What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty [73]
“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