The Secret Society of Demolition Writers (2 page)

I WENT FOR my first egg retrieval. The clinic was chic, the waiting room filled with pained and wealthy-looking women. I enjoyed their jewelry, the tennis bracelet, the stop-sign–shaped ruby on the ring. The nurse called me in. They did a quick ultrasound and then proceeded to sedation. “Just to calm you down,” they said, and I felt the pinch of the needle and an immediate coolness fill my veins, like some blue Slurpee, some sleep and relief from the heat. I saw the doctor in a dream or in reality, I don’t know which. My legs were hoisted high, into stirrups, and a warm sun shone into my cleaved body. I saw a silver-sharp instrument hovering in his gloved hand, and then it went in me. Up, up, the needle nosed, up into my uterus, feeling for the stuffed sac of the ovary,
there
, the gentlest pierce possible, the tiny sweet eggs spilling down the straw and into a clean bowl, where they were then whisked away. Afterwards, I sat up. Someone brought me water. “Good job,” they said. I sipped. I moved off the table, and where I lay, just a little dab of bright red paint, my body’s color.

ALL IN ALL, a very trustworthy operation. One week later, a check for five K in the mail. I took my mother and said “c’mon,” and we went downtown. I bought accessories. I bought glass door-knobs and ribbons. We went to the makeup counter at the mall. My mother said, “Cynthia, I’m tired.” I pushed her forward. I had just the slightest soreness in my side. I said, “Can you give her some foundation, some sparkle eye shadow?” I went through one procedure, she now through another. Five thousand, four thousand four hundred and fifty.

The makeup lady, who looked like a doctor herself in a white coat, poured a promising mixture onto a cotton ball, wiped at my mother’s face. Somewhere, Janice was taking my egg, they were inserting it into her; it was petaling open, a little leg cracking its fragile shell. Here we go. I felt giddy, rich, full. I felt pregnant myself, my egg there in the lining, there in the lavender-scented sprinklers, the blond lacquered crib,
shushhh
a woman says, and she holds me against a body that does not break. “I’m tired,” my mother said, and the makeup doctor swabbed her and waxed her with pink lipstick and then, it was all of a sudden, my mother swiped her hand sideways so bottles went scurrying like people in a sniper attack, rattling sideways, falling onto the floor, seeking shelter under the counters.

The whole store got quiet, looking. “Leave-me-alone,” my mother said into the silence. The makeup lady froze, a cotton swab in mid-descent. “You,” my mother turned to me, “you are entirely without empathy.” And I felt myself flush with shame, for it was true, my sin was flounce and flourish, and had it ever been any different? Once, a long time ago, I had liked to draw simple things, a star, an elephant without tusks. Return me there. “And you,” my mother said now to the Lancôme lady; my mother struggled to stand up, she backed away. “And you,” she said to that lady, who was holding her healing cottons and her pressed powders that in the end would do no good. That’s what my mother said next: “No good.”

CERTAIN THINGS BECOME compulsions. Some people drink. Some people smoke. Some people donate their eggs. Another cycle. Another five K, another chance at another woman’s womb. Ike said sure. My mother got weaker. Summer finally passed, and when the fall arrived it was a godsend, cooler air from Canada, birds in a V. I went back to school, hauling myself up off my mother’s porch swing, out of our smoke-stained house where the wallpaper curled, and into the classroom, where I’m straight A. Because I was a junior now, I took almost all interior design courses, to prepare me for the world. I took a course in perspective, where we studied vanishing points, and a course in textiles, where we compared cotton to twill, and I took a course in color management, where we learned what went together and what didn’t. I was bad at color management. I put things together I should not have; I collided separate spheres and thought it looked wonderful. I took pale orange and put it next to a wash of violet in a virtual room; I made one wall hunter green, the floor wine red, and I thought—I still do—that this was lovely. The instructor said, “All your homes look nervous,” but I couldn’t tell. Color, I think, is God’s way of laughing. I envision places inside me where the spectrum spreads out so every hue and tone meshes in a subtle burst of light. I picture a terra-cotta sill, a pot of pressed sea glass. Give me my floors in deep blues, my ceilings in marbleized pink. The instructor said, “Less is more, Cynthia.” My instructor said, “Neutrals like coffee work well,” but I couldn’t see that, couldn’t stand that, and so I found my flaw; it had to do with color. I got my first bad grade ever in that course. B. Minus. Look at it. B–. Like a pair of sideways breasts with a slash at the skin. My mother’s cancer went to the brain. I did yet another egg retrieval and picked a couple in a farmhouse in Nyack, New York, where there was, so said the profile, a salmon-colored living room, a woman with strawberry blond hair. I began to worry that something was seriously wrong with me. Never had I been anything but good at what I did. B. Minus. My instructor said I had a bad eye.

