sentences under his breath, the way people do when they are reading quickly and just trying to find the point of it all. He guides a finger through the lines on the pages as he skims through the information.

  “Your medical history is extensive,” he says, still not looking up from his desk. “Two transplants.”

  “Yes, one from my brother, and one from my husband,” I say, turning to Charlie.

  “Mm-hm,” the old man says. When people hear about my medical history, they are usually impressed. But this guy? He acts like I came from central casting. Straitlaced old-timers like this always make me nervous. I’m trying to understand what he sees when he looks over at me. It is difficult to be taken seriously about pregnancy by an aging obstetrician when you look like you’re seventeen. I’ve been known to overcompensate for this insecurity. At the risk of sounding like a loquacious adolescent, I respond succinctly. I refrain from an impulse to smile (I think my smile makes me look younger), and I attempt to keep mature company, though with Charlie’s loose-hanging jeans and his holey orange t-shirt, I’m sure this doctor thinks we’re both young idiots who want to get pregnant when they know they shouldn’t.

  “There are risks,” he says. “There’s small birth weight . . .” —he continues to rattle them off in a sleep-inducing monotone— ” ... pre-eclampsia . . .” and while I’m listening, I’m just waiting for the okay. I am ready to hate him, but his words weigh heavy on me. Especially when he says “loss of the graft,” or in other words, “loss of Charlie’s kidney.” That’s the one I hope he’ll overlook or the one he might not consider a threat. “All this being said,” he finishes, “I can’t tell you what to do. I can’t tell you to get pregnant or not. But ... I would not recommend it. A pregnancy probably would not work out well for you.” He takes his reading glasses off his face, tosses them to the corner of the desk, and eases back into his chair.

  This is not the answer I am hoping for. I came to his office so excited because Charlie was willing to come with me and listen to what the doctor had to say, and this is the bullshit he hears. Now I wish Charlie hadn’t come with me, that maybe I could go home and construe this conversation a different way for Charlie, focusing on the part where the doctor says, “I’m not one to tell you what to do.” I want to take my hands and cup them over this little man’s mouth.

  “Your consultation is appreciated,” I tell him. The old doctor stands but doesn’t move from behind the desk. He waits for us to leave the room. Walking out of his office, I see the young pregnant ladies of Baltimore—the lady with a bulge pushing through her button-down business shirt, the mother already pushing a jog stroller with twin toddlers, a Latina teenager with large hoop earrings the size of her shoulders. Their bellies are round and full, and I try not to hate them.

  Charlie holds my hand in the elevator. We stand side by side facing the door. I keep my eyes focused on the row of numbers above, how they darken one by one as we descend. I try to keep from crying.

  Charlie hunts for our car in the parking garage, which seems much colder now than it was when we arrived. “I think we’re up a level,” he says, to cut the silence between us. I trail behind him as he starts up the stairs, and I think, What does that doctor know?

  “3C or 3D. I can’t remember,” Charlie says, making a left out of the stairwell.

  I want something different. I want him to tell us how to start making plans. To hope for the best, even if we have to plan otherwise. Before I realize it, I am standing behind our car and Charlie is holding the passenger side door open. I look up from staring at the bumper.

  “How dare he!” I shout. My voice resonates against the concrete walls and it feels powerful for only a few seconds before it fades into the corners of the garage. Charlie stops and looks around to see if there is anyone else nearby. “I mean, how dare he, right? He doesn’t know how it is going to work out.”

  “Moon, the guy has a pretty good idea. Isn’t that why we were there?” Charlie says, walking closer to me cautiously.

  “But you never know what can happen. This isn’t anybody, right?”

  Charlie nods.

  “Isn’t that what you always say, Charlie? Maybe if we believe something magical can happen, it will.”

  “He’s just looking out for your health,” Charlie says. “He’s just giving you the facts.”

  “No, he wasn’t looking at the possibilities. The good possibilities. He was only looking at the bad.” Charlie knows I’m right. He exhales and his shoulders deflate.

  “I know what you mean,” he says. “That guy was totally negative. He was like a wall we couldn’t penetrate.”

  I am not crying, but as we stand there, I try to imagine our lives three years from now, a baby toddling between us. One that moves like Charlie, has a defiant look, a stiff chin. Maybe he imagines something similar.

  “You want this, huh?”

  I nod.

  “If you really want this, then maybe we can make it happen.”

  The next week, I make an appointment with another high-risk doctor at a community hospital north of the city that may not have the prestige of the university hospital but has a reputation for its solid obstetrics department. Yes, I admit it: I am shopping around for a second opinion, or a third, until I get the right answer. It seems unethical, like I’m cheating the results of an experiment. The scenario is the same, only this time, the doctor is in scrubs and he smiles when we take our seats in front of his desk. Silver hair and piercing green eyes, he has color in his cheeks and his ear lobes are undoubtedly normal sized. A good sign! Lebanese, maybe, and he moves swiftly like he keeps himself in shape.

