Barrel had thrown up in the living room.
“I baked cookies!” she cried as Spencer inserted a whole pistachio, still in its shell, up his nose, and Frank Junior crammed a fistful of pale-pink M&M’s into his mouth. Moving fast, I scooped the nut out of Spencer’s nostril, gave Frank Junior a stern look, gathered up the dishes of peppermints and butterscotch candies, Hershey’s Kisses and Swedish Fish, and put them out of reach.
I turned from the mantel, from which Christmas stockings hung year-round, and saw my sister standing in the kitchen door, studying me.
“Hi, Nance.”
She nodded. In high school, she had our mother’s rosy cheeks and fine, flyaway light-brown hair. She’d been pretty, sweet-faced, with soft features and a body as plump as a bunch of pillows tied together. It had been hard to take her seriously when she told me what to wear and what to do during the daytime when, at night, I’d fall asleep while she cried over some insult, imagined or, more often, real.
Now she was a size two with a butt and belly you could bounce quarters off of, and she worked as a part- time bookkeeper and receptionist in Dr. Scott’s office and spent most of her time working out, buying clothes to show off her new body, and, as she’d told Mary Sheehan, a classmate we’d bumped into Christmas shopping at the Franklin Mills mall, “planning our next vacation.”
“That was kind of rude,” I told her when we stopped at the food court. I was having a pretzel, she was sipping bottled water.
“It’s true,” she’d said with a shrug of her narrow shoulders. “She asked what I do, and I told her.”
I took a bite so I wouldn’t say something smart, or point out that Nancy and Dr. Scott, who had chosen not to have children, weren’t exactly renting a yacht and cruising the Greek islands or spending weekends in Paris. Scott’s idea of a good time began and ended with squash, so Nancy’s job — quote-unquote — was to find the resorts that were hosting some kind of medical conference and also had regulation squash courts, so that Dr. Scott could play his game and take the whole thing as a write-off.
My sister’s face was a smooth and poreless beige, and her hair, which she had chemically straightened every three months, hung in stiff curtains against each cheek. Her mouth was lipsticked and her eyelids shaded, and her jeans looked brand-new. She wore a black sweater tucked into her waistband, which was cinched with a black leather silver-buckled belt, and high-heeled leather boots on her feet. I turned to hide my smile. She looked like Oprah when she’d wheeled that wagon of fat across the stage, a thin, white Oprah full of the talk-show host’s confidence and self-regard. I hugged her, feeling dowdy in my own jeans (unpressed) and sweater (untucked) and boots that were not leather or high-heeled but, instead, rubber-soled lace-ups lined with dingy fake fur, fine for a muddy Pennsylvania spring but not what you’d call fashionable. Once I’d been the pretty one, the thin (at least by comparison) one, the stylish one. But I’d kept on about ten pounds of baby weight after each boy and there was hardly any money for new clothes. These days, what I wore had to be practical, and I barely had time to comb my hair, let alone style it, or pay someone three hundred dollars every three months to do it for me. I looked ordinary, a woman of average height, a little rounder than she should have been, with light-brown hair usually in a ponytail and blue-green eyes usually without shadow on their lids or mascara on their lashes, a woman with a diaper bag slung over her shoulder and a plastic bag full of Cheerios in her pocket who maybe could have been pretty if she’d had a little more time.
“Mom said you had news,” she said. “Are you pregnant again?” She scrunched up her nose, loading the question with just enough distaste that I could hear it, but not enough that I could call her on it. My mother lingered by the oven, watching the cookies and keeping an eye on us for signs of violence.
“No, I’m not pregnant.” I tried to keep my own voice pleasant, thinking,
My mother perked up. “What’s going on?”
“Give me a minute.” I got the boys set up in front of the TV in my mother’s living room, telling myself that a half hour of something educational was a necessary evil. Normally, I tried to limit their TV time and get them out and moving in the fresh air as much as I could.
Back in the kitchen, my mother was pouring coffee. Nancy sat at the table, which was draped in one of my mother’s paisley-patterned tablecloths. In the center of the table there was a bouquet of dried roses (“Explain to me the difference between ‘dried’ and ‘dead,’ “ Frank had said after noticing my mother’s dried-red-pepper wreath) and ceramic salt and pepper shakers in the shape of Minnie and Mickey Mouse. Nancy had her legs crossed, one pointed toe of her leather boot turning in small, irritated-looking circles. “So what’s the big announcement?” she asked.
“I’m going to be a surrogate.” This was not exactly true. What was true was that, that morning, I’d gotten a phone call saying I’d been accepted into the Princeton Fertility Clinic’s program. My information was now available to their clients on their website. Hopefully, soon a client would click on my profile, read the essays I’d worked so hard on and the pictures I’d cropped and retouched, and ask me to have her baby.
“Huh,” said Nancy, fiddling with the zipper on her boot. My hopes of my family’s being happy on my behalf were dwindling. My sister, as usual, looked bored and slightly hostile, and my mother, as usual, looked confused.
“It means,” I began, before Nancy jumped in, leaning forward in her best college-graduate-sister-giving-a- speech mode, which had only gotten more obnoxious since she’d married a doctor and felt qualified to lecture about all things health-related.
“It means she’s going to have a baby for a couple that can’t have one.”
“Or a single mother,” I said, just to stick it in Nancy’s face, to show her that she didn’t have all the answers. “Or a gay couple.”
“Oh,” my mother said. “Oh, well, that’s sweet.”
“She’s not doing it to be sweet,” said Nancy. She pulled her iPhone — one of the new ones — out of her bag and started tapping at the screen with one painted fingernail, like a bird pecking for feed. “She’s doing it for money.”
“That’s not exactly true,” I said. My tone was light, but inside I was furious. Leave it to Nancy to make it sound like it was all about the fifty thousand dollars I’d be paid. . and, also, to be right. For years I’d been trying to find a way to earn money while staying home with the boys, clicking on every “Make Hundreds of $$$ at Home” ad that popped up on the Internet, figuring out whether I could sell makeup or Amway during the ninety minutes three days a week when Frank Junior was at school and Spencer was asleep. I’d filled out an application to be a teacher’s aide at Spencer’s preschool, but the job paid only eight dollars an hour, which, between gas and babysitting meant I’d be losing money if I took it. “Yes, I’ll be getting paid, but it’s not just that. I really do want to help someone.”
“That’s nice.” My mother had drifted toward the sink. She picked up a roll of paper towels, each sheet printed with a row of pink-and-blue marching ducks. I wondered if she was trying to figure out how to make it cuter somehow, to stitch a quick ball-fringe onto the wooden dispenser or cover it in ConTact paper patterned with dancing milkmaids.
“How much will they pay you?” Nancy asked, without looking up from her screen.
“Why would you want to know that?” I inquired pleasantly, which was what Ann Landers said you were supposed to do when someone asked you something rude. I’d never asked Nancy how much she earned working for her husband, answering his phone in her clipped, just-short-of-rude voice and planning their squash getaways. “It’s a lot,” I said when she didn’t answer. “I’m working with one of the best programs on the East Coast.”
“How do you know they’re the best? Because their website says so?” Nancy ran her fingers through her hair curtains and tilted her head, giving me the same wide-eyed, quizzical look the morning-show newscaster used when she was asking the hiker who’d hacked his own arm off whether he shouldn’t have told someone where he’d be going before he got trapped in that slot canyon.
