“A pool table,” I said, pausing to consider. “All right. In fact, for the rest of our lives you get everything you could possibly want.”
“Good,” he said.
“Good,” I said.
“I want to be in the NBA,” he said.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Not a benchwarmer,” he said. “I want to start.”
I imagined him in a pair of snazzy, shiny shorts, with tattoos all over his arms, dribbling his bad self up to the kneecaps of Shaquille O’Neal. “You need to think about that one, okay? I just want you to think about it.”
So this brings us back to the present. This brings us here, to the first of September, three weeks before my fortieth birthday, the sumacs, and the design decisions concerning my headstone.
Forty?
Oh, come on. This is getting ridiculous.
Forty.
Forty is a number that says, “No more denying it, sister.” Forty is a number that says, “You are so not a baby anymore.” Then again, maybe this makes forty a very good age to have a baby. I don’t know; things have gotten complicated.
“It’s not that I’m angry at God,” I’m saying to Alex. We’re in the car. We are country people now, and so we are doing what country people do on a Friday night in September. We are heading to our county fair. We have, neither of us, ever been to a county fair. We are not entirely sure what happens at one.
“I mean, it’s not like I’m walking around crying ‘Why me?’ ” I say.
“Right.”
“I mean, why not me?” I say, borrowing, as I do, from my mom. “Why should I be spared from suffering?”
“Right.”
“So it really is not that I’m angry at God.”
“Well, it’s not like you’re one to yell at God even if you were angry,” Alex says. “You’re more the type to give the silent treatment.”
“I guess—but I don’t mean it as a treatment.”
“No.”
“When things get complicated, I just like some time to … think.”
“Things have gotten complicated,” Alex says.
“Yeah.”
The complications came almost immediately after we found ourselves agreeing yes to the kid and to the pool table and to the NBA contract. Yes! Yes! Yes! The world was full of possibilities. We were somewhat giddy, joining together in a life of renewed commitment. A life in which each looked out for the other’s needs. It wasn’t so much a turning point in our relationship as an affirmation. Like a lot of couples, we’ve talked the talk: “I want you to be happy.” And: “I’m happy if you’re happy.” All of that essential happily-ever-after talk. But now it was time to walk the walk, one foot in front of the other.
The complications came, as complications do, with reality. Making a baby. Was I even capable? That was the first question. There was, of course, the “old eggs” issue that so many of my friends in their forties had found to be a fairly serious obstacle. There was my sister Kristin, who met with exactly that obstacle, but eventually overcame it with the miracle now known as Katie. But there was also my sister Claire, who had no such problem and with relative ease produced Peter and Matthew and Elizabeth. And both my sisters were older when they became parents. So maybe I had Claire’s genes instead of Kristin’s. I doubted it. I seriously doubted it. Because there was also a memory, a lingering memory of a short gynecologist with a long braid down her back telling me, when I was about sixteen, that I would one day likely have “a lot of trouble” getting pregnant. I do not remember the reason, if I ever even knew it. To a teenage girl in Catholic school who wondered if sex before marriage really did equal a free pass to hell—but who knew that getting pregnant before marriage definitely equaled a free pass to hell right here on earth—this “trouble” seemed rather convenient, or something that might, at least, come in handy someday.
I never wanted to become pregnant in my twenties or thirties, and so I never had occasion to follow up on the long-braid lady’s prediction. My checkups were always uneventful.
There was another possible complication. There was the story of one of my “old egg” friends who had spent six years undergoing infertility treatments, not to mention about a hundred thousand dollars on in-vitro fertilization attempts, only to discover that the problem, all along, had been in her husband’s body, not hers. The doctors, all male, had simply never bothered to check.
Alex had reason to worry about a similar outcome for us, and so in the end we decided to save ourselves a lot of guesswork and get us both checked out. So we did. A week ago all the test results were in.
The results, in layman’s terms: Fat chance.
Actually, the one doctor said, “You really have only three choices: divine intervention, scientific intervention, or a combination of both.”
And see, I am not at all opposed to divine intervention. I am just not quite sure how to call it up. In the last week I have spent a good bit of time talking to God. And really, the only thing I’m hearing is: “You’re going to have to help me out here.” And: “I don’t see how I can do this without some human intervention.” We’re talking hormone shots, test tubes, petri dishes, the whole deal.
But I am not entirely sure this is God’s voice I’m hearing. I am not even close to sure. And neither is Alex. We are not the fertility clinic type. We are, or we like to believe ourselves to be, of the wind. If this is so—if we are not the sort of people who believe in trying to yank and pull and push life to behave a certain way—then we are certainly not the sort of people who believe in trying to force life to happen.
People are, I know, all over the map on this one. There are people who think nothing of shopping for human eggs on the Internet, people willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars for eggs harvested from women with degrees from prestigious colleges, or women with long legs, or women with especially good hair. There are people who think nothing more of this than simply “Cool!” And then there are people who think nothing less of this than simply “Sin.”
“It’s just not that simple,” I say to Alex.
“No, it’s not,” he says.
“Does it strike you as arrogant?” I say.
“Arrogant?” he says.
“Something like that.”
