A Theory of Small Earthquakes Read online

  “Biologically,” Schrier was saying, “the baby would be both of yours. Exactly as if Alison carried it herself.”

  If you’d lived your life right, her mother’s voice was saying, you’d have a real husband and two children by now. But no, not you.

  “You’re good candidates for surrogacy,” Schrier added, “because we know the two of you can create a viable embryo. A lot of our couples don’t have that going for them.”

  Mark took Alison’s hand. “I’m not saying we want to do this. But how would it work?”

  “You’d go through the same regimen you did to prepare for the IVF. At the same time, the surrogate—we call them gestational carriers—would take hormone shots to prepare her uterus for the implantation.”

  You never could do anything the way everyone else does.

  “When your eggs, and her uterus, are ready,” Dr. Schrier continued, “we’d harvest your eggs, fertilize them in a petri dish with Mark’s sperm, and transfer them to the surrogate. Forty weeks later, you’d have your baby.”

  “How would we find the woman?” Mark asked.

  “We work with a number of gestational carriers. They’re stable women, married, mothers of their own children. You’d look through their profiles and pick one. We’d arrange a meeting. Assuming all goes well, we’d take it from there.”

  “Do the women ever change their minds? Decide to keep the babies?” Mark asked.

  “The terms of the arrangement are clear. The baby would be biologically and legally yours.”

  Mark squeezed Alison’s hand. She shook her head.

  “Surrogacy isn’t anyone’s first choice,” Schrier said. “And it’s not for everyone. Among other considerations, there’s the cost. The payment to the gestational carrier alone is twenty thousand dollars.”

  “That’s the end of it, then. We don’t have that kind of money.” Mark’s hand slipped out of Alison’s. He pulled a tissue out of the box on Schrier’s desk and used it to wipe his eyes.

  I can’t give this up, Alison thought. I won’t.

  “What about our insurance?” she asked.

  Dr. Schrier shook his head. “Even the best insurance doesn’t cover surrogacy. But there is an option that can make it less expensive.”

  Alison and Mark looked at him, waiting. “Some of our patients ask women they know to be their gestational carriers,” he said.

  “Women they know?” Mark asked.

  “Typically a sister or a sister-in-law.”

  “Neither of us has a sister,” Mark said.

  “The carrier doesn’t have to be a blood relative,” Schrier said. “She can be a sister-in-law, a friend . . .”

  I have a friend, Alison thought.

  “It’s best if she’s younger than forty,” Dr. Schrier said.

  Zoe, Alison thought.

  28.

  berkeley

  December 2004

  Over the years, Zoe had given Mark and Alison gifts too big and too many to count or even remember. But Mark and Alison sat in stunned silence, driving through the misty December night to meet Zoe for dinner, contemplating the enormity of what they were about to ask of her.

  Downtown Berkeley rolled by Alison’s fogged-in passenger window. The Shattuck strip was dressed for the winter holidays in its usual festive, nondenominational style. Sodden banners dangled limply from faux antique lampposts, offering equal-opportunity tidings to celebrants of Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and winter solstice. Strings of twinkling white lights draped the spindly, malnourished trees that never quite greened the median divide. Plaques affixed to parking meters—typeset in the City of Berkeley’s own custom font—promised two free hours to those thinking global but shopping local. Homeless people huddled in doorways holding signs festooned with scribbled trees and wreaths, soliciting funding for their own holiday cheer.

  Under the neon awning of the multiplex, formerly Hink’s, where Alison and Zoe had bought curtains for the cottage a lifetime before, throngs of moviegoers bought tickets to see Ocean’s Twelve and The Incredibles. At the UA Theater one block north, there was no line for The Passion of the Christ.

  A taxi veered toward the Saab. Mark blasted the horn, rousing the knot of antiwar protesters at the corner of Center Street, who took his honking as a gesture of solidarity.

  The demonstrators cheered and waved, pumping their umbrellas and picket signs:SOMEWHERE IN TEXAS, A VILLAGE IS MISSING ITS IDIOT

  NO BLOOD FOR OIL!

  IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’RE NOT OUR PRESIDENT

  JAIL TO THE CHIEF

  WHO WOULD JESUS BOMB?

  HOW DID OUR OIL GET UNDER THEIR SAND?

