Then Came You (4 page)

“Huh,” said Nancy, fiddling with the zipper on her boot. My hopes of my family’s being happy on my behalf were dwindling. My sister, as usual, looked bored and slightly hostile, and my mother, as usual, looked confused.

“It means,” I began, before Nancy jumped in, leaning forward in her best college-graduate-sister-giving-a-speech mode, which
had only gotten more obnoxious since she’d married a doctor and felt qualified to lecture about all things health-related.

“It means she’s going to have a baby for a couple that can’t have one.”

“Or a single mother,” I said, just to stick it in Nancy’s face, to show her that she didn’t have all the answers. “Or a gay couple.”

“Oh,” my mother said. “Oh, well, that’s sweet.”

“She’s not doing it to be sweet,” said Nancy. She pulled her iPhone—one of the new ones—out of her bag and started tapping at the screen with one painted fingernail, like a bird pecking for feed. “She’s doing it for money.”

“That’s not exactly true,” I said. My tone was light, but inside I was furious. Leave it to Nancy to make it sound like it was all about the fifty thousand dollars I’d be paid . . . and, also, to be right. For years I’d been trying to find a way to earn money while staying home with the boys, clicking on every “Make Hundreds of $$$ at Home” ad that popped up on the Internet, figuring out whether I could sell makeup or Amway during the ninety minutes three days a week when Frank Junior was at school and Spencer was asleep. I’d filled out an application to be a teacher’s aide at Spencer’s preschool, but the job paid only eight dollars an hour, which, between gas and babysitting meant I’d be losing money if I took it. “Yes, I’ll be getting paid, but it’s not just that. I really do want to help someone.”

“That’s nice.” My mother had drifted toward the sink. She picked up a roll of paper towels, each sheet printed with a row of pink-and-blue marching ducks. I wondered if she was trying to figure out how to make it cuter somehow, to stitch a quick ball-fringe onto the wooden dispenser or cover it in Con-Tact paper patterned with dancing milkmaids.

“How much will they pay you?” Nancy asked, without looking up from her screen.

“Why would you want to know that?” I inquired pleasantly, which was what Ann Landers said you were supposed to do when someone asked you something rude. I’d never asked Nancy how much she earned working for her husband, answering his phone in her clipped, just-short-of-rude voice and planning their squash getaways. “It’s a lot,” I said when she didn’t answer. “I’m working with one of the best programs on the East Coast.”

“How do you know they’re the best? Because their website says so?” Nancy ran her fingers through her hair curtains and tilted her head, giving me the same wide-eyed, quizzical look the morning-show newscaster used when she was asking the hiker who’d hacked his own arm off whether he shouldn’t have told someone where he’d be going before he got trapped in that slot canyon.

“They have a very high success rate. Very satisfied customers.”

“So how does it work?” my mother asked, joining us at the table with her coffee.

“I wait for a couple to choose me. The egg will be fertilized in the lab...”

“So romantic,” Nancy scoffed under her breath.

“... and then implanted. Nine months later, I’ll have the baby, and give it to the parents.”

A frown creased my mother’s face. “Oh, honey. Won’t that be hard?”

“It won’t be my baby,” I explained. “It’ll be more like being a babysitter. Only no cleaning up.” I tried to smile. My mother still looked worried. Nancy had gone back to glaring at her iPhone. “Lots of women do this,” I continued. “Thousands of them. Lots of them are military wives. The insurance pays for everything to do with a birth...”

“Even if the soldier isn’t the father?” Nancy asked.

I bit my lip. This was sort of a gray area. Frank was in the reserves, and his insurance would cover my care as long as my
name was still on his policy, but Leslie at the clinic had told me it might be better not to mention to the nurses and the doctors I’d be seeing that this wasn’t Frank’s baby. “We’ve never had a problem,” she explained. “There’s a long history of Tricare looking the other way in cases like these, and we can recommend doctors and nurses we’ve worked with successfully before. They know how little men like your husband get paid for the important work they do, so they understand about how wives would want to contribute to the family income.” It sounded like this was a speech Leslie had given before. Still, it made me nervous. When the baby was born, I guessed it would be white, like me; white, like most of the couples in America who hired surrogates. It wouldn’t be too hard for anyone who was paying attention to figure out that Frank wasn’t the father . . . but I’d worry about that when I got picked. If I got picked.

