by Adina Senft
The place seemed to be empty except for a couple of women browsing quilt cottons at the front. From downstairs Carrie could hear the sound of the cash register. She was fingering a nice length of burgundy broadcloth that would look particularly fine on Melvin when a voice spoke up beside her. “Can I help you with that?”
And there she was. Lydia Zook smiled and indicated the material. “I can cut it for you if you like.”
Well, so far God was on Susan’s side. “Denki. Six yards, please, and I’ll need some thread to match.”
“It’s a nice color,” Lydia offered as she snapped the lengths out on the cutting table. “Are you making a dress?”
“Maybe, and some shirts for my husband. I like the warm colors on him, though he’d think I was crazy if I told him so.”
“Men don’t care about things like that,” Lydia agreed. “I love color.”
“So I see.” On a cloudy October day, she was wearing a spring green that made her hair seem to burn in the light. “The one you have on is very…bright.”
“Not as bright as some of the things we have in here.” Lydia tilted her head toward the front. “There’s a lime green up there that you could light a room with. Even I have my limits.”
“I hope so,” Carrie said, feeling her way into a conversational bramble. If she were going to run into a thorn, it would be now. “It wasn’t so long ago that I was trying on bright colors, hoping to impress a certain someone.”
Lydia ran the scissors up the cutting line, looking interested. “Ja? Melvin?”
“No, before I met him. It was a boy from the next district, and oh, didn’t I think he was fine. But”—she shook her head with mock sadness—“he must have been color-blind, because he only had eyes for my sister Susan. I could have been decked out like a Christmas tree and he wouldn’t have seen me.”
“But then you met Melvin, who wasn’t color-blind.”
Carrie nodded, with a reminiscent smile. “God led him to me in the unlikeliest of places.”
Lydia folded the length of fabric carefully, as though it might split. “Do you think God is in unlikely places?”
Careful, now. “I think He is in us. And sometimes, if we’re lucky, we meet Him where we don’t expect Him.”
“So maybe it’s not so bad to go to an unlikely place, then, if we find what God wants us to find?”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to go into the Hitching Post to test that idea,” Carrie said dryly, naming Whinburg’s only bar. “He also gave us a conscience. Why, have you been looking into unlikely places?”
“Maybe.” Lydia dimpled at her. “Or maybe just unlikely people.”
“As long as you find God there. Do you?”
Lydia nodded, though her merry gaze had fallen and become a little pensive. But maybe that was just because she had finished folding the fabric. She held it out to Carrie. “Elizabeth will ring you up downstairs.”
“Denki, Lydia. See you next Sunday.”
And she went downstairs to find a couple of sets of Kapp strings and pay for her purchases, feeling a little unsettled. For all her poking around in the bramble, what had she really learned?
Nothing much, except that maybe the girl was going places and seeing someone who might not entirely possess the presence of God. It wasn’t so hard to believe that. She was sixteen and was clearly choosing a Rumspringe and the activities that went with it. So far, nothing seemed very harmful. What kind of real trouble could she get into in Whinburg, anyway, that Carrie and half the people Lydia’s parents’ age hadn’t gotten into themselves?
Susan was worrying for nothing, and Carrie would tell her so the next time she saw her.
This was what came of poking your nose into someone else’s window. You might not get the sash slammed down on your fingers, but you wouldn’t get much of a welcome, either.
When she climbed the stairs again, Lydia was away in the back with a customer, and the two Englisch ladies had stacked a few bolts of cotton and worked their way over to the thread rack, where they were comparing colors.
Thread. That’s what she had forgotten.
With the ladies and their bolts, there was no room in front of the rack, so she browsed idly over the interfacing shelves while she waited for them to move on.
“…can’t believe he won’t even consider it,” the blond woman said.
“Since when has he ever listened to anyone but himself? I tell you, Tiff, that guy has severe empathy problems. He’s probably a sociopath. I mean, how could you tell your wife ‘No, you can’t have a baby if we don’t do it the old-fashioned way’?”
“It’s an ego thing,” the dark-haired woman—Tiff—said with a sigh. “He doesn’t want to admit his little swimmers are so weak they can’t get up the river.”
“But with IVF it’s still his swimmers. That’s what I don’t get. It’s not like she’s asking to go visit the sperm bank and pick someone a lot better-looking than he is.”
“Which I would totally do. I wouldn’t be inflicting that nose on my kid, that’s for sure.”
“Seriously. Or that Neanderthal brain, either. I don’t know why she stays with him.”
“I’ve told her over and over there will always be another bus coming down the pike, but she won’t believe me. She got on this one, and she’s staying with it no matter what.”
“I think you should go with that purple thread. The thread should be darker than the fabric, my mom says.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Some sewing rule. But you have a lot of purple here, so it would match the most.”
“Fine. Come on. Let’s go see if we can find someone to cut this. We should have gone to the place in Intercourse. This store is so quiet it makes me wonder if anybody actually works here.”
