A Theory of Small Earthquakes Read online

  “It isn’t a color.”

  “It’s wabi-sabi. That’s better than a color.”

  “That heap is thirty years old, Zoe. Keep the paint job and change the car.”

  “I’m attached to it.” Zoe gave Alison a meaningful look. “You know how I get when I’m attached.”

  She crossed the threshold and draped her chartreuse corduroy jacket over the tipsy wooden coatrack that guarded the entryway. “Nice jacket,” Alison said. “Is it new?”

  Zoe nodded. “Buffalo Exchange. The clearance rack. Not too many white people will wear this color.”

  “Except for crazy you.”

  “Except for crazy me.”

  “Want some tea?”

  Zoe followed Alison into the kitchen. Alison filled the kettle and set out black and red Mother Jones mugs. Zoe stood in front of the fridge, reading the scraps taped to its door. A Doonesbury strip mocking the recall of California governor Gray Davis and his replacement by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Berkeley High parent newsletter’s review of Finding Nemo, which Corey wanted to see. Flyers for MoveOn antiwar candlelight vigils. Coupons for Crest Whitestrips and Tom’s of Maine deodorant.

  “That stuff doesn’t work,” Zoe said.

  “The Whitestrips? Or MoveOn?” Alison asked.

  “The deodorant,” Zoe answered. “It covers up the stink with a smell that’s even worse.”

  The kettle whistled. Alison dropped two chamomile tea bags into a cow-shaped teapot, her birthday gift from Zoe the year before. The two of them sat in ladder-back chairs at the round oak table in the window, sprays of winter sunshine splashing over their hands.

  “New place mats,” Zoe said, fingering the one in front of her.

  “Crate & Barrel,” Alison admitted, resisting a vestigial tug of guilt. Zoe could live the rest of her life on the interest from her inheritance, but she still gave Alison grief about buying anything new.

  “Great colors,” Zoe conceded, fluffing her asymmetrical purple bangs.

  Alison put out a plate of Zoe’s favorite cookies, the new bittersweet version of Petit Écolier. Before the plate had quite landed on the table, Zoe had pried a chocolate tablet off a cookie and popped it into her mouth. Her hands were stained with blue, green, and yellow paint.

  “What are you working on these days?” Alison asked.

  “I’m doing a poster for the Human Rights Campaign’s gay marriage campaign. San Francisco’s going to start letting gay people get married. Maybe next month!”

  “I bet every gay artist in the country wanted to do that poster. And they picked you.” She lifted her Mother Jones mug and clinked it against Zoe’s. “Major mazel tov,” Alison said.

  Zoe’s face was radiant. “Thanks.”

  “I need to talk to you about something,” Alison said, lowering her voice. “I don’t know how to tell you this . . .”

  “You’re scaring me. Spit it out.”

  “Mark and I are trying to have a baby. Another baby, I mean.”

  Twin crimson spots bloomed on Zoe’s cheeks. She leaned back in her chair. “When did you decide?”

  “Last month. After—” Alison paused. She’d told Zoe that she and Mark had been getting along better. But, in keeping with their unspoken agreement—Zoe didn’t share the details of her flings, and Alison didn’t share the details of her relationship with Mark—Alison hadn’t told her how their reconciliation had come about. “After that trouble with Corey.”

  Zoe raised her eyebrows. “Does Corey know?”

  “We’ll tell him when there’s something to tell. At our ages, who knows how long this might take.”

  “Right,” Zoe said flatly. “Who knows how long getting pregnant might take.” She pushed her chair back and put her mug in the sink. “Gotta go,” she said. She took off down the hall.

  “Zoe, wait.”

  “Bye, Corey,” Zoe yelled up the stairs. “See you tomorrow at four.” The next thing Alison heard was the slamming of the door.

  24.

  oakland

  February 2004

  Alison felt her abdomen cramping, felt familiar stickiness in her underwear. “Dammit!” she cursed. She had her period. Again.

  She tried telling herself that she’d spotted when she was pregnant with Corey—the same bit of denial that had failed her four weeks before, eight weeks before, and twelve weeks before, when each of her periods came right on time.