“What’s your problem?” I asked my sister, tugging at the hem of my sweater, wishing I’d worn something that fit me a little better and wasn’t six years old . . . which, inevitably, led to wishing that I had things that fit me better and were new.

“Girls,” my mother murmured, clutching her mug like a life buoy.

“No, seriously, Nancy. If you’ve got a problem, you might as well tell me now.” Not that I’d let her objections stop me. Nancy drove a Lexus and had that iPhone and her platinum card. She had no idea what it was like to live in a big old house, to feed and clothe two boys who seemed to never stop growing and never stop eating, to keep everything repaired and running on one paycheck that never stretched far enough. She could object, she could complain, she could be sarcastic, but unless she was prepared to give me money, nothing she could say would change my mind.

She tucked her hair behind her ears, allowing me a glimpse of the pearls in her lobes—real ones, I knew, that Dr. Scott had
bought her for her birthday. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “It just seems unnatural.”

“Like getting your stomach stapled? Because that seemed pretty unnatural to me.”

Nancy jerked her head back like I’d slapped her.

“Banded,” she said. “It’s not stapled, it’s banded.”

“Girls,” my mother repeated. She’d never been the one to break up our fights. Our father was the disciplinarian. He was a baker at a supermarket, a big, husky man who stood six foot three and weighed close to three hundred pounds, not many of which were fat. He baked bread, mostly; rolls, sometimes croissants, leaving the sweet stuff—what he called “the fancies”—to other bakers. The one exception he made was for our birthdays, when he’d get up extra early to bake and frost our cakes. They were beautiful, those cakes. One year I’d asked for the Little Mermaid, and my father had covered my cake in an ocean of turquoise-blue icing that peaked in tiny white-capped waves, tumbling toward a golden shore upon which a topless mermaid with tiny pink-tipped boobies lounged underneath a green gum-drop palm tree.

“It’s just strange,” said Nancy . . . and she sounded truly confused. I hadn’t heard that tone much since she’d gotten skinny and gotten married and gotten the idea that she knew everything there was to know about everything. “I saw a TV special about these women in India. Women in America hire women there to carry their babies—mostly because they can’t have kids of their own, but sometimes just because they don’t want to. They don’t want to gain weight or have stretch marks or be inconvenienced. It just seemed wrong. Women shouldn’t use each other that way.”

“Well, I’m not being used, and I won’t be having a baby for someone who just doesn’t want to be inconvenienced,” I said, even though I wasn’t completely sure if this was true. The clinic’s
literature said I’d be helping an infertile couple—
fertility
was, of course, right there in the place’s name—but I could imagine some rich woman saying she was infertile and getting a surrogate just because she wanted to wear a bikini that summer, or didn’t want to miss out on a wine tasting or a ski vacation. Or, I thought meanly, a squash trip. “I’m going to be helping someone.”

There was a wooden bowl full of apples next to the salt and pepper shakers. My mother took one and started peeling it with a silver fruit knife with a mother-of-pearl handle that she’d ordered from QVC, a channel she affectionately called “the Q.”
Only your mother,
Frank had said,
has pet names for her favorite stations.
“Do you think you can do that? Have a baby and then just hand it over?”

I looked past her into the living room. The boys were on the couch, their crumb-laden napkins on the coffee table. Frank Junior was holding Spencer’s hand, the way he did when his little brother got scared at the movies.
My boys.
I thought about the bicycle Frank Junior wanted, a red Huffy in the window of the shop downtown that he would visit every time I took him on my errands with me. I thought about being able to sign Spencer up for sports readiness at the Little Gym, where classes cost four hundred dollars a semester. I thought about buying new winter coats and boots, instead of scouring the cardboard boxes at the church’s winter swap for hand-me-downs, and not worrying if they lost a mitten or if Frank Junior tore the sleeve of a sweater that I’d been planning to pass down to his brother. “I think I’ll be sad. But it won’t be my baby. It’ll be theirs. The intended parents.”
Intended parents
was a term I’d learned from the surrogacy websites. “As long as I can remember that, I should be fine.”

