“What? I mean, what do you want?”
“I might have it. I wasn’t planning to get pregnant, but maybe I’ll just let it happen this time. Maybe Mom’s right, and once I have a kid, I won’t be able to imagine my life without it.”
“What does Jeff think?”
“He’s not thrilled, but he’ll go along with it. He’s not going to punch me in the stomach or push me down the stairs.”
It occurs to me that she might have a miscarriage anyway, and I try to discard the thought.
“Now’s the part where you’re supposed to say I’d make a good mother.”
“You would,” I squeak. Audrey laughs.
“Who knows, right? You’re the one who always liked babies. But hey, maybe we’ll end up doing it together.”
I offer no assent, no sisterly chuckle. I haven’t told her, or anyone, that Kevin and I have been trying. Why discuss such things? Why say that you’re attempting to grow out your eyelashes? Why not wait until they grow too long, stick out from your eyelids like a rooster’s crown, sweep down your cheeks like a Chinese fan. If Audrey were around, I would ask her to trim them. Only she would have a steady enough hand, a careful enough eye. She would say, “You fool,” and then fix me up. I would close my eyes and tilt back my head, hear the satisfying snip of scissors cutting through abundance. Could you make a wish on an apron full of eyelashes? Would their numbers strengthen the wish’s power? Or is it only the chance falling of a single eyelash that makes it worth a wish?
Audrey chooses to ignore my silence, to spare me this time—or maybe she’s too wrapped up in her own expanding life.
After we’ve ended the call, Kevin comes into the room and changes into his pajamas. “What’s new with Audrey?” he asks, and when I tell him, since he’ll find out sooner or later, he says, “Just like that, huh, by accident?”
“Sounds like it.”
He settles heavily into bed, tugging the covers to his side. “Well I think we should stop trying to make it happen by accident.”
“Yeah, I’m following the calendar. You know, sex isn’t always a spontaneous seduction.”
“I mean we’ve got to get some help. Do the tests, follow the steps. It’s been long enough. Over a year.”
“I know how long it’s been.”
“But you don’t think we should do anything.”
I do think we should do things. I could carry around three hazelnuts; he could carry a mandrake root. We could place a small statue of a fertility goddess beside our bed. We could make a pilgrimage to this hill in England with a chalk outline of a giant sporting an enormous erection. And when all of the magical rituals have failed, we can make an appointment at a fertility clinic like the other sensible and desperate childless couples.
“That’s not true,” I say, but Kevin is already after me, because he is a person who believes in taking practical action and does so, and I am a person who dreams about taking radical action and does nothing.
“So fine, it’s easy for people like your sister who never even wanted a baby. Sometimes you have to work at things, give them a chance before you roll your eyes. What if you do become a mother? Are you going to teach our kid to give up, throw in the towel—it’s just too hard?”
I thump out of bed, angry in my underwear. Kevin grazes my hand. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it.”
“No, go ahead. Be harsh.”
I stand blinking in the doorway, watching him blink. It’s one of those things you never think about until you do, and then how strange, the constant flickering of everyone’s eyelids. But imagine a person who didn’t blink, who stared at you with unshielded irises, like a picture in a biology book, like a doll, like the dead.
I didn’t want to have to invest my faith and hope in medical technology. I wanted Audrey’s surprise-surprise. To suddenly have a flower waterfall sea tendrils shooting stars flutter-kicking misty-eyed lullaby blooming through me. I wanted the romantic view of life to win out this time.
* * *
—
The baby and Javier—though that is surely not his name—haven’t been on the bus for almost a month. The flu, I thought at first, in its heyday season. Then I envisioned a long vacation, the baby’s first flight. But I am coming to believe in a more permanent, mundane reason for their disappearance. The dad goes to work at a different hour now. The baby attends another daycare. They have a new car, with the radio on, heat flowing from the vent, and the baby in a car seat, flapping his arms for no one to see.
