Then Came You (2 page)

I looked up from my plate again. The man was holding his briefcase, standing in profile, looking like he was trying to decide what to do next. It could, I knew, go one of two ways: he’d keep staring, or he’d work up the nerve to cross the tiled floor and say something.

When I was thirteen, my father sat me down and gave me a little speech. “There’s something you should know,” he’d said. We were in the family room, half a flight down from the front door, a room with pine-paneled walls and mauve-colored carpet and a glass-topped coffee table on which there were a decade’s worth of yearbooks, one for every year my father had been the yearbook advisor at McKinley Junior High.

“What’s that?” This was in the fall; I’d been wearing my soccer uniform; shorts and shin guards and a sweatshirt I’d pulled on for the bike ride home. My dad was in his worn black recliner, a glass of ice cubes and whiskey in his hand, still dressed in the coat and tie he wore to school. My mom was in the kitchen making baked chicken—she’d dip each piece in a mixture of buttermilk and mustard, then roll it in cornflake crumbs. That chicken, along with Rice-A-Roni and a cut-up head of iceberg lettuce doused in bottled ranch dressing, was my favorite meal, and all I wanted was to take a hot shower, pull on my sweatpants
and a too-big T-shirt, eat my dinner, and get to my homework. For the first time, math was actually hard for me, and I knew I’d need at least half an hour to get through the problem set we’d been assigned.

My dad ducked his head, sipped his drink, and said into the knot of his tie, “Men are going to look at you.”

This wasn’t news to me, and hadn’t been for a while. “It’s not your fault, Julia,” said my father, pulling off his glasses as he spoke. “It’s what men do. It’s how we’re wired, maybe, men and women. We’re programmed to notice each other.”

I’d flicked my ponytail over my shoulder. I was already five foot four inches of the eventual five foot nine I’d reach. My hair was thick and butterscotch blond, and that fall I’d graduated from a training bra to an actual B-cup, and started junior high. These events combined made me feel as if my body wasn’t really me anymore, but something I lived inside; a borrowed blouse I’d snuck out of my mother’s closet, something I needed to treat carefully and could, if I was lucky, one day return.

Men will look,
my dad had said, watching me with a mixture of love and regret. Sometimes, he’d quote a line of Yeats, about how “only God, my dear / could love you for yourself / And not your golden hair.” It made me feel strange, a little proud, a little ashamed, especially because the truth, which maybe he’d guessed, was that men were already doing more than looking: they’d hoot, they’d whistle, they’d make sucking, smooching sounds when I was alone, walking home from school, and they were in their cars. One of my classmates, Tim Sather, seemed to have decided that his mission in life was to snap my bra strap as often as he could, and Mr. Traub, the gym teacher, would wrap his arms around me, letting his jogging-suited torso press, briefly but firmly, against my back as he helped me with my volleyball serve. That summer I’d been wearing my swimsuit, a dark-blue one-piece, and running through the sprinkler with
the Lurie kids, whom I’d been babysitting at the time, and I’d looked up to find Mr. Santos, who lived next door to the Luries, staring at me over the top of his fence with his mouth hanging open. A few weeks later, my older brother, Greg, had gotten in a fight at the town park’s swimming pool. When my mother had fussed over his black eye and swollen cheek, demanding to know who’d started it, Greg had muttered that the boys had been saying stuff about me. My mother hadn’t asked him anything else, and I’d been embarrassed, unsure of how to behave. Did I thank Greg? Did I ask him what the boys had said, if I’d done anything to provoke it? Finally, I decided to say nothing, to pretend the whole thing had never happened. That seemed like the smartest thing to do.

The worst part wasn’t the boys; it was the girls, the ones who had once been my friends.
She thinks she’s sooo pretty,
I’d heard Missy Henried sneer to Beth Brock one day at lunch after Matt Blum, staring at me across the cafeteria, had almost walked into a table. Like I’d asked for him to stare. I had a mirror, and I’d seen enough magazines and TV shows to know that I was what was considered good-looking, maybe even beautiful. But the beautiful girls on TV or in those glossy pages all seemed happy. They never looked lonely, like their faces, their hair, their bodies were traps keeping them apart from everyone else. I couldn’t figure out why I felt guilty when boys stared, like I was lying, or offering them something I didn’t really have. All I knew was that Missy and Beth and I had been Brownies together; we’d trick-or-treated every October, giggling in the costumes that had turned us into cheerleaders or witches or Pink Ladies from
Grease,
posing on Missy’s front porch while her father struggled with his video camera. Now I was their enemy. Now they were on one side of a wall, and I was on the other.

