What Alice Forgot (24 page)

At first I resisted the idea of splitting the world into “Fertiles” and “Infertiles,” as if we were in some science-fiction movie, but soon it became part of my new language. “What Fertiles can never understand . . .” we say to each other. Ben hates it when I say things like that. He doesn’t really like the group, either, although he’s never met them.

I’m making them sound awful, but they’re not. Or maybe they are and I can’t see it because I’m exactly the same. All I know is that sometimes it feels like lunch with those girls is the only thing that keeps me sane. And it’s Mother’s Day next Sunday. (As the television keeps loudly reminding me every two minutes.) That’s the most painful day of the year for an Infertile. I always wake up feeling ashamed. Not sad so much. Just ashamed. Sort of stupid. It’s a version of that feeling I had in high school when I was the only one in my class who didn’t need to wear a bra. I’m not a proper woman. I’m not a
grown-up
.

Today we met at a restaurant in Manly right on the harbor. When I got there, they were all sitting outside in a dazzle of sun and water and blue sky, huddled over something in the middle of the table, their sunglasses pushed on top of their heads.

“Anne-Marie’s pregnancy tests,” said Kerry when she saw me. “We disapprove, of course, but see what you think.”

Anne-Marie does this every time she does an IVF cycle. They tell you not to do a home pregnancy test after you’ve had an embryo transfer because the results are not conclusive. You might get a positive when you’re not really pregnant because your body still has hormones left over from the “trigger injection” that mimic pregnancy, or you might get a negative just because it’s too early to tell. The best thing is to wait for the blood test. I never do a pregnancy test because I like things to be conclusive and I’m a good girl, but Anne-Marie starts doing them the day after the transfer and admitted once that one day she did seven tests. We all have our own versions of this obsessive-compulsive behavior, so we don’t scoff.

I squinted at Anne-Marie’s tests. There were three, wrapped up in aluminum foil, as usual. They all looked negative to me, but there was no point telling her this. I said I thought I could maybe see a very faint pink line on one of them, and she said her husband had said he was sure they were all negative, and she’d yelled at him that he obviously wasn’t trying. You have to want to see the second line, she’d told him, and they’d had a big fight. Anne-Marie has never had a successful IVF cycle and she’s been trying for over ten years. Her doctors, her husband, her family are constantly campaigning for her to give up. She is only thirty, the youngest of us all, so she has time to ruin another decade of her life. Or maybe not, of course. That’s the thing for all of us. The elusive happy ending could be just a cycle away.

Kerry (two years of IVF with donor eggs, one ectopic pregnancy that nearly killed her) said to Anne-Marie, “Elisabeth is ten days past transfer and I bet she hasn’t even been tempted to do a test.”

We all keep up to date with our IVF cycles by e-mail. Anne-Marie, Kerry, and I are all in the middle of cycles. The other three are in between, or just about to start.

To be honest, all the drama about Alice has meant that I haven’t even been considering whether or not this cycle will work. In the early years, when I still believed in the power of the mind, I used to meditate each morning after a transfer. “Please stick around, little embryo,” I’d chant. “Stick, stick, stick.” I’d offer it bribes:
I’ll take you to Disneyland when you’re five. You’ll never have to go to school if you don’t feel up to it. If you would just please let me be your mother, please?

But none of it seemed to make any difference. So now I just assume that it won’t work, and that if it does work, I’ll lose it anyway. This is meant to protect me, although it doesn’t, because somehow the hope sneakily finds its way in. I’m never aware of the hope until it’s gone, whooshed away like a rug pulled from under my feet, each time I hear another “I’m sorry.”

The waiter came with our drinks and said, “Let me guess—you’ve left the kids with their dads and escaped for the day!”

Ah, the sweet innocence of the Fertiles. They assume any group of women of a certain age must surely be mothers.

“What’s the point of looking like fucking mothers when we’re fucking not,” said Sarah, who is our newest recruit. She has only been through one IVF cycle, but she’s already energetically bitter about infertility. She makes me realize I’m even jaded about being jaded. I admire the way she swears.

That sets us off on listing the ways we’ve been offended since we last met.

We had:

The boss who said, “Going through IVF is a choice, it’s not like getting the flu, so, no, I can’t sign your sick-leave form.”

The aunt who said, “Just relax and have a massage, you’re not getting pregnant because you’re too tense.” (Oh, there’s always one of those.)

The brother who said (with screaming child in the background), “You’ve got such a romantic idea of having children. It’s just bloody hard work.”

The cousin who said sympathetically, “I know exactly what you’re going through. I’ve been trying to finish this Ph.D. for six years.”

“What about your sister?” Kerry said to me. “You said something in your last e-mail about something she’d done that had you infuriated.”

“She’s the supermum with three children, isn’t she?” Anne-Marie’s lip curled. “The one who doesn’t need to work because she’s got the rich husband.”

They all looked at me avidly, ready to be disgusted with Alice, because, to be honest, Dr. Hodges, I’ve complained about her before.

But I thought about laughing with Alice on the way home from the hospital and the horrified, hurt expression on her face when she talked to Nick on the phone. I thought about how she’d said, “Don’t you like me anymore?” and how when I’d left her today, her dress was all crumpled from her sleep and her hair was sticking up on one side. That was so typically old Alice, not to even look at herself in the mirror before she came downstairs. And I thought about how she’d cried at the hospital with me when Olivia was born, and how she’d said so innocently to us all today,

“Who is Gina?”

