chapter seven

JOSIE

The morning after my last date ever, Pete calls while I’m still asleep, leaving me a rambling voicemail.

“So I’ve given it a lot of thought,” he launches in without saying hello. “Well, as much thought as you can give something in less than twelve hours, of which seven were spent sleeping….So anyway, contrary to your opinion, I think chemistry can develop over time. In fact, I can think of several significant examples in film and literature in which one or both parties had absolutely no romantic interest in the other at the outset of their interaction—only to find that it blossomed—intensely—later.”

I smile as I listen, suddenly genuinely interested—not necessarily in Pete himself, but in where he’s going with this.

“So I say we give it another try, just to be sure….In fact, if you’re free tonight, I’m going to a rooftop party. I’d love for you to join me…and you’re welcome to bring a friend—so she can judge me, perhaps offer a second opinion. Soooo…give me a buzz and let me know what you think.”

I listen to the message one more time, then delete it, shaking my head at the predictability of it all. It is a page right out of one of those dating handbooks—my sudden indifference and independence, neither of which can really be faked, had made me more attractive to the opposite sex.

I call Pete back immediately, something the old strategic me never would have done, and say, “So what are your examples from film and literature?”

“Who’s this?” he deadpans over loud music.

“It’s Josie,” I say, mimicking his dry tone. “Your blind date from last night.”

“Oh! Yes, hi there, Josie,” he says, turning off his music.

“So what are your examples?” I say again. “And do you have any real-life examples or just fictional ones?”

“I’ll tell you in person. Tonight.”

“So you really are asking me out two nights in a row?”

“Yes,” he says. “I really am.”

“You know that’s, like, 101 of what not to do if you like someone?”

“Who said I liked you?”

“Touché,” I say, grinning into the phone.

“So what do you think? About the party? It should be fun. I hear this chick throws Gatsbyesque parties. Over the top.”

The description tempts me for a second, but I reply with a quip. “How did Brio boy score an invite to a party like that?”

“She tore her ACL ballroom dancing. I worked on her knee,” he confesses. “She told me I was welcome to bring friends.”

“She probably meant guy friends,” I say. “I bet she likes you.”

“Nah. It’s not like that,” he says. “So are you in?”

I hesitate, but am determined not to succumb to the slippery slope. “I don’t think so,” I say, holding firm.

“That’s it? You ‘don’t think so’? You’re not even going to make something up? Like, tell me you already have plans or something?”

I laugh and say I actually do already have plans.

“To do what?” he says, breaking another cardinal rule—don’t ask nosy questions during your first phone conversation.

“I’m staying in tonight. I’m going to research sperm banks,” I say.

He laughs, but when I don’t respond, he says, “You’re not kidding about that, are you?”

“Nope,” I say, trying not to think about the potential good genes that could be awaiting me on that roof tonight. It’s the false promise that has always motivated me, kept me going out weekend after weekend. There is always an agenda; the point is always to meet someone. Even if disguised in the form of a girls’ night out. Even if you’re one of those people who pretends to actually enjoy going to the movies or eating at a bar alone. Even if you try to convince yourself that you just want to enjoy a nice end-of-the-summer rooftop party.

“Well, at least that’s a lofty pursuit,” he says. “Will you let me know how it goes?”

“Are you really interested?”

“Yes,” Pete says. “Moderately.”

I hang up, wondering if he’s talking about me or my project. I have a hunch that it is both, and have to admit that the feeling is mutual. But I remind myself that moderate interest is no longer my thing.

AS PROMISED, I dedicate the rest of the day to donor research, taking detailed notes about fertility doctors and sperm banks in Atlanta on a lined yellow tablet I previously used to jot down interesting profiles (including Pete’s) from Match.com. As I surf and read and pop into various chat rooms, I feel increasingly excited and empowered, liberated to let the whole marriage dream die. All I need is some good sperm and a doctor to put it in me. It isn’t going to be easy—or inexpensive—but it is much more straightforward than finding “The One,” and more important, blissfully within my control.

Every few hours, I go find Gabe somewhere in the house or yard and share nuggets of my newly acquired expertise. He listens intently, the way he always does, but I have the feeling he’s mostly humoring me. His interest is finally piqued when I stumble upon a website dedicated to sharing the testimonies, both positive and negative, of parties involved in third-party reproduction, from the egg and sperm donors, to the donor-conceived children, to the surrogate mothers, to the actual parents.

