Jennifer Weiner - Then Came You

“Ever been pregnant?” he asked, the same way he’d asked if I was a vegetarian or if heart disease ran in my family. I shook my head, ponytail swishing. I’d only had sex with three different boys, an embarrassingly low tally at my age. I was starting to think that I was one of those people who didn’t like sex very much. Maybe it made me lucky. I wouldn’t spend my whole life getting my heart broken, chasing after this guy or that one.

“And are you single?”

I nodded, trying not to look too excited, to give the appearance that men stopped by the food court to offer me piles of cash every Monday I went to the mall, but my mind was racing, imagining what I could do with twenty thousand dollars, a sum I hadn’t imagined possessing unless I won the lottery or married very, very well. Even with the investment-banking job I was going to take after I graduated, I’d have to manage rent in New York City and start paying back my loans, so the idea of having five figures’ worth of discretionary income was new to me, extraordinary, and alluring.

Jared Baker handed me a business card, a rectangle of heavy ivory paper with embossed letters on top that said PRINCETON FERTILITY CLINIC, INC. His name was underneath, with telephone numbers and an e-mail address. “Be in touch,” he said. “I think you’d be an excellent candidate.”

“Twenty thousand dollars,” I said again.

“Minimum,” he repeated. “Oh, and if you wouldn’t mind telling me your name?”

“Julia Strauss,” I said. “My friends call me Jules.”

“Jules,” he said, giving me another appraising look and shaking my hand again.

So that was how it started: in the Princeton MarketFair, over a Styrofoam plate of sweet and sour chicken and a spring roll that I never got to finish. It seemed so simple. I thought that selling an egg would be like giving blood, like checking the Organ Donation box on your driver’s license, like giving away something you’d never wanted or even noticed much to begin with. And yes, at first, I was just in it for the money. It wasn’t about altruism, or feminism, or any other ism . It was about the cash. But I wasn’t going to blow it on clothes or a car or a graduation bash, on Ecstasy or a trip to Vail, or Europe, or one of the hundred frivolous things my classmates might have chosen. I was going to take that money and I was going to try to save my father… or, more accurately, I was going to give him one last chance to save himself.

Istood in the kitchen with the telephone in my hand, heart pounding, until I heard a familiar voice on the other end say hello. “Ma?”

“Annie?” she asked. I could hear the sound of the TV set blaring in the background. My mother loved her programs, especially The View, which was why I knew exactly where to find her Monday through Friday from eleven to noon. “Are you still coming?”

I exhaled. She’d remembered. That was good. I wasn’t sure whether my mom had anything more than regular forgetfulness or something worse, like early-onset Alzheimer’s, which I’d looked up a few times on the Internet, but if there was something important, something you needed my mother to remember, you had to tell her and tell her and tell her again, and even then be prepared for the possibility that it would still slip her mind.

“Nancy’s here already. We’re just going over my bank statement.”

I imagined my sister sitting at my mother’s kitchen table with her acrylic nails tapping at her calculator. “The boys and I are on our way. And I’ve got some good news.”

“Ooh, fun,” she said. “Bye-bye, now.”

I switched off The Backyardigans, wondering when it was that my mother had started sounding more like a child than my actual children, and hurried Frank Junior, five, and Spencer, who had just turned three, upstairs to the bathroom, the only one in our three-story, five-bedroom farmhouse in Phoenixville, about forty-five miles outside Philadelphia. Frank and I had bought the farmhouse at auction five years ago. It had been a bargain, a big, sprawling place originally built in 1890, on three acres of land, with what the Realtor called “outbuildings” that had once been chicken coops and stalls for horses, along with a working outhouse that stood just off the back porch with the door now stuccoed shut.

Frank and I had grown up in the Great Northeast, in a working-class neighborhood of Philadelphia. I’d lived in a ranch house with my sister and my parents; Frank and his mother and father had a duplex a mile away. Both of us loved the idea of a big place to spread out in and raise our own family: a garden to grow vegetables and flowers, a yard for children to run in, a big country kitchen with two ovens and a six-burner stove where our families could gather and I could cook. When the farm came up for sale, we scraped together enough money for a down payment and convinced a bank that we could afford it. I had a little money I’d inherited from my grandmother, Frank had some help from his parents, and in those days, not so long ago, the banks gave out mortgages like they hand out lollipops, to pretty much anyone who asked.

We’d been so excited about what the farmhouse had — hardwood floors, wood-burning fireplaces, that big, sunny kitchen with whitewashed walls, the thicket of raspberry bushes at the edge of the yard — that we’d barely noticed the things it was lacking: working toilets, reliable appliances, closet space. We hadn’t thought about the high cost of heating and maintaining such a big home, or the time it would take to mow the lawn in the summer and how much it would cost to get the driveway plowed in the winter. Frank had a job working security at the Philadelphia airport, but that wasn’t a permanent thing. He was going to school to be an airplane mechanic; we’d planned on his getting raises and promotions, but of course, we had no way of knowing that the economy would crash and the airlines would end up in trouble. But now, I thought, I’d found a solution, a way to get ourselves out of the hole we’d fallen into and move up a few rungs on the ladder, the way my sister had.

“Frank Junior, you go first,” I said, pointing my oldest son toward the toilet.

He frowned at me, eyebrows drawn, lower lip pouting. “Privacy,” he said. Frank Junior looked just like his father, tall for his age, lean and wiry, with nut-brown skin and tightly curled hair and full lips. Spencer looked more like me: lighter skin, straighter hair, a round face and a sweet, plump belly I’d kiss every time I changed his diaper. People who saw the three of us together, without Frank, didn’t always realize that I was their mom. I took a secret pleasure from that moment, when they’d look from the dark-skinned boys to the white lady taking care of them and try to figure out the deal — was I the sitter? The nanny to a famous rapper’s kids? Some do-gooder who’d done an Angelina and adopted a poor black child from Africa?

I changed Spencer’s diaper, made both boys wash their hands, inspected them to make sure their zippers were zipped, their buttons were buttoned, and their shoes were Velcro’d shut, then bundled their warm little-boy bodies into their coats — it was April, but chilly — and loaded them into the car. My parents were still in Somerton, the neighborhood where I’d grown up, but they’d moved to a condominium that my sister, Nancy, had helped them buy after she and her husband decided that “the house was getting to be too much for them.”

I knew I should have been grateful to my big sister. She’d been right about the house. Three years ago, my father had had a heart attack — a mild one, but still — and my mother was always forgetting about things like having the furnace filters changed and the gutters cleaned and the paper delivery stopped when the two of them went on their bus trips. Still there was something that bothered me about the way Nancy had done it, as if the doctor husband and the degree from Penn State meant that she was smarter than the rest of us, that she was the one who knew best.