Happy Family (10 page)

A few months later, still feeling no reason for alarm that she hadn't gotten pregnant yet, Cheri bought an ovulation kit. She was only thirty-seven. She had regular periods. There was plenty of time. Little did she know that once the sword of infertility was hanging over their heads, the same procreative drive that reconnected her and Michael would end up unbinding them further, pushing them back into their old, distancing habits.

Cheri sighs. Conversations with her mother always exhaust her. An ambulance goes screaming by, followed by police cars. There must be an accident up ahead. She checks her watch. With this gridlock, it could take hours to reach Dr. Morrison's office. She pulls a thick sheaf of papers from her briefcase. They're the donor-egg profiles she'd been given at her last appointment. Each profile is several pages long and contains details on everything from the donor's ethnic background to favorite music to body type. Donor 157 is getting her master's in music theory. Her parents breed dressage horses. She likes nature and can hear stones sing. Number 258: Harvard grad, diplomat brat, pole-vaulter, likes dogs, allergic to cats, no cavities. Where's the box for daddy issues, bulimia, low self-esteem, leaning toward nymphomania, Cheri wonders. Do any of these girls have a sardonic sense of humor that would remotely resemble her own? Or will it be a repeat of the
Sesame Street
“one of these things is not like the other” dilemma she experienced with Cici and Sol? Was it so wrong to want to see herself in her child? To want her child to have the automatic sense of belonging that Cheri never felt? She'd like to be able to say that having a child is more important than having a child of her own. But maybe she's not that good of a person.

Cheri looks up. The expressway is a parking lot. Her chances of making it to Dr. Morrison's office on time are roughly equal to the one-in-a-million chance of Michael's elderly sperm reaching one of her middle-aged eggs. She pictures Number 157's fresh young egg, winking:
Come get me.

Not today. She doesn't have the stomach for it.

L
incoln Park is the whitest place in the world. That was her reaction when she and Michael started house-hunting. Leafy streets, safe park, upscale stores; far too vanilla. Until they saw the old Victorian house with purple shutters and odd angles, sloping hard oak floors and hidden compartments installed during Prohibition. It was long on charm and short on practicality—perfect for them.

Michael is not in the kitchen making dinner. Cheri crosses the backyard to the guesthouse that is his editing bay and office; the plaque she made to look like a ship's insignia reading
HMS Bay
hangs over the door. “Michael?” His office smells of weed and nag champa. It's a delicate ecosystem and only he knows the correct balance. Everything looks randomly placed, but if she were to move something, he'd have an aneurysm. He's got a framed Spanish titled version of his cult classic
Disco, Doughnuts, and Dogma
over his “napping bed.” On the bed are half-finished
New York Times
crossword puzzles and a beading tray. Beading is Michael's latest distraction. Cheri thinks of it as craft rehab for artists who have fallen and can't get up. It's no worse than his previous distractions: building shelves that tore up a wall in the process, making Moroccan lamb ten different ways, or trying to play Eric Johnson licks on his old Stratocaster.

Michael's computer screen is filled with beetles burrowing their way into glutinous dung, rolling around until they gradually become a living lozenge of excrement. He must have forgotten to hit Pause. Cheri doesn't come in here often, and she's never seen this footage before. How it figures into his documentary on drug addiction called
One World Under the Influence
or
Everybody Must Get Stoned
—the title teeters between the two—is anyone's guess. She can't help thinking that Michael's like the beetle, rolling around and around with his obsessive fiddling, revising and reshooting.

“Hey, babe. You're in my chair,” Michael says, coming up behind her.

He's still wearing the same sweatpants and shirt he rolled out of bed in. “Your mother called,” he says, motioning for her to get up. “On my line. Can you tell her for the millionth time not to do that?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, then. Back to work.” He hunkers down over his editing software. Tap-tap-tap. The beetles rewind. It takes several seconds for them to become denuded of dung. With his back still to her, Michael says, “There's nothing for dinner. My stomach's been acting up so I'm not hungry. You'll have to forage.”

“I saw that. So…how was your day?” she ventures.

“Like any other. I worked. Oh, and your mother was putting a bug in my ear about your fortieth. Months away but no time like the present to plan for something I'm sure you won't want.”

“I can't even start with that.”

“Forewarned is forearmed. Maybe you can head her off at the pass. Listen, I have to get back to this—is there something you need?”