As they passed, the blonde cut her eyes at Carrie, who focused on the interfacing as though it held the secret to eternal life. But in reality, she was hardly aware of it—or very much else.
Instead, she was trying with every ounce of willpower she had not to stop the two women and ask what they had been talking about. Another girl who wanted a baby and didn’t have one, that was clear. But what was IVF? Something sketchy, it must be, if the girl’s husband didn’t want her to have it. And swimmers? Surely they hadn’t meant…was that possible?
Carrie knew the basics of human reproduction—her mother had sat her down the night before she was married and struggled through the conversation, which had not turned out to resemble the beauty of reality very much. And over the years since, her Englisch doctor had broached the subject of her childlessness a time or two, shaming her so badly she could hardly get out of the clinic fast enough. But before Carrie had left the room, the doctor had said Carrie was healthy, if slightly undernourished, and there was no reason she could not have a baby.
Could this be their problem? Had she been blaming her thinness for her inability to conceive when it was really the “swimmers” that were weak and unable to travel far enough to do the job? And if it was so, what could she and Melvin do about it?
Oh, this was so frustrating. If she asked the women these questions, they would know she’d been eavesdropping, though in the quiet of the store their voices were impossible to avoid. But who else could she ask?
Well, she knew of one place to start. A place where you could be totally honest, no matter how shameful your question or confession. And that place was her own spare room, on Tuesday, with Amelia and Emma.
But until then, she had a few minutes to spare. Maybe she’d go over to the library and see if she couldn’t find out a thing or two.
* * *
Oh, if only this week were a church Sunday! Carrie could have cornered Amelia and Emma and put her questions to them then. But maybe it was better this way. It would certainly be easier to talk in the privacy of her own home than it would be to find a quiet corner in all the crowd, with the distractions of family and friends visiting and greeting one another.
She was thankful that when Joshua c
ame over to finish painting the chicken house, Melvin was there to manage him. Before she knew it, the two of them were walking the perimeter of the house itself, talking about getting the men together for a painting frolic before it got too cold.
That was good news. Carrie could never suppress a twinge of shame at her shabby house, but until now there had been no money to do the job. Now, even if they had only Joshua’s help, they could do it in a couple of days—and with a whole crew, in one.
Carrie felt more hopeful than she had in many months. People saw autumn as a time of ending, of going to sleep, of pulling in and turning to inside activity. But the feeling in the air around her wasn’t the slow easing of movement; no, if what she had read at the library thanks to a very helpful young lady librarian was true, it could be the season of beginnings for her.
Amelia and Emma had barely seated themselves and loaded up their needles with their first stitches when Carrie decided she couldn’t keep it in any longer. “You’ll never guess what I’ve been learning this week.”
Emma smiled. “How to crochet afghans like the ones Susan makes?”
“I don’t have the patience to make fabric for something. I’d rather just buy the fabric, make the blanket or quilt, and get to the point,” Amelia said. “But Susan’s afghans are beautiful. I’ve always liked the one you have downstairs on the sofa.”
“No, it’s not afghans. I’ve been learning about babies.”
Amelia blinked at her. “What more do you need to learn? A woman marries, she has babies, she learns she needs a lot less sleep at night.”
“Not every woman,” Emma said softly. “Carrie, what do you mean?”
Carrie gave her a grateful look and told them about the women in the fabric store. “So I went to the county library and you would not believe the number of books about it. I spent the whole afternoon there…and meine Freind, I can’t believe I never knew all this before.”
“All what?” Amelia laid down her needle. But instead of looking as interested and excited as Carrie herself was, she looked calm. Too calm.
Never mind. Carrie hurried on. “I always thought I couldn’t conceive because I was so thin. That if I just got to eating more, it would eventually happen. But our situation has been getting better and better, and still no sign. So then I wondered if it might be Melvin who is stopping it, not me.”
“Melvin? But he wants children as much as you do,” Emma said.
“Ja, I know. But what if there’s something going on inside? The doctor said there was no reason I couldn’t conceive. So it could be something in Melvin that isn’t right.”
“Have you told him this?” Amelia asked quietly.
“No, not yet. I wanted to talk it over with you first.”
“That is what isn’t right.” Emma chewed on her bottom lip and concentrated on her needle until she completed the lily petal. “These are very private matters between husband and wife. You should be saying these things to Melvin.”
“If he’ll hear them,” Amelia put in. “I’m not sure how any man would handle such an announcement from his wife.”
“It’s not like that,” Carrie protested. “I just wondered if either of you had heard of IVF and the possibilities it could hold for us.”
Emma shook her head. Amelia spoke slowly. “I have seen it mentioned in the papers. They used to call them ‘test-tube babies,’ didn’t they?”
“I suppose so. But the egg is fertilized outside the body and then put inside the woman to grow. If Melvin’s swimmers can’t get to my eggs, then don’t you see? This could solve it.”
“I can’t believe you’re even thinking about this,” Amelia muttered. “It’s crazy.”
“It’s not crazy!” Carrie caught her breath and forced herself to speak calmly. “Millions of babies have been born to millions of mothers from such a beginning. Just think, Amelia, how wonderful gut it would be if I were one of them.”
