Look Alive Out There

by Sloane Crosley

  *

  There’s an old riddle that goes like this: A father and son are in a car accident. The father dies instantly, and the son is taken to the nearest hospital. The doctor comes in and exclaims, “I can’t operate on this boy!”

  “Why not?” the nurse asks.

  “Because he’s my son,” the doctor replies.

  How is this possible?

  The riddle is a good litmus test for how we’re doing as a society. How quickly does the person being riddled to register that the doctor is a woman? It’s hard to imagine a grown individual being confounded by this brain buster—even the language, “nearest,” hints that everyone in the riddle has a familiarity with one another—but I remember being stumped by it as a kid. Probably because my coterie of medical advisers consisted of a pediatrician, an allergist, and an orthodontist, all of whom were men. I was too busy cracking my teeth on hard candies, oblivious to the patriarchy.

  But even knowing what I know now, I still don’t understand the doctor’s reaction. I don’t get the setup. Why can’t a mother operate on her son? Obviously, it’s not ideal. Her judgment could be obscured by emotion. Someone else really should do it. But I always picture the riddle taking place in a rural town, where she is the only doctor on duty. I imagine her pacing the hall while her son bleeds out on a gurney. All because she can’t pull it together. She just seems like a bad doctor and a hysterical woman, which transforms the riddle from feminist to sexist. Was this lady responsible enough to have a child in the first place? Or did she absorb so many outside opinions that she failed to develop one of her own?

  *

  By thirty-six, I was expending more energy avoiding the topic than it would have taken to address it. Like leaving instructions for houseguests about a “tricky” showerhead when all parties would be better served by a new showerhead. But by ignoring the conversation, I had put myself in conversation with the conversation. I was tired of maintaining the protective cloak of apathy I had once valued. There’s a term for this in economics: diminishing marginal utility. It’s the only economics term I know and I probably retained it for times like this, for understanding the moment when more of what used to make you happy no longer does.

  Which is how I found myself, on an idle Wednesday, at a fertility center located high above Columbus Circle. I came in for a general check on my fecundity, a medical morsel to tide me over. Was I broken or not broken? This was not a debate. This was a quiz. I could take a quiz.

  I sat in a waiting room with a nice view of Central Park, staring at a woman across from me as she knitted a baby blanket. At first, I dismissed this as wearing the band’s T-shirt to the show. But as I watched her needles go back and forth, clacking over each other, I became hypnotized. Her pain was so palpable, it was as if the needles were the one thing tethering her to polite society. If she dropped them, she might start screaming. I felt as if I could walk over, press my finger against her forehead, and sit back down. Even as I pitied her, I was jealous. She knew what she wanted and thus had the capacity to be disappointed when she didn’t get it. Whereas I was afraid that by the time I knew, there would be nothing to hope for.

  More women came in with husbands or partners or mothers, each pair looking more solemn than the last. This whole place was a six-word Hemingway story. The receptionist handed the newly arrived their informational folders. On the cover of the folder were tiny baby pictures arranged to form the face of one giant baby. This struck me not only as a Chuck Close rip-off, but as poor folder design. For patients like me, pictures of babies were intimidating and foreign. For patients like the blanket knitter, pictures of babies should come with a trigger warning. The whole reason I had selected this place to begin with was because their website featured the words Let us help you meet your family goals superimposed over a young couple playing with a Labrador. Turns out they lure you in with the promise of puppies right before they stick an ultrasound wand up your vagina.

  An ultrasound screen is something you just don’t see outside of a doctor’s office. You have never owned a TV shaped like the trail of a windshield wiper. So it’s no wonder we cross-stitch meaning with the image before us. Ultrasounds are the place where gender makes itself known, where one heartbeat becomes two, where one heartbeat becomes none. It’s package tracking for your unborn child. It was therefore unsettling to look at mine and see a wasteland of static. I was a healthy woman who wasn’t pregnant, so seeing anything in there, even an extra set of house keys, would have been disturbing. But how strange to look at a live cam of one’s own uterus and confront emptiness.

