Mommy Man (9 page)

7

The Wounded Bird

I
’d never given much thought
to what my ideal woman would be. It had always been kind of a moot point. As I sat down at my computer to search the Rainbow Extensions egg donor database, I was confronted with a page full of check boxes. Hair color, eye color, height, weight, hobbies. All I had to do was map out Ms. Right and hit “Enter.” I wouldn’t even have to worry if she was out of my league. I could click on any picture and be confident that the stranger I was looking at would willingly entwine her DNA with mine. It was a straight guy’s fantasy—and my worst nightmare.

Drew wanted nothing to do with it, so I offered to weed through the contenders and compile a short list. I hovered over my mouse. She should probably be tall, just to balance out my Smurf-like stature, should I be the sperm donor. She should be smart, happy, and fun. Her essay questions should be free of obvious grammatical and spelling errors. (No child of mine was going to inherit a disrespect for the language!) And I figured she should be at least kind of somewhat moderately physically appealing.

Of course, I had no idea what that meant. I’d spent my entire adolescence wondering what made women attractive, why certain ones made the cover of
Vogue
while others ladled Salisbury steak onto my Styrofoam lunch tray at school. The worst question one of my guy friends could ask me growing up was, “You think she’s hot?” I knew the wrong answer would be tantamount to confessing, “No, but you are.” But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t tell what separated Chrissy from Janet—or, hell, even from Mrs. Roper. Betty versus Veronica, Ginger versus Mary Ann, Nancy Reagan versus Barbara Bush. I just didn’t have a horse in the race, and it was so hard to pretend otherwise. It was such a relief when Julia Roberts came packaged with the title “Pretty Woman.” It was like having the teacher’s edition to the “You think she’s hot?” textbook. “I’ll tell you who’s hot!” I could say with confidence. “That chick who played Tinkerbell in
Hook
!” High five!

It’s not that I don’t appreciate female beauty. I just think all women are Julia Robertses, the same way that all art is nice to look at, but please don’t ask me to explain the deeper meaning behind those Jackson Pollock splotches.

As I stared at the search page, wondering how to make my own personal Kelly LeBrock materialize, I decided the best thing to do was just describe myself, only taller and with boobs. Brown hair, blue eyes, fair skin. I hit “Go,” and the screen went nearly blank.

“0 hits,” it read in tiny print. “Return to search page.”

It turns out there was one big problem with finding the perfect woman: Rainbow Extensions had only sixty-six to choose from.

Their photos were taken by the agency’s donor coordinator, poorly lit head shots all framed against the same drab blue wall. From the looks of things, it was a strictly one-take affair. These nervous young girls shuffled into an office and got shoved in a chair, and before they knew what they were doing, a flash went off in their face. There were no reshoots for crooked smiles or half-closed eyes. How they looked at their most vulnerable was exactly how I saw them.

For the most part, they were merely girls, some as young as nineteen. If Drew and I had been straight and foolish, we could have had a daughter this age by now. They had bad hair, freckles, and acne. They weren’t chosen for their emotional preparedness to donate. They were chosen because their ovaries were clown cars cram packed with eggs. These were the women nature deemed most suitable to get pregnant, but if they actually came home knocked up, their parents would have been furious.

As I browsed their profiles, I felt like I was looking at the more sensible, slightly older sisters of the Freshmen. “Xander, I’m totally telling Mom and Dad about that magazine you posed for!” “Go ahead, Kaitlyn! I’ll just tell them you’re selling your eggs to gay dudes.” Oh, Mom and Dad, if you’d just given Xander and Kaitlyn a bigger allowance, none of this would have happened!

If their photos weren’t clear enough indicators of their youth, the essay questions drove the point home. They discussed their poli sci majors, their fondness for indie rock bands I’d never heard of, and, eyes wide with optimism, the corporations they’d be running in five years. They all loved “hanging out” and
One Tree Hill
. Every single one of them described their sense of humor as “random,” like their generation had secretly convened and decided that “random” was a thing. Some wrote in that shorthand text speak that drives us thirty-somethings nuts. “Wood luv 2 help u.”

