Sara Cohen
How To Make A Baby
The human female has two ovaries, both of which contain about a hundred thousand
eggs. From birth until about age twelve, these eggs wait patiently in the ovaries, growing older
or dividing or doing whatever else eggs might do. Then when the female reaches age twelve, she
begins to release these eggs, at a rate of about one each month.
When an egg is released from an ovary, it lives about one day. A sperm frequenting the
same region does a little better…it may live up to two days. If the egg and the sperm happen to
meet up, the egg is fertilized and a baby is made. You don’t call it a baby yet, I guess, but I think
that’s as good a name as any. So adding up the life span of the sperm and the egg, there’s a
three-day period when a man can impregnate a woman.
So that brings up the question: how long is three days?
My best friend Becky and I thought three days sounded pretty long. We were in middle
school and our worlds pretty much revolved around who was having a birthday party next
weekend and when the math final was coming up. Pregnancy? I don’t think so. It was too scary
to even talk about, except for one day in art class when we were waiting for the paint to dry and
Becky asserted: “If I got pregnant, I’d kill myself.”
Lucky thing for us, we weren’t in any danger of becoming pregnant. My aunt Kate
hadn’t been so fortunate when she was younger. Kate got herself knocked up at fifteen years old
and had to go out of state for a quiet, scandal-free abortion to rid herself of the grandchild of a
local reverend. It was her first time, she didn’t use any protection, and I guess she didn’t know
about the three days. The reverend made Kate out to be the town whore who had somehow
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seduced his innocent young son. Her mother took it well, Kate said, but her father cried for an
entire night.
All this because of three days.
For my mother, who was forty years old, three days wasn’t nearly long enough. It was so
short a period of time that equipment was needed to identify this crucial period. Did you know
they make special kits to tell when a woman is close to ovulating, about to release an egg? The
kits have cute names, like OvuQuick, and they look pretty much like pregnancy tests. A blue
circle if you’re ovulating, a pink circle if you’re not. Then there’s the all-famous purple circle
that you squint at and show to everyone else in the room until you give up and try again. When a
woman gets older, it’s a lot harder to make a baby, even when she’s trying.
Mother wanted a baby. She told this to anyone who would listen. If I was in the room,
she’d glance at me and add: “Another baby, that is.” I figured that was an insult any way you
look at it, but I didn’t obsess too much over these things. Officially, she had been trying to
conceive ever since my father left us when I was three years old, but it was hard back then, since
there was no guy in the picture.
Now there was a guy. Mom had remarried a handsome, Jewish lawyer named Paul. A
good catch, especially for a woman in her late thirties. When she and Paul had first started going
out, he admitted to her that he didn’t know if he could have kids. In his twenties, Paul had been
diagnosed with a varicocele, which is a big old vein in the testicles that kills off much of the
sperm. There are operations that can be done to relieve the symptoms of a varicocele, but Paul
wouldn’t hear of it. He didn’t like the idea of giving his life into the hands of some crooked
doctor. I can picture him telling all this to Mom over dinner and she shrugs and smiles at him.
Kids? Who needs kids? You’re all I need, Paul. And the poor guy believed it.
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Sure, Paul thought it would have been nice to have a kid. A son to model in his image
and maybe someday take over his law practice. But if it wasn’t meant to be, he was content to
leave it at that. My mother, on the other hand, put everything she had into making a baby. Paul
might have been afraid of the surgeon’s knife, but Mom wasn’t. She allowed doctors to stick
their instruments inside her uterus and probe around as much as they liked. Then there were the
drugs. A drug called Purganol promised to increase her egg production to unnaturally high
levels so that even Paul’s low sperm count wouldn’t make a difference. And the price was only
a thousand dollars a month.
Purganol had to be taken intravenously—by an injection into a vein in the upper thigh.
It’s very hard for someone to give herself an injection into a vein, unless she’s a drug addict or a
diabetic, so usually the husband gives his wife the injection. Paul flat out refused. He didn’t like
needles and he didn’t want a baby enough to compromise himself.
And so it was decided.
