The biographer loves Penny at school, sharing snacks in the teachers’ lounge, but she loves her best on Sunday nights, when they watch Masterpiece mysteries in her little house with its rose-dotted wallpaper and stone fireplace and wool rugs, rain pattering on the oriel windows.
Penny hands her a napkin, a fork, and a plate of shepherd’s pie. “Tap water or limeade?”
“Limeade. But isn’t it time?”
“Oh damn!” Penny hurries to the television. (She is always losing her clicker.) Settles with her own plate next to the biographer, tucks a napkin into the collar of her turquoise sweater. “Let’s see what skills you’ve got for us, Sergeant Hathaway.” The opening credits begin, theme song swelling over shots of Oxford’s dreaming spires, a weak English sun turning Cotswold limestone the color of apricots. Penny intones, “Who will die tonight?”
“You should write mysteries instead of bra rippers,” says the biographer.
“But I prefer the beating heart. Did I tell you I’m going to a romance writers’ convention? They have agents you can pitch to.”
“How much do they charge you for that privilege?”
“Well, they charge plenty. And why shouldn’t they? The agents are being flown all the way from New York.”
“Can I read your pitch?”
“Honey, I have it memorized. ‘Rapture on Black Sand opens at the end of World War I. Euphrosyne Farrell is a young Irish nurse so gutted by her sweetheart’s death at the Somme that she emigrates to New York City. After becoming engaged to a middle-aged widower, she finds herself drawn to Renzo, the widower’s nephew, whose magnetic Neapolitan eyes prove irresistible.’”
“Where does black sand come in?” asks the biographer.
“Euphrosyne and Renzo make love for the first time in a small cove on Long Island.”
“But wouldn’t it be more interesting and, um, maybe less clichéd if she got engaged to the nephew, then found his uncle irresistible?”
“Lord no! This isn’t Little Women. Renzo’s a Brooklyn stallion and his britches are strained to bursting.”
Penny is a teacher of English and an inventor, she says, of entertainments. “They’re a hoot,” she answered when the biographer once ventured to ask why she wanted to write soap operas valorizing romantic love as the sole telos of a female life. Penny has written nine of them, all waiting for cover art showing bulge-groined men relieving bulge-chested women of their bodices. She intends to be a published author by her seventieth birthday. Three years to make it happen.
“Okay,” she says, “here’s Detective Sergeant Hathaway. Can’t buy cheekbones like that.”
Inspector Lewis and DS Hathaway trade jokes across a sheeted corpse; enjoy beers at The Lamb & Flag; and chase a murderous puppeteer through a faculty drinks party, leaving a wake of Oxford dons agape.
Then a large rosy meat bursts onto the screen. “It’s never too early to reserve joy. Call today for your Christmas ham!” Having lost all of its government funding, because the current administration won’t sanction the liberal bias of baking shows and mountaineering documentaries, PBS now airs long blocks of advertising. A spot for control-top hose (“Mom, you look extra beautiful tonight—is it your hair?” “No, my Tummy Tamers!”) makes the biographer’s nose sting.
“Hey, you’re crying!” says Penny, returning from the kitchen with glasses of limeade.
“Am not.”
Penny presses a napkin to the biographer’s cheek.
“It’s this new elderly-ovary medication,” sobs the biographer.
“Blow your nose,” says Penny. “Just use the napkin; I can wash it. Do the commercials with children make you—”
“No.” The biographer blows and wipes, shoves the napkin between her knees. “They make me think about my mom.”
In‑breath.
Who would pity her daughter for these solo efforts, this manless life.
Out-breath.
But her mother, who went from father’s house to college dorm to husband’s house without a single day lived on her own, never knew the pleasures of solitude.
“What does your therapist say?” asks Penny.
“I quit seeing him.”
“Was that such a smart move?”
“Poison is a woman’s weapon,” a grim lady tells Lewis and Hathaway. “‘.’”
“Medea!” shouts the biographer.
“We should get you on a game show,” says Penny.
