by Amanda Stern
“You have no patience.”
Desperate, I figure out a way to get more of the coke into my system by rubbing it on my teeth, which numbs them. In a few minutes, my nausea subsides and my fear is supplanted by a rare excitement—we’re in the country, going on an adventure, and not knowing where we’re going is miraculously fun. I shut my eyes and feel the September sun on my face, and the smell and sensation don’t trigger a free fall. I feel the way I did when I returned home from camp: normal. How do I get this feeling to become my regular life? Will I have to do coke until I’m old? When I open my eyes, I recognize Gwen’s country house.
“What are we doing here?” I ask.
“Thought it’d be fun,” he says. “Maybe you want to go swimming.”
“I don’t want to go swimming,” I say. “Besides, I don’t have a bathing suit.”
“Who said anything about a suit?” Taylor asks, winking.
“I don’t want to go swimming,” I say again, suddenly afraid. The coke high drains from my veins. Is he going to try to have sex with me? Taylor is handsome; all the acting kids think so—even the boys—and I know I’m lucky to get all his attention, but I want him to remain in his lane. I don’t want to have sex with a man—I haven’t even figured out yet how to have sex with a boy—but I don’t know how to tell an adult, even Taylor, to back off. My whole life, every time I’ve ever tried to tell an adult what I need, I’ve been ignored.
I decide that if I get more drugs into my system, I won’t be afraid to tell him to fuck off. Several lines later, we’re lying on the couch, taking a breather, and he leans over.
“You sure you know how to give a blow job?”
“Oh my God, stop. Yes. I do. I’m like the blow-job queen,” I say, hoping that’s a real expression.
“Okay, okay. Man, I can’t wait to see what you got. When do you turn eighteen?”
“Oh my God. Stop!” I say again, but I’m laughing from nerves, which he takes to be a type of flirting. I can tell from his smile.
“Maybe you want to take a shower?” he asks.
“A shower? Why would I want to take a shower?”
He shrugs. “Just asking.”
“I don’t want to take a shower,” I say. I don’t know how to steer him away. Why can’t he just be like a big brother or a dad to me?
And yet I don’t want to stop hanging out with him. I can’t. No one else pays this much attention to me. Plus, all the drugs are free.
1984
Dr. Parker Prentice
She has a little difficulty with reality and she doesn’t take to concepts. Her conceptual/perceptivity is not as strong as her sensitivity to art, people, music, etc. She needs a better understanding of herself.
Instead, she is pretending to know things she doesn’t. She is in over her head, and she knows it.
What If I Give Birth to Myself?
The world is passing by without me. My grandmother Puggy died. My mother has been complaining that the MacDougal Street house is too big for her; my little sister, Rebecca, is getting married; my little brother is about to get engaged; and I am just standing on the sidelines watching the world roll past me.
Wanting a baby broke up Javi and me, and the gates are nearly closed on having a biological child. So that’s why, without telling anyone—not my therapist, not even Kara—I go to a fertility doctor to see about freezing my eggs. I’m forty-one years old, and while I want a baby, I’m certain I don’t want to raise one alone. When my hands are filled with grocery bags, I ask myself, Could I manage this with a baby? When I have a cold, when I’m depressed, when I’m taking a shower, when I’m grumpy and overwhelmed, I stop and imagine a baby in the mix.
I’m afraid if I tell my friends, I’ll allow myself to be talked into doing something I’ll regret. I just want to freeze my eggs so that I can take more time. Maybe one day I’ll feel ready to raise a child on my own, but I know that time is not right now.
What I want is for the fertility people to tell me I have plenty of time, not to worry, and to return in nine years, when I’m fifty. I fill out the requisite paperwork, all nine thousand pages of intake about my pathetic loser life without a partner or children, not even a dog, pretending not to notice I’m the only woman here alone.
