This evening, Elise had a particular work-related errand to attend to that filled her with a little pitter-pat of excitement. She was going to stop at the barn on her way out to check in with Emanuel, the Pharm’s veterinary surgeon. The barn was connected to the lab by a long, windowed corridor and Elise headed down this and into his office, which, unlike the body of the barn where the animals lived, and the operating room where he infused the oocytes, had no “scrub-in” policy, which meant she could enter without showering, scrubbing down, and donning a whole freshly washed and sterilized shower cap and suit.
Emanuel was a tall, sad-faced Brazilian man, with the grave demeanor of an undertaker. Hunched behind his computer, bathed in bluish light, he looked awkward and gigantic, his shoulders too wide, his neck too long. He started when Elise rapped on the door and looked up with a comically surprised expression.
“Am I interrupting?”
“That’s all right,” Emanuel said, composing his features back into their usual dignified and somber expression.
“Any news?” Elise asked hopefully.
“Ula?” Emanuel frowned. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?” Elise blanched. She had not until that moment realized how completely she had assumed she would find the opposite. “Not even colostrum?”
Emanuel shook his head.
Ula was Elise’s pet “project.” As work on the blood plasma proteins that she had been hired to develop had become streamlined enough to seem downright routine, she had begun her own private experiment, using the same process to produce a baby goat whose milk would, hopefully, contain a different plasma protein—one that could be used to cure a rare but devastating blood disorder if she could develop it.
So far, Ula, the goat injected with this new genetic construct, had developed in sync with her peers. She suckled fiercely and played goofily and was every bit as shiny and glossy and healthy as any of the other transgenic goats. Last week Ula had hit nine weeks and had begun the routine injections of synthetic hormones to induce lactation. Which meant that by now the milk should be in. But there was nothing.
“That’s weird, isn’t it?” Elise asked.
“Unusual,” Emanuel corrected.
“What do you think it is?”
Emanuel shrugged. “It happens sometimes. It’s hard to say.”
“But you’re not giving up,” Elise said, feeling an unexpected pitter-pat of fear.
“No. Not yet,” Emanuel said in a way that was not very reassuring.
“Well, I believe in her,” Elise said, in what she had meant to be an ironically emphatic voice, but it came out sounding just as urgent and honest as she really felt.
Emanuel smiled wanly. “We’ll see what happens.”
When Elise arrived home she was stunned to find Claire Markowitz sipping a cup of tea with Chrissy in the backyard. The boys were puttering (or, in Nigel’s case, sitting) around with toy gardening tools, sifting, digging, and eating dirt, and Justin was throwing sticks over the fence at the neighbor’s dog.
“Hi,” Chrissy said, smiling as if there were nothing unusual about this. She did not get up from the table where she and Claire were sitting.
“Hi,” Elise said quizzically.
“Wow! Is it end-of-the day already? I had no idea!” Claire Markowitz babbled by way of greeting. “I didn’t mean to stay so long.”
Elise walked over and kissed Nigel and James on top of their heads.
“We forgot Justin’s lunch box over here so I came back to pick it up,” Claire continued.
There was a wounded yelp and bark from the other side of the fence as the good-natured mutt Justin had been throwing sticks at leapt away from a direct hit. Justin yowled with delight.
“That’s not nice, Justin. Stop that,” Claire said, rising.
She was wearing a loose-fitting, faux-African printed leisure suit and looked even more scattered than she had the other night. There was a smudge of black paint or dirt or something on her cheek.
“No!” Justin shrieked as she approached, which made both of the boys look over in surprise. Claire wrestled the stick out of his hand. “Come on, now, Justin, we’ve got to get home and see about dinner.”
“Do you want to stay?” Chrissy asked, and Elise shot her a fierce look.
“Oh, no, no—that’s all right. We’ve imposed enough already. We have to get home and feed poor Camembert, don’t we?”
