Come Up and See Me Sometime. Erika Krouse

I said. “We’ll do it and then you’ll sleep over.”

      “Like a slumber party. Sort of.”

      “How are you feeling?”

      “All right. Either I’m shallow, more liberal than I thought, or it hasn’t quite hit me yet.”

      “Hey, what if you had the baby and gave it to me?” I actually said this casually. Then I immediately thought about my studio apartment, my big plans to teach English in the Democratic Republic of Congo, how I haven’t been able to afford a dentist visit in almost three years.

      Mona snorted.

      “It’s feasible,” I said.

      “Stephanie. It’s mine.”

      “Yeah.”

      “No creative solutions. I’m getting an abortion.”

      “I’ll help you.”

      “Thank you. Just get me through the door.”

      “It’s a simple procedure.”

      “Easy for you to say.”

      Then I heard through the phone, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. But be glad you don’t ever have to go through this. Really.” Even so, there was something smug in her voice. Or maybe it was tears or food or something like that.

      I WALKED Mona across the picket line of men and women shouting in the rain. “Murderers,” they yelled. Mona gave them the finger. I did the same. We shared an umbrella above our frizzing hair. All the picketers wore shiny slickers, their bangs plastered to their foreheads.

      A wet man in a yellow raincoat shook a jar in our faces. Mona put her hand over her mouth. I stopped and asked him, “If you have so much respect for human life, how can you put it in an old pickle jar?” He silently shook the jar again like a maraca, the fetus rattling inside.

      Once we were in the office, the nurses were kind, the doctor was kind, it was over in three hours. Several women tapped their feet in the waiting room. A few men fidgeted or slept in their seats. I read an article about the complex social structure of bees, and then one on Van Gogh’s ear. I thought about taking a walk, but it was still raining. I ate three candy bars. I half expected to hear the sounds of a large vacuum cleaner.

      I examined the faces of the women as they pushed open the double doors, rejoining boyfriends or rattling their own car keys. They didn’t seem happy or sad. They seemed crampy.

      Then Mona was standing at the counter, writing a check. She didn’t look at me when I put my hand on her back. “How was it?”

      She was concentrating on signing her name. She picked up a big pink receipt with procedures checked off in carbon ink and dropped it into her purse. Then she turned to me and sighed.

      “Too easy. It made me uneasy.”

      She looked fine. Pink cheeks, hair a little mussed in the back. I patted it down. She said, “Make a plan for me. I’m whipped.” We headed out. As we passed the picketers, Mona waved slowly like the Queen of England, from the wrist.

      I’ve never made the mistake of thinking that everything I do is good. I’ve chosen badly on purpose, badly by accident. I once made fun of a man who was stumbling across the street, too drunk for walking, nearly too drunk to stand. Then I realized too late that he was in fact disabled or suffering from some incapacitating disease. The smile still trembling on my face like an aftershock. I’ve been terribly sorry for things unnoticed, for things stopped just in time or nearly too late. For all those choices better off aborted or barren.

      How does this fit in? It doesn’t, does it?

      BABIES WERE suddenly everywhere I went. In the fluorescent light of a midnight search in the grocery store for melatonin, they looked like shrieking Claymation characters, legs banging maniacally against the side of the grocery cart. Or sometimes they looked like those plastic dolls with a string coming out of their backs. There was one lying prostrate at the Koala Bear Kare station in the airport bathroom, laughing every time a toilet flushed. Babies at a distance. Across the street, a pregnant woman pushed a stroller in front of my window every five minutes. Babies on TV, selling diapers, clothes, dog food, even automobiles. Automobiles with car seats.

      Somehow it wasn’t the same thing when they were already five or six and whining about the long line at the bank, or asking for some ridiculous doll that shaves its own legs. But as babies—heads wobbling on their latex necks, toes wrinkled from sucking, long threads of spit hanging from their soggy lower lips—I couldn’t figure out how to feel. So I polled my friends.

      “What do you think about when you think about infertility?”

      “Nothing,” Mark said.

      “At all?”

      “Well, I think a little bit about my vasectomy.”

      “You had a vasectomy?” He simultaneously looked both more and less attractive than he had a minute ago.

      “After my first marriage.”

      “Have you ever regretted it?”

      “Yeah, when the AIDS thing became a big deal and I had to wear condoms anyway.”

      “So you have no feelings about infertility itself?”

      “No.”

      “Why?”

      “It took human civilization until Christ’s time to even come up with the number zero.”

      “Point, please?”

      “What is there to think about something that isn’t anything?”

      When I asked Amy, she said, “I think about my ovaries. And how you’re born with them and all the eggs are already intact. And each of those eggs contains all the eggs of future generations. Like a little universe. So when I think about infertility, I think, no universe. No universe … But it’s all so academic anyway, I mean, who really gets to experience their full potential?”

      Anthony said, “I think about the world population problem and say, hallelujah, Darwinism at work.”

      Mona said, “Big deal, adopt.”

      Fran said, “I think about life becoming real exotic. Like, no more working as a receptionist. I think about getting a graduate degree, maybe a cool job that lets you wear the miniskirts that nobody else gets to wear because they all get varicose veins when they’re pregnant. Oh yeah, and you can tattoo your stomach. You can live in foreign countries with no health insurance.”

      Ellen said, “Husband dog sofa.”

      “What?”

      “Those are the three stages of commitment in a woman’s life. First she gets married. Then she adopts a dog. When she’s really settling down, she finally buys herself a sofa.”

      “I have a sofa.”

      “You found it next to a dumpster, Stephanie.”

      “What about pregnancy? As a commitment?”

      “Well, that’s extra. That’s unplanned, much of the time. It’s not really relevant except in its result.”

      “Which is?”

      She stared at me. “The baby. You have a baby.”

      WHEN I asked my shrink if I was a control freak, he finished saying “Absolutely” before I finished saying “freak.” I told him that I once worked with a woman who carried a remote control in her purse. Whenever she got worried or angry, she took it out and stroked it like a gerbil. My shrink said that if I keep comparing myself to severe neurotics, I’ll think that anything is permissible.

      David, Mona’s David, called me up at home. He asked to meet me. I agreed, mostly because I was bored. Adventure, scandal, I told myself. Free drinks. We met in a country-western