The Proposal

by R. R. Banks

  I had been sitting in the waiting room for only a few minutes when a nurse came around handing registration forms to everyone. I started filling out the questions without reading the entire form.

  Name…Normal

  Birthdate…Yep

  Height…OK

  Weight…Hmmmm

  Last Menstrual Period…What?

  Why would a dentist need to know that?

  Have you ever been pregnant?

  Do you have a history of miscarriage?

  Does your family have a history of early labor or other birth complications?

  Does your family have a history of any genetic diseases?

  What the hell kind of dentist is this?

  At this point I could have just gotten up and walked out of the waiting room. Had someone else told me that they were in this situation I would have questioned their intellect for not getting up and leaving right then and dealing with Hairy Wrists. Yet something kept me sitting in that chair. Something made me fill out the invasive questions and turn in the form.

  A few minutes after we had all passed in our forms like a well-behaved little class turning in our pop quiz, the nurse started showing up at the door on the far side of the waiting room. She would call a name in a solemn monotone, then disappear into the back with one of the women in tow. Several minutes would pass, then another name would be called. An hour and five names had passed by the time that she called me. I gave a totally unwarranted smug look to the women still waiting and swept through the door. The nurse directed me to a small room that looked like a doctor’s examination room and I noticed the distinct lack of a dentist chair. Nevertheless, I sat up on the crinkly white paper and waited. Another nurse came in and took my vitals, scribbling the results on a piece of paper, and then left without saying anything. The first returned a moment later and escorted me out of the examination room and into what looked like an office.

  Well, this is efficient.

  I sat in one of the dark wood chairs in front of a heavy desk and waited. And waited. Then waited a little bit more. I was starting to feel like they had forgotten about me when the door finally opened and the man who had found me in the lobby came in. He looked delighted to see me as he sat down in the chair across the desk and proceeded to stare at me for several long, increasingly awkward seconds. Finally, he glanced over the papers he had placed in front of him that I assumed were my registration form and the information that the nurse had gathered, and then looked back up at me.

  “So, tell me. Why do you want to be a surrogate?”

  Chapter Three

  Richard

  The look on the woman’s face was enough to catch my attention and make me want to hear what she had to say. The look of her clothing was enough to make Flora not need to see or hear a single other thing and be ready to walk out of the office.

  “Honestly, Richie, is there anything that that woman could say that would make her wretched appearance any more forgivable?”

  I tried not to cringe. I hated when she called me ‘Richie’. I really didn’t know when she had decided that that was the term of endearment that she was going to bestow on me. No one else in my life, including my parents and my grandparents, had ever called me Richie and I had always detested the sound of it when it was applied to anyone else, beseeching anyone who I met not to shorten my name.

  Yet…there it was. Richie.

  The only thing that made the sound of the name less disagreeable was that it was tucked right there in the middle of another of Flora’s strings of arrogance. I don’t remember when she picked it up, but somewhere between finishing school and graduating from the university she started speaking in a stilted, unevenly formal way that made her sound like she was trying to sound like a casual British person and came off as her sounding like a horribly pretentious American.

  She was already standing, slipping her arm into the sleeve of her jacket, but I hadn’t gotten up from the sofa where I had been sitting, watching the hidden camera stream of the string of prospective applicants come into the office next door. These women had no idea that we were watching them. That was the intention. Choosing an applicant to carry our child was the most important decision that Flora and I would ever make, and it was essential that we made the right decision. I wanted to know everything that I possibly could about the woman who would bring my dream of being a father into a reality, and that wasn’t something that I could achieve just having an interview or two. I was trusting Ellery to handle this first stage of the screening process and sitting in the next room over to watch as he went over the women’s initial medical examination and information sheets with them. This wasn’t really in an effort to learn about their medical health or to even find out much about their history. Instead it was a chance for me to start evaluating their character and personalities in a way that was purely compulsive.

  Flora hated the idea. She much preferred the thought of just sending the women to the doctor, weeding out the ones who weren’t healthy enough or who had undesirable genetics, then hold interviews and choose the most qualified candidate from there. I didn’t see that as a viable way to go through the process. Of course, her health was going to be an extremely important element of choosing the right woman, but beyond that, the characteristics that were going to make her the right one was something that I didn’t think could be deciphered just by sitting across the desk from her and asking a series of questions. I had spent enough time in business to know that the person you met when you did an interview was very rarely the actual person that you were interviewing.

  People put on a mask when they sat down to interview. They presented themselves in the way that they thought you wanted them to and spewed out carefully prepared, rehearsed answers to virtually anything that you could ask them in an effort to sound exactly like the person you’re looking for. Even if inside, they are completely on the other end of the spectrum. I would never forget walking down the hall in one of my office buildings and hearing a voice coming from the one of the conference rooms that was supposed to be empty. When I peeked in I found a girl who was dressed like she was fifty and looked like she was fifteen pacing around the table, deeply engrossed in the speech that she planned to give when she came into the interview we had planned for ten minutes later. She was preparing herself for all of the spontaneous and charming answers she was going to give, right down to a few perfectly timed Freudian slips and girlish giggles.