Each profile came with a video. Almost without exception, they were like hostage videos. Nervous young girls uttering tightly rehearsed self-promotional pitches fed to them by the interviewer in front of that bare blue wall. “Hi, my name is X and I am Y years old and I go to the University of California at Z.” “My personal interests include snowboarding and . . .” “I want to be an egg donor because . . .” Isn’t this the generation that grew up with MySpace, reality TV confessionals, and sexting? Why were they all so webcam shy?

Dud, dud, dud. I was going through the sixty-six options so fast, I was afraid I would never find The One.

And then I saw her—Kellykins88.

It was love at first click. She was perfect years old, perfect feet tall, and a sophomore at UC Perfect. She had a bubbly voice and a hearty laugh. She had long blonde hair, oversized blue eyes, and a smile that withstood the requisite mention of her ovaries. For the last few years, she’d been volunteering with autistic kids at a local youth center. Now she dreamed of being a special education teacher. She spoke of herself assuredly but humbly. She was just a girl making a video for a boy, asking him to reproduce with her. She had me at “Do I look at the camera while I talk?”

Kellykins88 was the first candidate I could imagine telling our kid about someday. “We chose her because she was a good person,” I’d explain. “Just like you.”

When Drew got home, I dragged him to my laptop. “I’ve found her!” I squealed.

Drew took a deep breath and waited for me to pull up Kellykins88’s profile.

“This is so weird,” he said. “It’s like I’m getting my first look at our kid!” He was right. It was one of those truly special, totally twenty-first-century moments I’d cherish forever.

“Ewwwwwwwww!” Drew snarled. “Her?!”

His capsule review was not what I’d hoped for.

“What? She’s hot! Isn’t she?”

“She’s Shrek-ish!”

“Just wait till you see her video. She’s so sweet and charming and . . .”

“It talks?!”

“Oh, come on. She’s not that bad.”

Drew waved his hand. “Next!”

There was no point trying to convince him. If I sold him on someone he didn’t like, then I’d always be the one who picked the crummy egg donor. Kid got a D in social studies? Drew could shrug and say, “Well, you picked the egg donor.” No date for the prom? “Blame Daddy Jerry, sweetie. I preferred the cheerleader’s eggs.”

Drew wasn’t any kinder to my list of alternates. “Buck teeth, twelve chins, walrus whiskers!” he moaned as he went through the options.

I fought for a few. “But Missy spends her school breaks distributing mosquito nets in Senegal!”

“Pfft! You sure that’s a woman?”

I realized we were approaching this process completely differently. As a writer, I’m drawn to characters with intriguing quirks and heart-tugging back stories. But for Drew, who spent twelve years overseeing reality programming for MTV, this was just another casting session. If she wasn’t good enough for
Date My Mom
, she wasn’t good enough for us.

I’d never felt so shallow before, but then again, a certain amount of shallowness seemed necessary for the task at hand. If some physically flawed donor gave our son or daughter Spock ears or a cauliflower chin, the poor kid might never forgive us. It’s not like I’m under the illusion that Drew and I have such pristine genes. All the more reason we needed someone above average to balance things out.

There had to be other options out there. I pleaded with Google for help: “egg donor tall smart pretty” . . .
I’m feeling lucky!

0.11 seconds later, Google answered my prayers.

A company called Grade A Fertility promised eggs of a higher pedigree. Each listing boasted of the woman’s SAT scores and alma mater. Almost every girl was an Ivy Leaguer, but if she went to a safety school like Tufts and she looked like a cast member from
Gossip Girl
, they let her squeak through.

Each head shot looked like a Neutrogena ad, a medium close-up of some fresh-from-the-salon stunner lounging on a jetty and staring wistfully into the sunset. The essays read like excerpts from
New Yorker
profiles of particularly fascinating individuals. Their credentials were impeccable. You got the feeling that the first through fifth female presidents were all listed on this Web page.

There was just one big catch: the cost.

The federal government recommends an $8,000 fee for egg donors. It seems like a fair amount of compensation for the time and discomfort required to donate eggs, and most companies, Rainbow Extensions included, charge exactly that. But it’s merely a suggested retail price. It’s not legally binding, and individual agencies are free to mark up as much as they choose. Only a few are ballsy enough to do so. Grade A was the ballsiest of all. Along with each woman’s remarkable resume came an eye-popping price tag.

Heather graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth. She was a Rhodes scholar and a second-year student at Harvard Business School. She was also blonde and blue-eyed and had an absolutely perfect figure. Price: $25,000.