THERE ARE THEORIES, there are stories, and there are facts. Color is all three of these things. Eggs are just facts. The fact is that a baby girl is born with over fifty thousand tiny fresh eggs in her ovaries and she loses them month by month, so by the time she’s ready to have her own baby, she’s diminished; she’s down. I didn’t know this ahead of time, but I read it in the waiting-room literature. There are other ovoid facts. For instance, every egg has a tiny little X inside it, a perfectly shaped letter, a crossroads, two fine lines jointed just right. The most amazing fact, says Ike, is none of these things. The most amazing fact is that every single one of us, thieves and terrorists and adulterers and greedy ones, every single one of us is truly a good egg. Otherwise we would have miscarried. If this is true, and it so obviously is, then why did my mother’s cancer spread to the brain? Why can’t I manage my color wheel? Why did I get a B minus and why was there a boy murdered in the weedy woods, where the mall parking lot stops and the crow-darkness begins?

MY LAST EGG retrieval happened on a Thursday. I didn’t know it would be my last one, because I was getting rich, cash piling up as my storehouse diminished. My mother was babbling on and on at night now about angels in her tapioca pudding. I wanted them to move her to a hospice. I sometimes came to her and put quarters under her pillow, like I remember she used to do for me when a tooth fell out, and I’d sleep all night on silver.
Oh
mom, what can I give you?
I couldn’t kiss her, couldn’t stand the feel of her skin on my lips, or maybe it was my lips I couldn’t stand, the way I started to see them as earthworm pink, segmented and ominously plump.

I went for my last egg retrieval. I had two moments that are of note. That they happened almost side by side is important. Sometimes I get what I call these “flashes of notice.” They can happen anytime and they never come with warnings. Sometimes it seems to me that the world steps out of its skin and shows me its original beauty, or its ugliness. On the way to the clinic that late fall afternoon, doused on drugs that were maybe making my own mind a little whacked, I saw light swimming in the top of a tree, light fractured by leaves and swimming like little fish up there in the treetop sky, and I thought, “I am looking at a mass of light.” That was a moment of notice. Then I got to the clinic. I stepped in and sat down. Next to me was a woman too old to be there. She had a map of lines on her face and sunken eyes. She was, I’d say, fifty. She was wearing tasteless black-velvet leggings and a long tunic top and all in all, she had a beaten-up, trashy look. And I had a flash of notice then. I saw her ugliness absolutely, same as I’d seen the light’s beauty. I saw the cells spilling down her aging face and teeth, each one a tombstone. I felt, then, a pure and rising fury. I felt a tightness in my throat, like I’d swallowed a red rubber ball. I was going to cry soon, even though, come on, come on, we’re all good eggs. I sat down. Women whooshed in and out, hands placed protectively on their lower bellies. “What are you here for?” I said to the woman, really brazen, I didn’t care. I figured she was waiting for a daughter, and that, it turned out, was right, in a way. “I’m here to receive my first donor egg,” she said, and I felt punched in the gut, for it had not occurred to me, anyone can get a donor egg, you can be eighty years old and get one implanted, it is never too late to harbor life, and that seemed awful and wrong to me. It seemed polluted to put a young fresh egg in an ancient vessel. It was like a taboo. I had the thought that maybe one of the women I had picked was really like this woman, looks good on paper, but dying; of course. Color is God’s way of laughing. I thought of that myself. Here’s something else I thought of. Every moment you are with a person, you are with a dying person. There’s no way around that.

