I yelped as he hit his mark. “You don’t have to do it so hard," I snapped. “It’s skin, not leather.” Then I saw the expression on his face, and realized how much hurting me hurt him.
“Thank you,” I said, as he massaged the area to help the medication absorb.
“I’m sorry,” he replied.
At 5:30 on a springtime Saturday morning, Steven kissed me good-bye outside the hospital door. He was headed across the street to Dr. Stawecki’s office for yet another date with his hand. I was going inside to be prepped for surgery. The procedure had to be timed precisely: if the eggs were harvested too late, I’d ovulate and they’d be lost; too soon, and their outer membranes would be too thick for the sperm to penetrate.
“Good luck,” Steven said.
Memory selects; it protects. I recall looking over my shoulder as the hospital door slid shut behind me, seeing Steven still standing there, watching me. I remember the tenderness in his eyes. After that there are only fragments. I see myself lying on a gurney in an operating room, waiting to sink into the oblivion of general anesthesia. I remember Dr. Stawecki telling me he’d harvested only three eggs. I can hear the phone ring twenty-four hours later, the doctor’s flat voice telling me only two had fertilized and only one went on to become an embryo.
“What are my chances now?” I asked.
“Well, they’re not zero or we wouldn’t move forward,” he said, “but after a certain point it doesn’t do anyone any good to keep updating the odds.”
Four days later, in a cramped room that seemed arbitrarily dark, Steven was once again standing at my head watching someone else between my legs. Dr. Stawecki injected the six-celled ball, tinier than the period at the end of this sentence, into my uterus. I closed my eyes and tried to be pregnant.
“How do you feel?” Steven asked as we left the building.
“Fine,” I answered, tartly. “Absolutely fine.” I was not going to jinx myself with negative thoughts.
Some doctors put their IVF patients on bed rest for ten days until the pregnancy test; that provides the illusion of doing something productive, though there’s no proof that it helps. Dr. Stawecki told me to stay away from the gym and ask the supermarket clerk to bag the groceries extra lightly. I slept more, slacked off on work, and tried my best not to cough. Other than that, Steven and I barely acknowledged what might be happening—dwelling on it would’ve made those days even harder to bear. After about a week my friend Rachel visited with her two-year-old daughter, one of my favorite children, whom I unthinkingly swept up and spun around in my arms. She weighed nearly thirty pounds. “Oh my God!” I wailed, realizing what I’d done. Rachel tried to comfort me—"If you’re pregnant, you’re pregnant,” she said. “A baby doesn’t just fall out of you”—but I was certain I’d blown the one thing over which I actually did have control.
It probably wouldn’t have worked anyway.
5
BEST ACTRESS
The Fourth of July was excruciating. You’d think Mother’s Day would be the holiday that got me, but although I wasn’t a mom myself, I did have one. Independence Day, though, was about family picnics and childhood awe. It evoked memories of sandy potato salad, the itch of mosquito bites, of being sweaty and sticky with ice cream, snuggling on a beach blanket with my brothers to watch fireworks burst across the big Minnesota sky.
July Fourth in the Bay Area was never like that. While the rest of the country sweltered, we guzzled lattes and burrowed deeper into our leather jackets against the summer fog’s chill. Still, there were Frisbees and watermelons and children giddy over being allowed to stay up late and play with matches. I couldn’t rev myself up for being a good sport, everyone’s favorite auntie, so I’d turned down an invitation to a kid-infested barbecue and spent the day in bed. After trying to convince me to go out for a hike, for a movie, for anything, Steven said he refused to watch me wallow and stalked off to work.
He hadn’t come home when the rumbling of the fireworks began, so I’d bundled up and strolled alone to a bare hillside at the end of our street with a view of San Francisco. Way out by the Golden Gate Bridge, I could see the bursts of red and green, made wee and unimpressive by the distance. The sound carried like thunder after lightning, not reaching me until well after the flickering lights faded; their insignificance only made me feel lonelier. Since I’d stopped taking the shots, joy felt as remote to me as those colored sparks. I’d been so leery of being trapped by motherhood, so wary of its threat to my career and marriage, to my hard-won sense of self. Here I was instead, defined by my longing for a child, by my inability to become a mother. Far worse. Far worse.
