Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell (19 page)

“I don’t know quite how to say this,” Heather says. “But the Tomgirls, they’re starting to think about boys.” They’re not even eight yet, I say. “They’re starting to think about it, Miss O’Kell,” she says. “Maybe we better start to think about it too.”

“I came here for
you
,” Nancy says. “Not for
them
.” But I am
them
, I say, and they are me. I tell Nancy to be a Tommie is to be that much closer to me. “I don’t see how I could be any closer,” she says.

Nancy convinces me the oral history at Columbia is the best way to tell my side of the O’Kell story. “What have you got to lose?” she says.

I light the Christmas tree. “Big Mother!” the Tomgirls shout. “We love you Big Mother!” They have been well-trained. They have been taught that all good things in the last town along the canal flow from me. They believe that I am the source of all Christmas joy. It’s more than enough truth to set them free.

Ours is a quieter love now, a gentler love. My world with Nancy is smaller, brighter, better.

Dot Stewart is ready to be a carrier, too. “I’m not doing anybody else any good,” she says. “I want to have another baby. At least I know I can have a baby.” She is crying now. “I want a baby. A big beautiful baby.” A beautiful Cushing baby, I say. A beautiful baby girl.

I am amazed at how easy it is to recruit the new mothers to the Lying-In. They come from everywhere, from all over the country, but they are missing real meaning in their lives. Meaning will come when they give birth to one of our girls.

I am going to Columbia to have my teeth pulled, historically speaking. A professor, a man masquerading as a feminist, wants me to tell him all about The Tommies and the O’Kells. Only in America.

March 13, 1983

That’s the last fucking interview I ever give to a man. Oral History project my ass. It’s always
his
story.

“O’Kell Consolidated is applying genetic engineering to medicine, to crops, to health,” Nancy says. “Their focus is much more global than ours.” So there’s no competition? “Not directly,” Nancy says. We’re not a grocery store, I say. Tom can feed the world for all I care. I just want to make Cushing babies.

April 1, 1983

Allyson, our first carrier, gives birth to Odette. Mother and child are resting comfortably.

Allyson doesn’t want to give the baby up. You don’t have a choice, I tell her. Odette may be a part of you, I say. But this baby is part of
us
.

I say there is nothing quite like the wanton cravings of older flesh for older flesh. “Waste not, want not,” Nancy says.

Sliv makes sure the traitor takes nothing with her. “I escorted the bitch myself, Miss O’K, pardon my French. I wouldn’t let her take nothing, not even her Kleenex box after I made her cry. She was clean as a baby’s bottom when I hustled her out the door. Only things she took was the clothes on her back and whatever she had inside her head.” I don’t tell him that’s what I’m afraid of.

“‘Cease and desist?’” Tom says over the phone. “Genetics is a burgeoning field, Eleanor, a
booming
business, not just a backwater in that godforsaken town of yours. A certain amount of, shall we say, cross-breeding with O’Kell Consolidated can only benefit your little test-tube operation.” Fuck you too, I say.

I tell Nancy to give all of Abigail Rickover’s geneticists a fat bonus. I don’t ever want to lose anyone to Tom ever again.

Sales of our frozen embryos are going through the roof in Europe. Abigail Rickover thinks the same thing will work in Japan, in Asia, all over the world, even behind the Iron Curtain one day. “We’ve struck gold,” she says. I say it must be the O’Kell in me.

We will actively recruit carriers for The Tommies from the streams of mothers who keep showing up in the last town at the Lying-In. Business is booming, but we have to spread our wings.

Every bed is taken. Our numbers are so good that I keep raising prices. But it doesn’t seem to matter. The Good Egg is just a great business.

I look at the pictures Diana took for
Imagine
of Kelly and Heather, Scarlett and Allyson. They all look so much thicker, heavier, older to me now, just two years later. I wonder what I ever saw in them. Their daughters are the future of The Tommies, and they are the past.

I tell Nancy an egg is an egg is an egg in this business, as long as it’s a
Cushing
egg.

“No more needles,” Allyson says. “It’s my body and I won’t do it.” You don’t have to, I tell her. As a carrier, Allyson is now on a cash-and-carry basis.

“Are you making money?” Charles Evans wants to know over the phone. Hand over fist, I tell him.

“I need to experiment with dogs,” Abigail Rickover says. “I want to put genes into their bodies. Then I want to put genes into people. It’s going to take some time.” And I thought I was the one who wanted to play God.

“The Tomgirls are talking about boys,” Heather tells me. “But there are no boys in this town.” Let’s keep it that way, I say.

