I took a deep breath. “Um,” I started. “I was in here a few weeks ago, and I put this”—I pulled out the tub of wrinkle cream—“in my pocket, and I meant to pay for it, but I forgot.”
The woman looked at me coolly. “Nineteen ninety-five,” she said. I pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of my pocket. “Plus tax,” she said. I added two more crumpled dollar bills. “Sorry,” I said, and ran out the door without waiting for my change.
SEVENTEEN
It would have been a perfect question for Ann Landers, if she’d been alive to answer: Where, and with what gifts, do you ask your little sister for the temporary loan of her uterus?
Peter and I had sent in the Open Hearts application, along with our tax returns and our application fee. In the meantime, I’d been privately planning on bringing our search a little closer to home. Elle made perfect sense. She had the right body parts. I had the cash. And having my sister carry a child for us would let us keep things in the family, rather than hiring a stranger. It all made sense, except I wasn’t quite sure how to begin the conversation.
Thanks to volunteering at the library and the hospital, I knew a lot about what’s known as “the ask,” in which you attempt to part the rich person from a portion of his or her lucre. Six years ago, I’d been part of the three-member committee that had made a pilgrimage to a onetime TV star’s Radnor mansion to ask him for a breathtaking fifteen million dollars. At least I’d thought it was breathtaking. The former star, by then a magisterial presence in his sixties, with graying temples and a wall full of awards, hadn’t even flinched as he’d agreed to write the check. Then again, he’d just been slapped with a lawsuit for fondling PAs on a game show he’d guest-hosted years before, and that check bought him some awfully nice press.
Over the years, I’d asked strangers and acquaintances and friends for their money, for their time, for donations of everything from hamantaschen for the Preschool Purim Parade to thousands of dollars for the children’s hospital’s new lounge. But I was sure, as I shucked my clothes and pulled on a heavy white robe in the blue-and-green-tiled changing room one of Center City’s fanciest spas, I’d never made an ask quite as tricky as this one.
The spa had been my mother’s idea. “Take her somewhere fancy, get her relaxed,” she’d suggested. Then she’d invited herself along, unwilling to miss a moment of the drama. Getting the spa personnel to swap the standard herbal tea for champagne had been my contribution to the effort. I’d also come armed with wine, chocolate, and my checkbook. At some point between the mint/mojito exfoliating scrub and the warm willow-bark wrap, I’d explain the situation to my sister. Elle would probably be so blissed out that she’d sign up immediately. Maybe she’d even move in with us, I thought, avoiding for the time being thoughts of what Peter would have to say about that. Joy would love it, once she got over the weirdness of her aunt having her parents’ baby, which, given the accepting, inclusive, pro-diversity philosophy of her pricey private school, shouldn’t take long. I could imagine the three of us taking prenatal yoga and long walks along the paths of Fairmount Park, posing for pictures with my hand on Elle’s belly, working side by side in the kitchen to prepare healthy, nutrient-packed meals . . .
My sister’s groan of disgust cut through the eucalyptus-scented air. “Mother, for God’s sake!” I looked up. The sign above the hot tub said CLOTHING OPTIONAL. My mother opted out, shrugging off her bathrobe. Elle recoiled in horror at the specter of varicose veins, droopy breasts, and sagging belly, covering her eyes as our mother swayed and jiggled into the steaming water and settled herself beneath a waterfall, smiling peacefully. “It’s your future, girls,” she called. “Embrace it.”
“That’s Mona’s job,” said Elle, who was lean as a whippet, tanned and waxed, manicured and pedicured, without a single stretch mark or stray hair.
“Have a drink,” I said, shoving a flute of champagne into my sister’s hand. Elle scowled, doffed her own robe and slippers to reveal a tangerine-colored bikini and toenails to match, and carried her champagne into the hot tub. Once submerged, she arranged herself as far away from our mother as she could manage and drained her glass. “More champagne?” I asked as my sister placed cucumber slices over her eyes. Without moving her head from her waterproof pillow, Elle extended one slender, bronzed arm. “As you see, so shall it be,” she intoned. My mother smiled beatifically. I took a deep breath and ducked underneath the bubbling water.
