by Marc Parent
“Quite possibly,” he said.
“Which couple would get my egg?” I said.
“It’s what we call a reciprocal process,” Ike said. “You choose them and they choose you, a partnership.” Then Ike pulled out a file drawer and riffled through it. “Here are all the profiles,” he said. “Here are all the couples who might want your genetic material.”
“How much?” I said.
“Five thousand,” Ike said.
I felt my eyes pop out like a pug dog’s. “Five thousand?” I said.
“Per retrieval,” Ike said. “If you do it more than once, then of course you get five thousand again. It can be lucrative,” Ike said. “And for a girl your age, you have a lot to give.”
I HAD TO sign on many dotted lines. I had to sign away my rights to the future child, which was not a problem, because in my mind I was not giving away a child, just an egg, and there’s a difference. I had to prove who I was, birth certificate, doctor checkups, health histories, school report cards, where I’ve always been straight A. Three weeks later, Ike called. “You’re approved,” he said. I went back to his office and he fanned out the files before me. It was like picking parents. Each couple had their history, their likes and dislikes, their golfing styles, their pet status, their gardens and careers. I knew I wanted my egg to go to a certain sort of woman, one who had, say, a circular lawn, and underground sprinklers, the kind that work on an automatic timer and rain upwards just as the summer sun sinks, giving the air a lavender smell. I wanted the woman to have a lawn and a walk-in California closet and most definitely a career; she should have earned these things herself, and she should like dogs. I picked her, Janice. We would never meet, but then again, we would. I would be buried in her. She would grow me all over again. I would be born from her, born into her house, which she described as contemporary colonial, with two staircases and a shag carpet the color of cream. In the kitchen, I pictured fresh peppers hung in copper baskets; I pictured a small room painted a beautiful pale green, where the crib would be. I pictured the baby opening its eyes to see the lacquered blond spindles and the walls and a face bending over it, all shadow and jasmine scent. Janice. In her house, I would sleep in Neiman Marcus sheets. In her house, touch would be safe, mouth to cheek, finger to wrist, the skin always moist and fresh.
I THOUGHT THE procedure would be relatively easy, my mistake. They can’t, it turns out, just go in there with lobster tongs and pick out an egg or two. I had to take a lot of drugs and this did not appeal to me, given that, unlike my mother, who eats meat, I am a vegetarian with insides as bright as sunny corridors. So I wasn’t happy about the drug part, but the fertility doctor at the clinic, where Ike referred me, said it was absolutely necessary. The goal was to ramp up my ovaries so they spit out eggs like silver pinballs, so doctors could harvest as many as ten at a time, all for Janice. I went in for ultrasounds. The technician squirted warmed goop on my belly and said, “There they are,” but when I looked on the screen all I saw were shadows and clouds. Now, at night, I dreamt of Janice. She was my mother, my sister, my friend. I could be close to her; we could be like blood relations with none of the liabilities this usually imposed. We did not share disease or death or even difference. We were just a pure blood-bond, and she came to me in my dreams, this Janice did, her skirt a spiral of color. She held my hand. I felt I had come home.
MEANWHILE, MY MOTHER’S cancer was doing the cancer thing. Once a recurrence happens, and once that recurrence goes to the bone, well, you can imagine. If you have a cancer in your breast, which is where hers started, you have it limited, because there are only two breasts on the body. But when cancer gets to the bone it has a whole sewer system to work through because bones are everywhere, and they are not durable. My mother was in pain. She knocked on a door one day and shattered her porous knuckle. She drank her chemo down. The chemo was red as Batman’s cape, and left a stain on her lip. Ten years ago, when my father left her for a woman in high high heels, my mother’s already graying hair finished its transformation. Her veins are very purple in her high thighs, a little like mashed grape. “I’m my own woman Cynthia,” my mother tells me, has always told me. “I don’t care what anyone thinks of how I look or live and it’s a shame you do.” She says this to me in her bedroom slippers, as she sucks on her mentholated sticks. The smoke is snarled and yarnlike. I can’t believe I came out of her vagina. Sometimes I have a weird belief that the doctors never completely washed me off, so I still smell like her and what is this smell, my mother’s oils, the substance beneath the stone, where the worms are?
