Authors: Elisa Albert
So how did you decide to go for it?
I did nothing to prevent it. Then some time went by and it happened.
Teeny-tiny T-shirt.
I mean, like, how long? How much time?
I don’t know. A year?
That tiny green sock’s mate. When Erica and I were very little, she used to call herself CaCa.
Well
, she said,
I made an appointment to get all checked out and get a referral. Just in case.
A tiny orange sock. Of course, because if you could remotely afford medical assistance—or if medical assistance was covered by insurance—you were definitely supposed to need medical assistance.
Honey
, I say.
Sweetie. That’s a bad road. Please chill.
Maybe I don’t want to chill
, she whines.
This deeply tragic couple from philosophy are apparently on round like seventeen of that shit. At Cam and Betsy’s last year some of us were politely shaking our heads at their ordeal, and Crisp got all overheated.
Being for fertility medicine is like being for the death penalty
, he said.
If it’s
you
who’s infertile, if it’s
your
kid the maniac raped and murdered, of course you’re all for it, that’s just instinct. But maybe you shouldn’t be at the wheel, hmmm? Given our most ideal collective spiritual goal of, what’s it called again? Oh, right! Humility.
Jerry touched his arm and Crisp shook him off. Something fierce passed between them.
Do you know that America is the only first-world country in which the fertility industry is not regulated? It’s just about money, like everything else in this fucktard democracy. Customers. Salespeople. No ethical regulations, no profit caps.
The sad, divorced English department guy spoke up:
so if they taxed the crap out of people who can pay a hundred grand to make themselves a kid, you’d be okay with it?
Yes, that would be a start. Entitled fucks.
Jerry spoke softly.
Little harsh, isn’t that?
No, love, I don’t think so. Not at all.
What if we’d wanted kids ourselves
, Jer asked.
You mean like our friends? Who’ve completely lost their minds? Like my sister, who has fucking cancer now thanks to that shit? I’d say: my darling, we don’t get absolutely everything we want in this lifetime.
Betsy brought some dishes into the kitchen, didn’t come back. The weak of heart drifted off to refill their wineglasses and discuss university politics.
If I call my father at home, Sheryl always picks up the other phone and listens in. If I call him at work, I don’t have to talk to her. The receptionist puts me through.
Hi, my girl!
What’s up?
Benign and distracted as ever.
Not much
, I say.
A flash: forceps clamped around my father’s tender skull, the twist and pull of some cocky wartime OB. A cigarette dangling from the OB’s lips. A snap somewhere along the side of my father’s head, a series of pops somewhere deep inside, where courage lies. His mother drugged, listless, passive, moaning, sweating, abandoned, dead to herself. The baby removed and isolated.
How’s our beautiful boy?
Fine, Daddy. Good.
Good! Good.
We set up camp at my house or hers. We listen to music. I like the music she likes. I want to know it all. The days feel wonderfully full. Walker’s occupied and content. I begin to wonder if I need Nasreen’s anymore.
I could have ten children like this
, I say, meaning together, as a team. Sitting around, eating, talking, blankets on the floor. I mean, no fucking problem. We say
um-hmm I know oh my God totally right that’s normal yeah.
I nurse Zev. Instead of pumping, Mina has the bright idea to nurse Walker, who’s so much bigger and stronger and of course a total expert, so why mess with the pump? Screw the pump.
I wasn’t sure if he’d take to her. He looked at me first like,
huh?
Then he giggled maniacally, the funniest thing, looked back and forth between us giggling his ass off. Then he totally went for it.
I hold the fort while she goes to the bathroom; she holds the fort while I make lunch. We stretch, we breathe. Walker plays, shows me things, is chill, eats, sacks out. We rest.
We say
yes exactly poor thing
and
I know, I know that’s the whole problem
and
really, well of course!
We order in food from the questionable Thai place, the only Thai place. We compose a harsh email to the celebrity midwife, who’s based in the city, takes on way too many clients and half-asses it all up and down the Hudson. She still hasn’t responded to Mina’s original plea for help, hasn’t so much as made an appointment for a postpartum checkup.