“If you were the product of a sperm or egg donor, do you think that something would feel missing in your life?” I ask him after reading aloud a particularly troubling account of a donor-conceived teenaged girl who knew virtually nothing about her biological father and is now grappling with her identity, concluding with I will never forgive my mother for her selfish decision, one that has left a permanent hole in my heart and soul.

“Sounds like a typical melodramatic teenager to me,” Gabe says, glancing over his shoulder. A homebody, he has stayed in tonight to watch Broadcast News, one of his favorite movies, and hits pause as he finishes his reply. “If she knew her old man, she’d just find something else to hate her mom for.”

“Maybe,” I say. “So you don’t think you’d feel bitter?”

“If I didn’t know my biological father?” Gabe asks with a wry look because he actually doesn’t know his biological father, who died of prostate cancer just after Gabe’s birth. The only father he’s ever known is his stepdad, the soft-spoken, kindly professor his mother married when Gabe was seven. For a couple of years, Gabe called him Stan, but at some point started to call him Dad.

“But even though you didn’t know your real father,” I say, trying to differentiate the scenarios, “you at least knew who he was. He was never a complete mystery.”

“But a sperm donor doesn’t have to be a complete mystery, either,” he says. “You said yourself, earlier today, that there are all sorts of different arrangements.”

“True,” I say, thinking of the story I read about the girl who connected with her donor dad and biological half siblings via Facebook. “But that presents another whole set of issues.”

Gabe shrugs, still staring at the frozen screen, right in the middle of the scene where Albert Brooks sweats profusely. “Everyone has issues. And at the end of the day…you are who you are.”

I blink and say, “What does that mean? ‘You are who you are’?”

He sighs. “Let’s say I found out that I actually came from donated sperm, rather than the man I know from old photos and a few memories….Or let’s say that my mom had an affair with the milkman and I just found out….Then I’d still be exactly who I am today.”

I stare at him blankly.

“I mean, it’s just a donated cell,” he says. “At the end of the day, it’s no different than a donated heart or cornea or kidney.”

“It’s totally different,” I say, even though I want to believe in what he’s saying. “A cornea is not the same as half your DNA.”

“Granted,” he says. “But it also doesn’t change who you really are. Whether I came from my biological father or donated sperm, I was still raised by my mom and Stan. My dad.”

I take a deep breath and say, “But what if I had a baby with donated sperm and didn’t ever get married? What if I never gave my child a father of any kind?”

“Well, that’s a different issue altogether….That’s about the people in your life, rather than your identity. And that scenario could happen anyway. People die. They leave. Lots of people grow up without a mother or father. So if you didn’t ever marry, then your child would just have you.” He shrugs. “So what?”

“So what?” I say. “Isn’t that sad?”

“Sadder than never being born at all?”

I nod as he offers his final summation. “People just need to be who they are.”

I stare at him, digesting his Gabe-like quote, as he hits play on his movie and I move on to an uplifting testimony from a grandmother of a donor-conceived baby being raised by her lesbian daughter and partner. I reassure myself that the positive, inspiring stories with hunky-dory endings seem to far outweigh the tales of woe, especially when everyone involved is honest from the beginning. At the end of the day, it isn’t so unlike traditional families, really, all of us vulnerable to tragedy and estrangement, lies and secrets.

“Gabe?” I say.

“Uh-huh?” he asks, this time not pausing the movie.

“Do you think I’m crazy for considering this?”

“Are you really considering it? Or is this just like your Buddhist meditation kick?” he asks, still staring at the screen.

“I’m more than considering this,” I say, feeling my first wave of genuine fear, which in a sense confirms my answer. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

“Yep,” Gabe says with a smirk. “But no crazier than usual. And like I said—people just need to be who they are.”

THAT NIGHT BEFORE I go to bed, I call Meredith, really wanting to talk to my sister about everything. I can tell right away she’s in a bad mood, which is pretty consistent these days.

“What’s wrong?” I ask her.

“Nothing.”

“You sound pissed off.”

“I’m not.”

“All right,” I say. “So what’d you do today?”

“Three loads of laundry. Grocery shopping…oh, and I picked up Nolan’s shirts at the dry cleaner’s,” she says, perfecting her martyr routine.

