Red Clocks(30)

“Remind me what the average is?”

“We want the count to be at least five million.”

He inserts a speculum into the biographer’s vagina. It does not exactly hurt—more of a serious pressure—then he opens her cervix, and the pressure turns teeth clenching. A plastic catheter is guided through the speculum into the biographer’s uterus. The nurse hands Kalbfleisch the syringe of washed semen, an inch of pale yellow. He injects it into the catheter, depositing the semen at the top of her uterus, near the fallopian tubes.

The whole thing takes less than a minute.

He snaps off his gloves and says “Good luck” and goes.

“Rest for a bit, hon,” says Nurse Jolly. “You want any water?”

“No thanks, but thank you.”

In?breath.

She is so, so scared.

Out-breath.

Either this has to work or she has to be matched with a bio mother in the next two months. After January fifteenth, when Every Child Needs Two goes into effect, no adopted kid will have to suffer from a single woman’s lack of time, her low self-esteem, her inferior earning power. Every adopted kid will now reap the rewards of growing up in a two-parent home. Fewer single mothers, say the congressmen, will mean fewer criminals and addicts and welfare recipients. Fewer pomegranate farmers. Fewer talk-show hosts. Fewer cure inventors. Fewer presidents of the United States.

In?breath.

Keep your legs, Stephens.

Out-breath.

She lies perfectly still.

In high school she ran for hours every day of track season—had muscles then, had stamina. She competed in the four hundred and the eight hundred, and though not a star, she was decent, even won a few meets her senior year. Archie, tenth-grader, pressed himself against the chain-link fence and cheered. Her parents sat in the bleachers and cheered. Her mother made celebratory dinners with the biographer’s favorite foods: green-chile scrambled eggs, peanut-butter pie. How she loved the laden table, the lamps, the spring-night crickets, Mama before she got sick, Archie in his skull T?shirt balancing a spoonful of pie on his head. In the beam of their attention she was tired and proud, a warrior who had slung her arrow into every heel she aimed for.

If it is possible for you to come to me, let you come to me, and I will name you Archie.

In the car, she opens the ziplock of pineapple chunks, whose bromelain is supposed to encourage a fertilized egg to implant itself in the uterine wall. It will be five days before the egg is ready to implant, but eating pineapple comforts the biographer. Its sweetness is strong and good against the bitter, spitty fear.

Five days. Two months. Forty-two years. She hates the calendar.

Please let it work this time.

She doesn’t move her pelvis the whole drive home. Lifts her toes carefully on the brake and accelerator, no thigh muscle. “Hell, you could go to the gym today if you wanted,” said Kalbfleisch after the first insemination, to underscore how much it didn’t matter what the biographer’s body did after a few minutes of lying still on the exam table; but the biographer’s body is going to stay as quiet as it can.

It has to work this time.

She will sit behind her desk in class without thigh movement or pelvic commotion of any kind; and the eggs will float in the tube waters unjarred, open, amenable; and one sperm-struck egg will welcome a single invading spermatozoon into itself, ready to meld and to split. From one cell, two. From two, four. From four, eight. An eight-celled blastocyst has a chance.





I spent eighteen months in my husband’s house before a storm sank his boat and him with it.

That in eighteen months I had not been gotten with child brought shame to my mother.

The red morn I left for Aberdeen, she said, “Go on, get that broken fisa away from us.”





THE DAUGHTER


Her parents aren’t religious. Their reasons are pragmatic, they say. Logical. So many people want to adopt. Why should people be deprived of babies they will nourish, cherish, rain love down upon, just because other people don’t feel like being pregnant for a few months? When the Personhood Amendment passed, her father said it was about time the country came to its senses. He had no truck with the wackos who bombed clinics, and he thought it was going a little too far to make women pay for funerals for their miscarried fetuses; but, he said, there was a loving home out there for every baby who came into the world.

Her eighth-grade social-studies class held a mock debate on abortion. The daughter prepared bullet points for the pro-choice team. Her father proofread her work, as usual; but instead of his usual “This is top-notch!” he sat down beside her, rested a hand on her shoulder, and said he was concerned about the implications of her argument.

“What if your bio mother had chosen to terminate?”

“Well, she didn’t, but other people should be able to.”

“Think of all the happy adopted families that wouldn’t exist.”

“But Dad, a lot of women would still give their babies up for adoption.”

“But what about the women who didn’t?”

“Why can’t everyone just decide for themselves?”

“When someone decides to murder a fellow human with a gun, we put them in jail, don’t we?”

“Not if they’re a cop.”

“Think of all the families waiting for a child. Think of me and your mom, how long we waited.”