Come Up and See Me Sometime

How does this fit in? It doesn’t, does it?

BABIES WERE suddenly everywhere I went. In the fluorescent light of a midnight search in the grocery store for melatonin, they looked like shrieking Claymation characters, legs banging maniacally against the side of the grocery cart. Or sometimes they looked like those plastic dolls with a string coming out of their backs. There was one lying prostrate at the Koala Bear Kare station in the airport bathroom, laughing every time a toilet flushed. Babies at a distance. Across the street, a pregnant woman pushed a stroller in front of my window every five minutes. Babies on TV, selling diapers, clothes, dog food, even automobiles. Automobiles with car seats.

Somehow it wasn’t the same thing when they were already five or six and whining about the long line at the bank, or asking for some ridiculous doll that shaves its own legs. But as babies—heads wobbling on their latex necks, toes wrinkled from sucking, long threads of spit hanging from their soggy lower lips—I couldn’t figure out how to feel. So I polled my friends.

“What do you think about when you think about infertility?”

“Nothing,” Mark said.

“At all?”

“Well, I think a little bit about my vasectomy.”

“You had a vasectomy?” He simultaneously looked both more and less attractive than he had a minute ago.

“After my first marriage.”

“Have you ever regretted it?”

“Yeah, when the AIDS thing became a big deal and I had to wear condoms anyway.”

“So you have no feelings about infertility itself?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“It took human civilization until Christ’s time to even come up with the number zero.”

“Point, please?”

“What is there to think about something that isn’t anything?”

When I asked Amy, she said, “I think about my ovaries. And how you’re born with them and all the eggs are already intact. And each of those eggs contains all the eggs of future generations. Like a little universe. So when I think about infertility, I think, no universe. No universe … But it’s all so academic anyway, I mean, who really gets to experience their full potential?”

Anthony said, “I think about the world population problem and say, hallelujah, Darwinism at work.”

Mona said, “Big deal, adopt.”

Fran said, “I think about life becoming real exotic. Like, no more working as a receptionist. I think about getting a graduate degree, maybe a cool job that lets you wear the miniskirts that nobody else gets to wear because they all get varicose veins when they’re pregnant. Oh yeah, and you can tattoo your stomach. You can live in foreign countries with no health insurance.”

Ellen said, “Husband dog sofa.”

“What?”

“Those are the three stages of commitment in a woman’s life. First she gets married. Then she adopts a dog. When she’s really settling down, she finally buys herself a sofa.”

“I have a sofa.”

“You found it next to a dumpster, Stephanie.”

“What about pregnancy? As a commitment?”

“Well, that’s extra. That’s unplanned, much of the time. It’s not really relevant except in its result.”

“Which is?”

She stared at me. “The baby. You have a baby.”

WHEN I asked my shrink if I was a control freak, he finished saying “Absolutely” before I finished saying “freak.” I told him that I once worked with a woman who carried a remote control in her purse. Whenever she got worried or angry, she took it out and stroked it like a gerbil. My shrink said that if I keep comparing myself to severe neurotics, I’ll think that anything is permissible.

David, Mona’s David, called me up at home. He asked to meet me. I agreed, mostly because I was bored. Adventure, scandal, I told myself. Free drinks. We met in a country-western bar called the Elvis Pelvis.

“Thing is,” David said once we sat down, “I know Mona’s hiding something from me.”

I drank my beer.

“I always considered you a friend, Stephanie,” David said.

“Likewise, David.” But I didn’t. I had only seen him at the occasional barbecue, party, movie. Dinner out, dinner in, hike, rock concert, camping trip, vacation, funeral, softball game. But I was Mona’s friend.

Now he touched my hand. “There’s nothing I can’t handle, Stephanie.”

I smiled.

Whenever you spend time with a friend’s boyfriend, you grant him a sexiness that he might not deserve, just because your friend finds him somehow desirable. I considered David objectively for the first time. His butt had that expansive thing going on. It wasn’t big yet, but just give it a few more years in front of the television. His face was ruddy and childish, but something about his nose suggested that he could have been an artist, that he had a natural, neglected talent for something.

“Who’s she fucking?” he asked, which woke me up. I started laughing.

“You’re cruel,” he said.

“I’m sorry.” I straightened my face. “What makes you think something crazy like that?”

“She won’t sleep with me. She’s had these mysterious disappearances. Overnight. I called and called, and then I went over to her place. She’s distant. She’s uninterested.”

“Maybe she’s just … uninterested.”

“I wouldn’t mind that so much. I just don’t want to be made an idiot.”

I felt sorry for him. I scanned his face, handsome in anger. I was sort of afraid for Mona if he ever found out about the abortion. I realized that I probably knew every single Democrat in Colorado Springs, and David wasn’t one of them.

“Why don’t you try being supportive of her,” I suggested.

“What?” He leaned forward and looked hard at my face.

“Suh. Por. Tive.”

“What?” His expression got gentle. “You have something in your teeth.”