Good Ship Chinese is full of teachers, thanks to a federal mandate that doubled the number of standardized tests in public schools. Only half the staff are needed to proctor this afternoon’s exams.
The bleached-blond waitress pours their waters and says, “I’ll give you a minute.” A hairy mole clings to her cheek.
Didier reaches to pinch something from the biographer’s collar. “You had oatmeal for breakfast.”
She bats his hand away. He kicks her under the table. In front of Susan she doesn’t touch Didier. Doesn’t want her thinking Does she want my husband? because the biographer doesn’t, and if she did, all the more reason not to arouse suspicion. Susan once told the biographer how the music teacher had flirted her tiny ass off with Didier at the summer picnic, and Bex, drawing at the kitchen table, said, “Did she put her tiny ass back on?” and Susan said, “I wish you’d be seen and not heard for once in your life.” The biographer was pleased to know that Susan could be an unskillful parent.
“How goes your saga,” says Pete, “of the lady adventurer?”
“Almost finished.”
“I have no doubt.” He flaps his placemat vigorously, airing himself. “Everyone needs a good hobby.”
“It’s not a hobby,” she says.
“The hair coming out of that mole,” says Didier, “has got to be three inches long.”
“Of course it’s a hobby,” says Pete. “You do it on weekends or vacations. The act of doing it brings you amusement but no profit or gain.”
“You guys want to order? I can flag down the hair taxi.”
“So if something doesn’t make money,” says the biographer, “it’s automatically relegated to hobby?”
The waitress returns. Her sprouting hair—quite long, quite black—for a moment mesmerizes all of them. The biographer, who bleaches her own upper lip every few weeks, warms with fellow feeling. She and Pete order Golden Lily platters, Didier the Emperor’s Consolation.
Didier leans forward to say, low: “Why don’t she just bleeding yank that thing out, eh?”
There is an egg bracing to burst out of its sac into the wet fallopian warmth. Today the ovulation predictor kit showed no smiley face; she’ll test again tomorrow. Back to Kalbfleisch for sperm, once she gets the smiley face.
“Pour me some more tea, Roanoke?”
She moves the teapot six inches toward him.
“I said pour, woman! Can I get a ride home, by the way? I left Susan the car today.”
“How were you planning on getting home if I didn’t drive you?”
Didier grins, beau-laid. “I knew you’d drive me.”
Bryan Zakile saunters over to their table and bellows, “These three are clearly up to no good! Want to hear my fortune? ‘You will leave a trail of gratitude.’”
“‘In bed,’” adds Didier.
“You said it, not me.”
“Not I,” mutters the biographer.
Bryan flinches. “Thank you, grammar Schutzstaffel.”
She drags her fork through the Golden Lilies. “I’m not the one who teaches English.”
“He don’t really teach English either,” says Didier. “His subject is the beautiful game.”
“If only that knee had held up,” says Pete, “we’d be watching Bryan on telly. Who’d you be playing for? Barça? Man United?”
“Hilarious, Peter, but I was All-Conference for three years at Maryland.”
“That is tremendously impressive.”
The biographer smiles at Pete. Surprised, he smiles back.
Sometimes he reminds her of her brother.
She can’t use the ovulation predictor test when she wakes up, because first morning urine isn’t optimal for detecting the surge of luteinizing hormone that augurs the egg’s release. She has to wait four hours to let enough urine accumulate in her bladder, and in these four hours she can’t drink too many fluids, lest she dilute the urine and skew the results. Instead of coffee, she toasts a frozen waffle and gnaws it unbuttered at the kitchen table. She stares at the bookstore photograph. The shelf where her book will go.
Between first and second periods, in a stall of the staff bathroom, the biographer inserts a fresh pee-catching tab into the plastic wand of the ovulation predictor kit and squats over the toilet. The instructions say you don’t need to absorb the whole stream, only five seconds’ worth, which is good because the opening spray goes wide of the stick. She has to keep moving the stick around under herself to find it. Count to five. Rest the stick on some toilet paper on the metal tampon receptacle, angled just so, to allow the caught pee to wend its way through the stick into whatever mechanism tests it for luteinizing hormone. Which takes a minute or longer.
She wipes her wet hands, pulls up her jeans, sits back down on the toilet. During this minute or longer, while the digital display blinks—it will turn into an empty circle or a smiley-faced circle—the biographer sings the egg-coaxing song. “I may be alone, I may be a crone, but fuck you, I can still ovulate!”
She checks: still blinking.
Woman who is thin and ugly. Withered old woman. Cruel and ugly old woman. Witch-like woman. Stock character in fairy tale. Woman over forty. From the Old Northern French caroigne (“carrion” or “cantankerous woman”) and from the Middle Dutch croonje (“old ewe”).
Still blinking.
Through the bathroom wall come shrieks of girls whose ovaries are young and juicy, crammed with eggs.
Still blinking.
What is the total number of human eggs in this building right now?
Still blinking.
How many of the human eggs in this building right now will get sperm pricked, cracked open, to produce another human?
She checks: smiley face!
Bloom of delight in her ribs.
I may be forty-two, but I can still fucking ovulate.
“Hello, yes, I’m calling because I got my LH surge today—Okay, sure …” Holding, holding. “Yes, hi, this is Roberta Stephens … Yes, right … And I surged today … Yeah … And I’m using donor sperm so I wanted to—Okay, sure …” Holding, holding, bell shrilling; that was the second bell; she’s late for her own class. “Okay … Yes, I’ve got more than one donor in storage, but I’d like you to use number 9072.”
