1.
The book felt like a secret. Reading it was something to hide even though it was waiting to be found. I was eight when I saw it lying on the top of a chest of drawers in our living room, between the glass fruit bowl and the brass lamp. An unusual place. My mother was a fastidious put-away-er of things. Cups were cleared to the kitchen the second they were finished with. Newspapers were slid into the copper coal skuttle. Children’s books didn’t belong in the living room, unless they were the red-covered ones with gold engraved lettering that my mother had lined up for display on the dark-wood bookshelf.
How Your Body Works was thin, square, and paper-backed: a picture book with a title printed in large red capital letters. There was a yellow robot on the cover, the kind of robot that could only have been imagined in the 1970’s: metal, with a square head and body, articulated joints, and riveted sides. If it could speak, its voice would have been a grinding staccato, like a Dalek. If it had moved, its joints would have clanked and creaked, the soles of its robot feet would have made a suction-swoosh like the doors in the Starship Enterprise. If it glanced around, its eyeballs would have whirred and clicked.
The robot was surrounded by tiny people who examined it’s innerworkings. One lifted the lid to its brain. Another perched on the edge of a door in the robot’s stomach and peered inside. I imagined that once in a while the robot said, “Connection-Failure-Must-Correct,” then opened this door to squeeze in a couple of drops of oil or to tighten something with a screwdriver it would find in another door on another part of its robot body.
The tiny people asked speech-bubble questions:
“What do ears do?”
“How do fingers work?
“Why does the heart beat?”
One tiny person, a red-faced man, stood behind the crook of the robot’s arm and scratched his head:
“Where do babies come from?”
The robot reclined, propped up on its elbow; leaned its robot ear in its robot palm. One of the tiny people hoisted himself up on a rope to clean the robot’s giant white teeth. The robot’s mechanical eyelids looked to the left at a tiny human grasped between its robot thumb and robot forefinger. The robot was all hard edges and squares, rivets and screws, hinges and heavy steel—galvanized and welded, hammered and bolted. There were no circuits or chips or programs or operating systems. The robot was made of standardized parts pressed out by machine and factory assembled. Yet, its smile was relaxed. It was calm and knowing like a parody of a reposed figure in an oil painting. The robot’s cartoonish expression was almost lascivious.
2.
George W. Bush stares at me. An American flag waves behind his head. I try not to roll my eyes at his thin-lipped smirk, the satisfied wrinkles at the tops of his cheeks, his stiff mannequin hair, the practiced eye twinkle that is meant to signify “regular guy.”
The twinkle is a painted white dot; the eyes are flat and pixelated.
George W. Bush’s face is on the front of a mug that my doctor has placed, front and center, on his desk.
The doctor is a wide, rectangular man with side-parted lank brown hair, black-framed glasses, and an untidy mustache. I sit across from him, next to Dan, on the shiny blue cushion of a dark-wood-colored chair. We are at a fertility clinic because we are trying to conceive a baby and our bodies do not work.
The doctor reviews our deficiencies: low sperm count, low sperm motility, a blocked fallopian tube, advanced maternal age (I am thirty-seven). He folds his thick-fingered hands together and his knuckles redden. He leans forward on his desk and hunches his shoulders so that his neck disappears. His eyes move left and right behind his glasses. He looks at me, then at Dan.
“Advanced reproductive technology can correct these problems,” he says, with deliberate precision. “Injectable hormones will stimulate your ovaries to produce multiple eggs, then make you ovulate at an optimum time.”
He will use a suction device to retrieve the eggs. An embryologist will take them to a laboratory then insert sperm into the eggs under perfect conditions for the embryos to grow. Then he will transfer the best embryos back into my uterus using a syringe attached to a catheter connected to a metal cannula. We can watch him do it on an ultrasound screen. With his team of nurses, embryologists, and technicians, the doctor will help us conceive a baby—our egg and sperm, our genes and chromosomes, our two bodies together.
