Harvest
Eggs. They wanted eggs, and their requests
came trickling in daily in ten-point type, through the want ads of
the campus paper. Five, ten, fifteen thousand you could get for
doing it just once. More than that if you were experienced. We knew
girls who did it over and over and over again, once a semester.
Mostly they were girls whose parents paid their full tuition
anyway, and the money quickly manifested itself as stuff: cashmere
sweaters crumpled on the bathroom floor, new stilettos clicking
across the kitchen linoleum, matchboxes from Le Cirque and Nobu,
endless overpriced trinkets collected on excursions to the East
Side. Sometimes the stuff was more practical: new computers, a
savings account for grad school. Sometimes it was just bigger: a
brand-new entertainment center that got stolen the next week, and
shame on us, because we weren’t particularly sorry when it
did.
It wasn’t our eggs they wanted, so we spent the
weekends watching burned DVDs and chasing ramen noodles with Corona
the way broke college students were supposed to. Columbia
credentials be damned, no one was interested in paying us for our
genetic material. If they had wanted brown babies who so obviously
didn’t belong to them, they would have just adopted. Laura Kelso,
who lived in our suite—that was whose eggs they wanted. I was
surprised no one had come to our door to recruit her personally;
she’d practically stepped out of a want ad. 1600 SAT score, 4.1
GPA, and that only because some professors didn’t believe in A+’s.
Then, of course, there was the important stuff: blonde, blue-eyed,
five-foot-seven, barely 115 pounds, though we suspected the green
pills she stored in a clear plastic bottle with the label torn off
were diet pills of some kind. She’d been normal-sized when we met
her.
She was making bank, but we couldn’t hate her for
it. Absent her new income, she would have been broke like the rest
of us: too good a daughter to guilt her single mother into sending
more money than she could afford. Laura’s mother was a cashier at
Penney’s; what she could afford wasn’t much. For a while that had
given us a claim to her. She was a homegirl, a hermanita: we
were in this together. Then she walked through the front door
wearing Jimmy Choo boots, and we knew we were losing her. Before we
knew it, we hardly saw her, and then one day she invited Ellen
Chambers, serial donor, and Lisette Hartley, serial bitch, into our
common area for some egg donor support group, and they compared
paychecks and pain levels and wondered what had become of the
little pieces of them released into the universe. We sat in Candy’s
room with the door open and faked gagging. Nicole let the back
pages of The Village Voice fall open, 900 numbers and round
brown asses staring up at us from the floor. She said, “They’re
mother material, but who wants to fuck them? If we were
hookers, we’d be making twice what they were.”
We did not particularly want to be hookers, and so
this was little consolation.
What we wanted was to be a doctor, a lawyer, a spy,
and happy. Nicole was the aspiring doctor; she had a love-hate
relationship with her bio texts, but a love-love relationship with
catalogues of all kinds. Pinned to her wall where Mos Def and Che
Guevara hung on ours were ads for designer shoes and clothing,
electronic equipment—even the occasional house ripped out of the
home buyer’s guide to remind her of the bigger picture, the things
she’d wanted growing up but never had. Candy wanted to be a lawyer:
she had big ideas about justice and was always dragging us to
meetings with her, hoping we’d pick up some of her conviction.
Truth be told, Candy could have been Laura Kelso’s dark-haired
sister, but we didn’t dare say so. Freshman year at a sisterhood
meeting, some girl had looked at Candy walking in and sneered, not
quite under her breath, “What the hell is white girl doing here?”
Not three seconds later, Candy was all in her face, like:
“Mira, my people did not get half exterminated and have half
their country stolen from them for you to be calling me a white
girl, OK, bitch?” You didn’t mess with Candy; she was going to be
one scary-ass lawyer.
Me, I wanted to be the spy. I liked secrets.
Nicole, ever the realist, liked to point out that spies couldn’t be
spies on their own behalf, and I had yet to encounter a government
or revolution of which I approved. So far I had not accepted the
seriousness of this problem. I didn’t like to think about the
future, and we were only juniors, so I didn’t quite have to.
