Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (8 page)

In the waiting room, my grandmother still sat. I was struck by how open she looked, the way her grief pulled her out of herself the way most people’s tucks them in. I felt bigger than her for the first time in my life, but I couldn’t feel good about it. I thought of saying something to her, but I didn’t know where to start, how to explain who I was now, or what she’d had to do with it.

“I hear you’re really something these days,” she said when I stopped in front of her. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” I said, before I had time to regret it. I turned my back to leave, waited for her to say something else. I only heard her breathing.

 

 

My mother was
still in the car outside. When I knocked on the window to be let in, she jumped, then seemed relieved to see it was me.

“I’m sorry you had to do that,” she said as I got in the car. “You’re a better person than I’d be, in your shoes.”

“I’m not,” I said. “It wasn’t a big deal. It was a long time ago.”

“ ‘A long time ago’—Tara, we almost lost you. Maybe you don’t remember, but to me it’s like yesterday. Like yesterday.”

“How could you possibly remember?” I said. “You weren’t there.”

The tone of my own voice surprised me. My mother looked stung and I was sorry, but not sorry enough to apologize. She bit back tears.

“Tara, don’t. I mean, not now. Look, I wanted you to have your own life and me to have mine. I made a mistake, putting you there that summer. But I loved you, you always knew I loved you?”

I didn’t think she meant for it to be a question, so I didn’t answer her directly.

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

I looked out the window, watching people at a park through the glass. I thought of saying a lot of things that I didn’t. I didn’t tell her how badly I had wanted her back, not just that summer, but all the years before it; how those days she had lain beside me in the hospital bed, for once mine and mine alone, were among the best of my childhood. I didn’t tell her that every time I took note of the scar on my elbow, I thought she ought to thank me for giving her the way out of her mother’s house that she’d never found for herself, no matter how many times she ran away. I didn’t tell her how I had learned it wasn’t just snakes that could eat you alive. I didn’t tell her what I had told no one in all these years, what I had lied about even to the love of my life, because saying it out loud would unravel so much. Whatever motives Allison had for saying so—whatever she thought she saw a way out of, or more likely, back into, in confession—there had been no push, no one’s hands on my back. I hadn’t fallen, I’d jumped. It was shallow water, and though as it turned out I’d been lucky not to kill myself, at the time it hadn’t seemed like a long way down. Twenty feet and I would have my parents back, I would have my mother forever, I would have years before I had to consider the costs. I’d been, for the second time that summer, less afraid of the fall than what else I thought awaited me. That afternoon above the murky water, which I remembered quite clearly, there had been nothing but me, looking down at my own reflection, and seeing at last a way toward what I wanted most.

E
ggs. They wanted eggs, and their requests came trickling in daily in ten-point type, through the want ads of the campus paper. Five, ten, fifteen thousand you could get for doing it just once. More than that if you were experienced. We knew girls who did it over and over and over again, once a semester. Mostly they were girls whose parents paid their full tuition anyway, and the money quickly manifested itself as stuff: cashmere sweaters crumpled on the bathroom floor, new stilettos clicking across the kitchen linoleum, matchboxes from Le Cirque and Nobu, endless overpriced trinkets collected on excursions to the East Side. Sometimes the stuff was more practical: new computers, a savings account for grad school. Sometimes it was just bigger: a brand-new entertainment center that got stolen the next week, and shame on us, because we weren’t particularly sorry when it did.

It wasn’t our eggs they wanted, so we spent the weekends watching burned DVDs and chasing ramen noodles with Corona the way broke college students were supposed to. Columbia credentials be damned, no one was interested in paying us for our genetic material. If they had wanted brown babies who so obviously didn’t belong to them, they would have just adopted. Laura Kelso, who lived in our suite—that was whose eggs they wanted. I was surprised no one had come to our door to recruit her personally; she’d practically stepped out of a want ad. 1600 SAT score, 4.1 GPA, and that only because some professors didn’t believe in A+’s. Then, of course, there was the important stuff: blonde, blue-eyed, five-foot-seven, barely 115 pounds, though we suspected the green pills she stored in a clear plastic bottle with the label torn off were diet pills of some kind. She’d been normal-sized when we met her.

She was making bank, but we couldn’t hate her for it. Absent her new income, she would have been broke like the rest of us: too good a daughter to guilt her single mother into sending more money than she could afford. Laura’s mother was a cashier at Penney’s; what she could afford wasn’t much. For a while that had given us a claim to her. She was a homegirl, a
hermanita
: we were in this together. Then she walked through the front door wearing Jimmy Choo boots, and we knew we were losing her. Before we knew it, we hardly saw her, and then one day she invited Ellen Chambers, serial donor, and Lisette Hartley, serial bitch, into our common area for some egg donor support group, and they compared paychecks and pain levels and wondered what had become of the little pieces of them released into the universe. We sat in Candy’s room with the door open and faked gagging. Nicole let the back pages of
The Village Voice
fall open, 900 numbers and round brown asses staring up at us from the floor. She said, “They’re
mother
material, but who wants to fuck them? If we were hookers, we’d be making twice what they were.”

We did not particularly want to be hookers, and so this was little consolation.

