Water Babies
a short story by Amy Terlaga

Waiting. Nothing to do but that. She didn’t have the foresight before climbing up upon the sterile examining table to grab a Vogue or a Newsweek off of the desk, the desk that now seemed too far away to run over to, now that she was naked from the waist down with nothing but a half-sheet to keep her modesty intact.

Puh, puh, puh, puh. She smacked her lips together, then expelled some air in a rapid, staccato fashion, looking around the room in a sudden spasm of boredom. The room did not hold much to keep her attention for long—a cabinet of medical supplies, an ultrasound machine, a cloth basket for used sheets, a metal trashcan for medical waste— all familiar items to her. Looking down at the clipboard on her lap, she read the scrawled graffiti that covered it, not your usual, “For a good time, call Debbie . . .” tips, but rather clichés of inspiration—“Keep the faith!” and “Miracles happen,” words she found more depressing than the hackneyed insults found on public restroom stall doors.

There was a rap at the door behind her, then one of the many rotating residents she’d previously seen over the past year entered the room, accompanied by another lab coated individual, a woman this time, looking a little tentative, letting her male counterpart do the talking—“Well, hello there. How are you doing?”

She could tell by the tone of his voice and the absence of her name in his introduction that he didn’t remember her, even though she had seen him (and he had seen plenty of her) at least a half-dozen times about three months ago. She was tempted to say, “Gee, I guess if you’ve seen one cunt, I guess you’ve seen them all,” but, of course, she didn’t. Civil discourse excluded those kinds of phrases from getting any air time, and she imagined how freeing it would feel to have that particular string of words take flight; she imagined the looks on these two smiling individuals now approaching her, how their smiles would disappear, how they’d be struck dumb by such a crude remark, how they might think her a cunt for saying it . . .

“This is Ananda. She’ll be observing the procedure, that is, if you don’t mind.”

Mind? Early on in this God-forsaken process, she had ceased to mind flashing her nether regions to every anonymous medical professional that had passed through this room, her modesty giving way easily once she realized that they had forgotten about her as soon as they were through, barely noticing during the three-minute procedure that there was even a person attached to her reproductive parts. Okay, perhaps she wasn’t giving them the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps it was better this way; cool detachment might be preferred over the long haul, especially when the results were not as one hoped. Easier to forget when the memories were so monochrome. “No, of course not. Don’t mind at all.”

He looked at her chart. “Okay, so you’ve been on Follistim injections for 10 days now. We should be able to see some really nice follicles today. Won’t be long now.”

She knew the drill. Lying back, she put both feet into the stirrups, slipping her rear down to the edge of the table, all the while clutching her clipboard, her pen at the ready. Some remnants of shyness still did remain and, as he prepared to slide the long, latex-and-lubricant-covered ultrasound probe into her, he put one hand onto her right knee, moving it outward, saying “Open,” like she were in the dentist’s office and he needed to reach some back molar, way, way back, past the tongue, probing deeper, deeper into her now.

Jane was married to Michael for five years before they decided they were ready for a family. After six months of consistent evolutionary failure, they became less haphazard about the process. Thermometers, charts, and a persistent lack of spontaneity were introduced into the equation. Six months later, Jane had six lovely, near identical charts (textbook peaks and valleys), but still no prize. She brought her charts into her GYN. “Look at my charts,” she demanded. “Why aren’t I pregnant?”

Tests were performed. The first one, the post-coital, seemed invasively absurd, and her doctor punctuated her explanation of the procedure with a nervous little laugh. Jane was to come into her doctor’s office immediately after having sex with her husband so that his sperm’s movements could be tracked, as if her GYN were some ancient, vigilant battle historian, eager to get the messy details all down before the evidence was wiped away (In retrospect, how innocuous this simple, painless test seemed). Her doctor’s enthusiasm was unnerving— “Excellent motility! Strong swimmers! No problem here! Let’s move on . . .”

And move on, they did. On to Clomid, the fertility drug that keeps on giving. Just swallow one first thing in the morning for five mornings straight (“Down the hatch!”) and you won’t feel a thing. Well, maybe something. Maybe some visual disturbances. But it’s rare, really, quite uncommon. Her doctor assured her it would be temporary, if at all. Six rounds of Clomid and six months later, still no baby. But now when her eyes are tired, and the light is dim, sshhee sseess ddoouubblle.

“Maybe your tubes are blocked. Your tubes could be blocked, you know.” Another test. Dye pushed through, two flowing rivulets, splashing onto her ovaries, is this what they meant by the river of life?— because the water seemed to be going in the opposite direction . . .

