But our party was in western New York, not Lebanon. We had no dove, no Noah to warn and save the world from deluge. Even if the party hall were an ark, it had anchored itself along a suburban stretch of lawn, the tree near its door not an olive, but a magnolia. Still, magnolias are an ancient genus, millions of years old; the trees existed even before bees and had to rely on beetles for pollination. Beetles are sloppy as tanks when it comes to the task, sometimes chewing petals in place of the pollen and as a result, the magnolia, despite its elegant appearance, is in fact a rugged bloom, more primitive than olive trees and Sarah and maybe even love.
Inside the party hall, the sound of music and laughter.
Nineteen ninety-six. There would have been Eric Clapton and Blues Traveler for my husband. Barenaked Ladies and Alanis Morissette for my sister. The Weather Girls and ABBA for our friend—and for all of us really, because who could stand still to “Dancing Queen”? Friends danced in groups. Couples danced in pairs. Slow drags. My husband danced with another man. Gay or straight, everyone danced whatever way they wanted, so much movement blurring the edges of the evening I’m not sure whether I danced with my husband to “I Fall to Pieces,” or only imagined it later—but no, I was busy walking someone’s uncle to the door, someone not keen on male-on-male dancing, who’d waited an appropriate amount of time before announcing his departure.
“Good-bye,” he said and walked out into the night. “Thank you,” he said. “So sorry to have to go,” by which he meant that the cake and the music were fine but he could not abide the sight of men slow-dragging to Patsy Cline. It was a tiny loss, his leaving, the door opening to usher him out into a night that had already begun to grow cold.
The cakes were specially ordered. Made by a friend of a friend, a man who had a way with flour and sugar. Beautiful things. Frothy as ballerinas, perfect as debutantes. Hazelnut maybe, rich chocolate, one of them flavored with raspberry liqueur and whipped cream. And, as if it were a wedding and not a birthday celebration, the cakes were given the honor of their own table, a space more magnetic than even the gift table. The cakes were like hearts beating atop a tablecloth and I wanted more than anything to push my fingers into the pink one and lift it in frosted sections to my mouth. But I contained myself. My husband was turning thirty. As was my sister and my friend, whose mother stood and sang. She had a voice like old times, his mother. Big band and straight whiskey. A voice like crushed velvet. Everyone dancing, everyone forgetting the world while we could.
Look back and such nights thicken with metaphor. The magnolia must symbolize fruit and bloom and possibility. The snow stands, of course, for unexpected turns in the weather. And the drink in my hand? The way I brought it to my lips as the snow began to fall—is that a stand-in for freedom or despair?
I was new to drinking. I’d gone through the motions, but never really let myself go. I’d held off because of a grandmother’s sloshed calls from the West Coast, her diatribes coming without regard to differences in time zone or the motion of our lives. She discovered where we went to church and placed drunken calls to the priest, the wet accusations and sloppy confessions—the shame of it all, a grandmother disturbing the peace, a grandmother engaging in bar fights, then calling a stranger thousands of miles away for absolution. How much I wanted a grandmother who crocheted soft things instead of one who nursed a black eye with a T-bone like something out of a cartoon, one whose death came when her body could no longer sustain the ongoing assault. Cirrhosis. Even the word was ugly. And the men in my old neighborhood, holding court on street corners with their brown bags of liquor and bloated words, making little kingdoms with their longing.
Given such examples, I’d avoided anything stronger than wine or the frilliest of drinks, still believing, at least in part, in rewards for good behavior, allowing myself only a time or two of overindulgence. But on that night goodness itself felt like a lie so I let myself taste it, the way it dismantled the angles, the way it blotted. We were in our twenties, three of us turning thirty—what would have been in our cups? Rum perhaps, or fruit juice mixed with vodka. Drinks poured from a shaker and topped with cherries, something hard and certain and sweet.
