Jeffrey Eugenides - Fresh Complaint

“After thirty-five,” the magazine said, “a woman begins to have trouble conceiving.” Tomasina couldn’t believe it. Just when she’d got her head on straight, her body started falling apart. Nature didn’t give a damn about her maturity level. Nature wanted her to marry her college boyfriend. In fact, from a purely reproductive standpoint, nature would have preferred that she marry her high school boyfriend. While Tomasina had been going about her life, she hadn’t noticed it: the eggs pitching themselves into oblivion, month by month. She saw it all now. While she canvassed for RIPIRG in college, her uterine walls had been thinning. While she got her journalism degree, her ovaries had cut estrogen production. And while she slept with as many men as she wanted, her fallopian tubes had begun to narrow, to clog. During her twenties. That extended period of American childhood. The time when, educated and employed, she could finally have some fun. Tomasina once had five orgasms with a cabdriver named Ignacio Veranes while parked on Gansevoort Street. He had a bent, European-style penis and smelled like machine oil. Tomasina was twenty-five at the time. She wouldn’t do it again, but she was glad she’d done it then. So as not to have regrets. But in eliminating some regrets you create others. She’d only been in her twenties. She’d been playing around was all. But the twenties become the thirties, and a few failed relationships put you at thirty-five, when one day you pick up Mirabella and read, “After thirty-five, a woman’s fertility begins to decrease. With each year, the proportion of miscarriages and birth defects rises.”

It had risen for five years now. Tomasina was forty years, one month, and fourteen days old. And panicked, and sometimes not panicked. Sometimes perfectly calm and accepting about the whole thing.

She thought about them, the little children she never had. They were lined at the windows of a ghostly school bus, faces pressed against the glass, huge-eyed, moist-lashed. They looked out, calling, “We understand. It wasn’t the right time. We understand. We do .”

The bus shuddered away, and she saw the driver. He raised one bony hand to the gearshift, turning to Tomasina as his face split open in a smile.

The magazine also said that miscarriages happened all the time, without a woman’s even noticing. Tiny blastulas scraped against the womb’s walls and, finding no purchase, hurtled downward through the plumbing, human and otherwise. Maybe they stayed alive in the toilet bowl for a few seconds, like goldfish. She didn’t know. But with three abortions, one official miscarriage, and who knows how many unofficial ones, Tomasina’s school bus was full. When she awoke at night, she saw it slowly pulling away from the curb, and she heard the noise of the children packed in their seats, that cry of children indistinguishable between laughter and scream.

Everyone knows that men objectify women. But none of our sizing up of breasts and legs can compare with the cold-blooded calculation of a woman in the market for semen. Tomasina was a little taken aback by it herself, and yet she couldn’t help it: once she made her decision, she began to see men as walking spermatozoa. At parties, over glasses of Barolo (soon to be giving it up, she drank like a fish), Tomasina examined the specimens who came out of the kitchen, or loitered in the hallways, or held forth from the armchairs. And sometimes, her eyes misting, she felt that she could discern the quality of each man’s genetic material. Some semen auras glowed with charity; others were torn with enticing holes of savagery; still others flickered and dimmed with substandard voltage. Tomasina could ascertain health by a guy’s smell or complexion. Once, to amuse Diane, she’d ordered every male party guest to stick out his tongue. The men had obliged, asking no questions. Men always oblige. Men like

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