by Tracy Slater
I felt pierced by the news. Drawing a line at “no treatment” had felt different when deep down I’d assumed the cards were in my hands. I was fit, ate well, exercised daily, and had never smoked. I was carded on my fortieth birthday, with my parents! I thought, remembering the night in Boston when my mother and I had argued over my wearing black to the wedding blessing at her temple. At the time, she’d smiled proudly when the waiter had asked for my ID, temporarily forgetting her frustration with my poor sartorial choices. We’d all laughed at the irony, someone questioning whether I’d reached drinking age when I was entering my fifth decade. Now, though, it felt like the joke was on me, my young face and bottle-blond highlights apparently masking my shriveling insides.
Over the next few weeks, Toru and I batted the idea of medical treatment back and forth. Following the clinic’s advice, he went in for testing, too. Unlike me, he was in perfect procreative shape. “I worry you,” he said, as we reviewed the physical rigors in vitro would require of me. But he, too, was shaken by our sudden poor prognosis.
We decided we’d wait until mid-spring, and if I still wasn’t pregnant, we’d give IVF a try.
• • •
I BEGAN MY first round of treatment in mid-May. My confusion and fear about having a baby hadn’t dissipated, but somehow they didn’t staunch my growing resolve to try IVF. I couldn’t explain the paradox even to myself, but my brain shifted into autopilot, as if a new determination was rolling through the landscape of my ambivalence. At times, it felt like our potential baby was waiting for us to claim it, or at least to give it a chance to arrive, and something inside was compelling me on as if a homing pigeon had set up residence in my chest. Other times, I simply felt bewildered.
My period started on Mother’s Day, two days after an actual pigeon showed up at our balcony door, a sort of harbinger, it seemed later, of all that would come next. At first, Toru and I watched warily as the bird began hanging out behind our air-conditioning unit. Sometimes another pigeon would join it, and they’d flap around with antic jerks until we banged on the sliding glass door.
“Stupid pigeon,” Toru would mutter, as they lifted in hurried flight.
But the birds always returned, and when the pigeon couple began depositing twigs and scraps of underbrush behind the air-conditioning unit, Toru became even more annoyed. “Doesn’t stupid pigeon know he’s trying to build nest in terrible place?”
It wasn’t until Mother’s Day proper that we realized the female had laid an egg, depositing her future offspring on our balcony as if she’d been specially chosen to symbolize the miracle of life on this Hallmark holiday. I took it all as a personal affront.
My period had started a few hours earlier, and when I saw the offending orb, I couldn’t believe the audacity of that fertile bird. Procreating on my property! When I’m reproductively challenged!
“Terrible!” Toru exclaimed, when he saw the egg sitting roundly on the concrete.
Earlier that morning, I’d come out of the bathroom shaking my head, and he’d kissed my forehead. He’d assured me once more that if I didn’t want to go through with the IVF, that was totally okay. The most important thing was that we were together, Toru had reminded me, calm, unhurried.
But he really kicked into action when he saw the pigeon egg.
He immediately got online and within an hour learned everything there was to know about 1) the pigeon reproductive cycle, and 2) what to do if a pigeon tried to complete that cycle on your balcony.
“We have two choice,” he reported, closing his laptop and turning to me. “If we don’t do something, stupid pigeon will get a mess all over. And when baby hatches, it will walk around and make an even more mess.”
He eyed me aslant. “So . . . we can throw out egg—and there will probably be another soon, because pigeons usually lay more than one.” He could tell I wasn’t won over. “Or we can build cardboard box and put egg inside, and stupid pigeon will be sitting on egg in there.”
I’ve never been a nature lover, but the idea of chucking out a future chick felt too mean—and too inauspicious, especially on this of all days. “We have to at least try to save it,” I said, “even if that evil bird did steal my eggs.”
“Still, it may ignore egg after a human touches it,” Toru warned. But I didn’t budge. “Oh, okay,” he finally sighed. “That’s the chance we take if you want to try to saving the egg.”
