July 2, 1977
Abigail Rickover is our secret weapon. But it’s up to me to turn her genius into a business. The O’Kell in me wants to make a profit and a point.
July 21, 1977
We will call our business The Good Egg because that’s what Sliv called Mother, may she rest in peace.
August 2, 1977
How do we make this into a business? I ask Abigail Rickover. “I’ve never really thought about it,” she says.
August 8, 1977
This is really just like any other monopoly. Sperm and eggs are the commodities. If Adam can harness the power of the atom than surely Eve can unlock the secret of life. Especially if she has more money than God.
August 16, 1977
“Artificial insemination,” Abigail Rickover tells me. “In vitro fertilization. It’s simple, really. We put the egg in a petri dish with the sperm to fertilize it, then we place the fertilized egg in the womb.” Test-tube babies, I say. “That’s right,” she says. “That’s how we make money. For now.” I say this is a business I can understand.
August 27, 1977
I walk over to The Main Drag for drinks with The Tommies at the end of summer, at the end of the day. We’ve put in a deck out back that looks out over the canal, and I like to come here to be with my tribe. All the talk of free love in the world is starting to make sense to me. Free love is what happens when making love is no longer tied to making babies. Free love has to mean love that’s freely available to me.
August 30, 1977
We will specialize in producing girls, I tell Abigail Rickover. For business reasons. “People have been trying to do that for a long, long time,” she says. “In ancient Greece, men would lie on their right side during intercourse if they wanted a boy. In Germany in the Middle Ages, they used to put a hammer under the bed to get a boy, and in Denmark they thought a scissors under the bed would help them get a girl. In France, this was in the 18th century, they would tie up their left testicle to get a boy. But nothing worked, of course.” Can you do it? I ask. “I have a few ideas,” she says.
September 13, 1977
Ground is broken on our new mother ship, the Briody Center. Soon we will be ready to blast off.
September 29, 1977
Do our Tomgirls have names? Do I care? They call me Big Mama. I call each of them “Tommie.” I love them all dearly.
October 12, 1977
I take home a young woman from The Main Drag, a singer in a rock band called the Bi-Vocals. I don’t ask for her name and she never asks for mine. Who are you? I say to her after. “Gracie,” she says. Did you run away from home? I ask. “Most people run away from home to the circus. I had to run away from the circus to find a home.” Oh? “I don’t even know my real name. And I don’t want to know.” I want her to stay here with me, with my new family, with my tribe of Tommies.
October 13, 1977
I ask Gracie if she wants a job. “Forget it,” she says. When will you come back? I ask. “Whenever,” she says.
October 15, 1977
I can’t believe it but I’m smitten. I always thought being a Cushing was all about conquest, not communion. This has nothing to do with love or sex and everything to do with transformation.
November 3, 1977
“This is pure research,” Abigail Rickover says. “It takes time. Real time, not clock time.”
November 18, 1977
“She’s going to be a beauty, Miss O’K,” Sliv says. “Anybody can see that.” He is talking about the shell of our new Briody Center, not my new love.
November 30, 1977
Patience, I tell myself. It will be years before our girls are ready, before Abigail Rickover has solved the mysteries of life. Everything will take time, years and years.
December 3, 1977
Love or lust, life is hell without Gracie.
December 9, 1977
I follow her hundreds of miles down canal, tracking the Bi-Vocals from bar to bar. “What are you doing here?” Gracie says when she sees me. “You didn’t come here for me, did you?” I don’t say a word. “My God!” Gracie says. “I mean that’s pathetic. You are too old for me, girl.” I feel like a fool, like an old cow with a bell clanging around my neck.
December 20, 1977
I am going to find whatever love I’m looking for right here in the last town along the canal. I don’t want anyone to ever leave me again. Getting hurt’s not worth it, not at my age. I am going to make my own love.
December 23, 1977
They will wait until spring to finish the Briody Center and to landscape the grounds around it. For now we will use it to hang Christmas lights.
January 9, 1978
I give my first lecture to The Tommies about our Tomgirls, my first explanation in public. Every one of us, I say, is the mother of every child. Every one of us has a lifelong obligation to care for every Tomgirl. When I am done, there are no questions.
January 19, 1978
We will leave the boys to the boys. For the test-tube girls in the United States, you will have to go through The Good Egg. I tell The Tommies they will be donating their eggs to a good cause.
January 29, 1978
We work out the sperm profile. Our donors have to be smart, without diseases or any sign of depression or anxiety attacks. I want them tall and rock-hard. We start to screen them in Cambridge. Amazing, isn’t it? I say to Abigail Rickover. Women can produce one egg a month, and men can jack off until the cows come home, squirting out millions of sperm every single time. No wonder their come comes so cheap.