  I slipped out of the conference room before she saw me and was fully prepared for her when she got into the office for our interview. As soon as she perched herself on the edge of the seat, pressing her breasts forward toward me and crossing her legs so that just enough of her skirt lifted up to make it seem incidental when I knew very well it wasn’t because I had already seen it three times that morning, I started asking her questions.

  “What is your favorite planet and why?”

  “If you were an ice cream sundae topping, which would you be?”

  “How many roller coasters have you ridden in your life and did you keep your hands up the entire time?”

  “Don’t you know that that’s dangerous?”

  “A cat and three dogs walk down an alley and see a bowl of food. What color collar was the animal that got the food wearing?”

  After watching her squirm through a few minutes of this, I dismissed her, returning her resume and application to her before she walked out of the office. I hadn’t had any intention of giving her a real interview. Anyone who snuck into a conference room that she wasn’t supposed to be in and spent that much time polishing herself up for what was supposed to be an honest conversation wasn’t someone who I wanted working for me. I hoped that the barrage of questions and my deadpan reactions to whatever nonsensical answers she could spin as I asked them were enough to convince her to be a little more authentic next time she was meeting someone. If she was to get anything out of this interview, I wanted it to be that I was hiring an employee, not a Barbie. I didn’t want to look at
her thighs and then pull a string and listen to her scripted spiel.

  That experience had completely changed the way I saw every other hiring process that I encountered, and as cold and impersonal as it sounded, that was what this was. I was hiring a woman to do something that I couldn’t do on my own and that Flora had learned only months ago that she couldn’t, either. It was a job like any other that I hired for, but with responsibilities far more pressing and valuable than anything that had ever happened in any of my businesses. Choosing the wrong candidate wasn’t just an inconvenience or a frustration and amending that mistake wasn’t so simple as firing the person and starting the process over again. If we went through with this and found a few months down the line that the woman we chose was awful in some way, there was really nothing that we could do about it. We had to be sure that we chose a woman we would be able to not only entrust with our child in its most delicate form for the months before it was born, but also who we would be able to tolerate throughout those months as well.

  “Richie, what are you doing?” Flora whined from the doorway.

  That was something that she was exceptional at, I had become more and more aware of in the months since we started talking about having a baby. Whining. I drew in a breath, reminded myself for what felt like the hundredth time that day that this was the woman I was supposed to be sharing my life with, and smiled at her.

  “Darling, I really want to see this.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  That was completely true. There was something about this woman that was different than all of the other woman who had gone through the interview process already, and it went beyond just the clothing that she was wearing, not that that hadn’t gotten my attention as well. The goal of this phase of the screening was to let me see how the women conducted themselves when talking to someone who wasn’t technically the person who was hiring them, and then how they behaved when they were alone and didn’t know that anyone was watching them. I knew in the back of my mind that there was a bit of a shady element to how I was doing this, but the stakes were too high for me to take any chances.

  When this woman walked into the office and Ellery asked her why she was considering being a surrogate she looked totally taken aback. She stared at my assistant with wide eyes and a slightly open mouth, absolutely still and silent for a few seconds. It was an unexpected reaction, but it was also something that I had been looking for in every other woman who had come into the room…authentic. Ellery’s eyes widened to match hers and the change in his expression seemed to snap the woman…what was her name...out of her shock.

  “Babies,” she suddenly said. “I’d do it for the baby.”

  I covered my mouth to muffle the laugh that was bubbling up.

  “Well, yes,” Ellery said. “That would be why anyone would be a surrogate. It’s the entire purpose of the process. Beyond the actual carrying and birthing of the child, why would you consider carrying my clients’ child?”

  The woman quieted again, but this time she didn’t seem startled. Instead, the expression on her face seemed more like she was looking into her mind, seeing something that was difficult for her and that she was trying to put into words that the stranger across the desk would understand. Finally, she let out a sigh and met his eyes.

  “My father died recently and there are things that I need to take care of,” she answered confidently.

  “So, it is a financial motive?” Ellery asked.

  I had heard him ask the same question to two other women, both of whom had been completely tripped up by it and stumbled through fairly meaningless justifications. This woman, though, seemed unfazed. She kept her eyes strongly trained on Ellery, unflinching, not intimidated by him.

  “Absolutely,” she said. “This is a business transaction, is it not? There is a fee to be paid?”

  “Well, yes,” Ellery said.

  It was his turn to seem put on the spot now and I found a bit of strange enjoyment seeing this usually unflappable man flustered.

