by Leni Zumas
“Well, I would like, for once, to have dinner with you alone. Without the kids underfoot.”
“Just saying, it’s a luxury, whereas a cleaning service—”
“You mean like living rent-free is a luxury?”
He scrapes the olives off the cutting board into a bowl and lifts his beer bottle. “Is that gonna be held over my head for another six years?”
“How about, regardless, it’s saving us a lot of money?”
“That’s like saying ‘Be grateful you live in purgatory, because it’s cheaper than—’”
“Newville is hardly purgatory,” says the wife. The yogurt is stubborn; she licks her finger and rubs again. “I saw this thing on the road. A burnt little animal. I thought some kid had set it on fire. It was trying to get across to the other side.”
“As in the great hereafter?”
“Of the road. It was burnt within an inch of its life, but it was still moving—which felt so, I don’t know, brave?—and I wanted to help it, but it was already dead.”
Her husband slaps the breasts onto a foiled baking sheet. “I’ve never understood that saying, ‘within an inch of its life.’ Like there was some danger right next to its life but not quite touching it?”
“This little animal. It’s weird. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“Where’s the salt?”
“I think it was a possum. It was like it wasn’t accepting death—or didn’t even realize death was near. It kept going.”
“There you are, Salty McSalterton.” He dusts the chicken, slides the pan into the oven. “You know what’s so messed up about Ro’s sperm donors?”
The wife closes her eyes. “What?”
“They can totally lie on the application. All four grandparents died of cirrhosis, but dude claims they’re alive and healthy? Nobody’s checking. I’m surprised that somebody as neurotic as Ro isn’t worried.”
“She’s not neurotic.” But it pleases her to hear him say it.
“You don’t work with her.” He sets the timer. “She’s in full denial mode. Doesn’t realize what a nightmare it’s going to be. By herself? It’s a nightmare even where there’s two of you.”
“Didier, I want to go to counseling.”
He wipes his hands, hard, on a kitchen towel. “So go.”
“Couples counseling.”
“Told you before”—reaching for his beer—“I’m not a therapy person. Sorry.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Means that I don’t respond well to being blamed for things that aren’t my fault.”
Oh God, not his father again.
“I found someone in Salem,” she says, “who’s highly recommended, and they do late-afternoon appointments—”
“Did you not hear me, Susan?”
“Just because you had an incompetent therapist in Montreal thirty years ago? That’s a great reason not to try to save—” She stops. Licks her finger again, scratches at the yogurt on the stove.
“What? Save what?”
“Can you please just consider it? One session?”
“Why are people in the States obsessed with therapy? There’s other ways to solve problems.”
“Such as?”
“Such as hiring a cleaning service.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Since you clearly don’t want to do it yourself. Which”—he holds up a palm, nodding—“I get. I don’t feel like cleaning either, especially after being at work all day.”
“I’d much rather be at work all day,” she says, wondering, as the words settle in the air, if this is true.
“Then get a job. No one’s stopping you. Or go back to law school.”
“I wish it were that easy.”
“Seems pretty easy to me.” He is paper-toweling translucent pink shreds of raw chicken off the cutting board. “Honestly, Susan? Things aren’t that bad. I mean, yes, some things could be better. But I’m not gonna drive ninety miles to talk about how I should’ve bought you better presents on your birthday.”
Or any presents.
“But what about the kids?” she says. “They sense things—Bex asks—”
“The kids are fine.”
She takes a long breath. “Are you saying they wouldn’t benefit from our relationship improving?”
“It’s kind of interesting that you don’t give a fuck about my benefit. That douchebag brainwashed my mom, and she never stopped blaming me. Me, who was basically a child.”
“I know it wasn’t your fault he left, but—”
“The therapist didn’t even care why I hit him. Said it was ‘immaterial.’ Really, dude?”
“You broke your dad’s nose.”
“Well, he did a lot worse to me. Which is my point. The goal of therapy is to make you feel like dog shit in the name of insight. I’m gonna pay two hundred bucks an hour to feel like dog shit?”
