Chris Offutt: The Same River Twice: A Memoir

I told a few fathers that my wife wanted a baby and I was edgy. Their responses were always the same—“A lot of work, but worth it,” and, “Nothing is ever the same again.” I nodded without comprehension. They could have been talking about the construction of a hydroelectric dam that would give unknown power to a small community. All I could see was what I’d lose.

I began gauging Rita as a potential mother, seeking flaws, some hidden impediment that would give rise to psychopathic progeny. Unfortunately, she passed muster. Her chief drawback was considering me fit material for paternity, a flattering fault. She loved me and wanted a family. I’m not afraid of much, and it bothered me that I was scared of something as basic as having a child. The subject remained with us, floating like an ovum waiting for a sperm.

In autumn, a terrible awareness crept through my mind, moving with the certitude of a saboteur. There was a limit to Rita’s child-bearing years. If I genuinely loved her, I’d have to leave her. Worse, I had to leave her soon. She needed enough time to find a man who wanted a family. Considering it from this angle was like weighing options on a scale — a life alone without her, or a life with Rita and a child. The decision was remarkably simple. I went to town and got drunk.

The next day was smudged by a vicious hangover, a haze that stood between the world and me. When Rita came home from work, I asked her to join me at the kitchen table, where I’d placed her diaphragm, tube of jelly, and my emergency condoms. One by one, I dropped everything in the garbage. Rita’s eyes were damp. She was smiling. There began my true education, after years of practice, in the ways of flesh. Sex with the goal of conception finally meant making love. The chief difficulty lay in shedding my adolescent fear of knocking her up.

After a winter of delirious sex with no fecundity, we were nervous that something was wrong. In early spring I began watching nature for clues. When ducks mated along the river, three males went after one female and they very nearly drowned her. She was left dazed in the shallows. The males flew casually away, their wings dimpling the surface of the water on each downstroke. I preferred the constancy of the great blue herons, bonding in pairs and returning yearly to the same nest.

Each month, Rita anxiously waited for her period, then cried when it came. She called the doctor, who told us to keep working, that during the peak of ovulation, fertilization fails three times out of four. A woman releases fewer than four hundred eggs in her lifetime. The average man makes a thousand sperm per second. Three or four good ejaculations was enough to populate the entire world, but I couldn’t get my own wife pregnant.

To allay concerns for my manhood, I read several books on conception. An illustration of fallopian tubes looked like the horned skull of a steer hanging from a neighbor’s barn. Ovulation was described as “an intra-abdominal event.” Ejaculation speeds reached two hundred inches per second, with sperm receiving a glucose bath by the female body for extra energy. The sperm spat enzymes to break down the wall of the nearest egg adrift from the ovary. When one finally drilled through the egg’s outer shell, a trapdoor slammed shut behind it. I visualized everything happening on a large scale with accompanying sound effects and cheering, as in the Olympics.

Another guide, less technical, informed me that male orgasm fired an armada of three hundred million soldiers upriver to invade the cervix. Only one percent made it past the yoni’s fierce beach. Half of these were captured and held in the zona pellucida. Prisoners had eight hours to fertilize or starve to death. The egg carried food to sustain itself, but the sperm traveled light for greater speed.

I spent an entire weekend staring silently at the river, worried that my army was composed of lazy draftees. Years of drug abuse had so confused my sperm that they couldn’t swim a straight line. Rita suggested I consult our doctor, who assured me that I manufactured fresh goods every ninety days. “Think of it as a mom-and-pop store,” she said. “Low overhead with a quick turnover.”

She gave Rita a thermometer and a chart to monitor her ovulation. I began to wear boxer shorts. I’d read that the men of primitive cultures dipped their testicles in boiling water as a means of birth control; it seemed possible that the inverse might hold true. I filled a coffee cup with ice water and stared at it a full hour, never quite summoning the courage for immersion.

My next trip to the library yielded a pop-up book about conception. A gigantic lingam sprang from the pages, followed by a yoni the size of an animal den. The centerfold offered a huge multilevel egg. The sperm were tiny by comparison, except for one monster that dived into a slot when you opened and closed the book. The text said it was sinking its payload.

I am not by nature a squeamish man, but that pop-up book made me feel like a person who’d looked on the face of God — bewildered, regretful, possessor of forbidden knowledge. I took a long walk in the floodplain woods. A turtle rooted along a sandy bend in the river, hunting a spot to lay her eggs. I was envious until I realized we were both in the same fix — animal sex is only a billion and a half years old. I went home and threw the graph and thermometer in the trash. Turtles don’t need maps. They’re just slow.

On the first warm night of April, Rita and I drove to town and scaled the chain-link fence that enclosed the public swimming pool. I lurked in the shallows and watched for the law while Rita performed a flip off the high board. Her underwear flashed white against the black sky, a lovely sight, as if Virgo had become a mobile constellation, descending to earth with a graceful splash. We left the pool for a clump of shadowed oaks in the park. The sweet grass adhered to our limbs. I felt like Zeus field-testing his swan suit before the seduction of Leda. Gamete met zygote. DNA merged into the corkscrew that resembled the Milky Way’s spiral, Hermes’ Staff, the swift helix of infant birth.

Two weeks later Rita called from the doctor’s office. She spoke fast, her voice husky with tears and glory. The test was positive. I went outside and lay down beside the river. Blue dragonflies were mating so hard they rattled dry weeds. The land seemed to recede beneath me, leaving me prone in the air, as if residing between sky and earth. The clouds moved like surf. I was stationary while all existence was on the glide.

I never thought I’d be married, let alone mutate into a father. Such normal events had never seemed to have a place in my life. To mark the occasion, I bought an aluminum skiff with a six horse-power engine, and dubbed it Lily, Rita’s middle name. I moored it in the river twenty yards from the house and felt a little better prepared for fatherhood.

Throughout April, the river rose and fell, so controlled by a dam that it was barely a river except to the fox that stalked its bank. When the sound of a dying duck crossed the water at night, I thought of that old tree falling when no one’s there, and understood that regardless of listeners, the fox would kill a duck. In the same way, I realized that the baby really would be born.

We began seeing other pregnant women in town. Like locusts, they were emerging in warm weather. Rita felt the kinship of sisterhood, while I enjoyed a strange pride, as if responsible for all pregnancy. It was a potent sensation that lasted until the first of our monthly appointments with the doctor. I wanted desperately to be involved, but felt superfluous, a specialist who’d done his duty. There was so much focus on Rita that I became envious. Toward the end of each appointment, I’d invent some imaginary ailment to ask the doctor about. She always rolled her eyes, winked at Rita, and pronounced me fine.