“I guess I just wanted to see you.”

“Well, here I am.” Cheri notices a small Chinese apothecary cabinet next to Michael's desk. Its drawers have Post-its stuck on them with labels like
Doesn't hit you over the head, just lowers the ceiling; Don't take sitting down.

“Is this a joke?” Cheri asks.

“Research. Also, fans send me their favorite stuff. I'm finally cataloging it.”

“Fans send you drugs?”

“Yes, fans. Also biochemists, aborigines, people I've interviewed; that's what the film's about.”

“And you're keeping all this in the house?” Cheri thinks:
How many counts of possession?

“Just a few samples. A lot are classified as plants and medicinal. Don't look at me like I'm Timothy Leary.”

“Doesn't look like a few samples…”

“I'm trying to work. Did you come in here just to bust my balls, or did you want something?”

“I just had a hard day.”

“Well, why didn't you start by saying that instead of taking it out on me?” Michael says, not bothering to stop clicking and pausing the beetle footage. “Get some rest, babe. I'll be up later.”

Cheri has cereal and two large tumblers of scotch for dinner as she grades the last of her students' papers. She doesn't have a home office per se; she rotates between a table in the bedroom and her old college desk squeezed into the corner of the den. She notices a necklace in Jamaican colors hanging over her desk lamp. Encroachment. Is Michael going to start hanging them everywhere, like the milagro bean trees? She looks out the window at the corona of the John Hancock Center, lit against the ink palette of sky. It's a sight she's seen hundreds of times before, unremarkable. Except when she imagines it seen through the eyes of her would-be child. She used to do that last spring when Oz fair was in full swing in the park, the sailboats along Lake Michigan making their lazy circles. She yearns to experience that sense of childlike wonder, when everything seems possible and the world has yet to teach you otherwise.

When she goes upstairs to the bedroom, she finds Michael already asleep. He's on his side, pillows flanking him for his back. She crawls underneath the covers. Her mind pivots from the debacle with Samuelson to the umpteenth fight with Michael. She wants,
craves,
another cigarette. She's had fewer than ten today. She goes back downstairs to the kitchen, where she exhales smoke out the window, wishing she could expel the heaviness of the day.

She gets back on her side of the bed and tries to remember the last time they had sex. Weeks ago, early, quickly, lazy spoon position; she was in the fertile zone and he had a morning hard-on. In their semiconscious states, there was less chance of them fighting. Sometimes she'd use her imagination: a faceless man in a dark alley grabs her and presses her up against the wall, his hand reaching into her blouse, pinching her nipples while he whispers what he's going to do to her. That's what she thinks of now as she breaks through the pillow barricade and curls against Michael, pressing her hips against his back, her foot sliding against the arch of his foot. He jerks away. “I'm tired, Cheri,” he mumbles. “Can't you see I'm trying to sleep?” Lately Michael's complaints of tiredness feel near constant. The other night, after he could barely summon the energy to get undressed for bed, he had rolled over and asked Cheri if she thought there was something wrong with him.
Laziness,
she had thought to herself. She crabs over to her side of the bed and stares at the ceiling. Hating him.

“Do you want to talk,” she says, not really meaning it.

“I'm not a machine; I can't fuck on command. Wait a minute, we were taking a break—you can't even be ovulating yet.”

“It doesn't have to
only
happen when I'm ovulating.”

“You're kidding, right? You are telling
me
this?” After a while he adds: “Did you even notice the necklace?”

“The one hanging off the lamp by my desk? That was for me?”

“No, it's for Elijah. What do you think?”

Cheri thought it looked like something you'd buy from a Jamaican guy at the airport. “It's cute, thanks.”

“Cute? That's real buffalo horn,” he says gruffly, pushing the covers off and swinging his feet over the side of the bed.

“Where are you going?”

“I'm going to take a piss if you don't mind and maybe a shit because my stomach's been messed up. And then I'm going to meditate.”

Cheri listens to the on and off burst of his pee, the dribble at the end. She listens to the opening and half closing of the closet door, the rustle of fabric against carpet, the small crack of his neck as he settles on his cushion. He's perfected the art of using meditation as a passive-aggressive weapon. He belches, yawks at the back of his throat. Sounds that make Cheri feel like she's living with an old penguin named Milton. Without opening her eyes she knows he's in the lotus position on the floor by his side of the bed. She hears Michael's loud, heavy exhale, the sharp rise of his inhale. Namaste. She turns away and puts her pillow over her head until all she can hear is the hum of her own frustration.