Camembert? Elsie thought incredulously. Could this be that basset hound whose special raw food had appeared on Chrissy’s Google search?
“Stop by anytime,” Chrissy said graciously. “Will you come see us again?” she asked, leaning down to Justin, who glowered but nodded. “Oh, good. Next time we can make cookies.”
“Nice to see you,” Elise said, not exactly coldly, but certainly without warmth.
“Oh, right! Yes, of course!” Claire said. “So nice to see you again, Denise.”
“Elise,” Elise corrected.
“Oh, I’m so sorry! Of course! Of course…” the woman began a fit of harebrained apologizing as she made her way out, colorful muumuu, lunch box, and at least four handbags flapping, Justin dragging his heels.
“What was that all about?” Elise asked when Claire was safely out of earshot.
“Claire’s visit?” Chrissy said, raising her eyebrows in some approximation of surprise. Then she narrowed her eyes coldly. “She’s our friend, Elise. It’s not a sin to have a cup of tea with her.”
“I didn’t say—” Elise began, but Chrissy had already turned and, gathering up a few discarded sand toys, disappeared into the house.
“Come on, boys,” Chrissy said with a note of…what? Propri-etariness? “It’s dinnertime.”
It was later, on the phone to Laura, that Elise identified the feeling the incident had given her.
“It feels like I’m being punished,” she said. “Like I’ve done something awful—like lied or had an affair.”
“Why?” Laura’s voice sounded unduly alarmed. “Have you—”
“Of course not! That’s what I’m saying. I don’t understand what I’ve done.”
“Right. Of course.” Laura was silent for a moment.
Elise poured herself a glass of milk, wedging the phone between her shoulder and her ear. The boys were asleep. Chrissy was at her beloved book group.
“It has to do with this donor sibling thing, I think. Chrissy is mad that I don’t want to be a part of it.”
“Hmmm,” Laura said thoughtfully. “Why don’t you?”
“Because”—Elise shut the door to the fridge—“I’m not.”
“Not what?”
“A part of it.”
“Yes, you are,” Laura said. “They’re your boys too.”
“Not that way.” Elise stared at her reflection in the window. Short hair, sharp bones, glasses. Her eyes were inscrutable—dark pools of shadow. “Not biologically.”
“But—” Laura began, and then stopped. “Hmm,” she conceded. “But I’m sure Chrissy understands that that’s complicated…”
“I don’t know.” Elise sighed.
“Well, have you talked with her about it?”
“Of course! I mean, I’ve told her I don’t like seeing the boys as members of some weird biological pod, circling around this all-powerful, missing progenitor.”
“Well, okay. You’ve told her that—but I mean have you talked about what it means to you, personally?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Elsie said stubbornly. Although actually she did.
She had not wanted to share her feelings on this thorny subject with Chrissy. To give them voice would have dragged them out in all their divisive egotism, would have made them real. The fact was that there were times in those early days when Elise would come home to find Chrissy and the boys in bed sleeping like a litter of kittens, the room close and purring with their synced breaths, and she would be hit with a feeling of exclusion that was stronger than anything she had experienced since grade school. T
here were times even now when Elise felt the cold slap of outsiderness, coming upon the three of them crouched together on the living room floor building a block tower or constructing a train track. All at once she would feel her apartness from them—not only her workday absence, but the warm circle of blood that they shared, wholly unconnected to her own.
“I’m just saying it couldn’t hurt.”
“Really?” Elise said archly, and then sighed. “Anyway.”
They were silent for a moment.
“I’m sorry—I haven’t even asked—is everything—How are you doing?” Elise drained the glass of milk.
“Oh, fine. Fine. Just normal. Everything’s, you know, normal.”
Laura sounded overly breezy, actually. It was unlike her not to issue at least some small complaint.
Behind her, Elise could hear Chrissy’s key turning in the lock.
“It’s getting late,” Laura said. “Go to bed. You’ll feel better when you wake up.”
