Daughters for a Time (2 page)

I padded down the hallway to the baby room. The baby room with no baby. A room painted and wallpapered years earlier, when my naive optimism fueled the false belief that I
would be pregnant in no time. I sat on the edge of the bed, let gravity pull me down, and lay curled on my side with my knees pulled toward my chest. I hugged a teddy bear and let the tears flow easily. These days I was like a faucet.

Was it so wrong to want a family? To imagine a Norman Rockwell life where the three of us ate dinner around the same table every night, laughing, jockeying for turns to talk, a heated game of Candy Land afterward, a marathon reading session before bedtime.
Just one more!
our child would beg, crawling over Tim’s chest, her hands cupped around his face, while I fluffed her pillows and straightened her comforter, readying her cozy nest for a good night’s sleep. Later, as Tim and I curled into each other, we’d laugh over a memory from the night. “God, she’s so funny,” Tim would say. “A little comedian,” I’d agree, nudging closer to him.

Three years ago, after a year of trying to get pregnant, I had been diagnosed with endometriosis, which the doctors suspected to be the cause of my infertility and painful periods. Surgery followed, and then two more years of trying, but still no luck. This year’s theory was that my egg quality was poor. “The eggs might be there,” Dr. Patel, our fertility specialist, had said, “but they don’t want to come out.”

Lazy, good-for-nothing, squatter eggs.

Dr. Patel prescribed drugs to jump-start the ovulation process, a shocking dose of hormones to give my eggs a swift kick in the butt. Each month, Tim and I made a trip to the fertility clinic and I endured the humiliating experience of intrauterine insemination, a process whereby Dr. Patel strapped me into stirrups and used a turkey baster to direct my husband’s sperm to the right location. There, they rambled around looking for an egg to penetrate.
Hello! Anybody home?
Little did they know that my eggs were freeloaders, sponging off the system without doing an ounce of work.

“I just don’t get it!” I cried to Claire one morning after I’d gotten my period. “Why can’t I get pregnant?”

“You can! You will,” she insisted, though it seemed like she was starting to doubt it.

“I knew this round wouldn’t work. Dr. Patel was out of the office on an emergency procedure and a resident had to do the insemination. The idiot couldn’t even find my uterus. Ended up injecting the sperm into my cervix! My cervix!
Tim
could basically do that!”

“Everything happens for a reason,” my sister said. “Maybe this is God’s way of telling you that you’re not meant to birth a child.”

“Thanks a lot, Claire! So God finds crack whores and single teenagers suitable to birth a child, but not me.”

“That’s not what I meant. I’m just wondering if you should consider some alternatives.”

“Alternatives?”

“Like adoption.”

I shook my head decisively. “Adoption is great,” I said. “I
love
people who adopt. But I really want to have my own child.”

“But if you can’t, it’s an alternative. A baby’s a baby. Love’s love.”

“It wouldn’t be the same,” I said defiantly.

“Why are you so determined to perpetuate our gene pool? What’s so great about our family’s DNA? Poor Mom, dead at the age of forty.”

“You
have
a baby, Claire,” I said, now angry. “How can you not get that I want to birth a child more than anything in the world?”

“Of course I understand,” she said softly, setting a cup of tea on the table next to me. “I just hate seeing you in so much pain. How far are you willing to go?”

“To the end of the earth.”

I plopped into the corner of the sofa, sliding my body down the length of it. I placed my hands on my sternum where the gnawing pain was usually located, a nagging ache that had plagued me since Mom died. Acid churned in my stomach, the pressure lodged under my rib cage. Tums, Tagamet, Axid, Pepcid…Nothing worked. I needed something much stronger to extinguish the self-doubt that I was feeling. Today I needed an entire medicine chest: something for the cramps, something for the acid, something to dull the pain altogether.

If my mother were here, she’d smooth back my hair, make me a cup of cocoa with a heaping spoonful of fluffernutter, and assure me, “It’s okay; your time will come.” But Mom wasn’t here and that left Claire, and Claire would never say that. Claire was a problem solver. She’d give advice, recommend reading, tell me to buck up and think of a new plan. “Did you get the article I sent on the couple who adopted twins?” Claire would want to know.

The basement door squeaked when Tim came up from exercising. I wiped my eyes, slid off the sofa, and tried to lift my mouth out of its frown. Tim’s shirt was soaked with sweat and his disheveled sandy hair stuck up in every direction. His cheeks shone red.
Vibrant
was how he looked. The opposite of me. Every time I caught my reflection in the mirror, I couldn’t help thinking how much I resembled my father, Larry.
Defeated
was how I remembered him looking.

“How are you?” Tim asked in a careful voice. Dealing with me these days was like walking on eggshells.

“I’m fine,” I said, retrieving a Gatorade for him from the refrigerator.

“Thanks.” Tim had the boyish looks of a model in a Polo advertisement, like a prep school lacrosse player fresh off the field. He wiped the sweat from his face with a wet paper towel and then looked at me. “How are you, really?”

“Just the usual. Got my period in middle of the night.”

“Of course you got your period.” As if there wasn’t a chance in hell that I would turn up pregnant. “We need to start the process. There’s a daughter waiting for us. Focus on that.”

Tim had a childhood friend who adopted from China last year and their daughter was doing beautifully. Tim had already done some research, contacted the same agency that his friend had used, and requested the paperwork. It sat untouched on my dresser.

This is my daughter from China
, I had tried saying once, but the words got caught in my throat, like eating too much corn bread with nothing to drink. The
daughter
that melted in my mouth like a chocolate truffle was the one that I was unable to conceive.

“Helen, come on,” Tim said. “Anyone can have a baby, but it takes a special woman to adopt.”

