The Curiosities

by Susan Gloss

  “I’ll drink to that.”

  They each took a long sip before settling on the couch next to the fire. Nell pulled a crocheted blanket onto her lap—one her mother-in-law, Judy, had made her as a going-away gift when she and Josh had left Chicago.

  “I’ve heard it’s even colder in Wisconsin than it is here,” Judy had said. “You’ll need this.”

  Little could she have predicted that Nell would need not just the warmth, but the comfort as well. Or maybe she had known. The liquor thawed Nell’s throat as she swallowed. Josh kicked off his dress shoes and stuck his legs under the blanket so they were intertwined with hers.

  “Dr. Lynch said there’s a new protocol I could try if we do another egg retrieval,” Nell said. “Something about immune suppression.” She watched her husband’s face for a reaction.

  Josh set his drink down on the coffee table with a thud. “No,” he said. He shook his head. “No more. I can’t do it again. You can’t go through it again.”

  “I could,” Nell insisted. And she meant it. She’d endure all of it—the injections, the procedures, even the heartache—as many times as she had to. “If I knew we’d have a baby on the other side of it, I’d start another treatment cycle tomorrow.”

  “But that’s the thing—you don’t know. There aren’t any guarantees.”

  “But if we don’t try again, we’ll never know if maybe the next cycle would have been the one that worked.”

  “And we could keep saying that, month after month, cycle after cycle. But at some point, I think we need to say enough.”

  “It sounds like you’re saying it now,” Nell said. She’d suspected Josh felt that way, but it hurt to hear him say it.

  “I am saying it now.” Josh ran his hands through his short brown hair. Back when they were both in grad school, he used to keep it longer, collar-length. She remembered how she loved to tangle her fingers in it. But ever since he started teaching, he got it cut every three weeks.

  Nell bent her legs and hugged them to her chest, so that she and Josh were no longer touching.

  “Listen,” he said. “It’s hard for me, too. Especially to see how unhappy this whole process has made you. But we used to think our life was pretty great, even without kids. Remember that? I want to get back there.”

  Nell knew Josh had a point. But a familiar ache welled up inside her, drowning out everything but the palpable, biological desire to be pregnant again. Because she had been, once. And she would give anything—go into any amount of debt, endure any type of medical intervention—to experience that again and to take home a baby, this time, at the end of it.

  Early on, before any of the treatments, she and Josh had discussed adoption. But Josh said that with his legal background, he knew of too many stories where birth parents exercised their parental rights at the last minute, leaving the adoptive parents heartbroken. And then there was the cost.

  “I just don’t see how we can afford it, with the house and car payments, and you not working,” Josh had said. He’d gone along with the plan for fertility treatments because he believed they were covered by their health insurance plan. And they were . . . at first. But Josh wasn’t the one who handled all the bills and paperwork for their household. Since moving to Madison, with Josh so entrenched in his new job, Nell had taken over that task.

  Josh hadn’t read their insurance documents in all their excruciating detail like Nell had, so he didn’t know that there was a cap on what their plan would cover, and that they had reached it before they’d even finished their first IVF cycle. But by that point, Nell was already injecting herself with hormones and felt like there was no turning back. She was invested, both physically and emotionally, in the idea of getting pregnant again. So much so that she gave the clinic the numbers of credit cards she and Josh hardly ever used and told them to charge the cost of the rest of the treatments. Nell felt guilty about keeping Josh in the dark, but she justified it by telling herself that she’d have a job soon. Once she was pregnant, and the card balances were paid off, she could fill him in on the details. She was sure he would see then that it had all been worth it.

  Now, Josh shifted his legs under the blanket. “Just think about how much freer you’ll feel. No more taking your basal body temperature at five a.m., no more blood tests, no more pee sticks, no more hormone shots.”