“So what am I supposed to do about it?” I asked my dad. Back then, I thought he knew all the answers. Our house was full of
books he’d read, biographies of presidents and scientists, thick hardcover novels with approving quotes from
The New Yorker
on their backs, different from my mother’s mysteries, which were bright paperbacks with actual people on the covers and titles spelled out in foil.

He’d patted my shoulder. “Just be aware.” Almost ten years later, whenever I felt a man’s eyes passing over me—sometimes lightly, like water, sometimes like the high whining of a mosquito in my ear—I’d remember my father, mumbling into his tie, my father, when he was still all right.
Love you, sweetheart,
he’d said, and hugged me, the way he hardly ever did since my breasts had gotten bigger than bug bites on my chest.

In the food court, I speared a maraschino cherry on my chopstick. The man in the suit made up his mind, walking away from the salad stand, heading straight toward me. I thought he was in his late thirties, maybe his forties, with dark, curly hair and a handsome, coddled face.

I bent over my dinner, hoping he’d just keep walking, and began the time-consuming process of separating the chilies from the chunks of chicken and pineapple, wondering whether he’d work up the nerve to say something or if he was just cruising by for a closer look. When I looked up again he was standing right in front of my table for two, with nothing to eat.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Do you go to Princeton?”

I nodded, unimpressed. I was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that said
Princeton
right across the chest. No makeup, except a little lip gloss and the mascara and eyeliner I never left the dorm without, because my lashes are so sparse and fine that they’re basically invisible without a swipe or two of Lash Out, and my eyes are such a pale blue-gray noncolor that they tend to blend into my forehead without liner, giving my face the look of an underbaked pie.

“You like it there?” he asked. I nodded again.

He lifted his briefcase and moved as if he was going to sit down across from me. I edged my metal-legged chair backward, preparing to tell him, politely, that I needed to finish my dinner and get going because my friends were waiting, when he asked, “Do you play any sports?”

This was a surprise. I’d been betting an either
What’s your major
or
Where are you from
... either that or he’d ask me for help, the most common ploy. At the mall, guys would ask which movie I’d seen and if I’d liked it, or if I could help them pick out a necklace or a sweater for their sister or their mom. At the gym, guys would point at the controls for the StairMaster, feigning confusion.
Hey, do you know how to work this?
In the grocery store, they’d need my assistance picking out pasta or plums. At the gas station, they would require directions; in class, they’d want to know if I’d read the assignment, if I had plans for the weekend, if I’d read this book or heard that band. I know this makes me sound as if my life was a nonstop parade of men who were dying to talk to me, but it’s just the truth. When you look a certain way—blond and tall, with D-cup boobs, with wide-set eyes and a straight nose, and full lips that are dark pink even without lipstick—men want to talk to you. Usually they ask you out, and twice in my life, once in this very mall, I’d been asked if I was a model.

“Field hockey and lacrosse,” I said. I’d played both in high school, but not since.

The man sat down, uninvited. “Are you twenty-one?”

I narrowed my eyes, one hand on the strap of my backpack, wondering whether he was going to propose something illegal or seamy, like phone sex or stripping. Up close, he was older than I’d thought, older than he should have been if he was hitting on a girl my age, maybe forty-five, with a plain gold wedding band on his left hand, and I didn’t want to have dinner with him, or give him my number or my e-mail address or tell him where I
lived or let him buy me a drink or a frozen yogurt; I just wanted to finish my food and go back to my dorm room, avoid my boyfriend, curl up with a book, and count the days until graduation. That was when he smiled.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m getting ahead of myself. Jared Baker,” he said, and stuck his hand across the table.