Our relationship with Dr. Stawecki had fizzled as well. A few days earlier, at a meeting to review our options, his tone had transformed from clinical to curt. I began to see how he’d gotten his mixed reputation. “It was like the difference between the way people talk to you when you’ve just had a hit movie and when you’ve made a bomb,” Steven said. We had apparently developed the stink of failure.
“You only had one ovary to begin with,” the doctor said, “and you had a poor response. Then, of course, you’re over thirty-eight years old. So I would say at this point your chances of conceiving with your own eggs are not good.” He let that sink in for a moment. “Have you considered using donor eggs?”
“No,” I said, stung by the suggestion. “No, we haven’t.” Just a few weeks earlier he’d held out the promise of IVF. Now suddenly my only shot was to use another woman’s eggs? The leap seemed outrageous. Even if he were right, using donor eggs was so Handmaid’s Tale. Once again I thought, I’d never be that desperate for a child.
Dr. Stawecki shrugged. “The other possibility is that you could do injections with insemination every other month and try on your own in between.”
“I thought we only had a fifteen-percent chance of conceiving that way,” I said. Although cheaper than IVF, drugs and insemination would still cost over three thousand dollars a month.
He nodded. “Yes, but I would say that’s your best option.”
We said we’d think about it.
“I don’t like that he didn’t take any responsibility for what happened,” Steven grumbled on the way home. “He didn’t say anything about the decision to go forward with so few eggs. This doesn’t seem like an ideal situation for us to base the next decision on.”
Perhaps if the doctor could have owned up to, if not a mistake, at least his own subjectivity, we could have heard the rest of his message more clearly. It was true that I was limited by my age and lone ovary. I hadn’t responded well to the drugs. Twelve thousand dollars was a lot to spend on increasingly long odds. Instead it felt like he’d cast the blame on me, that he’d given up on us. I was a strong, accomplished woman, used to being able to make things happen by the force of my steel-toed will. The gauntlet had been thrown down; I wouldn’t accept defeat so readily.
“I could call the guy Kristin went to,” I said, referring to the friend who’d had twins after producing only four eggs. “Maybe we should consider trying with him.”
Steven nodded and put an arm around me. “Don’t be blue, P,” he said. “I love you more than anything, even my CDs.”
I smiled thinly, but I wasn’t listening. I was already mentally scanning our calendar, immersed in planning our next try.
“Do you have to be so glum?” Steven said, this time in exasperation. “Can’t you think of this as our opportunity to have a baby?”
“No,” I sulked. “I can’t.”
“Then why are we here?”
I looked around unhappily. Our new clinic, in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, was known for treating the posh infertile, though you’d never guess that by the waiting room. The couches were worn, the cushions sagging, and the walls could’ve done with a coat of paint. The place was packed, mostly with women. Like me, none of them smiled; none acknowledged anyone else’s presence. Everyone came in and took a seat as if she were the only person in th
e room, then stared blank-eyed at her lap or at a back issue of Town & Country. I checked them out from the corner of my eye. What’s wrong with the young brunette in the corner? I wondered. And that one with the reading glasses—who is she kidding? She has to be at least forty-five! I knew they were sizing me up, too, guessing at my age, the nature of my defect, which of us had a better shot at success.
Then again, perhaps I was projecting. Maybe, like Steven, everyone else was relieved to be doing something that could result in a child. Maybe they were dreaming of the woman on the clinic’s Web site, who gazed adoringly at a gurgling infant, fulfilled. It could be that I was the only one feeling as soiled as the furniture, ashamed that my body didn’t work the way it should. Although I’d been the one pushing for this appointment, which took another two months to get, I dreaded the infusion of hope it brought as much as I craved it. “I don’t want to have any expectations,” I confessed to Steven, as the nurse called our names.
