Editor’s note: Today, we set out on a new adventure: The Edge has recruited eight published authors and they are writing a serialized novel. A new chapter will appear every Sunday. Each installment of this novel will be written by a different author, who will pick up where the last author left us and take us who-knows-where. Rachel Siegel starts us off.
Marion turned the corner into the more private wing of the restaurant like a soldier turning the corner into certain fire. They were beautiful, all three of them, and all in a row, sitting politely and with clear nervous anticipation, they were a small Ralph Lauren army, facing off against her, all alone with her good bag. She was instantly anxious about her hair. To keep herself walking, she allowed herself the fantasy of a moment that she was just a middle-aged mom, coming to meet her three grown children for lunch, fitting her in among their busy and satisfying lives, her wearing the new cashmere scarf one of them had spent their hard-earned money to buy her last Christmas, la di da.
They stood– well bred, as predicted. But then, they would. The girl especially had a face that made you feel good to look at. She looked a bit like Marion had at her age, the ratio of eyebrow to eye to cheekbone, but calmer, with a lovely smooth forehead. Maybe dumber? Clearly eager to please. One boy was quite tall, the other less so, but both nicely built, the kind of boys she had crushes on in school who played serious sports but managed to be human. Her stomach churned. And also like those boys, kind of face, easy to smile. It was a complete ambush. Marion knew with absolute certainty she would never recover. She put her bag on the additional chair to her left, faced the phalanx of her perfect offspring, and smiled. “I’m Marion,” she said.
* * * *
Marion exited the doorway of her cousin’s posh downtown apartment, her cousin asking her, as she was walking away, almost shouting: she had meant to ask, would she consider being an egg donor for a friend of a friend? Extremely wealthy, great family. Having a terrible time conceiving. Consider it. Great money. They love the sound of you, Yale magna cum laude, blonde, great singer, no serious illness, what’s not to like, you’re amazing! What? Fuck off! My EGGS???
But she was flattered. Nothing about her felt very much in demand. Even men seemed put off by her after a while, when she would grow morose in a café and start making excuses to go home. The singing career had floundered, maybe for similar reasons? She hated taking money from her father but she did it anyway, money and rent and credit card payments. She wandered the streets of the city in confusion, watching the shark girls swimming purposefully toward their downtown banking reefs. She was replete with objectless ambition circling poisonously inside her and she needed to do something. Make a choice. A change.
$500,000 was put into a trust, for her future. There was medication, and a weird process where they suctioned eggs out of her ovary. They paid every expense, obviously, these anonymous rich people, plus the spending money they could give tax-free. She put first and last down on a new apartment in a better neighborhood. She didn’t want to meet them. She just wanted them to be nice, and responsible, and Sukie assured her they were both. In retrospect, what a tremendous amount of trust she put in her cousin, who was brokering this whole deal, out of what? Sukie had a solid finance job, plenty of money, was hoping to meet the right guy and start a family of her own. It seemed like she derived outsize satisfaction out of performing extended matchmaking services, and the more involved, the better she liked it. The very weirdness of the enterprise seemed to excite her. This was a person you would call when you needed to get rid of a body, Marion thought. Whatever, I’ve got more eggs I guess and it feels good to do something nice for people. “The selfishness of our culture poisons the soul,” her friend Magda said. So she did it.
When she met TIm, she began to think a lot more about them. Sukie had told her there were three, an oldest girl and two younger boys. They moved away so Suke didn’t know them but got a Christmas card. No, she didn’t want to see it. And please stop telling her about them. Oversharing was a chronic condition in Sukie’s case. She had to drink a solid whiskey and a half – and she wasn’t a drinker – to get up the nerve to tell Tim about them, about two months into their relationship. He reacted surprisingly well in the moment, but a few days later sat awkwardly silent on the couch before sex and couldn’t perform. She forced it out of him that he felt weird about it, like it took away the excitement of something that was supposed to be a surprise, but bigger. She was secretly excited that he was thinking about having kids with her but also depressed by this weird thing between them that would have to be gotten over. Maybe she was an oversharer too, and should have left it well enough alone.
When Carson was born, Tim was overcome. With surprise, as for him intellectually knowing there was a child of his being gestated, even hearing the heartbeat and watching her belly grow, was something completely apart from the utterly sci-fi moment of a living being with half of his genetic material being pulled out of his wife’s vagina. He stood dumbstruck and the nurses just moved around him but didn’t ask him to hold the baby for an hour.
She sat up herself that day, in a moment of surprise that somewhat mirrored his, and understood that someone else had done this for babies that were not her own, and wept.
Carson, oh Carson, a baby brings so many changes but usefully, crucially, purpose. She knew now, she mattered. Her life mattered. She walked purposefully into the grocery store, chose her items decisively. Settled on a hairstyle and stuck with it. She finally had enough mental bandwidth to do things like give to charity after a natural disaster instead of sort of sit paralyzed on the couch and worry.
The money for the egg donorship had been held in trust for her but now she thought she wanted it to be a nest egg for Carson, down the road. She and Tim were doing ok on his teacher’s salary and her odd jobs and stock-making for a local market. So she put it into a trust in his name, untouchable until his majorit
At his three-year checkup, she and Tim sat silently in the waiting room with furrowed brows. Carson had started speaking early, and lavishly, but recently in the bath couldn’t say ‘soap.’ He just stared quizzically at the bottle and looked perplexed. He had started making repetitive noises. When the diagnosis of autism was pronounced, she rocked a little and straightened up. More purpose. This will be my thing, now. Her high school teacher used to say, all anyone needs to be happy in life is to perform an impossible task with complete commitment.
