Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell (17 page)

On my way to The Main Drag, I find Becca bawling, beside herself on the steps of the Cathedral. “I’m trying to let go of what Tom did to Joe,” Becca says. What he did to Joe? I say. “He killed him.” Killed him? “I thought you knew.” I thought Joe killed himself, I say. “Tom said Joe was a Red, that everything was Joe’s fault. Joe couldn’t get a job in TV after that, because of Tom. They put Joe on the blacklist. Tom made sure of it, and after that no one would touch Joe. Tom might as well have pushed my husband off the Brooklyn Bridge.
The bastard.” So why do you want to forgive Tom now? I say. “Because I don’t know what else to do,” Becca says. Listen up, I tell her.

“You know what happened with Joe?” Becca says. “That’s not everything. That’s not the whole thing.” She’s not ready to tell me the rest, but I can guess the beginning, the middle, and the end.

Becca is leaving today. You stayed longer this time, I say. “Something’s happening here,” she says. “I can see it in my pictures. What exactly are you trying to do, Eleanor?” To show the world, I say.

The Tommies that I don’t favor feel left out, left behind. They want to do something about it. I tell them I will pay for anyone who wants to come
closer to perfection. Liposuction, facelifts, tummy tucks, butt-risers, breast lifts. Why the hell not? I wonder. Why the hell not?

Scarlett is the first to sign up for more surgery. Kelly is next in line.

“I’ve seen Becca’s pictures,” Diana says on the phone. “And I must come up to see you as soon as this ghastly winter comes to an end. I have a concept.”

“Here,” Scarlett says. “Now
here
.” The back of her thighs are higher, tighter. The fat has miraculously vanished. She is a medical miracle. I work my hand beneath her clothes and start to squeeze gently here, there. Then I slide my hands around to the inside of her thighs. I work my hands up and down, inside and out, a little higher each time, telling her all the while that she is a new woman, that she is
my
new woman. “
Ohhh!
” Scarlett whispers. You can’t beat the sex when you’re an ex-nun.

January 1, 1979

Tomgirls and Amazons made to order. My dream is coming true. Money makes it possible, but money doesn’t make it happen. This is about knowing what you want and being willing to do
anything
to get it. This is about being willing to play God when the job is open.

January 12, 1979

I pluck a different Tommie every night. Scarlett, Kelly, Heather. There is no reason, no rhyme, no pattern to my appetites. One night I want the wealth of someone’s experience, the next day noon I’ll take a Tommie who might as well be a virgin. I show them what I want to do, and then I show them how to do it. Scarlett takes her turn, the same as everyone else, with no questions asked.

February 9, 1979

“I think we’ve found something to help us produce females,” Abigail Rickover says. “But first I need to know more about breeding horses, about cows and pigs. I need more time and money.” Money I’ve got, I say, and time is on my side.

February 26, 1979

At The Main Drag, I let it be known, ever so gently, that I prefer blondes.

March 1, 1979

We christen The Briody Center. “She’s a beauty,” Sliv says.
She
is all wood and glass and promise stretching toward the canal, her arcs and curves bending like a beautiful woman. Abigail Rickover has everything she needs now except more talent. I tell her she has an open checkbook to get anyone she wants from anywhere in the world. She says she won’t waste a minute or a cent.

March 8, 1979

I tell Abigail Rickover no men need apply for the Briody Center. “I had assumed as much,” she says.

March 21, 1979

The blondes are popping up like streetlights at twilight. Scarlett, of course, is first, a bright bleached blonde to go with her new and improved body. Even the women I hardly know, like Kelly and Heather and even Allyson, have all gone blonde.

April 1, 1979

I tell The Tommies to chop their hair off and they became the Roundheads. I tell them to shave their heads and they become the eggheads. I tell them to dye their hair blonde and they become the airheads.

April 11, 1979

Abigail Rickover has recruits marching through town like shock troops, the very best female geneticists in the world. I make sure to meet every one of them, to make sure they have no life outside the test tube. So far so good.

April 25, 1979

How can I tell all this gene research is working? I ask Abigail Rickover. “You can’t tell until it works,” she says. Now
that’s
power.

May 2, 1979

In a different life Kelly would be selling real estate in a small town in a small car. She might have married early, made a small-minded mistake, raised a son by herself. She would be successful in that small way but she would want more until maybe it burned her up. Here there are none of those
expectations. She has nothing here, no role in life laid out for her except to be a good Tommie and to please me.
That
will burn her up soon enough.

May 22, 1979

Heather feels safe with me. I am the older sister, the mother, the great aunt, that great and glorified woman who is the repository of all wisdom in the tribe. She will know the truth soon enough.