February 17, 1978
“I have figured out a way to freeze the eggs,” Abigail Rickover says. She says they will last forever. Tommie immortality, I say.
February 26, 1978
We will corner the market on low-cost, top-quality test-tube babies. One day soon we will corner the market on test-tube girls.
March 2, 1978
I am looking at books about the original Amazons. I want to know everything about them, their homes, their bones, their enemies, their gods. They say the Amazons are a myth but I don’t believe it. To build the modern woman we have to understand our warrior past.
March 21, 1978
Abigail Rickover and I are meeting every week. “It’s too much,” she says. I say I need to update her on the Briody Center. “I don’t need to know,” she says. “I just need to keep working.” I wonder whether that might be the best thing I’ve heard yet about Abigail Rickover.
April 16, 1978
Everything about the Amazons is real to me. I think they were women who loved women but got what they needed from men. They were warriors mating with a male tribe just to make baby girls. I think they had sex slaves, too, from their conquests. And sex with each other. I think they would conquer towns and take the best-looking men captive and kill the rest. They understood that sex was war. No wonder men say Amazons must be a myth.
May 1, 1978
I make my Amazonian preferences known today, May Day, the next time The Tommies come together in the basement of the Cathedral. I tell them all about the Amazons, the warrior mentality, the way we must ready the Tomgirls for a new kind of combat in a new kind of world, one of our own making. I tell them we all have to be Amazons in thought, word, and deed, because this is war, and in war you must destroy your enemies.
May 23, 1978
“But I’ll never look like that,” Scarlett says. “There’s nothing Amazonian about me.” I say surgery is always an option.
June 2, 1978
I will pick and choose. I will pluck. I will tell them all the same thing, that they must submit to me to know what love is all about. Some of The Tommies will say no but not many. They are all reasonable women, and I see no reason not to reason with them all. I will make sure that I have what I need.
June 4, 1978
Why shouldn’t I have everything I want? This is my town, my creation, my dream.
July 1, 1978
Sliv says the
re have been men poking around the town. “They stick out like sore thumbs, Miss O’K,” he says. “You know how it is here with guys.” He says he thinks they’re spies. “But why?” Sliv says. “Who’re they spying on?” I have no idea, I say. No one knows what we’re doing here. “Not even me,” Sliv says. I ask Sliv if he wants to know. “Let sleeping dogs lie,” Sliv says, “or the hair of the dog will bite you.”
July 13, 1978
If we can make a whole new race of Tomgirls from scratch, then why can’t I re-make The Tommies into what I need right now?
August 1, 1978
With my blessing, Scarlett takes a van full of Tommies to Boston for plastic surgery. “You won’t even recognize us,” she says. I tell her I can’t wait.
August 6, 1978
There’s a peace about Rebecca now, as if the lens completes her own self-portrait. She is the only member of my family who ever makes the trip up here. Every time she comes she seems to have more cameras, more lenses, more equipment, less baggage. Why are you here? I ask. “This is where our story begins,” she says.
August 11, 1978
Back from Boston, The Tommies look battered, bandaged, like raccoons carved up by a bigger, nastier animal. The doctor tells me they will be beautiful once they have a chance to heal. But you would never know it from looking at them now. “What happened?” Becca wants to know. Self-improvement, I tell her.
August 14, 1978
Becca sets up a dark room in the bathroom of the Eileen Bell suite at the Queen Mother. It looks like she’s going to stay for a while.
August 21, 1978
My sister takes pictures of The Tommies as we peel off the bandages in the Eileen Bell Lying-In. They still look like prizefighters or war criminals to me. “My God!” Becca says when she sees their beat-up faces. She snaps away, making her pictures.
August 24, 1978
“What have you done to them?” she says. Nothing, Becca, I say. It’s something they decided to do to themselves. “They all say it was your idea.” I want them to think that, I say. To make it easier for them to do what they wanted to do anyway. I wanted to remove the stigma from the surgery. “That’s not all you removed,” Becca says.
August 27, 1978
You really do have to do something with your hair, I say to Scarlett, and she starts to cry.
February 26, 1986
“I don’t know who I am any more, Eleanor,” Becca says. Beats me, I say.
September 2, 1978
Our little Tomgirls are growing up so fast. Now is the time to teach them the difference between right and wrong, between good and bad, between women and men. Our curriculum and our little girls are developing nicely. In another ten years or so I will have what I need.
September 12, 1978
Becca shows me pictures of The Tommies after surgery and at first I don’t know what I’m seeing. Becca’s done something with time, before and after the surgery, so that one image blends into the next. The surgeon changed the way Scarlett and Heather and Kelly and Allyson look, but in cutting at their flesh it’s like he’s cut into their souls. They look lost and terrified in Becca’s pictures, battered and bruised, as if they’ve seen a ghost.