Her high school teacher was an asshole. This was fucking hard. Her son would seem to make gains, then lose them. He would start to pee on the potty only to regress worse than before a couple of months later. With no rhyme or reason. When he smeared shit on the driver’s seat of her car– it had to be HER seat– she lost it and screamed at him. He ran upstairs and shrieked, rocking in the bathtub, for an hour.
She and Tim held it together by a combination of first blind hope, then his recently adopted religious convictions, then weed and money left him by a settlement in a lawnmower accident that left him with three-quarters of a foot. Three-quarters of a foot, but a big new house closer to town with a kitchen where she could make her stock and cheese and exert beautiful, small control. When Carson turned seven some behaviors seemed to calm down and his academic skills gained steam, although speech still lagged.
They hoped for another child but after a benign cyst was removed from her ovary she couldn’t seem to conceive. The doctors assured her it wasn’t the case but she secretly blamed the fact of harvesting so many precious eggs in her mid-20s. In her mid-40s, she shuddered to count the measly number of ovulations which remained to her.
They ticked along more or less all right until Tim met Cassidy, a perfect nightmare of a 28-year-old yoga teacher who swept him off his one good foot. Tim’s injury, far from making him self-conscious and psychologically fragile, gave him a weird sort of sexual confidence because he wasn’t trying to be nice anymore. The other mothers suddenly noticed him– a wounded man, soldiering on. He took his settlement with him, it being too much of a douchebag move to ask him to put any part of his compensation for his physical disfigurement in both of their names, though Sukie suggested it. His yoga therapist fancied she was a great lover of the downtrodden to fall in love with a man with part of a foot and three million dollars.
The brow furrows grew deeper and when Marion could stand to look at herself in the mirror she knew that old boyfriends who saw her now would say she had lost her sparkle. Tim took Carsie on some weekends but Cassidy found it “stressful” so it was basically Marion. Marion parenting this strange, lovable, difficult child, with minimal money and a giant house she didn’t want to sell because it gave the sitter a place to stay too, so she had help and company.
She got a teaching job for the health insurance and to be able to keep an eye on things at school for Carsie. She manufactured a little of the old sparkle with considerable effort and dated Wayne, then Dave, then Pip, all teachers except Pip who was the father of a student. Carson was doing ok. And then, a pandemic swept the slate, which didn’t feel particularly full, clean, and it was just her and Carson, home. Tim and Cassidy were in a different town and pregnant. It was too hard to get time away to see boyfriends as the sitter had moved in with her boyfriend so she hunkered down, made stock like a badass, and did her best to love and teach her son. They moved like zoo animals silently and lethargically through their shared space. Her mom moved closer by and she was part of their pod, helping a little with Carse.
Carson didn’t seem to mind being home all the time. He watched his shows, built small lego towers, and painted inexplicable pictures. She had ceased long ago to hope there would be some savant genius in his creations. He could be bog standard autistic, and the other mothers could pity her for the brief amount of time they shared space with her and her son in the supermarket, Carson stimming his head off in the cart. She glided past them with a genuine smile because she knew many of them lived for their dreams for their wondrous kiddos but this weird being rocking out in her cart in the Stop and Shop was her ticket to Freedom From All That.
Online therapies were pretty much the same as in person for him, difficult and of limited value, so after a while they gave them up and Marion found new things online that he liked better. After a year indoors, under a rhythm they both grew used to, this unbearable life became almost bearable. If she could content herself with being a tiny mouse in the world, she could bustle about her life and eke out some small joys and a sense of accomplishment in just keeping going. How many people were doing any more?
The email came in mid-pandemic from Sukie that the kids, as she called them, were interested in meeting. Marion stared at the screen as if she had been slapped. It was a cliché but somehow this day was supposed to come much later. It was weird that something that existed in a state of suspended Then could suddenly break through to Now with no more fanfare than an email she could easily have deleted. A pandemic brought things from background to fore, speeding up underlying processes that otherwise might have been superseded by all the doing. Everything that was sure was sure to be unsure. There was a biological donor ‘mother’ out there they didn’t know, and as Charlie was almost through college now, and Kit was a sophomore, in the city, and Henry in his junior year of high school, they were home spinning wheels and free enough to wonder.
Did she want to see a photo?
She had a start when she thought it was appended to the email but mercifully it wasn’t. ‘Not sure,’ she typed back. And left it at that. But lying in bed that night, she allowed herself a little pleasure in thinking that these were her children. Even though her connection to them consisted of a bunch of doctor’s visits and a lot of phone messages from over 20 years ago, she suddenly felt something like propriety toward them. She felt slightly impressed, if that was the word, that their mother had told them, and that made it seem like these were good kids, well-parented by secure and well-adjusted people. Somehow she had imagined that this family wanted to keep their fertility dysfunction a well-guarded secret, and raise their kids without anything to trammel their golden days of lacrosse and Mandarin class. But they wanted to meet her. THEY wanted to. Not their parents. These young people biologically as related to her as Carson. Indeed, she had to allow, probably a good deal more like her than he was or would ever be.
When she woke up, she wrote: “OK.”