“I love you,” Scarlett says. She bites her lip when I ask her what’s the point of that.

June 10, 1979

Kelly submits to me the same way she agreed to have the fat sucked out of her thighs. She has the power to exist in
this
moment without a thought as to what has come before or what is sure to follow. There’s a kind of genius in that, in the way she moves to my touch, never doubting, never complaining, never hesitating to do what she’s told.

June 16, 1979

Allyson wants nothing to do with me, so she is the one I want.

July 4, 1979

What I want is your soul, I tell Heather. “How do you mean?” she says.

It’s so easy to fall in love, if only for a moment. Lust is complete and overwhelming but completely temporary. There is no need for ties or to be tied down. That’s what I love most about this moment in my life.

“I’ve been studying like you told me to,” Heather says. “About the soul. You were right. There’s so much I don’t know.” Put that down a minute, I say.

“I keep keeping an eye out, Miss Eleanor,” Sliv says. “But there’s been nothing. Maybe I been imagining that thing about spies.” Better safe, I say.

August 30, 1979

“What have you done to them?” Diana says. How do you mean? I say. “Oh but they’re all blonde now. Blonde was
yesterday
, the day before even. ‘Blondie’ and all that. We’ll just have to fix that this minute. Where’s your phone? I
must
call New York.”

“I was wrong, Eleanor,” Diana says. “I’m starting to love the bleached blonde blankness of them all. Just look.” She shows me the contact sheets, one tiny image stacked on top of another like boxes, Scarlett, Kelly, Heather, Allyson. “Blankety-blank. There’s nothing there, in their faces, not a scintilla of joy or suffering. It’s just as I thought. They are all so modern, so numb, so perfect for our January
White
issue. I even have the headline: ‘Bleached, Blonde, Blank.’”

How is Luigi? I ask. “Very well, thank you,” Diana says. And Gino? “Oh he’s wonderful with G, marvelous really. But I’ve told him he can’t let G see him for what he really is. Not for a long, long time. We don’t need another homosexual or another identity crisis in this family.” Where is Luigi now? “Southampton, of course. With his boyfriends. Stark-naked on the beach, no doubt.”

I tell Diana that she must protect us. She must write her story as a fable, a pretend tale about a town full of Amazons where strong women live by their lonesome, without caring about  men. “A parable?” Diana says. “Oh, that’s superb, gorgeous. That’s practically
Biblical
. Really a much better story than what you have here. What
do
you have here, Eleanor?”

And your marriage? I ask. “There is no marriage.” Diana’s shoulders round forward and her chin sinks to her chest. “Not even a façade. The only thing left is, shall we say, a
fondness
that makes it hard for one to hate.” Diana weeps. I slide Kleenex in front of her. She uses both hands to pull the tissue out with her nails. I wonder exactly when my sister has lost hold of her life, when she replaced it with
Imagine
and a made-up story. “Don’t you dare pity me!” she says. I lie by saying I don’t. “I have a beautiful boy, a beautiful co-op, a beautiful house in the country, a wonderful job.” She slams a fist full of tissue onto the table. “I have a life,
dammit
!” I can see that, I say.

October 3, 1979

Allyson sits all the way across from me on the other side of my bedroom. “What you want doesn’t seem right to me,” she says. Why not? I say. “There’s nothing permanent to it,” she says. “Nothing that will last.” That’s not what Scarlett says, I say. Or Heather. Or Kelly. Or more than a few others.

Kelly has gone to Boston without telling me and she has come back with breasts so big she almost has to bend over when she walks. “Don’t you love them?” Kelly says. “I do. I feel like they’re the part of me that’s been missing.” I don’t say a word about too much of a good thing.

“I feel so safe with you,” Heather says.

“Well?” Kelly says. They don’t even feel like breasts to me. More like big sacks of something. “Don’t you love them?” I tell her they are absolutely  beautiful, stupendous. I don’t tell her they stretch her skin like an overblown  balloon. Or that I keep bumping into them.

“We’re fully staffed,” Abigail Rickover tells me. I ask if she has everything she needs. “Everything, Miss O’Kell,” she says. “I promise you will get your money’s worth.”

No matter what I try, and I try
everything
, Allyson won’t touch me back.

I am reading about test tube babies and fertility clinics, I tell Abigail Rickover. “We’re very close to being able to pick the sex of the child,” she says. I don’t tell her close doesn’t count when you’re trying to play God.

“
Oh my God
!” Allyson says over and over, as if God were listening. We are alone. No Tommie in this town can say no to me forever.

I feel blank, empty, like I don’t know what comes next.