“Mrs. Korsmo?” A small voice from the hall.
“Yes?”
“Sorry to bother you,” calls Mattie, “but John scratched Bex’s arm, and she’s pretty upset about it.”
“Did he break the skin?” shouts the wife.
“No, but—”
“Then can you please just deal with it?”
Mattie appears in the doorway, nervous. “Bex says she needs you.”
“Well, she doesn’t. Tell her I’ll be up to check on her later.”
“I’ll go,” says Didier. “Take the chicken out when it buzzes.”
“But we weren’t finished,” says the wife.
He follows Mattie toward the stairs.
The wife shoves the chicken-stained cutting board into the dishwasher. Picks olives off the countertop. Wipes stray salt into her palm.
She washes her hands.
Switches the timer off but keeps the oven on.
Ignites a burner on the gas stovetop to high.
Reaches in with a pot holder for a breast, which she drops onto the burner’s high open flame. It flares and spits and sizzles, the whole breast blue with fire.
Darkening, bubbling.
Charred and rubbery.
Little animal, burnt black.
Her mother’s hand over hers on the knife.
The lamb’s face coming off.
Upon tasting a new batch of skerpikjøt, her mother boasted she could name the very hillside on which the lamb had grazed. No one believed her, but it was wiser, with this mother, to applaud the sensitivity of her tongue.
This mother informed the explorer only two days before the wedding that she was to marry a man she’d never set eyes on, a widowed salmoner aged fifty-two. Eivør was old to be unmarried—nineteen.
THE BIOGRAPHER
Good Ship Chinese is full of teachers, thanks to a federal mandate that doubled the number of standardized tests in public schools. Only half the staff are needed to proctor this afternoon’s exams.
The bleached-blond waitress pours their waters and says, “I’ll give you a minute.” A hairy mole clings to her cheek.
Didier reaches to pinch something from the biographer’s collar. “You had oatmeal for breakfast.”
She bats his hand away. He kicks her under the table. In front of Susan she doesn’t touch Didier. Doesn’t want her thinking Does she want my husband? because the biographer doesn’t, and if she did, all the more reason not to arouse suspicion. Susan once told the biographer how the music teacher had flirted her tiny ass off with Didier at the summer picnic, and Bex, drawing at the kitchen table, said, “Did she put her tiny ass back on?” and Susan said, “I wish you’d be seen and not heard for once in your life.” The biographer was pleased to know that Susan could be an unskillful parent.
“How goes your saga,” says Pete, “of the lady adventurer?”
“Almost finished.”
“I have no doubt.” He flaps his placemat vigorously, airing himself. “Everyone needs a good hobby.”
“It’s not a hobby,” she says.
“The hair coming out o
f that mole,” says Didier, “has got to be three inches long.”
“Of course it’s a hobby,” says Pete. “You do it on weekends or vacations. The act of doing it brings you amusement but no profit or gain.”
“You guys want to order? I can flag down the hair taxi.”
“So if something doesn’t make money,” says the biographer, “it’s automatically relegated to hobby?”
The waitress returns. Her sprouting hair—quite long, quite black—for a moment mesmerizes all of them. The biographer, who bleaches her own upper lip every few weeks, warms with fellow feeling. She and Pete order Golden Lily platters, Didier the Emperor’s Consolation.
Didier leans forward to say, low: “Why don’t she just bleeding yank that thing out, eh?”
There is an egg bracing to burst out of its sac into the wet fallopian warmth. Today the ovulation predictor kit showed no smiley face; she’ll test again tomorrow. Back to Kalbfleisch for sperm, once she gets the smiley face.
“Pour me some more tea, Roanoke?”
She moves the teapot six inches toward him.
“I said pour, woman! Can I get a ride home, by the way? I left Susan the car today.”
“How were you planning on getting home if I didn’t drive you?”
Didier grins, beau-laid. “I knew you’d drive me.”
