Rochelle took Elisabeth’s hand and rubbed it along her pubic bone. Apparently by your girlfriend, she had meant your uterus.
“You guys are at the age where a woman’s body is supposed to make babies,” she told Isabella and Sam. “I’m at the age where a lot of women actually do it. But that doesn’t mean you should sell your eggs. This stuff is so emotionally and morally fraught, even when it’s your own children you’re carrying.”
“How so?” Isabella said.
“Like in my case, I have two extra embryos. I don’t want any more kids. But I wanted one child so badly that I promised Andrew if we did IVF, I wouldn’t leave any embryos behind. He was raised Catholic; I don’t know if that’s why he’s so determined. He says it’s because he’s an only child. He knows what that feels like. He wants Gil to have a sibling.”
What was she doing? She shouldn’t have shared that. Andrew would be mortified if he knew.
“What else do you two have on tap for the weekend?” she said, trying to steer the conversation back to a neutral place.
“A friend’s birthday tomorrow night,” Isabella said. “And a party in our dorm on Sunday because there’s no class on Monday. It’s Lucretia Chesnutt Day.”
“What’s that?”
“Lucretia Chesnutt was the first African American woman to graduate from the college,” Sam said. “The school honors her on her birthday every year. There are panels and lectures and guest speakers, all on the topic of diversity.”
She sounded proud.
“Do you want the day off from here, so you can go?” Elisabeth said, silently praying the answer would be no.
“Nah,” Sam said. “It’s okay. Thanks, though.”
“Are you sure?”
“No one goes to the panels,” Isabella said. “We usually go to the mall.”
“I’ve gone to the panels,” Sam said.
“I’m not into it,” Isabella said. “Like, look at us. We are all about inclusion! One day a year.”
“It’s not just one day,” Sam said. “What about the fellows?”
“Right,” Isabella said. “The college has this program for black first-generation college students who got amazing grades in high school. The Lucretia Chesnutt fellows. They’re all totally brilliant. They get a free ride. But the way the school trots them out on special occasions—it’s weird.”
“I think it’s inspiring,” Sam said.
Isabella rolled her eyes, and Elisabeth understood that she was not as earnest, as pure, as Sam was.
“A fellowship for geniuses doesn’t address actual, structural problems,” Isabella said. “School inequality, access to test prep. Only the most elite kids get singled out. What about everyone else at a bad high school? Don’t they deserve a shot?”
“I feel like you stole that opinion from Shannon,” Sam said. Then, to Elisabeth, “Our friend Shannon is one of the fellows.”
Elisabeth nodded. “Ahh.”
“You can’t steal an opinion,” Isabella said. “I agree with Shannon is more like it.”
“Why shouldn’t someone who excels academically be rewarded for it?” Sam said. “I didn’t grow up around the kind of people who went to schools like this one. I didn’t have an SAT tutor like you and Lexi. If I hadn’t seen President Washington’s speech online, I would never have applied.”
Sam looked at Elisabeth. “President Washington gives this incredible lecture called ‘If Women Ran the World.’ It’s on YouTube. I’ve watched it like a hundred times.”
“Sam has a major crush on President Washington if you couldn’t tell,” Isabella said.
It was both touching and absurd, how they referred to her that way, as if she were the actual president.
“And what does she suggest would happen if women ran the world?” Elisabeth said.
“That it would be better in every way,” Sam said.
Elisabeth snorted.
“You don’t think so?”
“I think it all comes down to power. And the individual. Women are every bit as capable of being evil and corrupt as men are. They just haven’t had as much opportunity to show it, historically speaking.”
“But you’re a feminist, right?” Sam said.
“I don’t even know what that word means anymore. They use it to sell soap now.”
Both girls stared at her. Elisabeth felt like the biggest cynic who had ever lived.
“Yes, though. I’m a feminist. Of course,” she said. “I should stop talking. Sleep deprivation has left me with no filter.”
She turned to Isabella. “Gil’s going through a bad patch. They call them Wonder Weeks. The baby is up all night and a total disaster, but allegedly by the end of it, he’s mastered new skills. Though I think that might just be something they tell mothers so we don’t go insane.”
“Doesn’t your husband ever get up with him?” Isabella said.
“Iz,” Sam said.
“We switch off at bedtime and in the morning, but in the middle of the night, Andrew doesn’t wake up. He doesn’t hear the baby crying. I have no idea how that’s possible, but that’s what he says.”
“What if you didn’t hear him crying either?” Isabella said.
“But I do. I even wake up somehow knowing he’s about to cry.”
“But what if you gave it a minute? Didn’t jump up. What would happen?”
Elisabeth didn’t think she could lie there and listen to Gil cry until the sound grew loud enough to rouse her husband, but she smiled at the suggestion.
The back door opened then. Andrew stepped into the kitchen.
They started giggling like ten-year-old girls at a slumber party.
“What?” he said. “Aww, look at the mouse.”
Andrew lifted Gil from his bouncy seat atop the counter.
“Is it safe to have this here?” he said.
