Point, Click, Love (7 page)

“I never ‘let’ them, never thought it was happening. But it did,” said Claudia.

“Your husband?” asked Annie.

“Definitely.”

“How?”

“It’s not like he’s power-hungry or anything. He’s the nicest, most laid-back guy. And that’s the worst kind! They seep into your life, your brain, without you even knowing it. And pretty soon everything you do, every decision you make, it’s all about them.”

“Well, when you’re married, isn’t that the way it is? Don’t they do the same thing for you?”

“No. I don’t think so. I really don’t,” said Claudia. “I think men are different. I don’t think Steve thinks and acts with me in mind, because if he did, he’d be doing things a lot differently.”

Annie noticed their martini glasses were already empty, so she waved to the bartender. “You want another one? Do you need to get home?”

“Perfect example, right there!” said Claudia, slapping her hand on top of the bar. “Normally, I’d say, ‘No, I’ve got to go home.’ Why? So I can make dinner for my out-of-work husband, who’s been home all day watching TV and should have dinner waiting for me? Yes, I’ll have another drink.”

“Great,” said Annie. “But I hope I’m not causing any strife—”

“No, no. You’re fine. I’m sorry for going on about my husband.”

“Please, I don’t mind at all. It’s actually good for me to hear about it. I’ve been thinking lately about skipping the whole husband thing.”

“Awesome idea!” said Claudia, raising her newly poured martini with three plump green olives.

“There are some problems with the idea though,” said Annie.

“Like what?” asked Claudia, with a hyperbolically confused look on her face.

“Well, there’s the lack of sex.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. I had way more sex before I got married!”

“The lack of support?” asked Annie.

“Ha! You’d probably end up supporting him! Financially, emotionally … They’re always getting their egos bruised, getting deflated, and needing to be pumped up.”

“Loneliness?”

“There’s nothing more lonely than a bad marriage,” said Claudia. Annie noticed the mood change, as if Claudia felt that she had gone too far.

“Oh, wait. I know. Kids!” said Annie, trying to steer things in a different direction. “I think I’d like to have kids.”

“Absolutely! I’m all for kids.”

“You have some?” asked Annie.

“Two. Twin girls. Twelve years old.”

“How cute!”

“You know, Janie and Sandy are better companions than any man I’ve ever known.”

“But having kids on my own? I don’t know,” said Annie. “It seems like it would be awfully hard.”

“It would be. But kids are hard no matter what. And in some ways, raising kids with someone is the hardest. I can’t tell you how many fights Steve and I have had over those kids. I’ve often thought that the whole thing would have been easier if it had been only the girls and me. I don’t know. Maybe it’s something to consider.”

Annie had never thought about having kids in anything more than a vague, someday sort of way, but after her talk with Claudia she became obsessed with the idea. Maybe having a child on her own was exactly what she needed to do. It did seem that everything had been leading up to this—her breakup with Ben, her distaste for men, her attraction to married women with children, and, of course, her buying a huge four-bedroom house in the burbs. Maybe subconsciously she was preparing for this very thing.

Annie was a little taken aback at how impressionable she was, how a drunken conversation with a coworker she barely knew could make her think about changing her life so drastically. But this wasn’t the first time. Annie remembered when she got the offer from Sprint and was struggling with the idea of moving to
the Midwest. She was living in New York with her parents for the summer, working part-time at her father’s law firm and spending the rest of her time going to coffee shops, museums, and half-priced Broadway shows. One beautiful sunny day she decided to take a Circle Line sightseeing cruise around the city. She ended up sitting next to a middle-aged couple from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

“What brings you to New York?” Annie asked.

“Visiting family,” said the woman, straightening the straw visor perched on her head. “I’m actually from here.”

“Really? And now you live in Tulsa?” Annie was intrigued. Did New Yorkers who moved to the Midwest suddenly develop a taste for wicker headgear, pink polyester scarves, and matching tank top and shorts ensembles?

“I left New York twenty years ago. I love it here, love visiting. But it’s so good to leave.”

“So you like living in the middle of the country?” asked Annie.

