Lance Olsen - Girl Imagined by Chance

You’ve been thinking a lot about this, you whispered supportively.

Dreaming its own dreams beneath your heart. The very idea frightens me.

You watched children the size of Army tanks abusing their parents’ house on the screen. Audience members in your neighborhood chortled knowingly. Something the size of a great oak fell and smashed in Dolby sound.

We could always adopt, you whispered after a while.

In certain circumstances, I have no problem with adoption. Infertility, say. Age concerns. But for us adoption would spell bad faith. Simple cowardice in the face of the unfaceable.

I don’t understand, if I’m being really honest here, you whispered, how parents do it. Have you ever noticed that hollow, wasted, terrified look in their eyes two weeks after their babies arrive?

Like they finally understood the lifelong consequences of what they’ve just done?

One week they’re thirty, the next fifty.

Look how their skin turns gray overnight.

Their shoulders sag. They lose the ability to focus. They suffer from symptoms of sleep deprivation. They become irritable and self-absorbed and easily distracted.

They lose the ability to use an adult vocabulary and syntax and start worrying about how they’re going to pay for everything.

And then they begin talking in public about the color of their baby’s stool: semi-solid with light swirly hazelnut hues throughout, and so forth.

And then their child’s backing out of the driveway on the road to college and they’re standing on the front doorstep, wondering where the last eighteen years of their lives have gone, yet at the same time crushed by an overwhelming sense of loss they refuse to admit exists, saying every minute was worth it.

The young couple behind you hurrumphed and rose to move to a different section of the theater.

You noticed the woman was pregnant.

And labor, Andi said, no longer whispering. Don’t forget labor. They say birthing feels as if you grabbed your upper lip in your fist and yanked your facial flesh over your skull. In terms of pain magnitude, it’s the equivalent of losing a limb while you’re fully conscious.

Excuse me, the usher susurrated, kneeling beside you, pimply pale face floating in darkness, but I’m going to have to ask you to keep it down. People are trying to watch the movie.

It’s okay, Andi told him. We’re done.

She stood and without hesitation walked up the aisle toward the exit.

You looked at her vanishing, looked at the usher, handed him what was left of your popcorn, and hurried to catch up.

One morning not long afterwards you drove Andi to the hospital.

One afternoon not long afterwards you waited by her bedside as she swam through anesthetic.

A box of cherry chocolates and a dozen roses in your lap.

Cherry chocolates and chocolate-covered marzipans.

Then you drove her home.

Chocolate-covered marzipans being her favorite.

An unassuming half-inch incision at the base of her belly button.

It was this easy to make a decision.

It was this easy to change.

It always had been.

Neither of you mentioned children again, except sometimes on New Year’s Eve, appraising where you had traveled and where you were still planning to travel over a glass of champagne in the bathtub.

In order to congratulate yourself.

It was not for everyone, you agreed.

Now you are A.

Now you are B.

But you did not miss them.

You seldom even thought about them.

As you slid through your thirties, your friends began birthing around you.

It felt like mortars dropping in closer and closer to your home.

You gradually came to understand what being a minority feels like.

On occasion Andi wondered aloud what was wrong with her, biologically speaking, because she did not respond to children, did not long for them, found them nine times out of ten unpleasant ectoplasmic correlatives to black holes, absorbing the light from everything that had the misfortune to fall into their gravitational fields.

Being a minority feels like being wrapped in Saran Wrap.

Sometimes when you invited friends over for dinner, they would show up carrying their children in elaborately designed pseudo-Indian backpacks with bags full of toys and video cartridges at their sides.

Being a minority feels like forgetting cornerstone phrases of a foreign language you have rehearsed over and over in your mind as soon as the person in the customs booth begins asking you questions.

The children uninvited, it nearly goes without saying.

Sometimes you would spend the rest of the evening attempting to have a single meaningful conversation as your friends fluttered like finches around their offspring.

Leg cramps.

Leg cramps and skin problems.

Sometimes, particularly as the children began to enlarge, Andi and you got down on the carpet and played with them, she warily, you more or less content though never fully engaged, because you felt this was what was expected of you.

Got down on the carpet or took them to arcades, amusement parks, and other locales you needed a child by your side in order to enter.

Leg cramps, skin problems, and high blood pressure.

Exhausted, you were always happy to return them to their owners by sundown.

Leg cramps, skin problems, high blood pressure, and hemorrhoids.

Watching their owners reach for them, sincerely delighted expressions sprawling across their faces, it always struck you with great force how unqualified every person in the world was to raise another human being.

Now it strikes you how very little you know about the actual process.

What it entails.

What it is like.

It strikes you as you look out the window at Andi ambling up the driveway after slipping into the mailbox a padded envelope for Grannam which contains the fuzzy photo of her taken in a city park, in the woods, or in someone’s overgrown backyard with the word Expecting! scrawled across the back.

You never really paid it much attention.

Why would you?

You never really asked your friends what it felt like because you were simply never that curious.

It stands to reason.

The whole thing should come as no real surprise.

Still, to pull it off, you explain to Andi as she ambles through the front door, pinkish heat patching her cheeks, you are going to have to undertake some solid research.

This will not be as easy as it at first appears, you say.

This will not be a breeze.

Andi reflects a moment and agrees.

She stands there, apparently startled by the sudden earnestness in your voice, agreeing.

Next day she detours into Moscow on her way to Pullman for a shoot and launches a hunt at the university library.

You stay at home and run multiple computer searches on various engines during breaks from work.

Initially you come across adult sites featuring photos of pregnant women presumably absorbed in imaginative if depressing acts, then lengthy debates on Medicaid coverage for expectant moms, teen hotlines and chat spaces, programs for housing knocked-up kids, family planning clinics, the benefits of vitamin B and folic acid, some kinky prosthetics available solely in northern Europe, homepages highlighting proud mothers-to-be or lately delivered grimacing babies, and instructions on how to become pregnant, how not to become pregnant, how to become unpregnant, what exactly pregnancy is.

Now you are floating through a digital Milky Way of pertinent data.

One photo demonstrating that at eight weeks an embryo appears to be a diaphanous half-inch-long tadpole suspended in black-liquid void.

If you have morning sickness, you learn, you should try eating crackers.

If you smoke, so does your baby.

Andi almost two decades ago, raising her camera for the first time in your presence.