One Good Egg: An Illustrated Memoir (10 page)

Enough for one day. Still no sign of the hot-water man. We packed up a lunch and left for Wilsons Promontory, the southernmost tip of Australia. We picnicked on top of Mount Oberon, looking out over the Southern Ocean.

“Do you want a girl or a boy?” Steve asked.

Coincidentally, I had just been reading about how to control the sex of the baby during conception that morning.

Girl sperm is larger, slower, and lives longer than boy sperm. On average, sperm live 3 to 5 days in a woman’s body. The egg lives 1 to 2 days after being released. Trying to get pregnant
before
ovulation improves the girl sperm’s odds; trying later gives boy sperm the advantage.

OR: Consult the
Ancient Chinese Predictor Chart
which uses your age to identify boy or girl conception-months with 93% accuracy.

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think I was better with the boys when I was teaching, and then I think maybe it’d be harder for a boy to be raised by two women—but it’s not like there won’t be men in our kid’s life . . . Did you talk to your dad about sex?”

Steve let out a mini-shriek. “Good God, neither of them. I remember a dinner party when I must have been about twelve, they virtually shut me in my room with a book about the birds and the bees. Literally. I remember there were swans, strange images of swans . . . ”

“What about you? Boy or girl?”

“I’m like you. Either, really.”

I stretched out on the rocks with my eyes closed, imagining Steve introducing his kid to his friends, then woke up twenty minutes later. Steve was peering down at me. “We should probably head down if you want to do that river walk,” he said.

We walked along the Darby River out to the ocean. I did the driving on the way back in the dusk, completely comfortable on the left side of the carless roads.

The hot water was fixed. I had a shower and half a glass of red wine and fell asleep while Steve made dinner. Steve had a gin and tonic and wanted to talk all night. We took turns playing our CDs, filling each other in on the past ten years. Then we talked about writing. Steve finally let me fall asleep reading one of his travel pieces.

By the third day, we were about out of questions. Steve’s notebook was shut, his pen sitting on top, his hands in his pockets.

I had one more. “Have you thought about how you want to do the sperm-banking? Will Mark be able to come along with you? West Coast, East Coast?”

“Mark can’t get vacation time when school’s in session. The West Coast might be nice. You’d come there?”

“I could. I don’t think Lorene could be there the whole time, but part of it.”

Steve looked at me strangely. “We’re doing it, we’re really going to do this, aren’t we?” We took an unscheduled hug break, after which neither one of us wanted to return to the table.

That afternoon we walked down a jetty in another deserted fishing village. The jetty, a landmark from Steve’s childhood, was the draw. By the time we showed up at the town bar, they were done serving lunch. Steve wheedled two toasted cheese sandwiches out of a closed kitchen, then sat down with a surprisingly sheepish look.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

“Me? Yeah. No, you know, it’s weird. There was something you said once. It was during one of our phone conversations”—
something I said, something I said
—“and I keep coming back to it. I’m not sure what you meant—and I guess it’s the only, well, I guess it’s a concern, not a question.”

The toasted cheeses were delivered, prolonging my agony. “A concern?”

“I don’t know if you’ll remember saying it, and now I can’t remember the context . . . ”
Out with it already!
“You said you wanted to raise the child in a religious community, and I was wondering what type—”

“Oh, okay.” I’d cut him off. I didn’t mean to belittle or, worse, aggravate his concern. “Lorene’s son loved being part of the local Unitarian church—a pretty liberal, social-activist, I guess you’d call it Christian religion. But that church has changed a lot. If we could find another good Unitarian church close by, with a community of people—the kind you bring dinner for or they bring dinner for you—we’d like our kid to grow up in that kind of community.”

“When you said religious community, I thought—”

“Cult.” We laughed.

“That’s really it.”

The last morning, I got up early to run along the beach before I did the eighteen-hour plane ride home. My final call with Lorene had been unnerving.

We had been together only two months. It was silly to think our reserves would span six days, across half of the world. Tomorrow we would begin replenishing them.
We’ll have the rest of our lives . . . and a baby together.

I took Lorene’s compass necklace from my neck and put it around Steve’s at the airport. “For your trip.”

“Sure you don’t want it for yours?”

“Nah, it got me here, now it’ll bring you back.” We hugged good-bye and I headed for customs. I turned to wave one last time before I passed through the double doors.

The Best Laid Plans

Lorene and I stayed up all night
(or morning or whatever time it was according to my body’s clock) catching up when I got home and slept in the next morning. She had not received a single postcard from Fish Creek.