The chatty people on the bus confer with each other over weariness and weather. Spring is on its way, they agree. Yup, winter is out like a bad dream. The bus driver says, “So long, big guy,” to the kid who seems barely old enough to ride the bus alone, with his Batman backpack and his Spiderman shoes kicking the air above the floor. My mom calls to crow about Audrey’s pregnancy; to plan a baby shower; to assure me it’s okay that Audrey’s going to have a baby first even though she’s the younger sister, because my turn will come, she just knows it. Audrey tells me that she is throwing up, she is showing, she is considering cloth diapers, she is priming the chickens for the arrival of their human sibling. I let them do the talking; I ask the solicitous questions a loving daughter and sister is supposed to ask.
But some mornings, looking out the bus window at the proud tulips popping up out of the earth, I pretend that I am the one among us who can’t stand babies. Ignorant thumbsuckers, uncivilized droolers, toothless malcontents. That new baby smell mothers swoon over—it’s just their own soured milk. The soft, creamy skin—see how puckered and red it gets when the baby screams. To take care of a baby, you have to become accustomed to the constant sound of unhappiness; to spit-up and yellow poop; to long hours of doing nothing that requires your mental acuity, your wit, your carefully cultivated self. You will be so very tired. Once a baby is born, she will seem to expand ten times in size with her relentless needs and wants. She will care about you only in relation to herself, will claim residence in your arms and lock eyes as if to never let you go; and then, when the delicate fringe of her eyelashes finally comes to rest, you will be stuck awake, unable to turn away.
Field Notes
When Leah was sixteen, she’d seen a fetus preserved in a jar of blue formaldehyde on her high school health teacher’s desk. “Come up and look if you want,” Ms. Hennessey said to the class. “If you’d rather not, you can stay where you are.”
How had Ms. Hennessey gotten a fetus, and why was she bringing it in for show and tell? She was the most peculiarly open teacher Leah had ever had. Whenever they discussed a difficult health issue, she seemed to have had personal experience with it, which she’d relate to the class in the calm, storytelling manner of the school librarian. Her father was an alcoholic, her mother chronically depressed. She herself had suffered from bulimia. Among her friends were some HIV-positive, semi-recovering drug addicts. She sported a buzz cut, wore Champion sweat suits, and dismissed the class with a chipper “Have a nice day now, unless you have other plans.” Every once in a while, she insisted they collectively yell out “penis” to dispel the word’s taboo power.
One by one, the students went up and peered at the jar in silence, while Ms. Hennessey sat at a student desk, flipping through a stack of papers.
“Just observe,” she said lightly. “Let yourself feel whatever you feel.”
Preserved at nineteen weeks of development, it was a marvelously well-formed specimen: the nubs of the fingers and toes, the tiny shells of the ears. Leah felt amazed, the way she did in biology class, when she aimed her eye through the microscope and saw an organism squiggling on the slide. Studying the fetus in its blue perfection, she admired the rightness of the human form, the evolutionary logic that had shaped it.
“That was so sad,” her friend Tammy whispered when they’d returned to their seats. But Leah didn’t feel sad.
�
��It’s not a baby,” she whispered back, though she couldn’t say exactly what it was. A human prototype. A once-organic baby doll. A beautiful, made thing. Later, when she was asked why she’d decided to major in biology, to attend graduate school for pathology, to become a cancer researcher, she had her answers ready. Her interest in evolutionary development; her dedication to the experimental process; her desire to help in some tiny way (if she might be so bold as to suggest she could) with one of the greatest medical problems of our time. But the image that came to her was of the fetus—how fascinating it had been to peer into the jar on the desk, to see something so private, that it seemed like you weren’t supposed to see, and how much she’d wanted to keep looking, to understand everything about it.
