She breaks it to her father quickly, on the drive to school. He doesn’t bother to conceal his displeasure. “Another Christmas by myself?”
“I’m sorry, Dad. I have so little time off, and it takes a whole day to fly—”
“I never should’ve moved.”
“You hated Minnesota.”
“Give me a blizzard any day over this humid netherworld.”
The crease above her pubic bone feels vaguely bloated—or sore—different from period cramps, but the same family of sensation. It’s been almost a week since the insemination; she will take a pregnancy test in eight days. Are these signs of implantation? Has a blastocyst burrowed into the red wall? Does it cling and grow with all its might? Are its chromosomes XX or XY?
“Am I ever going to see you again?” says her father.
He won’t fly, on account of his back. He would send her money for a plane ticket if she asked, but he can’t afford it any more than the biographer can. His income is fixed and small. “I may not have cash to leave you,” he likes to say, “but you can sell my coin collection. Worth thousands!”
“You will, Dad.”
“I worry, kiddo.”
“No need! I’m fine.”
“But who knows,” he says, “how many more trips around the sun I’ve got?”
The boys in ninth-grade history make spitballs and ask, “Miss, in the olden days, when you were young, did they have spitballs?”
The eleventh-graders are enjoying the fruits of someone’s research on archaic terms for “penis.” When Ephraim yells “Bilbo!” the biographer stares him down, but he stares right back. Usually she has no issues with discipline; this outburst makes her feel like a failure.
Well, she is a failure. She and her uterus fail, fail, fail.
Ephraim: “Prepuce!”
The biographer: “That just means foreskin, my friend.”
Giggles. Haws. You said foreskin.
The biographer and her ovaries fail, fail, fail.
“Baldpate friar!”
But there have been twinges—sharp little aches. Something feels like it’s happening down there. Maybe not fail, finally? Thousands of bodies succeed every day; why not the body of a biographer from Minnesota whose favorite garment is the sweatpant?
“Nouri,” she says, “you can wait to put on lipstick until after class.”
“I’m not putting on, I’m refreshing.”
Nouri Withers loves books about famous murders and writes the best sentences of any child the biographer has taught. Her sentences need to be typed into a search program to make sure they’re not plagiarized.
“You can refresh later.”
“But my lips look janky now.”
“Agreed!” shouts Ephraim, long legged and fidgety, who thinks himself dashing in his vintage trilby hat. A boy who moves through the world unafraid. If he weren’t so fearless and handsome and good at soccer, he might have been forced to grow in more interesting directions. The only thing interesting about Ephraim, as far as the biographer can tell, is his name.
The biographer decides she will shout too. “Have you ever considered, people, how much time has been stolen from the lives of girls and women due to agonizing over their appearance?”
A few faces smile, uneasy.
Even louder: “How many minutes, hours, months, even actual years, of their lives do girls and women waste in agonizing? And how many billions of dollars of corporate profit are made as a result?”
Nouri, open mouthed, sets down her lipstick. It stands on the desk like a crimson finger.
“A lot of billions, miss?”
These kids must think she’s a joke.
“The institution began,” she tells the tenth-graders, “as a fiscal arrangement in which the father’s household transferred land, money, and livestock to the husband’s household, attached to the body of the daughter-bride. Its economic foundations have in recent centuries become shrouded by—some might even say smothered by—the veil of romantic love.”
“Are you married, miss?” says Ash.
“Shut up,” someone says.
“Nope,” says the biographer.
“Why not?” says Ash.
“Shut up!” shouts Mattie.
Silence crackles. Even the half-asleep kids are suddenly alert.
Mattie says, more quietly, “Why did they die?”
From the next desk, Ash rubs her shoulder. “You mean the whales?”
“The independent researcher said their sonar could’ve broken. High-decibel submarine signals can make whales go deaf.” Mattie cups her lunar cheeks.
“My dad said it’s the witch’s fault,” says the son of the local navy hero, “because she lured the dead man’s fingers back to Newville and they messed up the water.”
Shouts and cries: “Yeah, the seaweed poisoned the whales!” “That’s so dumb.” “But there’s been more dead whiting in the nets too—”
“Hold on, people!” says the biographer. “Maybe your dad was joking?”
“My Gramma Costello said the same thing,” says Ash, “and the last time she told a joke was 1973.”
“Also my dad is not dumb,” says the hero’s son.
The biographer contemplates digressions into marine biology and the history of witch persecution in Kingdom and States United, but she needs to end class five minutes early to get to her clinic appointment. Kalbfleisch is insisting that she come in to discuss the PCOS test results. A two-hour drive to receive what is probably—almost certainly—going to be bad news.
“There’s a Buddhist temple,” she says, “on a small island in Japan that used to hold requiems for whales killed by whalers. They prayed for the whales’ souls. They also had a tomb for whale fetuses taken from their mothers’ bodies during flensing. They would give a posthumous name to every fetus they buried, and they kept a necrology that listed the mothers’ dates of capture.” She pauses, scanning the room. “Do you see where I’m going with this?”
“Field trip to Japan!”
“Did the ones on the beach have any fetuses inside them?”
“Did you know a ‘tus’ is a male fetus?”
“We do a requiem,” says Mattie. “But first we need to name them.”
Good girl. Even when distraught, she pays attention.
“Okay,” says the biographer, “there are twenty-four of you. Pair off. Each pair names a whale. You have three minutes. Then we’ll reconvene for a recitation and a moment of silence.”