SO, SHE DRANK her cherry red chemo and I took my fertility shots; we sort of did this side by side. “Five thousand dollars Mom,” I’d say, holding the syringe in the air, plunging it down fast into my backside, feeling the Fertinex do its work, seep into my tubes, nourish my eggs, which were turning gold and perfect. Day after day I plumped out and became an Easter basket. Day after day she did the opposite, like a bad compare/contrast English assignment we were, the basket of her body frayed and unstable. “I disapprove of this job, Cynthia,” she’d say, and then her hair would fall out, a big clump on the rug.
IN COLLEGE, WHERE I was going to be a junior, I liked literature. It’s not my major, but I am bookish and also, of course, interested in decorating magazines. That summer of unusual heat I could sit for a long time on the porch swing, one bare foot scraping against the floor, and read stories about fortune-tellers who saw strange things in the crosshatched lines, stories of men on sailing ships and old Bostonian streets lit by gas lamps while women in hooped skirts walked poodles. I read Bed+Bath and then this writer named Colette, who described melon very well, and then Anne Rice with her vampires. Once, in school, in my freshman year, we read a very conceptual book called Purity and Danger. It was all about why some cultures find some things unclean. For instance, did you know that Jewish people don’t mix milk with meat because it is unclean, and the reason why is that dairy comes from a certain sphere, and meat from another, and some spheres should not touch. The same way some planets should not touch, the collision of worlds. Incest is unclean because a child is in one sphere, a parent in another, and it would be like a comet coming down, sex would. When I gave my egg, sphere shaped and wet, to Janice, would we be in purity or danger? Would we be one world, somehow separated, finally coming together, two women cut from the same cloth, separated by accident and neighborhood, or were we really two different worlds that had no business being in contact? I wondered about this, a little. I went to the library one day and looked for that book Purity and Danger, but the librarian said, “There’s no such book, my dear.” But there is. I remembered reading about the danger of pollution, but I also remembered reading about the danger of purity, how realms kept strictly separate, rigid realms where the goal is perfection unto itself, are also abominations. The craving for symmetry, the rejection of the dented world. That’s possibly some sort of sin.
I WENT FOR my first egg retrieval. The clinic was chic, the waiting room filled with pained and wealthy-looking women. I enjoyed their jewelry, the tennis bracelet, the stop-sign–shaped ruby on the ring. The nurse called me in. They did a quick ultrasound and then proceeded to sedation. “Just to calm you down,” they said, and I felt the pinch of the needle and an immediate coolness fill my veins, like some blue Slurpee, some sleep and relief from the heat. I saw the doctor in a dream or in reality, I don’t know which. My legs were hoisted high, into stirrups, and a warm sun shone into my cleaved body. I saw a silver-sharp instrument hovering in his gloved hand, and then it went in me. Up, up, the needle nosed, up into my uterus, feeling for the stuffed sac of the ovary, there, the gentlest pierce possible, the tiny sweet eggs spilling down the straw and into a clean bowl, where they were then whisked away. Afterwards, I sat up. Someone brought me water. “Good job,” they said. I sipped. I moved off the table, and where I lay, just a little dab of bright red paint, my body’s color.
ALL IN ALL, a very trustworthy operation. One
week later, a check for five K in the mail. I took my mother and said “c’mon,” and we went downtown. I bought accessories. I bought glass door-knobs and ribbons. We went to the makeup counter at the mall. My mother said, “Cynthia, I’m tired.” I pushed her forward. I had just the slightest soreness in my side. I said, “Can you give her some foundation, some sparkle eye shadow?” I went through one procedure, she now through another. Five thousand, four thousand four hundred and fifty.