The George W. Bush mug is surrounded by framed pictures of children—wooden frames, gilded frames, silver, brass, square, oval. Frames that hold three different pictures, frames made of clear plastic that photos slide into the top of. There are pictures of babies cradled by adults, babies who lie in cribs and reach for mobiles, babies who sit in bouncy chairs, put Cheerios into their mouths. There are toddlers who sit in kiddie pools, ride on carousels, build Legos, hold balloons. There are awkward tweens with braces, teenagers in sports gear, dressed up for prom, posed with rolled diplomas in their hands.
The children start off blonde. Then their hair gets browner, their faces longer, their skin ruddier. They stand next to adults who look like them—a grey-haired woman in a pastel top, an old man whose stomach pokes out beneath a yellow polo shirt. Is that a yacht? A golf cart? A swimming pool? In some of the pictures the doctor angles a red-faced baby with slick hair toward the camera, sits next to a boy at a baseball game, holds the hand of a girl in an Easter dress, stands with her in front of a giant bow-tied rabbit.
These are the doctor’s children. A boy and a girl. If I made a flip book out of all these pictures, the pages would slip, one-by-one, through the tips of my fingers and the babies would grow and have first days at school, learn to ride bikes, paddle kayaks at camp, graduate from high school, go to college. I try to picture the baby me and Dan might make. What color would our baby’s eyes be? Would their skin be light brown like Dan’s or pale and freckled like mine? Would their hair be straight and black like his or yellow-blonde and wavy like mine? What would its fingers look like curled around mine? I want to replace the children’s faces in the framed pictures with our child’s face. I breathe in, feel my ribcage expand. The features won’t come into focus.
A nurse hands me a black-and-white picture printed from a computer, stuck to an orange paper frame, and labeled “Your Embryos.” It had been taken after the injections, the anesthetic, the retrieval, and the insertion of the sperm into the egg. The nurse will soon take us into the room where the doctor will transfer these embryos—embryos made from my body and Dan’s body—into my uterus where they are supposed to implant into its lining, my endometrium. One of them, maybe more than one, will grow into a fetus, then a baby, then our child.
Two clusters of bubbles huddle at the bottom of the frame, one clings to the top. Each of the clusters is not quite contained by a circular perimeter—a moat or the rings around a planet. The fragmented cells brim messily over these edges like lethargic eruptions of hot mud.
The nurse expects me to care about these ugly clusters of cells and I am suddenly self-conscious about what expression I have on my face. Are my eyes supposed to glisten with tears? Is my mouth supposed to smile and my fingers rest over my heart until I can find the right words? Should I gasp in amazement at what technology can do to create life from bodies that have failed? The picture of my embryos has no signs of vitality, no evidence of my, or Dan’s, body. When I touch it, all I feel is a cheap square of flimsy paper. I don’t even leave a fingerprint on its surface.
3.
The top of the chest of drawers pressed into my ribcage when I leaned forward. I wasn’t tall enough to reach the book without standing on my toes. The page-edges caught on my chewed cuticles.
In the chapter, “How You Breathe,” lungs were sets of bellows balanced on springs operated by tiny people who pulled ropes that moved the bellows in-and-out to push air up-and-through a chimney. The “Teeth and Tongue Machine” was a red conveyor belt. A tiny man lifted up half an apple and another man on a platform pulled a guillotine blade up-and-down to chop it into slices. A glass flagon dripped green spit onto the slices before they passed through cylindrical “grinders” cranked by another tiny man. The morsels of apples slid into a square chute labeled “food pipe.” A tiny man who peered, satisfied, down into the pipe, oversaw the activity.
I recognized the mechanical processes in How Your Body Works. Clips on kids’ TV had shown me how cookies and crayons were made. Molds were loaded onto conveyor belts and different colored liquid wax squirted down to fill each crayon-shaped space. Heavy metal stamps flattened the sugar-cream insides of cookies into flat circles. On news programs, I’d seen men in factories haul curved squares and arches of metal onto their shoulders, then join the shapes together with blue flame to make the outside of a car. There were machines where my dad worked that pressed out clay into bricks, pushed racks of them to be fired into cavernous kilns with massive smokestacks. I could see the chimneys and the smoke from our road.
