Maybe Once, Maybe Twice(3)
I had made this appointment with the vain hope that I would be declared “a fertility marvel.” My doctor would pat me on the back with a wowed smile and reassure me that I had plenty of years left to strum through life without permanent repercussions.
Maggie Vine was not a medical marvel. Biology was holding me at gunpoint. I was walking the tightrope of regret. “Kids, one day” had become “kids, now or never.”
“If you have a partner, you should start trying,” he said. There was an inflection of hope for the hopeless in my doctor’s voice as he spun on a little stool below me, poring over my medical chart on his iPad.
If I have a partner…
My love life shared the potential of my uterine lining: outlook not good. One might best describe it as a fuckboy warfare hellscape. The word “relationship” was always in finger-quotes. My “relationships” were a lot like my music career: constantly on the verge of becoming something until they became nothing. Optimism spiraled me toward the joys of lovesickness and watched me lose myself in some angular jawline’s undertow.
“We should talk about your options,” he said, taking my silence for what it was.
“What do those bad boys run these days?” I asked, flipping through the IVF pamphlet.
“Well, I think you should try IUI first, which could be about five hundred to four thousand dollars, depending on the meds, bloodwork, and insemination—”
“Those are two very different numbers.”
“And then you’d have the price of a sperm donor on top of that,” he continued, handing me two more pamphlets. “If IUI doesn’t work, we’d shift to IVF, which is much more invasive and costly, but generally more successful. Now, yours would be considered a geriatric pregnancy, so I don’t want you to get too excited when you see these fifty percent success-rate numbers.”
“I’m sorry, did you just say ‘geriatric’?”
Apparently, it was time for my ovaries to take a starring role in one of those arthritis commercials. She would find a silver fox and run in slow motion down the beach, toward a bright light. Maybe they handed out AARP memberships to retiring reproductive organs. If my fertility was going to wave a white flag, at the very least, I deserved a discount at Red Lobster.
“There’s always freezing your eggs, but freezing eggs this old…I don’t know. If you were smarter, you would have done it sooner.”
“Smarter” shot through me like a bullet. I wasn’t exactly stupid, but I was overly hopeful. Which was possibly a very stupid way to approach life. Wide-eyed, I studied the silent nurse in the corner who awkwardly played with her hands, trying not to meet my eyes. I looked back at the doctor, just as he flicked a smile my way. It made me want to end his life.
There was nothing I hated more than proving a shitty man right. He was about to find out that I was much less smarter than he didn’t give me credit for. I had wasted my adulthood by choosing to play a game of risk, and it was not rewarding.
I shivered in front of the mirror at the Upper East Side exam room, dissecting my reflection—unfortunately under fluorescent lighting. Here I sat on my thirty-fifth birthday: cold ultrasound lube dripping onto my pale thighs; lime-green eyes open far too wide; long, wavy hair framing a heart-shaped freckled face; last night’s mascara creating an unintentional kind-of-hot smoky-eye. Here I sat: a woman out of options.
I was staring down the edge of my dream, completely unaware that two other doors were about to swing open.
2
THIRTY-FIVE
“IT’S JUST…I didn’t think I’d have to adult this quickly,” said a thirty-five-year-old fully grown woman to her best friend.
I had just divulged my lack of fertility options to Summer Groves, who responded to my pain by allowing me to open up an egregiously expensive bottle of pinot. A purple haze poured in through the arched windows of Summer’s Tribeca kitchen as the red wine burned down my throat. Summer lived in a generous three-bedroom condo, which was soon to be featured in Architectural Digest. It was the kind of place that made your mouth hang open when you walked in: bright, playful colors set against honed dark marble, one-upped by unobstructed views of the Hudson River. It was the kind of place you lived in if you were crushing adulthood.
“Hi there, Billie girl,” I cooed.
Summer’s goldendoodle, Billie, panted up at me with her apricot tail wagging. I scrunched my face down to Billie’s wet nose. Summer flinched, uncomfortable around the ease at which I let an animal’s warm tongue bathe my cheeks. Summer never grew up around affection, and it showed. She got high cheekbones and full lips from her model-actor father and icy veins from her emotionally stunted mother. She casually breezed into rooms and sent jaws to the floor. Summer was a knockout without trying—an intimidating combination that I would have died for. Unless you were one of the very few people inside her bubble, everything about Summer was terrifyingly untouchable—the kind of woman who you worried was judging you, whose silent approval you would go to the ends of the earth to retrieve. If not for my world turning on a dime when I was seventeen, Summer would have just become a distant memory—that bitchy college roommate whose name I can’t remember. But my father had to go and die. I joined the Dead Parent’s Club, a club Summer was already a member of, and my grief brought her walls down. Thankfully, I got to know the hilarious, ballsy, honest woman cloaked in sharp teeth.