I'll Be You(77)

I had just written down the third address when I heard Camilla Jackson’s heels clattering across the travertine at the end of the hallway. But three was good enough. I slammed Sam’s folder shut and slid it back across the desk, shoving the scribbled list in my purse. By the time Camilla appeared in the doorway, a cube of ice in one hand and a box of tissues in the other, I was standing up, head tilted backward, nose pinched shut with one hand.

“I feel dizzy,” I said. “I think I should go.”

She looked puzzled. “Don’t you want the information about your donations?”

“I’ll just send you my address so you can mail it.” I edged past her, toward the door. “I need to get home.”

I left her standing there, the ice melting down her wrist, a look of vague bafflement on her face. A trail of tiny blood droplets marked my way as I found the path back out to the elevator and fled.





26




A WEEK AFTER MY visit to BioCal, my mother took me out to lunch at our favorite outdoor café, where the tables are spread out under the oak trees and you can sometimes hear the children’s chorus practicing at a nearby church. I hadn’t seen her in weeks. We usually met for lunch every few weeks, plus family dinners on the first Sunday of the month, but I hadn’t had much bandwidth of late. She looked at me hungrily, as if I were an appetizer she was about to pick off a tray.

“You’ve gotten so skinny, darling,” she said and sighed, a bite of jealousy in her voice, as she ordered a bottle of Sancerre. In previous times I would have shared the bottle with her but that day I placed my hand over the glass. I’d lost my taste for alcohol. Lately, when I drank, I could sense something deep inside me starting to ferment, a panicky sourness rising from my gut. Anyway, Dr. Cindy discouraged drinking. “Alcohol is about losing your self-control,” she’d say. “And here at GenFem we’re trying to gain control.”

I was finally a Level Six, a promotion given to me after I returned from Los Angeles with the list of egg recipient addresses in my purse pocket. That night, Dr. Cindy had pulled me up onto the stage in the middle of a workshop to give me the yellow scarf that denoted my ascension up the levels. “You’ve proven your ability to transcend your comfort zone and push into new frontiers,” she said as she wrapped the strip of silk fabric around my neck, just a hair too tight. A half dozen fellow Neos applauded in the audience, their faces swollen with pride and envy. “You’re well on the path to achieving your best self.”

And yet that list still sat in a folder in a drawer in my living room, proof that I wasn’t pushing that far. I hadn’t visited the addresses on it, hadn’t even looked them up on a map. When I lay in bed alone at night, I could feel the list in the downstairs console, taunting me with its proof of my transgression. I had pretended to be my sister, I had stolen private information. I couldn’t believe I had done these things. The lightness that I had felt during the first few months of GenFem—the giddy feeling that I was discovering something essential about myself—was fading. In its place was something harder, something a little darker and more frightening.

Of course, Dr. Cindy had warned me that the growth would hurt: If it isn’t hard, then you aren’t making any progress. And yet, seven months in, I still mostly felt like I was in limbo, torn between the person that I had been and the person that GenFem told me that I ought to be, somehow managing to be neither.

My mother took a piece of focaccia from the bread basket and tore it into small pieces that she used to sop up a puddle of olive oil. The sight made me feel queasy: I didn’t have much of an appetite anymore, even when I wasn’t having a Sufferance. She popped a piece in her mouth with relish and looked at me as she chewed, her jaw slowing.

“Are you OK?” she said. “You’re not eating.”

“I’m just not hungry,” I demurred.

“You aren’t turning anorexic on me, are you?” The focaccia dangled from her greasy fingers; it looked like she was considering forcing it on me.

“No. I’m just…a little stressed.”

“Is it something to do with Sam?”

I didn’t know how to answer her question. Because of course it was about Sam, though not in any way that our mother could possibly know, since I’d never told her about Sam’s donated eggs or her attempted seduction of Chuck. (She assumed our fallout was related to all the money I’d spent on Sam’s failed rehab, and I let her believe it, since it just seemed easier.) But it was also about me, in a way that felt so much bigger; and I felt an unexpected surge of resentment toward my mother, for never looking past my sister to really see me. For always assuming that she didn’t have to worry about me.

“It’s not about Sam,” I said.

“You two made up?” She said this hopefully. A powerful smell of lavender was emanating off her, the essential oils she rubbed into her joints that didn’t seem to help her very much.

“No. And I really don’t want to talk about her.”

She seemed a little relieved by this, as if she didn’t really want to know anyway. “Of course, I understand. I just hate that you two are having issues. It seems like you should work to patch them up, don’t you think? And she does seem to be doing OK this time around. Apparently she’s stayed sober for half a year now. Maybe longer. She seems happy.”