  “If this was a charitable act that a woman was doing purely out of the good of her heart, that wouldn’t be the case. As it is, this is a service that is to be fulfilled in exchange for money. That in of itself establishes a financial motive. Any woman who tries to say that there isn’t one is lying at worst and flattering herself at best.”

  She’s the one.

  I wanted to just clear the building of the rest of the candidates and tell this woman that she had the position, but I knew that I couldn’t. There were more steps to be taken, and as much as I thought of this phase as being one of compulsion, I couldn’t let that control me entirely. I meant to use those gut feelings to trim down the field of applicants, so I could then focus on them each more intently.

  As if that thought had beckoned him, Ellery made some excuse and got up from the desk, hurrying out of the office and closing the door behind him. A second later he appeared at the door to the office where I was. His face was high with color and he looked somehow ruffled, like a little angry bird. Flora was still standing by the door, her arms crossed over her chest and her hip cocked now, and they exchanged glances as if they were wordlessly expressing the same thought. He took several long strides across the office toward me.

  “Can you believe her?” He asked.

  “No,” I admitted. “I can’t.”

  “Then I will just go in there and tell her that she’s dismissed, and we aren’t interested.”

  “’We?” I asked. “I didn’t know that you were going to be involved in the gestation of my child, Ellery.”

  The color on his cheeks deepened and he squeezed his lips together to try to hold back whatever he was going to say.

  “Did you see her?” he asked.

  “Of course, I did.”

  “Then surely you see that she is totally unsuitable.”

  “I told him the same thing,” Flora steamed, “but he won’t listen to me.”

  “All I can see is that she didn’t put a lot of thought into her clothes today,” I said.

  “And if she showed up for your next agent position looking like that, you wouldn’t turn her away instantly?” Flora asked.

  I knew she was right. If someone came into one of my offices in a sweat suit with her hair looking like a cinnamon bun on her head, I wouldn’t even think of her twice. Something about this woman, though. She was different.

  That word again. Different.

  “Maybe we should appreciate the fact that she wants to be comfortable with us,” I said. “This is a very intimate relationship we’re going to be in together, and being comfortable with each other is going to be important.”

  “A very intimate relationship?” Flora asked. “What do you mean by that?”

  I looked at her.

  “She is going to be carrying our child inside of her and giving birth to it. I can’t really think of many things that are much more intimate than that.”

  Without worrying about their reaction, I turned my attention to the computer screen to see how the woman there was handling her sudden isolation.

  “What’s her name?” I asked, not taking my eyes from her.

  “Rue,” Ellery told me.

  I nodded.

  In the office next door Rue was still sitting in the chair where Ellery had left her, staring at the chair that he had vacated almost as though there was still someone there. She didn’t move for several seconds, and then suddenly flung herself forward, her head dropping down between her knees and her arms dangling down by her sides, so her hands grazed the floor. Once in this position, she let out a long breath. As she hung there, I heard her muttering to herself. I wished that I could hear what she was saying, but the thick layers of grey cotton now blocking her mouth muffled the words.

  “Invite her back,” I said to Ellery.

  He looked at me with wide eyes.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Very,” I said. “Invite her back for another interview next week
.”

  I closed the computer on the image of Rue still folded over in the chair and stood up. I tucked the computer into my briefcase and crossed the office to the door where I grabbed my jacked from the coatrack and slipped into it.

  “Where are you going?” Ellery asked.

  “Lunch,” I said. “I have some very important appointments later this afternoon, but I will be taking the next couple of hours away from the office. Please continue with the screening and take notes if you’d like.”

  “You aren’t going to stay to watch the others?” Ellery asked.

  “No,” I said, not feeling the need to justify myself any further.

  I opened the door and allowed Flora to walk ahead of me out of the office. Ellery followed, and I looked back over my shoulder to watch as he went back into the office, wondering what Rue’s reaction would be when he asked her to come back for another interview.

  Half an hour later Flora and I were sitting at our usual table at our favorite lunch restaurant. She sipped white wine with delicate discrimination as if it wasn’t the exact same wine she ordered every time we came. I watched her, suddenly wondering if she had, ever in her life, worn a sweat suit. It was a strange thought and I shook my head to get it out, instead turning my attention to the menu in front of me.

  “What’s looking good to you this afternoon, Darling?” I asked.

  “I know what looked good to you,” she retorted.

  I looked up from the menu and narrowed my eyes at her.

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “I saw the way that you were looking at that woman,” she said, her icy eyes glaring at me from across the table.

  “I wasn’t looking at her in any way,” I said.

  Was I?

  “Oh please, Richie. I know that look. Remember, I used to be the one who was on the receiving end of those looks.”

  I couldn’t honestly believe that I would ever have looked at Flora in any way that I would look at Rue. They were just too different.