The makeup lady, who looked like a doctor herself in a white coat, poured a promising mixture onto a cotton ball, wiped at my mother’s face. Somewhere, Janice was taking my egg, they were inserting it into her; it was petaling open, a little leg cracking its fragile shell. Here we go. I felt giddy, rich, full. I felt pregnant myself, my egg there in the lining, there in the lavender-scented sprinklers, the blond lacquered crib, shushhh a woman says, and she holds me against a body that does not break. “I’m tired,” my mother said, and the makeup doctor swabbed her and waxed her with pink lipstick and then, it was all of a sudden, my mother swiped her hand sideways so bottles went scurrying like people in a sniper attack, rattling sideways, falling onto the floor, seeking shelter under the counters.
The whole store got quiet, looking. “Leave-me-alone,” my mother said into the silence. The makeup lady froze, a cotton swab in mid-descent. “You,” my mother turned to me, “you are entirely without empathy.” And I felt myself flush with shame, for it was true, my sin was flounce and flourish, and had it ever been any different? Once, a long time ago, I had liked to draw simple things, a star, an elephant without tusks. Return me there. “And you,” my mother said now to the Lancôme lady; my mother struggled to stand up, she backed away. “And you,” she said to that lady, who was holding her healing cottons and her pressed powders that in the end would do no good. That’s what my mother said next: “No good.”
CERTAIN THINGS BECOME compulsions. Some people drink. Some people smoke. Some people donate their eggs. Another cycle. Another five K, another chance at another woman’s womb. Ike said sure. My mother got weaker. Summer finally passed, and when the fall arrived it was a godsend, cooler air from Canada, birds in a V. I went back to school, hauling myself up off my mother’s porch swing, out of our smoke-stained house where the wallpaper curled, and into the classroom, where I’m straight A. Because I was a junior now, I took almost all interior design courses, to prepare me for the world. I took a course in perspective, where we studied vanishing points, and a course in textiles, where we compared cotton to twill, and I took a course in color management, where we learned what went together and what didn’t. I was bad at color management. I put things together I should not have; I collided separate spheres and thought it looked wonderful. I took pale orange and put it next to a wash of violet in a virtual room; I made one wall hunter green, the floor wine red, and I thought—I still do—that this was lovely. The instructor said, “All your homes look nervous,” but I couldn’t tell. Color, I think, is God’s way of laughing. I envision places inside me where the spectrum spreads out so every hue and tone meshes in a subtle burst of light. I picture a terra-cotta sill, a pot of pressed sea glass. Give me my floors in deep blues, my ceilings in marbleized pink. The instructor said, “Less is more, Cynthia.” My instructor said, “Neutrals like coffee work well,” but I couldn’t see that, couldn’t stand that, and so I found my flaw; it had to do with color. I got my first bad grade ever in that course. B. Minus. Look at it. B–. Like a pair of sideways breasts with a slash at the skin. My mother’s cancer went to the brain. I did yet another egg retrieval and picked a couple in a farmhouse in Nyack, New York, where there was, so said the profile, a salmon-colored living room, a woman with strawberry blond hair. I began to worry that something was seriously wrong with me. Never had I been anything but good at what I did. B. Minus. My instructor said I had a bad eye.
THERE ARE THEORIES, there are stories, and there are facts. Color is all three of these things. Eggs are just facts. The fact is that a baby girl is born with over fifty thousand tiny fresh eggs in her ovaries and she loses them month by month, so by the time she’s ready to have her own baby, she’s diminished; she’s down. I didn’t know this ahead of time, but I read it in the waiting-room literature. There are other ovoid facts. For instance, every egg has a tiny little X inside it, a perfectly shaped letter, a crossroads, two fine lines jointed just right. The most amazing fact, says Ike, is none of these things. The most amazing fact is that every single one of us, thieves and terrorists and adulterers and greedy ones, every single one of us is truly a good egg. Otherwise we would have miscarried. If this is true, and it so obviously is, then why did my mother’s cancer spread to the brain? Why can’t I manage my color wheel? Why did I get a B minus and why was there a boy murdered in the weedy woods, where the mall parking lot stops and the crow-darkness begins?