I’m led down the hall and into a back office so cold I wonder if they’re freezing the eggs inside us right now. I put my gloves back on. The fertility doctor has no identifying facial features, as if his face has been seen by too many people and just wore off. He hasn’t even sat down at his desk and he’s already midway through a monologue, reciting statistics about age and options, and his eyes look programmed: fervent and disconnected from reality.
“You’re forty-one. You’ve got no time to waste. I understand you want to freeze your eggs, but it’s too late, you don’t have time for that. If it’s a child you want, there is no point in freezing your eggs. You’re much too old. IVF must start now! The statistics don’t lie.”
A pressure I didn’t expect begins to close around my throat. I do want a child, I think, but I also want a career, and a partner. If I freeze my eggs, I can have a baby when I’m ready, which isn’t now. I have no money to even freeze my eggs, so what would I raise my baby on, the barter system? His urgency sets off a cascade of doubt in me. This is not matching my fantasy scenario where he tells me to return in nine years.
He pulls out a chart and starts pointing to the downward curving lines, citing statistics and averages. I cannot concentrate on the words coming out of his mouth, although I know I’m supposed to be absorbing everything and that statistically speaking, 95 percent of women between the ages of thirty-four and thirty-nine who come here panicked about their fertility wind up doing 100 percent of what he says. My fingers are numb, and my toes are cold. We wound down so many hallways to get here that if I race out of his office like I want to, I’ll never find my way out. I’ll probably end up in the IVF room, where he’ll restrain me and force-feed me his sperm. Or however IVF works.
“I don’t think I want kids right away,” I say. “I really just want to freeze my eggs.”
He stands. “I look forward to adding your baby’s photo to my wall of fertility successes,” he says, looking over my shoulder as if he hasn’t heard a word I’ve said. I turn and see hundreds of photos of infants, families, even a few teenagers, along with Christmas cards and birthday cards. The cards are insidious reminders of my failure. Here are some pictures where something is missing. Everywhere I go, I can point to the spaces where I am missing.
“No time to wait!” he says and ushers me down the hall to a different office. “Carol will set you up with a California Cryobank account and make your follow-up appointment.”
At the door of an empty office, he shakes my hand, tells me to wait for Carol, and gives me a stack of papers to bring to billing when I’m done. I should take a few days to think and call when I’m ready to start the IVF process.
“All right.” I know I will never see him again.
“We don’t want you to regret not having children.”
Instead of waiting for Carol, I bolt down the hall, lost in the maze, but anonymous since no one’s chasing me. When I finally get home, I shut my bedroom door, climb into bed, and pull the covers over my head so no one can find me: not the creepy doctor, not Carol. Not billing.
When will I ever feel like I have a place in the world, like I’m not some defective game piece that people never use?
I’m forty-one years old, but my roots are still in my childhood home on MacDougal Street. Even when members of my family move, the house stays the same. It’s never left me. I pull myself out of bed and head to MacDougal Street. My mom’s not there, but I eat the leftover pasta in the refrigerator, watch some TV, and call Kara.
I tell her what I did, and what happened, and she suggests that I do try to have a baby. Maybe even with a friend. Even though I specifically avoided telling her, worrying she was going to say something just like this, when she says it, it seems
less terrifying. She suggests a few books on single motherhood and I order them. I think of male friends to have babies with and rule each one out, wishing I could order them online also.
Who needs Carol? I sign up for California Cryobank, which my single-mother friends all used, and then scan the hundreds of thousands of sperm donors with the ease of the seasoned OkCupid user I am. You can’t see what the men look like, but the filters let you add donors to your cart based on critically important factors, like which movie star would play your sperm in a movie. I add Mark Ruffalo to the cart. Ryan Gosling. John Cusack. I try to find Dominic West. No luck. Still, my cart runneth over with impersonator sperm.