  The technician left me in the dark as I got dressed. I felt a hollow ball of grief expand in my body, but I couldn’t say what for. I couldn’t even say if it was real. Should I cry at the frozen tundra of my insides? Where had I put my underwear?

  After the exam, I sat across from the fertility doctor in her office while, stone-faced, she reviewed my test results. On the doctor’s desk were three glass sculptures, each with a colored jellyfish blown into the center.

  “Those are funny,” I said.

  “Oh,” the doctor deadpanned, “they were a gift.”

  Their bright tentacles so clearly resembled fallopian tubes; I was sad for this woman who surrounded herself by people who had failed to point this out to her. She closed my chart. Then she began explaining the reproductive process from scratch. As in from conception. I nodded the way I nod when a waiter details the steak special even though I don’t eat meat. At long last, she alighted upon the reason for my visit. On a Post-It note, she drew a graph, pitting age against biology. Her pen marked the precipitous late-thirties fertility drop-off so sharply, she drew on her own desk.

  “You look okay,” she said, “but you might want to consider freezing your eggs.”

  I promised her I would think about it, intending to drop the idea into my vast bucket of denial.

  In the elevator, I received a “What are you up to?” text from my boyfriend. I had not told him about this appointment, not because he would get squeamish but because he wouldn’t. My main purveyor of external pressure—the opposite sex—had temporarily, perhaps permanently, closed for business. Here was a man who was open with his emotions, receptive to mine, and initiated casual discussions about the future. It was extremely disorienting. I wasn’t sure I knew how to have an opinion about this without blaming everyone else for making me have it.

  “At doctor’s appt,” I texted.

  “Because you’re totally knocked up?” he wrote back.

  I smacked straight into the elevator doors before they had opened, like a bird who hasn’t figured out how to get out of its cage.

  *

  In addition to being a questionably necessary procedure—contrary to popular belief, one’s uterus does not spontaneously turn into a bag of stale tortilla chips at age forty—freezing your eggs costs a fortune. The cost is so high, I hesitate to state it here because I have worked hard to suppress the pain. You can easily find out for yourself by reading one of the many articles I refused to read. The best way I can describe the financial impact is this: I had a friend in college who had two hundred CDs stolen from his dorm room during our freshman year. He had learned to accept this loss but each time he heard a song he’d forgotten he once owned, he’d crumble into a depressed lump. For years, he basically couldn’t go anywhere music might be played. This is exactly how I feel about the egg-freezing bill.

  What egg freezing does is give you the illusion of a plan. An expensive illusion. I’ve paid far less to eat mushrooms and stare at a bedspread for an hour. But the women with the resources to pony up the cash are buying themselves time, which is, arguably, the most valuable commodity on the planet. Waylaying the inevitable doesn’t come cheap. For me, time was the side dish. The entrée was brain space, the ability to release the pressure of making a decision that would impact the rest of my life and, potentially, the life of an additional human. When I looked at it this way, it almost seemed like a bargain.

&
nbsp; Before you embark on the egg-freezing process, you have to take a class. The class is mandatory but you have to pay for it, which is a bit of a boondoggle. We arrived in the order of what kind of parent we would be. Women who got there early and sat up front would be the kind of moms who put notes in their children’s lunch boxes. Women who sat in the second row would remember it was Purple Shirt Day the night before and do a stealth load of laundry. Women who sat in the back would let their kids drink in the basement. I consoled myself that at least I was not the very last person to arrive. I was the second to last. But then I had to borrow a pen from my neighbor, which set me back.

  We were each given flesh-colored cushions reminiscent of ergonomic mouse pads. We had to practice pinching them as if they were our own skin, and injecting them with empty vials of medication. All the cushions were Caucasian. I don’t know the exact statistics regarding the racial profile of women who get their eggs frozen but I can guess. I suppose there’s an argument to be made, albeit a weak one, that it’s easier for beginners to practice on something pale, to see the contrast of the needle on a mound of white-girl pseudo-flesh. But since such a creature does not exist in nature, I don’t see the harm in manufacturing them all in violet or mint green.

