All Adults Here(5)

Choosing sperm was the ultimate online dating—you had all the information you needed on paper. Porter also wasn’t sure she trusted what were essentially résumés—everyone stretched the truth on résumés— and so she focused on the facts. Porter was tall herself and didn’t need tall genes; she wasn’t Jewish and therefore it was fine if the donor was, in terms of Tay-Sachs and other diseases on the “Jewish panel,” so said her reproductive endocrinologist. Porter wanted to make up for things she lacked—physical coordination, the ability to carry a tune. It was best not to think about these men masturbating into a cup. It was hard to decide which was more off-putting: a man donating sperm just to make some cash or a man donating sperm because he liked the idea of having lots of children borne by strange women. Porter put it out of her mind. The sperm was an ingredient, and this way, she got to choose what kind of cake she wanted to make. The child would be hers alone, and that cupful of swimmers was a means to that end. And now she was pregnant with a girl. Science worked, and miracles happened. The two were not mutually exclusive.

Porter turned off the showerhead and watched the soapy water pool around her feet. Her breasts had always been modest and small, even when the rest of her body had widened with age. Now they were full and hard, more than a palmful of stretching tissue. Her hips and tummy kept the secret with their soft width, a professional hazard. Porter didn’t trust anyone skinny who worked in cheese. You met them from time to time, mostly on the retail side, and Porter always kept her distance. Enjoying the product was important. Thank god her cheese was pasteurized.

Now that she was halfway and starting to show in earnest, Porter knew she was going to have to start telling people. And before she told people, she would have to tell her brothers. And before she told her brothers, she would have to tell her mother. She knew that it would be unimaginable to most women not to tell their mothers that they were embarking on such an experience—she’d seen scores of adult women clutching their mothers’ hands in the waiting room at her reproductive endocrinologist’s office. But Astrid Strick wasn’t like that. She knew how to get stains out of white shirts. She could name all the plants in her garden and identify trees and birds. She could bake everything from scratch. But she did not invite intimacy the way that Porter had observed in other mothers, the kind who would let their children sleep in their bed after a bad dream or get their hair wet in a swimming pool. Astrid had always existed—both before and after her husband died—in an orderly way. She had rules, and the proper clothing for any weather, unlike Porter, who had neither. That was part of it, of course. Porter was going to let her daughter sleep in her bed every night if she wanted to. She’d chew her food and spit it into her mouth, if that was what the baby wanted. Porter was going to be as warm as an oven. That’s what she was going to tell her mother.

Russell Strick had loved The Twilight Zone, and Porter thought that that was how she might have told her father—she would have asked him to imagine an episode where a baby was made in a lab and put into her body. It wasn’t fair, the way most people just got to keep both their parents, and have grandparents for their children, and cutesy nicknames. Porter was used to that unfairness—her college graduation, her brothers’ weddings, her mother’s fiftieth birthday, sixtieth birthday, all the big fucking days—but somehow that part didn’t get easier. He was still gone, and he would miss her big days, too, in addition to her brothers’. He would have been happy that she was having a baby, maybe (in some weird way, a way that they wouldn’t ever talk about out loud) even a little bit happy that he would be the primary male figure, apart from her brothers, that he, Grampa, would loom large. Gramps. Gamps. Pops. Popsy. Porter didn’t know which he would have been, which silly nickname he would have been granted by Cecelia and then called by all his grandchildren in turn. Porter had had a dream that somehow her father was also the father of her baby, through some mix of time travel and magic but with none of the troubling connotations that such a thing would have in real life—in her dream, it was like her father was somehow her grandfather and her father and her child’s father all at once, an ageless ghost, and the women in the family did all the work. It was like a Brad Pitt movie that would make you cry even though it got terrible reviews.

Porter stepped over the lip of the bathtub and wrapped herself in a towel. She wiped at the mirror with her hand, clearing a space large enough to see her reflection.

“You’re a grown-up,” she said to herself. “You’re a grown-ass woman, with a growing-ass baby inside her. You are an adult. It’s your life.” Porter turned to the side and cupped her hand beneath her belly. “Hey, you. I’m your mom, and I swear to god, everything is going to be okay. I am ninety-five percent sure that everything is going to be okay. At least seventy percent. I swear. Fuck.”

She would tell her mother today. Or tomorrow. At the very latest, she would tell her mother tomorrow.





Chapter 4





Unaccompanied Minor



It was only four stops on the train—Yonkers, Croton, Poughkeepsie, Clapham. Cecelia had a window seat but kept her nose in her book. The conductor had given her a special bracelet that read UNACCOMPANIED but might as well have read ABANDONED FOUNDLING, PLEASE TAKE ME HOME AND MAKE ME A SANDWICH. All the mothers on the train—Cecelia could tell which ones they were, even though only a few of them actually had children with them—gave her pitying looks and asked her pointless questions, like “Sure is pretty out there, isn’t it?” to which she would smile and offer an affirmative nod. Fathers either knew better than to speak to an adolescent girl they didn’t know or were better able to shut off the part of their brain that noticed children not their own.