There’s a boxload of border collies yelping in the corner of Abigail Rickover’s lab. They look scrawny enough to be half-breeds. Why collies? I wonder. “We are breeding them to be vigilant,” Abigail Rickover says.

“The price of eggs keeps going up,” Nancy says, “and the price of Good Eggs is going through the roof.” I tell her Europe is the tail that wags the dog.

The new mothers, our new Tommies, are true believers. They know the stories about Constance Briody inside out. I am going to put them to work with the Tomgirls. True faith is a miraculous thing.

“Why did you want to make babies in the first place?” Nancy wonders. To make a new world, I say, you have to start from scratch.

Let me tell you all about men, I tell the Tomgirls in the basement of the Cathedral. There used to be a time when we couldn’t live without them. They helped us make babies. They made most of the money. And they made our lives miserable. It was
slavery
, if you want to know the truth. We were stuck with them, and they could do anything they wanted with us. They could use us, they could abuse us, and we still had to make a home and raise the children, usually by ourselves. Sometimes they left us for another woman, usually a younger woman. It was pure hell to live your life through a man, but we never had a choice. Now we do. We don’t have to live that way any more. Look around you in the town. Do you see any men, other than Sliv and Chief Dan and the guys who take the trash out? There’s a reason for that, and the reason is
we don’t need them
. Now look at the Lying-In. Look at the smiles on the faces of the mothers when they come out with their own baby girls, without men. Do they look like they’re missing something? Or do they look like they found what they were looking for? That’s why so many of them are staying on or coming back to the last town to be Tommies. To be without men is a new kind of bliss, I tell the Tomgirls, and we want it to last forever.

I sit with Abigail Rickover and watch the Tomgirls run with the border collies. They are becoming so beautiful, so ripe, so rife for what awaits them. With boys they would only go to the dogs. “You see how they are?” Abigail Rickover says. A border collie puppy noses my hand,  then runs away. “I think there’s a genetic reason for that. I think there’s a gene, and if we find the genes that cause individual behaviors we hit the jackpot.”

There are no boys here at our nurseries. There are no mothers with sons in our town, and no fathers to speak of. We have finally reached the end of the road with men. Who needs them?

July 4, 1984

We are watching Sliv shoot fireworks out over the canal. The Tomgirls on blankets all around us are
oohing
and
aahing
. “What do we do with the Tomgirls?” Nancy says. “They won’t be girls forever.” No they won’t, I say. They will be Tommies very soon.

“We can’t keep up.” Abigail Rickover stops me in the lobby of the Lying-In. “It’s simple arithmetic. Every bed is full, even all the cots we’ve added to the rooms. But we’re coming up short on eggs.” That can’t be, I say. “Yes it can. Even Allyson. We used to be able to count on four, six, eight eggs every month from her. She was like a machine. Now the numbers don’t work any more.” I tell her to find me a better business. Or a better drug.

Nancy wants to tonight but I have nothing in me.

What have we learned from the border collies? I ask Abigail Rickover. “We’ve learned they love the Tomgirls,” she says. “But the rest will take time. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack full of needles.” I tell her I don’t have forever.

“We’ve got a problem,” Nancy says. “One of our donors is acting up. He graduated from Harvard Law then went out and grew a conscience. He’s a lawyer now. Specializing in bioethics.”
Bioethics
? I say. “We may have to buy him off,” Nancy says.

“I think I found it,” Abigail Rickover says. “That new business we were talking about.”
I say I’m listening. “Sometimes, after fertilization, multiple fetuses start to grow in the womb when there’s only room for one or two at most. So we take out the others.” You
abort
them? “It’s perfectly legal,” she says. “But until now we’ve just been disposing of the fetuses, throwing them out with the garbage. Now we don’t have to. There’s going to be a big market for that tissue.” There’s a market for dead babies? “It’s the best tissue known to man for gene research, and researchers are willing to pay top dollar. That’s their dirty little secret.”

So we have become a chicken factory, savoring and salvaging every last gizzard. I love it.

“I heard a rumor there’s been some people poking around town,” Chief Dan tells me in my office at the Lying-In. “Want me to have a look, Miss O’Kell?” Your job is to look the other way, I say. Or did you forget?

“His name is Vincent D’Angelo,” Nancy says. “He wants to know where his sperm went. He says that’s his right as a father. He wants $500,000 up front or he’s filing in court.” Tell him we don’t know, I say. “He knows that we know. He knows we’ve got records of everything. He’s not dumb. He’s Harvard Law, and he’s asking for full disclosure.” Son of a bitch, I say.