Dating Big Bird (16 page)

Well, at least in my case, the transformation from before to after wouldn’t be so dramatic
.

I flipped through the pages and right off the bat eliminated the need to carefully read about half the book since it was chock-full of such useless sections as these:

“Telling Your Husband You’re Pregnant.”

“Husbands as Birth Coaches.”

“Husbands and Your Body Changes.”

“Husbands’ Fears.”

“Husbands’ Involvement in Pregnancy.”

“Husbands’ Involvement in Labor and Delivery.”

“Husbands and Massages.”

“Husbands and Pregnant Sex.” (Please.)

I stapled those chapters shut so I wouldn’t have to keep looking at them and being constantly reminded of the annoying fact that husbands usually were part of a woman’s pregnancy, even if they weren’t going to be part of mine.

If even
I
were going to be a part of mine.

Then I read on.

“Stretch Marks.”

“Hemorrhoids.”

“Accelerated Nail Growth.”

“Accelerated Hair Growth” (which I made a note to tell Amy about so she could kill two birds with one stone by getting pregnant
and
filling in that bald spot).

“Digestion.”

“Dementia.”

At this point, I decided to limit the subject matter of my reading to the first trimester of pregnancy—keeping things linear and thereby not getting too far ahead of myself. After all, it seemed pointless to worry now about episiotomies, loss of bladder control, cesarean scars, edema, varicose veins, amniocentesis, fetoscopy, and chorionic villus sampling. I could save those for later and
really
have something to look forward to.

Morning sickness was one of the hallmarks of the first three months of pregnancy, so it seemed obvious that I should familiarize myself with the subject, even though I’d had just about enough of it after reading Arlene Schiffler’s previous month’s stupid diary entry. And when I finished with the
Girlfriend’s
“Ten Commandments of Morning Sickness,” I went on to
What to Expect When You’re
Expecting
. I got a pad of paper ready and kept it handy in case inspiration struck and I wanted to make a list, or a flow chart, or just scrawl a lot of annoyed sarcastic comments in the margins.

On first flip, I was off to a bad start again. A gazillion references to husbands and fathers-to-be littered the pages and put me off until I read a brief section at the beginning of the book with the header, “Being a Single Mother.”

I see.

So no traditional nontraditional terms like:

Sperm donor
.

Or
biological father
.

Or
nonparental biological father
.

Or
nonfamilial birth partner
.

Or
accidental pregnancy fantasy disorder sperm-harvest victim
.

Hankering for alternative nomenclature, I turned to the Internet. But when an initial search turned up a potpourri of available services that were a little too nontraditional for me—including a matchmaking service for complete strangers who wanted to find someone—anyone—with whom to “coparent” a child—I decided to go back to my books. Blacking out the word
husband
or stapling a few pages here and there seemed almost normal by comparison.

“What do you think about adoption?” Amy asked one freezing-cold Sunday afternoon in mid-January, when we
came back to my apartment from a fruitless preliminary shopping trip for Karen’s present.

“Adoption?” I blew on the tips of my fingers while water boiled in the kitchen for hot chocolate. “Adoption is fine. If you can’t have your own. But I want my own.”

“But what if you couldn’t?”

“Couldn’t what?”

“Have your own.”

“Then I would adopt.”

Maybe.

Better find a good book on that, too.

She flipped through
Beyond Jennifer and Jason: An Enlightened Guide to Naming Your Baby
—a book that contained every pretentious name in the universe and told which celebrity-children had them—but was clearly not reading it.

“I’ll probably end up adopting.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m convinced I’m sterile.”

“Sterile?”
I repeated in the most dramatic tone I could manage. “What kind of word is that?
Infertile
, maybe.
Fertility-challenged
, even. But not
sterile
.” I went into the kitchen and came back out with two big cups of hot cocoa, then sat down next to Amy on the couch. We were going to need chocolate to get through this conversation. “What makes you even
say
that?”

“I don’t know. I’ve just always suspected that I was.”