Donor semen is frozen shortly after collection and thawed shortly before insemination. In between, millions of sperm lie arrested, aslant, their genetic material paused. Tomorrow morning, before she arrives, the clinic staff will thaw a vial of 9072 (Rock Climber Beautiful Sister) and spin its contents in a centrifuge to separate sperm from seminal fluid, wash the swimmers clean of prostaglandins and debris.
“See you at seven!” she tells the nurse, so excited her throat hurts.
Tomorrow at seven. At seven tomorrow. Tomorrow, in Salem, on a leafy little upmarket street, at the hands of a former tight end, the biographer will be inseminated.
If it is possible for you to come to me, little one, let you come to me.
If it is not possible, let you not come, and let me not be shattered.
She can hardly sleep. Is holding a jar of some sort of face cream that contains opiates, and is going to cook it and shoot it, and is hunting in her mother’s bathroom for cotton. She needs to hide the gear from her mother. But she also is her mother, and the person with the jar is Archie. “What happened to the cotton balls?” he asks. “All gone. Use a filter.” “But I’m out of cigarettes!” says Archie. “Maybe I have some,” says the biographer.
She wakes before the alarm. Glass of water, her brother’s old green parka, her mother’s bike-lock key on a chain around her neck. The biographer is an atheist, but she doesn’t rule out helpful ghosts.
“Archie’s the charmer,” said their mother. “You’re the wise one.”
She leaves her apartment building in the briny dark, sea crashing, car freezing. No other cars on the cliff road. Her headlights sweep the rock wall, the fir tops, the black ocean flecked with silver, same road and water the baby will see one day.
7:12 a.m.: Signs in at the front desk. Takes her place among the silent, rock-fingered women.
7:58 a.m.: Nurse Jolly leads her to an exam room, where she strips below the waist and climbs under the paper sheet. Her heart is going twice as fast. Do quickened beats affect fertilization? In last night’s dream, she—as Archie—planned to shoot up into her chest, left-hand side, because she’d been told a “heart direct” made the pleasure immense.
8:49 a.m.: Kalbfleisch stands beside the biographer’s spread legs and stirruped feet and shows her a vial. “Is this the correct donor?” She squints: 9072 from Athena Cryobank. Yes. “The count on this vial was quite good,” he says. “Thirteen point three million moving sperm.”
“Remind me what the average is?”
“We want the count to be at least five million.”
He inserts a speculum into the biographer’s vagina. It does not exactly hurt—more of a serious pressure—then he opens her cervix, and the pressure turns teeth clenching. A plastic catheter is guided through the speculum into the biographer’s uterus. The nurse hands Kalbfleisch the syringe of washed semen, an inch of pale yellow. He injects it into the catheter, depositing the semen at the top of her uterus, near the fallopian tubes.
The whole thing takes less than a minute.
He snaps off his gloves and says “Good luck” and goes.
“Rest for a bit, hon,” says Nurse Jolly. “You want any water?”
“No thanks, but thank you.”
In‑breath.
She is so, so scared.
Out-breath.
Either this has to work or she has to be matched with a bio mother in the next two months. After January fifteenth, when Every Child Needs Two goes into effect, no adopted kid will have to suffer from a single woman’s lack of time, her low self-esteem, her inferior earning power. Every adopted kid will now reap the rewards of growing up in a two-parent home. Fewer single mothers, say the congressmen, will mean fewer criminals and addicts and welfare recipients. Fewer pomegranate farmers. Fewer talk-show hosts. Fewer cure inventors. Fewer presidents of the United States.
In‑breath.
Keep your legs, Stephens.
Out-breath.
She lies perfectly still.
In high school she ran for hours every day of track season—had muscles then, had stamina. She competed in the four hundred and the eight hundred, and though not a star, she was decent, even won a few meets her senior year. Archie, tenth-grader, pressed himself against the chain-link fence and cheered. Her parents sat in the bleachers and cheered. Her mother made celebratory dinners with the biographer’s favorite foods: green-chile scrambled eggs, peanut-butter pie. How she loved the laden table, the lamps, the spring-night crickets, Mama before she got sick, Archie in his skull T‑shirt balancing a spoonful of pie on his head. In the beam of their attention she was tired and proud, a warrior who had slung her arrow into every heel she aimed for.
If it is possible for you to come to me, let you come to me, and I will name you Archie.
In the car, she opens the ziplock of pineapple chunks, whose bromelain is supposed to encourage a fertilized egg to implant itself in the uterine wall. It will be five days before the egg is ready to implant, but eating pineapple comforts the biographer. Its sweetness is strong and good against the bitter, spitty fear.
Five days. Two months. Forty-two years. She hates the calendar.
Please let it work this time.
She doesn’t move her pelvis the whole drive home. Lifts her toes carefully on the brake and accelerator, no thigh muscle. “Hell, you could go to the gym today if you wanted,” said Kalbfleisch after the first insemination, to underscore how much it didn’t matter what the biographer’s body did after a few minutes of lying still on the exam table; but the biographer’s body is going to stay as quiet as it can.
It has to work this time.
She will sit behind her desk in class without thigh movement or pelvic commotion of any kind; and the eggs will float in the tube waters unjarred, open, amenable; and one sperm-struck egg will welcome a single invading spermatozoon into itself, ready to meld and to split. From one cell, two. From two, four. From four, eight. An eight-celled blastocyst has a chance.