  “At least he’s good for making fun of, that fucking Bush,” Alison said.

  “Hardly justifies the damage he’s done,” Mark said, turning left on University.

  They parked in the twenty-four-hour lot behind Szechwan Gardens and zipped up their matching REI anoraks. Alison reached for the door handle. Mark reached for her.

  “Whatever happens,” he said, holding her face in his hands, “we’ll be okay.”

  Alison nodded. They made a run for it, dodging raindrops, slipping and sliding through the restaurant’s open doors, wet dogs shaking off the rain.

  Zoe waved at them from their usual booth. Her tight white T-shirt and her face were pink beneath the red lanterns strung along the wall. As Mark and Alison slid into the booth, Sam appeared, greeted them by name, and guessed their order with flawless accuracy.

  Zoe poured tea. “Did you ever notice that Sam walks like the people in those weird, rolling-along-the-pavement scenes in Spike Lee movies? Maybe Sam was Spike’s role model.” She paused. “His egg roll model.”

  Alison barely summoned a smile. Mark didn’t respond.

  “Okay, I’m officially worried,” Zoe said. “What’s up with you two?”

  Alison took a breath and released it. “I can’t have a baby,” she said.

  Zoe’s hand shot across the table, landed on Alison’s. “Oh, Al. I’m so sorry. Are you sure?”

  “We’re sure,” Mark answered quickly, before Zoe could launch one of her alternative medicine monologues. “Alison’s uterine lining is too thin to sustain a fetus. And there’s nothing they can do to fix it.”

  “Then how did Corey get here?” Zoe asked.

  Liar, Alison’s mother said. “My uterus was younger then,” Alison said. You remember my uterus then, she thought.

  Sam arrived with a dish of mu shu vegetables and a plate of pancakes. “Chow fun coming,” he said, and he went back to the kitchen.

  “What are you going to do?” Zoe asked.

  “We have three choices,” Mark said. “We can adopt, which we don’t want to do. We can give up, which we really don’t want to do.”

  He took a sip of tea.

  “Or?” Zoe prompted him.

  Mark put his teacup down on the sticky Formica table. “Or we can find a surrogate to carry our baby.”

  “You mean . . . pay someone to be pregnant for you?”

  Mark nodded.

  Zoe looked at Alison. “You’d do that?” she asked, incredulous. Alison heard the rest of her question: Fifteen years ago, artificial insemination was too unnatural for you. And now you’re going to hire a surrogate?

  “It’s our last chance,” Alison said.

  Sam arrived with the chow fun. “No pork, the way you like it.” He noticed the untouched platters. “Something wrong with food?”

  They all shook their heads. Sam shrugged and disappeared.

  “How can I help?” Zoe looked at Mark. “Do you need money?”

  Mark gave Alison a pointed look. They’d agreed that she’d be the one to ask.

  “Anything,” Zoe said. “Just tell me.”

  “We’re wondering if you’d consider being our surrogate,” Alison said.

  Zoe’s jaw dropped. “You want me to be the mother of your child?”

  Mark shook his head. “The baby would be mine and Alison’s. My sperm, her e
gg. You’d be the gestational carrier.”

  “So . . .” Zoe frowned. “I’d give birth to the baby. And then I’d give the baby to you?”

  Again, Alison heard Zoe thinking.

  “Essentially,” Mark said.

  “Have you talked to Corey about this?” Zoe asked.

  “We wanted to talk to you first,” Alison answered.

  “I think he’ll be okay with it,” Mark added. “Ever since the miscarriage, he’s been saying he wants a baby sister.”

  “Yeah,” Zoe said. “He told me that too.” She poured a pool of soy sauce onto her plate, dipped the tip of her chopstick into it, drew a dark face against white.

  “Trudy and I have been talking about having a baby,” she said.

  Alison’s throat tightened. Things are going to change, she realized. Things are already changing.

  “Are you two that serious?” Mark asked.

  Zoe nodded. “I’ve haven’t felt this way about anyone since—” She flushed. “In a really long time.”

  In the awkward silence, Mark filled a pancake with shredded vegetables. Alison passed the red lacquer rice bowl to Zoe.

  “I know the miscarriage broke your heart,” Zoe said to Alison. She glanced at Mark. “Your hearts.”