“That’s it?”

“Hmm. Let’s see…I also took Harper to Buckles.”

“Did she get some cute shoes?” I ask.

“No. She pitched an epic fit over a pair of purple glitter sandals…and we had to leave.”

I laugh, and she adds gratuitous commentary. “Mom says there’s no justice in the world since I never pulled stunts like that. That was your department.”

Weary of the good girl–bad girl shtick, I sigh, but decide to use it as an opening. “So I guess that means I’ll have the perfect child!” I chirp.

She doesn’t react to this, nor does she even bother to ask what I did today, which is just common fucking courtesy. Instead she informs me that she ran into our old friend Shawna at the shoe store. She was buying her son his first pair of sneakers—little blue Keds.

“How’d she look?” I ask.

“Very good,” she says.

“Did she lose her baby weight?”

“Yes. She looked thinner than I’ve ever seen her.”

“Too thin?”

“No. Not too thin.”

“Did she seem happy?” I ask.

“As happy as you can be with a toddler,” Meredith replies.

“Did she ask about me?” I say against my better judgment. Meredith always accuses me of making things all about myself.

“No…but she did tell me y’all haven’t talked in months?” I detect a note of satisfaction in her voice, and feel another wave of irritation along with a stab of sibling rivalry at the mention of Shawna, our only shared friend growing up.

“I wouldn’t say months…but it’s been a while.”

“She wants to get drinks….”

“The three of us?” I ask.

“She mentioned me and Nolan. A double-date thing,” Meredith says. “But I’m sure she’d love to hear from you, too.”

“Right,” I say, thinking this is what I get for wanting to confide in my sister. “Okay, Mere. I’ll let you go.”

“If you want to go, say you want to go. Don’t tell me you’ll let me go,” she says, now just being a straight-up bitch.

“Okay, then,” I say, careful to keep my voice light. “I want to go.”

I HANG UP, pissed off at Meredith and pissed off at Shawna for giving Meredith that kind of ammunition, even unwittingly. She, of all people, knows our complicated history, the three of us going back to 1989, when the Ebersoles moved in across the street from us. Shawna was between us in age, but was precocious and had skipped a grade. Her mother, a Coke executive, had transferred the family from Hong Kong, enrolling Shawna at the Atlanta International School so that she could continue to use her Chinese. It was one of the many things that fascinated Meredith and me, along with her wealth of stories and breadth of travel (in stark contrast to the mainstay destinations of most Buckhead families, which included, give or take, Lake Burton, Sea Island, and Kiawah). The three of us went on long bike rides, built forts along the creek behind Shawna’s house, and played Capture the Flag with the other neighborhood kids. One summer, we planted a vegetable garden, then went door-to-door peddling basil and tomatoes from Daniel’s old red wagon. I remember Shawna coming up with most of the ideas, doing most of the talking, and generally entertaining Meredith and me. Looking back, I think Mere would agree that it was the only truly harmonious era of our sisterhood.

In middle school, Shawna morphed from our playmate into our fearless, experimental pioneer. The first adult penis Meredith and I ever saw was compliments of Shawna, straight from her parents’ very own porn-magazine collection, which they casually stowed in their nightstand along with a tube of K-Y jelly (the purpose of which Shawna clinically described). I still remember how my sister and I vacillated between horror and fascination at the sight of that large slab of bratwurst-like flesh, slung over the muscular thigh of a burly Nordic man named Big John. We gagged and covered our eyes, then peeked, then gawked, then analyzed, parsing out the anatomy, where his hairless scrotum attached to the long shaft ending with that one-eyed pink head. Shortly after that, Shawna taught us about masturbation, the myriad ways she pleasured herself, even demonstrating the swirling of her two fingers through the silk fabric of her pajama bottoms. There was no such thing as a taboo topic with Shawna—and she was just as likely to research a provocative issue on her own as to ask her parents directly. What was the difference between gay and transgender? How could someone be against abortion except in cases of incest or rape—if killing a baby was wrong, wasn’t it wrong no matter what the circumstances? And on and on.