  The women in my class were advanced fertility chess players. I couldn’t understand how they knew so much already. They were eight moves ahead, their hands flying skyward as they asked questions about dosages and hormone levels and how soon they could pop their frozen eggs back from whence they came. One lady asked if it was okay to have sex during the process, which is just showing off. Overwhelmed by the naked want they all shared, I stress-pinched my flesh wad. My heart raced from peer pressure. In the weeks to come, as I laid out needles like a mad scientist, consulting YouTube videos for each injection, experiencing foul moods that dripped down to my heart like black syrup, I would amuse myself by saying, “The real bitch of this whole thing is that they made us take that fucking class.”

  The only useful tidbit I learned is that the female reproductive system is just as dog-eat-dog as a man’s. Every month, all the eggs vie to be the power egg. This queen-bee egg forces the other eggs to sulk in the corner, presumably with such bad self-esteem issues you wouldn’t want one of them as your kid anyway. I had no idea that eggs were competitive like sperm. This is something we should toss into middle school health curriculums, if only for the sociological implications. My entire life, I have assumed that eggs were passive creatures, inert trophies to be earned by ambitious sperm. I blame Woody Allen.

  The first step in egg freezing is to hormonally democratize this dictatorship. You inject vials of drugs into your abdomen to persuade that one egg to let everyone have a chance. At the end of two weeks, you are briefly knocked out while your eggs are popped in a freezer. And that’s that … with one tiny snag. Whatever symptoms of PMS a woman has when she normally gets her period exist in proportion to that one egg. One egg’s worth of headaches. One egg’s worth of bloating. One egg’s worth of wondering why everyone in your life is such a goddamn disappointment.

  The average egg-freezing cycle produces between eight and fifteen eggs.

  You do the math.

  *

  But first, the drugs.

  The hormones alone can cost up to two thousand dollars. When I unleashed this information on my therapist, she told me she had another patient who had just undergone the process and had leftover medication. I was delighted. Especially given how much therapy costs. I had always assumed that if I bought mass quantities of drugs on the black market, they would be recreational in nature, but here we were. My therapist—our therapist—introduced us over e-mail and we arranged a time for me to come pick up the stuff.

  The woman was an Indian lawyer who lived in an apartment in Chelsea, a large doormanned co-op with aggressive lobby art and confounding elevator buttons. The interior of her apartment could only be described as palatial. No wonder she was giving away drugs like candy. When I stepped inside, I was asked to remove my shoes and handed a pair of “guest slippers.” In my house, I only have “guest hotel shampoos.” She had changed into leggings and a T-shirt after a long day of deploying her expensive education. We stood on either side of her kitchen island.

  “So, how long have you lived here?” I asked.

  “About three years,” she said. “I know it doesn’t look like it.”

  “No, no,” I said, “it definitely looks like it.”

  Visible through her open bedroom door was a large flat-screen television. The Bachelor was on.

  “I moved in after my divorce.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Cool.”

  It’s hard enough to make small talk with a stranger without knowing you have the same therapist. There’s a subtle jockeying for sanest. What you’re both really thinking is: What are you in for?

  “So you need three boxes of the Menopur and two of the Follistim, right?”

  The top half of her body was obscured by the open refrigerator door as she stood on her tippy-toes.

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

  “You’re aware that I’m selling these, right?”

  “No,” I said, “I was not aware of that.”

  “It’s at least a thousand dollars’ worth of medication.” She stated the facts.

  “That’s why I was so grateful,” I said, trying to laugh it off. “This is awkward.”

  “I couldn’t figure out why you were being so nice about it,” she mused.