I should have known his hands by then, they were always too big and too cold. I’d have normally avoided a doctor’s appointment on the day of a party, but it was an emergency. While it’s possible the doctor I’d had since I was a teenager only put his hands on top of me, I remember his hands inside me in spite of the seed growing and how tender, but he examined my body and shook his head, considering the few drops of blood that had brought me to him.
“Well, you still feel a little pregnant,” he said, sizing up the state of my life with one hand while turning toward the sink.
I sat on the table, trying to keep the paper gown from falling apart, unsure of whether to be glad I was still pregnant, if only just a little, or to give in to the desire to crumple to the floor. I thought of the party, the work to do, the way I’d begun to see Paul as a father—the pair of old-fashioned Keds I’d given him because they seemed the sort Ward Cleaver would wear. It was then that I knew. As I sat draped in paper watching the doctor write on my chart. A little pregnant. The way he avoided my eye, the thoroughness with which he washed his hands. I thought of all the years I’d seen him, the way his mildness was less a result of warmth than waxy detachment. The way he performed abortions on the same weekends he delivered babies. The way he’d go about his day either way. There was nothing to justify my flare of anger, no logic or consistency of theme, but it rendered me solid enough to push off the examination table toward the pile of clothes folded on the chair and all that needed doing for the coming night.
And the night came. A party with cakes beating like hearts and someone’s mother singing and people rushing to the door, mouths opening like new flowers, running onto wet grass and lifting their hands to the sky, as if it were the first time in the history of the world it had ever snowed.
Blackberry Winter, it’s called, a cold spell that follows you into spring, coming after the brambles have blossomed. The opposite of Indian Summer, a blackberry winter takes its name from whatever happens to be blooming when the unexpected cold snap arrives: Dogwood Winter when the dogwoods show, Locust Winter when the locust flowers are out. Magnolia Winter, I suppose, when the snow comes just as a little tree outside a party hall has just shaken its first blossoms awake. An Olive Winter, had a light snow fallen onto tiny blossoms in Canaan while Sarah watched her son look up at the sky, the white coming down, the woman, now a hundred years old, wondering how much longer she’d be around to watch him grow.
An olive tree can produce fruit for thousands of years. Pistachios can live for several hundred. Some apple trees go on bearing for more than a hundred years. But a woman is not a fruit tree and, unless she’s Sarah from the Bible, has only a few decades in which to reproduce. We are elevated in many ways—walking about on two legs, looking into mirrors, berating ourselves for shortcomings, performing ablutions, and eventually loving ourselves, little goddesses stringing bits of metal and rock round our necks. But compared to the bristlecone pine, we are ants. Compared to the Olive Trees of Noah, our time of bearing is the equivalent of a cigarette break.
It was late when the flood began. The door opened and closed, bringing in gusts of cold as the party whittled down to the closest friends and the most devoted few. It was not dramatic, this deluge; I simply slipped into the bathroom and stayed in one of the stalls while people left in groups, laughing as they went out into the snow. I waited for the silence that told me everyone had gone, but instead someone came to find me. Paul, I suppose, though I begged him not to tell. A few had seen me with a drink earlier, staring out the window, and saying, Are you sure you should be drinking that? Yes, I said, I’m sure. Because by then, I knew. And all that was left was the strange fact of snow on magnolia petals.
The next day it was as if it had rained inside my body, as if the entirety of Noah’s flood, forty days and forty nights, had been
waiting under the skin, pooled and swollen, and had finally broken loose. I’d cradled the telephone all night, drifting off between rings, the doctor on call checking in. “It’s me,” he said, like he was my oldest friend in the world, and on that night maybe he was. I slept in the guest room to keep Paul from the mess of trips to the bathroom, and I suppose I’d cultivated by then a preference for bearing things alone—or else I was testing him, saying, I’ll be better on my own, and flunking him when he said okay too quickly or flunking myself for lying in the first place—all of this while holding onto the phone.
“Everything will be fine,” the doctor said, “you’re doing just fine.”