  Nell had to admit that it did sound freeing, after months of pumping herself full of what she referred to as “the Acronyms”—FSH, LH, hCG, GnRH—but it also terrified her. She wasn’t one of those people who’d grown up always knowing she’d wanted to be a mother. As a child, she’d been more interested in drawing than in dolls. And even as she turned the corner into her thirties, she’d been focused more on finishing her PhD than starting a family. But then, shortly after she and Josh got married, she’d gotten pregnant. They’d been one of those couples she now envied—not trying, really, but not preventing, either. And poof! Two pink lines on a pregnancy test. That was the last and only time their baby-making journey had been easy.

  “I’m thirty-seven,” she said. “It’s not like we have all the time in the world to try again.”

  Josh crossed his arms. “You’re not hearing what I’m saying. I don’t mean taking a break. I mean no more trying. Because that’s where my head’s at. I think we’re getting a pretty strong signal from somewhere that this isn’t supposed to happen. If we have to work this hard at it, maybe it’s just not meant to be.”

  “Since when do you think anything worth doing is easy?” Nell asked, thinking of how doggedly he’d worked through three years of law school and two years of a federal clerkship.

  “I don’t see it as giving up,” he said. “I see it as deciding not to let this whole thing run our lives anymore.”

  But giving up is exactly what it felt like to Nell. And she didn’t just feel like Josh was giving up on their dream of a baby. She felt like he was giving up on her. Her body and its ability to do what women’s bodies were supposed to do.

  Her younger self, the one who’d taken college classes with names like Feminist Theory in Twentieth-Century Painting and Gender Identity in the Visual Arts, would have shrunk in shame at such thoughts. Rationally, she knew that she was no less of a woman or a wife for not being able to produce offspring. She knew, too, that her struggles were the type that only fortunate people could afford to have—people who didn’t lie awake at night wondering how they’d pay the grocery bill or mortgage. If Nell were the tweeting type, she’d have to lump her failed IVF treatments in with other complaints under the hashtag #FirstWorldProblems.

  Still, putting her problems into perspective didn’t stop Nell from feeling, in the murky recesses of her thoughts, that she was a failure. Since they moved to Madison a year and a half earlier, Josh had climbed the academic ranks at warp speed, collecting award nominations and committee chair appointments like shiny pennies. Meanwhile, Nell had yet to find a job in her field, which didn’t bother her quite as much at first, back when she still had high hopes of having a family. But now she had neither. Instead, she had the added burden of a lot more debt, and the stress of keeping it hidden.

  She kicked off the blanket and set down her now-empty tumbler on the coffee table. “I’m exhausted,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”

  The next morning, Nell put on her stretch tights, running shoes, and a fleece pullover. Before starting fertility treatments, running had been her sanity. She’d given it up, though, when Dr. Lynch advised against strenuous exercise while undergoing IVF. Nell had followed his instructions without a second thought, just like she did with everything else that might help her chances, even incrementally, of getting pregnant again.

  Now, her legs felt tight as she headed west toward campus, following the snowy sidewalks down her street, lined on both sides with small bungalows painted green, yellow, and pink. The tops of her running tights squeezed her stomach, still swollen from the pounds she’d put on.

  She kept running, though, cutting through O
rton Park, past its stone gazebo and the stately Victorian homes on its perimeter. She struggled to breathe, and her legs burned after just a few blocks. But at least she was breathing. And at least while her legs and lungs hurt, she couldn’t think about the deeper pain slicing through her heart.

  There were only a few other souls out at his early hour, people clad in down parkas, out walking dogs and clutching coffee cups. Nell’s feet made a solitary thudding sound on the snow-dusted pavement. She ran down to the bike path, past the sprawling conference center designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, following its curves along the frozen lakeshore. The wind coming off the waterfront stung Nell’s cheeks, but she kept running.

  She indulged in a memory of when she’d first told Josh she was pregnant, now almost two years earlier. When he came home from teaching that evening, Nell had thrust a plastic test stick in his face. Josh had squinted at it for several seconds before understanding lit up his eyes.

  “Does this mean what I think it means?” he’d asked.

