My friend Diane places a symbol of what she calls her “heart’s desire” on her bedside table. She’d been through five in the past six years—including a business card when she was hoping for a promotion, and a peace button when her husband was quarreling with his siblings—and they’d all paid off. She claims that a friend of a friend with a fireman fixation tried it with a photo of a 9/11 hero she’d ripped from a magazine; soon she had a one-legged boyfriend. The connection? In the picture, one of the fireman’s gams was obscured by a hydrant. A girl has to watch out for such things.
“That might be apocryphal,” Diane admitted. “But to me, the symbol is a nightly reminder of what you want. I’d like to think it’s magic, but it’s really more like a form of prayer. Then you work on it unconsciously in your dreams. And when you wake up each morning, you focus on the symbol again when your mind is still free from the clutter of the day.”
I took stock of my nightstand. There was a broken sand dollar from a long-ago trip to Big Sur (I’d pushed the pieces together so it looked whole, because I liked the pattern); an inlaid pillbox from a stoner ex-boyfriend; an antique pocket watch from a childhood pal who’d replaced the face with my fourth-grade school picture. Jeez, I thought. Broken shells? Gifts from exes? Stopped time? What was I thinking? I swept them into the trash and assembled a more conducive shrine: a Lakota soapstone turtle that I’d picked up on a visit to South Dakota and later learned was a fertility symbol; a turquoise bear from Santa Fe (I was trying to bear a child); a balsa-wood box of brightly dressed Guatemalan worry dolls, the kind that are said to solve your troubles while you sleep.
At first Steven was amused; he liked my little display so much that he moved it to the living room. “Where are my animals?” I said, aghast, that night.
“I thought they’d look better in the other room," he said.
“I do not want them moved.”
“I just thought…”
I glared at him. “I do not want them moved,” I repeated, carefully setting them back in their places. “I can’t believe you touched them.”
“Jesus, Peg. Next you’ll be putting voodoo dolls under the bed.”
“I already have,” I said, primly. I lifted the comforter to show him the beaded African fertility fetish I’d tucked under my side of the mattress.
He was silent.
“You’re the one who was talking about bad karma,” I said.
“Yeah, well I just think strawberries and whipped cream might work better.”
Even as I did all of this, I feared that I’d get what I wished for. On the days my writing was going well I didn’t care if I ever got pregnant—I secretly hoped I wouldn’t. After an evening with my three-year-old niece, who commanded me to sip from a play teacup, pretend the liquid burned me, and shriek, “Oh no!” until I thought I’d pass out from the tedium, I felt relieved not to have a child. On the way to a last-minute yoga class, I’d congratulate myself on the serenity and spontaneity of my life. Then each month when I got my period I cried.
I began surfing infertility Web sites, reading postings out loud to Steven. “Hey, hon, listen to this. It’s from someone with the screen name Babyfever:
Bill’s making me take a break! He says he’s burnt out. He says that hopefully—hopefully—he’ll be ready to reconsider in a couple of months. But only if I don’t talk about getting pregnant. How will I get through it? Am I supposed to put on an act? Pretend to be a good wife and smile and be happy knowing I’ve had two miscarriages and now might never get pregnant? What if one of those months is the only one for the rest of my life when I can conceive?
I’m going to seduce him when I’m ovulating. He’ll never know. Except that I haven’t wanted to have regular sex in, like, a year.
“Man,” I said. “That woman is out of control.”
“I don’t really need to hear that stuff,” Steven said. I jumped up to hug him. “Don’t worry,” I promised. “I’ll never be like that.”
Five months. Then six. I made an appointment for Steven to have his sperm checked by a urologist, the first step in sussing out a potential problem. Up to 40 percent of infertility is what’s called “male factor,” (about the same percentage is female factor; the rest is unexplained) and it’s the easiest glitch to identify. “There are only men here,” he hissed, when we entered the waiting room. “Middle-aged and elderly men with urological problems. I don’t even know what a urological problem is.”