“But why? Do you have any rational basis for thinking that?”

She shrugged.

“Some loser doctor at Planned Parenthood tell you that ten years ago when he misdiagnosed a yeast infection as syphilis?”

“No.” She put the name book down and picked up her cup. “It’s just that I’ve never been pregnant.”

“Well, neither have I.” I was getting more confused by the minute. “Isn’t that why we’ve embarked on our Decision Journey? To decide whether or not we
should
be someday?”

“Yeah, but …”

“But what?”

She paused. “It’s just that sometimes I’ve gone without birth control and nothing’s happened.”

“You mean, over the course of your lifetime?”

She didn’t answer.

“When are you talking about?”

She eyed me through the steam rising from her cup.

“Are you talking about with Will?” I asked. “With Will
now
?”

She nodded.

“What do you mean, you’ve gone without birth control with Will?”

“I kind of stopped using it.”

“Since when?”

“The past month and a half. Since Thanksgiving.”

I sat back on the couch.

“Does he know?” I asked.

“No.”

“You haven’t told him.”

“No.”

I tried to read her face. “You’re still doing it.”

She nodded.

“So you’ve been playing a secret game of Russian roulette and waiting to see if you hit.” I felt a wave of concern hit the pit of my stomach, and I sat forward on the edge of the couch waiting for her to explain herself.

But she didn’t.

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” I said. “Why you’re being so cavalier about something so potentially lifealtering.”

Her whole body shrugged.

“I’m tired of waiting—waiting for Will to do something, waiting for something to fall from the sky that will shake things up and push me in a different direction. I’m a fucking lawyer. I take action and make big decisions every day. I don’t see why I can’t do the same in my personal life.”

“But you haven’t thought this through yet. You haven’t figured out how you’d do it.”

“Yes, I have,” she said defiantly. “Just the way I was doing it. Accidentally. It’s better than a sperm bank.”

“I didn’t mean how you’d get pregnant. I mean
logistics
. How you’d manage. You know, money. Child care. Job. Like, are you going to get a nanny and keep working? Or would you want to work only part time? Could you afford to cut back your hours to be home more, and would your firm even allow it?” I felt like I was talking to a ten-year-old.

“Lots of single women have gotten pregnant accidentally and managed, and they’ve made much less money than I do.”

“I’m not just talking about money. Or managing. Or just getting by. I’m talking about being prepared. It’s a whole different thing if you’re doing it alone. It takes a lot of planning and rational thought if you’re going to do it alone, and feel good about doing it alone. And what about Will?”

“What
about
Will?”

“Well, don’t you think there’s a moral dilemma here? Getting pregnant accidentally on purpose? Do you think it’s fair?”

“Do you think it’s fair that he’s stringing me along and wasting my prime fertile
childbearing
years?”

Okay
. I could see I was going to have to try a different tack here. Up until now, I’d thought I knew what made Amy tick, but suddenly I wasn’t so sure.

“What do you think he’d do if it actually happened?” I asked.

She played with the handle of her cup. “I don’t know.”

“Do you think he’d want it? Do you think,” I said, pressing
her, “that it would force the issue—that it would make him want to get married?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“
Maybe?
The guy is a perpetual student, and you think he’s going to mature overnight and transform himself into the perfect responsible father and husband?”

“Maybe he would. Maybe if he had to, he’d grow up.”

“I think you’re kidding yourself.” An understatement.

“I’m not saying it’s probable that he would,” she said. “I’m just saying that it’s possible.”

Probable v. Possible
. Lawyers had such a way with words. “Those don’t sound like great odds to me.”

“Or to me either. But they’re better than nothing.”

I felt my brow crease as I tried—and failed—to follow her logic. “Why are they better than nothing?”

“Because. Because at least I’d be pregnant. Then one half of the equation would be solved. The rest I could figure out after that.”

By the time she left later that evening, I felt I’d managed to talk her out of her reckless dementia and had at least achieved containment on the Accidental-Pregnancy-Fantasy-via-Birth-Control-Boycott-Disorder front.