  “You know, a surrogate would be ideal,” he begins, looking at us over his tortoiseshell reading glasses. Oh, boy, here we go again. I’ve decided that this time, no matter how I look or sound, I will be honest with him. “Yes, but—” I start.

  “But you want to get pregnant,” he says, smiling. “Yes. I know.” Clearly, he’s heard about this overwhelming feeling women get as they move into their early thirties, wanting their bodies to experience something more. He has listened to them. “Well, there are risks—you would have to come in once a week so we can check on you and the fetus. The baby might be small; you might be on bed rest for many months to prevent pre-eclampsia. No questions asked.”


  “Bed rest, I can do,” I say, confident that it would be like a vacation.

  “We would have to make special arrangements for weekly labs and closer monitoring. But it can be done.”

  “Have you delivered a baby from a transplanted woman before?” Charlie chimes in with a question that has probably been brewing in his head for a while.

  He tells us that he had a patient who had had four kidney transplants and delivered twins. “She was fine; the babies were fine. Now, that’s no indication of what your pregnancy will be like,” Silver Fox says, looking at me over his glasses. “I’m just saying that it’s quite possible that you’ll be fine, too.”

  Quite possible.

  Driving south on Charles Street, the sunlit road before us is broad and unwrinkled. We’re almost home when we pass an apartment window covered with a familiar poster: believe.

  “It’s a sign!” I point.

  “Literally!” Charlie says. But I know it’s an omen; the universe is guiding us. “So, we’re doing this?” he asks, drawing in a long, slow inhalation before blowing it out.

  I nod.

  “Adoption is out?”

  “Out!” I yell.

  “Well, there are stipulations.”

  “There are always stipulations.”

  “You have to do whatever he says. I mean bed rest, and the weekly appointments, we’ll have to look at your diet again . . .”

  He goes on, his voice fading with the passing landscape. “So, let the procreation begin!” I hear Charlie’s announcement, but I’m concentrating on an image slowly coming into focus in my head. It is a baby, sweaty and squirmy, in my arms.

  That night, as we climb up to our apartment, i take on the staircase in giant, exaggerated leaps without holding on to the banister. “Slow down,” Charlie calls. When we get to our floor, a tiny spot of color hangs off the top step. Lying there is a knit cap, striped around the crown with all the colors of the rainbow, small enough to fit around a softball. Earflaps and straps hang from either side of its narrow brim.

  Charlie holds it carefully in a nest of his fingers as if it were a bird with a broken wing. Somewhere in this place an infant’s little head is cold.

  “A sign!” I whisper, as we stand in the hallway and hover over it.

  “It must be our neighbor’s,” Charlie says.

  “Can’t we keep it?” I ask.

  “No, because that would be psycho. I’ll bring it back,” he says, heading down the dark end of the hall where we rarely venture.

  Back in our apartment, I pull the blinds of the living room window up all the way. Outside, Baltimore teems with activity. There are sirens blaring down the alley behind us, and people are in the streets outside a local cafe. Three weeks ago, I stashed a jumbo bottle of neonatal vitamins in the back drawer of my bureau. When Charlie’s not looking, I take two of them into the kitchen, and gulp them down with iced tea.

  A few minutes later, Charlie is in the kitchen making himself a sandwich when there is a knock at the door. A woman in a pale cotton dress stands in the hall, and in her arms is a beautiful baby with silky black hair and full, pink lips shiny with drool. “Thanks for dropping off the cap. I just thought you’d want to know who’s been keeping you up at night.”

  “Oh, my god,” I tell her. “She’s gorgeous.” I hold out my hand, but the baby pulls away from me. She digs her face into her mother’s chest.

  “This is Isabella!”

  I stand there trying to put these two in the same family, but their differences are glaring. The baby has cafe latte skin and dark irises. She has thick everything: legs, head, cheeks, and arms. Our neighbor is pale and blue-eyed. And slim! She doesn’t look like someone who’s given birth recently.

  “Is she—” My words come out quickly, and I’m still trying to form my sentence after they escape my lips. “Did you—”

  “Yes,” she says, happy to relieve me of my awkward questioning, “we just adopted her. I spent last month in Guatemala getting to know her. And now, she’s mine!” She smiles broadly again, and this time I notice her dimples, which strangely now appear to be a trait she shares with her adopted daughter.

  Charlie closes the door softly when they leave. “Cute,” he says, and goes back to his sandwich. I return to the bedroom. So much for signs! I think as I plop myself on the bed, but I don’t dare say it aloud for fear the universe, or Charlie, might hear.