I
t's only the beginning of June and Cheri can already feel the humidity socking in. She's sitting outside at the patio table, darting between news sites on her laptop and smoking. So much for quitting. Or being pregnant. Or, much to the dismay of her editor, making progress on her new book. Every time she tried to focus on ancient burial customs, her mind, like a dog that sees a squirrel, would turn to Iraq. True to form, gauging the chances of war in Iraq is squirrelly.

“There's nothing like the smell of impending war in the morning. Bush talking about preemptive strikes? Or is that just the carcinogens you're inhaling?” Michael has emerged from the kitchen with his usual breakfast of oat-bran flakes and soy milk. “Don't tell me the news is any different from what it was an hour ago.”

“It's always different on Al Jazeera.” She doesn't know what's more annoying, his crunching or his riding her about her self-interest in the fate of Iraq.

“Different perspective, same prediction. What are the odds now of an invasion—fifty-fifty by the end of the year? Who cares that thousands of young men could lose their lives in a trumped-up war? It's what will happen to the artifacts—that's the question.”

She's not taking that bait.

“If you look away, it's not like you'll be able to get into Iraq any faster,” he says, putting his hand on her shoulder. “Hard as it is for you to accept, maybe a little downtime wouldn't be the worst thing. I can't get away but maybe you could do something with your mother so she gets off your birthday bandwagon?”

Cheri gives a vague grunt and doesn't look up until she knows he's crossing the weedy, mess of a yard, heading toward HMS Bay. Even after his longtime producer Bertrand told him they'd lost their distribution deal, Michael continued to carry himself with artistic entitlement; he's indignant if anyone questions all the time he's taking with this documentary. Bertrand has always reminded Cheri a bit of Father Christmas; nobody had seen his chin since the sixties. It's covered with a full but always neatly trimmed white beard. He's put up with Michael's ego far more patiently than she has, and for much longer. Cheri watches Michael tramping up the stairs to his office. She knows better than to ask when he'll be finished. All the F-words are hot buttons:
film, finances, fucking,
and, the worst—
failure.

Cheri was not supposed to be at home, staring down the barrel of a hot, muggy summer in Chicago without a project. Ordinarily, summers without teaching obligations were the best perk of her job. They allowed her to dive deeply into research, to write and devise new curricula or to travel to the Middle East as a visiting scholar. She lived for those transcendent moments when she was lost in her translations, ordering and reordering ancient symbols, unable to glimpse their story until they suddenly clicked into place, revealing a new custom, law, or, as was the case with the first tablet she helped Peter Martins translate, the world's oldest recipe for beer. “We are here to commune with ancient ghosts,” he told her, “we liberate them so others can hear.”

Archaeologists were known hoarders of information, so Cheri was grateful to have an ally in Peter. He had been a mentor to Cheri ever since her time in London conducting research for her graduate thesis. He was seventy now but had the enthusiasm of a twelve-year-old boy exploring a pond, pulling out tadpoles. He told her that his counterpart in Iraq, Dr. Irene Benaz, was far behind them in the painstaking first step of identifying and cataloging which tablet fragments among the tens of thousands in the basement of her museum belonged to Tell Muqayyar. Dr. Benaz was short-staffed and sure to be under government scrutiny. Despite the news online, Cheri has not lost all hope that there's been some progress. In fact, she had gotten a call from Samuelson's secretary that morning, requesting that Cheri come in to speak to Samuelson later that afternoon. The meeting is in three hours and forty-two minutes—not that she's counting.

