I Was a Test-Tube Baby
“I Was a Test-Tube Baby”
Something was compelling me to break rules.
Nothing really bad, like the kinds of trouble my father and Howie used to get into when they were my age.
I just wanted to try out being a different kind of person.
A year or so back, I’d slipped a tube of Revlon “Love That Pink” lipstick into my pocket.
I didn’t even like wearing lipstick. After I got home, I threw it in the trash.
More recently, I’d told Hayward I met Madonna once, at Bloomingdale’s in New York City, and she complimented me on my outfit.
I’d never even been to Bloomingdale’s, and only once, ever, went to New York City, for a class trip to visit the Statue of Liberty.
Now, as Hayward stood at the side of the court, zipping his racquet back into its case, something compelled me to offer up a story.
I just felt like doing this. It wasn’t even as if Hayward was someone I cared about impressing.
I just wanted to see if he believed me, if I was a good enough storyteller.
Like Stephen King—but in life, not a book.
“You probably don’t know it, but I was a test-tube baby,” I told Hayward. “My father had a tragic problem involving his reproductive organs that kept my parents from having me the normal way, so they went to this lab where they put the sperm and egg together in a petri dish.”
My story about meeting Madonna hadn’t made much of an impression on Hayward, but this one piqued his interest.
“That’s why I don’t have a belly button,” I told him.
This was where I slid the waistband of my shorts down just far enough to reveal a strip of bare skin on my midriff. An inch lower down and I would have revealed my navel, but he bought it.
“I bet you could have got on Phil Donahue or something if you’d let someone know about it,” he said.
“It was all hush-hush,” I told him. “My parents signed a nondisclosure agreement.”
I didn’t know what that was exactly, but I’d heard the phrase.
“I guess that explains why you’re so weird,” Hayward said. But I knew I’d impressed him.
That night in my room, under the eaves, I took out the tennis ball I’d brought back with me from the court that afternoon. Lately I had taken to standing in front of the mirror in my room, in my training bra, stuffed with a couple of socks, imagining how I might look if I ever developed breasts.
I tossed the tennis ball into the air above my head.
Just that. I didn’t know anything about how to swing a racquet, even less about how to play the game.
There was just something about holding that ball in my hand and launching it into the air and catching it without ever losing sight of the words on the fuzzy green surface: “Wilson 3.” My goal was simple: to keep the ball from touching the floor.
If it did, Forrest—in the bedroom below me—might have heard and wondered what I was doing up in my room.
This was my secret. The first one, maybe.