We were sent upstairs, where a nurse with a Russian accent handed Steven a cup and bellowed, “Take this down the hall and masturbate. Do not touch the inside of the cup.”
Sadly, he didn’t harbor any Nurse Ratchet fantasies. He slunk into a room that was bare except for a table and a towel-draped chair. “That towel made me think about all the other men who had sat there,” he told me later. An array of magazines was scattered on the table: Playboy, Penthouse, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, Playgirl (presumably for gay clientele), and, inexplicably, Golf Digest. “I tried to find something sexy, but I could hear the Russian nurse yelling outside, and people walking by. It was hard to find something … sustaining.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t my best work.”
A few days later Steven’s GP called with the preliminary results. His counts were low and too many of his sperm had damaged heads. “You’re going to have a hard time getting pregnant,” she said. That should’ve been devastating news, yet it left me weirdly chipper. If Steven was infertile, I could chalk childlessness up to fate. It was no one’s fault—more specifically, it was not my fault. This had nothing to do with my age or how long I had waited to try to get pregnant. It wasn’t retribution for my cavalier choices or my chronic ambivalence. I wasn’t happy about the news, but I felt the weight of my own presumed guilt lift.
When we met with the urologist, though, he assured us that Steven’s doctor had overreacted. “Steven doesn’t have the fertility of a twenty-five-year-old, but he’s still got plenty of decent sperm here.” There should be enough, he said, more than enough, to knock a girl up.
“I’m worried about you getting pregnant," Steven said. We were driving across the Bay Bridge, on our way home from shopping in San Francisco. He’d been acting a little distant, a little stressed all afternoon. We were just gearing up for our seventh month of trying.
“Why?” I said.
“What if they’re wrong? What if it gives you cancer again?”
I was stunned. We hardly talked about the cancer anymore. I hadn’t stopped worrying about it; it was more that I couldn’t allow myself the luxury of those fears. If I did, I might start agonizing over all sorts of things, like the ingredients in the toilet bowl cleaner or the noxious fumes from the cars backed up all around us on the bridge. I no longer fled the kitchen when the microwave was on. I’d stopped drinking carrot juice, which, antioxidants or no, I found repellant. I couldn’t live that way.
Steven was staring straight ahead, his hands gripping the steering wheel. I reached over, hugged him as best I could across our seat belts. “I love you so much,” I told him when I could speak again.
Can we talk about bad sex? My gynecologist, Risa Kagan, suggested a “postcoital test” before my next ovulation to see if my mucous was hostile to Steven’s sperm. It was part of a basic fertility workup that also included blood tests to check my hormones, an ultrasound, and a form of medieval torture in which blue dye was pumped through my remaining fallopian tube to see if it was clear. (It was.) “It’s not like you’re forty,” Risa said when I went in to see her, “but time is of the essence here.”
She told me to have intercourse immediately before my next appointment, which I shoehorned in after lunch during a busy week. Steven was running late and I was furious. He called me from the car to warn me that he didn’t have much time. “Can you get started without me and be ready to go when I get there?” he asked.
Needless to say, neither of us was in the mood for love. “I feel like Risa is in bed with us,” he complained. I glanced a
t the clock. “Just hurry up, will you? I’m going to miss the appointment.” Luckily, Risa wasn’t measuring the quality of our experience.
“Your mucous is gorgeous,” she announced, stepping back from the microscope. (Tell me something I don’t know,I thought.) A take-charge kind of gal herself with a brainy, East Coast style, Risa was part of a generation of women who had entered the field of medicine to change it, to be more of a partner than a parent to her patients. She seemed like a trusted older sister. She gestured for me to look through the lens. I could see Steven’s sperm, brave sailors on a journey to nowhere, swimming with all their evolutionary might through a river of my exemplary fluid. Our horoscope signs may have clashed—I’m Sag, he’s Pisces—but our love juices apparently got along fine. Good thing—the symbolism of my body rejecting Steven’s sperm, refusing to make life with it, was too disturbing to consider.