I shook it quickly. The skin of his palms felt as soft as I imagined the skin on his face would. I got to my feet, never mind that half my dinner was still sitting there. “Excuse me, but my friends are probably waiting for me.” I had my tray in one hand and my backpack in the other when Jared Baker said, “How would you like to make twenty thousand dollars?”

I paused. My skin was tingling.
Illegal,
I thought.
It has to be.
“Doing what? Smuggling drugs out of Mexico?”

His smile widened so that I could see his teeth. “Egg donation.”

I set my tray back on the table. “Sit,” said Jared Baker, coming around the table to pull my chair out for me. He looped my backpack’s straps over the chair and did everything but spread a paper napkin in my lap. It was a funny performance, like a parody of a man tending to a wife who was fragile as an egg. Or who was carrying fragile eggs. “Eat your dinner.” He frowned at the plate. “Skip the spring roll, though. Saturated fats.”

Looking him right in the eye, I dragged the roll through the slurry of Chinese mustard and duck sauce I’d made, and took a giant bite. His grin widened. “Moxie,” he said. “That’s nice. People like a girl with a sense of humor.”

“Are you serious?” I asked once I’d swallowed. “Twenty thousand dollars for an egg?” I’d seen ads, of course, in the school paper, online, and on fliers posted in the student union and the library.
Families seeking egg donors. All expenses paid. Please help make our dreams come true
. But I’d never noticed the fee for the egg itself, and I’d never guessed it would be so high.

Jared Baker was friendly, but not smarmy, serious and calm as he asked me more questions: Where had I grown up? What were my SAT scores? Had I ever had an IQ test? Had anyone in my family had cancer or diabetes or mental illness? I gave him the numbers and said no to the illnesses. He pulled a notebook out of his briefcase and asked if I had siblings, how old my mother had been when I was born, and how much I’d weighed as a baby. I was careful with my answers, thinking about what he’d want to hear, what story would go best with the girl he was seeing, a tall, blond, jockish girl in a Princeton sweatshirt who was eating by herself only because her friends had finished first and were waiting for her in the bookstore.

“Ever been pregnant?” he asked, the same way he’d asked if I was a vegetarian or if heart disease ran in my family. I shook my head, ponytail swishing. I’d only had sex with three different boys, an embarrassingly low tally at my age. I was starting to think that I was one of those people who didn’t like sex very much. Maybe it made me lucky. I wouldn’t spend my whole life getting my heart broken, chasing after this guy or that one.

“And are you single?”

I nodded, trying not to look too excited, to give the appearance that men stopped by the food court to offer me piles of cash every Monday I went to the mall, but my mind was racing, imagining what I could do with twenty thousand dollars, a sum I hadn’t imagined possessing unless I won the lottery or married very, very well. Even with the investment-banking job I was going to take after I graduated, I’d have to manage rent in New York City and start paying back my loans, so the idea of having five figures’ worth of discretionary income was new to me, extraordinary, and alluring.

Jared Baker handed me a business card, a rectangle of heavy ivory paper with embossed letters on top that said
PRINCETON FERTILITY CLINIC, INC.
His name was underneath, with telephone
numbers and an e-mail address. “Be in touch,” he said. “I think you’d be an excellent candidate.”

“Twenty thousand dollars,” I said again.

“Minimum,” he repeated. “Oh, and if you wouldn’t mind telling me your name?”

“Julia Strauss,” I said. “My friends call me Jules.”

“Jules,” he said, giving me another appraising look and shaking my hand again.

So that was how it started: in the Princeton MarketFair, over a Styrofoam plate of sweet and sour chicken and a spring roll that I never got to finish. It seemed so simple. I thought that selling an egg would be like giving blood, like checking the Organ Donation box on your driver’s license, like giving away something you’d never wanted or even noticed much to begin with. And yes, at first, I was just in it for the money. It wasn’t about altruism, or feminism, or any other
ism
. It was about the cash. But I wasn’t going to blow it on clothes or a car or a graduation bash, on Ecstasy or a trip to Vail, or Europe, or one of the hundred frivolous things my classmates might have chosen. I was going to take that money and I was going to try to save my father ... or, more accurately, I was going to give him one last chance to save himself.