Then Came You Read online

  “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.

  “It’s just strange,” said Nancy. . and she sounded truly confused. I hadn’t heard that tone much since she’d gotten skinny and gotten married and gotten the idea that she knew everything there was to know about everything. “I saw a TV special about these women in India. Women in America hire women there to carry their babies — mostly because they can’t have kids of their own, but sometimes just because they don’t want to. They don’t want to gain weight or have stretch marks or be inconvenienced. It just seemed wrong. Women shouldn’t use each other that way.”

  “Well, I’m not being used, and I won’t be having a baby for someone who just doesn’t want to be inconvenienced,” I said, even though I wasn’t completely sure if this was true. The clinic’s literature said I’d be helping an infertile couple—fertility was, of course, right there in the place’s name — but I could imagine some rich woman saying she was infertile and getting a surrogate just because she wanted to wear a bikini that summer, or didn’t want to miss out on a wine tasting or a ski vacation. Or, I thought meanly, a squash trip. “I’m going to be helping someone.”

  There was a wooden bowl full of apples next to the salt and pepper shakers. My mother took one and started peeling it with a silver fruit knife with a mother-of-pearl handle that she’d ordered from QVC, a channel she affectionately called “the Q.” Only your mother, Frank had said, has pet names for her favorite stations. “Do you think you can do that? Have a baby and then just hand it over?”

  I looked past her into the living room. The boys were on the couch, their crumb-laden napkins on the coffee table. Frank Junior was holding Spencer’s hand, the way he did when his little brother got scared at the movies. My boys. I thought about the bicycle Frank Junior wanted, a red Huffy in the window of the shop downtown that he would visit every time I took him on my errands with me. I thought about being able to sign Spencer up for sports readiness at the Little Gym, where classes cost four hundred dollars a semester. I thought about buying new winter coats and boots, instead of scouring the cardboard boxes at the church’s winter swap for hand-me-downs, and not worrying if they lost a mitten or if Frank Junior tore the sleeve of a sweater that I’d been planning to pass down to his brother. “I think I’ll be sad. But it won’t be my baby. It’ll be theirs. The intended parents.” Intended parents was a term I’d learned from the surrogacy websites. “As long as I can remember that, I should be fine.”

  “And Frank?” My sister, I’d thought more than once, was like a woman on a long car trip with her finger pressed against the stereo’s “search” button, scanning up and down the dial, looking not for music but for trouble. “Have you talked to him about this?”

  “We’ve discussed it.” In my head. In fact, this discussion was my rehearsal, my trial run for how I’d tell my husband what I’d done.

  “I think it’s great,” my mother said.

  “I think it’s crazy,” said Nancy.

  “You’re entitled to your opinion,” I said stiffly, and got up from the table. But Fancy Nancy wasn’t done yet.

  “I know you,” Nancy said. “You’re tenderhearted.” The way she said it—tenderhearted—it was like she was telling me I had bad breath, or hepatitis C. “They’re going to give you that baby to hold and you won’t want to let her go.”

  “Why do you think it’ll be a girl? I only have boys.” The words came out more ruefully than I’d intended. I’d always wanted a girl, and I’d hoped, privately, that Spencer would be one, and that I could dress her in all the beautiful little pink things I’d looked at when I was buying Frank Junior his tiny jeans and sweatshirts. I’d felt a little sad when they’d told me I was having another boy, because two was our limit, unless Frank won the lottery or I found a way to change his mind. I would have loved a big family, but we couldn’t afford one.

  “Especially if it’s a girl,” said Nancy. I sighed. We’d shared a bedroom until she left for college. She’d watched me dress up my Barbies in outfits I’d sewn myself and cook cakes for Roxie, the cocker spaniel next door, in my Easy-Bake Oven. I
f anyone in the world knew how much I would have loved having a daughter, it was Nancy.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, and looked at my mother. “Want to take the boys for pizza? I told them we’d do Chuck E. Cheese.”

  “Oh, right. Let me get my coat.”

  I turned to my sister. “You’re welcome to join us.”

  Nancy rolled her eyes. “Those places make me feel like I’m going to have a seizure. And you know I don’t eat wheat or dairy.”

  Or anything else. “Okay, then. See you soon.”

  I got the boys back in the car, feeling as if a thundercloud had settled in my chest. All I’d wanted was for someone to be happy for me — happy with me, straight-up happy, not happy with questions, or happy with reservations, or happy but confused, or not happy at all. . and there was no one in my life, including my husband, who fit the bill.