“Here’s the way it works,” Abigail Rickover says. “We stain the sperm with a fluorescent dye that stains the DNA. Then we measure the glow of the dye under a laser light. That tells us how much genetic material is being carried. Since X chromosomes for boys have more DNA than Y chromosomes for girls, we can tell which is which. Then we just sort them out. Ys on one pile, Xs on another. And that’s how we’ll get our girls.” You’re a motherfucking genius, I tell her.

January 6, 1980

Diana’s fable in
Imagine
is magnificent, with pictures of our Tommies transformed, transcendent. Kelly and Heather, Scarlett and Allyson are all reborn, their bleached blonde blankness an empty canvas that Diana has written upon. In sheer white gowns there is a lightness to their transformation, as if they are lighter than air, lighter than life itself. Imagine that.

I bet The Good Egg can make money on our test-tube girls. Gobs of it.

We blow up and frame all the photographs from the
Imagine
shoot and Sliv puts them up on the walls of the Briody & Daughter Bake Shop. We are baking, making up our own myths.

One egg per month per Tommie? I say. “That’s what they can produce 
without
the fertility drugs,”  Abigail Rickover says. And with the drugs? “Multiple eggs,” she says. “Two, four, six, maybe even more.” And we can freeze them? “With these new cryo techniques, we can thaw them out and fertilize them with sperm whenever we want to. Then we insert the fertilized egg into the carrier. Nothing goes to waste.” I say it sounds like science fiction. “To me,” Abigail Rickover says, “it sounds like science.”

Can these little creatures playing in the sun be nearly six years old? It must have happened that time I turned around. I sit on the swing in our playground and the Tomgirls spin around me and call me “Big Mother.”

The Eileen Bell Lying-In is becoming a production line for eggs now that  The Tommies are taking fertility drugs by the dozen. Every egg is worth thousands of dollars. Produce ten of them a month, multiply that by ten, multiply
that
by the number of Tommies, and you’ve got a business. And that’s not even the half of it.

I go to the Briody Center for a look-see. It really is a beautiful building, beams and light and steel in long arcs. Our research geneticists are everywhere now, in every cubicle, and Abigail Rickover tells me we have quite a reputation among women scientists around the world because of our basic research into gene therapies. I take her word for it. “It won’t be long before we can put exactly the gene we want right into the body,” she says. Right into a
woman’s
body, I remind her.

“It hurts,” Allyson says. “They stick a needle right
here
, right through your stomach. I don’t like it. It hurts! I don’t want the fertility drugs. I don’t want any more needles stuck into my stomach any more. I’m tired of being fertile. I’m tired of being
hurt
! I’m not just some chicken in a barnyard who’s going to keep laying eggs.” I say sometimes you have to suffer when your cause is just. “Just what do eggs have to do with justice?” she says.

We meet in the basement of The Cathedral because I want The Tommies to design the perfect man. Not as a partner, I say, but as a
donor
. Different concept. “I like that concept,” Kelly says. Kelly takes everything I say and swallows it whole. “No diseases,” she says. “And no slobbering. I hate it when a man slobbers.” What else? I ask. “No small fry,” Heather says. “Do you mean
small
small or just small?” Kelly says. The Tommies titter. Heather says: “Either. Both.” I say there should be no one under, what, five-ten? “Six feet,” Scarlett shouts. “And no one who’s going to lose their hair!” Kelly says: “Men are so naked without their hair.” Allyson says: “Teeth. They’ve got to have
all
of their teeth.” Everyone squeals. “So what have we got?” Kelly says. I read from my list. No diseases, I say. And no slobbering. No small fry, no baldies, and no one with bad teeth. We can design the perfect specimen, I say, if we know what we hate most about men.

The Tommies have become my precious hens, my carriers of Cushing  immortality.

We are precise about our bloodlines as we capture the eggs for freezing.

The Briody Center stays lit up long past midnight, like a factory meant to produce human beings on demand 24 hours a day. As I walk along the canal in the warm spring night, I can see Abigail Rickover’s recruits bent over their microscopes, women in ponytails and hornrims holding up petri dishes to the light. The place hums like a factory, morning and night, but I still feel like I don’t know enough to be sure this is working. I can’t look over everybody’s shoulder every minute. I have to trust Abigail Rickover, and I don’t like to trust
anyone
.

They are well-cared-for, our little Tomgirls, but we brook no nonsense. We teach them about sisterhood and loving each other and what it means to be a Tommie. What
does
it mean to be a Tommie? I ask them. “It means we’re strong,” says one of our little Tomgirls. Another one says: “It means we’re
wonderful
!” They seem happy to me, happy for all the care and attention from all of their mothers, happy to be happy. We are teaching them the importance of being a girl, of becoming a woman, of having their own babies and having nothing to do with men. We teach them about the tribe. They want for nothing, and I want them to have everything that matters in this world.