He went to the futon closet that we used for storage, pulled out old Sanyo and Panasonic boxes, and began to fashion a makeshift nest. Then he put on rubber gloves and a mask. “Don’t get bird flu!” I yelled stupidly as he stepped onto the balcony, the pigeons flapping away in a riot of feathers. He picked up the egg and some twigs and arranged them in the box.
“Stupid pigeon,” he grumbled again as he stepped back inside. He threw out the gloves, pulled on a clean pair of jeans, then went back to the glass to spy for the birds’ return. “Huh,” he said, after a few minutes of watching the vacant balcony. I came and hovered by the curtain. The sky was empty.
Toru sank onto the couch and picked up a magazine, and I got online. I was signing up for a new “Over 40 and Trying to Conceive” forum on an infertility chat site. I wanted to learn what other women, particularly Americans, were going through during their IVF rounds, since so much of my treatment would unfold in Japanese and, I feared, remain incomprehensible to me.
In the living room, Toru and I looked up frequently to check the window, then turned back to our tasks with feigned nonchalance. After ten minutes or so, he gave up the charade, drawing back the curtain liner for a better look. “Has she returned?” I jumped up to join him.
When one of the pigeons finally flew back (the mother, we both assumed), she walked around for a while behind the air-conditioning unit, looked at the box, made a pigeon noise. Then she hopped in and sat on the egg. I looked at Toru and smiled.
“Stupid pigeon,” he said. “So dumb. She doesn’t even know she’s in box, that I picked up egg myself.” He gave his head an exasperated shake, belying the relief around his face.
• • •
BEFORE I COULD begin trying to produce my own eggs with the clinic’s help, I had to supply a copy of our marriage license. Toru and I then had to sign a paper saying we understood that, in the event of our divorce, the clinic would automatically destroy any unused embryos we may have produced, regardless of our desires. I also learned that the Japanese Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology prohibits the use of donor eggs. Surrogacy: also a no-go in a country so conservative about heritage and bloodlines.
But when the clinic asked us to sign another sheet providing permission to use any embryos we discarded for stem-cell research, I quickly agreed. I expected Toru to share my support for scientific discovery, especially since he was completely irreligious, yet he shook his head. “Why not?” I asked.
“Don’t like,” he said, stern. “That’s private.” I puzzled out his response, finally realizing that his reaction stemmed from the not uncommon Japanese discomfort with mixing private and public, with crossing boundaries meant to be kept sacred. So, no, not a religious objection, but one still rooted in an ideology that always caught me a little off guard as an atheist in a secular culture. In America, tradition always seemed to derive from piety, and even after all this time in Japan, I was still surprised by dogma divorced from religion, as if I had found a couch in a kitchen or glimpsed green where I had always seen red.
Our embryos’ potential futures now safely codified and documented, I spent the next two weeks shuttling back and forth to the clinic to get my morning shots, which they insisted a nurse administer. I read on the Internet that in the U.S., patients could do their hormone shots at home. I guessed grumpily that in Japan infertile women were not to be trusted with sharp objects.
Every day after my shot, I’d come home and sit in my living room marking the calendar: depending on whether or how fast
my follicles grew, the egg retrieval would be on this day, the transfer on that. Then I’d settle down to try to work.
By now, the pigeon and I were passing time side-by-side. She’d sit in her little cardboard box just outside the glass door, warming her two eggs. (Toru was right; she’d laid the second twenty-four hours after the first.) I’d sit on the couch just inside, tapping at my computer keys. Every so often, I’d put down my laptop, slide open the glass, and look out, hoping to see what was happening beneath her. Sometimes she’d cock her head and stare back at me, blinking her beady eyes.
We’re both creatures strangely out of nature, I told her one afternoon, not saying the words out loud but thinking them as I watched her fidget, weighing whether I posed enough of a threat to inspire flight. You’re just a silly bird trying to hatch your babies behind an air-conditioning unit in a huge polluted city, inside a Japanese salaryman’s discarded cardboard box.
And I’m a forty-one-year-old woman with “poor ovarian response” trying to get knocked up by a petri dish and an army of doctors who barely speak my language. She cocked her head away from me, stared into the bowels of the air conditioner, rocked lightly on her genetic loot.