At eight-years-old, I was too young for biology classes. I had never labeled a cross-section diagram of the heart or the lungs. Never dissected a frog to survey its digestive system or sliced open the components of a bull’s eye. How Your Body Works had pictures of scarlet rivers that flowed around green cisterns and tubes, taps, and gaskets that showed me how my blood circulated. Soldiers in red armor linked arms against a hole in castle-wall skin to form a scab. A network of tiny people operated my brain—one responded to emergencies by pressing a red alert button that connected to other tiny people who researched the emergency’s cause in a library that held books of memories. Women switchboard operators told my hand to turn on a light, my feet to stop at the edge of a curb, my eyes to figure out what monsters hid in the dark hallway outside my room.
I thought about my dad as he left for work, dressed in his metal-smelling blue overalls and black wool jacket, carrying a canvas bag of tools and cheese sandwiches in a Tupperware box. Or my mum, who pedaled her bike to work, handbag in the front basket, to an office where she and other women answered telephones, put papers into folders, filled out ledgers, sorted through filing cabinets. At home they dusted, vacuumed, ironed.
4.
I understand the radiographer’s frustration. It is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the last appointment of the day, and my cervix is too small.
She assesses the diameter of the opening at the end of a plastic cannula she holds between two gloved fingers, then peers down at the space between my legs. She recalibrates, resets her posture, refocuses her gaze, recalculates how best to adjust the body in front of her to the equipment in her hand—the cannula, the syringe of iodine that she must inject through my cervix and into my uterus and fallopian tubes. She turns to the nurse who holds an ultrasound transducer against my abdomen:
“She needs to move closer to the edge.”
The nurse looks down at me:
“Can you move yourself along?”
My feet and ankles shift my body forward. The tops of my thighs balance at the end of the table. Muscles clench so that I won’t tip over. My open legs move to meet the cannula positioned between the radiographer’s fingers. I push myself into it. It is hard and stiff, and its end is sharp as it scrapes through and up inside. My diaphragm holds taut, my lungs are still, filled with breath. My fingers tingle—too little blood, not enough oxygen. Nails press into my palms. Molars grind against the inside of my cheek. My dry tongue pushes against the top of my palate. Hair snarls at the back of my head, red and yellow spots form under my eyelids. A salt trail tear line connects my temples to my earlobes.
I had learned from my parents that personal complaints were better expressed privately at home. If someone in a store or at a restaurant is rude, exchange glances with whoever you are with, mumble thank you to the rude person and never go back to that place again. If a part of your body hurts, grimace quietly or lie down in a dark room. If someone asks, say you are fine. If you are sad or afraid, run a bath. Read until you feel better.
I will not ask if something went wrong or tell the radiographer to be more careful. I will not sob or be angry or walk out. When the nurse asks me how I am doing, I will say, “I am fine.”
The radiographer pulls the cannula from my body and tells me to get dressed. I get up from the table, hold the open back of my gown together, and walk toward where I have left my clothes.
The nurse calls after me:
“It’s always the women who get the pain—never the men!”
I laugh again, continue to smile as I head to the parking lot.
5.
The drawer handles were flat against my hips—wood circles on bone. This chapter, “How a Baby Starts,” was why How Your Body Works had been left here, out of place, for me to find. I hesitated. Took a breath. Pushed the top of my body further against the top of the chest of drawers so that my collar bone almost touched its surface. Balanced at my waist like a seesaw. Tufts of polyester wool carpet brushed against the tips of my toes.
At the corners of the page, diagonal from each other, were illustrations of – not robot – human, children: a boy and a girl with wide white circles for eyes and black dots for nipples. There were curved lines, like smiles, under the girl’s dots. The pictures were labeled “The Special Parts of a Boy” and “The Special Parts of a Girl.” The special parts were the genitals which the illustrations showed. Not the outsides so that I recognized my body or what I remembered about my brother’s body from when we shared a bath as toddlers. Only the inside—tubes, glands, and organs colored in yellow, orange, and blue.
