The Stork Club

by Iris Rainer Dart

  After she made him a sandwich she sat next to him at the kitchen table, watching him eat, and realized she was breathing differently, more easily, because he was back. She always felt safer when he was near. There were days when she had rushes of feeling as mawkishly in love with him now as she'd been at seventeen when they met, and at eighteen when they eloped. An act which had horrified all of their parents. Particularly Gracie, who still had what Barbara knew was a forced smile on her face every time she talked to her son-in-law.

  "You don't get to pick, Mother," Barbara remembered saying when her mother had referred disparagingly to Stan's straitlaced style.

  Today while he finished his sandwich, he held Barbara's hand, as if to say he felt the same romantic way about her, and she looked down at their two hands together. At the slim gold wedding bands they'd slid onto each other's fingers so many years ago she could barely remember life without him.

  "Are you okay?" he asked. That was always the question he used as an opening to check in with her, to find out if she needed anything or wanted to report any new worry, to discuss something about the children, her mother, or her practice.

  "Just my usual overwhelmed self," she said, picking up a thin slice of tomato that had fallen out of the sandwich onto his plate and eating it. "I'm worried that I'm working by rote, that nobody's getting the best I have to offer because I've taken on too much. I console myself all the time with the idea of an early retirement."

  "No chance of that. I know you. You go through this from time to time, usually after you've had a few weeks of twelve- and fourteen-hour workdays. Then something happens to excite you and you're off and running again. A few months ago you told me you were cutting back. Too many private patients, too many groups, and did you?"

  "Tomorrow I meet with a new family, and I'm meeting with another new referral on Friday," she said, feeling like a child confessing a misdeed.

  "I rest my case. Sometimes it's like that. All the personalities and needs and pain get inside you and you start living them. I understand, because I do it too. My clients rail and scream and yell, I get involved in it, and then they feel better and I walk around with indigestion." They both smiled. "You realize, by the way, that as far as I'm concerned you can quit working any time you want. Take a year to read the classics, another year to putter in the garden. But I say that secure in the knowledge that you won't." Barbara sighed. Probably he was right.

  "Of course we could have a baby," he said, putting the sandwich down and taking a big sip of some orange juice he'd poured over a glass of ice. It sounded like a joke, and she laughed an outraged laugh, sure the remark was just his way of getting sexy with her.

  "What?"

  "Just a thought," he said, and the look in his eye was mischievous.

  "A unique one for a couple who's approaching their twenty-fifth anniversary, wouldn't you say?"

  "I guess. But there was a baby next to me on the airplane on its mother's breast, and it was so adorable. I forgot how sweet they can be."

  "I hope you're referring to the baby and not the breast."

  He smiled. "Speaking of breasts, where's our son?"

  "I'm curious and not a little bit concerned about how you made that linkage," she said, laughing and leaning forward, using the corner of a napkin to wipe a crumb from his chin.

  "I mean, if he's out and not due to come back looking for money or food, the only two reasons he ever stops in, maybe I could reacquaint myself with yours."

  "I thought you'd never ask," Barbara said.

  Upstairs in their bedroom, they slid naked between the cool soft sheets of their bed and moved close to each other. A thrill of familiar warmth passed through her as she felt his chest pressed against her breasts. At first their kisses were tender but soon he touched her in the way he knew would arouse her, and she felt her own passion rise and wanted the release, wanted him inside her.

  Just as she was so familiar with his moves when they slow-danced, knowing that a certain lift of the shoulder meant they were about to turn or a certain swivel of his hip meant they would dip, when they made love she knew exactly at which moment he was going to move over her and then inside her, and she opened her entire being to his entrance, feeling the perfectness of their union.

  "Welcome home, my love," she whispered.

  Once their sex could make her weak with heat. Today as their bodies united it was as if some part of her own person had been away, and by the act of sex had been reconnected.

  A baby, she thought. The idea interrupted her reverie. He had to be kidding. But while he filled her insides with his hard self, and kissed her, then kissed her again, as their lips and their tongues collided and then entwined, she was counting behind his back on her fingers to be sure it was late in her cycle. Hoping it was a safe day, so that she could let her mind get lost in the joy of his return. Her love. How lucky it was that after so many years their sex was so delicious and loving and good.

  "Ma?"

  Barbara and Stan were in bathrobes, had just stepped out of the shower when Jeff got home.

  "Hi, honey. Dad's home. Come in."

  "Hey, Dad." Jeff pushed the bathroom door open and gave his father something that could be construed as a quick hug. "Can I take the car down to Orange County? There's this game down there some of my friends have been going down to play. It's called Photons and it's really amazing. It's like being inside a video game. You play on teams and you run around this maze in the dark and try to blast the other guys with your light beams."

  "Sounds like my idea of a good time," Stan joked.

  "Why don't you stay home, honey? You haven't seen Dad in over a week. Let's all have dinner together, eat at the dining room table, and . . . "

  "Relate?" Jeff said, giving her a sidelong give-me-a-break look.

  "Spoken like the son of a psychologist." Stan laughed.