About five days after I started my shots, I climbed back into the pink mechanized chair for an ultrasound, inspiring the doctor to report that my follicles were growing at a slower than average pace. “But still, some are growing,” she said. “I thought maybe they would not be able to grow at all . . . because of your age, and your own hormones being so much out of range. So this is good.” She nodded, smiling me out the door with an expression more tentative than reassuring.
“Well, my eggs are growing. Slowly,” I told the pigeon that afternoon in my daily soliloquy. “But better than they expected,” I added quickly. She blinked blankly at me. Later, when she flew away to get food or more twigs or to complete one of her pigeon errands, I peeked out at the box. The eggs lay there, bald, promising, and white, an ovoid taunt.
“Stupid pigeon,” I muttered.
• • •
A FEW DAYS before my egg retrieval, a nurse handed me an instruction packet to prepare me for the minor surgery of sticking a needle into each ovary and sucking out the five follicles I’d managed to grow after fourteen days of shots. Most of the papers were in Japanese, but she pointed importantly to a few that had been translated into English. “No makeup. Don’t put nail polishl [sic] or perfume before coming to our clinic,” one sheet said. “Clip your fingernail. Take antibiotics every after meal for four days. We welcome your husband’s attendance.” Another page, titled “Restriction on the Number of Embryos,” explained, “Transferring high numbers of embryos may have high rate of pregnancy, but may bring multiple pregnancy. Multiple pregnancies are high risk to woman’s body and fetus.” One more difference between IVF here and at home: Japanese doctors were very reluctant to transfer more than one embryo. No Octomoms here.
The morning of my procedure, I opened the sliding glass door to check the pigeon. In the box lay one broken shell, the other egg hidden somewhere beneath the bird. Did the mother somehow know the egg was bad and crack it? I wondered. If not, where’s the baby? I turned away from the balcony, reminding myself that I’d never been superstitious. If the little chick met an untimely end before it had time to hatch—if the mother somehow rejected the egg because in her animal wisdom she knew it would not thrive—this had no symbolic resonance for my life.
Later that day, I met Toru on the subway platform. He’d taken the afternoon off from work so he could go to the clinic with me. “Did you see stupid pigeon?” he asked immediately. “Did you see egg?”
I grabbed his hand. A middle-aged woman and some salarymen in dark suits like Toru’s shifted slightly from us, as if noting the public affection without doing anything that in the Japanese lexicon of manners would be as gauche as staring.
“Yes! What did she do? Did she smash the egg herself?” I was secretly a little comforted that perhaps, after all, she wasn’t going to prove the better mother.
“No.” Toru laughed. “It hatched. She’s sitting on it.”
“Oh.” I was both relieved and disappointed. “Well, that doesn’t seem like very good mothering, to sit on your babies once they’re born.”
“It’s what all pigeons do to keep them warm, like with eggs.” Toru rubbed my palm with his thumb. “Fathers sit on chicks, too,” he said. And then the signal for the oncoming train began to sound, followed by a woman’s voice over the loudspeaker, crisply offering direction or warning, although I couldn’t tell which.
• • •
TWO DAYS AFTER they removed my follicles, the doctors deposited one fertilized embryo inside me, the only potentially viable one I had managed to produce. After the transfer, I lay down at the clinic for a few hours until Toru guided me home on the subway, holding my elbow, my head like packed cotton from the anesthesia. Then I began the notorious Two Week Wait, as they called it on the forums; I christened it the “Too Bleak Wait.” I rested around the apartment, trying not to knock about too much, waiting to see if our embryo would take hold.
Within a few days, the second pigeon egg hatched, and I’d hear Toru every morning before he went to work, standing at the balcony door. Still in bed, I imagined how he looked, handsome in his pressed suit, his dark hair shining in the early sun as he drew the living room curtains, slid open the glass. He thought I was still asleep, but I could hear him tsking softly to the baby pigeons, who had just started to peep out from beneath one parent or the other.