“And Frank?” My sister, I’d thought more than once, was like a woman on a long car trip with her finger pressed against
the stereo’s “search” button, scanning up and down the dial, looking not for music but for trouble. “Have you talked to him about this?”

“We’ve discussed it.”
In my head.
In fact, this discussion was my rehearsal, my trial run for how I’d tell my husband what I’d done.

“I think it’s great,” my mother said.

“I think it’s crazy,” said Nancy.

“You’re entitled to your opinion,” I said stiffly, and got up from the table. But Fancy Nancy wasn’t done yet.

“I know you,” Nancy said. “You’re tenderhearted.” The way she said it—
tenderhearted
—it was like she was telling me I had bad breath, or hepatitis C. “They’re going to give you that baby to hold and you won’t want to let her go.”

“Why do you think it’ll be a girl? I only have boys.” The words came out more ruefully than I’d intended. I’d always wanted a girl, and I’d hoped, privately, that Spencer would be one, and that I could dress her in all the beautiful little pink things I’d looked at when I was buying Frank Junior his tiny jeans and sweatshirts. I’d felt a little sad when they’d told me I was having another boy, because two was our limit, unless Frank won the lottery or I found a way to change his mind. I would have loved a big family, but we couldn’t afford one.

“Especially if it’s a girl,” said Nancy. I sighed. We’d shared a bedroom until she left for college. She’d watched me dress up my Barbies in outfits I’d sewn myself and cook cakes for Roxie, the cocker spaniel next door, in my Easy-Bake Oven. If anyone in the world knew how much I would have loved having a daughter, it was Nancy.

“I’ll be fine,” I said, and looked at my mother. “Want to take the boys for pizza? I told them we’d do Chuck E. Cheese.”

“Oh, right. Let me get my coat.”

I turned to my sister. “You’re welcome to join us.”

Nancy rolled her eyes. “Those places make me feel like I’m going to have a seizure. And you know I don’t eat wheat or dairy.”

Or anything else.
“Okay, then. See you soon.”

I got the boys back in the car, feeling as if a thundercloud had settled in my chest. All I’d wanted was for someone to be happy for me—happy with me, straight-up happy, not happy with questions, or happy with reservations, or happy but confused, or not happy at all . . . and there was no one in my life, including my husband, who fit the bill.

I
met my stepmother—not that I would ever dignify the bitch with that title—the spring of my senior year at Vassar. My father placed the call to my dorm room himself, instead of having his assistant call me, and then making me wait on hold until he could come to the phone.
Big news,
I thought.
Important.
“Tina,” he said. “There’s someone special I want you to meet.”

He sent a car to take me home for the weekend. As usual, I asked Manuel to collect me at the coffee shop downtown, even though I wasn’t fooling anyone—in the era of Google and Gawker, all of my classmates who cared to make the effort of typing my name into a search engine knew exactly who I was.

Manuel drove me to Bridgehampton. The two of them, my father and India, were waiting for me in the doorway of the gray shingled house, like an ad for Cadillacs or Cialis, or for one of those Internet dating services for old people. When I saw him standing there, his arm around her narrow waist, I knew. “This is India,” my father said.

“The subcontinent?” I asked. India had laughed like she was reading words off a script: “Ha ... ha ... ha.” Then my brothers arrived, Trey pulling up in the minivan he’d bought when his daughter was born, Tommy slouched in the seat beside him, like
he was ashamed to be riding in such a desperately unhip vehicle. My father beamed and dispensed hugs and introductions, and we all went in for dinner.

I sat quietly, observing, in the big kitchen with its white-painted floors and blue-and-white-striped cushioned benches. My parents had bought the place when I was ten, and my mother had decorated in a nautical theme, all crisp blues and whites and windows shaped like portholes, with canvas slipcovers for the couches and sisal rugs on the floor. I wondered if India was already dreaming of the improvements she’d make, the addition she’d build, the bedrooms she’d annex for her Pilates equipment and her clothes.