At some point between her fifteenth high school reunion and the previous Thanksgiving, my sister discovered what she calls, with absolutely no irony, “the meaning of my life.” Elle is now a Be-ist. (“A beast?” Joy had asked when Elle had stopped by to make her announcement.)
Be-ism arrived on the scene in 2005, when Jane Myer, a bank teller from South Africa—divorced, down on her luck, fifty pounds overweight, and unfortunately permed—came across an antique self-help pamphlet at whatever they call a tag sale in Afrikaans. The pamphlet contained a primitive version of the power of positive thinking, instructing the poor and needy to simply picture the thing they wanted most. If they concentrated long and hard enough on that image, the thing would be theirs. “See it, be it” was Jane Myer’s mantra. Her book of the same title, See It, Be It, sold a half million copies its first week out, and that was even before slimmed-down, sleek-haired Jane went on her book tour, beguiling talk-show hosts and TV audiences with her confidence, her accent, her cleavage, and the ineluctable simplicity of her message.
My sister, who’d been through at least half a dozen gurus, self-help movements, and life philosophies by then, bought a copy of the book and began applying its principles immediately. She dropped the name Lucy (“too many unpleasant associations,” she’d told us, without saying what those associations might have been). She stayed away from anyone with a drug problem, a drinking program, or weight issues, on the Jane Myer–endorsed belief that mere proximity to the act of overindulging could make you, without the consumption of a single mixed drink or Double Stuf Oreo, overweight and/or addicted yourself. This led to a year’s worth of awkward family dinners that Elle would eat leaning as far away from my mother and me as possible, with her eyes half-shut, while the two of us wondered out loud about which she was most hoping to avoid: the fat or the gay.
For the past three years, Elle had insisted that every good thing that had happened to her, from getting the perfect pedicure to landing a recurring role as a homeless woman on As the World Turns, had been the direct result of Be-ism. Peter and I privately joked that Elle’s version of See It, Be It involved an intermediate step that Jane Myer had never imagined—namely, getting the things she wanted via vigorous and protracted visualization of me paying for them—but neither one of us could argue that, at the advanced age of forty, my little sister had more or less gotten her life in order.
“Shapiro?” called a woman in a crisp white coat, poised at the edge of the hot tub with a clipboard in her hands. I said, “Yes?” My mother started to stand up. Elle pulled off her cucumber slices and scowled. “Keep that under the waterline!” she snapped.
“Now, Lucy,” Mom said mildly.
“Are we ready for our massages?” the clipboard lady asked.
We got out of the water (“Me first!” said Elle, shielding her eyes), pulled on our robes, and padded down the hall. My mother slipped into a single room, while Elle and I were led to the couples’ room that I’d requested, a candlelit space with two rose-petal-strewn tables set close to the white-draped walls. A fountain tinkled in one corner, and a choir chanted from speakers on the ceiling. I got on the bed closest to the wall.
Elle looked suspicious. “Cannie, what is going on?”
“I thought we could have some time together. You know, we never talk anymore.”
“What do you mean? We talk!” This was not untrue. Elle and I did talk a few times a week, and she’d also e-mail me pictures she’d snap on the set of ATWT of herself wrapped in a trash bag, with a big, fake, festering cold sore in the corner of her mo
uth, beneath the memo line I NEED A VACATION.
A man and a woman, identically attired in white drawstring pants and white T-shirts, like nurses at a very hip hospital, walked into the room and greeted us. “I get the guy,” Elle announced.
“As usual,” I said.
She gave him a cheery wave and flopped facedown (still, I noticed, wearing her damp orange bikini) onto the table. I hung up my robe and lay down beside her. “You’re not going to take off your bathing suit?” I whispered.
“Please,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I don’t do nudity with other women.”
“I’m your sister . . . and you can’t catch lesbianism,” I whispered.
“They don’t know that,” she whispered back as my masseuse squirted warm oil between my shoulder blades.
“So what’s new?”
“Mphm,” my sister said into her pillow. She lifted her head. “Nothing. What’s new with you?”
“Not much.” I knew how I must look to Elle, with a house in a city she couldn’t wait to escape and with a husband and a child, two things she most assuredly had never wanted. Not to mention my minivan. If it was the last car on earth, Elle, I was certain, would walk—or maybe pull off the wheels and try to build herself a sporty little scooter.
