Come Up and See Me Sometime

“I love her,” Gary said, “I love her completely. My love for her is complete.”

And it was. Complete. And I wasn’t. Completely. Relief and fear tangled together, like the hands of women clutching in the air for a falling bouquet of something.

No Universe (#ulink_0822da3d-e5d2-5eeb-9977-c1fc9ae3bbc1)

“Can you handle it?”

“Yeah, and I can kick it around, too.”

—Mae West

When I heard the news I said, “How can I be infertile when I’m the only member of my family that’s ever gone to therapy?”

The doctor pulled off her gloves and said, “Just probably infertile. You never know, miracles happen. Are you married?” I shook my head. She said, “Then what does it matter?” She left the room, closing the door behind her. I slowly pulled my feet out of the stirrups.

The rest of the day, I felt different. When I drove back to the office I thought, Look at the infertile woman in the car, driving a stick shift. At the supermarket salad bar I thought, Infertile woman selects a tomato.

But then I realized, maybe this is the answer. I’ve always felt secretly disgusted with new mothers. I hate how they say, “I just want to spend all my time at home with my baby.” Yeah, and I just want to spend all my time in the Oval Office with Ben and Jerry, but we can’t all manage that, can we?

Then there’s the way they talk incessantly about their bodies, and what baby eats for breakfast. And that maternity leave, extending indefinitely until they don’t know how to run all the latest computer programs anymore.

But that’s just rich women, mothers with the luxuries of both money and partner. The rest of them take correspondence courses to finish their mail-order MBAs, when all they ever wanted to do was paint pictures. Or tap dance. Anything but what they’re doing now: searching for affordable day care and thinking of creative ways to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Suffering for the sake of the future, which is the ultimate form of procrastination. No way, baby. So to speak. Not me, anyway.

MY FRIEND Mona called me at work. “I forget. Does the rabbit die or not? When you’re pregnant?”

“Dies. ‘The rabbit died.’ Yeah, that sounds right.”

Silence on her end while I kept typing. Then, dryly through the receiver, “So what do I have to do? Knit a booty?”

I froze, arms suspended above the keyboard in a Frankenstein pose. “Holy shit.”

“Yeah. Shit. Shit.”

I turned and my chair squeaked. Mona said, “It’s David’s. Don’t congratulate me. I’m going to 86 it. Will you come? Be the, uh, daddy?”

“Of course. David won’t go?”

“David doesn’t know. Hey, that rhymes.” I didn’t say anything. She said, “Oh come on, Stephanie.”

“You should tell him.”

“Not David. He tells Hillary jokes. David eats bacon for breakfast every day.”

“So, he’s a little conservative. What do you expect? We live in Colorado Springs.”

“He’d make me marry him and have the kid, and then he’d name it after himself.”

“Nobody can make you get married, Mona.”

“Please.” Her voice was thin and far away.

“OK,” I said. “We’ll do it and then you’ll sleep over.”

“Like a slumber party. Sort of.”

“How are you feeling?”

“All right. Either I’m shallow, more liberal than I thought, or it hasn’t quite hit me yet.”

“Hey, what if you had the baby and gave it to me?” I actually said this casually. Then I immediately thought about my studio apartment, my big plans to teach English in the Democratic Republic of Congo, how I haven’t been able to afford a dentist visit in almost three years.

Mona snorted.

“It’s feasible,” I said.

“Stephanie. It’s mine.”

“Yeah.”

“No creative solutions. I’m getting an abortion.”

“I’ll help you.”

“Thank you. Just get me through the door.”

“It’s a simple procedure.”

“Easy for you to say.”

Then I heard through the phone, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. But be glad you don’t ever have to go through this. Really.” Even so, there was something smug in her voice. Or maybe it was tears or food or something like that.

I WALKED Mona across the picket line of men and women shouting in the rain. “Murderers,” they yelled. Mona gave them the finger. I did the same. We shared an umbrella above our frizzing hair. All the picketers wore shiny slickers, their bangs plastered to their foreheads.

A wet man in a yellow raincoat shook a jar in our faces. Mona put her hand over her mouth. I stopped and asked him, “If you have so much respect for human life, how can you put it in an old pickle jar?” He silently shook the jar again like a maraca, the fetus rattling inside.

Once we were in the office, the nurses were kind, the doctor was kind, it was over in three hours. Several women tapped their feet in the waiting room. A few men fidgeted or slept in their seats. I read an article about the complex social structure of bees, and then one on Van Gogh’s ear. I thought about taking a walk, but it was still raining. I ate three candy bars. I half expected to hear the sounds of a large vacuum cleaner.

I examined the faces of the women as they pushed open the double doors, rejoining boyfriends or rattling their own car keys. They didn’t seem happy or sad. They seemed crampy.

Then Mona was standing at the counter, writing a check. She didn’t look at me when I put my hand on her back. “How was it?”

She was concentrating on signing her name. She picked up a big pink receipt with procedures checked off in carbon ink and dropped it into her purse. Then she turned to me and sighed.

“Too easy. It made me uneasy.”

She looked fine. Pink cheeks, hair a little mussed in the back. I patted it down. She said, “Make a plan for me. I’m whipped.” We headed out. As we passed the picketers, Mona waved slowly like the Queen of England, from the wrist.

I’ve never made the mistake of thinking that everything I do is good. I’ve chosen badly on purpose, badly by accident. I once made fun of a man who was stumbling across the street, too drunk for walking, nearly too drunk to stand. Then I realized too late that he was in fact disabled or suffering from some incapacitating disease. The smile still trembling on my face like an aftershock. I’ve been terribly sorry for things unnoticed, for things stopped just in time or nearly too late. For all those choices better off aborted or barren.