by Meg Wolitzer
“Our eggs aren’t worth $7,000,” said Amy. “We’re all too old. They wouldn’t even do the ultrasound. They’d use the ejector seat in the waiting room.”
“Oh, they would always have rejected me on the spot,” Jill said lightly, and a couple of the others looked up, startled, suddenly remembering the infertility anguish that she had gone through.
“Sorry, Jill, sorry,” they intoned, but Jill just waved their apologies away and kept on working.
“I always feel a little insulted,” said Karen. “Are our eggs so terrible? So defective that there’s really no one who would want them? They’re better than nothing.”
“You know,” Amy said, “if it makes you feel any better, I’ll buy your eggs. And I’ll give you cash. Twenty-eight dollars and fifty cents.”
All the women laughed, and they returned to the quiet shuffling of envelopes, but the subject of aging and failing and losing fertility and sexual vibrancy had been raised and couldn’t be dropped now. Over time their bodies had changed, the parts loosened, unscrewed a little, and once every so often, a crazy, mixed-up hair poked out from chin or nipple, and fertility was rapidly on its way to a complete fade-out in the imaginable future—if it hadn’t faded out already.
“But the thing is,” Karen said suddenly, “that’s partly why we have kids. In addition to perpetuating the human race, and the fulfillment factor, and all that. Because even if you can’t be young, you can be attached to someone who is.”
The other women murmured that this was true. Someone said, “The children are everything,” and there was a moment of quiet emotion, as each of them thought of their offspring, those idealized, miniaturized versions of themselves. Roberta, too, was made silent with reverence when she thought of Harry and Grace, the last of her really ambitious productions before her actual art had been stopped by some invisible force.
She thought of the children again now, while she was on the road in South Dakota. Nathaniel had said that he would take care of everything in her absence; the kids could go home with friends in the afternoon, and he would pick them up when he left work. She knew, of course, that he would forget to send Grace with money to buy chips from the vending machine at school and that he would neglect to help Harry study for his vocabulary test of words pertaining to the text of Charlotte’s Web (“arachnid,” “boastful,” “porcine,” “mortal”). She knew these lapses, but she already forgave him for them.
Nathaniel, at fifty-two, a full decade older than the other husbands, was lost inside his long days of work and his persistent, almost defiant love of the puppets he had created himself back when he was a much younger man. He had mastered their voices and mannerisms in front of a mirror, and then, many years later, had employed his own children as tough-nut critics. The presence of the puppets had diminished for him, but still he stayed with them. Sometimes Roberta knew that she had pulled Nathaniel into a big and complicated life he had not asked for; left alone, he would probably still be living with Wolf Purdy either in their old shared Cobble Hill apartment or else upstate, where Wolf lived now, the two men smoking pot and tinkering in an unheated puppet-making studio all day, with snips of felt and caramelized glue guns on all surfaces, and plastic googly eyes crunching underfoot.
But the love of a woman had transfigured Nathaniel into a responsible family man and a grindstone husband. True, he remained an intermittent marijuana smoker, though never when the children were awake or around. There used to be a time when Roberta and Nathaniel would frequently smoke together and fall into bed. A couple of times, early on, they had taken Ecstasy, which had created a crisping and glorifying of everything that Roberta saw and touched, so that she had gasped in appreciation for hours and thought that the world itself was like an art exhibit with interconnected galleries that you could walk through forever. But that sensation had ended after they had children.
“We can’t do Ecstasy now,” she had said to Nathaniel recently, when he had suggested it. “Poor us,” he’d said with a shrug. But it had seemed, she thought, to be the truth: They couldn’t do any sort of ecstasy now, or perhaps ever again.
