A Theory of Small Earthquakes Read online

  Mark and Alison cleaned the kitchen in proficient, practiced harmony, filling their recycling bin with cans and bottles, spooning leftover hummus and browning fruit salad into empty yogurt containers, washing serving bowls and spoons.

  On her way to bed, Alison stopped in front of Corey’s room. “Goodnight, Iverson,” she said through the door.

  “Goodnight, coach,” Corey called back.

  Alison’s heart swelled. “I love you,” she couldn’t help saying.

  She waited. Silence. She waited some more, then went to bed elated. Corey had watched the movie. And said goodnight to her nicely. For a mom of a nearly-fourteen-year-old, two out of three wasn’t bad.

  25.

  san francisco

  June 2004

  “The news is good,” Dr. Schrier said. “I see nothing unusual in the test results.”

  Alison released the breath that she felt she’d been holding since their last visit. She’d been more worried about finding out that Mark was sterile, and what that would mean about their past and their future, than she’d been about her own fertility.

  “Your hormone levels are excellent, Alison, especially for a woman your age. And Mark, your sperm count is seventy-five million, which we consider to be in the high-normal range.”

  “That’s great.” Mark took Alison’s hand and squeezed it.

  “We did find a little polyp on your uterine lining, Alison,” Dr. Schrier said.

  Mark’s smile faded. “Is it dangerous?”

  “Not at all. But an embryo needs a smooth surface to attach itself to. So a polyp can contribute to infertility. I can take it out here in the office, under light anesthesia. There might be a bit of cramping. Otherwise, there should be no side effects.”

  “If you take it out,” Alison asked, “is there a chance we could get pregnant on our own?”

  “It’s possible. We already know you two don’t have the problem some couples have: their eggs and sperm just don’t mesh. On the other hand, your age is definitely a factor.”

  Mark looked at Alison. “It’s your call. I really want to give this our best shot. But I hate the idea of you going under the knife.”

  “Let’s do it as soon as possible,” Alison said. If you could please remove my secrets while you’re in there, she told Dr. Schrier silently, I won’t miss them.

  Corey wasn’t quite his old self—Alison’s favorite person on earth, a person she knew she was unlikely to see again. But since their confrontation, his grades and attitude were holding steady. He wasn’t confiding in his parents as much as they wished he would, but as far as they knew, what he was saying was true.

  Unlike what they were telling him. Alison told Corey about her upcoming surgery, but she didn’t tell him why she was having it.

  “It’s a tiny little growth,” she said. “Nothing serious.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In my uterine lining.”

  Corey winced. “Do you have cancer?” he asked.

  “Absolutely not.”

  Corey looked at her suspiciously. “Would you tell me if you had cancer?”

  God, I love this kid, Alison thought. “Probably,” she said.

  On the day of her surgery, Corey insisted on skipping practice to come right home after school. Alison awoke from a nap with a Vicodin hangover to find him sitting at her bedside, holding a steaming bowl of soup. “It’s Campbell’s Chicken Noodle,” he said proudly. “I bought it at EZ Stop on my way home.”

  He watched as Alison ate as much as she could stand of the salty broth and mushy noodles, his mouth mirroring each motion of hers. Alison remembered her own mouth doing the same thing as she spooned baby food into his.

  “Have some more, Mom,” he urged her when she put the half-empty bowl on her nightstand. “It’s good for you.”

  “Who’s the Jewish mother now?” Alison teased him.

  “You. But I’m the Jewish son.” He climbed onto the bed, turned on the TV, worked the remote until he found a Law & Order rerun.

  “Look, Mom! I found your favorite show!”

  Alison didn’t tell him that there was always a Law & Order rerun playing on one channel or another, and she didn’t tell him that Law & Order was too violent for him to watch, as she’d said when he asked to watch it with her in the past. Milking this rare moment, when the episode ended, Alison asked Corey to play her some Beatles songs.

  He went to his room to find his long-abandoned guitar. When he came back with it, he didn’t ask which song she wanted to hear first. He knew it was “Blackbird,” and he played it for her. And he didn’t stop singing, even when hearing her son sing about a bird learning to fly with broken wings made her cry, as it always had.