The burning behind my breastbone flared. It was never Tim’s intention to hurt my feelings; he was just able to do it so well. As if these four years we’d spent trying to conceive had been just a silly exercise in biology and chemistry that didn’t really matter in the long run.

“Not anyone can have a baby,” I reminded him.

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

“Sorry,” I said, wishing I didn’t take everything Tim said so personally.

He exhaled and offered a smile. “Let’s start over. What are your plans for today?”

I bit into a cranberry scone he’d whipped up earlier. My recipe. Though back when I was the pastry chef in our house,
I’d used currants. It was buttery and light and the cranberries were tangy and chewy. Baking was my personal alchemy. I loved how the science of yeast, flour, and liquid could produce such delicious results. I liked, too, the reminder that there was a fine line that separated miracles from disasters. How all the skill in the world still required a dash of luck.

“Let’s see, I’m going to do some laundry, pay some bills, go grocery shopping,” I said, trying to sound efficient, like Tim. But what I really wanted was my flannel pajamas, my down comforter, a couple of these scones, and a pot of coffee. I had a week’s worth of soap operas recorded upstairs. I wanted to hear the opening music for
Guiding Light
because it reminded me so much of Mom that I could almost feel her.

“Do you think you’d have any time to come into the restaurant?” Tim asked. “You know you’re always welcome to come in and work, whip up something for the night’s tasting menu.”

“I know. I’ll think about it.”

“It’d be good for you to get back to work a little, you know?”

“Meaning?”

“Just that it would be good for you to get out of the house for a while. For you to remember how much you used to love baking.”

“True,” I said, wistfully remembering what it was like to spend a morning at my stainless steel workstation, my mixers, pans, and tins organized neatly in front of me, a giant marble slab covering a refrigerated space below. But true, too, was the memory of my last day at work when the devastation of starting my period flung me into a rampage, setting into flames with my blowtorch an entire rack of chocolate-hazelnut tortes.

“We have rehearsal today at eleven o’clock, for tomorrow’s show,” Tim said. “I could always use your help with that.”

For the last year, following a glowing article on Tim and Harvest in
The Washington Beat
magazine, my husband had
enjoyed the status of a celebrity chef. Now, once a week, he prepared a gourmet meal in a five-minute bit on
Good Morning Washington.
Last week he seared foie gras, slid it onto pointed toast, and topped it with caviar. The bleached-blonde, C-cupped newsperson, Melanie Mikonos, was nearly orgasmic as she savored Tim’s creation, leaning into his arm. Unassuming Tim—a guy who was a thousand times cuter than he realized—just shrugged his shoulders like it was no big deal.

“It still cracks me up that you have to ‘rehearse’ cooking,” I said, instantly regretting my snotty tone.

Tim raised his eyebrows, probably wondering where the woman he married had gone. I used to be funny, but now I was just sarcastic, as if I’d forgotten the mechanics of a good joke.

“Sorry.” I walked toward Tim and took his hand. The clot in my throat left me unable to say more.

Tim kissed my forehead, and for a second, I wished that I could burrow into his chest and go to sleep. I wished that things were as they were when we’d first met. The two of us, broke and in love, traveling through Europe following our graduation from cooking school, lying side by side in our sleeper cabin as the train thundered through the night. Back when having children was just a fantasy. We’d split our time between DC and Paris. Our children would be so
international
they’d speak three different languages. It would be no big deal to pull them out of school for a holiday in Naples.

We’d exhale, lying back with our arms crossed over our chests, dreamily resolved in our plans. Back then, anything and everything seemed possible. Our love and curiosity and ironclad loyalty to each other insulated us from any wrong turn.

Those were happy days for me, two special years spent overseas with Tim, traveling with no itinerary, an unfolded map spread out before us. Those were the years when I actually found some peace following Mom’s death. Something about
feeling so small in comparison to a gigantic world gave me a perspective I hadn’t had before. After years of blaming Mom for leaving me too early, I was finally able to mourn
her
loss, finally able to see that she was a woman who had been robbed of her future, too, and forced to leave her girls to fend for themselves.

“Sorry I’m such a crab,” I said. I wrapped my arms around Tim and let my head rest on his chest. Closed my eyes. Breathed. More tears ran down my cheeks.

Tim hugged me back, unwrapped my arms, and went to the cupboard for a coffee cup. “If I don’t see you sometime today, then I won’t see you until late tonight.” He feigned sadness, turning his bottom lip over.

“On a Wednesday? Why can’t Philippe close the kitchen?”

“We have a special group coming in. I want to be there ‘til the end, just in case.”

“I’m sure Philippe could handle it.”

“I’m sure he could, but I’d rather stay. If you need me, just call. Or even better, come in and work.”

“I don’t think so.”

These days, feeling sorry for myself reigned supreme. Somewhere below the self-pity was a nagging guilt I felt for shirking my responsibilities at the restaurant, welshing on our “co-owner” arrangement.

“I’m sorry I’m not more helpful,” I added.

“It’s fine,” Tim said. “By the way, I looked at the draft of the new menu format you designed. I think it looks great.”

“Thanks.” I had spent hours on the Internet, pulling up actual menus from restaurants in France and Italy, getting ideas.

“And when you come back to work, you’ll be even more help,” he said.

“Yeah. Sure.”

When you come back to work
. The words splashed a wave of acid in the bowl of my stomach. More evidence that there would be no baby in my future. Tim was never one to initiate a fight, but he was a champ when it came to putting his foot in his mouth, always pushing the buttons that hurt me most.

“What are Claire and Maura up to?” Tim asked. “Maybe you could get together with them.”

Four years ago, my sister and I started trying to get pregnant at nearly the same time, only Claire succeeded and I failed. Claire got the starring role and I was cast as the understudy, the one who only got to play mom while babysitting my young niece.