What we wanted was to be a doctor, a lawyer, a spy, and happy. Nicole was the aspiring doctor; she had a love-hate relationship with her bio texts, but a love-love relationship with catalogues of all kinds. Pinned to her wall where Mos Def and Che Guevara hung on ours were ads for designer shoes and clothing, electronic equipment—even the occasional house ripped out of the home buyer’s guide to remind her of the bigger picture, the things she’d wanted growing up but never had. Candy wanted to be a lawyer: she had big ideas about justice and was always dragging us to meetings with her, hoping we’d pick up some of her conviction. Truth be told, Candy could have been Laura Kelso’s dark-haired sister, but we didn’t dare say so. Freshman year at a sisterhood meeting, some girl had looked at Candy walking in and sneered, not quite under her breath, “What the hell is white girl doing here?” Not three seconds later, Candy was all in her face, like: “
Mira
, my people did not get half exterminated and have half their country stolen from them for you to be calling me a white girl, OK, bitch?” You didn’t mess with Candy; she was going to be one scary-ass lawyer.

Me, I wanted to be the spy. I liked secrets. Nicole, ever the realist, liked to point out that spies couldn’t be spies on their own behalf, and I had yet to encounter a government or revolution of which I approved. So far I had not accepted the seriousness of this problem. I didn’t like to think about the future, and we were only juniors, so I didn’t quite have to. Courtney was the one who said she just wanted to be happy. Nicole said this was her middle-class showing. Courtney was from one of those barely middle-class black families where the girls are always called Courtney or Kelli or Lindsay or Brooke, and the family forgoes vacations and savings and stock for a nice house in a nice neighborhood in the hopes that the neighbors will forget they are black. Usually what happened was Kelli tried so hard to prove her parents right that she turned into a bleach-blonde, rock-music-loving creature who seemed foreign to them. Lindsay got so tired of being called white girl that she studied Ebonics on BET and started dressing like a video extra, calling herself Lil L, and begging to hang out in the neighborhood they’d moved out of. Brooke, sick of not fitting in, would become anorexic or suicidal or both. We were all proud of Courtney for coming to us relatively normal.

Laura faded from us gradually. We kept our doors shut and she began to keep hers closed as well. We didn’t know whether this was in retaliation or because she wasn’t interested in hanging out with us. We never heard her in the shower, we rarely heard her enter: she seemed to glide. It was like we lived with a ghost—a snowflake, Nicole called her, and though she meant it in the harshly disapproving vein with which we spoke of most girls who were pale and delicate and seemed to be everywhere, in a more gentle sense the word had a ring of truth to it. We were living with something barely visible, something that might have vanished any second.

In tenth grade,
I went through a bad-romance-novel phase. In bad romance novels, women always know the moment they are pregnant; the heroine can feel her lover plant his seed inside her, or something equally melodramatic. Perhaps because I subconsciously expected pregnancy to announce itself with some such motherly feeling of omniscience, I completely overlooked mine. Winter gave way to spring, and when I started getting queasy, I thought maybe I was lactose intolerant. When quitting dairy didn’t help, I thought maybe I had an ulcer. Nicole, Candy, and Courtney started to notice something was off, but by the nature of their prying questions, I could tell they were thinking I was bulimic. It wasn’t until I was lying on the floor, listening to Candy complain that her cramps were killing her, that I realized I hadn’t had my period for two months. It had never been regular and I had grown accustomed to red spots on my underwear at odd intervals. There was something almost thrilling about its off-kilter arrival. I liked surprises. When my friends swallowed little green and white and blue pills and marked the start date of their periods on calendars, I thought how boring it must be to have your body run like clockwork. Turning sideways and inhaling bits of dust off Courtney’s carpet, I understood that my dislike of the pill was irrational, but it was too late for all that.

Of course I had a boyfriend. We all did, they were like accessories; we kept them stored at colleges up and down the East Coast and pulled them out on formal occasions or in the event of extreme boredom or loneliness. Mine I kept at NYU, where he was lonely more than I was. I had spent a good number of nights downtown, curled up in his blue flannel sheets, listening to him breathe. He was good at hand-holding and being subtly witty and distracting me when I was on the verge of tears, brilliant in that completely useless way where he could tell you off the top of his head the architect of any office building downtown and the historic relationship between the toothbrush and cultural imperialism, but not what day of the week it was or what train to take to where. I didn’t want to see him yet, so I bought a pregnancy test to confirm what I already knew, and then another in case the first one had been wrong, and then I threw the two sticks with their faint plus signs into the trash can and called my mother.

People who do not call my mother “Mother” call her Isis. Her name conjures up a persona that she indulges with miniature altars and smoky incense when she is not busy being a hairdresser. She was not busy at all when I called, the vague hum of her meditation music in the background let me know that.

“Angel. I was just thinking of you.”

Every time I call my house, even those times when I am calling because my mother has forgotten to pick me up or call me back or send me something necessary, she tells me she has just been thinking of me. I ignored her and started talking, hoping maybe with some small talk she would pick up on the tremor of my voice. I was lying on the bed in my underwear when I called her, pinching the fat at my abdomen and trying to determine whether there was more of it, looking down at my breasts and wondering if they were any bigger. I looked the same to me. I wondered if maybe I was imagining this. Stupid girls got pregnant, careless girls, girls who didn’t worry about their futures, girls whose mothers had never explained to them about sex.

Laura had been a girl something like that when she’d come to college—not stupid, but naive, uninformed. She’d been sitting in the back row of the mandatory safe-sex lecture, wide-eyed, when we met her. They’d divided us into teams and made us do races to put a condom on a banana and she’d screwed it up, put the thing on backward and had it go flying off somewhere, then blushed a brilliant shade of red and hid her face in her hands. The girls on the other team laughed.

“It’s OK,” Nicole said, putting a hand on her shoulder after we lost. “There are too many hos on this campus anyway. Who comes to college knowing how to put a condom on in five seconds?”