“Yes,” I said, agreeing that I was doing fine when, in fact, I was doing nothing but yielding to the work of my body. “Okay,” I said when he called to remind me to see my doctor first thing. “I promise,” I said to the voice that came one last time as the sun rose, then fell away like an old sweater I’d needed on a chilly night long ago.
The sun was out. Everything was light. A proper May. Except for a few fallen blossoms, no one would have known how cold it had been just a few hours before, the snow falling and melting while most people slept.
What the Body Wants
WHEN SHE’S BORN, A girl is lousy with eggs. Like a clownfish or a cod, all those follicles waiting to rise and flare. By puberty only a quarter of the original two million remain and in her lifetime, only four hundred follicles will mature into ripened eggs. Four hundred chances for things to line up just right, for the moon of her ovum to burgeon and divide into another of her kind.
Trying to force the body to bear fruit isn’t as pretty as forcing forsythia in winter, not as simple as submerging cut branches into warm water to trick them into flowering. The body is not a shrub. There’s no getting around its particular vocabulary. When you force the body, words like follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) and human chorionic gonadotropic (HCG) and luteinizing hormone (LH) enter your life. It’s a return to grade school with a new list of vocabulary words to learn. Nothing so lovely as an eruption of yellow in mid-March. Except that forsythia contain ovaries too, and have their own lexicon. A fact to keep in mind as you find the spot on your thigh and jab the needle hard and fast. Too shallow and you’ll miss the muscle and have to try again. Too deep and the spot will sting for days. It’s understandable then, isn’t it, the desire to memorize instead the language of flowers?
Stigma and style. Sepal and calyx. Petal and corolla.
Mine is not called a Fertility Clinic. It’s called a Center for Reproductive Endocrinology, which sounds better somehow—less Movie of the Week and more medically valid—but still amounts to a brochure rack loaded with information on in vitro fertilization and sperm washing. No matter what it’s called, the waiting room is populated by women whose bodies are straight and tall or round and short, women with older partners or female partners or no partners, women past typical childbearing age, and a few like me, under thirty—all of us flipping through magazines with smiling women and beautiful homes on their covers. A room occupied by those waiting to discuss the progress of their cycles, women awaiting the results of blood tests to measure FSH levels, couples with brown bags waiting for their artificial insemination appointments, women biting the insides of their lips while listening for their names to be called, all looking and not looking at the door to the inner sanctum of the examination rooms, a door plastered with photographs of babies, all pink and clean and new, twins overrepresented. The one thing everyone has in common, besides waiting, is the way our eyes travel to and from that door, the way we pick up and put down again the home and garden magazines, study the framed artwork and the brochure rack, shift in our seats, trying to hide the fear that the follicles didn’t develop or the blood test will be negative—all under the watch of a squadron of beautiful babies.
The serum injected into the thigh is a purified form of FSH extracted from human urine. “From postmenopausal women,” my doctor says, and while I’m absorbing this fact, she adds, “from nuns.”
Nuns from Italy, it turns out.
FSH is the hormone responsible for the development of egg follicles and rises in women after menopause so that, ironically, women no longer able to bear children produce in excess exactly what’s needed to ovulate and become pregnant. A fact that resulted in kindly older women donating their urine to help strangers halfway across the globe.
I think of this sometimes, in the lab, the exam room, under the glare of all the tubes and machines and lights—those nuns sharing their pee for the making of babies they will never hold. How strange this world, so advanced and so wonderfully primitive.