I stared at this woman. “Aren’t you a little old?” I said, my voice high and frantic. The woman blinked. She had so much mascara on that her blink left little black dots on the belly-bags beneath her eyes. Everyone in the waiting room turned to listen.

“Old for what?” the woman said snippily.

“Old to be getting a donor egg?” I said. “I mean,” and the rage kept rising, “I mean, at some point you just have to admit, it might be too late.”

The woman didn’t say anything, just looked away, fiddled with the gold clasp on her purse.

“Well,” I said, laughing, and I’d like to add here that months and months of fertility drugs can make you crazy, although I know it’s more than that, there are many facts, theories, stories that underlie a mind, “well,” I said, “I’m a veteran at this and let me tell you it sucks. It sucks,” I said. “They put you on a table, spread you wide, and then blow the eggs up you like they’re bubbles.”

“Would you shut up,” the woman said to me.

“Would I shut up?” I said. I thought of my mother then. She kept talking tapioca, angels with wet wings. Why wouldn’t she shut up? Would I shut up? “Fuck you,” I said. “You’re too old to have a baby.”

“Please,” the woman said, holding up her hand, “please, stop.”

“I’m just trying to tell you the truth,” I said. “They spread your legs wide and stuff things inside. Like a flaxidermist.”

“You mean taxidermist,” she said.

“That’s what I said,” I said.

“Tiffany,” a nurse called, coming to the door, and the woman looked up.

“Your turn,” I said. Outside the plate glass windows, the trees were glorious, but I did not have a flash of notice; the glory stayed separate from me. Tiffany, old, with a big fat butt, moved off, her cells falling onto the floor with a tinkling sound, like goblets being broken. Only I could hear it. I sat there, my eyes closed, listening.

THE SEDATION, THAT last time, felt particularly fine. I was covered in a net of fluff and borne away with Winken. The retrieval needle seemed sheathed in silk, and I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I was in the recovery room, sun streaming in, falling in bold strokes across the squeaky floor. In the bed next to mine, Tiffany was lying there, moaning. I could see her bare bottom through the sheet, the extra bags of fat. “Tiffany,” I whispered, “Tiffany, Tiffany,” and she turned slowly towards my sound, and opened her hurting eyes, and looked at me. “What,” she said, and then, I don’t know, she tried to get up, she wanted to escape me, or she just thought it was time, but in order for implantation to succeed, a woman should lie flat. “Don’t move Tiffany,” I whispered, “you have to lie flat for thirty minutes,” but she kept struggling to stand. I should help her, I thought. I should just take her hand, lead her wherever it is she wants to go. For how long, after all, can a person dwell in a perfectly decorated sphere? My egg store was getting depleted. My colors could not be managed. There are discordancies: angels in pudding, babies in ancients, and then there’s plain old pain. It cannot be helped. In a farmhouse, in Nyack New York, there are built-in bookshelves, fir floors. Janice, she could be four months along already, I’ll never know. What I knew then was Tiffany, struggling to stand, so I gave her my hand, and I pulled her up, and we walked across the sunlit floor together, two people from ordinary eggs, two people taking first steps to some unnamed place. Where it was, I had no idea.

There Is No Palindrome of Palindrome

HE HAD A SHARP-CHINNED HEAD that could split wood, a nose that was merely a smaller version of his head, an angular torso. His hands, too, his flat feet, were ax-shaped and sharp. In the silver light of morning, he looked like a many-bladed knife, with all of the blades pulled out for display. At night, in the dark, he looked merely amphibious. You would have thought he was a mortician or toymaker, his hands white and muscular, made for life’s hardest or gladdest work. He was a pharmacist. Of course. Look at him again, the spatulate fingers, the long limbs, the exuberant yet deadly serious mustache. Not a knife after all, not sea-life come to suck the rarefied oxygen at water’s surface. Halfway between a mortician and a toymaker: a pharmacist’s hands. Now he steadied a woman’s chin in the L of his right thumb and index finger. He had his other hand on the back of her neck. He was looking at her tonsils. They were both at a party.