“Sure. It was hard at first, adjusting. I miss all the culture, the big-city feel. And I’ve never found a decent bagel. But other than that, I love all the space. I like being able to walk down the sidewalk without feeling like a salmon swimming upstream.”

After that, Annie couldn’t walk anywhere without feeling harassed by the crowds that surrounded her. She hated riding the subway during rush hour, when she felt packed in like a sardine. She hated waiting in line at the Museum of Modern Art and having to stand next to five other people just to look at Monet’s
Water Lilies
. She was even annoyed by the apartment where she had grown up and lived most of her life, with its narrow galley kitchen and cluttered living room and no access to the outdoors. Within a week she made her decision to take the job at Sprint—leaving cramped New York for the wide-open Midwest.

It appeared Annie was going to do the same thing with having a baby. After that first drink with Claudia, the two became fast friends, and Annie always took the opportunity to pepper Claudia
with questions about her kids. But Annie knew better than to cavalierly make the decision to have a baby. Everything else was reversible—where she lived, the job she took, the man she dated. Giving birth to a child was not.

After a while Annie stopped talking about it with Claudia and began to seriously consider the idea of single motherhood.

At first it seemed that everything about the idea was difficult and sad. She imagined waking up in the middle of the night to a crying baby, with nobody there to nudge and say: “Can you get this one?” She imagined bringing her child to school on the first day of kindergarten and having no one to stand next to arm in arm as she waved goodbye. And when her child was a teenager, who would she worry and wait up with until two o’clock in the morning?

But then she remembered everything that Claudia had said about raising kids with her husband. According to Claudia, Steve slept right through the kids’ wailing in the middle of the night and never once got up to feed them. He skipped the first day of kindergarten because he had a meeting he couldn’t get out of. And now that the girls were entering their teenage years, Claudia and Steve fought about everything from curfews to dating to whether they should be allowed to wear makeup.

Annie wondered if maybe Claudia was right, that maybe it would be easier to go it alone. Sure, there wouldn’t be anyone to help when things were hard or to share in the good times, but there also wouldn’t be anyone to argue with or disappoint.

In the end, whether or not to have a partner in parenthood was really beside the point. Annie was thirty-eight years old, and not only was there not a man on the horizon, she hadn’t even been mildly interested in one for three years. If she wanted to get pregnant and have a healthy child, she needed to act.

So without saying a word to her friends and family, Annie began researching the process in secret, scouring the Internet for
information about artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and sperm banks.

For Annie, that was the best part: the digital sperm bank. As a busy executive who hated going to the malls and shopping centers that dominated her surroundings, Annie bought everything over the Internet. Now it felt like she was shopping online for a baby.

She’d go to her favorite site and input her donor preferences: eye color, hair color, hair texture (curly? wavy? straight?), skin tone, height, ethnicity. She could even narrow her choice down to a Buddhist with a master’s degree, type A blood, and an interest in linguistics. There were profiles and essays and staff members’ impressions to read, and for a price she could see a baby photo, listen to an interview, and look at a personality test. The site even let her do a search based on the celebrity the donor resembled most. There were look-alikes for everyone from Vince Vaughn to Bob Saget, John Travolta to Keanu Reeves, Tom Brady to Stephen Colbert. There were even two versions of Russell Crowe to choose from—a youthful Crowe from his
Gladiator
days and an older version, presumably after the thrown telephone and extra poundage.

Once Annie stopped worrying about hormone shots and midnight feedings and instead concentrated on what her child would look like and which stroller to buy, the whole process seemed a lot more fun and a lot less scary. She felt comforted by all the websites hawking services and products for women just like her, who simply wanted to give birth without having to find, date, and marry a man first. She imagined there were whole legions of women out there thinking about and doing the exact same thing. Then she did a search on Google—singlemom.com, single mothers.org, singlemothersbychoice.com—and discovered there were.