  Fifteen years earlier, when she couldn’t get pregnant with Zoe, Alison had a choice of factors to blame. The unnatural artificial insemination process. Zoe’s stressful obsessiveness. Her own ambivalence. Alison had nothing and no one to blame now. She and Mark were using the oldest, most natural insemination method on earth. And they’d been trying for three months. And she was fifteen years older now, and their time was running out.

  Alison called Mark at work. “Oh, honey,” he said.

  Alison started to cry. “I feel like I failed you again.”

  “When have you ever failed me, my love?”

  Every day I haven’t told you I’ve been through this before.

  “I was thinking,” Mark said. “Maybe we should see a specialist. There’s a place near my office. Redwood Fertility Center. It’s one of the top-rated clinics in the world.”

  Alison drew in a sharp breath. “You keep telling me it’ll happen. But you’ve been researching fertility clinics. You knew it wouldn’t work.”

  “You know me, Alison. Always with a Plan B. So what do you think?”

  What Alison thought was, I should have told you the whole truth from the start. I wish I could tell you the whole truth now.

  “I bet those doctors cost a fortune,” she said instead.

  “Our insurance will cover most of it.” Mark paused. “But if you don’t want to do this—”

  “I want to try,” Alison said, stuffing the lie inside the truth. Or was it the truth she was stuffing inside a lie?

  Alison heard the pneumatic rattle of a streetcar outside Mark’s window; the clatter of phones ringing, printers printing in the rabbit warren of Mother Jones’s new offices on Market Street.

  “It’s weird,” Mark said. “I thought this would just happen, didn’t you? We sure didn’t have any trouble getting pregnant the first time.”

  Alison imagined telling him the whole story. She imagined him hurt and furious. She imagined him leaving her. Leaving her and Corey. “We were twenty-seven the first time, remember?” she asked. “Give me the number of that clinic. I’ll make an appointment.”

  Alison’s cramps were worse, and her headache had blossomed. It was the middle of a workday and she had two stories due on Monday, but she decided to break her own stringent work rules and lie down for a while.

  She made herself a cup of the Women’s Wisdom Fertility Tea Zoe had given her and carried it to bed. She got under the covers and flicked on the ABC midday news.

  “Gay Marriage Debate Heats Up,” the headline read. A film clip rolled, dated the day before, February 13, 2004. In the rotunda of San Francisco City Hall, two women in white bridal gowns stood holding hands with a little girl between them, facing a beaming city clerk. “I now pronounce you wife and wife,” the clerk proclaimed. “Congratulations. You may now kiss the brides.”

  The women lifted their daughter off her feet and wrapped their arms around her and each other, their faces streaming with tears. The crowd in the rotunda applauded. Rose petals drifted through the air.

  Lucky them, Alison thought. They picked the right place at the right time. Fifteen years ago, no one would have given Zoe and me a marriage license, let alone a wedding on TV. She remembered the way she’d laughed off Zoe’s marriage proposal: a joke in 1988, no laughing matter now.

  “Was it me you stopped wanting?” Zoe had asked Alison ten years before, the only time they’d talked about their breakup. “Or did you just want to be a normal mother more than you wanted what we had?”

  Alison couldn’t answer that question then, and she couldn’t answer
it now. I wish I’d been with Zoe when being gay wasn’t such a big deal, Alison thought. Maybe then I’d know why I really left Zoe—because I was afraid to trust her, or because I couldn’t trust the world not to break our child’s heart.

  “When did your last period start?” Mark whispered. “Two weeks ago,” Alison whispered back.

  They were sitting in matching mauve chairs in the windowless, mauve and gray waiting room of Redwood Fertility Center. Mark was bent over the clipboard in his lap, filling out forms. Alison was trying not to see herself in the waiting room of the East Bay Sperm Bank with Zoe in 1989.

  This time she had more to worry about than the humiliating questions and the tedious temperature taking, and the high-tech tests and painful procedures. What if these new fertility doctors could tell, somehow, that she’d been inseminated in the past? What if someone who’d worked at the East Bay Sperm Bank in 1989 worked at Redwood Fertility now? What if the tests proved Mark was sterile and couldn’t be Corey’s father? What if trying to make her family bigger and better tore her family apart?