“Okay.” Elise felt a swell of warmth for her. Laura was a good friend. At least she had a good friend, even if Chrissy was falling out of love with her.
“Goodnight, sweetie.”
“Goodnight.”
She placed the phone back in its receiver and stood for a moment, watching Chrissy’s reflection in the window—sinking onto the sofa, pushing back her mane of hair, looking normal, the anger and hostility washed away. Where had it gone? Who was this newly volatile woman she was married to? And then, warily, maybe a little petulantly, she turned around.
“Beanie,” Chrissy said. “I’m sorry I was such a grouch.”
Chrissy was the only woman Elise had ever been with, a fact that was occasionally troubling to Chrissy but made perfect sense to Elise, who had not considered herself gay when they met. She had spent her life up to that point as a heterosexual, neither delighted nor disgusted by the opposite sex. In high school and college she had partaken in the requisite amount of hookups (largely with semi-outsiderish boys—acceptable, but not particularly appealing to the mainstream—or to herself, for that matter). And for the most part she had been uninterested in sex. She was willing to partake in it for all the obvious social reasons; it was really not that different from her willingness to smoke nasty-tasting cigarettes outside the Mini Mart in the humdrum Detroit suburb she had grown up in, or feign interest in bands whose music she found grating. It was all in the name of fitting in, which had for a stultifyingly long time been her primary MO.
And then she had started the PhD program in molecular biology and met Chrissy. It was hard to separate the two revelations of her life, both of which had occurred within two months. She had been scooping out portions of lasagna at a soup kitchen—an unlikely activity which she had been dragged to by Laura, who was experiencing one of her regular fits of volunteerism that she good-naturedly shamed her friends into joining. Chrissy had been the supervisor—the tireless women’s shelter advocate who turned the motley crew of volunteers into a functioning body of workers, and who, after the meal was served, went around from table to table checking in with the homeless women, asking after kids and husbands and job interviews with genuine interest.
Elise was spellbound by Chrissy’s quiet competence, her gentle voice and odd mix of humor and earnestness. She had shown up at the shelter every Sunday and Wednesday for the next few months. Until finally she had been able to name the attraction and admiration she felt for this woman, for what it was. Love. But Chrissy was a woman! The idea that she could love Chrissy was so radical it had filled her with a heady, terrifying excitement. The revelation had been cataclysmic, but at the same time utterly, smoothly perfect—like the clink of a delicate dominolike machinery slipping, one piece after another, into place. She only doubted it at all because it seemed too perfect to be right.
Chrissy, on the other hand, had come out at the very beginning of her wholesome, self-actualizing sojourn at Macalister College in Minnesota. She had been in two serious and long-term relationships with other women, had checked out the lesbian bar scene, participated in gay rights protests, and been a peer counselor to other, less confident gay youths. Her lesbian identity existed entirely apart from Elise. How could you not want that? she had pressed before they moved in together. Elise had had to work to convince her. Her love for Chrissy was a thing unto itself. It was everything, not part of a sexual experiment. In Chrissy’s presence Elise felt defined. She was no longer the mismatched collection of attitudes and experiences that made up her life, but something purer, truer, and more coherent: an individual. She saw more clearly. She thought more clearly. And for some reason—this was a central and sometimes disturbing mystery to Elise—Chrissy loved her. Chrissy gathered up the scattering of bits and pieces that had heretofore been Elise Farber, and palmed them into a logical and desirable shape.
And this firm and unifying grasp was the most certain thing in Elise’s life.
6
THE TASTE OF VICTORY WAS SWEET. Sweeter even than Jenny would have imagined. Lying on her desk was a white cafeteria plate containing a sleek lacquer-red box that looked like a cross between a compact and a cigarette case, modern but not mod, shiny but not slick. She pressed the hinge and opened it to find four neat lines of beautiful robin’s-egg-blue pills, each in its own little compartment. She lifted the red foil packet and slipped one of the pills onto her palm. It was the loveliest, most alluring color she had ever seen. And the size was perfect: not too big to swallow, but not the usual, apologetically minimized, wish-me-away size most psychopharm drugs came in. This was a pill that fairly sang of happiness.