“It would be wonderful gut to see you a mother,” she said. “But Carrie, these things can’t happen in a lab. The gift of a child is from God alone. You can’t just march into a hospital and have them go into your body and take an egg and put it in a test tube and expect a baby to come out of it, like putting a coin in the phone and getting a connection.”
“Why not, if it’s my egg and Melvin’s sperm? If we can’t conceive the natural way, why not use the hospital?”
“Because that would be man’s way,” Amelia said gently, “not God’s. It would be saying that God’s timing is too slow, that His will for you isn’t good enough. That you know better than the God of all creation what is right.”
“I’m not saying that at all.” Carrie felt as though Amelia had put a hand on her chest and given her a good, hard push backward.
“Maybe not, but it’s what Bishop Daniel will say.”
“My problems are not Bishop Daniel’s business.” Carrie was beginning to think she shouldn’t have made them Amelia’s business, either. “He doesn’t need to know what goes on between Melvin and me.”
“I’m sure he already does,” Emma said to no one in particular.
“What I mean is, I don’t tell the bishop when I go to see the doctor. Why would this be any different?”
Amelia gave her a long look. “Because it is different, and you know it. Before you eavesdropped on those women, you had never heard of IVF…and now you’re ready to go to the doctor and have it done, just like that?”
“I wasn’t eavesdropping. You could hear them all over the store.”
Amelia let this go. “I’m just saying, Liewi, that you should think about it carefully—and pray about it, too.”
“Do you think I haven’t been?” Did she have any idea about the hours and hours she had spent on her knees, asking God for just one single moment of mercy—one tiny moment of conception?
“Of course you have.” Emma’s tone was soothing, and Carrie felt her hackles smoothing down in spite of herself. “But here is another thing to think of—something I had to think of when Grant got hurt this summer.” She paused, loaded her needle again. “Money. It’s one thing to go to the doctor and have the Gmee pay for it. We all do this and it’s not a problem. But how much will this new procedure cost?”
Carrie bent her head over the quilt. She hadn’t taken a single stitch yet. “A lot, I think.”
“Even if you see a doctor about it in private, when it comes to paying for it, Bishop Daniel will have to know. He and the elders will have to approve.” Amelia inclined her head so that Carrie was forced to look up to meet her eyes. “And if they would not approve a radical treatment when I thought I had MS, do you really think they would approve of a test-tube baby?”
Did she have to put it like that—so bluntly, so unkindly? Carrie’s eyes filled with tears.
And Amelia saw it. “Oh Schatzi, I’m sorry. Carrie, please don’t cry—you know I would never hurt you for the world.”
“Well, you have,” she blurted, and then wished she could grab the words and stuff them back where they’d come from. Amelia looked stricken, tears welling into her own eyes.
“My dear ones, don’t do this to one another,” Emma cried softly. “The whole subject is as spiny as a chestnut husk. Please, let’s not say things to hurt when we come to each other for help.”
Amelia pulled Carrie into a hug. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I just don’t want you to get your hopes up like I did, and suffer so much when they’re disappointed.”
“I’m no stranger to that,” Carrie managed. But she couldn’t say she was sorry in return. She hadn’t done anything but speak the truth.
And God would not put this spirit of hope in her heart if He didn’t mean to bring something good to her.
Would He?
Chapter 9
Amelia may not have meant to rain on Carrie’s parade, but the cold drops still stung. Maybe that was why she’d got caught up on her quilting stitches so quickly afterward…she really didn’t have much to say, which left her to stitch and
Amelia and Emma to natter about Emma’s wedding preparations. With only a couple of weeks left to go, the buzz of activity at the Stolzfus place was building like that of a hive of bees.
Carrie waved good-bye as the buggy rolled down the lane. As she turned, she scanned the lawn. Not a single hen pecked and scratched in the yard. A drop of rain hit her on the forehead. Aha. The hens could tell a raincloud from a hole in the ground. They had put themselves to bed early.
She put on her lumber jacket and went into the henhouse, where she found most of them already roosted up. As she filled the feed cans and topped up the waterers, she rehearsed with the hens what she would say to Melvin tonight after dinner.
Maybe it was just as well that Amelia had had her say. At least now Carrie was prepared if her husband didn’t see things as she did.
When she sat, Dinah walked along the roost and settled onto her shoulder. Carrie spent a few quiet moments enjoying her companionship…well, her body was quiet. Her mind was a jumble of arguments to marshal into order, of gabbled prayer, and snippets of conversation that might happen or might not.
This was no way to prepare herself. She should have brought home one of the books from the library. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? Then she could have everything laid out sensibly, with all the information at her fingertips. As it was, she’d probably get things confused, or just like this afternoon, be unable to come up with an answer to what would probably be the same objections.
Gently, she set Dinah back in her place. Talk or no talk, Melvin still expected his dinner when he came in from work. That at least she could do. Then, when they were both full, but before he sat down with the paper, she would broach the subject.