Monica was a Junior at Princeton and a violin prodigy who’d played with the Pittsburgh Philharmonic at age ten. She got a perfect score on her SATs, spoke four languages, and translated ancient Greek poetry as a hobby. She bore a remarkable resemblance to the actress Scarlett Johansson. Price: $30,000.

Diane was tall with perfect bone structure and flawless skin. She was an editor of the
Yale Law Review
and had clerked for the Supreme Court. She was a member of MENSA and an alternate on the Olympic shotput team. Diane was African American. Price: $12,000.

Each listing boasted how many times that particular young woman had donated successfully. Heather had done nine transfers and was ready for number ten. This statistic was supposed to assure you she was up to the job, but it made Heather seem kind of easy. Like naming your kid Madison, having a Heather baby was a sure way of ensuring there were three other kids in the preschool class just like her. Growing up, we played shirts versus skins basketball. Kids today probably played Heather DNA versus non-Heather DNA.

Not that Heather cared. She’d earned almost a quarter of a million dollars passing on her genetic material to strangers. Unlike at Rainbow Extensions, there was no pretense that she was in this to help infertile couples. It was a get rich quick scheme, nothing more. You wondered why she even needed business school anymore. She’d struck gold with her genes. If she kept this up until she was thirty, she could retire comfortably and still have time left to make ten kids of her own.

Still, it was hard not to be sucked in by the stats. We all want our kids to have the best, and being beautiful and intelligent gives you a big head start in life. There are no guarantees that a Rhodes Scholar’s eggs are going to make your kid smarter or that Scarlett Johansson’s DNA will make your kid prettier than Kellykins88, but it sure couldn’t hurt. This was possibly the most important decision we’d make about our child. How would we feel if we cheaped out and, as a result, our kid’s dreams were always frustratingly shy of his reach?

Then again, did we really want a miniature reflection of stuck-up Heather’s snotty little face gazing up at us from our Baby Björn? Who was she to think she was better than Kellykins88? If we used Heather’s $25,000 eggs, we could just as easily be saddling our unborn child with the greed gene. And how would we explain it to him? “Your egg donor was top of the line, son. We got you, and she got a Porsche.” Or, “We wanted you to be taller, but anything over five-foot-nine was out of our price range.” Was that what we’d have to substitute for, “We picked your donor because she was a good person?”

We’d already made our peace with the ethical gray areas of surrogacy, but these so-called premium eggs were a minefield of moral dilemmas. It was like eugenics or something. No, it wasn’t like eugenics. It was eugenics.

Even Drew was turned off by the idea. He would have killed to get any of these girls on
The Real World
, but he didn’t want one as his daughter.

Plus, of course, we didn’t have the money.

Grade A was out, and so was Rainbow Extensions. I wasn’t sure we’d ever find someone who satisfied us.

“We should just ask Susie,” I said one night, in frustration.

Drew’s answer was not what I was expecting. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

Susie was as close to the ideal woman as I could imagine. She was kind, beautiful, smart, a gifted artist, and, at twenty-eight, practically at the peak of her fertility. She was pretty enough for Drew and good-hearted enough for me. She was somebody we could proudly tell our kid about someday. She was what we dreamed of finding, and she was right under our noses. Susie was Drew’s little sister.

Despite being nine years apart in age and on opposite sides of the country, Susie and Drew couldn’t have been closer or more alike. They talked on the phone nearly every day, laughed at the same dirty jokes, had the same mercurial temper. Their mother was constantly remarking about how similar they were, how Susie made the same facial expressions Drew did, how she had the same attitude he did at her age, the same frustrations. They weren’t just brother and sister. They were kindred souls—and best friends.

We thought of Susie as our princess because nobody deserved a fairy-tale life more than she did. Unfortunately, she seemed permanently trapped in the part of the story where she was stuck doing menial chores while everyone else went to the Prince’s ball. Instead of scrubbing the castle floors, she was stocking shelves part time at Lord & Taylor. She liked having a position where she didn’t have to think and where she could listen to her iPod all day. When she went home at night, it was to her childhood bedroom in her parents’ house. She had a phobia about driving, so she walked miles back and forth to work, even in the harshest winter weather. She spent most nights at home because she simply couldn’t get to wherever her friends were hanging out. Drew called her a wounded bird.