“Babe is examining tonsils again,” said Mal, the evening’s host. “Babe has a tonsil fetish.”

“Yes?” said the woman’s Dutch husband. “This is very original.”

The woman had the artificial, trustworthy, fiber-optic blond hair of a CNN foreign-policy pundit, lit up with Aqua Net. Her head was tipped back. Her eyes scanned the ceiling in an attempt to make the examination seem incidental: she was thinking great thoughts, she was multiplying great sums in her head. She tried, the way you always try when being examined in a room full of strangers, to look unworried. Besides, it was hard to look directly at Babe. His eyes didn’t exactly match. The left one was slightly smaller and lower than the right.

“Pretty as an Arizona sunset,” he said, still peering.

It wasn’t true, what Mal said. He didn’t have a fetish. He just liked looking down women’s throats, and when you put it that way, yes, it sounded terrible. But he felt he was performing a service. He admired women’s tonsils at the drugstore (he worked for a national chain), but he preferred parties. So yes, all right, yes. A fetish. He was a voyeur and an exhibitionist, both. Sometimes he sat a woman down in a chair, to look down her throat from above. Other times he targeted a tall woman and had her lean over. Every angle had its pleasures, and every pair of tonsils had its beauty. Jealous husbands gathered, waiting to catch him in the act. Did he look down her blouse or let a hand slide somewhere it shouldn’t? Maybe he was about to lean in for a kiss. No. He didn’t even glance at her tongue. If he was feeling naughty he might raise his oak eyes a fraction of a millimeter to the woman’s uvula. “Beautiful uvula,” he’d say.

The woman with the blond hair was named Connie. She felt on her cheek twin spots of intermittent hot breath from his nose, warm and damp as her own tonsils but with a whiff of well-groomed mustache. She’d never seen her own tonsils face-to-face. Why was he so interested? She breathed in. She crossed her legs and kicked him in the shin, felt him wince, instinctively caressed the shin with the same toe that had done the kicking. He stood up.

Her mouth still hung open. She raised her eyebrows and gave a quick nod to ask the diagnosis.

Babe shrugged. His leg hurt. “I’m a pharmacist,” he explained apologetically. He reached over and closed her mouth for her. He could feel her jawbone under his thumb. When she got up to leave, he saw how badly put together she was—bow-legged and pigeon breasted and spraddle elbowed—and also how pretty. She looked like the sunniest, dopiest person he’d ever met. That kick, her toes. They were the thin edge of the wedge, he’d think later.

BLACK-AND-WHITE film combined with murder makes any room look small and sordid. The corpse lowers the ceiling, the film and flash turn all the surfaces to dented metal. In this case, in this crime-scene photo, the room is large—a suburban kitchen overlooking a dining room, a cathedral-ceilinged addition to an old house—but you can’t tell. There are two bodies on the floor underneath sheets. Aren’t all corpses back sleepers? Not the one closest the camera. All you can see is an ear turned wrong way round, one curl of light hair. Even so, the blood on the sheet is patterned in a physiognomic way. The head’s wearing a mask: a pair of dark eyes and a long nose, a stroke victim’s sloppy mouth. Never mind that it’s in the wrong place. The face on the sheet is singing something but failing to remember the words. It seems to be backing up in the song again and again, the way you do when you hope the chorus will remind you of the verse. The other body is visible only as a pair of men’s feet, one wearing an untied shoe and the other bare. The bare foot is clean. The rest of the body is hidden behind a kitchen island.

Nothing is happening in the photo. Things happen up until the photo, then continue afterwards. For the moment, the two people under the sheets are not dying. They’re alive or dead. Their pulses are beside the question, being undetectable. In this way every photo is a photo of a corpse, devoid of circulation, synaptic function, liver function, brain function, kidney function, respiration. Even the third person in the photograph, she is a body, too, her chest thrust out towards the camera and her brown eyes open very wide, a teenager wearing a Shetland sweater. The semicircular pattern across her shoulders and chest looks under the circumstances like some kind of restraint. Her complexion is tarnished, her blue jeans are hammered tin. She’s pointing to the right. Her mouth is hanging open. Her name is Constance Lafferty, she is fifteen years old, and she’s about to be arrested for the murder of her parents.