We break ground on a huge addition to The Eileen Bell Lying-In. It’s like a holding tank for all the women who will be coming here to make their own (Cushing) babies.

“We’re ready,” Abigail Rickover says. “All we need now are the carriers.”

I’ve seen all the stories about how hard Dick and Jane have been trying to have a child of their own, of the agony they have been going through to conceive, of how they will turn to the test tube only as a last resort. I have no interest in Dick and Jane. I want the women who want a child but want nothing to do with men. That’s where we’re going to plant our Cushings. No men need apply.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Abigail Rickover says. Sorry? I say. “Look at these charts. The rest of The Tommies, they’re all very fertile.” They’re Cushings, I say. “So I see,” she says. “But Allyson is off the charts. Every month. She is the motherlode.”

Can it be true? Can all of these Cushing eggs be ready to go out into the world to become Cushing babies and Cushing girls? We will keep track of our girls,  genetically speaking. We will know them better than their parents do. We will know them better than they know themselves.

Our sperm donation program in Cambridge is spitting out more semen than we can stick our eggs into, even though we screen our donors very carefully, a long interview first about their teeth, their hair, their diseases, their life. Kelly checks them all carefully for signs of slobbering and excess body fat. Then she hands them a vial and lets them have at it in the bathroom. The Harvard types don’t know that we record their vile moment through the two-way mirror over the toilet. They carry out their comeuppance and we ask them to write down what or who they were thinking about at the moment of deception. No one ever writes down “girlfriend.” No one ever says “wife.”

As I sit looking out over the canal, I like to think of the fine young men of Harvard jacking off for a buck, leaving their best behind, then drinking up the profits with dollar pitchers of beer.

We are ready to go with a backlog of eggs, with enough sperm to populate Harvard Medical School. We are ready to make a new world,
our
world, starting of course on Labor Day.

I am alone in the basement of the Cathedral, in the middle of the day, in the midst of Allyson. “Are we done yet?” Allyson says.

The mothers-to-be arrive early so I can make sure they understand what we require of them. We have done our homework. We have done our screening. We have weeded out the weak. We have concealed our plans. We are of a piece with the rest of these women who can do without men. They will wear our children well. They have no idea yet of who we are or why we care. We do not use the words “until death do us part.”

I tell the new mothers to treasure the moment of conception far more than if a man were doing the deed. “This is the future we can create by ourselves,” I tell them. “This is
our
future.”

“
Paydirt
!” Abigail Rickover says. We have our first pregnancy, a girl of course, the first Cushing made to order. Mother and child-to-be are doing just fine.

The babies come in bunches. “Six for six so far,” Abigail Rickover says. I wonder if miracles will never cease.

“I can’t thank you enough,” our first mother, a woman named Dot Stewart, tells me. Maybe you can, I say.

“There is a small problem,” Abigail Rickover says. “We have in fact fertilized some eggs in the lab that will produce boys. It was going to happen. There’s nothing we can do to stop it.” Dispose of the problem, I say. “I have a better idea,” Abigail Rickover says.

Word is out. The women are coming in a constant stream to make girls from the come of Harvard men and the fertility of Cushing women. Our test-tube marriage is made in heaven.

“And where do you get the eggs?” one of the new mothers wants to know. We lay them ourselves, I say. “No,” the mother says. “I mean
really
.”

Dot Stewart, now with Cushing child, wants to stay on to become a Tommie, just as I’d hoped. There’s no reason why we can’t recruit more carriers to our cause, to keep Cushing with Cushing, to make sure our offspring spring up all around us. I don’t tell her that one day her daughter’s eggs will be priceless. The Good Egg is becoming a damn good business.

Where are we now with our projections? I ask Abigail Rickover. “Right on the money,” she says.

December 24, 1980

“I hardly know which one is my daughter any more,” Allyson says. We are bundled up on the swings in the playground watching our Tomgirls play outside in the winter. “They all look alike and act alike,” she says. “They all say the same things. They even sound alike. I can’t tell which one is which. I can’t tell which one is
mine
.”

The bleached hair of The Tommies is growi
ng out, the roots lengthening, darkening.

January 9, 1981

The stream is steady, unending.
One mother after another leaves impregnated with my version of Cushing immortality.

Allyson, her hair half-black and half-bleach, wants out. I tell her there is no way out if she wants to grow up with her daughter because I made sure a long time ago that I have shared custody of all the Tomgirls. I don’t tell
Allyson she is worth her weight in gold, that she is the Cushing goose who lays the golden eggs.

We have already captured the market for frozen embryos, such as it is, for little girls born of single mothers. Just like that. I order a new wing for the Lying-In. You can’t have too many Cushings.