Heather feels safe with me. I am the older sister, the mother, the great aunt, that great and glorified woman who is the repository of all wisdom in the tribe. She will know the truth soon enough.
June 3, 1979
“I love you,” Scarlett says. She bites her lip when I ask her what’s the point of that.
June 10, 1979
Kelly submits to me the same way she agreed to have the fat sucked out of her thighs. She has the power to exist in this moment without a thought as to what has come before or what is sure to follow. There’s a kind of genius in that, in the way she moves to my touch, never doubting, never complaining, never hesitating to do what she’s told.
June 16, 1979
Allyson wants nothing to do with me, so she is the one I want.
July 4, 1979
What I want is your soul, I tell Heather. “How do you mean?” she says.
July 12, 1979
It’s so easy to fall in love, if only for a moment. Lust is complete and overwhelming but completely temporary. There is no need for ties or to be tied down. That’s what I love most about this moment in my life.
July 27, 1979
“I’ve been studying like you told me to,” Heather says. “About the soul. You were right. There’s so much I don’t know.” Put that down a minute, I say.
August 2, 1979
“I keep keeping an eye out, Miss Eleanor,” Sliv says. “But there’s been nothing. Maybe I been imagining that thing about spies.” Better safe, I say.
August 30, 1979
“What have you done to them?” Diana says. How do you mean? I say. “Oh but they’re all blonde now. Blonde was yesterday, the day before even. ‘Blondie’ and all that. We’ll just have to fix that this minute. Where’s your phone? I must call New York.”
September 4, 1979
“I was wrong, Eleanor,” Diana says. “I’m starting to love the bleached blonde blankness of them all. Just look.” She shows me the contact sheets, one tiny image stacked on top of another like boxes, Scarlett, Kelly, Heather, Allyson. “Blankety-blank. There’s nothing there, in their faces, not a scintilla of joy or suffering. It’s just as I thought. They are all so modern, so numb, so perfect for our January White issue. I even have the headline: ‘Bleached, Blonde, Blank.’”
September 6, 1979
How is Luigi? I ask. “Very well, thank you,” Diana says. And Gino? “Oh he’s wonderful with G, marvelous really. But I’ve told him he can’t let G see him for what he really is. Not for a long, long time. We don’t need another homosexual or another identity crisis in this family.” Where is Luigi now? “Southampton, of course. With his boyfriends. Stark-naked on the beach, no doubt.”
September 13, 1979
I tell Diana that she must protect us. She must write her story as a fable, a pretend tale about a town full of Amazons where strong women live by their lonesome, without caring about men. “A parable?” Diana says. “Oh, that’s superb, gorgeous. That’s practically Biblical. Really a much better story than what you have here. What do you have here, Eleanor?”
September 15, 1979
And your marriage? I ask. “There is no marriage.” Diana’s shoulders round forward and her chin sinks to her chest. “Not even a façade. The only thing left is, shall we say, a fondness that makes it hard for one to hate.” Diana weeps. I slide Kleenex in front of her. She uses both hands to pull the tissue out with her nails. I wonder exactly when my sister has lost hold of her life, when she replaced it with Imagine and a made-up story. “Don’t you dare pity me!” she says. I lie by saying I don’t. “I have a beautiful boy, a beautiful co-op, a beautiful house in the country, a wonderful job.” She slams a fist full of tissue onto the table. “I have a life, dammit!” I can see that, I say.
October 3, 1979
Allyson sits all the way across from me on the other side of my bedroom. “What you want doesn’t seem right to me,” she says. Why not? I say. “There’s nothing permanent to it,” she says. “Nothing that will last.” That’s not what Scarlett says, I say. Or Heather. Or Kelly. Or more than a few others.
October 11, 1979
Kelly has gone to Boston without telling me and she has come back with breasts so big she almost has to bend over when she walks. “Don’t you love them?” Kelly says. “I do. I feel like they’re the part of me that’s been missing.” I don’t say a word about too much of a good thing.
October 15, 1979
“I feel so safe with you,” Heather says.
October 21, 1979
“Well?” Kelly says. They don’t even feel like breasts to me. More like big sacks of something. “Don’t you love them?” I tell her they are absolutely beautiful, stupendous. I don’t tell her they stretch her skin like an overblown balloon. Or that I keep bumping into them.
November 2, 1979
“We’re fully staffed,” Abigail Rickover tells me. I ask if she has everything she needs. “Everything, Miss O’Kell,” she says. “I promise you will get your money’s worth.”
November 18, 1979
No matter what I try, and I try everything, Allyson won’t touch me back.
December 5, 1979
I am reading about test tube babies and fertility clinics, I tell Abigail Rickover. “We’re very close to being able to pick the sex of the child,” she says. I don’t tell her close doesn’t count when you’re trying to play God.