Nathaniel had taken it upon himself to find a day job that actually brought in a salary and benefits. He never complained about it, except in the same cursing, low-level way he complained about everything. But he was getting too old for this job; most of the cameramen at the station were young, strapping guys. More to the point, she knew that it must be difficult for him that puppetry had not worked out in a substantive way and that during the week he was left in the netherworld of work he didn’t care for. Yet his mournful, doglike decency was always endearing, and there remained a strange symmetry in the dull and plodding ways they spent their weekdays. By which she meant that both of them were mostly unfulfilled. Both of them, she thought when she was really feeling sorry for herself, were losers. She would never insult Nathaniel by saying this to him; but she could already see far ahead into the rest of their life together, as though their loserhood provided them with a spectacularly clear view of the downward slope.
Now, after a phone call to Nathaniel and reassurance that life at home would continue on just fine without her, Roberta started to enjoy the nervous drive across South Dakota, along the broad highways with the expressive, blunt tableaus in the distance. She was relieved to be away from the ordinary routine of her daily life: the spackling of peanut butter onto bread; the low roar of conversation in the Golden Horn—the disquisitions upon their children’s homework load, and the banter about politics, and Amy Lamb’s monologues about Penny Ramsey.
Goodbye to all that, Roberta thought as she drove. She reached Lorton in about three and a half hours, the GPS urging her gently in the right direction, and she found herself leaving the wide highway and going down a service road that narrowed into nothingness. The apartment complex where Brandy Gillop and her mother lived revealed itself from an outcropping of sparse, scorched trees. The two-story stucco building of connected units was so dispiriting that there was no way to imagine framing it vividly and concisely for the other women in a couple of days at the Golden Horn.
As the car approached, Brandy Gillop came outside, and Roberta saw that she was a very pretty teenager, her hair cut in a birdlike, feathered way that could be found almost everywhere in the country except in New York City. Though she was wearing a down jacket, she was visibly thin, self-conscious, unhappy. Her mother, Jo, a starker, ropy version of her daughter, came out of the apartment door behind her.
“Hello,” said the mother when Roberta got out of the car. “You came a long way. I guess you want to use the ladies’ before you get going.”
“Pardon?” said Roberta. “Oh, right.” She laughed at her own incomprehension, the sound trilling out foolishly, and then she went inside to use the bathroom, trying not to look at the rooms and see the despair that she thought would surely be in evidence. Of course, despair was probably in evidence in Roberta’s small apartment too. But this was different.
When she came out, Jo Gillop offered her a glass of diet soda, which Roberta thanked her for profusely, embarrassed by the heightened and false sentiments of the eager New York liberal Jewish woman but knowing no other way to speak. Was it better to stay home and never to have come here but just to send money in various directions, as some of her friends did? Karen and Jill wrote jumbo checks every year to the hungry and the disadvantaged and the homebound with AIDS, and sometimes they sat on benefit committees that made life better somewhere far from the benefit’s banquet rooms and gilded bamboo chairs. But Roberta had no extra money to send to anyone, and she had been eager to come to South Dakota. Yet now, in this small kitchen, her throat caught, and she thought she seemed embarrassing, that she was embarrassing.
But maybe it was in her head. The girl’s mother was friendly, tired, thankful, and the daughter was shy to the point of strangeness, but neither of them mocked her. There was no irony to this moment, and in its absence Roberta felt confused. How should she behave? Which part of her personal
ity was she meant to show?
“Well,” she said brightly, “I guess we ought to head off now.”
“You’re not too tired?” Jo Gillop asked, and Roberta was touched by her show of concern, but then thought, Oh, of course, she doesn’t want me falling asleep at the wheel and killing her daughter. She tried to imagine letting little Grace drive partway across a state with a stranger, and of course it was not something she could envision at all. As though her own child were more valuable than this one.
“I’m wide awake,” Roberta told Jo. “And completely ready.” She was wound up and caffeinated from motel coffee and could have driven straight through to Minnesota and even on into Wisconsin without showing signs of exhaustion. Jo and her daughter Brandy hugged goodbye and whispered words to each other that Roberta could not hear, and then Roberta got back into the car. Oddly, she had not imagined that the girl she would be driving would sit beside her. For some reason, she had seen herself as the abortion chauffeur, with her passenger sitting mutely behind her in the car. The idea of conversation had not really occurred to Roberta, but now, as Brandy slid into the passenger seat, Roberta felt panicked about what they would possibly talk about for so long.