I suppose it seemed fair that I should be the one giving the injections. After all, I was a
lot closer to my mother than Paul was. Paul didn’t come home until midnight every night, but I
was home all the time. At promptly three o’clock every day, my mother was waiting for me at
school because she didn’t trust me to take the subway home myself. On the ride home, I’d tell
her about my day and she’d tell me about hers. And after I had done my homework, we’d talk
until it was time for bed. I don’t know when it was that my mother first confided in me. Maybe
there was some point when it was the only thing left to talk about.
I practiced giving injections to an orange first. It was a big, round orange with tough
skin. My mother filled a cup with water and handed me a syringe with a reddish cap over the
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point of the needle. I noticed her hand holding the needle was trembling slightly. I held the
orange in my left hand and the syringe, still capped, in my right hand.
“The trick is to not get any bubbles in the syringe,” Mother told me with authority. She
had gone to nursing school for a short time before becoming a high school teacher, but when my
father left, there wasn’t any money left for frivolous things like medical training. She dropped
out of school and took a job at the local high school, where most of the kids packed pistols and
knives under their denim jackets. One time when she was facing the blackboard, a student threw
a chair at her.
I fumbled with the cap on the syringe. My mother placed her hand over mine, and eased
the orange cap off the needle. Her hand lingered on mine a few moments longer than necessary.
When I looked up at her, she smiled and squeezed my fingers gently. I tried to smile bravely.
My eyes were intent on the fruit. The fingernails of my left hand dug into the shiny
orange flesh. I placed the tip of the needle on the fruit. I felt a moment of resistance, then the
needle slid smoothly through layers of juice and pulp. I pushed down on the plunger and
released ten millimeters of water.
I looked up for approval and saw that my mother’s gaze was not on the orange, but on my
face. She smiled at me, the wrinkles under her eyes deepening. “That was good. Now let’s try
it again.”
We practiced for about an hour before I was ready. Pulling the water into the syringe,
injecting it into the orange. As I punctured more and more holes into the orange, the water and
sticky juice escaped into the palm of my hand. By the end, the orange was glistening with water
and its own juices. My hand was sticky and dripping wet.
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My mother undressed in her bedroom, then came before me completely naked. It wasn’t
the first time I had ever seen her without clothes on, but it was the first time since she had
remarried. When my father had left, it was just me and her, so our apartment became like a
women’s locker room. We became very close. I clung to her and she took me everywhere with
her, and never shielded me from the truth. I remember watching her put on make-up for her
latest boyfriend and frowning in confusion as she slid her diaphragm into her purse. I remember
how my jaw dropped open when she told me what it was for. I guess it’s kind of ironic that she
spent all those years using a diaphragm, then when she finally decided she wanted more children,
she couldn’t have them. She later told me that if she had known, she would have let herself get
pregnant with the first sleazy Jewish lawyer who pressured her into bed.
I knew she had sex with those men before I even knew what sex was. Like I said, she
never shielded me from the truth. She told me that sex was what men wanted, and that they
would leave her if she didn’t oblige. She told me this was the position my father put her in when
he left us, forced to have sex with man after man. It didn’t bother me. As long as I could still
crawl into bed with her when my room became too scary or just because I was lonely. And when
we lay in bed together, I felt her half-naked body against mine and I felt warm and safe.
But then Paul moved in and all that changed. With a man around, nakedness suddenly
became a sin. Plus I was getting older and was beginning to feel more self-conscious. I no
longer knew my mother’s body intimately and she knew nothing of mine.
My mother’s body had not changed much. She had gained a little weight in the thighs
and stomach. Her large, round breasts sagged from all her jogging without a bra. The birthmark
right above her belly button was still there though, right where I had left it. I hated the way my
eyes instinctively averted from her body. I couldn’t understand why she had to get completely
undressed for an injection in the thigh.
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It was a very different thing to give an injection to a person as opposed to an orange.
First of all, the peel of an orange isn’t much like human skin. With a person, you have to pinch
the skin together with your fingers before plunging in the needle. Then you release the skin and
inject the fluid. Pinch, plunge, release, inject. Nice and easy.
“Are you okay, Leah?” Mom asked me. She was frowning and her eyes were worried.
“I’m fine,” I replied, wiping a sweaty palm on my jeans.
Pinch, plunge, release, inject.
I smiled at her to show how fine I really was.
Pinch, plunge, release, inject.