  "Can we relate tomorrow night, Mom? I really want to do this."

  "I think it's all right if he goes." Stan looked at Barbara and grinned. "This is why people our age have babies.''

  "You two having a baby? Oh, cool," Jeff said over his shoulder, and he was gone.

  Later that night when Stan was turned away from her and she was snuggled close against him, knowing by his breathing he was seconds away from sleep, she said to his back, "How serious were you about babies?"

  She was relieved to hear his groggy reply, which was "Not serious at all."

  "Scottie, what's going on?"

  Scottie Levine, age four and a half, was dressed in a Ralph Lauren shirt, khaki pleated pants, a tan braided leather belt, tan socks, and brown loafers. And his haircut wasn't from the Yellow Balloon or any other kid's barbershop. It was shaped and gelled into some semblance of the haircut of a thirty-five-year-old man. He looked as if he should be carrying a portable phone and talking on it to his broker. Scottie was one of a group of children who had been nicknamed "chuppies" by one of Barbara's colleagues, children of yuppies.

  Even his sigh was adult, a strained exhale that sounded as if it meant he was resigned to the fate of being the child caught in the middle of a warring, acting-out couple and forced to be the sane one in the family. Barbara watched him pick up a small black bag of magnetic marbles he'd played with before in her office, spill them out and line them up so he could flick them the way he liked to, one at a time until they hit the molding at the far end of the room.

  "Do you go to your daddy's house to be with him?" Barbara asked. He nodded.

  "And is it fun to do that?"

  No response.

  "What do you and Daddy do on your days together?''

  "Nothing.'' He moved the marbles around, rearranging their order into groups of matching colors.

  "Do you stay at home and play together?"

  ''We play Frisbee."

  "Oh yes, I remember your telling me how good you're getting at Frisbee."

  "I sleep over too."

  "That must be great. Do you have your own room at Daddy's?"

>   He nodded, was silent for a while, then added, "And Daddy sleeps with Monica."

  "Who's Monica?"

  A shrug. Then Scottie turned onto his stomach, made a circle of his thumb and forefinger, and with a hard ping sent the first marble across the floor, and then another. When all twelve of the marbles were against the wall, Scottie put his elbows on the floor and his face in his hands and said in a near whisper, the way Barbara often heard many of the children she treated state their hardest truths, "I saw her tushie."

  "You saw Monica's tushie?" She spoke softly too.

  She could only see the back of Scottie's head as he nodded. "In the morning in my daddy's bed. She was sitting on top of him and they were naked."

  Now he put his face down on the floor and left it there for a long time, the gel on his hair glistening from the sun that poured in through the office window.

  "It must have made you feel funny to see your daddy and Monica naked."

  The little head nodded again, almost imperceptibly.

  "Was it sad because of your mom?"

  No answer. Barbara sat on the floor next to him. He was crying. When the hour was up she opened the door to the waiting room, and Scottie left with the Levines' pretty, Swedish au pair, who had been waiting for him. Barbara called and left a message on Ronald Levine's answering machine asking him to call her as soon as possible.

  She was late, due downtown in twenty minutes and it would take her at least half an hour to get there. She was rushing to get out of the office, so when the phone rang she decided to let the machine answer it. But she stood in the open doorway waiting to hear who was calling in case it was an emergency.

  Beep. "I'm Judith Shea, I was referred by Diana McGraw, who's in your Working Mothers group. I had two babies by D.I. and I need to talk to you as soon as possible. Here's my number."

  Barbara pulled a pad out of her purse and jotted the phone number down, then locked the office door and rushed out to the parking lot to her car. D.I., she thought. D.I., and for an absent minute as she looked at what she'd written, she thought the caller was being strangely coy and giving her the baby's father's initials, but then she laughed at herself as she made the turn out of her office parking lot and realized what the letters actually meant.

  3

  THERE WAS a kind of glow around Judith Shea as she sat on the floor of the reception area nursing her baby. She was one of those women whose look Barbara always envied. Skin that was a naturally peachy color no cosmetologist in the world could ever recreate, green eyes so bright they might have been ringed with liner, though she wasn't wearing a drop of makeup. Her thick shiny auburn hair was cut bluntly in a perfect bob. Barbara realized with embarrassment that her own unconscious prejudice had made her assume that a woman who used donor insemination to conceive a baby would be homely.

  The nursing baby looked over the full round breast at Barbara with eyes that matched her mother's, while her cherubic sister, a toddler girl with red ringlets, was asleep on the love seat. "We got here a little early," Judith said. "Jillian fell asleep. I hate to wake her."

  "Don't move," Barbara said and hurried into her inner office to get a pad and pen. "You're my last family of the day, so there's no reason why we can't talk right here," she said, returning to sit across from Judith in a way that accommodated her own straight black wool skirt.

  "So let's see. Where do I start? I was thirty-six years old with no boyfriend and not a whole lot of dates either. In fact, my friends at work always kidded me that Salman Rushdie went out more than I did. But I always had a powerful craving to be a part of a family. Maybe because I was an only child or because so much of my own family are deceased.

