“Don’t you have them memorized?” she asked.
“No,” I said, feeling my voice crack. “That’s why I wrote them down.”
I started crying. Hysterically. Inconsolably. People outside the door probably thought I’d lost a whole baby. The doctor removed the wand and flicked the lights back on.
“It’s the hormones.”
I sat up. I shook my head but was too busy sobbing to speak. It was, most definitely, not the hormones. The Venn diagram of financial, psychological, and physical strain was more of a total eclipse. What’s worse, I had subjected myself to all this voluntarily. I had reasons to cry. My problem was that, once triggered, I couldn’t seem to get it under control. And for argument’s sake, let’s say it was the hormones. It seemed borderline dangerous to point it out. Try asking a pregnant woman if she’s in a bad mood because of the hormones and see what happens.
* * *
My boyfriend was out of town but offered to come back early for the procedure. As a longtime mostly single person, I appreciated this relationship perk. This was right up there with going to the bathroom at the airport without having to drag your luggage into the stall with you. That and the general reprieve from being viewed by society as either threatening or pitiable. But I discouraged him. It’s fifteen minutes, I explained. A power nap. People go back to work afterward. I did, however, inform my parents that I was going under anesthesia. Which meant I had to tell them why.
“I told you so,” said my mother. “You do have a uterus!”
I asked my friend Sara to retrieve me. Hospitals won’t let you walk out the door by yourself, which really makes you wonder if they’re fixing people in there. Before I went under, I asked the anesthesiologist what would happen if I didn’t fall asleep. Most people, she said, wondered what would happen if they never woke up. I told her this seemed like a nonsense question. Who cares? You’ll be dead. Your concerns are minimal.
Again, one wonders how I would speak to an actual child.
I don’t remember waking up from the procedure—“harvesting,” if you’d like to lose your lunch—but apparently I was less than pleasant. When Sara tried to force-feed me a saltine, I told her to “eat it.” From a padded chair, I watched other women sign their discharge papers and go, flying away to their lives. Eventually, a doctor came over and pulled a chair up next to mine. I lolled my head in her direction, waiting for her to do something insidious like ask me to take a sip of apple juice.
The doctor was younger than I was. Triangular pink diamonds swayed from her earlobes. Definitely a gift, but from whom? She was young enough for the answer to be “Daddy.” As she scooted forward, the concern on her face came into focus. She looked like the kind of lady who might refuse to operate on her son.
I knew it, I thought. I knew that my body would not behave as it should, that all my inklings about not being a real woman had been correct.
“Something a bit unusual happened during the procedure,” said the doctor.
Unusual? I rolled the word around the padded walls of my brain. Like they had to give me more drugs than expected “unusual” or they staged a revival of Gypsy over my unconscious body “unusual”?
Evidently, my eggs were fine, now crowded cozily together in a petri dish. But at sixty-seven, the club was at capacity.
“What?!”
I was awake now. I looked at Sara to make sure she had heard the same thing. Sixty-seven is not within the range of numbers listed in pamphlets. It’s a gaudy amount of eggs for a human to produce. On some core level, I was thrilled. To go through all this and get three eggs is like reading all of Ulysses only to discover the last page has been ripped out. But I was also disturbed. I felt disconnected from my body, as if it had been trying to tell me something for years and I hadn’t been listening. Or I had been listening but had heard the wrong thing. Because I was right. I am not a woman—I am a fish.
Sara promptly told me that I had “ruined caviar” for her.
“How often are you sitting around, eating caviar?”
“Often enough.”
How, I wondered, had the daily wand molestings failed to see this coming?
“Because they were so packed in,” explained the doctor, cupping her hands to approximate the shape of an egg, “like a vending machine.”
“Gross,” Sara and I said in unison.
* * *
One of the benefits of having gone through something so specific is the ability to rehash the details with other people who have gone through that same specific thing. We may be done with our subcutaneous injections but our subcutaneous injections are not done with us. But I learned quickly to keep my mouth shut about my egg number. If it came up, I changed the subject or indicated that the procedure had gone fine. It’s a pass/fail world and I passed. Number disclosure is considered as gauche as bragging about your massive pay increase for doing the exact same job as your coworker. Many women find it insensitive. It’s how I feel about straight-haired beauties who get a thrill out of humidity. Know your audience, I think, tallying up a lifetime of hair products, keeping my hands in my pockets so I don’t throttle these shaggy-banged bitches. Seeing as how we’re dealing with the potential for human life, the throttling urge is that much stronger.
To so badly want a baby and not be able to have one is a peerless brand of devastating. Everyone knows this. Fictionally, it turns women deranged (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle) and men monstrous (The Handmaid’s Tale). In real life, it just makes everybody sad. I am not in the habit of making people feel bad about themselves when they can do that on their own. And
