Then Came You Read online

  “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.

  ANNIE

  I stood 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.

  But that was Nancy for you, I thought, snapping the buckles of Spencer’s car seat closed, then hurrying back into the house for string cheese and sippy cups, to pull my cell phone out of its charger and grab my purse. She used to be fat and bossy, and then, when she finished high school, she’d gone to work in a doctor’s office that did gastric banding and gotten the procedure and become skinny and bossy. One of the doctors in the practice had fallen for her, so now she was married and bossy, with that college degree that she never once let us forget about, the first one that anyone in our family had earned. I should just be grateful, I thought, as I got behind the wheel, that she and Dr. Scott were generous, even though I could feel a bitter taste crawl up the back of my throat whenever Nancy sweetly offered my parents a loan or slapped down her platinum card to pay for their gas or their groceries.

  My mom was waiting at the door, waving as if she hadn’t seen us in months, when, in fact, we’d had dinner with her on Friday. She looked like a children’s book drawing of a grandma, short and plump, with white hair drawn back softly in a bun, a rounded face, and pink cheeks. She wore a flounced denim skirt, a frilly white blouse, boiled-wool clogs on her feet, and a yellow-and-pink apron in a cheerful paisley pattern around her waist. Frank Junior and Spencer pelted up the concrete stairs and into her arms. “How are my handsome boys?” she crooned, hugging them, making me feel ashamed for the way I judged her. Maybe she was silly and forgetful, maybe she spent a lot of time involved in the feuds and dramas of the Real Housewives of whatever city Bravo was visiting that season, but she loved my father, she loved me and Nancy, she loved her grandsons, she loved Frank, and she
even managed to love Dr. Scott, who had the good looks and personality of a dried booger.

  The condo was toasty warm, smelling like baked-apple air freshener and cinnamon potpourri. It wasn’t a big place to begin with, and my mom had covered every available wall and surface with framed stitched samplers, frilly doilies, cushions embroidered with inspirational sayings, scented candles, fringe-shaded lamps, and collections of commemorative snow globes, shot glasses, and thimbles from every place from Branson to Atlantic City to Disney World. On the coffee table were cut-glass dishes of nuts and foil-wrapped candies whose colors would change with the season and were currently pastels for Easter. In the bathroom, extra rolls of toilet paper were tucked underneath the skirts of dolls with old-fashioned dresses and yellow yarn hair. There was even a crocheted sock-style wrap for the air freshener can. The first time we’d visited, Frank said my parents’ place looked like a Cracker Barrel had thrown up in the living room.

  “I baked cookies!” she cried as Spencer inserted a whole pistachio, still in its shell, up his nose, and Frank Junior crammed a fistful of pale-pink M&M’s into his mouth. Moving fast, I scooped the nut out of Spencer’s nostril, gave Frank Junior a stern look, gathered up the dishes of peppermints and butterscotch candies, Hershey’s Kisses and Swedish Fish, and put them out of reach.

  I turned from the mantel, from which Christmas stockings hung year-round, and saw my sister standing in the kitchen door, studying me.

  “Hi, Nance.”

  She nodded. In high school, she had our mother’s rosy cheeks and fine, flyaway light-brown hair. She’d been pretty, sweet-faced, with soft features and a body as plump as a bunch of pillows tied together. It had been hard to take her seriously when she told me what to wear and what to do during the daytime when, at night, I’d fall asleep while she cried over some insult, imagined or, more often, real.

  Now she was a size two with a butt and belly you could bounce quarters off of, and she worked as a part-time bookkeeper and receptionist in Dr. Scott’s office and spent most of her time working out, buying clothes to show off her new body, and, as she’d told Mary Sheehan, a classmate we’d bumped into Christmas shopping at the Franklin Mills mall, “planning our next vacation.”

  “That was kind of rude,” I told her when we stopped at the food court. I was having a pretzel, she was sipping bottled water.

  “It’s true,” she’d said with a shrug of her narrow shoulders. “She asked what I do, and I told her.”

  I took a bite so I wouldn’t say something smart, or point out that Nancy and Dr. Scott, who had chosen not to have children, weren’t exactly renting a yacht and cruising the Greek islands or spending weekends in Paris. Scott’s idea of a good time began and ended with squash, so Nancy’s job — quote-unquote — was to find the resorts that were hosting some kind of medical conference and also had regulation squash courts, so that Dr. Scott could play his game and take the whole thing as a write-off.

  My sister’s face was a smooth and poreless beige, and her hair, which she had chemically straightened every three months, hung in stiff curtains against each cheek. Her mouth was lipsticked and her eyelids shaded, and her jeans looked brand-new. She wore a black sweater tucked into her waistband, which was cinched with a black leather silver-buckled belt, and high-heeled leather boots on her feet. I turned to hide my smile. She looked like Oprah when she’d wheeled that wagon of fat across the stage, a thin, white Oprah full of the talk-show host’s confidence and self-regard. I hugged her, feeling dowdy in my own jeans (unpressed) and sweater (untucked) and boots that were not leather or high-heeled but, instead, rubber-soled lace-ups lined with dingy fake fur, fine for a muddy Pennsylvania spring but not what you’d call fashionable. Once I’d been the pretty one, the thin (at least by comparison) one, the stylish one. But I’d kept on about ten pounds of baby weight after each boy and there was hardly any money for new clothes. These days, what I wore had to be practical, and I barely had time to comb my hair, let alone style it, or pay someone three hundred dollars every three months to do it for me. I looked ordinary, a woman of average height, a little rounder than she should have been, with light-brown hair usually in a ponytail and blue-green eyes usually without shadow on their lids or mascara on their lashes, a woman with a diaper bag slung over her shoulder and a plastic bag full of Cheerios in her pocket who maybe could have been pretty if she’d had a little more time.

  “Mom said you had news,” she said. “Are you pregnant again?” She scrunched up her nose, loading the question with just enough distaste that I could hear it, but not enough that I could call her on it. My mother lingered by the oven, watching the cookies and keeping an eye on us for signs of violence.

  “No, I’m not pregnant.” I tried to keep my own voice pleasant, thinking, You’re not the only one with plans. You’re not the only one with dreams. “But that’s part of what I wanted to tell you, Mom.”

  My mother perked up. “What’s going on?”

  “Give me a minute.” I got the boys set up in front of the TV in my mother’s living room, telling myself that a half hour of something educational was a necessary evil. Normally, I tried to limit their TV time and get them out and moving in the fresh air as much as I could. You’ve got to run boys like dogs, my mother had told me when Frank Junior was just two. I’d thought it was a terrible thing to say. Once Frank Junior started walking I understood, but in my parents’ condo complex there was nowhere to run. Most of the residents were older, and the tiny rectangles of deck off their kitchens were all they had. The playground was just sad, with a rusted swing set, a broken teeter-totter, and a single basketball hoop. There was a pool, but the one time we’d tried to use it, the lifeguard had yelled at the boys for running, for splashing, for cannonballing, and for improper use of the water aerobic teacher’s foam noodles, all within ten minutes of our arrival. We’d never gone back.

  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.