  BETTINA

  I met my stepmother — not that I would ever dignify the bitch with that title — the spring of my senior year at Vassar. My father placed the call to my dorm room himself, instead of having his assistant call me, and then making me wait on hold until he could come to the phone. Big news, I thought. Important. “Tina,” he said. “There’s someone special I want you to meet.”

  He sent a car to take me home for the weekend. As usual, I asked Manuel to collect me at the coffee shop downtown, even though I wasn’t fooling anyone — in the era of Google and Gawker, all of my classmates who cared to make the effort of typing my name into a search engine knew exactly who I was.

  Manuel drove me to Bridgehampton. The two of them, my father and India, were waiting for me in the doorway of the gray shingled house, like an ad for Cadillacs or Cialis, or for one of those Internet dating services for old people. When I saw him standing there, his arm around her narrow waist, I knew. “This is India,” my father said.

  “The subcontinent?” I asked. India had laughed like she was reading words off a script: “Ha… ha… ha.” Then my brothers arrived, Trey pulling up in the minivan he’d bought when his daughter was born, Tommy slouched in the seat beside him, like he was ashamed to be riding in such a desperately unhip vehicle. My father beamed and dispensed hugs and introductions, and we all went in for dinner.

  I sat quietly, observing, in the big kitchen with its white-painted floors and blue-and-white-striped cushioned benches. My parents had bought the place when I was ten, and my mother had decorated in a nautical theme, all crisp blues and whites and windows shaped like portholes, with canvas slipcovers for the couches and sisal rugs on the floor. I wondered if India was already dreaming of the improvements she’d make, the addition she’d build, the bedrooms she’d annex for her Pilates equipment and her clothes.

  Once the meal was finished and my father and India — quote-unquote — had adjourned to the living room (India in her heels and fancy jeans and the fringed tweed Chanel jacket that she’d worn to pick at a meal of hamburgers and Carvel ice-cream cake), my brothers and I excused ourselves, then snuck through the butler’s pantry and out onto the back porch. Tommy pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and gave one to me and one to Trey. My classmates would have howled to see me smoking — to them, I was Bettina the straitlaced, Bettina the pure. The truth was, I only smoked with my brothers, and I only did it because it was one of the rare times they’d let me into their circle and talk to me like a person.

  “Now, I ain’t saying she a gold digger,” Tommy sang. Trey shoved his hands into his pockets and gave a hooting laugh. I rolled my cigarette between my fingers and announced, “If any of those parts are original, then I am the queen of Romania.”

  “Dorothy Parker,” said Tommy, tipping the bottle of beer he’d snagged from the refrigerator toward me in a toast. “Nice.”

  Tommy flicked his lighter and shielded the flame with his hand until my cigarette was lit. I inhaled, blew a plume of smoke into the starry night sky, and delivered my one-word assessment of our father’s new ladyfriend: “Bitch.”

  “C’mon, Bets,” said Tommy. “Maybe she’s not that bad.”

  “Oh, she’s that bad,” I assured him. I knew her type. India — not that I believed for a second that India could actually be her name — had made an effort during the meal, asking Tommy about his band, Dirty Birdy, and Trey about his daughter and me about my internship appraising European paintings for Christie’s. She let us know that she knew things about us, where we lived and what we liked and what our hobbies were: that Tommy played the bass and guitar, that I collected things — seashells and bottlecaps when I was little; antique compacts and cigarette cases now. She was polite; she was — or at least acted — interested. She’d laughed (“ha. . ha. . ha”) when she’d gotten ketchup on the sleeve of her blouse, and hopped up from the table to clear the dishes. All of this should have eased my mind, but there was a hardness about her, something calculated, flinty and unkind. I could see scars behind her ears, beneath her chin. The skin of her cheeks was too taut and her breasts were too big for her frame. Her hair was dyed, her nose was done, and I suspected tinted lenses were responsible for the luminous indigo of her eyes. Who are you, really, I wondered as she rinsed and dried plates and kept up her expert, cheerful chatter. Who are you? And what do you want with my dad?

  “I bet her name’s really something like Tammy,” I told my brothers. Trey just shrugged, and Tommy said, in the calm way that made me crazy, “Trying to make something of yourself isn’t a crime.”

  “Making something of yourself is fine,” I replied. “Getting a boob job, dying your hair, getting your nose done, changing your name, whatever. That’s all fine. I don’t object. But she should make her own money, instead of going after his.”