“So off we go,” she said, turning the key. The mother still stood by the front door, as if making sure that Roberta actually knew how to drive. In anxiety about this, Roberta put the car in neutral by mistake and stepped on the gas. “Oh, fuck,” she said. Then, “Excuse me.”
To which Brandy responded, softly, “I’m taking driver’s ed next year.”
“Apparently I could use a refresher course,” Roberta said. “Maybe I could come to your school and take a class.”
Brandy looked at her, considering, then said, “I think you’re out of the age range.”
“I think you’re right.” Roberta swung the car around. In the rearview mirror, the girl’s mother stood with her arms wrapped around herself, and then she went back inside. Roberta got the car back onto the road. There was silence for a moment, and then she said, “I know this is a difficult day.”
“It’s all right.”
“I’m sure you wish your mom could have taken you.”
“She signed the consent form.”
“Yes. But this has got to be hard.”
“Yeah. You’re nice to do this,” said Brandy. “To fly out here and drive all this way. My mom wanted me to be sure and say that.”
“Thank you.” Then, impulsively, Roberta said, “I had an abortion too. When I was in art school.”
“Oh.”
“It was a long time ago. If it means anything to you, I hardly remember it anymore.”
What she did still remember was that there had been no consent form, no drive across an enormous state. The boy who had gotten her pregnant was a tall, angular art student from Miami named Seth Brennan who made wall-sized paintings that resembled antique maps. He had become quite successful later on. There had been a diaphragm involved, she recalled, but when Roberta thought about it afterward, she realized that she had sometimes forgotten to apply the spermicidal jelly.
Roberta had had her abortion at a clinic in downtown Providence, accompanied by Cindy Skye, and that night she’d lain in bed in her off-campus apartment drifting a little on Percocet while her friends drank beer and played “Would You Rather?” in the living room. Once in a while someone poked in a head to check on her. By the next morning she was back in her classes drawing, painting, and wearing goggles as she held a soldering iron. The abortion did not become the subject of any of her work. It did not transform into art but instead stayed a slightly difficult experience that became less difficult as she moved farther away from it in time.
Only after Grace and Harry were born did Roberta ever sometimes feel disturbed by it, thinking, Who would that blastula have become, if it had been left to grow and run its course? What child would it have been, a girl or a boy? What color hair? What favorite book to be read to at night? How much would I have loved that baby, if I had let the pregnancy continue? Oh, so much. And then she had stopped herself from such circular, obsessive thoughts, because they got you nowhere and only forced you into an untenable posture of sadness and regret.
She did not want Brandy to be besieged by regret, either, nor did she want her to be cavalier. She realized that, actually, she wanted to control the girl’s response in every way, to make her feel grateful for her help but also not suffer. In Roberta’s mind, she imagined that Brandy ought to seem slightly frightened but brave, yet really she seemed neither. She was ordinary, quiet, alert, prim, sitting in the passenger seat with her seat belt across her chest.
“What was it like?” Brandy suddenly asked.
“What was it like? Well, they give you Percocet. It’s not so bad. And I think the feelings that you’ll have…they’re complicated. Of course there’s a little sadness. A kind of mourning. It’s—”
“Art school.”
“Oh! What was art school like?” Roberta was surprised. “I loved it,” she said.
“You did? I want to be an artist too,” said Brandy. “I do abstracts.”
What were the chances of this? It was as though the reproductive rights agency had matched her with Brandy Gillop the way college housing matched roommates. “That’s wonderful,” Roberta said, and now quiet little Brandy was off and running, talking about art class and how Lorton High School was being overrun by a pervasive crystal meth problem and how she couldn’t wait to get out of there and eventually out of South Dakota too.
“And also, what’s it like to live in New York City?” Brandy asked.