I can’t believe I got an oblivious cunt of a home-birth midwife
, Mina says.
I was sure the whole idea of home-birth midwife canceled out the whole idea of oblivious cunt.
Zev’s gained two pounds in a week.
Formula!
the pediatrician says.
What’d I tell you? A lot of women just can’t nurse. Do we have your updated insurance info?
This is what women have done since time immemorial. We’ve rediscovered normal. No sitting home alone going quietly insane, thankyouverymuch.
This is my motherfucking dissertation.
If high school was girls named Lindsay, Jewish summer camp was girls named Yael.
Jewish summer camp. The words taste of strychnine even now. It made you wonder if, damn, what if that whole idea about the Jews being an inferior race was actually kind of true? It was all fucking and Zionism, straight up. Zionism and fucking. Almost a relief to go back to school in the fall, and that’s saying a lot.
But! We have Jewish summer camp to thank for Jess. My lovely Jessica. Co-counselor. Teacher. Guide.
Boyfriend girls
, we called the ones who early on found themselves a boy and clung to him steadfastly. Boring blanks. I always thought that’d be a good band name. The Boyfriend Girls. The Boring Blanks.
(
Yeah
, Mina says.)
If you were friends with a boring blank and she got a boyfriend, you no longer had any place or import. You were only ever a way station to a boy. Space filler. Audience for endless recaps of boy drama.
Jess was not a boring blank boyfriend girl.
Jess was Jewish summer camp liberation theologian. From the Boston suburbs. Older, about to be a college senior. She was hot and fearless. She hated that place even more than I did, but her parents had
met
at this particular Jewish summer camp a hundred and thirty years ago. The dining hall was named after her maternal grandfather.
It’s pretty simple
, she said.
If I appear to be doing the things they approve of, they pay my credit card bill and leave me alone.
She gave me
The Beauty Myth
, played the first Ani DiFranco album over and over. We held hands. She had just spent her junior year in India and now had a wardrobe of simple, sumptuous cottons and silks, jewel tones, whites, lavenders, skies, silvers. Her posture was flawless. Never a bra. Stuck her tits way out proud. Never washed her long, shiny hair. I played with it. She rubbed my shoulders.
Cutie
, she called me.
Sweets. Honey bear.
We touched a lot. I’d never had a friend I could touch before. What woman had ever touched me?
Jess did nothing to court her prettiness. Had no interest in being pretty. Everyone worshipped her. And she was
my
friend. Mine!
She had been with several guys already. At least one of them fairly damaging. She never said what, but something bad had happened. Or many bad things. An abortion, I realized one afternoon, but did not seek confirmation. She had secrets. There was a kind of power in that.
Anyway, she was off guys. She was done giving a shit about guys. She wanted to hear about my mother. She wanted to know about my father and his women. She wanted to know about private school, the Lindsays.
She told me about women’s studies, the Guerrilla Girls, Jean Kilbourne.
This was new: a girl I wanted to
be.
I blatantly copied her. Aped her, top to bottom. Soon I was wearing straw sandals and kurtas, got my nose pierced, stopped washing my hair. She taught me about Sharon Olds, cowboy boots, jewelry as amulet. She gave me Susie Bright, Grace Paley, Emma Goldman. She gave me Sleater-Kinney. The neti pot. Yoga. She gave me palo santo from Peru. She gave me vegetarianism. She gave me Hula-Hoops. She gave me Ecstasy. We made tea with honey and lemon and cinnamon and fell asleep wrapped around each other. We sang “Both Hands” to our charges, a gang of hormonal-to-bursting twelve-year-old girls we otherwise ignored.
One night, I was beet red admitting I was a virgin and had never had an orgasm—
I mean, I don’t
think
I have, but maybe I have, I don’t know
—and she very patiently, slowly, and assuredly reached down her drawstring pants to show me what an orgasm was. Watching, I understood that I was fairly far from ever having had one.
