Dating Big Bird (26 page)

“You think?” she said, still groggy from the painkillers. Paul had taken Nicole to the cafeteria, so it was just the three of us in Lynn’s quiet, dark hospital room. I was sitting on the edge of her bed. “Everybody keeps saying he looks just like Paul.”

“Well, he does. But he’s got—”

“My eye thing?” She pushed the sides of her eyes down. “My stupid droopy eyes?”

“No,” I said, smiling. “He’s got your fat thing. The sixteen double chins. And twenty rolls of stomach flab.”

She tried to laugh without moving so she wouldn’t pull on her cesarean stitches.

“I was kidding, you know.”

“I know. But don’t make me laugh. It hurts.”

“Okay.”

We both looked at David sleeping on Lynn’s chest.

“He’s amazing,” I said. “Truly amazing.”

“Isn’t he?”

At that moment I could think of nothing more wonderful than him. Nothing. Tears came into my eyes. Tears came into her eyes, too, and she took my hand.

“Are you going to do it?”

“I’m not sure yet. I go around and around, thinking about it and thinking about it.” I reached for a tissue and wiped my nose.

“It’s a big decision.”

“It’s a huge decision.”

“Is Malcolm a possibility?”

“No. Not anymore. Not for a while now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

She squeezed my hand. “Well, what about other—?”

“Alternatives? I’m looking into them.”

“Do it,” she said suddenly.

I turned to face her.

“Just do it. You’ll never be sorry.”

“You sound so sure.”

“I am sure.”

“But why?”

“How,” she said, cupping the back of the baby’s head in her hand, “could you ever regret this?”

I stayed the following week, helping out with meals and laundry and errands and with anything else that needed to be done. This was, basically, everything, since when Lynn came home from the hospital, all she could do was lie around trying not to aggravate the pain from her cesarean scar and breast-feeding twenty-four hours a day. My main job and, needless to say, my favorite job, was taking care of the Pickle. The usual nonstop marathon of
Barney
-watching and story-reading ensued, as did the occasional “no”-induced tantrums, which seemed at an all-time high this visit.

Which was understandable.

It would take some time to adjust to the fact that there was a new little Monkey in the house.

On my next visit, during the long Labor Day weekend, Nicole was in love with her little brother, nose-kissing him at every opportunity.

On the Tuesday afternoon before I returned to New York, I took a walk along the beach at Widow’s Cove. It was a few miles from my sister’s house, so I drove there and parked the Jeep in the lot, which was empty now that the season was officially over.

The air was clear and breezy and almost chilly as I walked
barefoot at the water’s edge. Overnight, it seemed, the season had changed. In New England, Labor Day meant the end of summer, and without a moment’s hesitation, the air and the light looked different. This day could no sooner have been mistaken for a day in early June than it could have been mistaken for a day in late February—and I envied nature its absoluteness, its clarity.

It was after six when I went back to the parking lot. I unlocked the car and sat behind the steering wheel, keeping my legs outside the door so I could brush the sand off my feet and put my shoes back on. The soft clang of distant buoys and the sharp squawks of seagulls flying overhead had a sadness to them, and sitting there, listening to the sounds of summer disappearing, I suddenly felt completely and utterly alone, and I knew it with a certainty I had never known before. I felt it in my bones, and in every cell of my body, and to the very core of my being, and in the flash of an instant—in a flash of vision and insight and time fast-forwarding itself inside my eyes—I saw that I could be alone like that forever, and I knew, at that moment, that I could not bear it.

And that I did not have to bear it.

I could have my own child—my own Pickle, my own Monkey.

I could be somebody’s
mammo
.

Finally, I knew what I wanted to do.

Resolving to have a baby and going about actually having one as a single woman were two very different things. I realized this once my leave had started, while I paced around my apartment and watched
Sesame Street
and
Barney
.

I wanted to call Amy for guidance, but she had taken a week off to go leaf-peeping with Barry in Vermont, and besides, she had gotten off the sperm-bank-baby path a while ago. So I called Renee at work instead.

“You said we had a varied and multilayered friendship, so now’s your chance to prove it to me.”

“I’m
not
joining a dating service,” she said, which is what she always said when I suggested we try to think of ways to improve our antisocial social lives.

“That wasn’t what I was going to ask you.”

“Then what?”

“I thought, since you’re so good at designing clothes for men, that you’d be the perfect person to help me pick one out.”

“From where?”

“A sperm-bank catalog.”

I’d already done a fair amount of preliminary research, which would spare Renee any unnecessary boredom (“I don’t want to sit there while you weed through the entire world of sperm”), so I knew that while you could browse the donor profiles on the computer once you’d registered, you needed to be under the care of a doctor, who would order the sperm for you.

I’d also found out that at my sperm bank of choice—Cryogenesis—all donors undergo a psychological evaluation using the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and are screened repeatedly by licensed psychotherapists.

And that the average age of their donors was 29.3 years.

And that less than five percent of the men who apply to become part of the Semen Donor Program are accepted.

And that since the first successful artificial insemination with frozen human semen was achieved in 1953, more than 200,000 births had been reported using cryopreserved human semen, with another 30,000 births taking place annually.