My eyes focused on a picture of two steam engine-like contraptions labeled “Mum and Dad machines” at the center of the page. There were no robot versions of human features on these machines, no clockwork eyes or mechanical lips, no metal ribs, no red conveyor -belt tongues.
The house was silent. Sun shone through a gap in the long orange curtains at the end of the living room, sliced a bright line on the wooden surface and over my forearms. My dad was out in the garage. My mum might have been outside hanging clothes on the washing-line or planting white alyssum in the diamond-shaped flower bed at the front of our house. My brother was off somewhere on his bike.
The dad machine was blue, which made sense: blue equaled boy. The mum machine should have been pink but was the color of dried-up blood. It was bigger than the dad machine, even though dads were supposed to be taller, stronger than mums so they could work tools and lift heavy suitcases, mow the lawn, or hang wallpaper.
Both machines had chambers on the back. The mum’s chamber looked like a gumball machine. But, instead of candy dropping into an open palm, each red circle was an egg that fell into a cavity inside the mum machine and onto a “cushiony lining,” made of blood and mucus. The dad’s chamber held “extra blood” that pumped down a coil that extended beyond the machine and hung limp. The dangling spring was labeled “penis.” I read the caption: “blood pumped from the tank and down the spiral tube to make the penis “long and hard.”
My temples, then the tops of my cheeks, warmed. I gnawed the skin inside my bottom lip until a tiny piece of it came away between my teeth.
The coiled spring that drooped outside of the dad machine was level with a tunnel in the mum machine labeled “vagina.” The tunnel had a “special opening.” The dad and mum machine must fit together, I decided. In the next picture, the coil on the dad machine had pushed through the opening on the mum machine and into the tunnel.
My fingers stretched across the next picture. Alongside the tops of my nails, above the two machines, I noticed a heart. I knew hearts meant love. Mums and dads loved each other. My mum and dad held hands on walks. My mum rested her feet on my dad’s knees when they watched television. At night, I sometimes heard them laughing in the living room.
I kept still: the springs attached to my bones tensed against hook-and-peg tendons. Air and spit moved down the length of my tongue to the back of my throat. I heard my heart beat. What signal had the part of my brain that registers confusion, fear, excitement, curiosity sent to the part where the books of memories were? What part of my body would my brain tell to move? Would my hands shut the book? My feet walk to my bedroom? I searched the other images on the page. My eyeballs darted around. There were no clicks or whirrs.
6.
I was married to someone else the first time I went out with Dan. Our date was at Hugo’s, a dive bar at the poorly lit end of Pleasant Street in Northampton, Massachusetts. We drank pints of Guinness and shots of Jameson whiskey. Our legs framed the tiny corner table where we sat together, our elbows resting on its sticky, dark-wood surface. We leaned toward each other so that our forearms, wrists, fingers, almost touched. Dan had two rows of thick black eyelashes, his teeth were perfectly straight, his nails were wide and square and white against the light brown skin of his fingers.
There was a gumball machine full of M&M’s next to our table. I searched through my purse for a quarter. Slid in my coin, cranked the handle, held my hand under the metal flap, caught the red, green, and blue circles. When I turned back, Dan was looking down. His eyelashes touched the top of his cheeks. The hairs on his forearm were tiny, fine arches. I offered him some candy. The tips of his fingers brushed against my palm.
Outside the bar, a giant cicada lay paralyzed on the ground. Its wings vibrated intermittently, like winding-down clockwork. We cupped our hands together and lifted it gently to the edge of the sidewalk. Then, we walked down Pleasant Street and up the bike path toward the bus stop. Held hands, sat on a bench. My ankles rested on the top of his feet, his arm against my shoulder blades. The edges of our bodies touched at our knees, hips. The sides of our chests expanded and contracted together when we breathed. We kissed and his thumb hooked into the loop of a silver earring my husband had given me for my birthday. The earring pulled loose and fell into the dark.