Few things annoyed her more than when he walked in and immediately critiqued some baby-related decision she had made in his absence.
A response came quickly to mind, but Elisabeth chose not to say it out loud.
Andrew looked into the bowls of candy. Only a handful of Tootsie Rolls and Milk Duds remained. She should have thought to save him some.
“The trick-or-treaters cleaned us out,” she said.
Elisabeth saw him eye the mountain of silvery wrappers on the counter, next to the empty wine bottle.
“Huh,” he said.
“Oh wow. It’s six-fifteen,” Sam said. “We better get going before the nail place closes.”
Elisabeth went with them to the front door.
“Thanks for keeping me company,” she said. “Have fun tonight.”
Isabella hugged her goodbye, a move that surprised her.
“Think about my advice, please,” Elisabeth said.
“Okay,” Isabella said. “And you think about mine.” She cast a glance in the general direction of Andrew.
Elisabeth watched them cross the lawn to Isabella’s car, a blue Audi.
Across the street, Debbie had installed an inflatable black cat in front of her house. It was maybe ten feet long and taller than the tops of her first-floor windows. There were fake cobwebs on the bushes, and orange flashing lights wrapped around the columns on her porch. Tonight, she had added eight jack-o’-lanterns, two on each step, and a sound machine that let out a terrifying laugh every time someone passed by. Elisabeth had never seen anyone go so all out for Halloween. God help them at Christmas.
She had gone inside Debbie’s house last week, for book club. They were discussing Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which they had selected because it was shorter than The Secret History, and there was a movie version they could watch if, as Karen put it, they needed a break from reading.
It was a tamer affair than the first meeting Elisabeth attended, since nobody�
��s husband was away. They sat around Debbie’s dining room table eating crudités and baba ghanoush and drinking bad wine. Every so often, one of Debbie’s children wandered in and shook the television remote in her direction, which meant they wanted her to come change the channel.
At some point, Elisabeth asked, “Have any of you heard from Gwen?”
They shook their heads.
“That reminds me,” Karen said. “Josh says she forced Christopher to go along with her to Hong Kong because he got into some hot water with a student of his.”
“He’s such a creep,” Stephanie said.
“Tell us more,” Debbie said. “Details!”
“Yes!” the rest of them shouted.
They were reveling in it.
Elisabeth wished she hadn’t raised the subject. She wondered if what the Laurels were saying was true. She couldn’t picture Gwen with a guy like that.
“That’s all I know,” Karen said. “Josh swore me to secrecy, so don’t tell anybody.”
You just told everyone, Elisabeth thought but did not say.
As she was closing her front door now, she saw a woman her age dressed as Princess Leia—a brown wig, a tight white dress with a slit up to her crotch, tall white leather boots underneath. She was walking a dog in a Yoda costume.
Elisabeth remembered what Isabella had said earlier.
She went back toward the kitchen, smiling, thinking that she ought to tell Andrew.
“Do you still want to make burgers?” she said before she realized he was holding up the empty wine bottle.
“How was this?” he said.
“Fine.”
“This is a hundred-dollar Cabernet,” he said.
“No. A hundred dollars?”
“Yeah.”
She could tell he was annoyed, even as he made it sound like it was just something to say.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Were you saving it for something?”
“No, but—it’s one thing when it’s just Sam, a glass at dinner, but should you be getting these kids drunk? Are they even twenty-one?”
“Nobody was drunk,” she said.
“Really? The way you were all laughing when I came in, it kind of sounded like you were.”
“That was the sound of people enjoying themselves, Andrew,” she said. “Sorry if it offended you.”
She took the baby from him and went upstairs.
The doorbell rang three more times, but neither of them answered.
* * *
—
Elisabeth gave Gil his bath and put him to bed. Then she went into the upstairs den and switched on the TV. She wanted dinner, but she was stubborn. After that exchange, Andrew would need to come to her.
She couldn’t stop thinking about Isabella. She had to find a way to talk her out of it. She imagined the woman who was expecting the eggs, who might not get them now because of her. Elisabeth wondered who she was, where she lived, how long she’d been trying.
She herself had spent her late twenties and early thirties debating whether she even wanted children. For years, Elisabeth hoped for a burst of estrogen that would drown out her fears and turn her baby crazy. In the end, she didn’t know what the best answer was, but she could do simple math. The thing about choosing not to was that the door closed eventually. The thing about choosing to was that the door would never close.
How many choices had she made in her life to avoid having regrets later on?
The deliberation lasted so long that she somehow convinced herself it would be the hardest part. Everyone around her was pregnant, or had recently been pregnant, or both. Nomi had Alex by then, and was trying for a second.
Elisabeth woke one morning to a photo of three home pregnancy tests on her phone, above the words: It’s faint, but I think I see a double line. Do you??? Or is it a pee line? (The top two tests are mine. I made Brian pee on the bottom one as a control.)
“Nomi thinks she’s pregnant again, but she can’t decide if it’s a second line or a pee line,” Elisabeth said.
She showed Andrew the picture.