BABE KNEW NOTHING of this. Connie was one of Mal’s strays, or her husband was, the doll-like Dutch Jules. They’d introduced themselves at the wine table in the dining room. “This is my husband, Jewels,” said Connie, and Jules—pale blond hair, brunet eyebrows—said to Babe in a merry voice, “Hallo I am
Zhool.
” They seemed perfect for each other. Connie was one of those brash, intensely American women who nevertheless develop a deep identification with a foreign country. He’d known them in college, the girls who dated only foreigners. They were the girls who’d never had a date in high school. In college they’d order widely off the atlas: the chubby friendly Kenyan, the vest-pocket Malaysian Romeo, the Irish engineering student with the smelly feet, the Argentinian painter with hearing loss and a crush on his sister. These girls always had the loudest voices in the room. They’d go on dates with their foreigners, and all you’d be able to hear would be the American girl blaring out her love for all things Kenyan, Malaysian, African, South American, and the low murmur of her date agreeing. Eventually, the girl would settle on a region. She might even go to graduate school and major in it, in some way—Comp Lit with a specialty in writings of the Americas, Public Health with a focus on East Africa. Connie, clearly, had landed on the Netherlands, and here was Jules, patient and practical and Dutch, to feed her chocolate on her morning toast and listen to her monologues. Both of them seemed made out of a jumble sale, Connie with her seaworthy torso and spindly legs, Jules with his clashing hair and eyebrows. Like all mismatched couples, they seemed suited to each other. Which was why after all Babe asked to look at her tonsils. It was the happily married women he was interested in, having once been happily married himself.

He was a widower. Women felt stirred by such tender concern for a part of themselves they’d never seen straight on: tonsils—who knew? His wife had been killed in a car crash, a hit-and-run in the crosswalk in front of the stationery store where she worked. Let’s be honest, he’d done the tonsil thing when his wife was still alive, and now it was unsettling, but who’d refuse him? Sad man with a mustache, unhandsome until he smiled, which he almost never did. He had a billboard cowboy’s smile, open-mouthed to show his perfect white teeth. He rocked back on his heels in a silent impression of belly laughter. He even touched his stomach then, as though to ask it,
D’ja hear that, buddy?
Smiling scrunched his eyes up till they matched. His voice seemed made of pencil shavings: grubby, sneezish, insinuating. People thought he was making fun of them when he said what his name was.

His wife was seven years dead, enough time for a sense of humor to regenerate, at least a little. Babe liked puns, palindromes, horror movies. Family pleasures, in other words. What is so sad as a solitary punster? His friend Mal, a doughnut-shop owner and giver of dinner parties, cocktail parties, surprise parties, invited him to everything.

So what if Babe sometimes had a few drinks and turned to somebody else’s wife and suggested, “Say ah?” So what if he put his hand on her neck and inhaled, in a professional way, her patient, personal breath. He was tactile. He was a letch, but in an old-fashioned cocktail-napkin way. Harmless.

He was a decent guy! He was still in love with his wife, poor thing. Everyone knew
that.

THE SMALL FLOCK of pharmacy assistants filled most of the actual prescriptions. Babe checked them, argued with insurance companies, consulted with customers, gave advice, worried about the string of Oxycontin holdups in the area. Mostly the store was prey to teenage theft of condoms, pregnancy tests, protein bars, Dramamine for the dimenhydrinate, Robitussin and Coricidin for the dextromethorphan. A group of local high schoolers held a Robitussin Round Table by the dumpsters. They cracked jokes about their hallucinations, they announced they were tripping, they informed each other they were tripping.

Yo, dude: you’re tripping.

I am, I’m totally tripping.

In the afternoon you could hear them laughing. Later, you could see the tiny unused cups, the plastic wrappers, and slicks of vomit.