Summer meant that Cheri had to make arrangements with her mother. A trip with Cici was not what she had in mind. Cici hadn't left the tristate area since Sol died; she always had excuses, like the annual meeting of the co-op board she'd never once attended or that she has to light the shivah candles. Cheri informed her that she was confusing shivah with Shabbat and neither custom applied to Sol, who was nominally Catholic and had actually started going to church with Cici in his last few years. But Cici insisted she needed to light the shivah candles every Friday and said, “We must remember,” as if Sol's death should be commemorated like the Holocaust. Cici's memory had somehow reconstructed Sol as the perfect husband and father. “He worked so hard his whole life for us. He leaves money for the hospital. He leaves money for you to buy a nicer house, not with so many cold drafts to give you the pneumonia. Why you no want this?” Talking to Cici forced Cheri to bite her tongue until it was numb. The irony of Sol having made a considerable fortune, not as a radiologist but as the inventor of an easy-to-swallow coating for pills, called Entercap, may have been lost on Cici, but it certainly wasn't on Cheri. Sol was honored as a humanitarian for making the world's medicine go down, but Cheri well knew the price it paid to do so in her family. She had borne the ugly secret she shared with Sol for so long it was a part of her, like a deformed toe she forgot she had until she went to try on someone else's shoes.

Unsurprisingly, Cici picks up after the first ring and immediately launches into a play-by-play of a recent trip to Cartier in which a rude saleslady dared to imply that Cici didn't know the difference between the scintillation and brilliance of a diamond. Cheri gets hit with a wave of guilt. “You need to get out of the apartment to do more than shop,” she says to her mother while she's refreshing the American Federation of Scientists webpage for the tenth time, seeking further confirmation that Saddam's WMDs don't exist to bolster her argument that war can be averted. “What about going to the opera?”

“There is no opera in the summer, are you thinking I go in the park to hear opera? I am no sitting on the ground.”

“Then go see Zia Genny for Ferragosto and go to the opera in Milan. You love that. I'll deal with the tickets—you don't have to call Rosa; nobody uses travel agents anymore.”

“How can I be in Lago di Como when I am giving you a birthday party? We can do it at Le Cirque or we open the house in Montclair but I have no redone the gardens and will need to start right now.”

“Who do you think would come to this party? All the old high school friends I don't have? You'll be throwing it for yourself.”

“Oooffff. You pretend you no care about this birthday,
cara,
but this is a turning stone and you should have family and friends at your side. Put on a dress and wear some of the jewelry I give you. Would that be so bad?” Even after forty years of failure, her mother still thinks she can mold Cheri in her own glamorous image. “You are smoking still?” Cici accused, clearly picking up on Cheri's nearly inaudible exhalation. “It bad for making a baby!”

Cheri is reminded of the birthday parties her mother had given her when she was too young to protest. Cici handed out invitations at the park and the market—wherever she saw a
bella ragazza
with a
bella mamma.
All of these strangers would descend on their backyard—which Cici transformed into a fairyland with ponies and ducks and bunnies where the little girls could be festooned in princess costumes. Cheri didn't want to be a princess; she wanted to be a pirate and wear an eye patch. “Girls can no be the pirate,” her mother insisted, forcing her into a poofy costume. Cheri ran and hid in her room and came out and dressed up only because Cici was so desperately sad, so worried about social failure. Cheri remembers patting her mother's hair, and how heavy Cici's head felt against her small chest.

“I'll look into a ticket to Italy for you,” she says again, checking her e-mails and finding one from Peter. Given the standoff in Iraq, he says he is going to start photocopying the tablet fragments that he's cataloged and promises to send a set of copies to Cheri. They both know it's virtually impossible to assemble this ancient puzzle without having all the pieces, but perhaps they'll get lucky, stumble across one or two contiguous fragments. “I've got to go now, Mother,” Cheri says, cutting off Cici's birthday blather. “I've got a meeting.”

The nape of Cheri's neck is damp from her walk across the quad to Samuelson's office. She thinks that whatever he has to say may be based on Peter's mentioning that they were scanning their fragments. If this is the case, maybe Samuelson will send her to London this summer to see what Peter has identified so far. While scholars often started transliterating cuneiform texts from photocopies, there was no substitute for spending time with the real thing. Even given the divided and unconquered state of the Tell Muqayyar find, Cheri feels a frisson of excitement picturing herself finally getting her hands on the tablets and actively engaging with Peter. And, although Samuelson's fifteen minutes late, she has a genuine smile when Dolores says, “Please go on in.”

“Nice to see you,” Cheri says as he motions for her to sit across from him. “Thank you for reaching out.” She will let him lead; she won't mention anything about communicating with Peter Martins.

“I've had a complaint,” Samuelson says, peering at her over his reading glasses, then leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms.

“A complaint. About?”