From our beginnings, humans have done what we could to trick the earth into giving up its riches. We perform rituals to fatten the crops, offer blessings to enhance our offspring, and create figures like the twenty-five-thousand-year-old Venus of Willendorf with her red ochre tinted belly to cultivate fertility in times of famine. So many symbols, so many hopeful acts. The club-wielding Cerne Abbas Giant, a naked figure drawn onto a hill in the English countryside, was said to help childless couples who danced around or slept on the site to improve their chances for conception. In the city of Amarante, pastries are shaped into phalluses and named for São Gonçalo, Portugal’s patron saint of love. We sacrifice chickens; throw rice at weddings; rub bellies against coffins; fashion maypoles from birch maypoles; tattoo trees onto brides’ foreheads; press turmeric—and sometimes coriander and saffron—onto the bodies of new couples; pour water over the heads of girls at Easter; sip teas made with bits of sparrow and hare; and touch the trousers on the statue of Victor Noir in Père Lachaise Cemetery, kiss him softly on the lips, and place a flower in his stone hat. Some carry hazelnuts and jasmine flowers; have sex in farmers’ fields; whip girls with willow branches; place a thumb in the column of St. Gregory in Istanbul; float wreaths of flowers in rivers; walk in the shadow of a lusty woman; jump bonfires; pray novenas to St. Brigit of Kildare, St. Gerard Majella, and St. Rita of Cascia; and pass through an ancient stone hole backward on the night of a full moon.
My counselor said it was my second chakra. “The Swadhisthana Chakra.”
Though I tend to be cynical where chakras are concerned, I was so tired of focusing on my ovaries I’d begun to hate the very word.Ovary. How medical it sounded, how naked and how slippery. The idea of contemplating a lotus was a relative relief.
“The chakra is aligned with reproduction, but also with unconscious desires and creativity,” the counselor said.
I fixed my gaze on the box of Kleenex kept on the side table for those who came before and after me, men and women who sat in the very same seat discussing troubled marriages and alcoholism and thwarted dreams. I stared into the Kleenex, rolling my eyes while trying to hide how much I wanted to believe in chakras and lotus blossoms.
“It’s as though you are stuck in many ways,” he said. “Where else aren’t you freed up creatively?”
He’d been my counselor for years. I knew he was right for me when, years earlier, we’d felt the earth shake during a session and ran to the window to see what caused the boom. Barnum & Bailey, it turned out; the circus was parading into town, their elephants thundering down city streets. It seemed a sign. There were others. When I took a fringed pillow from the end of the small sofa and held it up to block my eyes during my first few sessions, he never once suggested I put it down. When I complained about the fertility drugs making me fat, he only offered me a Buddha smile and said, “Some people get bigger when big things are about to happen.”
“What a lie,” I thought. “What a perfectly gorgeous lie.”
Now he was talking chakras and creativity and other ways in which I might be stuck. I must have snarled and made a crack about needing to make a painting of goldfinches to jump-start my ovaries, but eventually, my shoulders would have relaxed as I breathed, allowing myself to conjure a lotus and imagine it unfold one vermilion petal at a time.
The Internet was still new in the
mid-’90s but was already organizing itself into websites and discussion groups and topic-related listservs. I researched as much as I could about the world within my body, trying to make sense of the stew of hormones, reading books and articles and websites where people shared theories about special diets, medical treatments, and specialists. One name kept coming up. An expert. A real life fertility god. One who, it turned out, would spend an hour online answering questions during an upcoming chat session. Oh my god, women with handles such as W8N4BABY and H4PPYM4M4 wrote about the upcoming session: I can’t wait!
Women all over the country plugged in, posing questions about selective reduction, blighted ova, and intrauterine insemination. The expert may have sat in a den in Iowa wearing a T-shirt and faded Levi’s. He may have been in an office in New York, wearing a suit jacket and loosened tie. He may have been in his bedroom in Montreal, a tangle of underwear and back hair, but I imagined him in a white coat seated beside an examination table, hands in latex gloves. Back and forth the questions and answers came, until finally there was an opening. I was shy, even online, but eager, and began typing my question.
Sometimes I feel pain in the sides of my pelvis—my fingers shook as if I were posing my question to an actual god—near my ovaries, almost as if they want to ovulate.
I hit “send” as fast as I could, before another woman’s question could appear on the screen and steal his attention. Before I could write a follow-up to ask why the pain might be coming, or what it might mean, his answer flashed back from Iowa or Montreal or New York: Ovaries are organs. They don’t WANT anything.
Queen of the Fall Page 7