“How’s the bat mitzvah planning coming?” She pursed her lips. “Are you giving Mona an aliyah?”
“Um.” The truth was, I hadn’t even begun to figure out what role my mother’s partner would have in the festivities.
“And what about Guberman?” Elle demanded. “Is he gonna help pay for it?”
“Well,” I said, thinking that I’d ask Bruce Guberman for money at roughly the same moment I’d ask him to sleep with me again. “We’ll work something out. It’ll be fine.”
We lay quietly for a few minutes. “Do you think we’re really going to look like Mom?” Elle asked. “All saggy and horrible?”
“Elle,” came our mother’s mellifluous voice from the cubicle next door, “I can hear you!”
“Mom looks fine,” I said firmly.
“Mom does not,” Elle replied. “She should have gotten a lift.”
“Do Be-ists believe in plastic surgery?” I asked. “Shouldn’t Mom just visualize herself getting lifted?”
“It’s too late for that for her.” Elle herself had gotten her breasts, brow, and chin done before her embrace of Be-ism, not to mention the six-month course of laser hair removal that she’d completed mere weeks before See It, Be It’s release.
“And what was she supposed to get lifted?” I inquired.
“Everything!” said Elle. “All of it!”
“I heard that!” our mother called.
“Shh,” I whispered as my masseuse raised the sheets draping us and asked us to roll over. “I need to ask you something.” I dropped my voice. “It’s kind of personal.”
Elle lowered her own voice and reached across the space between our tables to grab my massage-oil-slick hand. “Oh, Cannie. Are you having that not-so-fresh feeling?”
I shook my head. Elle ignored me. “You need a woman’s advice!” she blared. “Well, Cannie, I’m here to help! Just tell me your troubles! Do you need diet tips? Are you having”—she lowered her voice again, fractionally—“trouble in the bedroom?”
“I don’t need your advice, exactly,” I said hastily. “I need . . .” And here it was. “I need you to lend me something.”
“What?” Elle asked.
“Pardon me, ladies,” my masseuse whispered. “It’s time for your wraps.” I cursed her timing while she explained the procedure: We’d be slathered with willow-bark extract, bundled like baked potatoes in silver space blankets, then left in the room, with the lights down, as our pores absorbed all of the barky goodness. Elle lay back as her guy smoothed lotion on her legs, then her arms, then folded her, burrito-style, into her blanket and draped a padded eye pillow over her face, while my masseuse did the same to me.
Finally, with the lights off and the room quiet except for the crinkling of the blankets and the chorus singing overhead, we were alone, flat on our backs, immobilized. “You don’t need me to lend you money,” Elle said.
“Nope.”
“Clothes?”
Ha. “Uh-uh.”
“Accessories? Hair extensions? Back issues of Vogue?”
“Peter and I have been thinking about trying to have a baby,” I began. “I’ve got viable eggs, and his sperm is fine, so . . . um. Well. We’d just need a surrogate to carry it.” I managed to turn my head toward her, to work one hand free and stretch it across the gap between the tables so I could squeeze her shoulder. “It’d be fun! Maybe you could move in with us until the baby was born—”
Elle sat up fast and almost slid off her plastic-draped table. “You want me to what?”
“I just thought you could maybe think about . . . you know . . . helping us out.”
Her eye pillow had tumbled onto the table, and even through the dim light I could see her eyes get wide. “You want me to sleep with your husband?”
“No! God!” I took a deep breath. “It’s a simple procedure, really. They’d just inject the fertilized egg into your—”
“What? When? Now?” Elle’s feet smacked down on the tile floor, and she struggled against her silvery cocoon. I remembered a little belatedly that the spa shared space with doctors’ offices, so the well-tended ladies of Philadelphia could get their Botox or cosmetic dentistry along with their massages and scrubs. Maybe Elle had seen a few white coats as she made her way from the dressing room to the whirlpool and had assumed that the Jacuzzi and the massage were all leading up to some kind of Rosemary’s Baby–style insemination.
“Calm down!” I whispered.