And that you can purchase extra vials of a particular donor’s sperm to keep in reserve in case you want to have several children by the same donor.

And that the cost of the sperm-purchasing process will run somewhere in the vicinity of $1,600 for frozen semen specimens and around $2,400 for fresh semen specimens—not including “assisted reproduction procedures,” which could run anywhere from $350 to $600 with each insemination attempt, depending on your medical insurance.

Logging on to Cryogenesis that night—for real this time—I pulled up the Semen Donor Catalog, which provided
a complete list of all active donors and a detailed view of their physical characteristics as well as their maternal and paternal ancestry, education/occupations, and special interests. Then, once I had narrowed down the selection of possible candidates, I could order a five-page detailed dossier (Data Assisted Donor Selection, also known by its official acronym as DADS,
ha ha
!) on each for fifteen dollars a pop. I could even get a Photo Assisted Donor Selection (
PADS
?), which is where you send a photo of the person you want your child to resemble, and the staff ranks the resemblance of the donors you’ve selected to make the best match.

I entered my password (“Big Bird”) and selected the browsing menu. Instantly an array of questions appeared—
preferred eye color, hair color, skin color, height, religion
—presumably to help me start choosing from donors who looked something like me and nothing like Danny Bonaducci. I entered brown, brown, Caucasian, and tall and left the preferred religion blank, since at this point whether or not the donor was Jewish seemed irrelevant, not to mention ridiculous, though I was sure my parents would have disagreed. In seconds 172 profiles matching those physical preferences were available for browsing.

And so I started.

I eliminated the first ten profiles right off the bat, the way a trial lawyer eliminates potential jurors for probable cause—uninteresting professions-to-be (business major); excessive height (six foot six).

By the end of the week, I’d narrowed it down to a total of seven donors who looked promising, then ordered the DADS. The extended profiles with photos arrived a few days later by Federal Express, and keeping her word, Renee came over to help me make my final selections.

“I’m sweating like a pig,” she said, walking into my apartment for the first time and looking around as if, given the
chance, she’d change every single thing in it. It was Indian summer, and she looked tormented in her signature black clothing. “Where’s your air conditioner?”

I pointed to it, and she went over and turned it up all the way.

“Can I get you something? Water? Juice? Diet Coke?”

She followed me into the kitchen, pushed me toward the refrigerator, and took a slim clear bottle out of her big black bag. “Just get me a glass of ice. I brought my own beverage.”

Vodka.

And so it began.

File 1:

“This one looks like a nonfag,” she said once we’d settled onto the floor of the now-freezing-cold living room. She threw the file she’d picked into the preliminary keep pile.

File 2:

“Fag.”

Discard pile.

File 3:

“Wacko.”

Discard.

File 4:

“Nonfag.”

Keep.

Files 5 and 6:

“Wacko. Fag. Ugly. Boring.”

Discard.

Discard.

File 7:

“Okay, wait.” She made the face a sixteen-year-old boy would make if he thought a girl was hot.

“What?” I said, putting down the folder I was looking through. “Another nonfag?”

She nodded, mesmerized, pointing at the photograph. “He’s adorable.”

I looked over her shoulder. Brown hair, brown eyes, good teeth, strong jaw, no facial hair. “Not bad.”

“Not
bad
? What are you, a fucking dead person? He’s the cutest guy I’ve seen in about ten years.” She scanned down to the bottom of the page and flipped to the next one. “And he’s studying to be an
architect
.”

“He’s not my future husband, Renee. He’s a
sperm donor
. Remember?”

She sat back in her chair and looked slightly deflated. “I know. But I can’t help it.”

“Help what?”

“I’m a romantic. I want you to pick out the best guy so you can have the best kid.”

I put my folder down and smiled at her.
“You’re a romantic?”
She flinched.

“Mrs. He’s-a-Wacko-He’s-a-Fag has a little bit of hope left in there?” I reached over and tried to poke her in the ribs near her heart, but she smacked my hand away. Only Renee would be perverse enough to feel sentimental and romantic while sitting around looking at sperm donor profiles.

She gave me the finger.

“Asswipe,” she said under her breath.

“Asswipe,” I replied.

By the time the evening had ended, she’d helped me narrow my selection down to two potential donors. Being a romantic, too, I went to sleep that night with visions of Nicole and David behind my eyes.

The following week I called my gynecologist for a referral. Since I was over thirty-five, she referred me to a fertility specialist: Dr. Singh Vishnu, on Park Avenue and Eighty-first Street. And because she liked me, she got them to squeeze me in the next week. I could hardly wait. My
Tuesday appointment finally came, and before I knew it, I was in a cab, then in the waiting room, then ushered from the waiting room into the doctor’s office as he came rushing in behind me from an examination room next door.

“I am Dr. Vishnu,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand before he sat down behind his desk. “And you are”—he glanced at my file, which he’d brought with him—“Ms. Franck.”

“Ellen.”

He nodded. “Ellen.” He was a small balding man with gigantic glasses, and as he scanned my file, his giant leather chair dwarfed him in the same way that Karen’s giant chair dwarfed her. “Tell me, Ms.—Ellen—why you have come.”