“But the temple guys named the fetuses, not the grown-ups. You changed the ritual.”
“So I did, Ash. Get to work.”
She opens her notebook.
Things to do with baby:
- Take train to Alaska
- Burrow in blankets
- Gorge on dried mango
- Tell stories about the Great Sperm-Whale Stranding
- Put toes in waves on year’s shortest day
Her students christen a Moby-Dick, two Mikes, a Spermy, for God’s sake. But then whales are not exotic to these kids. The coastline near Newville is known as the whale-watching capital of the American West. For decades the local economies have depended on injections from tourists eager to see a breaching, lunging, slapping, spraying, spy-hopping colossus. They pay to watch from the decks of boats and through high-powered spotting scopes from the Gunakadeit Lighthouse; or to swim with guides, in wet suits, in the whales’ feeding grounds.
The biographer is closing her backpack, thinking ahead to the traffic on 22—she can miss the worst of it if she hurries—when Mattie comes to the desk. “Can I talk to you about something?”
“Of course. I mean not right now, because I have a doctor’s appointment, but tomorrow?” If she gets out of the parking lot in three minutes, she’ll be on the cliff road in seven.
“Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving.”
“Monday, then.”
The girl nods, staring at her hands.
“I know the whales are upsetting,” says the biographer, “but—”
“It’s not about that.”
“Have a good weekend, Mattie.” Parka zipped, pack shouldered, she bolts.
She read about the stranding in the paper but has hardly thought of it since. Barnacly, fat-lidded blocks of beast—they only feel real in her book, when young Eivør watches them die in the grindadráp.
“How late is Dr. Kalbfleisch running?” she asks the front-desk nurse. “I’ve been here almost an hour.”
“He’s a popular guy,” says the nurse.
“Could you give me a general idea?”
“It’s the day before a holiday,” she says.
“And?”
“Sorry?”
“Why should that make a difference?”
The nurse pretends to read something on her computer screen. “I have no way of knowing how much longer the doctor will be. If you need to reschedule, I am happy to help you with that.”
“Gee, thanks,” says the biographer, and returns to her fawn-colored chair. She touches the bike-lock key on her neck. Her mother rode her bike every morning, shine or rain, until she went to the doctor about shoulder pain and learned she had lung cancer.
Accusations from the world:
13. Preferring one’s own company is pathological.
14. Human beings were designed for companionship.
15. Why didn’t you try harder to find a mate?
16. Married people live longer, healthier lives.
17. Do you think anyone actually believes that you’re happy on your own?
18. It’s creepy that you relate so much to lighthouse keepers.
Kalbfleisch wears a necktie of chuckling chipmunks. “Have a seat, Roberta.”
“That’s your best tie yet,” she says.
“As you know, I was concerned about the possibility of you having polycystic ovary syndrome. After seeing some evidence of ovarian enlargement and polycystism, we checked your testosterone levels, and I’m afraid the results confirm that you do, in fact, suffer from PCOS.”
Of course.
But she will be calm and resilient. She will be a problem solver.
“Okay, which means?”
“Which means that some or many of your follicles aren’t maturing properly, and therefore ovulation is significantly compromised. Even when the OPK detects an LH surge, for instance, it’s very possible no egg will appear. Let’s cross our fingers for your current cycle. When do you come back for the pregnancy blood test?”
“Wednesday,” she says, recruiting her facial muscles into a smile. Problem solver. “And if it’s negative, I’ll use a different donor for the next cycle. Someone with more reported pregnancies than—”
“Roberta.” Kalbfleisch leans forward and looks her, for once, in the eye. “There won’t be a next cycle.”
“What?”
“Given your age, your FSH levels, and now this diagnosis, the chance of conception via IUI is little to none.”
“But if there’s a chance, at least—”
“By ‘little to none,’ I mean more like ‘none.’”
Taut pain at the back of her mouth. “Oh.”
“I’m sorry. It wouldn’t be ethical for me to continue the inseminations when the statistics just don’t bear it out.”
Do not cry in front of this man. Do not cry in front of this man.
He adds, “But let’s, well, let’s keep our hopes up for this cycle, okay? You never know. I’ve seen miracles.”
She doesn’t cry until the parking lot.
On the dark highway, she works the calendar.
She will take the pregnancy test, her last ever, on the first day of December.
If positive—!
If negative, she’ll have six and a half weeks before January fifteenth.
Before January fifteenth, she could still be picked from the catalog, chosen by a biological mother, phoned by the caseworker: Ms. Stephens, I’ve got some good news!
On January fifteenth, the Every Child Needs Two law will restore dignity, strength, and prosperity to American families.
In the lobby of her apartment building, she checks the mailbox. A reminder card from the dentist; a catalog of long skirts and floaty tops for women of a certain age; and an envelope from Hawthorne Reproductive Medicine, which she rips open. THIS IS A BILL, it says, to the tune of $936.85.
Very possible no egg will appear.
In her kitchen, on a cookie sheet, she sets fire to the bill and watches the flames until the smoke alarm goes off. WANH! WANH! WANH! WANH!
“Shut up, shut up—”
WANH! WANH! WANH!
Drags a chair toward the shrieks
WANH! WANH!
and climbs on
WANH! WANH!
and punches the alarm with her fist (“Shut the shit up”) until its plastic cover splits in two.