I felt sick with shame, Dr. Hodges. I wanted to say to them, “Hey, that’s my little sister you’re talking about.”

Instead I told them about how Alice had lost her memory and thought she was twenty-nine, and how it had made me think a lot about what my old self would say about this life I’m leading. I said I thought my younger self might think it was time to give up. Just to give up. Let it go. Walk away. No more injections. No more test tubes of warm blood. No more grief.

Of course they snapped to attention like good soldiers who know their duty.

“Never give up,” they told me, and one by one they recounted horrendous stories of infertility and miscarriage that had all ended with healthy bouncing babies.

I listened and nodded and smiled and watched the seagulls squabbling.

I don’t know, Dr. Hodges. I just don’t know.

Over lunch, Roger took it upon himself to bring Alice up to date with his own interpretation of every historical event that had taken place over the last ten years, while her mother decided to simultaneously do the same thing with the personal lives of everyone she’d ever met.

“And then the U.S. invaded Iraq, because old matey, Saddam, was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction,” intoned Roger.

“Except there were no weapons,” interrupted Frannie.

“Well, who really knows for sure?”

“You
are
joking, Roger.”

“And then Marianne Elton, oh, of course you remember her, she used to coach Elisabeth’s netball team,” said Barb. “Well, she married Jonathon Knox, that nice young plumber we had over that time when we had that problem with the toilets that very cold Easter, they had the wedding on some tropical island, so inconvenient for everyone, and the poor flower girl got badly sunburned, anyhow, two years ago they had a baby daughter called Madeline, which made Madeline very happy as you can imagine. I said, ‘Well, I never expected my girls to name their children Barbara,’ which I didn’t, but Madeline is such a popular name now, anyhow, poor Madeline turned out . . .”

“. . . and let me tell you, Alice, exactly what the government should have done straight after the Bali attacks . . . ”

“Oh, and one of Felicity’s boys was there in Bali!” said Barb, the personal world suddenly intersecting with the political. “He flew out
the day before
. Felicity thinks it means he’s been chosen to do something great, but so far he doesn’t seem to do anything much but visit Facebook, is that what it’s called, Roger—Facebook?”

Frannie said, “Does any of this mean anything to you at all, Alice?”

Alice had only been listening with one part of her mind. She was busy thinking about the concept of forgiveness. It was such a lovely, generous idea when it wasn’t linked to something awful that needed forgiving. Was she a forgiving person? She had no idea. She’d never been called upon to forgive something as big as infidelity. Anyway, did Nick
want
her forgiveness?

She said to Frannie, “I’m not exactly sure.”

Some things that Roger had been saying had maybe seemed familiar, as if they were things she’d learned once at school and then forgotten. When he talked about terrorist attacks, she felt a reflexive feeling of horror, and maybe even some fleeting memories: a woman in a sun visor with a hand pressed to her mouth saying, “Oh my word, oh my word.” But she couldn’t remember where she was when she first heard about them, if she’d been with Nick, or alone, if she’d watched them on TV or heard about them on the radio. She also seemed to recognize some parts of her mother’s stories. There was something familiar, for example, about the phrase “sunburned flower girl,” like the punch line of a joke she’d heard before.

Frannie was saying, “Well, she’s going to have to go back to the doctor. There’s something not right here. Look at her. It’s obvious.”

“I doubt they can just transplant her memories back in her head,” said Roger.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Roger, I didn’t realize you had experience as a neurosurgeon,” said Frannie.

“Who wants a nice piece of custard tart, then?” said Barb brightly.

Chapter 16

A
lice was alone.

There had been a lot of intense debate about the wisdom of leaving her alone after lunch. Barb and Roger had their Saturday-afternoon advanced salsa-dancing class. They said they could
easily
miss it just this once, although, of course, it was an especially important class because they were rehearsing for the Family Talent Night at Frannie’s retirement village, but really and truly, it would be no problem to miss it if Alice needed them there. Frannie had an important meeting at the retirement village—something to do with Christmas. She was chairing the meeting but she could
easily
call and ask Bev or maybe Dora to do it, although they were both nervy public speakers, and it was likely they’d be railroaded by this rather domineering new resident, but that would hardly be the end of the world; her granddaughter came first.

“I’ll be fine,” Alice had repeated over and over. “I’m nearly
forty
years old!” she’d added flippantly, but there must have been something strange about the way she’d said it because they’d all stared at her for a moment, and then a whole new round of offers to stay began.

“Elisabeth will be back any minute,” she’d told them, shooing them out of the kitchen, down the hallway, and out the door. “Off you go! I’ll be fine!”

And within minutes, they were packed into Roger’s big shiny car, shadowy figures waving at her behind tinted windows, and the car was disappearing down the driveway, gravel flying.

“I’ll be fine,” Alice repeated quietly to herself.

She saw old Mrs. Bergen coming out of the house next door wearing a big Mexican hat and carrying a pair of gardening shears. She liked Mrs. Bergen. She was teaching her how to garden. She’d given Alice lots of advice about the problems with her lemon tree (she suggested Nick should give it the occasional “tinkle,” which he had, with rather revolting enthusiasm) and was always bringing over cuttings from her own garden for Alice and gently pointing out what needed watering or pruning or weeding. Mrs. Bergen didn’t like cooking much, so in return Alice took over Tupperware containers with leftover casseroles and pieces of quiche and carrot cake. Mrs. Bergen had already crocheted three sets of bootees for the baby and was starting on a matinee jacket and bonnet.