The masseur cracked the door open and found me on the table, still straitjacketed by my blanket, while Elle was half naked on the floor, kicking her way out of hers, like a naked bird in a hurry to be born. “Ladies, is everything all right?” he asked.
“Everything’s fine,” I said, hopping onto the floor next to my sister. “Elle, take it easy!”
Red-faced and panting, after extensive convincing, my sister allowed her masseur to rewrap her blanket and hoist her back onto the table. I eased myself back onto mine. “I’ll take that as a no,” I said.
“No,” Elle repeated. “I just— I mean, no offense or anything, Cannie, but I don’t think I want to be pregnant. I don’t think . . .” She busied herself readjusting the folds of her blanket.
“You don’t think what?”
“That any of us have any business having kids. You know. With everything . . .” She flapped her hand in a manner meant to encompass our parents’ divorce, our father’s defection, our mom’s late-in-life lesbianism, the whole mess. “I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”
“You don’t have to—”
“No. I will.”
• • •
“You really should read See It, Be It,” Elle said for roughly the thousandth time, as I piloted a shopping cart through the produce section of the brand-new organic grocery store that had just opened down the road from the Accessible Ranch. We’d gone there, post-spa, to shop for my mother’s traditional end-of-Passover feast, which we’d celebrate with an all-inclusive, politically correct, gender-neutral Seder where God was referred to as the Power, and there were as many mentions of Miriam as there were of Moses.
“Why?” I grabbed a bunch of grapes and a bag of golden-red Rainier cherries, then a container of plump gold raisins for the fruit compote. My mom whimpered as though she’d been stabbed. “What’s wrong?” I asked her. She gestured mutely at the price written on the blackboard. “Ma, they’re cherries! I can afford them!”
“Oh, never mind her,” said my sister. “Read the book. Maybe if you just, you know, visualized your intended result . . .”
“I appreciate the thought, but I don’t know if I can visualize myself a new uterus.”
“Well, maybe not,” Elle allowed. “Maybe just visualize the end resu
lt. A baby.”
I picked up a pint of hormone-free half-and-half. My mother gasped. “What now?” I said.
“It’s a dollar fifty-nine at the Price Chopper.”
“I’m not at the Price Chopper. I’m here.”
“You weren’t raised like this,” she protested.
“No kidding,” Elle muttered, tossing a jar of olive tapenade on top of the box of matzoh in the cart. “Three kids in one bed in the Days Inn every summer at the water park.”
“You loved the water park!” said Mom.
“Nobody loves the water park for seven summers in a row,” Elle said. “Particularly not when they have to share a bed with their brother.”
I wheeled the cart to the meat counter, where the dry-aged meat was displayed in a special cooler like jewelry in a glass case. I pointed at a rib roast. My mother clutched her head and moaned.
“If you don’t want it, you don’t have to eat it,” I said. “But I’m not eating casserole.” I gathered focaccia, olives, a wedge of sweet Gorgonzola, figs, and salad greens. Elle, meanwhile, was smiling at the white-coated man behind the counter, who seemed to be enjoying the attention. He set the meat on a chopping block, lifting his knife. “You want the bone?” he asked my sister. I rolled my eyes.
“What do you think?” Elle whispered as the guy bent over the counter to wrap the roast. “Gay or just well groomed?”
I looked at the guy. “No idea. Ask Mom.”
“Please,” Elle said. “She didn’t even know she was gay until she was fifty-six. Why would you think she’s got any idea about anybody else?” She swished off down the aisle in her short skirt made of tiers of fuchsia satin, a black leotard, a cropped denim jacket, fishnet stockings, a cowboy hat, and hot pink boots. I paid for my groceries, as well as the thirty dollars’ worth of stuff (blueberry honey, artisanal marshmallows, twenty-year-old balsamic vinegar) that had mysteriously been added to the haul. At the register Mom snatched the receipt out of my hand, squinted at it through her bifocals, then tottered off toward the café tables. “Get Mother some smelling salts and help me bag,” I said to my sister. Elle flipped open a paper sack and began loading it with the stuff she’d picked out. Lemon body wash. An all-natural loofah. A plastic bottle of pink grapefruit juice. Jane Myer would have been proud. I picked up the juice and shook it.
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