My mother drew the Purganol into the syringe herself. I had done okay with the water,
but it really didn’t make sense for me to do that part when she could do it herself. She handed
me the syringe and I held it tightly, feeling the plastic digging into my fingers. She swabbed her
upper thigh with alcohol and looked down at me expectantly. “Leah?”
Pinch, plunge, release, inject. “Yeah, okay.”
Mom lay down on the couch and I knelt down beside her. I pinched the fat of her thigh
between my fingers. Her skin was pale and smooth between my fingers. Suddenly, two green
spots appeared before my eyes, like when someone takes a photograph and the flash goes off.
When I was smaller, I remember my best friend Becky and I used to love the colored circles that
followed a flash. We used to scan the room with our eyes, marveling at how the circles would
move around like magic.
I blinked, hoping the spots would disappear, but they didn’t. In fact, two more spots
appeared, but now they were all blue. I swallowed and plunged the needle into the pinched skin.
Pinch, plunge, release, inject!
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I released the skin.
The spots before my eyes had multiplied and widened.
My
peripheral vision had completely disappeared and all I could see was the tiny square of skin
where the needle was embedded. I felt a cold sweat forming at my brow and my hand trembled
slightly.
Pinch, plunge, release, inject! Just do it, you wuss!
I pushed my thumb down on the plunger, injecting the clear fluid into my mother’s thigh.
I pulled out the needle and released a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. I looked over at my
mother and saw that her eyes had been squeezed shut. She opened them and stared at me.
“Leah! Oh God, are you okay?”
I dropped down onto the floor, allowing the empty syringe to fall from my fingers. I bent
my head down between my legs, taking shaky breaths. Mother’s hand was on my shoulder and
she was talking to me, asking me if I was all right. When I answered, my voice sounded far
away and muffled. And I heard myself saying yes, I was all right.
It takes a little while to recover from passing out. Or almost passing out, to be more
accurate; I never actually lost consciousness. My vision completely blacked out for a short time,
but it came back after a few minutes. My hearing was muffled and there was a dull ringing in
my ears. When I looked in the mirror, I was as white as the paint on the wall, except for a slight
greenish hue. I thought this might be how I’d look if I were dead and it kind of scared me. My
head throbbed painfully, making each thought an effort in itself.
Mother insisted that I lie down and I rarely argue. She made a big fuss over me, like she
always does when I’m sick. Whenever she got mad at me when I was little, I used to pretend I
was sick so that she’d stop being mad. Usually it worked. After all, I might have been the only
baby she would ever have and she was terrified of losing me.
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I drifted off to sleep and when I woke up, I sensed the apartment was empty. When you
live in a tiny two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, it’s pretty easy to tell when nobody else is
home. And our apartment was more of a wannabe two-bedroom apartment. My room was
actually part of the living room that had been sectioned off by the last family who had lived
there. If anybody was moving inside that apartment, I could hear it. I guess that’s why most
horror movies involve a house rather than an apartment.
I slipped out of bed and wandered into the living room. My mother hadn’t bothered to
dispose of the syringe yet and it was lying innocently on the coffee table next to the small bottle
of Purganol. I sat down on the couch and picked up the bottle. The words instantly popped into
my mind:
Pinch, plunge, release, inject.
I closed my eyes and shook my head. Mom said she wouldn’t make me do the injection
again, but what would she do when Paul refused to take over my job?
When my mother had first picked up the bottle at the drug store, she had shown me the
obligatory warnings included in the package. I don’t know what she hoped to accomplish by
letting me know that women who took Purganol had a 78% higher rate of ovarian cancer. She
read the whole thing to me until I tearfully begged her to stop.
I shook the bottle gently, staring at the clear liquid. I couldn’t understand taking such a
risk for a baby that hadn’t even been born yet. I could understand jumping in front of a car to
save your child, sure, that made sense. The baby my mother wanted didn’t exist yet. She didn’t
love it. She couldn’t. So why was she doing something so stupid to herself?
My mother told me a story about a childless female M.D./Ph.D. she had met once. Mom
always wanted to be a doctor and this woman had a double degree (she was a “doctor-doctor,” so
to speak). Anyway, Mom and the doctor-doctor got into a conversation, and Mom mentioned the
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fact that the doctor-doctor didn’t have any children. Subsequently, the doctor-doctor burst into
tears and sobbed that she had wasted her genes.