Courtney was the one who said she just wanted to be happy. Nicole
said this was her middle-class showing. Courtney was from one of
those barely middle-class black families where the girls are always
called Courtney or Kelli or Lindsay or Brooke, and the family
forgoes vacations and savings and stock for a nice house in a nice
neighborhood in the hopes that the neighbors will forget they are
black. Usually what happened was Kelli tried so hard to prove her
parents right that she turned into a bleach-blonde,
rock-music-loving creature who seemed foreign to them. Lindsay got
so tired of being called white girl that she studied Ebonics on BET
and started dressing like a video extra, calling herself Lil L, and
begging to hang out in the neighborhood they’d moved out of.
Brooke, sick of not fitting in, would become anorexic or suicidal
or both. We were all proud of Courtney for coming to us relatively
normal.
Laura faded from us gradually. We kept our doors
shut and she began to keep hers closed as well. We didn’t know
whether this was in retaliation or because she wasn’t interested in
hanging out with us. We never heard her in the shower, we rarely
heard her enter: she seemed to glide. It was like we lived with a
ghost—a snowflake, Nicole called her, and though she meant it in
the harshly disapproving vein with which we spoke of most girls who
were pale and delicate and seemed to be everywhere, in a more
gentle sense the word had a ring of truth to it. We were living
with something barely visible, something that might have vanished
any second.
In tenth grade, I went through a
bad-romance-novel phase. In bad romance novels, women always know
the moment they are pregnant; the heroine can feel her lover plant
his seed inside her, or something equally melodramatic. Perhaps
because I subconsciously expected pregnancy to announce itself with
some such motherly feeling of omniscience, I completely overlooked
mine. Winter gave way to spring, and when I started getting queasy,
I thought maybe I was lactose intolerant. When quitting dairy
didn’t help, I thought maybe I had an ulcer. Nicole, Candy, and
Courtney started to notice something was off, but by the nature of
their prying questions, I could tell they were thinking I was
bulimic. It wasn’t until I was lying on the floor, listening to
Candy complain that her cramps were killing her, that I realized I
hadn’t had my period for two months. It had never been regular and
I had grown accustomed to red spots on my underwear at odd
intervals. There was something almost thrilling about its
off-kilter arrival. I liked surprises. When my friends swallowed
little green and white and blue pills and marked the start date of
their periods on calendars, I thought how boring it must be to have
your body run like clockwork. Turning sideways and inhaling bits of
dust off Courtney’s carpet, I understood that my dislike of the
pill was irrational, but it was too late for all that.
Of course I had a boyfriend. We all did, they were
like accessories; we kept them stored at colleges up and down the
East Coast and pulled them out on formal occasions or in the event
of extreme boredom or loneliness. Mine I kept at NYU, where he was
lonely more than I was. I had spent a good number of nights
downtown, curled up in his blue flannel sheets, listening to him
breathe. He was good at hand-holding and being subtly witty and
distracting me when I was on the verge of tears, brilliant in that
completely useless way where he could tell you off the top of his
head the architect of any office building downtown and the historic
relationship between the toothbrush and cultural imperialism, but
not what day of the week it was or what train to take to where. I
didn’t want to see him yet, so I bought a pregnancy test to confirm
what I already knew, and then another in case the first one had
been wrong, and then I threw the two sticks with their faint plus
signs into the trash can and called my mother.
People who do not call my mother “Mother” call her
Isis. Her name conjures up a persona that she indulges with
miniature altars and smoky incense when she is not busy being a
hairdresser. She was not busy at all when I called, the vague hum
of her meditation music in the background let me know that.
“Angel. I was just thinking of you.”
Every time I call my house, even those times when I
am calling because my mother has forgotten to pick me up or call me
back or send me something necessary, she tells me she has just been
thinking of me. I ignored her and started talking, hoping maybe
with some small talk she would pick up on the tremor of my voice. I
was lying on the bed in my underwear when I called her, pinching
the fat at my abdomen and trying to determine whether there was
more of it, looking down at my breasts and wondering if they were
any bigger. I looked the same to me. I wondered if maybe I was
imagining this. Stupid girls got pregnant, careless girls, girls
who didn’t worry about their futures, girls whose mothers had never
explained to them about sex.