  Alison’s cramping lasted only a couple of days. Her next appointment was two weeks away. Corey was doing fine. Alison was too. She was finally free to work.

  She started outlining a query called “Gray Area” about the baby boom among middle-aged, middle-class Americans:• Is feminism to blame, or to be credited, for the increasing number of career women having babies at forty-five?

  • Are claims of higher intelligence among children of middle-aged parents a form of eugenics in modern-day disguise?

  • Is having a baby at forty-five intrinsically a selfish act?

  Waiting for a killer opener to present itself, Alison doodled on her notepad, doing the math. If she got pregnant within the next six months, she’d be fifty-seven when she was driving around Berkeley, looking for her next surly fourteen-year-old. At sixty she’d be planting her sagging butt on a brutal stone bench in Berkeley’s Greek Theater, watching that kid graduate Berkeley High. When she was seventy-five or eighty, they’d be wheeling her into that next baby’s wedding—if she even lived that long. “Is midlife parenting a good thing or a bad thing,” Alison typed. “And for whom, and why?”

  It was blue sky springtime when Alison boarded BART in Oakland, gray sky winter in San Francisco when she got off the train. Mark met her at Schrier’s office, eight blocks from Mother Jones.

  “Now that we know you’re both fertile, and we’ve taken care of that polyp, we have two choices.” Schrier ticked them off on his fingers. “One, intrauterine insemination using Mark’s sperm. Two, IVF. That’s in-vitro fertilization, which is more invasive and more expensive. But it’s also the most effective.”

  “How much does each method cost?” Alison asked.

  “Intrauterine insemination is about three thousand dollars per cycle.”

  Three hundred the last time I did it, Alison did not say. She saw herself with her feet in the stirrups at the East Bay Sperm Bank in 1989, Zoe at her side; Naomi with a fat syringe of milky semen in her rubber-gloved hand.

  “IVF is about ten thousand dollars per cycle,” Schrier said. “And it often takes several cycles.”

  “What would you do if you and your wife were in our situation?” Mark asked.

  “But with our income,” Alison added.

  “If you were in your thirties, I’d probably advocate insemination,” Schrier said. “But given your ages, I’d go straight to IVF.”

  Mark’s eyes were on Alison. She knew what he wanted to do, and she knew he’d put their house in hock, if he had to, to do it.

  She remembered the feeling she’d had just before Naomi inseminated her the first time: in the front seat of the front car at the top of a giant roller coaster, heart in throat, hands in the air. She had that feeling now.

  “Let’s do the IVF,” she said.

  Zoe reappeared. She took Corey to a Saturday movie matinee. “Al?” she called when she dropped him off.

  “Up here.” Alison was in her bedroom, editing her wardrobe. Zoe plopped herself onto the bed.

  “What did you guys see?” Alison asked.

  Zoe rolled her eyes. “Anchorman,” she answered.

  “You must really love that kid,” Alison said.

  “I do.” Zoe lowered her voice. “And that kid loved the stupid-ass movie.”

&nbs
p; “Where have we gone wrong?”

  Alison had missed Zoe, as she always did. Falling back into their friendship was like stepping into a hot bath on a cold day. But Zoe’s latest hiatus had been well timed; it had given Alison a good excuse not to tell her about the IVF. If it worked, she’d decided, she’d deal with Zoe’s reaction then.

  Alison held up a men’s linen shirt. Zoe stuck her fists out, thumbs down. Alison tossed it into Zoe’s lap. “Here. You can paint in it.”

  Zoe slipped the shirt on, rolled up the sleeves, stiffened the collar, and tied the tails into a knot above her flat belly. Alison was mesmerized as always, watching Zoe play with clothes. Only Zoe could make the most boring shirt look hip.

  Alison showed Zoe a clingy scoop-necked top. Zoe had convinced her to buy it years before.

  “Are you nuts? You look great in that. Next.”