Then there was the story about Diane, who had started trying to have kids at age forty.
She had gone on the same fertility treatment my mother was going through and was blessed with
a son who she named Jeremy. Diane was so happy with Jeremy that she went on the treatment
again, and again became pregnant with a boy. Except this time the pregnancy ended two months
prematurely, and her infant son Kenny had cerebral palsy bad enough that doctors said he would
never walk, not to mention the severe retardation.
I’ve got a million of these stories. I don’t pretend to understand these women, but it’s
comforting to know that my mother isn’t the only woman willing to risk her life for a strange
infant.
Holding the bottle of Purganol in my hand, I wondered what would happen if I threw it
right down the incinerator. I had never done anything like that in my life.
Pinch, plunge, release, inject.
This small bottle had cost a thousand dollars. It was good only for another few days. If I
threw it out, I would only be prolonging the inevitable. Then again, I’d be saving my mother
from all those awful side effects she had rattled off to me, if only for a short period of time.
Maybe if the bottle mysteriously disappeared, it would give her a chance to reconsider and
realize how silly this whole thing was.
Mom sometimes said to me: Someday you’ll understand, Leah. When you’re older. I
hadn’t started my monthly cycle yet. I wished for it to come. I thought that once I started
bleeding, I would become a woman. I wanted so badly to be grown up.
My fingers closed over the bottle of Purganol so that it was entirely concealed in my
hand. My mind was racing as I considered what I was about to do. One thousand dollars down
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the incinerator, and I was always such a good girl. I wonder if I would have hesitated so long if I
had known that the drugs would never work or what the consequences would be.
I lifted up my hand and placed the bottle high up on a bookshelf, where I knew it would
be missed.
Paul is cheap.
When he goes to a hotel, he’ll search the room for defects. He’ll check every corner of
the room and note everything wrong with it. A leaky shower. A crack in the paint. A stain on
the bedspread. He won’t ask for a change in rooms though. He’ll wait until check-out time and
then tell the manager all the problems with his room and argue until they give him a free night.
He’s owned the same broken-down Toyota for nearly twenty years. It’s a two-door
vehicle with ripped upholstery and chipped blue paint. As a result of two separate robberies, the
locks on both the doors are broken. But instead of fixing the locks or buying a new car, Paul
simply climbs into the car through the trunk. Forty years old, a lawyer, and the only way to get
into his car is through the trunk.
And Paul never, ever, under any circumstances throws anything out. God forbid he
should need something later and have to buy a new one. This was a tenet of life, something
Mom and I could always count on. Paul will accumulate garbage. I was in my room reading
when I heard my mother’s accusing voice float in from another room:
“Paul, have you seen the bottle of Purganol?”
“No.”
“Come on, stop being difficult!”
“I haven’t seen it.”
“Paul!”
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“Christ, I said I didn’t see it! What do you want from me?”
“Well, where did it go then?”
“How should I know? You’re supposed to be keeping track of it.”
“This isn’t funny, Paul! That bottle cost a thousand dollars!”
“Am I laughing, Helen?”
“Did you throw it away?”
“Of course not! Why would I do that?”
“Because…because you don’t want to deal with the baby issue.”
“I’m so sick of this. Why don’t you blame your ex-husband? I told you I couldn’t have
kids.”
“Why are you trying to ruin everything?”
“Maybe Leah took it. Did you ever think about that, Helen?”
“Don’t be silly. She wouldn’t do that.”
“Why not? She’s as sick of hearing about babies as I am.”
“Leah’s a good girl. She wouldn’t do anything to keep me from being happy.”
“And I would?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You know something, I’m really tired of this. If you want to get
pregnant, you’re on your own.”
“I’m already on my own, Paul.”
“You know what, Helen? I did throw out the bottle. It was in the bookcase, so I took it
and threw it down the incinerator because I can’t take any more of this. It’s making you moody
and impossible to live with!”
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“How could you do that? You knew…you knew how important this baby is to me!
Everyone around me is getting pregnant except me! I can’t take it anymore! It’s not fair! What
did I do to deserve this?”
“Oh, cut it out, Helen. You have one kid and that’s more than I have. And I’d just be
happy if you’d give this up.”
“A thousand dollars! I can’t believe you just threw it away!”
