Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [64]
I went to the kitchen for my car keys and a mug of mint tea. I would have preferred coffee. I hadn’t slept well the night before and was worried about getting drowsy behind the wheel. But as an expectant mother-to-be—I hoped—I knew enough not to show up with coffee on my breath.
“Be good,” I told the boys, who’d been bribed with an extra half hour of Go, Diego, Go! “Listen to Aunt Nancy. She’s the boss while Mommy’s gone. Spencer, did you hear me? Do you understand? And Frank Junior, how about you?” I repeated their names, in part so they’d acknowledge my seriousness, in part to increase the chance of Nancy’s remembering them.
“Just go already,” Nancy ordered as I rifled through my purse. There was my wallet, a tube of lipstick, my Mapquest directions, the list of questions I’d printed out at the library, huddling in front of the printer so that nobody could see what I was doing. I knew the longer I hung around, the more likely it would be that the boys wouldn’t let me leave, so I walked to the car and started driving.
Two hours later I was sitting in the Princeton Fertility Clinic. The clinic director, Leslie, trim and brisk in her suit, had walked me back to a room that must have been specially designed for just this moment, when a prospective surrogate and the woman who’d be paying the bills (buying the baby, I kept thinking, and trying not to think) would first set eyes on each other. The walls were the peach of melting sherbet, and there was a painting of a mother gazing tenderly at an infant in her arms. A love seat was upholstered in a light golden fabric. I gave it a quick pat, then a longer one, enjoying its softness and its lack of stains, wondering how long it would last in my house.
The coffee table was set with a china teapot, a carafe of ice water with translucent circles of lemon floating on the top. Fanned out in a circle on a plate was a ring of Mint Milanos that it was taking all my willpower to avoid. I’d been torn about dieting. On the one hand, maybe infertile women would want their surrogate to look robust and healthy, with broad shoulders and wide hips that evoked peasants in the field, squatting to give birth without missing a swing of their scythes. Then again, rich people hated fat people, maybe because they thought that being fat was the same as being lazy, or they were afraid of becoming fat themselves. I ignored the cookies and checked out the china instead. The sugarbowl and cream pitcher had a lacy blue-on-white pattern, and the spoons and the tongs resting on top of the sugar cubes were probably real silver.
“Just a few minutes,” Leslie had said before closing the door, but it had already been more like fifteen. I wondered why she hadn’t just left me in the waiting room, the one I’d glimpsed online and had walked through on my way back here. I could understand why the women hiring the surrogates, the infertile ones, might not want anyone else to see them, but as for me, I was just there to do a job, same as if I’d been back working at Target, and in the waiting room at least there were magazines.
Target made me think of Gabe, and thinking of Gabe made me remember the bad patch in my marriage, the part I hadn’t mentioned on the forms. For distraction, I eased a single Milano out of its place and slipped it into my mouth, letting the sugary wafer dissolve on my tongue. I was trying to rearrange the circle so it wouldn’t look like any of the cookies were missing. Of course, that was the moment the door swung open and Leslie and a slender, graceful, beautifully dressed woman walked inside.
I got to my feet as Leslie trilled the introductions. “Ms. Croft, this is Anne Barrow. Annie, this is India Croft.”
She was Ms., and I was Annie. So it begins, I thought. For a moment, the two of us stared at each other. India Croft