The books on single motherhood arrive and as I read them, old memories jar loose of conversations with my new mom friends who bemoan the mind-numbing boredom of newborns. I think about how many doctor appointments I make for myself, and how annoying it is when I have to interrupt my writing day to go tend to my own body. What would it mean to add in another person’s doctor appointments until there’s no writing time left? I don’t see how I could possibly do both. My worries are pushing their way up like acid reflux. What if I give birth to myself and screw myself up even more?
Maybe I’ll find a different place that will let me freeze my eggs. Then I can have a baby whenever I want, because what’s the urgency? I know plenty of forty-two-year-old single moms. Forty-two is the new Thursday. Right now, my brain wants me to have a baby, but all my friends who chose to do this on their own wanted a baby with their bodies. They were driven by a profound need to make it happen, and I don’t feel that need. I felt that need for a dog, and I got the dog, and look what happened.
Maybe I’ll feel the profound need at forty-two, when I’ll be more confident and self-assured. But what if my store is entirely closed at forty-two? If I have the baby now, the issue will be off the table, and I can focus on finding the right partner without putting pressure on this person to have a baby, because I’ll already have the baby! But wait—how am I supposed to meet anyone if I have an infant? I’ll never be able to leave my house. I also know that when I have the baby and people ask about my writing, anxiety will surf through me, because having a baby was a good decision for my heart, but bad for my career, and now it’s too late to do anything about it except feel, without wanting to, resentment at how the baby hampers my life, which will make me feel trapped, and I’ll spiral into a suicidal despair, unable to get out of bed, and they’ll have no choice but to lift me out of my apartment by crane. No, I cannot have a baby on my own. Next year. Next year, I’ll do it.
I log out of California Cryobank and on to OkCupid. I spend hours looking at human faces, but I’m not quite ready to go back out there. Life would be so much more convenient, though, if they just lumped these two websites together. Then I could add baby and man to cart, click free shipping, proceed to checkout, and expect my family to be delivered in three to five business days.
Who Doesn’t Want to Be in a Play?
I’m at my tenth-grade Field Day when my mom gives birth to a baby girl she names Nina. I rush home every day to hold her and sing to her and play with her. When anyone congratulates Jimmy, he just shakes his head, confused, and says, “I don’t know how it happened.” I like having a newborn in my house, and I invite some classmates over to check her out. I’m desperate to get my new friends to accept me, but since I’m just transferring in, I’m joining established friendships, and no matter how many memories we make, I’ll never catch up.
People at my new school think it’s cool that I have an entirely separate life and that I’m writing and acting in plays. We’re writing one right now, and we stay up late working on it. Afterward Paul, his brother Jonathan, and I trail behind Taylor to the after-parties; those nights I sleep at Gwen and Taylor’s on their couch. I call my mom when Gwen goes to bed to tell her it’s too late for me to walk home. Then Taylor keeps me up late doing coke. My mom is occupied with baby Nina and she doesn’t ask any questions.
I get a crush on a kid named Aram. He’s a year older and not my type, though I hardly know what that would be. He’s the smartest kid in school, loves sports, is frighteningly sexy, kind of a loner, never had a serious girlfriend, and already looks like a man. Friends Seminary is different from Whittaker. Our classes are mixed ages, so instead of having a small group of friends in just my grade, I have pockets of friends in several grades. And now that I smoke, I have my smoking alley friends, but I don’t have a confidante. Instead, I seem to have become the one people confide in, as well as the dispenser of advice. People admit things to me that, if they were my secrets, I’d never confess to anyone. I’ve certainly never told my friends how I have these terrifying attacks inside my body that make me feel like I’m dying. To tell anyone would mean revealing I’m defective or crazy. I keep everything to myself, which means people get closer to me, but I don’t get closer to them. The more time passes where I don’t reveal myself, the more convinced I become that I shouldn’t do it.