My mother didn’t say much to me during the cab ride, except that I shouldn’t mention
any of this to Paul.
I was really good at keeping secrets. Some people might call it lying, I guess, but I know
for a fact that it’s a lot easier to lie than to keep a secret. A lie slips right off the tongue, whereas
a secret burns the insides. I’ve kept a lot of secrets in my life and sometimes I thought that if I
didn’t tell I would burst. But I’ve never told.
Mom knew I was good at keeping secrets. After all, I had kept a good few for her in my
day. But I sensed that she would have taken me along even if I had the biggest mouth on the east
coast. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think she needed me. I was the only girlfriend she had and her
lone confidante.
The cab stopped in front of an apartment building in the West Village. Mom paid the
driver five dollars plus a dollar for tip. She took my hand and led me inside. There was a list of
several names with buttons next to them, and my mother pressed the button next to the name
“Stuart Kessler.” A male voice crackled out of a speaker: “Yes?”
“It’s Helen,” Mom said.
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A loud buzz made me jump and Mom pushed open the door to the lobby. Again, she
took my hand. “Don’t tell anyone about this,” she warned me again. She gave my hand a firm
squeeze.
When we got out of the elevator, another couple was waiting to get in. My mother pulled
me along, but I couldn’t help turning back to stare at the two men with their hands clasped
together affectionately. I had never seen anything like that before in my life. I looked up at my
mother and saw her lips were pursed together tightly as she cringed. I thought of Paul and all his
words for men like that.
Stuart Kessler was a man approximately ten years younger than my mother. He had dark
hair and eyes like Paul, but there was something about him that was very different from Paul. He
didn’t look as serious, for one thing. When he saw my mother and me, his face broke out into an
easy smile. “Helen!” he exclaimed. “This must be your daughter! Leah, right?”
I nodded.
Stuart Kessler held out his hand to me and I took it. “I’m Stuart,” he introduced himself.
“I’m a friend of your mom’s.”
Mom took off her coat and Stuart threw it on a chair. The blouse she was wearing
underneath seemed to be too tight and her full breasts strained at the material. I could see the
outline of her bra. My mother told me once that she had developed breasts early and it had
traumatized her during early childhood. She said she often thought about getting them reduced,
but had never gotten around to it. She also told me that when she was a little girl, her cousin had
asked her how many children she wanted to have and she had replied, “Fifteen.”
“Leah,” Mom said. “Stuart and I are going to do some work in the other room. In the
mean time, you can watch TV in here.” I winced when she said the word work. As if she hadn’t
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told me about her plans for Stuart weeks earlier. As if I were some innocent little child who
didn’t have a clue.
“Or you can get some food,” Stuart suggested. “I think I have some soda in the ‘fridge.
Also, there’s bread and butter, in case you want to make toast.”
I nodded and agreed to be good.
Stuart took my mother by the elbow and led her into another room. They shut the door
behind them, and I heard it lock with a loud snap. For a moment, my mind flashed back to when
I was three, watching my father leave with two suitcases and his desk that folded up, as I hugged
my Raggedy Ann doll to my chest. Maybe he said good bye to me, but I don’t remember it. All
I remember is the door slamming shut in front of me and knowing somehow that he wasn’t
coming back. It was my first memory.
I turned back to Stuart’s living room. It was decorated in a casual way, which seemed to
match Stuart’s personality. The only thing about the place that struck me was a picture I saw on
the wall by the bookcase. It was a large painting of a man’s back, completely covered in tattoos.
Despite the tattoos, I could still make out large muscles in the man’s shoulders and down his
back, covered by skeletons and flowers and eagles. The painting cut off just below the man’s
waist, and there was no promise of slacks. I had never seen a poster like that on anyone’s wall
before.
I turned away from the picture and went to the kitchen. As Stuart had promised, there
was a loaf of bread in the refrigerator. I took out two slices from behind the end slice, and
popped them in the toaster. I set the heating controls to dark brown and an eerie orange light
came on inside the toaster.
