The Paternity Test (12 page)

“Isn’t it sweet,” said one lady, who stopped me at the Job Lot, when Debora had gone to browse the canned-goods aisle. “To see a family together. A husband who participates! I’d hug you, but . . .” She lifted her arms, laden with discount spices.

The old activist part of me was tempted to give a lecture: “Actually, I’m not the dad, I’ve got my own husband, and soon we’re going to have our own baby.” Technically speaking, though, Stu was not my husband; and now that, in Massachusetts, same-sex couples could marry, using the word was maybe insincere. Still and all, I could have simply—civilly—corrected her.

Was it a terrible thing that I loved the lady’s mistake? I loved the little Pop Rocks burst of pride that it provoked.

“My, what a cutie pie. How old?” asked a checkout clerk at Sears, as I patty-caked with Paula. (Debora was in the fitting room, trying on crew-neck sweaters.)

“Four,” I said.

“Oh! My grandson just turned four. Aren’t they just a wonder at that age—such curiosity.” The woman’s rawhide face appeared to flush with camaraderie. Even her smoker’s greasy eyes grew spirited and clear.

“Yes,” I said. “You’d think she only knows two words:
How come?
”

That was true. Nothing at all untrue.

And so what if the clerk assumed my knowledge was a father’s? I asked myself: Really, who gets harmed?

Stu, when I told him what had happened, made a squinchy face, something between amused and appalled. “Why do you get off,” he said, “on being an impostor?”

“Hey, isn’t that a little harsh? I mean, ‘impostor’?”

“Well,” he said, “pretending to be something that you’re not.”

“Something I’m not
yet
. But will be, right? Am meant to be? I guess I figured: couldn’t hurt to practice.”

Stu was changing light bulbs in the kitchen’s recessed fixtures, swapping out the old electron-guzzlers for fluorescents. He stepped down from his stool, got a bulb, stepped back up. “It’s good you’re psyched, but aren’t you, maybe, a little over the top?” he said. “At least for the stage of things we’re at. You seem a little—what’s the word?— hysterical.”

“Careful,” I said. I grabbed a bulb. “There’s places I could shove this. ‘Hysterical’?—that’s misogynist, you know. You shouldn’t say that.”

“How can I be misogynist to
you
? You’re a man.”

“Doesn’t
hyster
, or
hystera
, or something like that, mean
womb
? As in, you know, a doctor cuts it out:
hysterectomy
. So saying I’m ‘hysterical’ literally means I’m getting
womby
. Fine with me! A badge I’ll wear with pride.”

“Suit yourself,” he said, and gestured for me to flip the switch, to see if the new light bulbs were working.

Nothing at first. But warily, then, withholdingly, they glowed.

Was Stu less excited than I? I didn’t want to think so. I guessed he was focused on the
task
of having a baby, the technical steps to get from here to there. Save up cash, hire an expert, oversee the setup—an improvement, like adding on a deck. I, on the other hand, was woozy with emotion, thinking ahead to how I’d feel in various situations (what if there were a stillbirth? what if we had twins?), and how, then, would Stu feel, and Debora, how would we cope?

Okay, well, maybe I
was
hysterical.

But I had so many questions; I wanted to get things right. And every hour with Debora, I wondered if she judged me, waiting for a greenhorn’s goof that proved I wasn’t worthy.

The day after I talked to Stu I saw her again, with Paula. We were already at Toys“R”Us when Debora confessed our purpose: Paula’s tiara had fallen into the bathtub and been wrecked, and now she needed a new one for her endless game of “princess,” her ardent search for princely frogs to kiss.

I didn’t mean to make an icky face when Debora said this, admitting she allowed the girl’s obsession. I must have, though, given how quickly Debora got defensive.

“I try and try to get her wearing something else,” she said. “A baseball cap, a sailor hat—something not so ‘girl.’” Longingly, she touched a box of Aquaman apparel. “But girls, I think, sometimes they
are
girls. It’s what they are.”

“Wait,” I said. “You don’t think I . . . I wasn’t criticizing.”

“Come on, Pat. I saw the way you looked.”

“But no, it’s not
your
choices I’m worried about. It’s mine.”

This was true: I had no beef with Paula’s girly conformity or with Debora for abiding the cliché. (Most of the real-life girls I knew were plenty princess-centric. The girls obsessed with quarterbacks, or big-game hunters, or pick-your-quirk were mostly just the ones in children’s books.) No, what I was struggling with were questions about myself. How the hell would
I
teach gender roles?

