When the Lights Go Out(32)

It isn’t that Aaron doesn’t have enough sperm—he does—it’s that what he has doesn’t swim properly and isn’t able to travel the four inches or so to where my egg may or may not be waiting.

In short, we’re both to blame, though there isn’t a moment that I don’t wonder which of us is to blame more and even though I think it’s me, I know it’s me, there is a part of me aggrieved that I’m the only one forced to record my body temperature, to take ovulation tests, to cry in public for no sound reason at all, to travel to the fertility clinic again and again, to be probed so that some doctor or technician can gaze inside me and at my ovaries, while all Aaron has to do is take an herbal supplement from time to time and exercise on occasion.

It doesn’t seem fair. It doesn’t seem right.

I’ve come to resent Aaron for this, as I’ve come to resent him for many things.


March 13, 1997 Egg Harbor

I field questions nearly every day about when Aaron and I are going to have a baby, often from my stepmother or Aaron’s mother, calling on the phone when he’s at work, asking not-so-subtly for grandchildren.

When can they expect them? When will there be good news to share?

It’s not that grandchildren are in short supply because they aren’t. Instead it’s that Aaron and I have been married for over two years, and society doesn’t take well to that: two nearly thirty-years-olds, married for over two years without kids, as if there’s something unthinkable about it, something taboo.

Is there something wrong with that?

It feels as if there is.

A married woman of my age without a child is quite the anomaly these days.

I can’t bring myself to say aloud that we’re trying, trying and failing to make a baby because I don’t want pity and I don’t want advice. And so instead I tell Aaron’s mother and my stepmother soon, wishing that my own mother were still alive because hers is the only advice I want and need.

I spend my days waiting. Waiting for Aaron to wake up, waiting for Aaron to leave, waiting for Aaron to get home so I can again close my eyes and sleep. Waiting for a new cycle of Clomid to begin, to ovulate, to make love to Aaron like robots would do, hasty and unfeeling, and then waiting for the negative pregnancy test results, the loyal, trusty blood.

It’s the only thing I can depend on anymore. That sooner or later, my period will come.


March 14, 1997

Egg Harbor

Spring looms on the horizon.

It’s weeks away still, but every now and then a day blooms before me, fifty or sixty degrees and full of sun, so that it’s easier to get through than the endlessly gray winter days.

These rare springlike days I leave the cottage when Aaron is away and head into town. I’ve discovered a dance studio there, completely by chance—I didn’t seek it out—a small single-story cottage on Church Street that tiny ballerinas move in and out of all day.

The first day I spotted the studio, I saw an empty park bench nearby, which was warm and welcoming, set directly in a shaft of sunlight so that even though it was no more than fifty-two degrees outside, I felt snug, my skin warm from the sun’s generous beams.

For nearly an hour I watched the ballerinas, toddlers mainly in leotards with their hair pinned neatly back in buns. Their little voices were happy and high-pitched, like birds, as they clung to their mothers’ hands, coming and going like clockwork, nearly every hour on the hour.

There was one group in particular that caught my eye. A group of sixteen—eight mothers and their daughters—who arrived en masse around noon, a whole bundle of giggly girls with women trailing behind, women who sipped lattes and gossiped while I sat alone on a park bench, feeling sorry for myself, isolated from society because I didn’t fit in. Because I didn’t have a child.

The women were beautiful, every last one of them, which for whatever reason made me feel dirty, self-conscious and ashamed. I smiled as they walked by, but not one looked at me and no one smiled in reply. They wore peasant tops and floaty skirts; cowboy boots; big, baggy sweaters; hobo bags; while me, on the other hand, I sat wrapped up in a sweatshirt of Aaron’s that had faded and shrunk in the wash, feeling alone, bloated, desperate, wanting for a child.

How different I am from those mothers.

I could never be one of them, one of those women who travel in a pack, whispering secrets about their husbands, their children’s nighttime habits, which little ones still wet the bed. All because I didn’t have a child. Because without a child, I had nothing to offer them.

Because I’m nothing, I easily reasoned then, if not a mother.

There’s no other justification for my life.

I watched them as they walked by, as they closed in on the dance studio. And then, after the women had passed and I assumed the parade was through, I noticed one little girl straggling behind, nearly stagnant on the sidewalk. Struggling to keep up. Too busy examining the buds on the trees. Smaller than the rest, which made me think of the piglet in Charlotte’s Web. Wilbur, saved from slaughter by little Fern. I was captivated by her, holding my breath as she passed by, joining the others in the studio. Only when she was gone did I allow myself to breathe.

And now twice, sometimes three times a week I find myself sitting there on that bench, watching the dancers come and go, wishing one of them, any single one of them—but especially the littlest one, a head shorter than the rest, straw-colored hair and a collection of freckles, whose tiny feet always lag behind so that one day I worry she’ll be forgotten—was mine.