Days later, outside Dan’s house in my parked car, we sucked on lollipops—spheres of sugar from the coffee shop that filled our mouths and stretched our lips. Mine was apple-flavored with green and red swirls. His tasted like root beer.
There was a futon mattress on the floor of his room. Milk crates filled with records against the wall. Chinese philosophy books stacked next to the door. A red-and-white tapestry was pinned to the window frame. Sun filtered in patches on our legs and shoulders. Light sliced across our muscles, limbs, hair, mouths, eyes, fingertips, the edges of our hips, the tops of our ribs. Our skin tasted like sugar and salt and dust. Our bodies fit perfectly together.
7.
There were no machines, no robots, in the next chapter, “How a Baby is Born.” Two parallel stories--the mum’s and the baby’s--were told in comic-strip pictures.
My fingertips touched each illustration, moved from one to the next like stepping-stones:
A woman with short brown hair glanced at a man, they held hands, walked together. They looked into each other’s eyes. In one picture the woman’s stomach was flat, in the next it was round beneath a baggy white shirt. The woman made tea, laid on a couch with yellow cushions, put her hands on her stomach. She closed her eyes in a hospital bed, spread her legs as a head emerged from her vagina. Sat up in bed, held a baby. The dad watched the mum walk, sit, and stand. He looked up from his newspaper, called the doctor, brought the mum flowers after the baby was born.
The baby’s story began with an egg that grew into an embryo, then a fetus. At the end, a nurse cut the umbilical cord of a pink-and-white newborn boy. The final caption read, “And the baby is born…his own lungs and eating machinery will do the work now.” I imagined tiny pulleys and cogs, steel plates and rubber belts inside the baby, pillaged from the mum’s body—piece-by-piece, bolt-by-bolt, wire-by-wire.
The baby grew, moved, kicked, twisted the mum’s muscles, stretched her vagina. Its face was hard and aggressive--closed eyes, chin up, determined as it pushed out. The mum’s eyes were round white circles. She didn’t sob or yell or ask the nurses questions. She laid back and waited until she had wrapped the baby in a yellow blanket, looked down at its face while her husband stood alongside her.
I stepped back from the chest of drawers and pressed my palm against my stomach. Spread my fingers so that the skin between them stretched, measured the space between my naval and the bottom of my ribs. How would a baby fit inside my body? Where would my ribs go? When the baby’s head pressed against my lungs, would I be able to feel it breathe? Hear its heartbeat? I knew there was a hole between my legs. If I pushed the tip of my index finger inside it was warm and soft. How could it open, stretch wide enough for a baby’s head? My eyes fixed on the picture of the apple-slice space between the mum’s legs—bare, white and red, a hard black line around the hole.
8.
My legs, in stirrups, frame my view of the embryo transfer room. Off-white walls, faux granite counter, dark-wood cabinets. It looks like a remodeled kitchen in a moderately-priced suburban home. The ultrasound monitor is beside my right hip, the embryology lab is behind my head on the other side of dark-tinted windows. I had seen shadowed figures in blue robes working next to violet-lit tables when I had come into the room.
The nurse presses a button on the wall. Soothing music—the kind you hear in an elevator or do yoga to—begins. I circle my ankles, try to un-tense the muscles in my neck, shoulders, hips, legs.
The doctor surveys the equipment, gives instructions to the nurses and technicians. His gestures are too big, his voice too loud, for the small room. His movements seem clumsy next to the delicate machinery—the thin, spiraled catheter, the narrow metal cannula, the miniature syringe. His mouth creases his mask when he talks:
He is confident that the technological process he initiated will produce a successful outcome. The injections had stimulated my ovaries. He had retrieved many eggs. The embryologist had inserted Dan’s sperm into them. Cells had divided and embryos—embryos made of our bodies together—had developed. He would now use the syringe to inject fluid into the catheter that would propel the embryos through the cannula and into my uterus. They would implant into the cushiony lining, where at least one of them would develop into a fetus, then a baby, then our child.