It hadn’t been easy.

Her dogged determination to force a resolution—a change—in the status of her relationship with Will seemed desperate and bizarre, especially since she was the one who had seemed less enamored of the idea of having a baby by herself than I had when we’d first talked about it.

Which was probably what would end up happening if her birth control boycott continued much longer.

And yet, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that that was the point: She
wasn’t
planning on having a baby alone.

She was, as she’d admitted earlier, hoping he would hear the news and rally to the challenge—hoping he’d realize, finally, how tired he was of being a retarded and infantile
almost-forty-year-old and how this was the perfect way to turn his life around.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized this was another variation of Amy’s disregard for relationship reality—in essence, she’d done the same thing with Jonathan: she’d decided what she wanted, and she would ignore any and all signs that what she wanted was not possible. Only this time the stakes were much higher.

Sadly, I understood her dementia and the fantasy that lay behind it. If Malcolm and I had had sex, I’m sure I would have been thinking the same thoughts and hiding my birth control pills under the mattress, the way crazy patients in mental hospitals always did in the movies.

But I liked to think I was different from Amy.

That I was more rational.

I liked to think that I was in complete control of myself and of my own raging Pregnancy Fantasy Disorder.

“Did you know that paraplegics—even quadriplegics—can get their wives pregnant even though they can’t, obviously, move around and have sex?” I asked Malcolm later that night.

I’d gone over to his place after Amy had left, and by the time I’d arrived and we’d had our requisite three-hour conversation—this time about the world’s growing obsession with gigantic muffins—and were finally getting into bed, it was after two.

“Where’d you read that?”

“I can’t remember,” I said quickly, even though it was actually true. I just didn’t want to admit that what I couldn’t remember was which of the three million pregnancy books I had read it in.

He pushed his fist into his pillow. “No. I didn’t know that.”

“It’s because, well, it’s because they still have involuntary spasms,” I continued, as if he’d asked me to.

“ ‘Spasms’?”

I nodded.

“Erections,” he said. “Let’s call a spade a spade.”

“Okay. Erections,” I repeated. “While the paralysis affects nerves and limbs, it doesn’t affect the muscles of the—”

“Penis.”

I nodded. “But even if there weren’t these involuntary spasms—” I continued.

“Erections.”

“Erections—the doctors would still be able to harvest sperm from them clinically. And then impregnate their wives through artificial insemination.”

He started to set the alarm clock but stopped.

“Is somebody you know at work married to a paraplegic or a quadriplegic?” he asked.

I shrugged. “No.”

“Has Karen suddenly decided to design a line of clothes for people in wheelchairs?”

“No.”

“Are you thinking of leaving the fashion industry to become a spinal-cord-injury lobbyist?”

I rolled my eyes. “No.”

“Then why are we talking about this?”

Wasn’t it completely obvious?

If a woman could get pregnant by a paralyzed man, then I could get pregnant by a—well, by Malcolm.

In control of my own raging Pregnancy Fantasy Disorder.

Hardly.

After Malcolm fell asleep, I sat up in bed, thinking.

It wasn’t just the money.

Or the nanny.

Or the job issues.

And it wasn’t just the mystery sperm donor.

Or the ethics of certain psychological impairment to the child as a result of being the product of anonymous artificial insemination.

There was another obstacle getting in the way of my own moving into the how stage—an obstacle that had nothing to do with finances and moral imperatives or the unfathomability of a nameless, faceless “father” whom I still could not imagine—if that was the route I was going to take—if I was going to take any route at all. And it was one that defied logical solutions and practical decisions.

It was the idea of giving up: giving up the possibility, the chance, the hope that it could all still happen in a natural way, in a normal way; that I could still fall in love with someone who wasn’t married or who wasn’t frozen. Someone who wanted a relationship and could sustain a relationship and didn’t have to be begged and prodded and cajoled every step of the way. Someone, in short, who wasn’t ambivalent.