  She pushed rice around her plate. “I want to help you guys. You know I do. But I need some time to think.”

  “Of course you do,” Mark said.

  “Trudy and I are going to Point Reyes for Christmas. I’ll talk to her about it while we’re there.”

  Alison fought a memory of being with Zoe in Point Reyes on their third anniversary, making love on a hot fall day in the cool dunes of Heart’s Desire Beach.

  “We’ll be back for New Year’s,” Zoe said. “Maybe we could all get together then.”

  “Zoe,” Mark said, “I’m sure you know that surrogacy isn’t my first choice, or Alison’s.” He swirled his tea, big hands eclipsing tiny white cup. “But if we are going to use a surrogate, you’re our first choice.”

  Zoe looked at Alison and quickly looked away. “Whatever happens,” she said, “I’m honored that you asked me.”

  Mark stabbed a serving fork into the platter of noodles and held a forkful aloft. “Who’s ready for chow fun?” he said, a little too loudly.

  “I’ll take any kind of fun you’re dishing up,” Zoe said.

  Alison was going crazy, waiting for Zoe to decide. She tried to lose herself in planning Hanuchris. But all roads led back to Zoe, including that one. They’d never celebrated it without her before.

  Alison wasn’t a writer who spent hours plugged in and nursing a latte in a Wi-Fi café. She found the ambient activity distracting, not convivial. But right now distraction was what she needed. So she packed up her iBook and left the house and started walking.

  It was one of those warm, blue sky winter days that made her feel smug about having left the East Coast for the West. Narcissus unfurled and hyacinths poked up from gardens soaked with rain. Princess trees nodded, cartoonish purple blossoms bobbing. Pink camellia heads crowned from tight green buds.

  A decent cappuccino, a three-pronged outlet, and a Wi-Fi signal used to be a mile or more away. But now Alison had her pick of cafés within a few blocks of home. There was a price to pay, and the neighborhood was paying it. The Thai One On import shop had replaced the office of Vernon W. Jackson, real estate agent and notary public, where Alison used to get her documents notarized. Stepping into Mr. Jackson’s dim, smoky office, she always felt she was stepping back in time.

  There was always a group of elderly black men sitting on folding chairs in the corner, wearing ironed white shirts and suspenders clipped to their cuffed, creased trousers, playing dominos, smoking cigars, watching the TV that was mounted overhead. The men kept up a running commentary on the news of the day, reserving their most scathing remarks for the foibles of George W. Bush. “The lights are on, but nobody’s home,” one man would say. “If his lips are moving, that’s how you know he’s lying.” On the rare occasion when Bush did something that won their approval—increasing funding to fight AIDS in Africa, doubling trade with African nations—they’d dismiss it as a fluke. “Even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then.”

  Mr. Jackson would not be rushed. When Alison brought him a pink slip or a passport application to be notarized, he’d open the notary book on his big oak desk and thumb through to the proper page. Then he’d ask for Alison’s driver’s license and peer at it carefully, comparing her photo to her face. Slowly, deliberately, he’d take out his notary stamp, open the stamp pad, and affix stamp to document with a surgeon’s precision. The deed done, Mr. Jackson would look Alison in the eye, take her $10, give her a handwritten receipt, and say, “I thank you very much for your business, Miss Rose, and I surely do hope that you have a blessed day.”

  Alison wondered where Mr. Jackson was now, and where his friends were smoking their cigars and having their conversations. Sixteen years after she and Mark had chosen it for its funky affordability and ethnic diversity, their neighborhood was yuppifying at warp speed, becoming a buffed and polished, manicured version of its former ragged self.

  Hipster cafés and drought-resistant plant nurseries were replacing barbershops and barbecue joints. Ersatz “industrial live–work lofts” were appearing where lots littered with crack vials and used condoms had been. Dilapidated backyard cottages were being stripped down to the lath, earthquake-reinforced, skylighted, and landscaped, interiors by feng shui, kitchens by Sub-Zero and Wolf. The peeling Victorians that once housed sixties communes and food conspiracies were being sandblasted to the bone, intricate gingerbread curlicues and dentil details custom replicated, period authenticity provided by Urban Ore. The stucco sea-foam-green and pale pink Mediterraneans, bought for $12,000 in the forties by black folks who migrated to California for shipyard jobs, were being bought up by young white families with thousand-dollar baby strollers and achingly astute design sensibilities, who restuccoed and painted them celadon with terra-cotta trim, or periwinkle with chocolate brown, or gradated shades of elegantly titrated blues. The dueling mainstays of the neighborhood, corner liquor stores and Baptist churches, were the only sentries standing guard against the firestorm of gentrification.