“It’s called Robodosing,” said Hilary, the pharmacy assistant with the rusty-bedspring hair. She was sorting NutriNate, a chewable prenatal vitamin that smelled disconcertingly of merlot. “Or Robocopping. Or plain Roboing.”

“I know,” said Babe. He didn’t know what was more depressing, kids getting high on motion-sickness pills and cough syrup, or coming up with slang for it. Teenagerland. Adolescent Narcissiville. Some days Babe longed to travel there with shoplifters, look around. The land of teens, its mufti and customs, Babe understood none of it. He hadn’t even when he was a teenager himself.

The teenagers never approached him. They merely squinted at him standing at the pharmacy counter as though he were the goalie of the opposing team and he better watch out for flying pucks. Then they left by the far door.

A pharmacist is fluent in mime. Fingers flutter around cheekbones to explain one kind of sinus pain. They straddle the nose for another. Some symptoms can’t be articulated except by pulling faces. Some need both arms and one foot. In the fluorescent lights of the pharmacy, Connie-from-the-party had a sugar-cookie complexion. She wore pants in a lavender-based plaid and a bulky, bumpy sweater that seemed carved out of dirty snow. In her hand she held four hot-pink daisies wrapped in blue tissue paper. Babe stood on the raised flooring behind the Drop-Off counter.

“The florist said they’re very masculine flowers,” she said. Maybe she wanted a second opinion. He couldn’t tell whether she’d be disappointed to have the diagnosis confirmed.

“They’re pink,” he said.

She sighed. “Pink’s pink, I guess.”

“A manly pink!” he answered. “The color of Sylvester Stallone’s prom dress.”

At this she smiled. “Yes!” she said. “They’re—what’s the word?” Her pink tongue tapped against her very white teeth.

“Testosteriffic?” asked Babe.

She laughed briefly, then frowned. “They’re for you.” She hoisted them higher. Then she put her free hand to her own throat and stroked it. She opened her mouth.

Was she crazy? Was everyone? Pharmacists weren’t supposed to examine people. The roof of her mouth looked ribbed like a cathedral. You could dive down that throat. Her tonsils were inflamed but small, and for the first time Babe wondered what was past a pair of tonsils. He’d always thought of them as landmarks, just not on the way to something.

This time she steadied her own chin. He stared at her fingers. “What do you want?” he asked her.

She leveled her head but still held her throat. Her mouth was ajar. Finally she said, in her loud voice, “What do you recommend?”

“Truly?” he said, and his hands shook. “You should go to a doctor for a culture.”

She shook her head. Her hair didn’t move. “My mother was a doctor,” she told him.

He led her to the Cough & Cold aisle. “So,” he said, to indicate that
he
hadn’t forgotten the facts of the matter, “how long have you and Jules been married?”

“Four years?” she asked. “Depends on how you do the math. Four years for real, but we didn’t live together till about six months ago.”

“Because he was in Holland?”

Connie hooted. It was an actual hoot. She threw back her head like someone impersonating a rare suburban owl. Hoo
hoooo!
“You don’t know!” she said. “Mal didn’t tell you!” She looked directly at Babe. Her eyes narrowed and she leaned in. She touched his forearm. When she spoke, she was as loud as she’d ever been. “Not because he was in Holland. Because I was in prison
.
”

“Right. OK. What for?”

At the end of the aisle an old woman pushing one of the store’s pygmy shopping carts appeared. “I killed my parents!” said Connie.

“You killed your parents!” he answered, which seemed the only appropriate response to such a statement. He could hear the little old lady’s cart quiver in shock. OK: Connie
was
crazy. Of course. Whenever a strange woman seemed the least bit interested in him, it turned out to be in a Rescue-Me-from-the-Space-Aliens way. The bottle of grape-flavored Chloraseptic he held in his hand—for children, she was so childlike—would not cure her problem, no matter how zealously she operated the spray pump. Haunting pharmacies, claiming to be a parricide. Very classy, to go crazy in the way of the Greek myths. Very sensible, to go crazy near a stock of antipsychotics. We will of course be delighted to meet your future pharmaceutical needs.

She raised her eyebrows and nodded. Was that
delight
on her face?