“Perhaps your walls are too thin.”

Another test. Just a pinch, some pressure, so that a piece of her wall could be extracted and examined under a microscope. Her walls were fine, but now she imagined one side of her reproductive waiting room to have an indentation in it and felt like some putty-like substance were needed to spackle the hole.

Her doctor had reached again into her bag of reproductive tricks and this time she came up empty. “You need to see a specialist.”

The first time she had given herself an injection, into her left upper thigh, she had hesitated as she pushed the needle in, and she accidentally drew blood. Over time, she noticed that not only did she get used to pushing the needle in, quickly, masterfully, but eventually, gradually, she began to enjoy it. There was something almost sensual about the process, the act of plunging the 1-inch prick into her flesh, watching it disappear, then slowly delivering the liquid through with a steady push of her thumb. Sometimes she still drew blood, but now she almost relished the sight of it—evidence, something tangible, something so sexily real.

Through all of this she successfully created the illusion of progress; nobody could deny that there was activity, what with all of the tests and procedures and surgeries and such. She did not let herself think beyond the project. Sometimes late at night, when she couldn’t sleep, she would be visited by a succubus who would whisper in her ear terrible things (irrational thoughts, really); not an ambivalence, no question there’d be love, more like a fear of the physical manifestation of her perceived, broken self. She’d will the succubus to leave her (I’m whole, I’m whole, I’m whole, I’m whole), and then, through exhaustion, she would slip into the netherworld where she would dream of airborne, engorged, purple uteri, uteri flying away from her, and fetuses doing the backstroke in her backyard pool, the water a deep, crimson red.

She visited the Mutter Museum one weekend while visiting some friends in Philadelphia. The Mutter Museum = an exhibit hall of medically malformed specimens, freaks on display, specializing in grotesquely formed fetal twins— some starfish babies, with two heads and five limbs, some just (mercifully) drawn, others shamefully suspended in liquid-filled jars. She stood in front of one glass case a little too long— there for the world to see, a tiny fetus no bigger than a thumbprint embedded in between two maternal pelvic bones, perfectly preserved in its mother’s body, discovered long after its tiny wanderings off course, long after the woman went on to have several other children, uncovered only after the woman’s autopsy, a hidden treasure, quietly waiting inside of her, nature gone silently awry. (Upon her return, she did not tell her husband about what she had seen there, she was a superstitious woman in spite of herself.)

The last injection before the egg retrieval, the intra-muscular shot, was a spousal tag team effort, and as they prepared the two-inch needle, the two of them would joke (as they were accustomed now to do) about his giving it to her “in the butt,” before his hands began to shake, before his heart began to pound, before she bent over the dining room table, her pajama bottoms lowered, a cotton swab gliding over a patch of her skin, a needle nervously sunk into her apprehensive, unseeing flesh, and it was all so very serious.

On the day of her retrieval, she waited again, this time in faded, hospital Johnny-coated garb and gray slipper socks, and before he walked away from her, labeled cup in hand, he kissed her on the lips, a kiss of good luck to us, a kiss that disappeared from her lips by the time he turned to go. They ushered her into the room and hooked her up with an IV and something better, something sweet, something that would make her worries fly upward, up into the air above her, into the waterfall landscape picture pinned to the ceiling up over her head. Her doctor entered the room and said, “Hello,” but there again, no mention of her name, and despite the chemical sweetness, she found herself saying, “My name is Jane,” as in Dick and Jane, but wait, dick is not here. No, dick is down the hall, in a room, performing to Penthouse or Puritan magazine . . . what did Michael tell her he had seen in that room before? Was it Business Week? What sick fuck beats off to Business Week, she wanted to know. But now was not the time to wonder about such things, no, now was the time for her to relax, to let go, to give herself over to . . .

The pain awakened her, a searing, fire-branded pain, and she felt as if they were burning a hole through her from the inside out. That sweetness turned on her then, and she realized that she could not move, could not do anything other than to grimace, and to concentrate on the single drop of water now sliding down the left side of her face.

Five days later, five blastocysts were pumped into her, and they joked again about little Gustav and Clementine and Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and weren’t they the best-looking blastocysts they had ever seen in their lives? And won’t their friends and relatives be jealous when they see them on their next Christmas card?

Eight days later, when she couldn’t wait any longer, and alone, hovered over her bathroom toilet, she peed on the white, absorbent stick, and watched the liquid pass up through the one window, and held her breath, and watched and watched and watched and watched, and saw the nothingness there, the nothingness there, and the same, unchanged world stopped and started again, right there, she felt it.

It was all so very real, but she only felt it for a heartbreaking instant.