* * *
—
The lobby of the Biomedical Research Institute where Leah worked was cavernous and windowless with a black marble floor. People moved in and out of the revolving doors, harboring an air of covert business, while Yolanda, the receptionist, tended to the phone with its echoing ring. When Yolanda’s children began coming to work with her now that school had ended, they brightened up the atmosphere of the somewhat sinister-looking lobby. Adolfo, the five-year-old, laid out memory cards on the floor, a stuffed turtle hanging out of his pocket. Nina, six, brushed her Barbie’s hair. Nine-year-old Jasmine lurked by the stairwell with her deadly serious face.
Heading upstairs to her lab in the Pathology Department, Leah waved at Jasmine, who carried a small spiral notebook and was tapping her pen against the metal rings.
“Do you kill mice?” the girl demanded.
“I work with mice,” Leah said. “They help us with our research. We’re trying to figure out what makes people sick.”
“But do the mice die?”
“Sometimes,” she admitted.
“Hmmph.” Jasmine regarded Leah coldly and turned away.
Leah tried to get her back. “Do you have any pets?”
Jasmine considered this. “We have Adolfo.”
“Your younger brother?” Leah laughed.
“My parents won’t let us. Pets are too expensive.”
“If you could have a pet, though, what would it be?”
“I like dogs—big dogs. And cats, if they’re friendly. My friend has a mouse. She thinks he’s cute. But he has red eyes.”
“Their eyes are a little freaky.”
“You still shouldn’t kill them.”
“Some people agree with you,” Leah said.
Last year there’d been a series of demonstrations outside the Institute. “All Life Is Precious,” the signs said, and “Stop Human-Centrism.” Her colleagues had scoffed at the demonstrators, or ignored them, but Leah stood across the street for a while and took them in. She could understand. These were people who imagined themselves in mice bodies: imprisoned, tortured, sentenced to death.
“What’s in the notebook?” Leah asked. Jasmine hugged it protectively to her chest.
“I’m taking field notes. Like a biologist. I do sketches, too.”
“Cool. I’d love to see them sometime, if you’d let me. I should get to work now but I’ll see you later, okay?”
Jasmine said nothing. Fair enough, Leah thought. Rudeness was a kid’s prerogative. She had to respect it.
* * *
—
In their wire cages, five to a cage, Leah’s mice appeared healthy. Their coats were white and shiny. They weighed about twenty grams, the average weight for an adult mouse. Inspecting them, Leah was disappointed not to find a mouse that seemed amiss—skinny, agitated, avoiding its food. She had bred them with a mutation in their DNA that caused cancer, with the goal of learning more about how the cancer developed and spread. When a mouse was ailing, she would bring it to her lab bench and monitor the sickness until it had to be sacrificed in a chamber of CO2. The trick was to catch the mouse at the right time. If she got to it too late and the mouse was dead, she couldn’t breed the next generation with the same altered cells.
Leah sat down at her computer to work on graphing her recent data. She was tracking the extent to which the mice’s cancer had metastasized to different organs: the liver, the pancreas, the colon. Manipulating data, she suddenly wanted very much to have sex with her boyfriend, whom she hadn’t seen in almost a week. She pictured Greg sitting up naked in bed, awaiting her approaching hand, whose course toward his crotch was prolonged by the intrusion of x- and y-axes and statistical calculations. When her hand finally alighted, he moaned—a word that had thrilled her since she’d read it over and over again in the notorious pages of a teen novel. She said it several times to herself: he moaned, he moaned, he moaned—and she felt the word between her legs. Then she imagined Greg’s attentions to her breasts and her clit, but she couldn’t follow the fantasy all the way through to sex. The exact configuration of limbs wouldn’t settle itself in her mind. Even a week without sex could make her think of it as a strange, near impossible act.