Our new enabler, Daniel Balfour, was the opposite of Dr. Stawecki. Dan, as we called him, was young and good-looking, with none of the older doctor’s mystique or paternalism. As earnest and squeaky-clean as a shampoo ad, he was the kind of guy you’d trust to water your lawn and pick up your mail while you were on vacation. He wore a preppie shirt and tie, but no doctor’s jacket; his blond hair was boyishly tousled. His online, I’m-human-just-like-you biography said he played the trombone. He was confident that he could do better than Dr. Stawecki. “In my opinion he oversuppressed your natural cycle,” Dan said. “That may have made the stimulation harder. I’d try a different protocol and I’d add ICSI after the egg retrieval.”
“Icksee?” I said. “What’s that?”
“I-C-S-I,” he said. “It’s an acronym for a relatively new technique that we usually use in male factor infertility. We inject a single sperm into each egg. It will optimize your potential.” It was also thought to possibly raise a child’s risk of heart defects, chromosomal abnormalities, and, if it were a boy, infertility, though Dan assured us the chances of that were minimal.
“ICSI,” I repeated, feeling the rhythm of the word on my tongue. It sounded like one of the Balearic Islands, a party paradise: Visit the beautiful beaches of Mallorca, Ibiza, and ICSI! I smiled at Dan. His voice was honeyed, sympathetic, yet seemingly untouched by personal pain. I liked him. I felt we had chemistry, and who knows, maybe that could influence biology. He’d already gotten my friend Kristin pregnant. Plus, my parents, who were as eager as we were for us to conceive, had generously offered to pay for another round of IVF.
“It seems worth a try,” I said to Steven. “We can always stop if it doesn’t go well”—words I had said before.
“Do you have any tips for success?” I asked as we left.
“Take your prenatal vitamins,” the doctor replied. I nodded. Done. “Cut back on coffee and alcohol. There’s a small study that says poultry products like eggs and turkey enhance human egg quality. And work on reducing stress.” He chuckled. “I wish I had a cure for that one!”
We wouldn’t see Dan again for the rest of the cycle. After several examinations by one of his partners, Gary Franklin, I asked a nurse where he was. She seemed surprised. “Dr. Balfour is on vacation,” she said.
“But he’s why we chose this clinic.”
“Oh, all of our doctors are excellent,” she replied lightly. Maybe. But it wasn’t about competence; I’d picked Dan based on a hunch, on intuition. Now I was in the hands of a man whom I suspected didn’t know my name, who probably couldn’t pick me out of a line-up unless I were lying on my back naked with my legs spread. I’d never felt so invisible in a doctor’s office, so much like parts on an assembly line. But by then I’d been taking the Pill for three weeks to shut down my reproductive system so it could be better manipulated. If I waited until Dan came back, I’d have to stay on it. I couldn’t do it—it was too perverse to use birth control for two months in an attempt to get pregnant.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about." Steven was lying in bed trying to read while I nattered on about my endometrial lining.
“I’ve explained this to you a dozen times,” I said,-impatiently. “The thickness of the lining affects implantation.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t remember all the scientific stuff. And frankly I don’t really care to.”
I bristled. “I go to these appointments every day, the least you can do is try to understand the process.”
“I don’t mind understanding it, but understanding it and being obsessed with it are two different things.”
“Obsessed?” I said. “Let’s see you spend all your time poking yourself with needles and getting ultrasound wands shoved inside you and blood drained out of you, and we’ll see who’s obsessed.”
Steven pressed his eyelids with the pads of his fingers. “Can’t we please change the subject? Can’t we, for just one night, talk about something else?”
“That’s easy for you to say. I’m not doing anything else,” I lashed out at him, but I was angry with myself, with my lemon of an aging body, with fate. Every morning I would drive through rush-hour traffic to the city to be probed, measured, and judged. Then it was out to the ‘burbs to a cheapo pharmacy for my drug fix. I could’ve saved a couple of hours in the car by using my local Walgreen’s, but each vial cost twenty dollars more there. I was using eight, a difference of a hundred and sixty dollars a day—nearly two thousand bucks by the time I was through. My first car had cost less than that.
Infertility treatment consumed me, used up all my physical and mental energy. And speaking of consuming … I stood up and shoved my feet into my slippers. “If you’ll excuse me,” I said, stiffly, “I’m going to the kitchen to eat some poultry.”