  Attempting to distract herself from the train wreck happening in her head, she checked out the other people in the room. A heavily made-up, suburban-looking single woman. Two young women, obviously a couple, but when did lesbians get so stylish and so hot? A tense-looking straight couple with salt-and-pepper hair and deep parentheses around their eyes and mouths. It did not improve Alison’s mood to realize that they were probably her age.

  Mark returned the clipboard to the woman behind the front desk and picked a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle off the coffee table. “Shit. Look at this,” he said, pointing to the headline. “Bush Lead Widens in New Poll.”

  “Bush probably paid for that poll himself,” Alison said. The straight couple glared at her. One of the lesbians gave her a two-fisted thumbs-up.

  Alison went back to studying the author bios on the Vanity Fair contributor’s page. For once her chronic professional jealousy was coming in handy, helping her forget how she felt about being where she was.

  “Alison Rose and Mark Miller.” The nurse summoned them from the doorway, holding a manila folder. “I’m Nancy. Welcome.”

  Nancy led them down a long corridor decorated with blurry watercolors in mauve plastic frames and into a luxurious office. Floor-to-ceiling windows framed views of the city’s boxy skyline and, beyond it, the choppy gray bay. Photos of beaming parents holding newborn babies covered the bulletin board behind a glass-and-chrome desk.

  Nancy waved Mark and Alison into leather-and-chrome chairs. “Dr. Schrier will be right with you. Can I get you anything while you’re waiting? Water? Coffee? Herb tea?”

  “Shot of Stoli?” Alison asked.

  Nancy smiled. “Second choice?”

  “Herbal tea.”

  Nancy nodded and left the room.

  “You sure you’re all right?” Mark asked.

  “Uh-huh. Why?”

  “You usually don’t make Stoli jokes when you’re fine.”

  “I guess I’m little nervous,” Alison admitted.

  “About what?”

  Alison shrugged, wishing she could tell him.

  Mark took her hand, looked around the office. “Nice digs, huh?”

  “If you like Roche-Bobois.” Alison had been threatening to toss every stick of make-do furniture that had accumulated in their house and start over with a $4,000 Roche-Bobois couch. That plan was on hold now that she and their funky furniture might be facing another eighteen years of spit-up, grape juice, and sweaty teenagers.

  Mark tugged on a hank of Alison’s hair. “Die, yuppie scum.”

  “Let them eat Ikea.” Alison let her head fall back into the cup of his hand. She closed her eyes, wishing she were anywhere else.

  “Careful. This is hot.” Nancy handed Alison a steaming mauve mug imprinted with the Redwood Fertility Center logo, which seemed to depict sperm chasing one another around an endless circle. On her way out, Nancy nearly collided with a tall, balding man in a white lab coat, knife-pleated gray trousers, and gleaming leather loafers.

  “Don Schrier.” He shook Mark’s hand, then Alison’s, leaving behind a faint medicinal smell. “Good to meet you both.”

  Schrier settled into the chair behind the desk, perched a pair of glasses on his nose, and flipped their chart open. “Let’s start with why you’re here.”

  “The Transamerica Tower was closed,” Alison said, “and we heard you had great views.”

  Mark shot Alison an annoyed look, then turned to Schrier. “She makes jokes when she’s anxious.”

  “Guilty as charged,” Alison said. “Sorry.”

  Mark cleared his throat. “We’ve been trying to get pregnant since December,” he said. “Alison’s forty-two. I’m forty-three. We don’t want to miss our chance.”

  “Understood.” Schrier peered at them over his glasses. “Most of our patients are in your age range. And the fact that you’ve already conceived a child together bodes well for your chance of doing it again.”

  If we actually conceived a child together, Alison thought.

  “You have one son, age thirteen?”

  “We got pregnant by accident.” Mark grinned. “The first time we were together, actually. But we were in our twenties then.”

  Alison felt queasy. “I’ve heard the miscarriage rate is high for women my age,” she said.

  “True. But less so in a second pregnancy than in a first.” Schrier pulled out a lab slip, checked a few boxes, and handed it to Alison. “Give this to Nancy on your way out. We’ll get started with some noninvasive tests. In a few days, when the results are in, we’ll have you come in again.”