“Discrimination. One of your students says that you were biased and it was reflected in his grade.” Cheri's stomach drops.

“
Biased?
Against what? Who is this student?”

“He claims that your presentation of material and your manner of leading the discussion conflicted with his religious beliefs and when he expressed this, you gave him a lower grade. Apparently he came to you to discuss this several times.”

“This is the first I'm hearing of it. Nobody came to me. Does this student have a name?”

“Anthony Richards.”

It takes Cheri a moment to place Anthony Richards as the kid who insisted prostitution was wrong because the Bible said so. “If I remember correctly, he got a C in the class. If he has an issue with my grading, he should have discussed it with me.”

“He said he tried to do just that. And according to him it was a C minus.”

“I can check the grade. He never came to me or tried to discuss anything outside of class. The criteria for grading is clearly laid out in my syllabus, and his work was evaluated in exactly the same way as all the other students' in the class. Biased about his religion in a course that deals with polytheism? I'd like to speak to him face-to-face. Where does he live? Can he return to campus?”

“Not appropriate,” Samuelson says, leaning back even farther in his chair and tapping his fat fingertips together like he's able to gain power from his own superhuman touch.

“Why not?”

“We have to tread lightly. Mr. Richards's father is an alumnus and a significant donor to the university. Any contact at this point would not be advisable. Did you tell him that he should leave your class because he's Catholic or because he doesn't share your views on prostitution?”

“You can't be taking this seriously.”

Samuelson exhales and picks a nonexistent piece of lint off his jacket.

“The entire point of the class is to look at texts without any contemporary or personal religious points of view—Catholic, Muslim, Jewish. I state that to all students and it's also in the course description. I would never tell a student to leave my class based on religion or race or gender.”

“Mr. Richards has stated that he intends to file a written complaint. Given that his family is important to the university, I'm trying to resolve this. Informally.”

“And that means?”

“The Richards family is upset. I want to find a solution that will avoid embarrassment for everyone, most of all for you, Professor Matzner. In the event of an official complaint, per university regulations, I will have to appoint an independent review board. Who will then give you a copy of his written complaint and outline the process and materials they need from you.”

“Fine. I welcome that; anything they need from me, they'll have.”

“I'm glad to see you being so cooperative.”

Samuelson stands up as if to dismiss her but Cheri refuses to go gently: “I hope
you
realize that this sets a very dangerous precedent, especially where religious studies are concerned. If professors have to walk on eggshells and answer to any student who is dissatisfied with his grade and makes up bogus charges of discrimination, we'll be unable to teach. I take it this is all you wanted to talk to me about, not further developments with the British?”

Samuelson meets her gaze. “This is the only development you should be concerned with. Now, I did you the courtesy of informing you of this matter as soon as it came to my attention. And in return, I'd like to ask a courtesy of you.”

“Yes?”

“Please take this to heart,” he says. “Did it occur to you that you will be placed on academic suspension if this goes before a review committee? And you know as well as I do that if it comes to that, I'll have to remove you from the team.”

“Temporarily. Until I am cleared, which I will be.”

“My point, Professor Matzner, is that pragmatism, in situations like these, cannot be overrated.”

Back home, Cheri pulls and yanks on the lawn mower she's dragged out of the garage, trying to get it started. She managed to still her hands while she was sitting, like a chastised child, across from Samuelson. Now they won't stop shaking from anger and adrenaline. The lawn mower yowls like a sick cat. As soon as she pulled into the driveway and noticed the weedy, overgrown lawn (yet another task Michael was too busy or too tired to bother with), she thought,
Good, a living thing I can raze.
If she can get the motor to run for more than ten seconds. She might have been brusque with Richards that day, but extracting
You're a Catholic, get out of my class
from that is absurd. She's had students like Richards before, advocates of creationism who tried to hijack discussions with it's-the-word-of-God-so-it-has-to-be-true. She steered those students to a theology class or they dropped out on their own, but this little fucker spent the entire semester with her and then had the gall to put her career in jeopardy because he got a C minus. She'd looked up his grades and recalculated his 71.2 percent just to make sure. Pissant motherfucker. Of course his father is a high-profile donor; if that weren't the case, would Samuelson even be trying to negotiate a peace treaty? Part of her thinks if it didn't reflect poorly on his department or him, he would have a glint in his eye that this was happening to her.