Now Ana recognized what was strange about the small crowd: Barely anyone in the room looked older than fifty. Ana remembered the old schoolhouse where she had been married, with James’s great-aunts and -uncles in their wheelchairs in locked positions tucked away in the corners like umbrellas.
On the edges of the empty dance floor, a small child swayed by himself, wearing a rock ‘n’ roll T-shirt—ABCD split by a lightning bolt, like the logo for the band AC/DC—with a blazer over it, hair hanging in his eyes. How old? Ana had no idea.
She had seen the boy earlier, in the bathroom. As Ana stood at the automatic dryer, his little hands had suddenly brushed against hers, grabbing at the warm air, his body up against her skirt.
“Oliver, don’t be rude!” The boy’s mother had appeared, pulling him away. Ana smiled, shrugging lightly. “I’m so sorry,” said the mother, unfolding a soft towel from the stack by the sink. She rubbed furiously at the boy’s hands. He looked at Ana quizzically, silent. “Were you smart enough to leave yours at home?”
Ana sighed internally, knowing what she’d find at the next step of this conversation. “I don’t have kids.”
And so it came: the pause and the nervous rebound. “Right, I get that, absolutely,” and the exaggerated eye roll at the small, wet child. It surprised Ana how often mothers played up their misery, as if she would find it comforting to pretend they would switch places with her.
Eighties pop rock blasted from the speakers. In daytime, this room would probably be used for a conference, a PowerPoint presentation to bored executives trying to keep their tortoise necks from snapping down to sleep. Ana attended these kinds of meetings and had occasionally led them. She knew the closed air of this kind of room, the scent of boredom, the water glasses and pens lined up next to blank tablets of paper. She didn’t like to think of Sarah’s wedding shadowed by the ordinary in this way.
“You forget all about the wedding when you realize you’re in a marriage,” said Ana, her eyes now on James, who was still talking.
“I know. We’ve been together so long, I’m not sure why it mattered at all to Marcus. His traditional side appeared as soon as I showed him the pee stick.”
Then came the sound of knives clinking on glasses and a small cheer. Sarah rolled her eyes at Ana with a smile that discredited the eye roll. Marcus leaned across the table and gave his bride a kiss, so deep and certain that Ana looked away. James did not. He let out a whoop.
When Ana turned back, Sarah was beaming and cackling, her big sound bouncing below the DJ’s music like an extra track. The cake appeared, carried by two sweating women in manly black vests and white dress shirts. Three tiers of white buttercream icing, ribbons of chocolate down the side. A round of applause. There were no figurines on top. Ana remembered picking her bride and groom: James thought it would be funny to use two black people, or a pair of women. In the end, he let her pick, and she panicked and chose two that were so small her mother drunkenly asked if they were children.
The women placed the cake directly in front of Ana, which set off fireworks of flashing cameras.
“Oh, no, no. I’m not—” said Ana, sliding her chair closer to James, out of the way of Sarah and Marcus and all the years that this photo would exist in computer in-boxes and dresser drawers.
The sound in the room was beginning to bother her. A thrumming filled her skull, and her body craved the cool of the sheets waiting for her at home. The edges of her eyes blurred.
James saw Ana cringe a little and knew what was happening. He put his arm around her, and she leaned into it. She tried to stem his worry.
They were equal now. All that work to clear the tubes of their nests of cysts, and it didn’t matter: According to the celebrity doctor, Ana had an “inhospitable” uterus—no visitors allowed. Its walls were thin as onionskin, unable to support anything. And James’s sperm had low motility. They were too lethargic to broach those walls anyway.
Now they had the information, the perfectly balanced failure. A year ago, they had agreed upon the circumstances under which the long, gruesome trail of appointments and injections would end, and today they had kept their covenant. No more stirrups and pills. No more bloody syringes and bruised thighs. No more electronic wands.
James had a new plan now. Even as he was explaining to the table why vegetarianism was an untenable ethical position, the other part of his brain had him sweeping into Rwanda. He had been there once, during the rebuilding. He had opened the door to a church, and children came tumbling out like jelly beans from a machine. He imagined himself on an airplane back from Africa. Finally he’d be one of those dads he always got seated behind. But he would be bouncing and expertly soothing the new baby, a baby with no one besides them. Ana was in the seat next to him, holding a baby bottle. They could do that. It would be good for everyone.
But then, there were risks: trauma; fetal alcohol syndrome; the stigma of being a racial outsider … He glanced at Sarah’s swollen stomach. Maybe they could borrow a healthy uterus for a while and grow their own.
Ana did not know what thoughts were racing through James’s mind or why his eyes on her smiled sadly. She wanted to show him that she was all right, to let him know that it was possible to be happy for someone else. She gave him a small kiss on the neck. She was trying to remind him of something that she herself was working hard to remember.
A year later, Ana watched James through the kitchen window, open for the first time in months. He looked medium. His brown hair had thinned at the top of his head to reveal a little gleaming planet that hoped not to be discovered. When he turned sideways, the silhouette of a small belly emerged from his untucked shirt, surprising her.
Ana rapped on the window. James waved. She pointed to her wristwatch. He nodded.
Ana had discovered the pipes had broken when a smell led her to the basement, where shreds of toilet paper and purple-black sludge coated the drain in one corner. James had handled it, which meant that when Ana came home from work the next afternoon, there were three men in her frozen, broken yard, and James, too, each of them drinking a beer out of the bottle. James had gloves on; the men did not. One was Romanian and two Italian, though they considered themselves Sicilian, really, James informed her later, in the bathroom, his mouth filled with toothpaste. The tinier the country, the more divided, James noted. (Ana thought: What about Andorra? But she didn’t say it out loud.) He prided himself on always knowing something significant about everyone within eleven minutes of introductions.
The pipes had been replaced, but the yard remained ripped apart. James and Ana had decided to leave it until spring, and now it was spring and James stood in the very center of the frozen lawn like a spoon in a bowl of hardened pudding, with two rolls of sod at his feet. James knew a little about gardening—he had interviewed some organic farmers in California who discovered ammonium sulphate in their fertilizer—but not enough to save the lawn.
Ana surveyed the kitchen. The risotto ingredients were lined up in small ceramic bowls as if waiting for a cooking show close-up. Ana wore an apron James had sewn years ago in his high school home economics class: WOK WITH JAMES, it said in black iron-on letters across the chest, a reference to a popular TV show Ana had never seen.
James slammed the back door, letting in a gust of cool air.
“How can you not be wearing a coat?” asked Ana.
He leaned over her three-ring binder, reading the recipe in its plastic sleeve.
“This looks great.” Then: “I’m not cold. That apron is still fucking hilarious.”
He plugged his iPod into the dock in the next room and returned midsentence, speaking over the music, telling Ana about the band, which included a tuba player. This enthusiasm reminded Ana of a time during their courtship when James would arrive at her apartment in the middle of the night—3 or 4 a.m.—just as the black crust of the sky was breaking. He had a key by then, and wouldn’t wake her, but would stand for a moment at the side of Ana’s bed. She would press her eyelids closed, feigning sleep. After a few minutes of heavy breathing, if he was still there, she would open her eyes. James never went out at night in those days without the paramedic’s shirt he’d bought at a secondhand store in Kensington market. It had blue crosses on the shoulders and a polyester sheen made Day-Glo by James’s sweat.