Laura had been a girl something like that when
she’d come to college—not stupid, but naive, uninformed. She’d been
sitting in the back row of the mandatory safe-sex lecture,
wide-eyed, when we met her. They’d divided us into teams and made
us do races to put a condom on a banana and she’d screwed it up,
put the thing on backward and had it go flying off somewhere, then
blushed a brilliant shade of red and hid her face in her hands. The
girls on the other team laughed.
“It’s OK,” Nicole said, putting a hand on her
shoulder after we lost. “There are too many hos on this campus
anyway. Who comes to college knowing how to put a condom on in five
seconds?”
“Don’t say ‘hos,’” said Candy. “Just ’cause
somebody likes sex doesn’t make her a ho.”
They argued all the way to the dining hall while
Laura and Courtney and I exchanged hellos and shy smiles.
Nicole and Candy were virgins then, too, though you
wouldn’t have known it by looking at them. Even on budgets they
knew how to dress like city girls, girls who knew their way
around—not like Laura, whose wardrobe screamed Kmart and favored
the color pink. Maybe that was why we’d liked her right away: her
need for us was immediately apparent, and unlike most of the people
who needed us, we knew what to do for her.
I told my mother about Nicole’s new Triple Five
Soul sweatshirt and Candy’s plans to go abroad next year. Pages
rustled in the background. My mother told me how Mrs. Wilson from
down the street thinned all her hair out, leaving braids in too
long.
“She’ll be back by Easter,” my mother said. “She
won’t let anybody else do her hair for Easter Sunday.”
“Uh-huh,” I started to agree, but my mother had
already interrupted herself to read out loud from the catalogue she
was thumbing through. Health crystals, mood-balancing jewelry, a
guide to spiritual belly dancing.
“Spiritual belly dancing, Angel. Doesn’t that sound
like fun?”
I imagined myself dancing for a minute, and then I
imagined my belly fat, swollen, with stretch marks, and felt most
unspiritual. I told her I had a test to study for.
“OK,” she conceded. “You should go out later,
though. Your horoscope says it’s a good day for Pisces to be in the
right place at the right time.”
I hung up and thought to myself that the right
place was two months ago in Rafael’s bedroom, but I wasn’t sure
what my horoscope could do about that.
In the morning I skipped a review session and took
the C train to Brooklyn to visit my father. He opened the door to
my still-raised fist and seemed pleasantly surprised to see
me.
“Angel. To what do I owe the honor, Miss
Lady?”
My father had called me Miss Lady since I was four
years old, and though I had not been prissy enough to deserve the
nickname since then, it stuck. Uncomfortably, dishonestly, but it
stuck. I walked in without answering his question. My visits were
always like this. I liked to disrupt him. Interrupting people was
the only way I could be sure of my presence in their lives.
My father’s apartment had been painted red since
the last time I was in it. I could still smell the newness of the
paint. It looked as though he had painted it himself; whoever did
it had forgotten a drop-cloth, and the furniture was flecked with
red.
“Better not let the cops in here, Daddy. They’ll
think you killed someone.”
He didn’t hear me. Instead, I heard the pop of two
bottle tops and then he walked into the living room and handed me a
soda. My father drank only the kind that came in glass bottles; he
believed aluminum was unhealthy, and wouldn’t drink or eat anything
that came out of a can.
“I want you to hear something,” he said, before I
had a chance to open my mouth. I occupied myself by running my
tongue around the rim of the bottle. My father had his back to me
and was messing with the ancient stereo in the corner of his living
room.
My father was into radio then. My father was always
into something; he was a collector of hobbies and habits. Sometimes
I wondered how my parents could have been in the same room for long
enough to conceive me, let alone be married for four years, but my
mother had amassed her own fair share of collections over the
years. I imagined their marriage was just a phase during which they
had collected each other until something more interesting came
along. A year ago my father was into the stock market, but then he
invested the few hundred dollars he’d made initially in a company
that marketed giant tomatoes, and lost it all. Now he planned to
get famous doing radio commercials.