  Nell had nodded and let him fold her in a hug, lifting her feet off the ground. They’d been so happy then, so hopeful. They both had thought, naively, that a positive pregnancy test meant holding a newborn baby nine months later. That myth, and all the others they believed about having babies, had been shattered in the long months since then.

  Her foot skidded on a patch of ice on the path. The thin, top layer cracked under her feet like the crust on a crème brûlée. Her feet landed in the cold puddle underneath, saturating her socks and the bottoms of her tights.

  She kept running.

  Nell felt, as she so often did when she thought about the baby, phantom kicks in her lower abdomen and a letdown sensation in her breasts. It was as if her body refused to accept the fact that she was no longer pregnant. And she couldn’t blame her body, really. She’d confused it with synthetic hormones and herbal supplements. Coaxed it into a constant state of waiting to harbor life again.

  She kept running. She hardly noticed when a man atop a bike equipped with thick, studded snow tires whizzed toward her, coming the opposite way down the path. Just as Nell tried to dodge out of his way, he swerved in the same direction and nearly ran her over. His wheels spattered gray slush all over her clothing.

  “Watch where you’re going!” he yelled over his shoulder.

  Nell stopped and sat down on the edge of a concrete pier, brushing grime off her sleeves. Her legs shook as they dangled over the edge toward the jagged ice below. As her heart rate slowed, the tears she had been holding back finally flowed, dripping down her chin and nose. As the tears fell faster, Nell realized she was no longer crying over her lost baby, or even the fact that her attempts at another one had failed. She was crying for the loss of the person she’d been before she ever waved that positive pregnancy test in Josh’s face.

  She knew he was right that she needed to focus on something else, but she’d forgotten how.

  She got up and half ran, half walked back home. She grabbed the mail sticking out of the mailbox affixed to the house, beside the front door. It had become a habit of hers to always get to the mail before Josh did. She plucked an envelope from the credit card company off the top of the stack and tore it open, her eyes darting to the balance on the front page. Had it really gone up so much, so fast? She didn’t think the last payment to the fertility clinic would show up until next month’s bill. She crumpled the paper in her fist, then walked around to the side of the house and tossed it in the recycling bin next to the garage.

  When she went inside, Josh sat at the kitchen island reading the Saturday Chicago Tribune, which they still got delivered on the weekends.

  He smiled when he saw her. “I was wondering where you went.”

  Nell grabbed a glass from the cabinet and filled it with water. “Bet you wouldn’t have guessed I went running.”

  He shook his head. “It’s been a while.”

  Nell gulped down half the glass before sitting down on the stool next to his. “So,” she said.

  Josh set down the paper and leaned toward her. “So.”

  “Let’s just say, theoretically, that we’re done with fertility treatments,” Nell said. “I guess what terrifies me the most, even more than not having a baby, is the idea of how I’m going to fill that space.”

  And how I’m going to pay off the credit card bills, she added silently.

  “You mean now that you don’t have to see Dr. Lynch every other day?”

  “Yeah, that,” she said. “But what I really meant was the headspace. My brain is so jammed up with all this obscure information about reproductive science that I can’t even remember what I thought about before.”

  “Oh, you just thought about other obscure stuff,” Josh said. “French futurist painting, ancient Byzantine art . . .”

  Nell smiled. “Seriously, though. I’m going to start my job search back up. For real this time.”

  She’d been looking for jobs at a casual pace since they’d moved to Madison the previous summer. But she’d been pregnant when they arrived, in her second trimester. She and Josh decided it didn’t make sense for her to begin a teaching job in September, only to go on maternity leave shortly thereafter. Then, after they lost the baby, the hope she’d get pregnant again any month now had kept her from looking in earnest. But then she didn’t get pregnant, month after month. More recently, as her credit card debt grew, she’d ramped up her search efforts, only to get discouraged, probably too easily, by the lack of positions in her field.

