Jennifer Weiner: Then Came You

Back in the kitchen, my mother was pouring coffee. Nancy sat at the table, which was draped in one of my mother’s paisley-patterned tablecloths. In the center of the table there was a bouquet of dried roses (“Explain to me the difference between ‘dried’ and ‘dead,’ “ Frank had said after noticing my mother’s dried-red-pepper wreath) and ceramic salt and pepper shakers in the shape of Minnie and Mickey Mouse. Nancy had her legs crossed, one pointed toe of her leather boot turning in small, irritated-looking circles. “So what’s the big announcement?” she asked.

“I’m going to be a surrogate.” This was not exactly true. What was true was that, that morning, I’d gotten a phone call saying I’d been accepted into the Princeton Fertility Clinic’s program. My information was now available to their clients on their website. Hopefully, soon a client would click on my profile, read the essays I’d worked so hard on and the pictures I’d cropped and retouched, and ask me to have her baby.

“Huh,” said Nancy, fiddling with the zipper on her boot. My hopes of my family’s being happy on my behalf were dwindling. My sister, as usual, looked bored and slightly hostile, and my mother, as usual, looked confused.

“It means,” I began, before Nancy jumped in, leaning forward in her best college-graduate-sister-giving-a-speech mode, which had only gotten more obnoxious since she’d married a doctor and felt qualified to lecture about all things health-related.

“It means she’s going to have a baby for a couple that can’t have one.”

“Or a single mother,” I said, just to stick it in Nancy’s face, to show her that she didn’t have all the answers. “Or a gay couple.”

“Oh,” my mother said. “Oh, well, that’s sweet.”

“She’s not doing it to be sweet,” said Nancy. She pulled her iPhone — one of the new ones — out of her bag and started tapping at the screen with one painted fingernail, like a bird pecking for feed. “She’s doing it for money.”

“That’s not exactly true,” I said. My tone was light, but inside I was furious. Leave it to Nancy to make it sound like it was all about the fifty thousand dollars I’d be paid. . and, also, to be right. For years I’d been trying to find a way to earn money while staying home with the boys, clicking on every “Make Hundreds of $$$ at Home” ad that popped up on the Internet, figuring out whether I could sell makeup or Amway during the ninety minutes three days a week when Frank Junior was at school and Spencer was asleep. I’d filled out an application to be a teacher’s aide at Spencer’s preschool, but the job paid only eight dollars an hour, which, between gas and babysitting meant I’d be losing money if I took it. “Yes, I’ll be getting paid, but it’s not just that. I really do want to help someone.”

“That’s nice.” My mother had drifted toward the sink. She picked up a roll of paper towels, each sheet printed with a row of pink-and-blue marching ducks. I wondered if she was trying to figure out how to make it cuter somehow, to stitch a quick ball-fringe onto the wooden dispenser or cover it in ConTact paper patterned with dancing milkmaids.

“How much will they pay you?” Nancy asked, without looking up from her screen.

“Why would you want to know that?” I inquired pleasantly, which was what Ann Landers said you were supposed to do when someone asked you something rude. I’d never asked Nancy how much she earned working for her husband, answering his phone in her clipped, just-short-of-rude voice and planning their squash getaways. “It’s a lot,” I said when she didn’t answer. “I’m working with one of the best programs on the East Coast.”

“How do you know they’re the best? Because their website says so?” Nancy ran her fingers through her hair curtains and tilted her head, giving me the same wide-eyed, quizzical look the morning-show newscaster used when she was asking the hiker who’d hacked his own arm off whether he shouldn’t have told someone where he’d be going before he got trapped in that slot canyon.

“They have a very high success rate. Very satisfied customers.”

“So how does it work?” my mother asked, joining us at the table with her coffee.

“I wait for a couple to choose me. The egg will be fertilized in the lab…”

“So romantic,” Nancy scoffed under her breath.

“… and then implanted. Nine months later, I’ll have the baby, and give it to the parents.”

A frown creased my mother’s face. “Oh, honey. Won’t that be hard?”

“It won’t be my baby,” I explained. “It’ll be more like being a babysitter. Only no cleaning up.” I tried to smile. My mother still looked worried. Nancy had gone back to glaring at her iPhone. “Lots of women do this,” I continued. “Thousands of them. Lots of them are military wives. The insurance pays for everything to do with a birth…”

“Even if the soldier isn’t the father?” Nancy asked.

I bit my lip. This was sort of a gray area. Frank was in the reserves, and his insurance would cover my care as long as my name was still on his policy, but Leslie at the clinic had told me it might be better not to mention to the nurses and the doctors I’d be seeing that this wasn’t Frank’s baby. “We’ve never had a problem,” she explained. “There’s a long history of Tricare looking the other way in cases like these, and we can recommend doctors and nurses we’ve worked with successfully before. They know how little men like your husband get paid for the important work they do, so they understand about how wives would want to contribute to the family income.” It sounded like this was a speech Leslie had given before. Still, it made me nervous. When the baby was born, I guessed it would be white, like me; white, like most of the couples in America who hired surrogates. It wouldn’t be too hard for anyone who was paying attention to figure out that Frank wasn’t the father. . but I’d worry about that when I got picked. If I got picked.

“What’s your problem?” I asked my sister, tugging at the hem of my sweater, wishing I’d worn something that fit me a little better and wasn’t six years old. . which, inevitably, led to wishing that I had things that fit me better and were new.

“Girls,” my mother murmured, clutching her mug like a life buoy.

“No, seriously, Nancy. If you’ve got a problem, you might as well tell me now.” Not that I’d let her objections stop me. Nancy drove a Lexus and had that iPhone and her platinum card. She had no idea what it was like to live in a big old house, to feed and clothe two boys who seemed to never stop growing and never stop eating, to keep everything repaired and running on one paycheck that never stretched far enough. She could object, she could complain, she could be sarcastic, but unless she was prepared to give me money, nothing she could say would change my mind.

She tucked her hair behind her ears, allowing me a glimpse of the pearls in her lobes — real ones, I knew, that Dr. Scott had bought her for her birthday. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “It just seems unnatural.”

“Like getting your stomach stapled? Because that seemed pretty unnatural to me.”

Nancy jerked her head back like I’d slapped her.

“Banded,” she said. “It’s not stapled, it’s banded.”

“Girls,” my mother repeated. She’d never been the one to break up our fights. Our father was the disciplinarian. He was a baker at a supermarket, a big, husky man who stood six foot three and weighed close to three hundred pounds, not many of which were fat. He baked bread, mostly; rolls, sometimes croissants, leaving the sweet stuff — what he called “the fancies”—to other bakers. The one exception he made was for our birthdays, when he’d get up extra early to bake and frost our cakes. They were beautiful, those cakes. One year I’d asked for the Little Mermaid, and my father had covered my cake in an ocean of turquoise-blue icing that peaked in tiny white-capped waves, tumbling toward a golden shore upon which a topless mermaid with tiny pink-tipped boobies lounged underneath a green gum-drop palm tree.