I’m not even sure what I mean. I lean back in my seat, rest my feet on the dashboard, admire my fluorescent-green sandals while feeling the reassuring vibration of the smooth Ford Explorer engine.
I don’t know. The idea of in-vitro fertilization. The idea that we humans think so much of our special selves that we can go about procreating when nature is standing there saying “Whoa.” Are we even listening? How can you be listening when you’re so busy saying “Whatever” and “Out of my way” and “I want what I want, and you’re not gonna stop me.” It seems to me we should at least listen first.
The procedure the doctors suggested for Alex and me is to take one of my aging eggs, and one of Alex’s possibly reluctant sperms, and to physically inject that sperm into that egg, and to then see what might happen in the petri dish. If the two happen to agree to stick together and make an embryo, the doctors would then put that embryo in me and see if it might grow. Kind of like when you order sea monkeys in the mail.
“Arrogant …,” Alex repeats, still trying this on. He turns right at the BP station. There’s a giant chicken on the roof of the restaurant next door.
“You know,” I say, “forcing that little sperm to go somewhere it doesn’t necessarily want to go.”
“Honey, men don’t like anything about them called ‘little,’ least of all things having to do with this particular function.”
“Sorry. How about ‘that cute rascal sperm’?”
“Cute? How about ‘big manly hunkatomic-power sperm.’ ”
“Right. And as I was saying. The arrogance. The arrogance of forcing that big manly hunkatomic-power sperm to go somewhere it doesn’t necessarily want to go. And forcing that beautiful little angel princess egg to a
ccept something it may have no interest in accepting.”
“Kind of like genetic breaking and entering,” he says.
“Something like that.” Outside my window I see two pizza parlors rolling by and a church in between with a sign that says “Jesus needs no extra toppings.”
“Or sort of like sea monkeys,” I say.
“Huh?”
“Did you ever grow sea monkeys when you were a kid?”
“Um. No, I never did that.”
“Me neither. What the heck were they?”
“I have no idea. Something in the shrimp family?”
I tell him the forced embryo idea reminds me of sea monkeys. “Just one of those things other kids did.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Me neither.”
“Oh, what-ever.”
“I hear you.”
“Grrr.”
“Ugh.”
“I hear you.”
We have easier things to talk about. For example: adoption. No matter which way we decide to go with the sea monkey idea, we’re both set on adoption. That decision took all of about three seconds.
“How about adoption?”
“Well, that’s a good idea.”
“Okay, then.”
Something like that. Barely even a conversation, really. I got an instant picture of some nurse handing me a baby, and there I was standing there saying, “Well hi, Baby! It’s about time we found each other.”
Something like that. I know, for some people it’s a lot more complicated. I have friends who really needed to be pregnant, who needed to feel a baby growing inside of them. I know of plenty of people who need to grow a baby that looks like them, sounds like them, has their grandmother’s hair. I know of people whose paths toward adoption are circuitous and painful. I know of people who arrive at adoption only after years of infertility treatments, followed by periods of grieving, and then adoption comes as some sort of consolation prize. Most of these people—this is the way this story so often seems to go—end up wondering, after adopting, why in the world they waited so long. More than that, they wonder how this child could ever have been thought of as a consolation prize. The child, it seems, went from abstract notion to actual child, and so of course love took over.
This whole thing is about love.
I hear of people making the “leap” to adoption, as if having needed some sort of fuel to propel them there. I am aware of no such leap for me. If indeed I once leaped, it must have happened a long time ago. In an airport, perhaps. Gate 10 at Philadelphia International Airport. A baby. The first baby I ever touched. My niece Alyson. It was love that buckled my knees. It was an utterly unexpected and supersize punch of love that sent me flying into that tile wall. That this baby—the source and the carrier and the patron and the object of that love—was coming into our family via adoption … well, that really was quite beside the point. The love was so … loud. Adoption? Adoption was about as significant as the style of car seat the baby happened to be in. A baby! A person! A new actual member of our family! Adoption? Adoption was, apparently, one of the vehicles babies took in order to get to you. I suppose I grew into adulthood with that notion hardwired into me somewhere.
And now, as I think of my life with Alex, as I think of a family we might create, the child I can imagine most clearly is the one we would adopt. There might be one that we create out of our own bodies. But the adopted one, that one is obvious.
I’m a mom who needs a baby. And somewhere out there, there’s a baby who needs a mom.
It’s so … simple.
And I trust simple. The truth, I have always found, is in the simple answers. The truth is never complicated. Lying—and denying—is what takes up all your time.
This gives me an idea. An idea for my gravestone design. Maybe inside the ivy border I’ll have it say “Why does life have to be so complicated?” up top, but then underneath I’ll answer it: “It doesn’t.”
Hmm.
The other thing I could do is have my gravestone ask the question, and then have Alex’s next to mine answering it.
Hmm. He always gets the good lines.
“Have you given any thought to your gravestone?” I ask him.
“Excuse me?”
“Like what design you want, or what you want it to say?”
He looks at me. “You’re giving me whiplash,” he says. “I thought we were talking about sea monkeys, although I wasn’t quite clear on why we were talking about them either.”
