Red Clocks(29)

“Hilarious, Peter, but I was All-Conference for three years at Maryland.”

“That is tremendously impressive.”

The biographer smiles at Pete. Surprised, he smiles back.

Sometimes he reminds her of her brother.

She can’t use the ovulation predictor test when she wakes up, because first morning urine isn’t optimal for detecting the surge of luteinizing hormone that augurs the egg’s release. She has to wait four hours to let enough urine accumulate in her bladder, and in these four hours she can’t drink too many fluids, lest she dilute the urine and skew the results. Instead of coffee, she toasts a frozen waffle and gnaws it unbuttered at the kitchen table. She stares at the bookstore photograph. The shelf where her book will go.

Between first and second periods, in a stall of the staff bathroom, the biographer inserts a fresh pee-catching tab into the plastic wand of the ovulation predictor kit and squats over the toilet. The instructions say you don’t need to absorb the whole stream, only five seconds’ worth, which is good because the opening spray goes wide of the stick. She has to keep moving the stick around under herself to find it. Count to five. Rest the stick on some toilet paper on the metal tampon receptacle, angled just so, to allow the caught pee to wend its way through the stick into whatever mechanism tests it for luteinizing hormone. Which takes a minute or longer.

She wipes her wet hands, pulls up her jeans, sits back down on the toilet. During this minute or longer, while the digital display blinks—it will turn into an empty circle or a smiley-faced circle—the biographer sings the egg-coaxing song. “I may be alone, I may be a crone, but fuck you, I can still ovulate!”

She checks: still blinking.

Woman who is thin and ugly. Withered old woman. Cruel and ugly old woman. Witch-like woman. Stock character in fairy tale. Woman over forty. From the Old Northern French caroigne (“carrion” or “cantankerous woman”) and from the Middle Dutch croonje (“old ewe”).

Still blinking.

Through the bathroom wall come shrieks of girls whose ovaries are young and juicy, crammed with eggs.

Still blinking.

What is the total number of human eggs in this building right now?

Still blinking.

How many of the human eggs in this building right now will get sperm pricked, cracked open, to produce another human?

She checks: smiley face!

Bloom of delight in her ribs.

I may be forty-two, but I can still fucking ovulate.

“Hello, yes, I’m calling because I got my LH surge today—Okay, sure …” Holding, holding. “Yes, hi, this is Roberta Stephens … Yes, right … And I surged today … Yeah … And I’m using donor sperm so I wanted to—Okay, sure …” Holding, holding, bell shrilling; that was the second bell; she’s late for her own class. “Okay … Yes, I’ve got more than one donor in storage, but I’d like you to use number 9072.”

Donor semen is frozen shortly after collection and thawed shortly before insemination. In between, millions of sperm lie arrested, aslant, their genetic material paused. Tomorrow morning, before she arrives, the clinic staff will thaw a vial of 9072 (Rock Climber Beautiful Sister) and spin its contents in a centrifuge to separate sperm from seminal fluid, wash the swimmers clean of prostaglandins and debris.

“See you at seven!” she tells the nurse, so excited her throat hurts.

Tomorrow at seven. At seven tomorrow. Tomorrow, in Salem, on a leafy little upmarket street, at the hands of a former tight end, the biographer will be inseminated.

If it is possible for you to come to me, little one, let you come to me.

If it is not possible, let you not come, and let me not be shattered.

She can hardly sleep. Is holding a jar of some sort of face cream that contains opiates, and is going to cook it and shoot it, and is hunting in her mother’s bathroom for cotton. She needs to hide the gear from her mother. But she also is her mother, and the person with the jar is Archie. “What happened to the cotton balls?” he asks. “All gone. Use a filter.” “But I’m out of cigarettes!” says Archie. “Maybe I have some,” says the biographer.

She wakes before the alarm. Glass of water, her brother’s old green parka, her mother’s bike-lock key on a chain around her neck. The biographer is an atheist, but she doesn’t rule out helpful ghosts.

“Archie’s the charmer,” said their mother. “You’re the wise one.”

She leaves her apartment building in the briny dark, sea crashing, car freezing. No other cars on the cliff road. Her headlights sweep the rock wall, the fir tops, the black ocean flecked with silver, same road and water the baby will see one day.

7:12 a.m.: Signs in at the front desk. Takes her place among the silent, rock-fingered women.

7:58 a.m.: Nurse Jolly leads her to an exam room, where she strips below the waist and climbs under the paper sheet. Her heart is going twice as fast. Do quickened beats affect fertilization? In last night’s dream, she—as Archie—planned to shoot up into her chest, left-hand side, because she’d been told a “heart direct” made the pleasure immense.

8:49 a.m.: Kalbfleisch stands beside the biographer’s spread legs and stirruped feet and shows her a vial. “Is this the correct donor?” She squints: 9072 from Athena Cryobank. Yes. “The count on this vial was quite good,” he says. “Thirteen point three million moving sperm.”