  Although she scorned it, Alison couldn’t entirely deny her own part in the defunkification or its benefits to her own bottom line. In 2004 their house was worth three times the $200,000 they’d paid for it in 1990—great on paper, as she often reminded Mark, but only useful in real life if they cashed out of the Bay Area and moved to Des Moines or Detroit.

  As Alison approached one of those ramshackle churches, she saw an old black man in baggy coveralls, plaid flannel shirt, and porkpie hat sweeping Doritos wrappers, forty-ounce Old English malt liquor bottles, and wet leaves off the steps. “Good morning, young lady,” he greeted her, squinting into the bright morning glare.

  “Beautiful day,” she answered, and he nodded. The neighborly exchange and the sun warmed her as she walked on.

  Just past Alcatraz Avenue was the Nomad, the spiffiest of the new Wi-Fi cafés. Alison ordered a decaf low-fat latte with extra foam, grabbed a handful of recycled brown paper napkins, went outside, and wiped yesterday’s rain off a polished aluminum chair. She opened her laptop and logged onto the Nomad’s Wi-Fi network, sipping her coffee, taking in the view.

  The café was aptly named; its customers carried their lives in the Macs on their backs. Around her, twentysomethings surfed the Net on their iBooks and PowerBooks, adjusting their iPod buds, talking on glowing cell phones that flashed like pinball machines and played loud, tinny hip-hop song fragments when they rang. Alison figured she had twenty years on most of the people there.

  Whatever it was they were typing about, talking about, worrying about, she was fairly certain it wasn’t what she was there to distract herself from: her age-related infertility and the hope that her best friend would agree to be the “gestational carrier” of her second child.

  On New Year
’s Eve afternoon the Christmas tree was shedding its needles; Alison, Mark, and Corey were enjoying a rare afternoon of family togetherness, playing a raucously competitive game of Scrabble, munching on Alison’s homemade caramel corn before a roaring fire.

  The kitchen phone rang. Alison waited for Corey to race to answer it. Then she realized that thanks to the cell phone they’d given him for Hanuchris, the landline wasn’t his umbilicus to his social life anymore. She jumped up, wincing at the protest from her knees.

  “Corey’s house,” she answered it.

  She heard Zoe’s belly laugh. “Honey, we’re home.”

  Alison’s mouth went dry. She took the cordless phone into the bathroom and closed the door. What did you decide, what did you decide, what did you decide, she thought. “How was Point Reyes?” she asked.

  “Gorgeous. Perfect. Except I missed you guys.”

  “We missed you too.”

  “So, Al. I want to talk to you about the baby thing in person. Do you have time to go for a walk? Inspiration Point? It’ll be too muddy everyplace else.”

  Alison was listening for the answer in Zoe’s voice. She didn’t hear a yes, but she didn’t hear a no. “I’ll meet you there in half an hour,” she said.

  After days of relentless rain, Tilden Park was a chartreuse chiaroscuro. The new-growth redwood needles were the color of lime Popsicles; the old-growth branches, Crayola Forest Green. The eucalyptuses were dripping and glistening, backlit by breakthrough beams of sun.

  A wagon train of cars circled the trailhead parking lot, kids’ and dogs’ noses pressed against windows, mud-caked mountain bikes strapped to roofs. And there was Zoe, leaning against her beat-up Volvo, a standout in her kelly green sweater, violet velvet pants, and olive-green leather aviator hat. Alison greeted her by adjusting an earflap.

  “Great hat,” Alison said. “Is it new?”

  “New-old. I got it at that great thrift shop in Point Reyes.”

  The two of them fell into step, their waltz familiar, bent against the incline and the sharp wind whipping up from the bay. Runoff rivulets streamed down the steep hillside, carving crevices into the soaked earth. A pair of lesbians walked by them. The women cruised Zoe and ignored Alison. Same old, same old, Alison thought.