Trying to keep my eyes away from the painting, I wandered away from the kitchen
toward Stuart’s bookshelves. He had three of them lined up against one wall. He seemed to
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have a great deal of math books, which made me wonder what he did for a living. He had books
on algebra, geometry, calculus, logic, probability, and philosophy. Then there was a shelf filled
with books about Communism. I pulled out the title, A Cartoon Guide to Marx (Karl, not
Groucho), and flipped to the first page. There was an inscription, too personal for me to be
reading, signed Love, John. I thought about the two men from the elevator as I quickly snapped
the book shut and replaced it on the shelf.
After several minutes had passed, I decided to go back and check on my toast. A strange
odor assaulted my nostrils as I approached the kitchen before I caught sight of the orange flames
shooting out of the toaster. The fire was narrow, like a little winding staircase leading to the
ceiling. I stared at it for a full minute, mesmerized. I was a city girl, so I rarely had a chance to
witness a fire. The best I could do was light a match or maybe start up the stove.
Slowly, I backed away from the flames toward the room where Mom and Stuart were
hiding out. I knocked on the door gently. No answer. I knocked again, this time with a little
more authority.
“Leah?” My mother’s voice. “Hang on a few minutes.”
I stood there, my hand poised to knock again. I craned my neck to look back at the
kitchen. Did the fire look a little smaller? Maybe it was just because I was further away.
In a low voice: “Um…there’s a fire.”
A pause followed by a crash. Frantic shuffling.
Stuart yanked open the door, his placid features twisted in fear. “A fire?”
“It’s in the kitchen,” I told him.
Stuart ran over to the toaster and my mother followed him out of the room. I watched as
he yanked the plug out of the toaster and just stared at it, daring the flame to grow. Within a
minute, the fire had subsided.
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“Christ, Leah,” Mother said in a breathless voice. “Why didn’t you say something?”
I looked down at her blouse, which looked even tighter now. I realized it was because
the buttons were now one out of place. “I did say something,” I insisted.
“There’s a fire,” she mimicked me. She shook her head. “Unbelievable…I knew I
couldn’t trust you with a toaster.”
“Hey, calm down,” Stuart said, who had returned to his easy-going self now that there
was no danger of his apartment burning down. He smoothed out his hair, which was now
sticking out oddly on the sides. “It wasn’t her fault. It was an old toaster. I ought to throw it out
and get a new one.”
The phone rang, but the three of us just stood there, listening to it. Finally, Stuart sighed
and rushed off to answer it. The person on the other line was obviously a very close friend, and
Stuart became engaged in an animated discussion. I was left alone with my mother.
“Well,” she said. I looked at her eyes and I could tell she was trying hard not to cry. A
glob of watery mascara dripped a few millimeters from the center of her lower eyelid. I waited
for her to yell at me, to tell me that I had ruined everything and now she would never get her
baby. It had been so perfect. She thought she would get pregnant and Paul would never figure it
out.
“I’m sorry I set fire to the toaster,” I said quietly.
A long pause. “It’s not your fault,” my mother replied. She dabbed at her eye with her
pinkie finger and adjusted her incorrectly buttoned blouse. She looked up at me. “Let’s go
home, okay?”
“Okay, Mommy,” I said.
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If an egg fails to be fertilized by a sperm cell in that three-day period, it is flushed out of
the female uterus, accompanied by a rush of blood that has built up along the walls of the womb
in anticipation of pregnancy. The egg is nearly microscopic; most women are unable to locate
the tiny cell in the mass of blood. The unfertilized egg slips out of the body unnoticed, half of a
baby that will never be born.
My mother, like all other women, was born with about a hundred thousand eggs in each
of her ovaries, and she will die with nearly as many still remaining. Except by then, the eggs
will be old and rotting away, no longer able to create an organism capable of life. She will
mourn for all those lost eggs, most flushed away down the toilet when she wasn’t paying
attention, only one of which managed to combine with a sperm cell to produce a baby that grew
inside her. And she will love and protect that baby, because I’m the only one she will ever have.
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Sara Cohen
How To Make A Baby: Revisions
I changed several things in the story. First, I tried to develop the mother’s character more
by clarifying her relationship with Leah. I tried to explain why she would confide in her
daughter, but at the same time treat her like a little girl. There were a few other points that
people mentioned about the story that I tried to clarify, such as the mother’s feelings about men.
I also changed the lead in to the dialogue between Paul and the mother so that the dialogue didn’t
come out of nowhere. I also closed up the “shell” that the story was in. Other than that, I just
made some small changes here and there.
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