MY LAST EGG retrieval happened on a Thursday. I didn’t know it would be my last one, because I was getting rich, cash piling up as my storehouse diminished. My mother was babbling on and on at night now about angels in her tapioca pudding. I wanted them to move her to a hospice. I sometimes came to her and put quarters under her pillow, like I remember she used to do for me when a tooth fell out, and I’d sleep all night on silver. Oh mom, what can I give you? I couldn’t kiss her, couldn’t stand the feel of her skin on my lips, or maybe it was my lips I couldn’t stand, the way I started to see them as earthworm pink, segmented and ominously plump.
I went for my last egg retrieval. I had two moments that are of note. That they happened almost side by side is important. Sometimes I get what I call these “flashes of notice.” They can happen anytime and they never come with warnings. Sometimes it seems to me that the world steps out of its skin and shows me its original beauty, or its ugliness. On the way to the clinic that late fall afternoon, doused on drugs that were maybe making my own mind a little whacked, I saw light swimming in the top of a tree, light fractured by leaves and swimming like little fish up there in the treetop sky, and I thought, “I am looking at a mass of light.” That was a moment of notice. Then I got to the clinic. I stepped in and sat down. Next to me was a woman too old to be there. She had a map of lines on her face and sunken eyes. She was, I’d say, fifty. She was wearing tasteless black-velvet leggings and a long tunic top and all in all, she had a beaten-up, trashy look. And I had a flash of notice then. I saw her ugliness absolutely, same as I’d seen the light’s beauty. I saw the cells spilling down her aging face and teeth, each one a tombstone. I felt, then, a pure and rising fury. I felt a tightness in my throat, like I’d swallowed a red rubber ball. I was going to cry soon, even though, come on, come on, we’re all good eggs. I sat down. Women whooshed in and out, hands placed protectively on their lower bellies. “What are you here for?” I said to the woman, really brazen, I didn’t care. I figured she was waiting for a daughter, and that, it turned out, was right, in a way. “I’m here to receive my first donor egg,” she said, and I felt punched in the gut, for it had not occurred to me, anyone can get a donor egg, you can be eighty years old and get one implanted, it is never too late to harbor life, and that seemed awful and wrong to me. It seemed polluted to put a young fresh egg in an ancient vessel. It was like a taboo. I had the thought that maybe one of the women I had picked was really like this woman, looks good on paper, but dying; of course. Color is God’s way of laughing. I thought of that myself. Here’s something else I thought of. Every moment you are with a person, you are with a dying person. There’s no way around that.
I stared at this woman. “Aren’t you a little old?” I said, my voice high and frantic. The woman blinked. She had so much mascara on that her blink left little black dots on the belly-bags beneath her eyes. Everyone in the waiting room turned to listen.
“Old for what?” the woman said snippily.
“Old to be getting a donor egg?” I said. “I mean,” and the rage kept rising, “I mean, at some point you just have to admit, it might be too late.”
The woman did
n’t say anything, just looked away, fiddled with the gold clasp on her purse.
“Well,” I said, laughing, and I’d like to add here that months and months of fertility drugs can make you crazy, although I know it’s more than that, there are many facts, theories, stories that underlie a mind, “well,” I said, “I’m a veteran at this and let me tell you it sucks. It sucks,” I said. “They put you on a table, spread you wide, and then blow the eggs up you like they’re bubbles.”
“Would you shut up,” the woman said to me.
“Would I shut up?” I said. I thought of my mother then. She kept talking tapioca, angels with wet wings. Why wouldn’t she shut up? Would I shut up? “Fuck you,” I said. “You’re too old to have a baby.”
“Please,” the woman said, holding up her hand, “please, stop.”
“I’m just trying to tell you the truth,” I said. “They spread your legs wide and stuff things inside. Like a flaxidermist.”
“You mean taxidermist,” she said.
“That’s what I said,” I said.
“Tiffany,” a nurse called, coming to the door, and the woman looked up.
“Your turn,” I said. Outside the plate glass windows, the trees were glorious, but I did not have a flash of notice; the glory stayed separate from me. Tiffany, old, with a big fat butt, moved off, her cells falling onto the floor with a tinkling sound, like goblets being broken. Only I could hear it. I sat there, my eyes closed, listening.