Chapter Five

S
ometimes, a cigar is just a cigar, but rarely is a book club just a book club. Most of the time, it’s a way to meet people, a way to assuage one’s guilt for not being well read, or a way to get out of the house one evening a month. Katie joined this club made up of moms from her kids’ school two years ago, right after she broke up with Rob, to take her mind off the divorce and to try to rebuild all those brain cells that had died during pregnancy. Maxine joined because Katie didn’t want to go alone. Claudia, whose kids went to the same school as Maxine’s, joined a few months later because Maxine told her it would be a night away from Steve. Annie, the newest member of the group, joined because she wanted to meet a whole new batch of married women with kids.

Every four months or so, the book club morphed into something
different, depending on who showed up, what books they read, and what kind of refreshments were served. At first, the club was dominated by former English majors who wanted to reread all the classics and have weighty discussions about character, point of view, and narrative, as if they were back in a college literature seminar. During that period, cheese and crackers and Diet Coke were served. Then a few of the literary types dropped out and were replaced by women who had no interest in Austen, Dickens, or even Updike and instead insisted on books that had the stamp of approval of Oprah, Tyra, Ellen, or some other one-named daytime-television talk-show host who could be trusted not to waste their time. These women upgraded the cheddar and Ritz to fontina and water crackers, and the Diet Coke was replaced with merlot. Then there was a brief self-help phase, with books by everyone from the Dalai Lama to Dr. Phil and refreshments that included raw vegetables and herbal tea.

The latest phase was the confessional memoir, covering everything from drug addiction to incest to domestic violence. This month’s selection was about a stay-at-home mom who couldn’t stand staying at home with her kids so she arranged play dates in order to get wasted with the other moms. Since Katie was hosting, she decided to serve her special artichoke dip along with her favorite mixed drink—frozen melon balls. But when she brought out a tray of martini glasses filled with the chilled, slushy green mixture, the women looked at her with mild confusion. Katie suddenly realized that her refreshments were probably not appropriate for a discussion about alcoholic mommies, but she set the tray down anyway. After a brief, uncomfortable pause, each woman picked up a glass and started guzzling.

The drinks were downed in roughly fifteen minutes, prompting Katie to go back into the kitchen to whip up another batch.

“Hey, those are awesome,” said Maxine as she walked into the kitchen. “Can I get another one?”

Soon after, Claudia came in with Annie following close behind.

“Us too,” said Claudia.

“I knew they’d be a hit,” said Katie.

“But I’m afraid you might be in here blending the whole time,” said Annie.

“That’s okay,” said Katie. “I don’t feel like talking about this book anyway.”

“Me neither,” said Maxine.

“I didn’t even read it,” said Claudia.

“Me neither,” said Maxine.

“I read the blurb on the back and I think I got the gist,” said Annie.

“You guys!” said Katie. “It’s a book club. You have to read the book!”

“Nuh-uh,” said Claudia, taking a gulp of her drink and chewing on a stray chunk of ice. “I was prepared with lots of comments about this book even though I never read it. I was gonna say that this woman has no business drinking wine while she plays Candy Land with her kids and someone should call Child Protective Services immediately.”

“Well, if you read the book you’d know it was a little more complicated than that,” said Katie, pulling a piping hot dish of artichoke dip out of the oven. “She’s actually a sympathetic character.”

“Whatever,” said Claudia, taking a cracker and sticking it into the dip.

“Isn’t she a blogger?” asked Maxine.

“Who isn’t a blogger?” said Annie.

“I’m not and never will be,” said Claudia as she finished the last of her melon ball and grabbed another, which was sitting on the wooden serving tray that Katie got for a wedding present. “I
can’t stand all that spewing. Get an editor, for God’s sake.” Blogging was a sensitive subject for Claudia, who had begun to see her husband as a mini-blogger wannabe, with his incessant unedited Facebook updates.

“I was thinking about starting a blog,” said Katie warily. “ ‘Dealing with Divorce’.”

“Catchy,” said Annie.

“I know,” said Katie. “But then I realized I would actually have to write the damn thing.”

“How are you dealing with divorce, anyway?” asked Annie. Annie hadn’t known Katie long but was intrigued by this woman whose life had been turned upside down so abruptly and who seemed to have made the transition so effortlessly.