  “I was going to suggest a job search if you didn’t,” Josh said. “I think it would be good for you.”

  “Maybe I should have taken the university up on their offer to help me find a job before we moved here,” she said.

  Josh shook his head. “You can’t second-guess yourself. The timing wasn’t right.”

  Nell knew, though, that her refusal to accept the university’s help wasn’t all about timing. It had also been about pride. After working for years on her graduate degree, she felt uncomfortable riding her husband’s coattails in order to secure a spot on the faculty here in Madison. If she was going to get a teaching position, she wanted to earn it herself.

  “They still might be willing to help,” Josh said.

  “I doubt it.” Nell took another sip from her water glass. “The offer was all part of their strategy to lure you here. And now that you’re here, they won’t be as motivated.”

  “Well, I can ask, anyway. And you can reach out again to some of your contacts in Chicago. Maybe they have some connections here.”

  Nell nodded. “I guess this means I’ll have to reopen my Facebook account.”

  She used to keep up with her old colleagues’ personal and career developments through social media, but she shut down all her accounts after she lost the baby the year before. It was just too painful to have to explain to acquaintances why she wasn’t posting newborn pictures once her due date rolled around. Not to mention the fact that other women she knew seemed only to think about reproducing and then, voilà, they were updating their profile pictures with nine-month-pregnant bellies and blissful smiles.

  “People do still email, you know,” Josh said. “Sometimes.”

  “Okay. I’ll start putting out some feelers. Maybe after I take a shower.” Nell got up and tucked a sweaty strand of hair behind her ear. She couldn’t tell if the sweat was from the run or from her moment of panic at the mailbox. Maybe both.

  Chapter Two

  Nell

  PIECE: Megan Gladwell, Elizabeth Barrett at Home, circa 2005. Oil painting on canvas.

  Nell shut her laptop and put her head down on top of it. Looking for job leads turned out to be more difficult than she had anticipated. A year and a half had gone by since she defended her dissertation. She’d assumed that at the slow pace academia moved, the gap between her degree and whatever postdoctoral work she could find would be, to borrow one of Josh’s law terms, de minimis. Something she could explain away with a witty interview answer.<
br />
  But during the last eighteen months, while Nell had been consumed by all things baby-making and only half-heartedly looking for jobs, her colleagues had been busy. Out of the four other people who had finished their degrees at the same time as Nell, two had landed tenure-track teaching positions. Another lived in Amsterdam, doing postdoc research at the Rijksmuseum with the help of a hefty grant. And the fourth had secured a spot on a Smithsonian advisory committee to the White House, curating new acquisitions and making recommendations regarding display and preservation. Nell wondered what she might have accomplished in that time frame, had things been different.

  “Is everything okay?”

  Nell popped her head up at the sound of Josh’s voice.

  “Just looking for jobs,” she said. “Again. I didn’t know you were home.”

  “I just got here.” He set down his keys on the kitchen counter.

  “Did you make any progress grading?” Nell asked.

  Josh nodded. “I like the university when it’s not in session. It’s so quiet. If it were like this all the time, I could get so much more work done.”

  “You also wouldn’t have a job because you’d have no students to teach.”

  “Oh, right.” Josh went to the fridge and grabbed a bottle of beer. “Want one?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I need one after all the roadblocks I’m hitting.”

  Josh took out a second beer. He opened both and handed one to Nell. “It probably doesn’t help that most universities are still on winter break,” he said. “Maybe you’ll have more luck in a couple of weeks when the semester starts back up and people are actually in their offices.”

  “I’ve lowered my standards at this point. Anything—even an adjunct or a fill-in position would be fine for now. I’m just not seeing anything remotely related to my field.” Nell looked down at the label of the microbrew Josh had given her. The sticker depicted a kitten riding a fire-breathing unicorn. “The breweries around here keep getting more and more creative with their labels.” She squinted at a pixelated picture of a fortress. “Is that Bowser’s Castle? From Super Mario Bros.?”