One day, I heard the mother pigeon, or maybe the father, fly away in search of something. I stood at the door so I could see the chicks in their box, unobstructed. I watched their sparse yellow hair tufting over pinkish gray skin, little bodies puffing out with each quick breath.
They learned to fly a few weeks later. They were practicing taking off when I took a home pregnancy test on the twelfth day after my transfer and saw a faint double blue line.
“Congratulation, Mrs. Tracy!” the doctor said in broken English the next morning at the clinic, confirming my pregnancy with a blood test. The nurses were all giddy. Although they spoke no English, I knew what their delight said: Forty-one! Getting pregnant on your very first try with IVF! With your own eggs! They smiled happily and bowed enthusiastically, and they repeated these effusions every week when I came in for ultrasounds. “Ii, ne,” they would say—“It’s great, isn’t it!”—and their eyes would sparkle as they clasped their hands against the bright pink of their polyester uniforms.
I felt somewhat removed at first from the life force gathering in my belly. I was enthralled that a little being was tucked just inside my belly—half Toru, half me—but also a little numb, overlaid at times with a kind of quiet shock. The progression from deciding to try to have a baby to starting IVF to becoming pregnant had unspooled so quickly, as if I had been looking out the window from the bullet train to Tokyo, the world around a blur. I also still felt scared of what becoming a mother would do to my identity and my connection to Boston, but as I did when I started IVF, I followed a clear pull to continue my daily shots and pills, now a different kind of hormone cocktail, and adhere to each and every clinic direction about sustaining the flicker inside me. Every week after my ultrasound, I’d stare at the black-and-white photos they handed me, tracing the outlines with my finger: first a tiny dot, then a larger spot with a white blink inside where the embryo’s heartbeat had appeared, and then a little bean-shaped figure, curved against a dark and hazy background.
Although the action was all taking place inside me, Toru seemed both less removed and less shocked. He’d guide me through stores with his hand against my lower back, a proud smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Take rest and keep warm,” he’d tell me. At night, he’d lean over in bed and whisper in Japanese against the skin of my stomach.
• • •
THE PIGEON CHICKS from the balcony were long gone by
the time our embryo’s heart stopped at nine weeks. The doctor, a man this time, told me at my weekly scan. What had appeared vibrant and growing seven days earlier now proved dormant on the screen. He never actually explained any of this; instead, he tried to make me know, with his splintered English and his Japanese insistence on politeness at all times. He didn’t ever actually say, “I’m sorry, your baby has died.” He just kept shaking his head and sighing, sucking in his breath, moving the ultrasound wand around inside me with the embryo’s measurement—“eight weeks, five days”—printed along the bottom, the moon-shaped figure in the middle now bereft of its blinking center. The doctor shifted the screen back and forth as if to draw my eye to the stillness splayed across it, waiting for me to say something.
But I wouldn’t. Grasping on to whatever meager fragment of control was left me, I kept my mouth clamped shut.
For the next week, the embryo inside me stayed put despite its loss of heartbeat, my body refusing to accept that the beginnings of our child had come to an end, refusing to relinquish its hold. But my belly felt like a mausoleum. The day was hot and clear when Toru brought me back to the clinic, holding my hand the whole way. Then the doctors knocked me out completely so I wouldn’t hear them speaking words I couldn’t understand while they scraped the embryo out of me.
My earlier emotional remove from my pregnancy now began to shatter, although my numbness stayed, but it felt colored by a different, sadder shade. Songs that had once made me think of painful breakups now reminded me of the embryo, suddenly gone, and I wept as I had when I was an adolescent over the loss of some infatuated future. I lay in bed and looked out my bedroom window at the hot gray sky, Osaka’s buildings a jigsaw of the same dull hue. “So you’re leaving / If you have to go / Then go / But my heart’s going with you,” the words to a British pop song echoed through me, and I thought of the bundle of cells that had blasted to life then faded inside me. While I was still pregnant, I’d been so confused about what parenthood would mean, and there was still a lot that remained confounding. But one thing I knew now: motherhood was a whole new way to break your heart.