  Chapter Twelve

  Commencing on Dates to be Determined: The Starling of Great Imagination

  I haven’t realized it until now, but Charlie and I have been prepping for the homemaking and parenting stages of our lives since coming to Baltimore. Once our lease is up, we settle on a skinny two-bedroom row house with hardwood floors and ceiling fans. The apartment was feeling too cramped, even with just the two of us. And while the market is filled with newly rehabbed houses, we get our first loan and make our first major investment.

  Charlie starts to sweat as we sign the closing papers, and the stuffy old lawyer with the horn-rimmed glasses says to him, “It’s just one responsibility after another from here on out.”

  At first, the place seems like a good size for me and Charlie. But sometimes, when he is upstairs and I am in the kitchen, I can feel the whole floor separating us. We have so little furniture— really just the beastly beige couch—that the floor plan, though skinny, looks spacious and wide. I tell Charlie that there is room to fill, and he nods. I assume we are thinking about the same kind of new occupant—a sleepy one that wears diapers. But Charlie thinks we are talking about someone else, and drives me up the hill to the local SPCA. Charlie’s wanted a dog since we were living in Iowa. He always had one growing up, and I think he misses the silent companionship. We are greeted by a wall of sound, happy yelping and dogs bouncing off the high fences of their cages. There is one quiet fellow—a bluetick coonhound with silky black ears that hang below his handsome face. He keeps drawing us back to cage number three with his lonely eyes.

  “That little grifter pulled a fast one on us,” Charlie says the month after we bring him home. For despite his gentle looks, the hound is a bad boy. His bark, which he kept hidden so well in the kennel, is loud like a foghorn, and it ricochets off the narrow walls of the row house, back and forth, and rings in our ears. The bark might be considered funny or cute if he could only control it. But Bluey has just one volume: deafening. And he unleashes that bark at every UPS truck, mailman, bus, cat, skateboard, bicycle, motorcycle, rollerblade, garbage truck, and horse-drawn fruit cart that goes past our front window.

  Our quiet little home suddenly becomes a madhouse wherein Bluey is barking and I’m yelling at him to stop while Charlie is chasing him around so he doesn’t jump on the windows and click his nails on the glass. Charlie holds our dog down for as long as he can, while, out of breath, he looks up at me and says, “And you want to add someone else to the mix?”

  My new nephrologist gives me her blessing about getting pregnant, acting like it’s not really an issue at all, and warns me that, in her experience with transplanted women, she finds that they don’t usually worry about whether or not they should get pregnant. They worry about whether or not they can get pregnant. Another dare, I think. Clearly these doctors don’t know with whom they are dealing.

  Charlie’s one stipulation is that if we are going to try to get pregnant, we are not going to become slaves to the fertility industry. “Your body doesn’t need any more injections or medications or procedures,” he says, and I agree. “If we have to go through all that, then let’s just assume that it wasn’t meant to be.”

  When I first got on the pill as a young twentysomething, I was amazed by its predictability. The doctors told me I wouldn’t get cramps, and I didn’t. The doctors told me I’d get my period on the same day of each cycle, and I did. I didn’t get pregnant and my breasts did swell while I was on the pill, just like everyone said they would. So I just figured that coming off the pill would be the same: I’d stop taking it and my period would
appear. I expected there would be some lag time, but after six months, there is still no sign of my old friend.

  During my most recent visit with the doctor, I read in a women’s magazine about the benefits of acupuncture to well-being and fertility. After Charlie deems acupuncture not medical enough, I make my way to a small office on the north side of town where there is no receptionist, just rows and rows of oriental herbs on a shelf against the wall.

  “My system is whacked,” I tell the well-dressed Chinese man in his mid-forties. He wears a neatly pressed collared shirt and matching tie. His accent is sometimes hard to break through, but his friendly demeanor elicits my patience. Right now, he is confused by my vernacular. “It’s not working,” I clarify. At first, I don’t tell him that I’m trying to get pregnant, just that I’d like to start getting my period again.

  “Oh, yes,” he nods.

  In a tiny but well-lit exam room, we go over my long, long medical history. As I speak, I occasionally look at the wall above the exam table, where there is a calendar with Chinese characters in red and gold. On the table at which we sit, there is a miniature plastic model of the human body, but instead of pictures depicting the human anatomy, it is marked by little dots in blue and red and cryptic coordinates: te 23, st 6. Dr. Cheng sees me concentrating on it and enlightens me: “Meridians,” he says. I’ve been to many a doctor’s office, so I know what to expect: how to breathe into the stethoscope when a doctor puts it to my heart or to my back, what my pulse rate should be. But this office is like traveling in a foreign land. Even the examination customs are exotic.

  “Okay. Show me your tongue,” he says. I open wide, assuming he is looking at my throat.