The tape started. I watched its wheels spin as my
father’s buttery baritone echoed out of the brown speakers, their
wood paneling peeling at the edges. In two minutes of tape, my
father sounded convincing selling: cars, liquor, a swanky
restaurant downtown. He sounded unconvincing selling: study aids,
season tickets for the Knicks, diet pills. He sounded downright
ridiculous selling: golfing equipment, stain remover, the Daily
News.
“What do you think, Miss Lady?” he asked when the
tape stopped.
I said, “Daddy, I’m pregnant.”
My father said nothing, finished his soda in a few
sips, and rested it on top of the speaker. He left the room and I
heard creaking in the kitchen, the squeak of hinges, and then the
rustling of cabinet clutter. He emerged triumphantly, smiling, and
handed me a sticky, half-gone bottle of molasses.
“Take a spoonful of this every day, it’s good for
the baby. Your mother took it when she was pregnant, and look how
good you turned out.”
From the looks of the dusty amber thing he had just
handed me, the letters on its label faded into nonexistence, my
mother had taken her spoonfuls from that very same bottle.
“I might not keep it,” I said.
“Oh.” He looked uncomfortable, as though he
wondered why I was telling him this. It was simple. I had screwed
up, I wanted to punish somebody. He sat beside me on the couch and
held my hand.
“Whatever you think is best, baby. You were always
the smart one.”
The smart one. That was my other nickname growing
up. It was only recently that I had been able to convince people it
didn’t necessarily apply, either. I got up.
“I gotta go, Daddy. I’ll call you.”
I walked quickly and let the door slam on his
parting fatherly advice.
I wanted to hurt somebody, and so far it wasn’t
working. My mother, when all was said and done and she finally
found out, would be devastated that she hadn’t been the first to
know, but I couldn’t even have that yet. I went to see Rafael not
so much because I thought he should know as because he was
woundable.
Rafael is an artist, in the most clichéd
college-student, nude-self-portraits-on-the-wall kind of way. There
are also nude pictures of me on his wall, though I am not
identifiable in any of them—an elbow here, a belly button there, an
arched brow, the curve of my thigh. The one with my breasts is in
his portfolio but didn’t make the wall. “I don’t want other guys
staring at my girlfriend’s tits,” he said. He does not, however,
mind people looking at the picture of his penis he has pasted to
the ceiling, though he did take it down when his little sister came
to visit.
Rafael was raised in Miami by Catholic parents who
left Cuba just before Castro came to power. His father did work for
the League of Cuban Voters, his mother was the president of an
anti-Castro society and the most respected woman in the church that
he attended twice every Sunday until he left for school. He started
sleeping with me the same week that he took down the family
portrait beside his bed and replaced it with a photo of Castro. I
was not stupid enough to believe this was coincidence. I imagined
him on the phone with his mother: No, I’m not a virgin anymore
and maybe Castro was right about you and do you know what else, Ma,
she’s black, even darker brown than Grandma Margarita, what are you
going to do to me now?
Probably this conversation never happened. I didn’t
particularly care if it did. I rather relished being his own
personal Eve. It felt reckless and romantic. When I played I Never
with my cousins over winter break, they raised impressed eyebrows
when I drank to both Have you ever devirginized somebody?
and Have you ever done it with a Catholic? People thought I
was the good kid, but going to college was pretty much the only
thing I’d done that they hadn’t.
Now, though, confronted with Rafael, I would have
traded all my good grades to know what to say to him. I had gone
there to hurt him without knowing that I wasn’t capable of it. He
rambled about how we really only had to be part-time next year to
finish and we could get an apartment somewhere uptown and he’d just
take the train to class and we’d get summer jobs to save money,
floundering when he tried to be more specific and making grossly
obvious mathematical errors when he tried to compute our budget in
his head. He was adorable and lost and I wanted to hold him until
he felt better, but then I realized I was the one in trouble.
“Rafael, shut up,” I said.