“That’s a good question. It never really shuts down. That’s the city’s most distinguishing characteristic, I think.” Although, of course, at Roberta’s age, and with two kids, she hardly went anywhere late at night anymore like she used to do every weekend when she was single—she didn’t even want to—but she didn’t feel like telling this to Brandy.
The girl wanted to hear more about the city that never slept. Was it true that there were clubs that were like caves, into which you could descend and not have to leave until dawn? Was it true you could walk around in the middle of the night without being murdered? Was it wonderful? Was it beautiful? Was it everything she had read about?
So Roberta became a New York tour guide as she drove across the state of South Dakota. Brandy was easier to please than anyone Roberta had ever met. She had become guileless and open. When they stopped at an aggressively fragrant Cinnabon to use the bathroom, she said to Roberta, “Can I ask you something? “
“Sure.”
“Are you Jewish?”
It bothered Roberta slightly whenever this subject came up, because, really, the person who mentioned it was always at least indirectly referring to Roberta’s nose, which was too big for the dimensions of her face. But when Brandy asked the question now Roberta was touched and didn’t feel self-conscious or offended.
“Yep,” she said. “A hundred percent.”
Later, she would tell Nathaniel that she had been Brandy’s “first Jew,” and she decided that she liked this role. The girl knew nothing and had seen nothing. Her life was small and its edges well-defined, and then, suddenly, becoming pregnant had made it turn both more finite and less certain, and now she was relying on a stranger to drive her across the state so she could be an ordinary teenaged girl, so she could be returned to herself. Roberta was doing the returning, and this realization braced and awed her, as though it was the first selfless gesture she had ever made in her life.
THE GYNECOLOGIST at the clinic—young, overworked, female, in need of sleep—did not want to let Brandy be driven all the way back home that afternoon. She had seen plenty of women being ferried here from all over the state. “It would be good if she could stay somewhere local,” she told Roberta when Brandy was resting in a small back room. “She’s bleeding, and she vomited a little, and I’m not thrilled with letting her get into a car.”
Which was how the forty-year-old from New York City
and the sixteen-year-old from Lorton ended up in Roberta’s motel room for the night, Brandy lying on the bed while Roberta sat in the vinyl desk chair watching her sleep. She thought of all the times she had watched Harry or Grace sleep, sitting anxiously on the floor of their tiny room while one or the other of them was sick with a fever in the night.
Brandy napped now from all the IV Valium she’d been given. Her hair was run through with sharp blonde highlights, and her skin was veined at the temples. She slept with an open mouth all through the run of crime shows in the next room, accompanied by the sound of cars and trucks on the interstate and the shuffle of people walking up the shuddering wooden outdoor stairs to the second floor of the motel. Roberta wanted to bang on the door of the next room and go up the wooden stairs and even run out onto the shoulder of the interstate, telling everyone to be quiet, because a girl was trying to sleep.
Roberta remembered the kitchen in Lorton and the taste of the soda in her mouth and the overburdened mother going to her job at the Kubla Khan Casino. She imagined the abstract paintings of Brandy Gillop stacked up in her room, all the canvases signed neatly in her girlish hand in the lower right corner: Brandy G. Maybe they were actually terrific. Maybe Brandy Gillop had it—not only the talent but also the drive. Art appeared in the strangest places, just popping up out of nowhere, growing like an experiment with lima beans and damp cotton kept in a dark closet and suddenly, whoa, the cotton was overrun with curling sci-fi bean flora. Roberta felt herself excited at the idea of this girl’s art, which she imagined to be original, unschooled, authentic.
She would help Brandy; she would give her a significant leg up. The girl slept now as the motel room darkened behind its pale green curtains, and when she finally woke up in the evening, Roberta darted across the service road to fetch some food from a burger place, and they sat in the motel room eating supper together. The room was filled with a meaty fragrance and soft light, and there was no lack of conversation. Brandy wanted to hear more about art and galleries and the whole scene in New York City, and Roberta told her whatever she could, letting her own voice grow more instructive and sure.