September 13, 1978
On my way to The Main Drag, I find Becca bawling, beside herself on the steps of the Cathedral. “I’m trying to let go of what Tom did to Joe,” Becca says. What he did to Joe? I say. “He killed him.” Killed him? “I thought you knew.” I thought Joe killed himself, I say. “Tom said Joe was a Red, that everything was Joe’s fault. Joe couldn’t get a job in TV after that, because of Tom. They put Joe on the blacklist. Tom made sure of it, and after that no one would touch Joe. Tom might as well have pushed my husband off the Brooklyn Bridge. The bastard.” So why do you want to forgive Tom now? I say. “Because I don’t know what else to do,” Becca says. Listen up, I tell her.
September 19, 1978
“You know what happened with Joe?” Becca says. “That’s not everything. That’s not the whole thing.” She’s not ready to tell me the rest, but I can guess the beginning, the middle, and the end.
November 2, 1978
Becca is leaving today. You stayed longer this time, I say. “Something’s happening here,” she says. “I can see it in my pictures. What exactly are you trying to do, Eleanor?” To show the world, I say.
November 15, 1978
The Tommies that I don’t favor feel left out, left behind. They want to do something about it. I tell them I will pay for anyone who wants to come closer to perfection. Liposuction, facelifts, tummy tucks, butt-risers, breast lifts. Why the hell not? I wonder. Why the hell not?
November 16, 1978
Scarlett is the first to sign up for more surgery. Kelly is next in line.
December 19, 1978
“I’ve seen Becca’s pictures,” Diana says on the phone. “And I must come up to see you as soon as this ghastly winter comes to an end. I have a concept.”
December 31, 1978
“Here,” Scarlett says. “Now here.” The back of her thighs are higher, tighter. The fat has miraculously vanished. She is a medical miracle. I work my hand beneath her clothes and start to squeeze gently here, there. Then I slide my hands around to the inside of her thighs. I work my hands up and down, inside and out, a little higher each time, telling her all the while that she is a new woman, that she is my new woman. “Ohhh!” Scarlett whispers. You can’t beat the sex when you’re an ex-nun.
January 1, 1979
Tomgirls and Amazons made to order. My dream is coming true. Money makes it possible, but money doesn’t make it happen. This is about knowing what you want and being willing to do anything to get it. This is about being willing to play God when the job is open.
January 12, 1979
I pluck a different Tommie every night. Scarlett, Kelly, Heather. There is no reason, no rhyme, no pattern to my appetites. One night I want the wealth of someone’s experience, the next day noon I’ll take a Tommie who might as well be a virgin. I show them what I want to do, and then I show them how to do it. Scarlett takes her turn, the same as everyone else, with no questions asked.
February 9, 1979
“I think we’ve found something to help us produce females,” Abigail Rickover says. “But first I need to know more about breeding horses, about cows and pigs. I need more time and money.” Money I’ve got, I say, and time is on my side.
February 26, 1979
At The Main Drag, I let it be known, ever so gently, that I prefer blondes.
March 1, 1979
We christen The Briody Center. “She’s a beauty,” Sliv says. She is all wood and glass and promise stretching toward the canal, her arcs and curves bending like a beautiful woman. Abigail Rickover has everything she needs now except more talent. I tell her she has an open checkbook to get anyone she wants from anywhere in the world. She says she won’t waste a minute or a cent.
March 8, 1979
I tell Abigail Rickover no men need apply for the Briody Center. “I had assumed as much,” she says.
March 21, 1979
The blondes are popping up like streetlights at twilight. Scarlett, of course, is first, a bright bleached blonde to go with her new and improved body. Even the women I hardly know, like Kelly and Heather and even Allyson, have all gone blonde.
April 1, 1979
I tell The Tommies to chop their hair off and they became the Roundheads. I tell them to shave their heads and they become the eggheads. I tell them to dye their hair blonde and they become the airheads.
April 11, 1979
Abigail Rickover has recruits marching through town like shock troops, the very best female geneticists in the world. I make sure to meet every one of them, to make sure they have no life outside the test tube. So far so good.
April 25, 1979
How can I tell all this gene research is working? I ask Abigail Rickover. “You can’t tell until it works,” she says. Now that’s power.
May 2, 1979
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In a different life Kelly would be selling real estate in a small town in a small car. She might have married early, made a small-minded mistake, raised a son by herself. She would be successful in that small way but she would want more until maybe it burned her up. Here there are none of those expectations. She has nothing here, no role in life laid out for her except to be a good Tommie and to please me. That will burn her up soon enough.
Book of O'Kells: Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell Page 14