“I love you,” he said. It was almost an
afterthought.
I could hear the subtext to it, the desperate chord
underneath. I love you. I love you enough. But I knew what enough
turned into. One day you could have enough, and the next you had a
house full of mood crystals or an apartment full of the sound of
your own voice in stereo.
“I don’t think I’m keeping it,” I told him.
“Angel,” he said, then stopped. I could see him
struggling. We’d had this conversation before, in the theoretical
sense. For most of his life he’d been told that abortion was a
mortal sin, that to even let a girl do it was to shirk his
responsibility as a man and a Christian. Those voices echoed
somewhere deep, somewhere I had never been. Then there were the
more recent voices: his newly declared agnosticism that called
those other voices archaic and self-righteous; the voices that
asked who was he to ever tell a woman what to do with her body, as
though he were the boss of her. He had been told so much and become
so accustomed to his own opinion not mattering that at the critical
moment he seemed not to know what his own thoughts on the matter
were and couldn’t finish his sentence. Or maybe it had nothing to
do with that. Maybe it was just him being selfish the way that most
artists are, part drawn to the idea of something that would outlast
him, part worried that he couldn’t control it.
“Angel,” he said again.
Usually when I found myself not knowing what to say
to make things better, I kissed him instead. If it were anything
else he was upset about, I’d be undoing the buttons on his shirt
and kissing circles down his chest until the distressing moment was
gone, our fingers in each other’s hair, across each other’s bodies.
I would lie beneath him and raise my hips to meet his while he
breathed into the curve of my neck and kept a hand cupped under my
butt. I would bite his earlobe and think I love this boy and
Fidel would watch the whole thing silently. Then it would be over
and we would breathe heavily and know where we were wounded but not
how to make it better.
Instead, I left, and told him I’d call him once I
thought about it. I wouldn’t, though; I decided the least I could
do was make him call me. I returned to the dorm to find the girls
sprawled across the common-area furniture and thought maybe they
would do. It was midterm reading week, but no one was actually
reading. My friends were eating chips and salsa while an underfed
starlet railed against the injustice of life on MTV, buzzing in low
volume while Nicole talked over it.
“You know what Laura has now?” she asked.
Value, I thought, but said nothing.
“Some damn two-hundred-dollar jeans. Can you
believe? I’m about to donate me an egg.”
“Please, girl. Who you gonna find wants a Nicole
egg?” Candy said.
“Well, then you’re about to haul your light ass in
there and donate an egg, then cut me a percent.” Nicole continued,
“Twenty seems fair. Could get me some cute jeans anyway.”
“Right. Let me go in there and sign Dulce Maria
Gutierrez Hernandez on the dotted line and see how fast they throw
me out the office. Who knows what could be hiding in DNA with a
name like that. Maybe the kid would only get a 1400 and its whole
life would be over.” Candy laughed. I felt sick. Nicole kept
going.
“Well, there gotta be some rich-ass black people
who can’t have their own kids and think my 1500’s worth something.
C’mon, Courtney, your parents got money, right? Think they want
another kid? A better one?”
Courtney threw a lime Tostito at Nicole. I walked
away without them noticing and tried to imagine telling them.
Nicole would say to be realistic. She’d go through numbers the way
Rafael had tried to, only hers would add up and show how ridiculous
the situation would be. She’d tell me we didn’t come this far to
screw it up now. Candy would say it was only guilt keeping me from
doing what had to be done right now, and then she’d go on a tangent
about the government’s attempts to restrict female sexuality, and
when I was about to walk away and she realized what she was doing
she’d apologize and then have nothing left to say. Courtney would
just keep asking what I wanted, which wouldn’t be any more helpful
than me asking my damn self.
I knocked on Laura’s door, not sure what I wanted
from her. She looked startled to see it was me knocking; it had
been months since we’d had a real conversation. We’d spoken only in
passing, when at all: hello, cold today, isn’t it, psych midterm’s
going to be a real pain in the ass.
“What do you want?” she asked, not quite rudely but
headed there.
“Can I come in?” I said. “I need to talk.”