Five thirty a.m., the air cold and gritty with salt. She can’t face the drive to her day-nine egg-check appointment without coffee, even though caffeine is on Hawthorne Reproductive Medicine’s What to Avoid handout. Teeth on her mug, she steers up the hill, under towering balsam fir and Sitka spruce, away from her town. Newville gets ninety-eight inches of rain a year. The inland fields are quaggy, hard to farm. Cliff roads dangerous in winter. Storms so bad they sink boats and tear roofs from houses. The biographer likes these problems because they keep people away—the people who might otherwise move here, that is, not the tourists, who cruise in on dry summer asphalt and don’t give a sea onion about farming.
A billboard on Highway 22 is a stick drawing of a skirt-wearing person with a balloon for a stomach, accompanied by:
WON’T STOP ONE,
WON’T START ONE.
CANADA UPHOLDS U.S. LAW!
American intelligence agencies must have some nice dirt on the Canadian prime minister. Otherwise, why agree to the Pink Wall? The border control can detain any woman or girl they “reasonably” suspect of crossing into Canada for the purpose of ending a pregnancy. Seekers are returned (by police escort) to their state of residence, where the district attorney can prosecute them for attempting a termination. Healthcare providers in Canada are also barred from offering in vitro fertilization to U.S. citizens.
Unveiling these terms at a press conference last year, the Canadian prime minister said: “. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies. Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder.”
Kalbfleisch calls her ultrasound “encouraging.” The biographer has five follicles measuring twelve and thirteen, plus a gaggle of smallers. “You’ll be ready for insemination right on schedule, I suspect. Day fourteen. Which is …” He leans back, waits for the nurse to open the calendar and count off the squares with her finger. “Wednesday. Do we have at least a couple of vials here?” As usual, he doesn’t look at her, even when asking a direct question.
Four, in fact, are sitting in the clinic’s frozen storage, tiny bottles of ejaculate from the scrota of a college sophomore majoring in biology (3811) and a rock-climbing enthusiast who described his sister as “extremely beautiful” (9072). She also owns some semen from 5546, the personal trainer who baked a cake for sperm-bank staff; but his remaining vials are still at the bank in Los Angeles.
“Start the OPKs tomorrow or the next day,” says Kalbfleisch. “Fingers crossed.” He rubs foaming sanitizer into his hands.
“By the way.” She sits up on the exam table, covers her crotch with a paper sheet. “Do you think I might have polycystic ovary syndrome?”
Kalbfleisch stops mid-rub. A golden frown. “Why do you ask?”
“A friend told me about it. I don’t have all of the symptoms, but—”
“Roberta, were you looking online?” He sighs. “You can diagnose yourself with anything and everything online. First of all, the majority of women with PCOS are overweight, and you are not.”
“Okay, so you don’t—”
“Although.” He is looking at her, but not in the eye. More in the mouth. “You do have excessive facial hair. And, come to think of it, excessive body hair. Which is a symptom.”
Come to think of it? “But, um, how does that account for genetics? Certain ethnic groups are naturally hairier. My mom’s grandmothers both had mustaches.”
“I can’t speak to that,” says Kalbfleisch. “I’m not an anthropologist. I do know that hirsutism is a sign of PCOS.”
Wouldn’t that be human biology, in which all physicians are trained, and not anthropology?
“When you come in on—” He glances at the nurse.
“Wednesday,” she says.
“—I’ll take a closer look at your ovaries, and we’ll include a testosterone check with your bloodwork.”
“If I have PCOS, what does that mean?”
“That the odds of your conceiving via intrauterine insemination are exceedingly low.”
To justify being late to work, sometimes as often as twice a week, she scatters crumbs of mortal illness. Principal Fivey is annoyed—has broached the subject of unpaid leave. But he hasn’t been around much since his wife went into the hospital.
Taking fresh blue books from the supply closet, the biographer asks the office manager how Mrs. Fivey is doing.
“Poor thing’s still in very critical condition.”
Is “critical” an adjective that can take an intensifying premodifier? “What happened, exactly?”
“Took a nasty tumble down the stairs.”
“What stairs?”—picturing the Exorcist steps, the biographer’s favorite ten minutes of a family trip to Washington, DC.
“At home, I think? We’re circulating a card.”
