by Suzy Becker
Mark joined us for dinner. Steve met Mark when they were both working for the government. Steve was still working in the same office as a writer. Mark left to get a teaching degree and now taught elementary school. I immediately loved that about him, which completely overrode my preexisting dislike of something he couldn’t help—he wasn’t Gary.
I waited while Steve walked Mark back to his car; this was their good-bye for the week. As we drove back to Taylor Street, Steve asked, “You sure Lorene is the one?”
“Yeah. It’s so easy—I don’t know that I can explain it. I don’t have to spend any energy meeting her halfway—we’re already together.”
“It’s new.”
I blushed in the dark. “She’s really nurturing. Her store is like a community center; people go there just to hang out. Everybody loves her.” I trailed off, missing Lorene. It would have been so much easier to have her there so he could see she was the one, the way my dad and sisters did.
Steve didn’t stir until eleven the next morning. I was up, bags packed, temperature marked on my chart. Turns out there was no need to rush off to Fish Creek; we could head out for a little breakfast and shopping (Fish Creek wouldn’t provide any opportunities) on Steve’s favorite street. We talked through two coffees and walked the length of the street—in and out of soap and lotion stores, clothing stores, book and paper stores. I ended up with two dog toys for Vita and Mister.
Steve still had more packing to do when we got home, and then there was a stop he’d planned at his parents’ house on the way out of town. We would be getting to Fish Creek in time for dinner.
I had the gifts I’d brought for Steve’s parents on my lap in the car. Maple syrup and blueberry jam. All of a sudden, they seemed very small. “What do your parents think about this?”
“June’s intrigued. She never expected to get a grandchild out of me. And Pete has always really liked you—he’s quite impressed with your books. He hasn’t tuned in to the baby thing.”
I was starving by the time we arrived. June’s buttery toasted cheese-and-tomato sandwiches tasted delicious. She had collected photos from Steve’s boyhood to show us. After lunch, Steve sat with his dad. I stood with June while she refilled her bird feeder with brown sugar and water. Wild parrots fluttered around the patio off her kitchen. I could see a lot of Steve in her face. I read the hint of a smile as acceptance. We could have been mother- and daughter-in-law, the two of us standing there talking.
After a bit, Steve and I traded places. I joined Pete at his desk on the enclosed porch, his retirement office. Stacks of unfiled folders were piled on the tops of full filing cabinets. We talked about publishing and the economy. “Has Steve shown you the elementary school?” he asked, looking up at me over his half glasses. “It’s right at the end of the street; the boys walked there from here. They spent a lot of time at the little creek you’ll pass on the way.”
Steve took me down to the school, stopping by the dried-up creek where he and Andrew had played. After we got back, we corralled June and Pete together on the front doorstep for a couple of photos, then left for Fish Creek.
It was dark when we pulled in. We threw our bags into our separate rooms and Steve changed into his “house pants”—a familiar pair of now grayed-out blue “track” pants with white stripes down the sides. He put some music on and got dinner started. His meals are simple, just a few ingredients—in this case, pasta, tomato, and mushrooms—but he enjoys laboring over them. He was singing, chopping, sautéing, and stirring alone in the kitchen for over an hour. I read my book on the couch.
Neither of us made any mention of a baby—the retreat didn’t officially begin until the next day.
After dinner, we went for a walk. The sky was full of stars, pinhole pricks of bright light, no moon. There was a chorus of cud chewing; once our eyes adjusted, we could make out a hundred or more dark blobs in the meadow alongside the road.
“The sky’s so different. Must be upside-down.”
“Different for me, too; I’m not used to being here in winter,” Steve said. “I don’t think you ever get the Southern Cross.”
Steve made himself a cup of tea, and I said good night. I fell asleep to strains of techno-pop music and his occasional throat clearing as he worked on his novel. I awoke the next morning at six (the dogs’ breakfast hour) and recorded my temperature. Day 13 of my cycle. I should be ovulating any day now. I would wait until after lunch to break out the predictor kit.
Steve got out of bed at nine and made his morning tea. I let him wake up, appearing immersed in my writing. I was thinking we could start the retreat off with a real bang . . . We had talked about the possibility of just jumping into bed together, circumventing the rest of the process. Everyone, including Lorene and Mark, was in favor of the concept.
We went to the Flying Cow for breakfast. The café was two doors down from our place. The owner was eight and a half months pregnant. “Where’s Mark?” she greeted Steve.
“He’s leaving us to work out this part of the project,” Steve answered.
“Please, don’t make me laugh,” she begged, and steadied her middle.
We sat down and ordered “flat white” coffees, bacon, and eggs. “I thought you were a vegetarian,” Steve said.
People always do—it must have to do with my writing animal books or my earnestness or something. “Nope, but I hardly ever eat red meat.”
“I am,” Steve said. “I’ll eat a little chicken, if Mark’s cooking, and it’s hard to get around eating lamb in this country.”
Our breakfast arrived. We were the only ones in the place. “Weather’s not so good. I thought maybe we’d go to Foster this afternoon, do a supermarket shop.”