Maybe she could tell it was serious, because she
opened the door all the way and moved aside so that I could enter.
Her first few checks had mainly gone to her mother, to paying off
her loans, but the last one she’d clearly spent redecorating. The
cheap navy comforter had been replaced by something purple and
woven. Egyptian cotton, I thought, without knowing where the
term had come from. The photos on her walls were not of us anymore;
they were of her at clubs I’d never been to with girls I didn’t
recognize. Her pajamas were screaming Nick & Nora and her hair
had recently been highlighted, and I had to look at the floor in
order to pretend she was the same girl I’d once been friends with,
the girl who couldn’t say “Blow Pop” because she thought it sounded
dirty, the girl who’d been confused about how it was possible to
pee while wearing a tampon before Nicole broke it down for her. I
told her the whole story, with the vomiting and the not knowing and
my mother’s health crystals and my father’s car commercials, and
Rafael being all beautiful and tortured and useless. She nodded in
a kind of horrified sympathy, and then asked:
“What do you need me to do?”
I needed her to stop looking at me. I needed her
eyes to not be blue and liquid. I needed her to understand what she
couldn’t possibly: how it felt to not be her. I asked her to come
with me when I got rid of it, and she was surprised but
nodded.
“I’m asking you,” I said, “because I can’t really
tell them. I was thinking, though, that maybe you know what it
feels like to almost be a mother.”
I let the door close as she sat there on her purple
comforter, looking not sure whether to feel insulted or
understood.
I wanted to schedule it in Brooklyn, on the off
chance that someone I knew would be at the Planned Parenthood in
Manhattan, but Brooklyn was all booked up and they sent me
downtown. The whole place was pink pink pink: shell-pink carpeting,
puke-pink plastic chairs that wobbled if you squirmed, pale pink
walls. I signed in and took a number, imagining I was anyplace
else. The DMV, backstage at a beauty pageant, the take-out counter
at a restaurant. The lobby was full of mostly girls, with the
occasional boyfriend. A boy who looked no older than fifteen patted
the round belly of his even younger-looking girlfriend. Another
twirled a strand of his girlfriend’s hair while she read through a
brochure on contraceptives and occasionally looked up nervously, as
though scared someone would see her there. A grown man squeezed the
hand of the young woman next to him, who looked panicked and
terrified.
Laura looked panicked and terrified, too,
mesmerized by the tacky not-quite-tragedy of the waiting room. I
imagined (this is what we did with Laura then: we never asked, we
imagined) the doctor’s office she’d visited to be screened and
tested and have her eggs removed. I imagined it blue, with soft
music in the background and fresh flowers on the waiting-room
table, next to the New Yorker. I imagined people smiled more
and struck up conversation easily. The girls there to donate would
feel kinship with Laura, and if the women there to receive were
inclined to be jealous of her youth and beauty and fertility, their
jealousy would recede once they realized they could afford to buy
her.
I wondered if Laura was uncomfortable there. Her
childhood was probably free clinics like the one we were sitting
in. The shyness of her voice, the way she sometimes slipped up and
had to fix a grammatical error—these hinted that maybe she was what
my father would have called white trash if my mother weren’t there
to say it was a term analogous to nigger and he ought to
apologize for using it. Impostor or not, she could hide her
inadequacy behind salon-lightened hair and a thousand-dollar
leather coat. Sitting next to her, I did not feel analogous. They
paid her for her potential babies, and they were about to vacuum
mine out of me. I felt queasy. I hoped they would forget to call my
number. I didn’t want or not want the baby, I didn’t have any grand
political problem with abortion, I didn’t have any religion to
speak of and thought that if God existed and expected me to follow
any particular rules, I was probably going to hell anyway, and not
for this. I just didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to deal with
it, didn’t want to be any emptier than I already felt. I wanted to
be full. That was one of the things the girls in Laura’s egg-donor
group complained about: the painful part of the drugs they had to
take. They felt “full” in their abdomens, swollen with potential
for life. I had wanted that forever and had never felt it
yet.
“I don’t want to do this,” I said.