Bryan Zakile saunters over to their table and bellows, “These three are clearly up to no good! Want to hear my fortune? ‘You will leave a trail of gratitude.’”
“‘In bed,’” adds Didier.
“You said it, not me.”
“Not I,” mutters the biographer.
Bryan flinches. “Thank you, grammar Schutzstaffel.”
She drags her fork through the Golden Lilies. “I’m not the one who teaches English.”
“He don’t really teach English either,” says Didier. “His subject is the beautiful game.”
“If only that knee had held up,” says Pete, “we’d be watching Bryan on telly. Who’d you be playing for? Barça? Man United?”
“Hilarious, Peter, but I was All-Conference for three years at Maryland.”
“That is tremendously impressive.”
The biographer smiles at Pete. Surprised, he smiles back.
Sometimes he reminds her of her brother.
She can’t use the ovulation predictor test when she wakes up, because first morning urine isn’t optimal for detecting the surge of luteinizing hormone that augurs the egg’s release. She has to wait four hours to let enough urine accumulate in her bladder, and in these four hours she can’t drink too many fluids, lest she dilute the urine and skew the results. Instead of coffee, she toasts a frozen waffle and gnaws it unbuttered at the kitchen table. She stares at the bookstore photograph. The shelf where her book will go.
Between first and second periods, in a stall of the staff bathroom, the biographer inserts a fresh pee-catching tab into the plastic wand of the ovulation predictor kit and squats over the toilet. The instructions say you don’t need to absorb the whole stream, only five seconds’ worth, which is good because the opening spray goes wide of the stick. She has to keep moving the stick around under herself to find it. Count to five. Rest the stick on some toilet paper on the metal tampon receptacle, angled just so, to allow the caught pee to wend its way through the stick into whatever mechanism tests it for luteinizing hormone. Which takes a minute or longer.
She wipes her wet hands, pulls up her jeans, sits back down on the toilet. During this minute or longer, while the digital display blinks—it will turn into an empty circle or a smiley-faced circle—the biographer sings the egg-coaxing song. “I may be alone, I may be a crone, but fuck you, I can still ovulate!”
She checks: still blinking.
Woman who is thin and ugly. Withered old woman. Cruel and ugly old woman. Witch-like woman. Stock character in fairy tale. Woman over forty. From the Old Northern French caroigne (“carrion” or “cantankerous woman”) and from the Middle Dutch croonje (“old ewe”).
Still blinking.
Through the bathroom wall come shrieks of girls whose ovaries are young and juicy, crammed with eggs.
Still blinking.
What is the total number of human eggs in this building right now?
Still blinking.
How many of the human eggs in this building right now will get sperm pricked, cracked open, to produce another human?
She checks: smiley face!
Bloom of delight in her ribs.
I may be forty-two, but I can still fucking ovulate.
“Hello, yes, I’m calling because I got my LH surge today—Okay, sure…” Holding, holding. “Yes, hi, this is Roberta Stephens… Yes, right… And I surged today… Yeah… And I’m using donor sperm so I wanted to—Okay, sure…” Holding, holding, bell shrilling; that was the second bell; she’s late for her own class. “Okay… Yes, I’ve got more than one donor in storage, but I’d like you to use number 9072.”
Donor semen is frozen shortly after collection and thawed shortly before insemination. In between, millions of sperm lie arrested, aslant, their genetic material paused. Tomorrow morning, before she arrives, the clinic staff will thaw a vial of 9072 (Rock Climber Beautiful Sister) and spin its contents in a centrifuge to separate sperm from seminal fluid, wash the swimmers clean of prostaglandins and debris.
“See you at seven!” she tells the nurse, so excited her throat hurts.
Tomorrow at seven. At seven tomorrow. Tomorrow, in Salem, on a leafy little upmarket street, at the hands of a former tight end, the biographer will be inseminated.
If it is possible for you to come to me, little one, let you come to me.