Maybe if I had a boyfriend, I’d have the closeness I crave. I’m desperate to get Aram to notice me, and since I’ve cowritten several plays already with my acting school, and my English teacher secretly submitted a play I wrote to a playwriting contest, I propose my idea of writing, directing, and producing a play at school to that same teacher, who loves the idea and volunteers to get permission. No other student has ever written, directed, and produced their own play independent from the theater department, and it’s a big deal when I get the go-ahead. I am both thrilled and nervous. I’ll ask Aram to be in it. Who doesn’t want to be in a play? I also ask my friends Miranda and Wren and, even though he’s a teacher, Paolo.
Our first rehearsal is just a conversation about the play and how I imagine it looking; having their attention on me, treating me like I’m a real producer, gives me a surge of confidence. Since Aram’s the star, his rehearsals go longer. We spend our rehearsals talking about the play, which is about suicide, and how hard it is being a teenager, and soon we’re talking about our parents and siblings, gender, sexuality, and race. I love the way he listens to me as though I actually have things to say that are valid.
I don’t think he knows I have a crush on him. I had thought I was making progress with him, bonding over these big questions, but then he starts asking if he and Miranda can have a kiss in the play, one that they’d have to rehearse. Fuck no: The only kiss that will occur takes place between his stage-parents, played by Wren and Paolo, and if I have my way, the only person Aram will be kissing is me.
At school people are talking about my play, with the opening night now just a few days away. I feel lucky that in the one place I do not excel—an academic environment—I am being given an opportunity to be noticed for my strengths. That belief in me is palpable, and I wonder if maybe being creative is a type of intelligence and people just don’t know it. I do everything myself: I design the lighting scheme and the sound track; I make the playbills and the tickets. The play is about a father’s suicide, and the teenage son who attempts suicide but survives. It takes place in a therapist’s office. The actors sit on chairs about six feet apart, with the light focused on one person at a time. Each character begins a sentence about his or her own experience, a line that is then completed by the next person, with the account changing drastically between perspectives.
Everyone thinks the sentence completion aspect is innovative, but what I don’t tell anyone is that my much smarter friend Naomi wrote a story that introduced me to the idea of this kind of shared, shifting monologue. She goes to a different school, so I’m not that worried. Aram is so smart, and now he thinks I’m smart, but I’m not. I’m hiding behind a pretense. Everywhere I go, there are always two of me. There is the me getting tested and the me who doesn’t know why. There is the me who suffers from countdowns and the me who pretends she’s unafraid. There is the me who pretends she knows things and the me who knows I know nothing.
On opening night I look down from the balcony into the Quaker me
etinghouse, at the gray pews where we spend our mornings sitting in silence. Taylor and Gwen are there, along with Paul and his brother Jonathan, plus more than half of the school. The principal of the school introduces the show, the lights go out, and the performance is better than any rehearsal we’ve ever had. No one forgets their lines and the lighting is perfect and it all goes by too fast because suddenly the final scene is up and Wren and Paolo kiss as the lights fade to black. I take a deep breath.
When the houselights come up, though, there are audible gasps, because Paolo and Wren are still kissing. They leap apart, but it’s too late; everyone saw it, even the principal. Even Wren’s boyfriend, Carlos, saw it. I don’t have time to wonder whether a scandal will be good for publicity or not, because I’m called onto the stage and I bow and the applause grows and I can’t quite believe how incredible this moment feels. I am being seen and recognized for something I wrote. For something I wrote about feelings and emotions. Instead of being seen for what I’m doing wrong, people are clapping because I’ve done something no one else has done in this school before. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to have people look at me the way I look at everyone else—like they know how to do things I don’t—and now, right in these very moments, they are. I don’t want it to end.
Afterward, Taylor and Gwen congratulate me, and I’m floating in a way that’s not terrifying. Except for the two of them, all the adults in my life seem out of touch; other people are concerned about the subject matter, asking if I am all right, and do I need to talk about anything? I’m annoyed that I had to do something so big to receive a question so small. It feels like too little too late. Yes, I did need to talk about something, years and years ago, but now I’m too far in to be extracted. I vow never to be an adult so unaware of the interior life of kids.