  Alison went on pulling T-shirts and sweaters off hangers and out of drawers, offering them up for Zoe’s appraisal. Zoe went on giving a nod to the keepers, thumbs-down to the things that had to go. They weren’t saying what Alison knew they both were thinking. The last time they’d purged Alison’s closet was twenty years ago, and it had ended with hot sex on a soft mountain of velvet and velour. They weren’t saying that Alison was purging her closet in case she got pregnant with Mark’s child.

  “What about this?” Alison frowned at a faded black Planned Parenthood T-shirt with white lettering that read, PRO-CHOICE, PRO-WOMAN.

  Zoe didn’t answer. Alison saw that she was half-buried in a pile of keepers, staring into space. Her face looked burnished, as if she’d had a chemical peel.

  “Earth to Zoe.”

  “I’m seeing someone,” Zoe said.

  “Oh.” Alison held a royal blue jumpsuit in front of her, taking a moment to compose her face. “What’s she like?”

  “Young. Cute. In a kind of exotic way.” She paused. “Hot. Funny.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Trudy Fleischer. Her mom’s a writer, and she named Trudy after Gertrude Stein. She and her mother are really tight. Like Mom and me.”

  Zoe had never mentioned a lover’s last name before. “How young is she?” Alison asked.

  “Very.” Zoe giggled.

  “What does she do?”

  “She’s in theater.”

  “Which theater?”

  “You’re acting weird, Al.”

  “What’s weird about wanting to know about this hot young thing?”

  “Are you jealous?” Zoe threw her head back and laughed, as if Alison was making her almost as happy as her new girlfriend did. And if she was so happy, it didn’t matter what Alison said.

  “I’m just surprised,” Alison said. “I’ve never heard you talk about anyone the way you’re talking about . . . her.”

  Zoe nodded. “I’ve never met anyone like Trudy before.”

  Alison decided not to solicit Zoe’s vote on her lavender 1988 Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival T-shirt. She balled it up and stuffed it back into her bottom drawer. “I’m happy for you,” she lied. “When do we get to meet her?”

  “Zoe has a girlfriend,” Alison told Mark later that night. They were undressing with their backs to each other, preparing for what now constituted foreplay.

  Every night for a week, Mark had been injecting Alison in the stomach with follicle stimulating hormone. Every morning she’d been injecting herself in the thigh with Lupron to control her ovulation. Three sets of shots and two ultrasounds from now, if her eggs were plentiful and big enough, she’d be scheduled for her first egg extraction. Then Dr. Schrier would fertilize her eggs with Mark’s sperm in a petri dish and implant the embryos into Alison’s womb.

  “Zoe never has a girlfriend.” Mark opened the closet door, reached up to the top shelf, and pulled down a brown cardboard file box labeled “Tax Returns.” Since they’d reactivated their sex life, he and Alison had been stashing their carefully curated porn collection in that box. Recently they’d added a new, distinctly unsexy collection: the syringes, alcohol swabs, vials of drugs, and hazardous medical waste container they called their weapons of mass conception.

  “She does now,” Alison said.

  Mark raised his eyebrows and went back to readying her injection, flicking the syringe with his forefinger like a seasoned junkie or a nurse.

  Alison was starting to feel like a junkie herself. Her belly was swollen and covered with black and blue marks from the shots. Her ovaries were so engorged that she could feel them through her jeans. Her emotions were swollen too. The hormone highs gave Alison a taste of how the other half—lighter, more carefree people—lived. The lows plunged her into deeper darkness.

  “Ready?” Mark asked, holding the dripping syringe aloft.

  Alison stepped in front of him, offering her naked body. With the tenderness of a lover and the sanguine efficiency of a lab tech, Mark swabbed her skin with an alcohol rub, then emptied the syringe slowly into Alison’s belly.

  “O w.w.ww.w.w,” Alison moaned.

  “All done.”

  “Till tomorrow.”

  In one smooth gesture, Mark gave Alison a kiss and deposited the used syringe in the red plastic medical waste container. He replaced the box in its hiding place in the closet.

  “That’s what I call safe sex.” Alison dug through her bottom drawer for her one remaining flannel nightgown. When she’d moved back into the bedroom with Mark, she’d replaced most of her tattered sleepwear with a trousseau of uncomfortable, impractical, sexy negligees. This was not a negligee night.