“Listen, how can I win?” I said. “Let’s say I have a daughter, and let’s say she’s just crazy for tiaras. My gay friends will laugh at me and say I’m only using her to live out all my secret faggy dreams. Or worse, they’ll be mad at me—especially the lesbians—for reinforcing cultural expectations. But what if I refuse to buy tiaras for my daughter, and raise her as some kind of tomboy butch? Then I’ll be accused of . . . of recruiting.”

Debora inhaled. “I never thought of this. But yes, I see.”

“Right?” I said. “Right? Okay, now, imagine me with a tiara-loving
son
!”

Oh, how Debora laughed. A sound like scattered beads. Laughed and laughed, then touched me on the cheek. “And I thought you were watching me with Paula,” she revealed. “Watching to see if I would pass the test. A man from New York, you know. So stylish, so intelligent. Also your job: you write tests for a living!”

“Never crossed my mind,” I said, “to fault you for your parenting. The way you are with Paula? It’s a marvel. No, I thought you’d think that
I
was clueless.”

Poof!
Like a candle lit to cancel out a stink, honesty made our fears go up in smoke.

Later, riding home in my emphysemic Volvo, with Paula and her favorite frilly Barbie in the back, Debora turned and leaned to me and whispered: “Pat, I wonder. We get along so well now. What do you think of doing it ourselves?”

My breath caught. What did she mean by “it”? I said, “Ourselves?”

“This is a bad idea?” she said. “Maybe it is. I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s just”—my voice was thin—“I’m not sure what you’re saying.”

“Making the baby,” she said. “Maybe it’s better at home?”

“Oh! Oh, I see now. At home? Really? You’d want to?”

The thing was, she said, she’d started to imagine: lying in a doctor’s room, on one of those awful tables, the cold, crinkly paper they rolled out (it made her feel like a flounder that the fish man would wrap up). Lying there, her feet up in the stirrups, with a stranger. “This is not the way to make a baby,” she said. “Is it?”

“Mãe, what’s a stirrups?” called Paula from her car seat.

How had she managed to hear us, above the rasping muffler? Debora nudged my thigh with incredulity.

“What is it, Mãinha? And how come you are whispering?”

“Stirrups is a grown-up word. It’s something at the doctor’s.”

“Like lollipops? I like when Dr. Li gives me lollipops.”

“No,
filha
. It’s something doctors use to help them check you.”

My hat was off to Debora for such head-on, honest answers— simplified but not at all deceitful. I wondered what she’d told Paula about me and Stu, and why we were spending time together. How would Debora explain when she got bigger- and bigger-bellied, and later, when we whisked the child away? Paula would be the baby’s—what? Her half-surro-sister? How would we expect them to relate?

Debora turned and touched the tip of Paula’s nose, anointing. “That’s enough, now. Mãinha needs to talk with Pat, okay? Play with Barbie. I think she seems alone.”

Paula, looking pained—had she been called neglectful?—cuddled the doll and murmured near its mouth.

“I’ve been reading,” said Debora to me, her voice now even lower. “And asking the women on Surromoms, you know? Everyone says it’s more nice, if you have two good IPs, to do insems yourselves: more relaxed.” She told me about a woman named Felicia (“Four times a surro”), who’d done both in-clinic and at-home. “The doctor, he took three tries, but at home? First time was charming.”

Debora’s English: talk about charming!

Cheaper, too, she said, if insems were done at home. IUI was four hundred dollars, easy, maybe five. Plus another hundred for the washing of the sperm, a hundred or two more for ultrasound. All of this for one in-clinic try that might still fail.

“The most important thing isn’t the money,” I insisted. “It’s making you as comfortable as possible. You and Danny.”

“I think he’ll like this better, too. Like this, he can be part of it. And not so many strangers with their fingers on his wife.”

“I can’t argue with that,” I said. “Just let me check with Stu.”

Before that, though, I figured I had better check with Marcie, my go-to friend for all things gynecological.

“Took you long enough,” she said. “I thought you’d never ask.”

“Didn’t want to impose,” I said.

“Impose? Are you kidding? Asking a lesbian mom for tips on home insemination?”

How I’d missed her banging, mannish laugh!