For two weeks after the embryo transfer, I survey my body—vigilantly assess any physical change. In the shower, I smooth my palms over my breasts, scan for the source of every twinge or ache. I stand sideways in front of the mirror, frame my abdomen with my thumbs and forefingers, turn left and right, try to gauge if my stomach has grown. I evaluate my face: Do my cheeks glow? Are there blue-grey circles under my eyes? I study my fingernails, test their brittleness against hard surfaces.
I review each stomach gurgle, every taste on my tongue. I yearn for cravings, imagine my teeth biting, grinding chocolate, radishes, stones, burned matches. Feel them slipping across my tongue and down my throat.
I imagine my pregnant body. Consider how it would fit into maternity clothes, how I would lift it in and out of chairs. Contemplate walking—the gait of my legs, the angle of my hips, the position of my shoulders.
I conjure mobiles with zoo animals or birds or the solar system above a crib. Mouth first words, map first steps. Dream ice-creams, carousel rides, bicycles, sandcastles, grandparents, balloons. Picture myriad combinations of Dan’s genes and my own: his olive skin, my freckles, his black silky hair, my curls, his long thick lashes, my blue eyes, his broad square feet, my long toes. Our muscles, limbs, lips together. Our bodies perfectly combined.
All of the images, all of the photographs, join together in a flipbook that slips effortlessly through my fingers.
There are sudden twitches in my abdomen. Tiny hands tug on tendons, fingers stretch wide inside me. Intermittent, rhythmic pulls and contractions. My best friend tells me:
“That’s just what happened when I was pregnant. It’s muscles moving. Your body needs to expand for the baby.”
The fetus, the baby, our child, is making itself room, finding a place for its feet and hands, getting its back and neck comfortable, looking for the space it needs to grow.
At the fertility clinic, a nurse inserts a needle into my arm, and I watch my blood circle in a dark red line up the cannula to fill the glass tube. She disconnects the tube, pushes in a stopper, sticks a label printed with my name onto the side. She smiles, wishes me luck.
I won’t need luck. The laboratory will measure the HcG hormone in my blood and confirm an embryo has settled into the cushiony lining of my uterus, that it is beginning to grow into a fetus, a baby, our child. The technology the doctor prescribed will have made the mechanical processes in my body work—switches will have been flipped, gears will have started to grind, belts and pulleys and springs and wires will have begun to operate as they were supposed to.
When the nurse calls, I let my phone ring once, twice, enjoy the space between hope and certainty for a second before I answer.
“Your blood test results show that you are not pregnant.”
My fingertips press against the sides of the phone. The skin beneath my nails whitens. My mouth is dry, my lips stick together as I start to speak.
“OK”
“Do you want to make an appointment to follow up with the doctor or will you call
back?”
The edges of my eyes feel warm, yet I don’t cry. I swallow and breathe in so that my voice won’t tremble.
“I’ll call back. Thank you.”
“Are you OK?”
I hear my heart beat.
“I’m fine.”
When I was eight, my dad mended things that were broken—the car engine, the brakes on my brother’s bike, the hot water heater in the attic. Bodies, too, could be fixed: tissues for runny noses, lozenges for sore throats, ginger for upset stomachs, plaster casts for broken bones. My mother ironed wrinkles out of clothes, swept away dust to make surfaces clean, made ingredients into meals. Steps were taken in order, which led to a predictable end. That was how my blood circulated, how I formulated thoughts, how my baby would be made.
But my embryos had not implanted. Nothing had been fixed. My body did not work.
A couple of days after the nurse’s call, I stare down between my legs at red-brown blood on the toilet tissue I hold in my hand. My body has confirmed the lab test: the child, the baby, the fetus, the feeling of it moving and growing had been imaginary.
I put the picture of my embryos between the pages of a book that I will never read. Close it and push it to the back of a shelf.
Jacqueline Ellis is a writer and professor of women's and gender studies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in WSQ, Mutha Magazine, Porridge Magazine, Hinterland Magazine, and Bending Genres. Originally from England, she lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
Photo by Pixabay