  “Nice” didn’t begin to describe it. In our e-mails, I had referred to her as a “lifesaver” and a “saint.” I told her she was “doing her good deed for the year.” I was in for a financially and physically arduous ride, and the idea that a stranger with a heart of platinum would be so generous had renewed my faith in the capacity of women to support each other.

  Later that evening, I went back and examined our correspondence. Sure enough, she had clearly listed prices next to the name of each medication. The numbers were unmistakable. The issue was, she had left the dollar signs off. That’s how many boxes of drugs there are—it takes real time to type the dollar signs. Because I had never done this before, I assumed all those numbers were milligrams or micrograms or marbles. But the e-mails were not the point. Why would I assume a total stranger would part with such expensive items for free?

  I wanted so badly to find just one loophole of ease, my subconscious made it so. I immediately began making justifications to myself about how I was right and she was wrong. She had found something incongruous about my appreciation and had ample opportunities to clarify the situation before I was standing in her kitchen. Not to mention the fact that these drugs had been in her possession for almost a year and would expire in a month, which meant she needed to find a buyer pronto. Selling them online would be illegal. If I knew that, she definitely knew that. Would she rather consign them to the dumpster or donate them to a clinic than give them to me? Absolutely she would.

  I explained that if I was going to pay full price for nearly expired drugs, I might as well just be an upstanding citizen about it and go through a pharmacy.

  “Well,” she said and shrugged. “Good luck with it.”

  No negotiation. Case closed. She wasn’t doing it to be spiteful. She wasn’t even annoyed, as I surely would have been if the slipper were on the other foot. She was doing it because it was time to draw a line in the sand. She had gone through two rounds of egg freezing with negligible results. Her husband had left her for a younger woman. She was forty-four, spent her days thinking about fairness on behalf of other people, and she felt owed. And she was owed. Just as every woman who smiles through a lifetime of complicated biology and double standards is owed. But tonight, I was going to be the one to pay her.

  On the television in the bedroom, a tearful girl told the camera how much she regretted “putting herself out there.” I wondered if I should tell my therapist about this incident or if this woman would beat me to it.

  *

>   Only the Upper West Side, a neighborhood that caters to the yet-to-be-born and the on-their-way-out, would be host to a pharmacy that specializes in both fertility meds and compression socks. I stood in line, eyeing bars of Reagan-era soap and a stunning variety of pastel candies. I tried to imagine the woman who had spent the past nine decades figuring out exactly which flavor of pastel candy she liked the best. When it was my turn, I relinquished my credit card to a cashier, who had to pry it from my fingers. As money had apparently ceased to have any meaning, I selected a couple of overpriced hair clips while he filled a supermarket bag. A few customers cast sympathetic looks in my direction. What would have to be so wrong with you that you’d walk away from a prescription counter with a shopping bag full of drugs?

  “You want me to throw an ice pack in there?” asked the cashier.

  “Why not?” I said. “Go crazy.”

  None of the medication required refrigeration unless you were going to store it for an extended time, and so long as you didn’t do anything brilliant like rest it on a radiator. But at this juncture, I would take anything I didn’t have to pay for. Do you want me to throw a patty of petrified horse shit in there? Sure, why not? You only live once.

  I went straight home, put the bag on my kitchen counter, tossed the ice pack in the freezer, and threw on a dress. It was New Year’s Eve. I was putting the “new year, new you” diets to shame. I would start the year as a grown-up card-carrying member of my gender, as someone who makes proactive health decisions and cowers before the reality of the future, as woman-shaped flesh wad.

  The next day, I decided to familiarize myself with the drugs. I stood in my kitchen across from the bag, staring at it. But when I got up the nerve to peer inside, there were no drugs. Just the syringes, the needles and a portable toxic waste container for disposing of them. I touched the bottom of the paper, thinking vaguely of trapdoors. I could feel the anger spread across my skin. The cashier had forgotten to put my entire order of medication in the bag. Naturally, such a thing had never happened with a five-dollar prescription but of course it had with the fifteen-hundred-dollar one.