Mrs. Fivey always looks good in her Christmas costumes. Garish, true, but good. Also: why garish? Probably only because the biographer grew up in suburban Minnesota. A saying of her mother’s was “Don’t take your clothes off before they do.” The muddy grammar always bothered the biographer. Should she not take her clothes off before the men removed their own clothes? Or should she keep her clothes on until the men took them off for her?
“Here’s the card,” says the manager. “And can you write something personal? Most people have only been signing their names.”
“I don’t—”
“Sheesh, I’ll tell you what to say: ‘Heartfelt hopes for a speedy recovery.’ Is that so hard?”
“Hard? No. But my hopes are not heartfelt.”
The two long jowls on the manager’s face shake a little, as though in a breeze. “You don’t want her to get better?”
“I do in my mind. Not in my heart.”
In her mind she wants Mrs. Fivey to walk out of the hospital. In her heart she wants her brother to be alive again. In a place that is neither mind nor heart, or both at once, she wants an ashy line down the center of a round belly; she wants nausea. Susan’s marks of motherhood: spider veins at the knee backs, loose stomach skin, lowered breasts. Affronts to vanity worn as badges of the ultimate accomplishment.
But why does she want them, really? Because Susan has them? Because the Salem bookstore manager has them? Because she always vaguely assumed she would have them herself? Or does the desire come from some creaturely place, pre-civilized, some biological throb that floods her bloodways with the message Make more of yourself! To repeat, not to improve. It doesn’t matter to the ancient throb if she does good works in this short life—if she publishes, for instance, a magnificent book on Eivør Mínervudottír that would give people pleasure and knowledge. The throb simply wants another human machine that can, in turn, make another.
Sperm, in Faroese: sáđ.
Three donors walk into a bar.
“What can I get you?” says the bartender.
Donor 5546, dumb and cocky and hot, says: “Whiskey.”
Donor 3811, looking up the weather on his phone, says: “Hold on.”
Donor 9072, who notices the bartender has his own glass going, says: “Whatever you’re drinking.”
Bartender points to 5546 and says: “You’re a little too hot.”
And to 3811: “You’re a little too cold.”
And to 9072: “But you’re just right.”
True to 9072’s humble nature, he blushes, only deepening the bartender’s sense that this man would make a first-class provider of genetic material. Throughout the evening, 9072 is sociable and composed, at ease with self and others. Meanwhile, 5546 hits on four different women before last call, and 3811 stays on a stool, swiping through his phone, aloof and alone.
The least confident of the four women takes 5546 to her house, where they have unprotected sex, and she happens to be ovulating, but because his sperm are too weak to puncture her egg, she doesn’t get pregnant.
Donor 3811 leaves after two beers, without talking to any humans.
Donor 9072 strikes up a conversation with the most confident of the four women hit on by 5546. She is drawn to 9072’s good health and good brain. They discuss his rock-climbing skills and his beautiful sister. He walks the woman to her car, where she tells him she wants to have sex, but he shakes his head politely.
“I’m a sperm donor,” he explains, “and my sperm are exceptionally vigorous, which means I’m likely to impregnate whatever body receives them, whether through intercourse or intrauterine insemination. So I can’t go around having a lot of sex. If too many children are conceived from my loin butter, especially in the same geographical area, some of them might meet each other and fall in love. Which would be bad.”
The woman understands, and they part as friends.
But how can you raise a child alone when you can’t resist twelve ounces of coffee?
When you’ve been known to eat peanut butter on a spoon for dinner?
When you often go to bed without brushing your teeth?
Ab ovo. The twin eggs of Leda, impregnated by Zeus in swan form: one hatched into Helen, who would launch ships. Start from the beginning. Except there is no beginning. Can the biographer remember first thinking, feeling, or deciding she wanted to be someone’s mother? The original moment of longing to let a bulb of lichen grow in her until it came out human? The longing is widely endorsed. Legislators, aunts, and advertisers approve. Which makes the longing, she thinks, a little suspicious.
Babies once were abstractions. They were Maybe I do, but not now. The biographer used to sneer at talk of biological deadlines, believing the topic of baby craziness to be crap for lifestyle magazines. Women who worried about ticking clocks were the same women who traded salmon-loaf recipes and asked their husbands to clean the gutters. She was not and never would be one of them.
Then, suddenly, she was one of them. Not the gutters, but the clock.