“I need to do this tester thing before we go; I think I’m getting ready to ovulate.”
He laughed nervously. “Well, that makes things interesting. I suppose we could stay home and spend the afternoon in bed. Is that what you were thinking?”
“I’d be tomorrow or the next day, if it’s positive.” I paused. “I don’t know, when we used to talk about it, I always imagined the other two nearby. Feels like there should be some ground rules—”
“Shirts on, lights on. No, lights off!” We were laughing. “No, you’re right, it could be dangerous. What if we like it? How about we agree to do it just once . . . ” He shifted in his chair. “I’m sure you’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it . . . ”
“I have. I—well, if we were both single . . . In this stupid, idealistic way, I always wanted this whole thing to be an act of love, not—not turkey baster or technology.”
I paid for breakfast and we left. “We don’t have to decide right now,” he said. “Do your test. We could call home.” The phone was in front of the post office, on the other side of our place.
“I don’t want to wake Lorene. I know what she’d say—‘Go for it!’”
“Same with Mark.”
We walked into the post office. Steve made a copy of his sperm-test results. I bought ten postcard stamps.
“As you wish, jellyfish,” the clerk said, and handed me the stamps in a little sleeve.
What did I wish? I wished for a baby. I wished Lorene was there. All of a sudden I had this strong feeling that I didn’t want her to miss the Moment.
When we got back, we each took a seat at the dining room table, our notebooks in front of us in place of place mats. “You go first,” Steve said. “I realized I don’t really have that many questions. I guess the trip itself was kind of a test balloon . . . I think I just needed to know how it would feel, to make sure, after all these years. Yeah. So I don’t have specific questions. I’m sure I will have them, after you go.”
“Okay, the first question. Have you given more thought to how much of a father you want to be?”
“Yeah. The distance is tough . . . My best friend Kelly sees his kids a few times a year. I was thinking once a year, at least. Maybe alternate, here, there, somewhere in between. What were you thinking?�
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“Like that. With calls, letters, e-mail . . . Whatever we decide, I just want to make sure we can really do it. I don’t want to set the kid up for disappointment. And I want to celebrate birthdays and Christmas—”
“Together?”
“No, long distance. But they’d be important.”
“Definitely.” We stared at our notebooks. “Would you want me there for the birth?” he asked.
“Not a command performance. If you’d want to be there, I’d love it. I think. I have no idea what it’ll be like.”
“Who knows with any of this stuff? We should be allowed to change our minds . . . ”
“Except lowering the minimums on involvement.”
“Okay, here’s another one for you, then,” Steve said. “What if I fall in love at the birth, you know, with the baby, and decide I want to stay?”
“Fine. Just not in our house.”
“Next door?”
“Great. Here’s one for you. What if she hates us when she’s fourteen and she wants to come live with you?”
“Seriously?”
“I hope not.”
“That’d be just about perfect timing for me. I love high school kids.” Steve paused, then said, “My friends all think this is crazy. They keep saying—maybe it’s because of your brain surgery—‘Something’s going to happen to Suzy and Junior’s going to land on your doorstep.’”
“Lorene would get custody of Junior. Or do you mean if something happened to both of us? I was going to make my younger sister Meredith guardian in the will. You’d have visitation—would you want Junior?”
He thought for a bit. “I think you’re right . . . ”
We talked through lunch and then I took my OPK into the bathroom. Steve raised his eyebrows when I came out. “It takes five minutes.”
Ovulation Predictor Kit (OPK)
The test detects the surge in luteinizing hormone (produced in the morning) which separates the egg from the follicle. Fertilization occurs 1 to 3 days later, 36 hours optimally.
We stood beholding the stick. Steve put his hand on my shoulder. “Darling, if we were going to be really responsible, I should have all my test results, right? The hep C results aren’t back yet.”
“That settles it?”
“I think so.”
“Could you possibly have hep C?”
“I don’t know. Let’s go to Foster.”
When I woke up the next morning, I reached for my purple thermometer. 97.1 degrees, the telltale drop. If we were going to do it, this would be the day.
The sun was out and so was our hot water, a conclusion I reached four minutes into a cold shower. I dried off, got dressed, and went down to the post office to buy a phone card. It was Bruce’s birthday.
“Nice place that, where you’re staying?” Mrs. Jellyfish inquired.
“It’s perfect for us, just no hot water this morning.” I offered up the intimate detail since this was our second meeting.
“It’s a chilly morning. Not as bad as yesterday. Tell your friend there to ring the owner up.” I was surprised she didn’t say “husband.”
I left Bruce a singing message, then tried Lorene. Just a quick call to tell her I loved her, missed her, and we weren’t going to do it.
“Do you want to?”
“Kind of. If I got pregnant and we could skip the rest. ”
“You still could . . . ”
“I don’t want to bring it up again. Maybe when he’s there in the fall.”
She didn’t sound 10,000 miles away. “You okay?” I asked.
“I’m okay. The house is okay. Mister and Vita are okay. We miss you, but we’re fine. You okay?”
“I am. Feels selfish, though. I wish you were here.”