“Sorry—but what do you think? You don’t want some kind of, like, big monument or something, do you?”
“Um. Well, actually, I always thought I’d get cremated and be sprinkled somewhere.”
“Oh, that won’t work. That won’t work at all.”
He looks at me. He looks at me like maybe I’m traveling too close to the tippy-tippy edge of loo-loo land.
“Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to get into that. I was just thinking about adoption.”
“And that led you to me being dead and needing a gravestone?”
“Well, not in a bad way. In a good way, actually.” I’m pushing in the pink flowers on my sandals. They’re so spongy.
“Uh-huh,” he says.
“We should definitely go to that meeting about adopting from China,” I say.
“I thought we already decided we would.” He’s the one who spotted the ad for the meeting in the newspaper. He’s the one who suggested we go. Maybe I’m just now deciding he was right. We’ve also decided to look into domestic adoption, as well as adopting from Russia and Guatemala. But something about the idea of China … I don’t know. I have no explanation. The idea of China has become a kind of pleasant bell ringing in my ear. Come to think of it, I haven’t heard the ticking of my kitchen clock for some time. Not since this adoption talk started.
Well, we’re here, anyway. This is it. This is our county fair! Beyond the trees you can see the Ferris wheel spinning and the arms and legs of other rides reaching like spiders into the clouds.
We pull into a parking lot, which is really a cornfield with all the stalks mostly cut down.
“Hey, look at that,” Alex says, pointing to a sign. “It appears we’re on time for the School Bus Demolition Derby.”
“Oh … goody.…”
So we go. We pay our five dollars to get into the fair, we get the back of our hands stamped with red cows to show our legitimacy as county-fair-goers. Soon we are sitting in the grandstand, the aluminum kind with pleated benches and crimped walkways, hot when you touch them and first sit down. We’re eating popcorn and nachos, looking down at nine school buses parked in a circle, revving their engines, ready to, um, bash.
This can certainly take your mind off things.
There are teenagers in front of us, teenagers with cigarettes and tattoos, and kids with painted faces to our right, and here and there are women with tired eyes leaning back on their men. There is, we have learned, a goat show we can go to later. And a swine-breeding lecture. A lamb carcass class and a milk-chugging contest. There are snow cones and funnel cakes, and there is Helga, a headless woman (“Still ALIVE!”).
There are triangular flags hanging everywhere, blue and red and yellow flags snapping in the muggy breeze, announcing that this is the two hundredth anniversary of the Washington County Fair. An old woman behind me is telling her grandson that she hasn’t seen it this crowded since she was a girl, when the fair was the one event that everyone, young and old, worked toward all year long. Farmers would shine up their tractors to show off, kids would fatten their pigs, and moms would try yet again to win a prize for their pies. And it still goes on like this, two hundred years after it began. It still goes on.
“Tradition,” I say to Alex. “That’s what this fair is about.” We decide that we love our county fair and this is what we love about it. This isn’t like Disneyland or some other prefab fun fest where no one really belongs. This is a place where everyone bel
ongs.
Except, well … us.
We are still newcomers. That’s the truth of it. No matter how much we’re learning about sandals, and outerwear, and storytelling, the fact of the matter is we are newcomers. It can take years to convert a city-person into a country-person. It can take generations to fully convert a familial line.
We look down at the buses, each spray-painted with the howling urgencies of youth: AMY! DONNA! WHIZ KID. 2002 RULES! Five of the buses rumble onto the muddy field and form a circle, back ends to back ends. “Five, four, three, two, one!” the announcer shouts, and all five buses fly in reverse until BAM!
“Ahhh!” shouts the crowd. The buses zoom forward, slam backward again, zig and zag. BAM! “What a hit!” says the announcer. BAM! FOOM! “There went a front end, folks, there went a front end!” SMASH, hisssssss. “They’re popping and crackling, folks. Smokin’ and steamin’, but at least they’re moving, folks!” BAM! “There went a fender or something, folks. I’m not sure what it was. But by golly, we’re still moving, folks!”
“Can-dee! Can-dee! Can-dee!” the crowd chants.
I turn around and look up at the crowd. Arms are flailing against the hazy autumn sky. People are on their feet—tattooed teenagers, painted-faced kids, and tired-eyed women alike. And every face, young and old, has a smile on it. I turn back around and look at Alex. His face is … different. He has a ruffled brow. He seems to be wearing the same thought I am thinking: Why? What is the point?
These are the questions of newcomers.
BAM! Okay, there went an electrical system. You can smell it. Two of the buses are declared dead. Another is lurching like a bug drowning in bug spray. The crowd is hollering: “Smash ’em! Can-dee! Let’s go, Fort Cherry! Bust ’em up, Bentworth!”
“Bentworth?” I say to Alex. “Isn’t that our school district?”
“I think it is,” he says.
“That’s our school!” I say. And instantly I see things I couldn’t see before. This isn’t just buses bashing into one another. This is school against school, team against team, us against them. Belonging is, after all, about joining. Belonging involves an act of will on the part of the potential belong-ee. And Bentworth, the blue bus with all the pink swirls on it and the lime-green tires, is still bashin’ with the best of ’em.
The Exact Same Moon Page 12