Eight months. “This could be the problem,” Risa said, tapping my chart. My labs had come back showing that the hormone progesterone was low during the second half of my cycle. “That would keep an embryo from implanting.”
I asked her if that could be fixed.
She nodded. “You could try Clomid.” Clomid was a fertility drug used for women who either didn’t ovulate or, as in my case, didn’t ovulate “robustly.” I’d heard it was also implicated in ovarian cancer.
“Studies haven’t supported that,” Risa said, adding that she’d conceived her own second child on Clomid. “With my oldest, I’d gotten pregnant on the first try, so I assumed I’d have the second one exactly when I wanted. A year later, I could tell you exactly where I was every time I got my period. You know how it is. It’s devastating. And in some ways, it’s even harder when you already have a child, because you know what you’re missing. It turned out that my progesterone levels were a little low. I didn’t think twice about taking the Clomid, I wanted to get pregnant so badly. And whether it was the Clomid or not, I got pregnant the next month.”
“Hmmm," I replied, noncommittal. I still wasn’t eager to be part of what felt to me like a massive experiment in women’s health. I wasn’t that desperate to have a child, was I?
Risa continued talking. Clomid was a low-level intervention, a pill that I’d take only five days a month. It was inexpensive, too—only fifty dollars a cycle. Despite my reservations, I felt tempted. For the first time, I asked myself the Two Questions, the ones that would drive me for the next five years: What if this worked? What if it was the only way we could have a baby? Risa scribbled a prescription and held it out to me. I dont have to fill it, I reasoned as I slipped it into my purse. I’ll just hang on to it, for insurance. What harm could that do?
My left breast looked surprisingly good; the scar had faded quickly and the lumpectomy gave it a little midlife lift. But the radiation had killed the milk ducts, so it could never nourish a child. That’s why, a week later, only my right breast felt like it was on fire, like it was being stung by scores of bees. I’d waited for my period to come, then waited some more.
“Would this be good news or bad news?” The checkout clerk at Long’s Drug boomed as she rang up the home pregnancy test.
“Um, good, I think,” I stammered, making a mental note not to get in her line if I ever bought hemorrhoid cream.
“Best of luck then,” she said, grinning.
I shook the box, turned it round and round in my hands like it was a Magic 8 Ball. What if I were pregnant? What if I weren’t? As long as I waited, I could remain comfortably in the hypothetical, my life wouldn’t have to change. Finally, though, the suspense (and two cups of tea) got the better of me. Once again, I peed on a stick. Then I ran to my car, sped to Steven’s office, and wordlessly held out the result. We gaped at each other for a good thirty seconds.
“You’re pregnant?” he asked.
I plunked onto his lap, laughing, and threw my arms around him. Then we looked at each other again, our eyes wide. I felt like Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross in the final scene of The Graduate, staring slack-jawed out the back of a bus: we’d finally gotten what we thought we wanted. What now?
“You know, “Steven said, “I suddenly realize how much courage it takes to choose not to have children.”
I could give a guided tour to all the places I’ve puked in Honolulu. Over there, by the band shell in Kapiolani Park. And at the curb next to the multiplex in Restaurant Row after suffering through the Robin Williams stinker What Dreams May Come. And oh yes, on the beach near where we once spotted Gwen Stefani. I was seven weeks pregnant when we left for our annual vacation. I vomited on the way to the airport. I vomited on the plane. I vomited out the window of the car on the way to the hotel and every couple of hours after that. In our favorite restaurants I cut my food into minuscule pieces and pushed it around the plate, even snuck some of it into my napkin hoping Steven wouldn’t notice, would think I was having a grand time. I had no one to blame but myself; he’d offered to cancel the trip when the nausea set in, but I’d refused. I didn’t want the baby already holding me back. The only thing that soothed me was the movement of the ocean. I floated over the reefs in my snorkel and fins, humming lullabies, imagining I was an embryo myself, rocking in a salty womb. I’d read somewhere that couples in which the man was at least ten years older than the woman were more likely to have sons—that was just about the distance between Steven and me. So I was sure the baby would be a boy. We’d already named him Kai, which means “ocean” in Hawaiian and Japanese.