  "I wanted to be a mother. But as independent as I am, it was the only thing I couldn't do alone. And I didn't see marriage anywhere on the horizon." She thought about what she'd said for a minute, then laughed a bubble of a laugh. "Marriage, hell! I couldn't find a man I'd risk safe sex with, let alone the kind without a condom that could make a baby." Her eyes tested Barbara's to see if the psychologist was making a judgment about what she was hearing.

  "Go on" was all Barbara said.

  "You don't know me yet but believe me, I'm not one of those women who won't buy herself a white couch in case she meets a man who might like a brown couch better. I've got plenty of my own money, a great career, I'm an art director in an advertising agency. Remember that quote from Gloria Steinem? Something about how we've become the men we wanted to marry? Well it's true. I love my life and don't have any enormous need to couple up.

  "So I went to a sperm bank, and not only did I buy and use the sperm successfully once, but having Jilly was so much fun that I did it again. And I used the same donor both times, which means that my girls are full sisters, with the same mother and the same father . . . in absentia though he may be."

  "How much do you know about the father?" It was not the question Barbara wanted to ask. She would have loved to ask, "Aren't you dying to meet the donor?" or "Aren't you afraid he'll show up someday?" or "Weren't you worried there would be something wrong with the sperm? Genetic problems or God knows what?'' But she was working at keeping her professional distance.

  "The truth? I know less about the co-creator of my children than I do about the Federal Express delivery man," Judith said, and laughed. "Actually the way these cryobanks work makes it very chancy, because all you get from them is a list of numbers that represent each donor. And all they tell you is his race, blood type, ethnic origin, color of eyes and hair, type of build, and then a one-or-two-word description of his special interests.

  "It's funny how rational it all feels when you're doing it, and yet when I describe it to you, I can hear how weird it must sound. I mean, for example, I wanted my babies to have light hair and light eyes, so I picked donor number four twenty-one, and all I know about him besides his coloring is that he likes reading and music."

  The baby on her breast let out a happy little shiver of a moan, and Judith gently patted its tiny behind. "I made it a point to buy the sperm from one of those places where the donor agrees to let the children meet him in eighteen years, which means that my kids have a chance of knowing their father someday if they like.''

  "How do you feel about that?" Barbara asked.

  "A little worried. But I've got a long time until I have to face it," she said, then added grinning, "Somehow I get the feeling you probably don't get a lot of people coming in with this kind of story."

  "You're right about that," Barbara said.

  "For all intents and purposes I'm a single mother. And a hell of a lot happier than if I'd been divorced and had to go through all of the who-gets-custody issues. I mean, it's a very no-muss, no-fuss way to go. Not to mention the fact that you've never once heard any torch singer sing 'The Donor That Got Away' or 'My Donor Done Me Wrong.' "

  Both women laughed. Barbara liked Judith Shea's spirit. "How can I help you?" she asked. And as if that was the cue Judith had been anticipating, her front of confidence fell away, her cheeks flushed, and she looked very young and full of emotion. It took her a while to pull herself together. For a long time there was no sound in the room but the plink of the numbers on the digital clock as they rolled over.

  "Jillian's nearly two and a half, and she's already talking about penises and vaginas and babies. And I realize that pretty soon she's going to want to know how they get inside mummies' tummies. When I think about that I start to panic and I worry about her coming to me and asking, 'Whatever happened to good old donor number four twenty-one?' " She shook her head at her own funny take on the situation. "When I thought about having a baby I pictured going out to buy happy sets and pretty nursery furniture, and then having someone soft to cuddle. But not even once did I plan for what happens when the babies are children who have language and ask tough questions, which will probably be any minute."

  "And when they do start asking you about their father, which they will, you'll have to give them some unprecedented answers," Barbara sa
id.

  "Sometimes at night before I drift off to sleep I think of elaborate lies I can tell them about their genesis. But then I know I won't be able to do that because I think lying to kids about anything is unconscionable. Don't you?"

  "Yes," Barbara said.

  "I know you have a lot of programs over at the hospital for single parents and widowed parents and working parents, but I also know my problems don't fall into the purview of any of those groups. So what do I do?"

  "I don't know," Barbara said honestly. "As you said, this is a new one. But we'll work on it together."

  "You see," Gracie said, "it's why I always tell you that you can't predict human behavior by scientific laws. That woman is a product of these times. Sexual relationships are unsafe, infertility is rampant, people are faxing their brains out instead of speaking to one another. And there's no rat in a maze who could have made the kind of emotional decision she made to have those babies."

  Barbara and Gracie moved swiftly down San Vicente Boulevard on the grassy medial strip. As usual Barbara was huffing to keep up with her energetic mother, telling Gracie, as she had for years, about what was going on at work. She always left out the personal information to protect her clients' confidentiality, and knew she was leaving herself open for some disdain, like that pointed comment about the way psychologists studied laboratory animals to learn about human behavior. But she was sincerely interested in her mother's always passionate input. Today when she talked about Judith Shea, Gracie "tsked" every now and then as she listened.