“What’s a pee line?” he replied.
Elisabeth felt actual excitement upon taking her last birth control pill. An unfamiliar calm settled over her. For the first time, nothing could penetrate. It wasn’t just about her anymore. She felt like she was rolled in layers of tissue paper and Bubble Wrap. A precious and fragile object.
Her first miscarriage was upsetting, but she knew lots of people who’d had one. The second made her scared to try again, for fear that another loss might destroy her. After the third, Elisabeth’s OB suggested testing, which revealed chromosomal issues. She referred them to an endocrinologist on the Upper East Side.
There was usually a two-month wait to see him, but his secretary said Elisabeth was in luck—she called on a Wednesday, and he’d had a cancellation for that Friday.
“We are so lucky,” she kept telling Andrew.
What you consider luck can change fast, she thought.
The doctor said if they did IVF, they could test the embryos, only put in the healthy ones.
“You’re thirty-five, not twenty-five,” he reminded her three times in ten minutes, as if she might have forgotten.
Even though it was a consultation, Elisabeth was swept into a room for an ultrasound immediately after he finished his sales pitch.
“Are we doing this?” she asked Andrew. “Should I be having an ultrasound?”
A few minutes later, she was having it.
“Your uterine lining is thin,” the doctor said, moving the wand around inside her. “Your lining is the Holiday Inn, okay? I am looking for the Four Seasons. Don’t worry, we can thicken it.”
He started naming things, like items on a grocery list. Progesterone injections. Viagra suppositories.
She and Andrew both had blood work, sitting in two cubicles, facing each other. The worst date they’d ever been on. Afterward, they went for beers at an Irish bar across from the hospital. She wondered how many dire conversations had played out between those walls.
She had dinner with Nomi that night, at a Thai place on Smith Street.
Elisabeth had the folder the doctor had given her tucked beneath one arm. She put it on the table between them.
Nomi ordered the drunken noodles with extra tofu. She was eight weeks pregnant, a vegetarian, trying to get as much protein as possible.
When Elisabeth opened the folder, and said she was sorry to burden her with it, Nomi said, “Bad news isn’t catching.”
Because she was such a good friend, Nomi asked how Elisabeth felt about her being pregnant. Elisabeth told her she never wanted to be that person, jealous of her friends. But she was jealous—of Nomi, of their friend Lauren, who just had her third healthy child by accident and without incident.
At home, she went deep with the online searches to find out what IVF would entail. The doctor had told them already, but Elisabeth wanted to see it written out, all in one place. You will be injected with four different kinds of hormones a day, you will have blood work and a transvaginal ultrasound every day or two, and after two weeks of this, you will be sedated and have surgery to extract your overgrown eggs. Meanwhile, in another room, your husband will ejaculate into a cup.
This seemed to sum up everything there was to the problem of woman versus man.
In the middle of the night, she googled.
Does IVF cause cancer? Possibly. Maybe. What doesn’t?
She grew obsessed with the idea that children born through IVF looked abnormal. She emailed herself images of babies, success stories from various fertility sites. In the morning, she showed them to Andrew and asked, “Do these look like real kids to you?”
Once, she googled “Do IVF babies—” and the search results autofilled the rest with have a soul?, which sent her
down a Catholic fertility message board rabbit hole.
A woman on another board said if you tried IVF six times, statistically speaking, you would most likely succeed. Elisabeth thought if she had to try six times, she would run away. She’d go off the grid, become a hermit.
But then, you never knew. Before all this, she hadn’t understood IVF, period, those people so hungry to make a child in their own image. Why wouldn’t they adopt? she had said. We would adopt if it ever came to that.
She confessed her message board addiction to friends over drinks. It turned out they were all on the boards for something. The shared interest could be anything—everyone in the group enjoyed cooking, or they were all lawyers, or they had attended the same private girls’ school thirty years ago. This was where women met now. Where they told one another their secrets.
Elisabeth’s friend Amy was on the message boards because she hated her stepkids. She wasn’t expecting to feel that way. Her coworker Maisy was on a board for married women pondering lesbian affairs. They would never post. But they lurked and lurked. None of them read books anymore.
When Nomi went in for an ultrasound at nine weeks, there was no heartbeat. She had to take a drug to force herself to miscarry what was left inside her. She was nervous, as the women online reported a great deal of pain and bloodshed. One woman said she wanted to warn others: You might see the baby’s eyes.
Elisabeth went to Nomi’s apartment and played race cars with Alex, her three-year-old. Nomi felt crampy. The drug could take four days to work fully. The doctor gave her twenty pills and said he hoped she wouldn’t need them all.
Elisabeth made them lunch, then put Nomi and Alex down for a nap.
Back at home, she tried to write. But she was distracted. In the next two days, she would visit Nomi twice more as this baby, or this idea of a baby, left her body. She would go to the organic children’s store on Court Street and buy three precious outfits for friends who had just had babies, or were about to. She would order the hormones that, starting next month, Andrew would inject her with nightly, in the hopes of making a baby of their own.
Friends and Strangers Page 18