She picked up the phone immediately, heart beating in her throat.
“Your baby’s here,” Watson’s strong voice boomed over the line two minutes later. “You like it?”
“It’s beautiful. I want to pop it in my mouth right now.”
Watson laughed.
“So was it worth hiring them or what?”
“You win. You win.”
She could imagine him shaking his head, throwing his hands up. The idea for the birth-control-style package had been hers exclusively. In the face of much resistance from her male colleagues, she had insisted Genron hire a top-notch consumer product design firm, one that had never been used by any pharma company before, to come up with a prototype. Her instruction: to create a pill and a package that did not connote “medicine.” Something that would make it easy to see if you had missed a day, and that replaced the stigma of antidepressants with the sly sophistication of “family planning.” And the firm had come up with several unimpressive ideas: a shiny yellow star-shaped pill in a Pez-dispenser-like container, a clear box full of tiny pink beads, and then a row of more typical beigy oblong pills in a case like a pencil, which Watson had favored. But now this: The fruit of her labor! The most beautiful pill and packaging she had ever seen.
“Who wants a pill the color of a Band-Aid?” she taunted.
“Not new mothers, apparently.”
“They don’t want a Band-Aid. They want happiness. They want bliss.”
“Whoa, there. You’re scaring me. No. But Jennifer…”
She could hear him shifting gears—here came serious Watson. Intimidating Watson. The Watson who had built this place to what it was today.
“…the focus groups loved it. Nine to one. I’ve never seen anything like it. Just—bam. So we’re gonna move this thing fast. The FDA boys are all over it and it shouldn’t be a problem. The factory’s ready to go. And you and me—we have things to discuss.”
“Things’?” Jenny’s heart beat a little faster.
“I’ll pass you back to Violet. You have lunch plans Friday?”
Jenny glanced at her calendar. Laura. “Nothing I can’t change.”
“All right then. You like steak?”
The other half of Jenny’s inspiration had not been executed yet. It was the ad campaign itself, which had come to Jenny quite literally in a dream. She had woken up one night around three a.m. with the idea in her h
ead, fully intact, as if it had been planted there—by God, or some computer chip, or some archetypal mechanism of the human brain. You deserve…she saw in bright, cheery yellow writing. You deserve to be happy, you deserve to enjoy your baby, you deserve to sleep…Wasn’t that what every middle-class American mother felt?
The writing was transposed over an image of a woman lying on the grass—an attractive woman, not too beautiful, but healthy and smart and happy, holding a baby aloft above her, smiling into its blissful, gurgling, cooing face. And then in bold, bright font, the list of things that she deserved: happiness, love, affection, the ability to be carefree, to sleep, to look good, to feel good—the ability, above all, to be herself.
Jenny was not unsympathetic. Hell, motherhood was nuts. It did not fit logically into the modern, well-educated, career-driven woman’s life. What preparation had they been given for the physical demand of it; the lifting and carrying and lugging? The sleep deprivation? The odd combination of worry and tedium that dominated every day? Maybe in simpler times, when women grew up learning how to cook and garden and keep house, to take care of brothers and sisters and grandparents—maybe then the routine of caring for a newborn had slid right into place. When a woman’s primary aspiration was to achieve reproductive potential—not some more elusive form of recognition, monetary or otherwise.
Jenny was sympathetic to this plight, but she was different. She had her mother to thank for this. Judy Callahan, bossy, demanding, domestic genius that she was, had schooled Jenny early in the day-to-day running of a household (dishes, laundry, casseroles—at age eleven Jenny had been responsible already for her own wash and for putting dinner on the table once a week). And she had trained her only daughter to help her with the day care she ran out of her living room.
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