  “Dad’s a big boy,” said Trey, thumbing his BlackBerry, probably to see if his wife had called or texted or sent pictures of the most recent adorable thing that nine-month-old Violet had done during the three minutes since he’d last checked.

  “And he’s lonely,” said Tommy.

  I exhaled. This was the truly infuriating part. If our father had serially discarded his wives, trading up for younger, hotter models, we’d have rolled our eyes and agreed that he was getting what he deserved with the world’s Indias. But our mother had left him. After all her time in Manhattan, her years as a stay-at-home mom, a PTA volunteer, a fund-raiser for cancer research and the preservation of historic churches, she’d fallen under the sway of her yoga instructor, one Michael Essensen of Brick, New Jersey, who, after a six-week sojourn in Mumbai, had renamed himself Baba Mahatma and opened a yoga center and spiritual retreat five blocks from our apartment. The Baba, as my brothers and I called him, started popping up in passing in my mother’s conversation: The Baba says Americans should eat a more plant-based diet. The Baba says colonics changed his life. A few months after she’d started taking classes, we would come home from school and find the Baba himself in the kitchen, in all his ponytailed, tattooed, yoga-panted splendor, dispensing wisdom over a pot of green tea. “Oh, hi, guys,” my mother would say, blinking like she was trying to remember our names. The Baba, who had a chiseled chin and an artificial tan and flowing locks inspired by Fabio, would give us an indulgent nod, pour more tea for both of them (never offering me or my brothers a cup), and continue talking about whatever cleanse or fast or ritual he was endorsing that week. At fourteen, I’d been able to identify his spiel as incense-scented nonsense, but my mother had believed every word of it, swearing to her friends (and, eventually, to the strangers she’d corner in the schoolyard or the dentist’s office or the fish counter at Russ & Daughters) that the Baba was magical, and that his ministrations had helped her survive the mood swings and hot flashes of menopause when the hormone therapy prescribed by the top doctors in Manhattan had failed.

  My mother had been born Arlene Sandusky in a suburb of Detroit in 1958. She’d married my father at twenty-three, then moved to New York, where she’d had three children and become an enthusiastic baker of cookies and trimmer of Christmas trees, a woman who liked nothing bett
er than taking on some elaborate holiday-related project — assembling and frosting a gingerbread house, or running the schoolwide Easter egg hunt. In the wake of her association with the Baba, she’d ditched her traditions and her Martha Stewart cookbooks. She’d grown her hair long and let it go gray. She’d swapped her designer suits and high heels for embroidered tunics and thick-strapped leather sandals, and traded her Bulgari perfume for a mixture of essential oils that made her smell like the backseat of a particularly malodorous taxicab, sandalwood and curry with hints of vomit. She’d gotten a belly piercing that I’d seen and a tattoo that I hadn’t — I hadn’t even been able to bring myself to ask where or of what—and, eventually, she began slipping the Baba tens of thousands of dollars. When my father’s accountants finally started to ask questions about what the Order of New Light was and whether it was, in fact, a tax-free C corporation, she’d announced her intentions to get a divorce and follow the Baba to Taos, where he was building a retreat offering intensive yoga training, raw cuisine, and a clothing-optional sweat lodge.

  I came home from school one afternoon and found luggage lined up in the hall and my mother in her bedroom, packing. “I am renouncing the meaninglessness of the material,” she said, sitting on top of her Louis Vuitton suitcase to get the zipper closed. I pointed out that the meaninglessness of the material did not seem to cover the great quantity of Tory Burch tunics and Juicy Couture sweat suits that she had packed.

  “Oh, Bettina,” she said, in a tone that mixed scorn and, unbelievably, pity. “Don’t be so rigid.” She kissed me, taking me into her arms for an unwelcome and musky embrace.

  “Be good to your father,” she said, smoothing my hair as I tried not to wriggle away. “He’s a good man, but he’s just not very evolved.”

  After that, my mother communicated by letters and postcards, while my father became Topic A in the gossip columns and, when he started dating again, prey for single ladies of a certain age. There was the magazine editor famous enough to have been skewered in a movie, played by an actress who, in my opinion, was ten years too young and significantly too pretty to be a plausible standin. She was followed by a real-estate mogul with a face permanently frozen into a look of startled puzzlement, then a newspaper columnist, similarly Botoxed, who’d made a career out of being bitchy on the Sunday-morning political chat shows. In that realm of gray-suited, gray-faced men, it turned out that even a not-terribly-attractive fifty-two-year-old could pass herself off as a babe if she wore pencil skirts, kept her hair dyed, and made the occasional reference to oral sex.