* * *
—
In eighth grade Leah’s friend Mandy learned the meaning of the word phallic, as in “That fence post looks phallic!” “That hair spray bottle looks phallic!” Mandy had gone around delightedly pointing out that phallic symbols were everywhere, and the joke got tired long before she quit doing it. Now that Leah’s period wasn’t coming, the world seemed full of bawdy insinuations. The celebrity baby craze on magazine covers at the supermarket. A billboard for Planned Parenthood with a woman’s curvy silhouette. Actual babies strapped to their mothers’ torsos, gawking at her. She saw a coworker’s diamond ring emerge from a rubber glove and remembered an elementary school jingle meant to embarrass the boy and girl paired together in the chant. In her case it had been Jared, a redheaded nerd who was said to eat earthworms. “Leah and Jared sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage.” A kid’s recitation of adulthood, each event in its proper chronological order.
Since she’d lost her virginity at eighteen, Leah had been fastidious about safe sex. She went on the pill with her first serious boyfriend, and even then still used condoms for months, not because she didn’t trust him, but because she didn’t trust the pills. It wasn’t rational; she believed that proper usage yielded a very high rate of effectiveness. But the image of sperm swimming past all odds was seared into her mind, from some PBS special she’d secretly watched when she was seven. With new partners she gently initiated conversations about sexual history. “Can we talk?” she’d ask, before too many clothes were shed, feeling like one of the virtuous, shadowy figures in an STD prevention ad. Eventually she went off the pill. She had headaches that her doctor thought might be related to the hormones. Also, during dry spells, she didn’t like to be reminded every evening when she popped the pill that she had no need to take it.
For twelve years Leah had been safe, as safe as you could be with sex, but in her six months of dating Greg, she had several times practiced that most dubious form of birth control: withdrawal. Though she’d chastised friends who took such risks, she found the idea of it sexy, the way a tightrope act was sexy. She liked the idea of a lover extracting every bit of pleasure from inside her before hastily coming on her belly or hipbone or breasts. She’d fantasized about it: the danger, the timing, the spurt on her stomach. So when she and Greg went hiking and enjoyed a spontaneous romp on a bed of ferns, they tried it; and when they were soaping each other up in the shower once, they tried it; and on a night when Leah fumbled inside the drawer of her bedside table and pulled out an empty condom box, they tried it. And that third time—from a biological point of view—they succeeded.
* * *
—
In the hard rain, the windshield wipers swished at a dizzying pace. Leah pulled over by a playground and jumped out of the car. The back of her head got drenched as she bent over to throw up into a trashcan. A woman herding
two toddlers under an umbrella gave her a sympathetic look. Leah drove the rest of the way to work with the radio off, afraid that the sound of earnest newscasters would trigger another bout of nausea. When she arrived at the Institute, Adolfo was pushing a plastic dump truck, Nina was whispering to a purple kangaroo, and Jasmine was monitoring the revolving door like a junior security guard.
“Hi there.” Leah tried to smile. She had a flash of being seventeen years old, coming home from a party having recently puked from red wine, and hoping to convince her mother that nothing was the matter. Her mother had let her creep upstairs, but Jasmine cornered her.
“I like your shirt.”
“Thanks.” Leah looked down, afraid that some bit of vomit clung to the cotton.
“Look, I brought cherries.” Jasmine held up a plastic bag.
“Yum,” Leah gulped. “Enjoy.”
She came back down a few hours later to buy gum from the 7–Eleven down the street. As she was heading out the door, Jasmine waved her notebook. “I guess I could share the field notes I wrote about you today.”
Leah was suddenly nervous about what this undersized investigator might have to say about her disheveled appearance. But she believed in empirical evidence. “Sure, if you want.”
Jasmine read from the notebook. “She is wearing a blue-and-green-striped shirt. I want a shirt like that. She is wearing jeans with a hole in one knee. She is wearing muddy shoes. It’s raining so why didn’t she wear boots? Maybe she is sick today because she looks white. I mean whiter than normal. I hope she feels better.” Jasmine closed the notebook. “I might do a sketch later.”
“Thanks,” Leah said. “I am a little sick today.”
“Is it your belly?”
“Yeah.”
Jasmine reached out and petted it, as if stroking a dog. “Stop making Leah sick,” she said.
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