If it is not possible, let you not come, and let me not be shattered.
She can hardly sleep. Is holding a jar of some sort of face cream that contains opiates, and is going to cook it and shoot it, and is hunting in her mother’s bathroom for cotton. She needs to hide the gear from her mother. But she also is her mother, and the person with the jar is Archie. “What happened to the cotton balls?” he asks. “All gone. Use a filter.” “But I’m out of cigarettes!” says Archie. “Maybe I have some,” says the biographer.
She wakes before the alarm. Glass of water, her brother’s old green parka, her mother’s bike-lock key on a chain around her neck. The biographer is an atheist, but she doesn’t rule out helpful ghosts.
“Archie’s the charmer,” said their mother. “You’re the wise one.”
She leaves her apartment building in the briny dark, sea crashing, car freezing. No other cars on the cliff road. Her headlights sweep the rock wall, the fir tops, the black ocean flecked with silver, same road and water the baby will see one day.
7:12 a.m.: Signs in at the front desk. Takes her place among the silent, rock-fingered women.
7:58 a.m.: Nurse Jolly leads her to an exam room, where she strips below the waist and climbs under the paper sheet. Her heart is going twice as fast. Do quickened beats affect fertilization? In last night’s dream, she—as Archie—planned to shoot up into her chest, left-hand side, because she’d been told a “heart direct” made the pleasure immense.
8:49 a.m.: Kalbfleisch stands beside the biographer’s spread legs and stirruped feet and shows her a vial. “Is this the correct donor?” She squints: 9072 from Athena Cryobank. Yes. “The count on this vial was quite good,” he says. “Thirteen point three million moving sperm.”
“Remind me what the average is?”
“We want the count to be at least five million.”
He inserts a speculum into the biographer’s vagina. It does not exactly hurt—more of a serious pressure—then he opens her cervix, and the pressure turns teeth clenching. A plastic catheter is guided through the speculum into the biographer’s uterus. The nurse hands Kalbfleisch the syringe of washed semen, an inch of pale yellow. He injects it into the catheter, depositing the semen at the top of her uterus, near the fallopian tubes.
The whole thing takes less than a minute.
“Rest for a bit, hon,” says Nurse Jolly. “You want any water?”
“No thanks, but thank you.”
In-breath.
She is so, so scared.
Out-breath.
Either this has to work or she has to be matched with a bio mother in the next two months. After January fifteenth, when Every Child Needs Two goes into effect, no adopted kid will have to suffer from a single woman’s lack of time, her low self-esteem, her inferior earning power. Every adopted kid will now reap the rewards of growing up in a two-parent home. Fewer single mothers, say the congressmen, will mean fewer criminals and addicts and welfare recipients. Fewer pomegranate farmers. Fewer talk-show hosts. Fewer cure inventors. Fewer presidents of the United States.
In-breath.
Keep your legs, Stephens.
Out-breath.
She lies perfectly still.
In high school she ran for hours every day of track season—had muscles then, had stamina. She competed in the four hundred and the eight hundred, and though not a star, she was decent, even won a few meets her senior year. Archie, tenth-grader, pressed himself against the chain-link fence and cheered. Her parents sat in the bleachers and cheered. Her mother made celebratory dinners with the biographer’s favorite foods: green-chile scrambled eggs, peanut-butter pie. How she loved the laden table, the lamps, the spring-night crickets, Mama before she got sick, Archie in his skull T-shirt balancing a spoonful of pie on his head. In the beam of their attention she was tired and proud, a warrior who had slung her arrow into every heel she aimed for.
If it is possible for you to come to me, let you come to me, and I will name you Archie.
In the car, she opens the ziplock of pineapple chunks, whose bromelain is supposed to encourage a fertilized egg to implant itself in the uterine wall. It will be five days before the egg is ready to implant, but eating pineapple comforts the biographer. Its sweetness is strong and good against the bitter, spitty fear.
Five days. Two months. Forty-two years. She hates the calendar.