On a trip into town one night just before the end of the summer we got matching tattoos. Both of us high. Acorns. My left shoulder, her right wrist. Because however far the winds might carry us, we were certainly of the same tree.
She was only two hours outside the city at college, and for a while we saw each other all the time. We met up and down the East Coast, went to shows, me so giddy, all disappeared into her. The way she stood up front, screamed her assent, threw her fists in the air, and emerged hoarse, with a tear-streaked face, swollen and satisfied. My idol. We ate at diners after like we hadn’t eaten for a week.
You and your dyke music
, Erica remarked once. I hadn’t thought of them as dykes, my beloved Indigo Girls, my Michelle Shocked, Dar Williams, Shawn Colvin, Le Tigre, my Ani DiFranco. I just knew that at those shows I was whole and right. I was a person. I mattered. I was in fact
not
stupid or fat or ugly or lame; I was smart and valid and right and well. I had a fucking voice. The women at those shows weren’t gussied up like geishas. They talked of art, life, politics. They felt entitled to feelings and opinions and rage and poetry and laughter and tears and bodies. There was dissent. Looking “cute” was low on the list. Practical shoes were high. It mattered only that one articulate oneself properly and loudly and the rest of the world could fuck itself. I was beautiful. I had style. Substance. I smoked. Drove too fast. We’re all clichés. You learn who to be from your friends. Especially if you don’t have any siblings.
Or a sibling with nothing to teach you
, Mina says.
Jess joined the Peace Corps, went to Ecuador, fell in love with a German guy, lives in Berlin now. She apologizes once a year for being so bad at keeping in touch.
Can I please hear about it?
What, birth? Craziest experience of my life. I mean, acid, heroin, S
&
M: kid stuff. Adolescent bullshit. Playtime.
What, because of the pain?
The pain is incidental. Actually, no; the pain is the point. The pain gets your attention. When something is actually wrong there’s fear attached to pain, which is what makes it horrible. Fear is horrible. Fear is the fucking worst thing in life. When something’s completely as it should be, and when you trust that, there’s no need for fear, so pain is
. . .
whatever. A fact. A thing. Pain in itself doesn’t always warrant fear. Getting that straight is the game changer. Blew my fucking mind.
Go on.
It approached death. You go down into places it’s hard to get at in life, you know? Extremity. And there’s no safe word. No, like, “stop this train, I want to get off.” It was like being turned inside out. It was like my skin came off. My soul left my body. Ego firebomb. I thought I was exploding. Like, literally: becoming a star. It was galactic. And it goes on in these waves, which are really rhythmic and crazy. This
. . .
I don’t know
. . .
like fucked-up primal cosmic rhythm. And you’re alone in it. Your whole life, your whole self, just obliterated. It’s like when you try to lose your everyday consciousness? That’s why people drink or compulsively exercise or get stoned or whatever else? Because it rules. But with this there’s, you know, redemption, survival. The minute it’s over, the pain is gone, and here is the literal fruit of your labor. The literal fruit of your labor! You can hold him in your arms, wrap him up and hold him tight and keep him safe. How amazing is that?
Huh
, I say.
Her fingers travel up and down the length of Zev’s leg. He’s really alert. I always thought infants were just kind of out of it, but turns out, nope, when they’re born regular, they’re actually—oh, hi—quite present.
Because it’s not like a construct the way S
&
M is, for example. An agreed-upon game. There’s no one holding the other end of the rope, as it were. Or it’s some force you’ll never know. Like
. . .
life, death, outer limits. I don’t know.
She puts one of his feet into her mouth and nibbles on it. He pumps his arms, concentrates so hard on her.
And what about the baby?
What
about
the baby?
I don’t know, how does the baby figure in?
The baby is a reward. The baby is the prize. The baby’s a gift. Waiting across
. . .
a
. . .
like
. . .
mythic crossing. I don’t know. There’s before and then there’s after. Before is this entirely different thing, and after, the before is irrelevant. Death, rebirth.