“Me neither,” she said, which didn’t make a lot of
sense, but I didn’t really care what she was trying to say right
then. I looked at her for a second. Her fingertips were pressed
into her temples, and I could see her nails, the French polish on
them chipping slightly, and her roots, a few shades darker than the
blond of the rest of her hair. Logic was never going to save us,
but I started talking anyway.
“If I took summer classes, I could graduate in
August. Before the baby. I have good grades, I could get an OK
job.”
Not a spy. You couldn’t spy with a baby. It would
cry and blow your cover.
Laura looked the other way.
“I’ve done this before,” she said.
“This?” I asked.
“The waiting-room thing. With my older sister, when
we were in high school. Twice. She wasn’t one of those people who
got emotional about it, she just needed me for the ride
home.”
“What was it like?” I asked.
“The doctors were sweeter to her than I was,” Laura
said. “I was sitting there waiting for her, and I kept thinking
everyone in that room knew someone who knew someone who knew me,
and they were all thinking it would be me next, and I’d show them,
it never would be.”
“It’s not you,” I said. I looked down at my scuffed
red and black Pumas. I thought about kicking her, for reminding me
where we came from, for reminding me that I used to think of her as
one of us.
“Isn’t it?” she asked.
“It’s me. You might as well not even be
here.”
“Then why’d you ask me?”
“Why’d you come?”
“What am I supposed to say?”
“I don’t know. What am I supposed to do with a
baby?”
“Love it,” she said. Her voice sounded like it was
about to break. Love it. Like it was that simple. Like
loving something ever paid anyone’s rent. I tugged so hard on the
strand of hair I’d been twirling that it snapped off. Love it, I
thought. Let it be mine. I took a breath.
“I’d need money, though.”
I ran through the numbers again. I thought of my
baby like a doll, like one in a row of dozens and dozens of fancy
toy dolls, all with price tags announcing that I couldn’t have
them. The money was such an obvious problem that I didn’t even get
to thinking about any of the others most of the time. It seemed
wrong to me, that money should be the difference between a baby and
not-a-baby. I had a thing inside of me that I could not afford, and
Laura had things inside of her that she couldn’t afford not to
sell, and on the other end of it there were women spending tens of
thousands of dollars to buy them because they felt their own bodies
had betrayed them. Any way you looked at it, where there should
have been a child, there was a math problem.
“At Financial Aid they’d probably cover my tuition
for the summer,” I said. “But I’d need the security for an
apartment, and something to live on till I could get a job. Plus
money for doctors and stuff. Once I graduate I can’t get school
insurance anymore.”
Laura turned and looked at me, and it was not
exactly friendship on her face. More like resignation.
“I just got paid,” she said softly. “Take
it.”
I didn’t care right then why she was doing it:
guilt, or anger, or privilege. I didn’t care if she needed it or
not. I didn’t even have the pride to reject the first offer and
make her insist. It wasn’t that I’d planned it that way, and I
don’t know when I knew what I was doing but all of a sudden it was
done and I wasn’t about to feel guilty.
“All right,” I said. “If you can afford
that.”
She pulled out her checkbook, like it was nothing.
I thought of telling her to stop, watched her loopy cursive fill
the space of the check. I wondered what I’d say to Rafael, what I’d
do when the money ran out, what Laura and I would say to each other
for the last few months of what was suddenly my last semester of
college. I thought of telling her to stop, but like I was afraid of
undoing the knot of cells growing into something alive inside of
me, I was afraid of undoing what was happening.
When she handed me the check, I folded it into my
wallet and didn’t say a word. I didn’t think I deserved it, not
really, nor did I think she owed me. I thought the universe was a
whole series of unfulfilled transactions, checks waiting to be
cashed, opportunities waiting to be cashed in, even if they were
opportunities made of your own flesh. I thought it was a horrible
world to bring a child into, but an even worse world in which to
stay a child. I left my number lying on the seat and stood up and
walked out to Broadway, Laura behind me. I watched my feet as
though they belonged to someone else. I looked up at the sky,
feeling grown and full of something sad and aching to be
known.