In those years forming the bridge from childhood to adolescence, Shawna was not only our friend and confidante but also the source of many a secret that Meredith and I guarded together. Our parents, both conservative Presbyterian Republicans, liked the Ebersoles well enough, but they called Shawna “out there” and referred to her parents as “permissive” and “liberal.” I can vividly remember Dad’s face turning bright red when she told us at dinner one night that creationism was an “ignorant myth perpetuated in red states” and how he had stammered a retort that the Bible was most certainly not a myth. Only Daniel could calm him down, shifting the conversation to “intelligent design,” how it was possible to reconcile Christianity with Darwinism and evolution. It also helped that Daniel enjoyed Shawna in much the same way he loved Nolan. Neither was ever dull.

In any event, we remained a threesome until the summer before Shawna and I entered the ninth grade, when she convinced her parents to let her transfer to Lovett, where Daniel and I went to school. The writing was on the wall, but Meredith fiercely resisted the inevitable shift in our dynamic. Her feelings were perpetually hurt, which only annoyed Shawna and me, as did her tattling to Mom and Dad that we were “blowing her off” and “leaving her out.” I insisted that it wasn’t like that at all, Shawna and I simply had more in common. We were in the same grade, the same school, for heaven’s sakes. Beyond that, we had different interests. Meredith listened to downer folk music; Shawna and I danced to R & B and pop. Meredith didn’t speak to boys; Shawna and I had begun to date. Meredith was a Goody Two-shoes; Shawna and I sneaked cigarettes and beer.

“What’s the big deal?” I’d say to Mom when she pulled me aside and talked to me about my “sister’s feelings.” She pointed out that Meredith was a bit of a loner, and had come to rely on Shawna and me. I retorted that the age gap had become more significant over time, and that high-schoolers didn’t hang out with middle-schoolers. Mom argued that Shawna had always been a neighborhood friend. Not anymore, I said.

Over time, Meredith moved past the big betrayal and made her own theater friends at Pace, but I think it always stung. Shawna remained a longtime sore spot between us. Deep down, I knew I was being insensitive and maybe even a little mean, and looking back, I can see there was definitely a competitive component, too. My sister, like my brother, was a parent pleaser. She wasn’t as crazy smart as Daniel, but she got really good grades in honors classes, never got in trouble, and most important, had a genuine passion and talent for acting. Mom and Dad raved about her plays and performances, just like they raved about Daniel’s baseball, while I was the classic middle child with no sport or hobby to make me special. It was lame to consider Shawna a feather in my cap, but I took secret satisfaction in beating my sister in this particular tug-of-war.

After graduation, Shawna and I both decided on the University of Georgia. Our freshman year, we were closer than ever, rooming together, then pledging the same sorority. We even started to look alike, wearing the same clothes and sporting the same superlong, overbleached, flat-ironed hair. Some people confused us, or asked if we were twins, which I found flattering.

Then, sophomore year, Shawna started dating Jacob Marsh, asshole extraordinaire. I couldn’t stand him, and made the mistake of telling her as much—which almost always backfires. It certainly did in our case, the two of us drifting apart until Shawna finally came to her senses and dumped Jacob: his cue to leak a video of Shawna masturbating to Madonna’s “Justify My Love.” It spread within days, not only all over UGA but across the SEC, to Auburn, Alabama, and Ole Miss. Beyond the fact that she was thoroughly humiliated, she was also kicked out of ADPi under the promiscuity clause. A group of us appealed the decision, arguing it wasn’t her fault the video got out; it was supposed to be private. But the ladies at the national office weren’t budging and Shawna had to move out of our house. She ended up transferring to Georgia State, and we drifted apart even more—much to what I perceived as Meredith’s odd vindication. I remember when she heard the news, her first reaction wasn’t sympathy—but an off-the-cuff announcement that she “always knew Shawna was trouble.”

The next time I saw Shawna was over the following Christmas break, when we ran into each other at a bar in Atlanta. I gave her a hug and told her how much I missed her. She said she missed me, too, but things felt strained. It made me sad, the emotion heightened by the encroaching holidays, but a little bit angry, too. After all, it wasn’t my fault that she had trusted such a jerk. As I watched her hanging out with her new friends, I made the conscious decision to have more fun than they were having. I downed my vodka drink, then ordered another, on my way to a blackout drunken night—the kind with big gaping holes, followed by nothingness. In fact, I’m sure the entire night would have eventually been forgotten altogether, except that it happened to be the very night I lost my brother in a car accident.