My friend Margaretta, an editor at a women’s magazine, called the next morning to offer me a last-minute assignment that would require a trip to Los Angeles. “I can’t," I confided. “I’m in the middle of an IVF cycle.”
“Oh, God.” I could almost feel her recoil from the phone. “I would never want to be back where you are now.”
Margaretta had once organized her life around infertility, even staying in a job two years longer than she wanted to, to avoid changing her health insurance. She’d taken Clomid for a year—”That was stupid,” she said now—and done one round of IVF. “I had planned to do two more cycles, but I realized we would spend all of our money on IVF, and if it didn’t work we wouldn’t have enough left over to do anything else. We’d be broke.” She and her husband had decided instead to adopt, and ten years ago brought their daughter, Franny, home from Paraguay. Margaretta was one of the happiest moms I knew. She and Franny were about to leave for a mother-daughter vacation in Mt. Zion Park.
I had other acquaintances, five or ten years older than I, who had lost their late thirties down the rabbit hole of infertility, whose lives had been undone by it. I had never considered that the same could happen to me. A few of them eventually delivered miracle babies. Several more, like Margaretta, had adopted. One had divorced, then later remarried and become a stepmother. Each would make a point of telling me that she was content, safely on the other side of the trauma, though she’d shudder to recall the journey. “I wouldn’t wish infertility on my worst enemy,” another of my editors said. “I don’t even like to talk about it.” Those exchanges, sometimes just a few minutes long, sustained me. At my worst moments I would replay them in my head, polishing them like lucky charms, like gemstones. They reminded me, even fleetingly, that one way or another this would end, that the way I felt now might not be how I’d feel for the rest of my life.
“There’s something I want you to know,” Margaretta said, her voice urgent. “The pain goes away.”
God, I hoped so.
On one of our earliest dates, Steven took me to Los Angeles to attend the Academy Awards. He’d been nominated for a documentary about Estelle Ishigo, a Caucasian artist who’d gone into the internment camps with her Japanese American husband in
the 1940s and chronicled the prisoners’ lives there. At the ceremony, we were seated near Sinead O’Connor (before the blasphemy charges), Michael Jackson (before the molestation charges), and right next to primatologist Jane Goodall (a competitor in Steven’s category, who, apparently having spent too much time with apes, snubbed us).
When actress Phoebe Cates opened the envelope-please and read Steven’s name, he didn’t move. “You won,” I said, feeling like I was speaking through Jell-O, then stood to let him pass. On the tape there is a flash of big hair and aqua sequins before a clip from his film rolls—my nanosecond of fame, witnessed by all of our friends as well as forty-three million strangers. That night imbued our relationship with a fairy-tale glow, a sprinkling of Stardust. If part of marriage is developing a mythology of destiny, the Oscar (which now sits on top of our fridge) was integral to ours.
How different things were ten years later, when Steven was nominated for an Emmy, this time for a film he’d made for HBO about young heroin addicts. The awards were scheduled smack in the middle of our IVF cycle, right around the time that whatever embryos we had would be transferred back to my body. I didn’t even congratulate him when he told me. “Too bad you can’t go” was all I said. Even whacked out on fertility drugs, I should’ve known that was a mistake. My husband’s ancestors are from Mito, a city in Japan whose population is renowned for its stubbornness. I could almost see him dig in his heels.
“I’m not missing it,” he said. “And there’s no reason you can’t go, either.”
“You want me to get on a plane right after the embryo transfer?”
“It’s not like you’d be running a marathon,” he said. “You’d just be hanging out in business class. What’s the difference if you sit in a plane or on a couch?”
“You don’t know,” I said, defensively. “You’re not a doctor.”
“Then why don’t you ask one?”
Dr. Franklin took Steven’s side. There was no medical reason for me to stay behind. But my resistance was deeper than that. I wanted to direct all of my energy to pregnancy, to nurse my hopes and delusions in my own bed. More than that, I needed to feel beyond reproach, especially self-reproach.
Waiting for Daisy Page 7