December 20, 1979
“Oh my God!” Allyson says over and over, as if God were listening. We are alone. No Tommie in this town can say no to me forever.
December 24, 1979
I feel blank, empty, like I don’t know what comes next.
The Eighties
January 3, 1980
“Here’s the way it works,” Abigail Rickover says. “We stain the sperm with a fluorescent dye that stains the DNA. Then we measure the glow of the dye under a laser light. That tells us how much genetic material is being carried. Since X chromosomes for boys have more DNA than Y chromosomes for girls, we can tell which is which. Then we just sort them out. Ys on one pile, Xs on another. And that’s how we’ll get our girls.” You’re a motherfucking genius, I tell her.
January 6, 1980
Diana’s fable in Imagine is magnificent, with pictures of our Tommies transformed, transcendent. Kelly and Heather, Scarlett and Allyson are all reborn, their bleached blonde blankness an empty canvas that Diana has written upon. In sheer white gowns there is a lightness to their transformation, as if they are lighter than air, lighter than life itself. Imagine that.
January 18, 1980
I bet The Good Egg can make money on our test-tube girls. Gobs of it.
February 4, 1980
We blow up and frame all the photographs from the Imagine shoot and Sliv puts them up on the walls of the Briody & Daughter Bake Shop. We are baking, making up our own myths.
February 14, 1980
One egg per month per Tommie? I say. “That’s what they can produce without the fertility drugs,” Abigail Rickover says. And with the drugs? “Multiple eggs,” she says. “Two, four, six, maybe even more.” And we can freeze them? “With these new cryo techniques, we can thaw them out and fertilize them with sperm whenever we want to. Then we insert the fertilized egg into the carrier. Nothing goes to waste.” I say it sounds like science fiction. “To me,” Abigail Rickover says, “it sounds like science.”
March 1, 1980
Can these little creatures playing in the sun be nearly six years old? It must have happened that time I turned around. I sit on the swing in our playground and the Tomgirls spin around me and call me “Big Mother.”
March 18, 1980
The Eileen Bell Lying-In is becoming a production line for eggs now that The Tommies are taking fertility drugs by the dozen. Every egg is worth thousands of dollars. Produce ten of them a month, multiply that by ten, multiply that by the number of Tommies, and you’ve got a business. And that’s not even the half of it.
April 1, 1980
April 9, 1980
“It hurts,” Allyson says. “They stick a needle right here, right through your stomach. I don’t like it. It hurts! I don’t want the fertility drugs. I don’t want any more needles stuck into my stomach any more. I’m tired of being fertile. I’m tired of being hurt! I’m not just some chicken in a barnyard who’s going to keep laying eggs.” I say sometimes you have to suffer when your cause is just. “Just what do eggs have to do with justice?” she says.
April 24, 1980
We meet in the basement of The Cathedral because I want The Tommies to design the perfect man. Not as a partner, I say, but as a donor. Different concept. “I like that concept,” Kelly says. Kelly takes everything I say and swallows it whole. “No diseases,” she says. “And no slobbering. I hate it when a man slobbers.” What else? I ask. “No small fry,” Heather says. “Do you mean small small or just small?” Kelly says. The Tommies titter. Heather says: “Either. Both.” I say there should be no one under, what, five-ten? “Six feet,” Scarlett shouts. “And no one who’s going to lose their hair!” Kelly says: “Men are so naked without their hair.” Allyson says: “Teeth. They’ve got to have all of their teeth.” Everyone squeals. “So what have we got?” Kelly says. I read from my list. No diseases, I say. And no slobbering. No small fry, no baldies, and no one with bad teeth. We can design the perfect specimen, I say, if we know what we hate most about men.
May 14, 1980
The Tommies have become my precious hens, my carriers of Cushing immortality.
May 16, 1980
We are precise about our bloodlines as we capture the eggs for freezing.
June 1, 1980
The Briody Center stays lit up long past midnight, like a factory meant to produce human beings on demand 24 hours a day. As I walk along the canal in the warm spring night, I can see Abigail Rickover’s recruits bent over their microscopes, women in ponytails and hornrims holding up petri dishes to the light. The place hums like a factory, morning and night, but I still feel like I don’t know enough to be sure this is working. I can’t look over everybody’s shoulder every minute. I have to trust Abigail Rickover, and I don’t like to trust anyone.