  “Doesn’t it seem weird that we’re going through all this to make a baby,” Mark asked, “when we did it by accident the first time we made love?”

  Alison noted that Mark had now made this observation twice. “Totally weird,” she said.

  Zoe called Alison and said she wanted to bring Trudy over for dinner. “Make sure the boys are home,” Zoe said. “We’ll bring food. Trudy’s an amazing cook.”

  Alison was nervous, washing the day’s dishes while Mark and Corey set the table for five. By the time Zoe used her key to open the front door and called out, “Honeys! We’re home!” Alison wasn’t sure she’d be able to eat, no matter how amazing Trudy’s cooking was.

  Alison had spent fifteen years wondering what it would be like to meet the next person Zoe loved. Looking at Trudy now, her long, straight blond hair; her smooth, pale skin; her curvaceous, muscular body; her bright, friendly, pretty face, Alison had one clear thought: she’s just right.

  And then, a tangle of murkier emotions.

  “It’s great to meet you.” Alison glanced at Mark and saw that he was staring at Trudy too.

  “Welcome,” Mark said. “Any friend of Zoe’s is a friend of ours.”

  Mark can be such a dork, Alison thought.

  “I am so very glad to meet you too,” Trudy said. Her accent was thick and guttural. “Zoe speaks of you often.” She pronounced it So-e. “You mean so much to her, you three.” It sounded like zree.

  Alison realized Zoe hadn’t made eye contact with her since they’d arrived. Zoe grabbed Trudy’s hand. “We left the food in the car. We’ll be right back.”

  “She’s pretty,” Corey said as soon as they were gone.

  “Corey,” Alison scolded him.

  “What? Am I supposed to say she’s ugly?”

  “You’re supposed to notice something about her besides how she looks.”

  Mark was grinning at Corey as if he were about to give him a high five. “Hey! You too,” Alison barked.

  Zoe and Trudy bustled back into the kitchen, emptying Berkeley Bowl bags, arranging platters and bowls on the table. Mark lit the candles. “Let’s eat,” Zoe said.

  Trudy took Alison’s chair. Zoe shot Alison a questioning look. Alison gave her a small smile: it’s fine. Zoe asked the next question with her eyebrows, and Alison nodded: she’s great.

  “Where are you from in Germany?” Alison asked.

  “Freiburg. A very pretty town in
the south.” Zouth, she said. Trudy reached for one of the bottles of wine they’d brought. “We make wine in Freiburg. Like here in California.”

  “What’s that?” Corey pointed to a steaming bowl of something that looked like squiggles of pasta.

  “Spaetzle,” Trudy answered. “It’s a favorite dish in Germany.”

  “Are there still Nazis there?” Corey asked her.

  “Not all Germans are Nazis, Corey,” Alison reproached him. Her mother had died years before Corey was born. How had Alison managed to transmit her mother’s stupid stereotypes to her son?

  “I know,” Corey said. “But that’s where the Nazis came from.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alison said to Trudy. “I swear, we’re not the kind of Jews who blame every German for the Holocaust.” She forced a little laugh. “God knows we don’t want the world to blame us for George W. Bush. That’s why we’re trying to get rid of him in November.”

  Trudy smiled at Corey. “My grandparents were in Berlin during the war. They joined the resistance against the Nazi Party. Do you know about the resistance, Corey?” Alison liked the way Trudy kept her eyes on Corey as she spoke to him.

  “Sort of,” Corey hedged.

  “If you like, after supper I can tell you some of the stories of the resistance that my parents told me. It was an exciting time. Bad guys chasing good guys and good guys running away. Like your American films . . .” Trudy turned to Zoe. “How are they called?”

  “Action movies,” Zoe said, smiling at her affectionately. Zoe turned her smile on Alison, sharing her delight.

  As usual, Zoe’s childlike pleasure was irresistible. Alison smiled back.

  26.

  san francisco

  July 2004

  It felt strange to take BART into San Francisco on a Saturday morning instead of a workday. But Alison’s ovaries were setting the schedule now.