Chapter Thirty-Three
We’re standing at Alden Drive, a few paces over from the emergency entrance to the hospital.
Cars pull in and out of the cul-de-sac, dropping off and picking up patients.
It’s less chaotic than you’d think, being the emergency entrance to the biggest hospital in Los Angeles.
No sirens, no whirling ambulances. Just the slow stream in and out of sick people.
Marcella is clutching and uncurling her hands in repetition.
She’s wearing khaki pants and a black sweater and Reebok sneakers, and she looks, all at once, old—older than I remember.
My mother has always been youthful and vibrant, if uptight.
Rarely a wrinkle, petite and tight body.
But I see her now, not as young as before.
The realization feels cruel, somehow—and I’m immediately filled with regret.
At my attitude in the cafeteria. At being angry with her when really I am angry at myself.
But I want her to know what this summer has been like. I want her to know that it worked.
“I had a second chance,” I tell her. Still angry, still kicking, but the truth.
A Honda drives by with the radio blaring nineties rap. We both turn to look as it whizzes by.
“Yes, well—”
“No, Mom. For real. I did something bad. Something bad to Leo and—”
But then I feel it, the injustice of it. The thing I keep buried down deep inside my heart. The thing I’ve sworn to Leo we will let go of. The thing I’ve “given up.” The absolute garbage, the utter infuriating impossibility, that I cannot get pregnant.
And all at once I want to tell her. I want Marcella to know.
Because she doesn’t, she has no idea what we—I—have been going through.
The hormones and the drugs and the utter despair that, once again, it did not work.
That once again, another month—another year—has gone by and there is no child in our arms.
“I can’t have a baby,” I say. I say it plainly, but it feels like screaming. The declaration feels like the only thing that has ever been spoken aloud in the whole world.
Marcella blinks at me. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I can’t get pregnant. We’ve been trying for three years. We’ve done every fertility treatment under the sun, many times over. And none of it works.”
I’m angry, and I’m angry at her, at her obliviousness, at her insistence that life should be and is orderly.
That people meet and fall in love and have a child and that marriage is uncomplicated and that motherhood is given.
That she’s never noticed before, the gaping hole in her daughter’s life.
That every time I’m over for Shabbat after a failed retrieval or visiting for the weekend after my period comes that she hasn’t seen my eyes, that she’s never asked me what’s wrong and really, truly, wanted to know.
“Oh, honey,” she says. “I had no idea.”
We stare at each other for a brief moment that feels charged—the anger, the recognition. We are strangers to each other. We have no idea about the other’s life.
“This summer,” I say, “I cheated on Leo. He went to New York, and I came to the beach, and I slept with Stone.”
I see Marcella react, but I push on.
“Things have been hard. We needed money for fertility; Leo didn’t want to keep going; I was angry with his absence. Being with Stone made me feel like… like maybe I wasn’t broken.”
My mother says nothing, just keeps looking at me.
“And then I took it back, and it was like we had a second chance.” The tears come fast, now. Fluid and hot. “And we weren’t just grieving anymore, we were happy. Really, truly happy. We gave up and we got our marriage back.”
Marcella opens her mouth to protest, to say, maybe, some inane thing they all say: Don’t give up. Don’t worry, it’ll happen. When you least except it. You just have to believe; miracles happen all the time.
But for some women, they don’t. For some women there is no miracle, no spontaneous pregnancy, no twelfth retrieval where, finally, the One Good Egg, the end. For some women there is only the big, open, wide, gaping middle.
“It felt great. It worked. The do-over worked. It made everything better.”
“I know,” Marcella says. “Sweetheart, I understand.”
I look at her. I see now that she’s crying. Big tears falling down her cheeks. I realize how infrequently I’ve ever seen my mother cry, how infrequently I’ve ever seen her moved.
“I got a second chance,” I say. “And now—”
Marcella, my mother, looks at me. She takes a deep breath. I see her get quiet, very quiet. And then she puts her hands on my shoulders. She holds them there. She looks into my eyes, and it’s like I see it before she says it, like I know, just from looking.
“It has all been a second chance,” she says, and then she tells me.