June 2, 1980
They are well-cared-for, our little Tomgirls, but we brook no nonsense. We teach them about sisterhood and loving each other and what it means to be a Tommie. What does it mean to be a Tommie? I ask them. “It means we’re strong,” says one of our little Tomgirls. Another one says: “It means we’re wonderful!” They seem happy to me, happy for all the care and attention from all of their mothers, happy to be happy. We are teaching them the importance of being a girl, of becoming a woman, of having their own babies and having nothing to do with men. We teach them about the tribe. They want for nothing, and I want them to have everything that matters in this world.
June 6, 1980
We break ground on a huge addition to The Eileen Bell Lying-In. It’s like a holding tank for all the women who will be coming here to make their own (Cushing) babies.
June 16, 1980
“We’re ready,” Abigail Rickover says. “All we need now are the carriers.”
June 26, 1980
I’ve seen all the stories about how hard Dick and Jane have been trying to have a child of their own, of the agony they have been going through to conceive, of how they will turn to the test tube only as a last resort. I have no interest in Dick and Jane. I want the women who want a child but want nothing to do with men. That’s where we’re going to plant our Cushings. No men need apply.
July 4, 1980
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Abigail Rickover says. Sorry? I say. “Look at these charts. The rest of The Tommies, they’re all very fertile.” They’re Cushings, I say. “So I see,” she says. “But Allyson is off the charts. Every month. She is the motherlode.”
July 14, 1980
Can it be true? Can all of these Cushing eggs be ready to go out into the world to become Cushing babies and Cushing girls? We will keep track of our girls, genetically speaking. We will know them better than their parents do. We will know them better than they know themselves.
August 1, 1980
Our sperm donation program in Cambridge is spitting out more semen than we can stick our eggs into, even though we screen our donors very carefully, a long interview first about their teeth, their hair, their diseases, their life. Kelly checks them all carefully for signs of slobbering and excess body fat. Then she hands them a vial and lets them have at it in the bathroom. The Harvard types don’t know that we record their vile moment through the two-way mirror over the toilet. They carry out their comeuppance and we ask them to write down what or who they were thinking about at the moment of deception. No one ever writes down “girlfriend.” No one ever says “wife.”
August 7, 1980
As I sit looking out over the canal, I like to think of the fine young men of Harvard jacking off for a buck, leaving their best behind, then drinking up the profits with dollar pitchers of beer.
August 19, 1980
We are ready to go with a backlog of eggs, with enough sperm to populate Harvard Medical School. We are ready to make a new world, our world, starting of course on Labor Day.
August 28, 1980
I am alone in the basement of the Cathedral, in the middle of the day, in the midst of Allyson. “Are we done yet?” Allyson says.
August 30, 1980
The mothers-to-be arrive early so I can make sure they understand what we require of them. We have done our homework. We have done our screening. We have weeded out the weak. We have concealed our plans. We are of a piece with the rest of these women who can do without men. They will wear our children well. They have no idea yet of who we are or why we care. We do not use the words “until death do us part.”
September 6, 1980
I tell the new mothers to treasure the moment of conception far more than if a man were doing the deed. “This is the future we can create by ourselves,” I tell them. “This is our future.”
September 7, 1980
“Paydirt!” Abigail Rickover says. We have our first pregnancy, a girl of course, the first Cushing made to order. Mother and child-to-be are doing just fine.
September 15, 1980
The babies come in bunches. “Six for six so far,” Abigail Rickover says. I wonder if miracles will never cease.
September 26, 1980
“I can’t thank you enough,” our first mother, a woman named Dot Stewart, tells me. Maybe you can, I say.
October 2, 1980
“There is a small problem,” Abigail Rickover says. “We have in fact fertilized some eggs in the lab that will produce boys. It was going to happen. There’s nothing we can do to stop it.” Dispose of the problem, I say. “I have a better idea,” Abigail Rickover says.
November 13, 1980
Word is out. The women are coming in a constant stream to make girls from the come of Harvard men and the fertility of Cushing women. Our test-tube marriage is made in heaven.
November 30, 1980
“And where do you get the eggs?” one of the new mothers wants to know. We lay them ourselves, I say. “No,” the mother says. “I mean really.”
December 13, 1980
Dot Stewart, now with Cushing child, wants to stay on to become a Tommie, just as I’d hoped. There’s no reason why we can’t recruit more carriers to our cause, to keep Cushing with Cushing, to make sure our offspring spring up all around us. I don’t tell her that one day her daughter’s eggs will be priceless. Th
e Good Egg is becoming a damn good business.
December 19, 1980
Where are we now with our projections? I ask Abigail Rickover. “Right on the money,” she says.
December 24, 1980
“I hardly know which one is my daughter any more,” Allyson says. We are bundled up on the swings in the playground watching our Tomgirls play outside in the winter. “They all look alike and act alike,” she says. “They all say the same things. They even sound alike. I can’t tell which one is which. I can’t tell which one is mine.”
Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell Page 15