  Schrier stood up. “Much as I wish I could, I can’t promise you an outcome. But I can guarantee that we’ll give you the best fertility treatment available.”

  He looked at Alison. “You’re in good hands. Really, Alison, you have nothing to be nervous about.”

  You have no idea, she thought.

  Alison knocked on Corey’s bedroom door. As was his habit lately, he actually opened it. Alison pointed to his ears and he removed his iPod buds.

  “The meeting starts in ten minutes.” Alison peeked around him, scanning his room the way she checked her breasts in the shower, hoping not to find what she was looking for. It had been months since Corey had given them reason to worry, but Alison’s plan was to keep a close eye on him for a while. Until he was thirty-five or forty.

  Like lots of kids at Berkeley High, Corey skipped school for anti–Iraq War demonstrations, wore a BUCK FUSH button on his backpack, and lay down in the school courtyard at lunchtime, dressed in black, for “die-ins.” But despite the resurgence of his good nature since the night he’d broken down in Alison’s arms, Corey still refused to appear in public with his parents.

  Always on the lookout for things they could do as a family, Alison had invited him to the MoveOn meeting and Fahrenheit 9/11 screening that she and Mark were hosting that night. Anything happening on a video screen, she figured, gave her an advantage. Also bribe-worthy: the food.

  “What meeting?” Corey’s voice cracked. He cleared his throat, reminding Alison of one of Mark’s annoying habits.

  “MoveOn,” Alison said. “I told you two days ago, remember? You said you’d come.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “We’re having Zachary’s Pizza.”

  “Cool,” Corey said noncommittally.

  “See you downstairs,” Alison said optimistically.

  At seven, Mark arrived with a stack of steaming Zachary’s boxes in his arms, followed by a stream of people. Alison found the twenty-three of them a predictable bunch. They were white, mostly, mostly her age or older, most of them wearing T-shirts pledging allegiance to the San Francisco Mime Troupe, KQED, Sierra Club, Kerry for a Stronger America.

  They came bearing predictable platters loaded with predictable foods—wilting green salads and browning fruit salads, lumpy homemade hummus and whole-wheat pita bread, carrot stick
s and bowls of French bread filled with veggie dip. They pulled bottles of Sierra Nevada and Calistoga from coolers, piled their plates with Zachary’s four-pound slices of spinach and mushroom pizza, and settled onto the couch, the chairs, the floor. They talked and argued predictably about the prediction that Bush would win by a landslide in the election, only eight months away.

  Alison fought her chronic cynicism, reminding herself why she’d invited these people into her home. As Corey got older, and Zoe got busier with her Juvenile Hall job, and Alison started anticipating the isolation a new baby would bring, she’d been forcing herself to connect with new people. Since their reconciliation, she and Mark had been making efforts to do things together. And then there was the little matter of George W. Bush.

  “We’re going to start,” Alison said. Mark turned on the computer and sat down beside her. The Internet broadcast began with Joan Blades, cofounder of MoveOn, announcing that thousands of people across the country were doing what Alison and her houseful of predictable people were doing. She introduced Michael Moore, who introduced his movie.

  “Corey would love this,” Alison whispered to Mark.

  “Or so his mom would like to believe.”

  “I’m going to go get him.”

  “Don’t.” Since Corey’s troubles ended, Mark had been advocating giving him more space. Alison had intensified her campaign to reel him in.

  As the movie was starting, Corey came thumping down the stairs. Alison patted the patch of floor beside her. Corey ducked his chin at her and headed into the kitchen. Moments later he reappeared with a plate full of pizza. He made his way through the crowd and plopped himself into the space between Alison and Mark. It took every bit of discipline Alison had and Mark’s warning glance to keep from throwing her arms around him.

  The movie came to its dramatic, distressing conclusion. Corey beat a hasty retreat before the lights came on. The people in the living room hooted and applauded, gathering themselves to go. As she closed the door behind the last of them, Alison realized that Zoe hadn’t shown up. She’d been around less than usual lately. She must be seeing someone, Alison thought with the usual twinge of worry.