“It’s not selfish. It’s a wonderful thing you’re doing.”
Steve was padding down the walk in his house pants. “No hot water! I’m going to phone the guy.”
We adjusted our routine and headed to the Flying Cow. The owner looked up from her copy of the Fish Creek Mirror. “Heard your hot water heater’s stuffed. You’re welcome to shower in the back here.”
I turned to Steve. “Wait, how does she know?“
Steve shook his head and started laughing. “Small town, this.”
After breakfast we discussed finances and football. I would pay for all of the donation expenses and any of Steve’s testing that wasn’t covered under his insurance. He insisted on paying for his travel, including the sperm-banking trip. Aside from visiting, he wouldn’t have any further financial responsibility, which raised the topic of citizenship. Steve didn’t feel strongly, but if the baby were an Australian citizen, “uni”—university, our biggest foreseeable future outlay—would be free.
I segued to school in general. I felt strongly about sending the kid to public school. Steve wasn’t set on anything. He had been the equivalent of an American public high school teacher and graduated from the public schools, but he had seen friends’ kids benefit from private schooling.
“How much do you want to be a part of those kinds of decisions?”
“However much is useful. Parenting’s already tricky between two people, I don’t know that you want a third. But I’m happy to weigh in when you want. How’s that?”
“Good. What about football?” Lorene was opposed, I was pro—not pushing it, but if our kid wanted to play.
Steve didn’t know the first thing about American football, so he refused to cast the tie-breaking vote, saying instead, “Those things will usually sort themselves out.”
Enough for one day. Still no sign of the hot-water man. We packed up a lunch and left for Wilsons Promontory, the southernmost tip of Australia. We picnicked on top of Mount Oberon, looking out over the Southern Ocean.
“Do you want a girl or a boy?” Steve asked.
Coincidentally, I had just been reading about how to control the sex of the baby during conception that morning.
Girl sperm is larger, slower, and lives longer than boy sperm. On average, sperm live 3 to 5 days in a woman’s body. The egg lives 1 to 2 days after being released. Trying to get pregnant before ovulation improves the girl sperm’s odds; trying later gives boy sperm the advantage.
OR: Consult the Ancient Chinese Predictor Chart which uses your age to identify boy or girl conception-months with 93% accuracy.
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think I was better with the boys when I was teaching, and then I think maybe it’d be harder for a boy to be raised by two women—but it’s not like there won’t be men in our kid’s life . . . Did you talk to your dad about sex?”
Steve let out a mini-shriek. “Good God, neither of them. I remember a dinner party when I must have been about twelve, they virtually shut me in my room with a book about the birds and the bees. Literally. I remember there were swans, strange images of swans . . . ”
“What about you? Boy or girl?”
“I’m like you. Either, really.”
I stretched out on the rocks with my eyes closed, imagining Steve introducing his kid to his friends, then woke up twenty minutes later. Steve was peering down at me. “We should probably head down if you want to do that river walk,” he said.
We walked along the Darby River out to the ocean. I did the driving on the way back in the dusk, completely comfortable on the left side of the carless roads.
The hot water was fixed. I had a shower and half a glass of red wine and fell asleep while Steve made dinner. Steve had a gin and tonic and wanted to talk all night. We took turns playing our CDs, filling each other in on the past ten years. Then we talked about writing. Steve finally let me fall asleep reading one of his travel pieces.
By the third day, we were about out of questions. Steve’s notebook was shut, his pen sitting on top, his hands in his pockets.
I had one more. “Have you thought about how you want to do the sperm-banking? Will Mark be able to come along with you? West Coast, East Coast?”
“Mark can’t get vacation time w
hen school’s in session. The West Coast might be nice. You’d come there?”
“I could. I don’t think Lorene could be there the whole time, but part of it.”
Steve looked at me strangely. “We’re doing it, we’re really going to do this, aren’t we?” We took an unscheduled hug break, after which neither one of us wanted to return to the table.
That afternoon we walked down a jetty in another deserted fishing village. The jetty, a landmark from Steve’s childhood, was the draw. By the time we showed up at the town bar, they were done serving lunch. Steve wheedled two toasted cheese sandwiches out of a closed kitchen, then sat down with a surprisingly sheepish look.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Me? Yeah. No, you know, it’s weird. There was something you said once. It was during one of our phone conversations”—something I said, something I said—“and I keep coming back to it. I’m not sure what you meant—and I guess it’s the only, well, I guess it’s a concern, not a question.”
The toasted cheeses were delivered, prolonging my agony. “A concern?”
“I don’t know if you’ll remember saying it, and now I can’t remember the context . . . ” Out with it already! “You said you wanted to raise the child in a religious community, and I was wondering what type—”
“Oh, okay.” I’d cut him off. I didn’t mean to belittle or, worse, aggravate his concern. “Lorene’s son loved being part of the local Unitarian church—a pretty liberal, social-activist, I guess you’d call it Christian religion. But that church has changed a lot. If we could find another good Unitarian church close by, with a community of people—the kind you bring dinner for or they bring dinner for you—we’d like our kid to grow up in that kind of community.”