Even the sea turned against me eventually, my stomach lurching with the waves. By the time we got back to Berkeley, I’d lost twelve pounds. Looking at my computer screen made me dizzy. I felt like such a wimp; women got pregnant all the time—what was wrong with me?
“This is not okay,” Risa said when I went in for my first prenatal appointment. My blood pressure had plunged; I could hardly sit up. “You can’t go on like this.”
In some women, she explained, “morning sickness” spins out of control. No one knows why. Doctors used to be taught that it reflected a mother-to-be’s ambivalence about the pregnancy. That, she added, was back when all obstetricians were male. A kinder interpretation says the nausea is a vestige of evolution, a biological alarm system designed to keep women from eating something that would harm the fetus during the initial, critical months. But that doesn’t explain why some women don’t have a lick of trouble while for others the illness itself becomes a threat to the pregnancy. Risa made arrangements for a nurse to come to my house with a temporary intravenous drip to stop me from dehydrating. “There is one good thing,” she said. “Being so sick is usually a sign of a healthy pregnancy.”
The next afternoon, Steven and I went to the hospital for a routine ultrasound and prenatal counseling. I was nearly eleven weeks pregnant, still feeling rocky, but full of confidence that all was well. The technician poured a cool, slippery, liquid onto my stomach. She ran the ultrasound wand over my belly, ‘then left the room for a moment, returning with a long phallic device. I slid it inside of me and she scanned the screen again. “I think I’ll get the doctor,” she said, her voice neutral.
We knew. Steven took my hand, his lips compressed. I felt myself slipping into the familiar numbness of medical emergency. The doctor came in and broke the inevitable news—the fetus had stopped developing two weeks earlier. He ushered us to plastic chairs in the hallway while he called Risa’s office.
“Are you relieved?” I asked Steven, thinking back to our Graduate moment.
“Maybe a little,” he said. “Mostly, though, I’m sad.”
We went through the rest mechanically. The D&C, the bleeding, telling our families and friends. My brother David had already told his children about their impending cousin. For the next year at unpredictable moments, like the middle of a Friday night dinner, my four-year-old niece would turn to me and say, “You lost your baby, didn’t you, Aunt Peggy?” Each time felt like biting down on tin foil.
In the following weeks, Steven watched me closely for
deeper signs of devastation. But honestly there weren’t any, not then. I was sorry to lose the pregnancy, but I didn’t have any difficulty sharing the excitement of two friends who were expecting babies the same week I had been due. I was happy for their happiness, ready to welcome the little lives they were creating. ”I’m grateful that we got pregnant at all,” I told Steven. “And we can start trying again in a month. If it happened once, that means it can happen again.”
3
THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY
Larry Brown was my first true love. My junior high school notebooks are a mass of arrow-pierced hearts, our names entwined inside. “Larry+Peggy," “Larry & Peggy Brown,” “Peggy Brown,” “Dr. and Mrs. Larry Brown.” There are two parallel smudges in the creamy paint on my parents’ dining room wall where I propped my stockinged feet during the hours and years of our phone conversations, adolescent musings about poetry and God. We flirted and fought; he read me couplets from Ogden Nash and Shel Silverstein—not, perhaps, the most romantic of offerings—and I reciprocated with my own tortured verse. For years I sent his mom Mother’s Day cards; I still confide in his dad.
As we got older, though, Larry grew more devout—or frurn as it’s called in Yiddish—and I less so, unable to reconcile Judaism with my incipient feminism. He stopped mixing milk and meat after his bar mitzvah; I converted to Diet for a Small Planet vegetarianism. A few years later he rejected anything prepared in nonkosher cookware or served on treif plates, including those in his own mother’s home. I stopped attending religious services. By our sophomore year of college he’d banished all shades of spiritual gray: if the Torah was God’s word, how could he neglect any of its commandments? How could he pick and choose? Shared history, rather than shared belief or experience, kept our friendship afloat, though often just barely.
Waiting for Daisy Page 3