The dykes had been DIYing for years, she assured me. Didn’t I know that that’s how she and Erin conceived Randall? Medically it was fine; politically it was preferable: “Not relying on the heteronormative system, yadda yadda. Just sit tight. I’ll send you all you need.”

Four days later her parcel arrived, its gifts flagged with Post-it annotations: bottles of zinc and vitamin E (“To make Stu’s swimmers strong”); an ovulation predictor kit and needleless syringes (“Better than a turkey baster, trust me”); and then a strange device called an Instead Cup. “Sort of like a little plastic toque,” said Marcie’s note. “An alternative to tampons—at least that’s what they’re sold for. Fitted around the cervix as a way to catch the blood. The secret is, they work just as well to hold in
semen
. Watch the website video. You’ll catch on.”

Finally, at the bottom of the box, a spine-worn book:
No Penis? No Problem: The Compleat Guide to Home Insemination
. “Patriarchy is a towering wall,” its cover blurb proclaimed, “but here’s new light for readers—heterosexual and lesbian—who’ve had enough of living in its shadow.”

Our problem wasn’t a lack of penises; we probably had too many. But I supposed the book’s advice would still provide some aid. It even had some old
Joy of Sex
–style pencil drawings, to help us picture Debora’s undertaking. I planned to read it front to back, mustering all my data—the cost savings, the odds of successful fertilization—and then present the possibility to Stu.

But Stu came home early (“De-icer malfunction. Grounded”), and there I was in the living room, my nose buried in
No Penis? No Problem
.

“Um,” said Stu. “Pat? Have you had some sort of accident?”

No, I assured him, I was still
all there
. Then, even though the case I’d make was unperfected, I began explaining our idea.

I figured he’d be skeptical, maybe even pissed. Why would I have talked to Marcie before I talked to him, and what was I doing, tinkering with our plan? But Stu said he’d wondered, too, about the at-home option. Given the way fertility docs had trampled over Rina, he wasn’t eager to face the men in lab coats. So yeah, sure, if Debora herself preferred to do it that way . . .

“Really? You’re not mad?” I said.

“Why would I be mad? You’ve been so good, doing all your homework.”

If anything, he seemed almost impressed that I’d arranged this, as though, in the baby bazaar, I’d bargained for a discount. He seemed happy that Debora would be happy.

I guessed I should have emphasized that
she
had been the instigator. None of the credit fairly belonged to me. But Stu was so appreciative. He kissed me on the eyelids! I didn’t see the upside of explaining.

When the phone rang, a cold afternoon a few weeks later, I was watching the daily White House briefing on C-SPAN.
End the death tax. Enemy combatants
. A horror show, but soothing—in fact, the only soothing thing on days, like today, when I was steamed: a headbutt to a wall to cure a headache.

The thing that had me steamed was a spat with Steve, my editor, and his was the phone call I’d been dreading. I’d written a new lesson, on Marranos in Brazil, the ways they’d survived the Inquisition: their secret rites and prohibitions—no kneeling in church, no pork—the doggedness of Debora’s brave forebears.

Steve’s response?
Anti-Christian. Will never get through Texas
.

I hated his way, in e-mails, of leaving out the subjects of his sentences, as if he were too busy.
Baloney
, I shot back. How was it anti-
anything
to describe one group’s strength in the face of unflagging persecution? Would it be “anti-white” to mention, say, the Underground Railroad? Should
those
facts be stricken from the books?

Not arguing facts
, he typed.
Just warning you: won’t fly. School board’s very touchy about religion
.

I wrote back:
As touchy as they’ll be if they discover that an open homosexual writes their books?

My threat (an idle one; I needed to keep my job) provoked no return message from Steve. Which usually was the clue that he’d be calling.

I muted the White House fright show, and scuffled toward the phone. Steeled myself. Picked up the receiver.

“I searched,” said Debora.

“Oh!” I said. “So happy that it’s
you
.” By now I was used to her zero-to-sixty style. Used to it but still, each time, enamored. “Searched?” I said. “Hold on. Searched for what?”

“No, no. Not searched,” she said. “
Surged
.”

“But wait, you weren’t supposed to—”

“I know. But, well . . . I did.”

According to the predictor kit, the daily temperatures charted, we’d thought
tomorrow
was the start of ovulation. We were supposed to have another day!