Some gift.
But don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. What happens happens, and I’m as guilty as anybody, I admit it. It’s just that when the guys at the Flounder Inn are sniggering in their beer and Marie starts looking at me like I’m a toad or something, you’ve got to put things in perspective, you’ve got to realize that it was her all along, she’s the one that started it.
“I want a baby,” was how she put it.
It was April, raw and wet. Crocuses and dead man’s fingers were poking through the dirt along the walk, and the stripers were running. I’d just stepped in the door, beat, chilled to the teeth, when she made her announcement. I went straight for the coffeepot. “Can’t afford it,” I said.
She didn’t plead or try to reason with me. All she did was repeat herself in a matter-of-fact tone, as if she were telling me about some new drapes or a yard sale, and then she marched through the kitchen and out the back door. I sipped at my coffee and watched her through the window. She had a shovel. She was burying something. Deep. When she came back in, her nose was running a bit and her eyes were crosshatched with tiny red lines.
“What were you doing out there?” I asked.
Her chin was crumpled, her hair was wild. ’Burying something. ”
I waited while she fussed with the teapot, my eyebrows arched like question marks. Ten seconds ticked by. “Well, what?”
“My diaphragm.”
I’ve known Marie since high school. We were engaged for five years while she worked for Reader’s Digest and we’d been married for three and a half when she decided she wanted some offspring. At first I wasn’t too keen on the idea, but then I had to admit she was right: the time had come. Our lovemaking had always been lusty and joyful, but after she buried the diaphragm it became tender, intense, purposeful. We tried. For months we tried. I’d come in off the river, reeking of the creamy milt and silver roe that floated two inches deep in the bottom of the boat while fifty- and sixty-pound stripers gasped their last, come in like a wild bull or something, and Marie would be waiting for me upstairs in her nightie and we’d do it before dinner, and then again after. Nothing happened.
Somewhere around July or August, the sweet blueclaw crabs crawling up the riverbed like an army on maneuvers and the humid heat lying over the valley like a cupped hand, Marie went to Sister Eleazar of the Coptic Brotherhood of Ethiop. Sister Eleazar was a black woman, six feet tall at least, in a professor’s gown and a fez with a red tassel. Leroy Lent’s wife swore by her. Six years Leroy and his wife had been going at it, and then they went to Sister Eleazar and had a pair of twins. Marie thought it was worth a try, so I drove her down there.
The Coptic Brotherhood of Ethiop occupied a lime-green building the size of a two-car garage with a steeple and cross pinned to the roof. Sister Eleazar answered our knock scowling, a little crescent of egg yolk on her chin. “What you want?” she said.
Standing there in the street, a runny-eyed Chihuahua sniffing at my heels, I listened to Marie explain our problem and watched the crescent of egg on Sister Eleazar’s face fracture with her smile. “Ohhh,” she said, “well, why didn’t you say so? Come own in, come own in.”
There was one big room inside, poorly lit. Old bottom-burnished pews stretched along three of the four walls and there was a big shiny green table in the center of the floor. The table was heaped with religious paraphernalia — silver salvers and chalices and tinted miniatures of a black man with a crown dwarfing his head. A cot and an icebox huddled against the back wall, which was decorated with magazine clippings of Africa. “Right here, sugar,” Sister Eleazar said, leading Marie up to the table. “Now, you take off your coat and your dress, and less ex-amine them wombs.”
Marie handed me her coat, and then her tight blue dress with the little white clocks on it, while Sister Eleazar cleared the chalices and whatnot off the table. The Chihuahua had followed us in, and now it sprang up onto the cot with a sigh and buried its nose in its paws. The room stank of dog.
“All right,” Sister Eleazar said, turning back to Marie, “you climb up own the table now and stretch yourself out so Sister ’Leazar can listen to your insides and say a prayer over them barren wombs.” Marie complied with a nervous smile, and the black woman leaned forward to press an ear to her abdomen. I watched the tassel of Sister Eleazar’s fez splay out over Marie’s rib cage and I began to get excited: the place dark and exotic, Marie in brassiere and panties, laid out on the table like a sacrificial virgin. Then the sister was mumbling something — a prayer, I guess — in a language I’d never heard before. Marie looked embarrassed. “Don’t you worry about nothin’,” Sister Eleazar said, looking up at me and winking. “I got just the thing.”
She fumbled around underneath the cot for a minute, then came back to the table with a piece of blue chalk — the same as they use in geography class to draw rivers and lakes on the blackboard — and a big yellow can of Colman’s dry mustard. She bent over Marie like a heart surgeon, and then, after a few seconds of deliberation, made a blue X on Marie’s lower abdomen and said, “Okay, honey, you can get up now.”
I watched Marie shrug into her dress, thinking the whole thing was just a lot of superstitious mumbo jumbo and pisantry, when I felt Sister Eleazar’s fingers on my arm; she dipped her head and led me out the front door. The sky was overcast. I could smell rain in the air. “Listen,” the black woman whispered, handing me the can of mustard, “the problem ain’t with her, it’s with you. Must be you ain’t penetratin’ deep enough.” I looked into her eyes, trying to keep my face expressionless. Her voice dropped. “What you do is this: make a plaster of this here mustard and rub it on your parts before you go into her, and it’ll force out that ’jaculation like a torpedo coming out a submarine — know what I mean?” Then she winked. Marie was at the door. A man with a hoe was digging at his garden in the next yard over. “Oh yeah,” the sister said, holding out her hand, “you want to make a donation to the Brotherhood, that’ll be eleven dollars and fifty cent.”
I never told Marie about the mustard — it was too crazy. All I said was that the sister had told me to give her a mustard plaster on the stomach an hour after we had intercourse — to help the seeds take. It didn’t work, of course. Nothing worked. But the years at Reader’s Digest had made Marie a superstitious woman, and I was willing to go along with just about anything as long as it made her feel better. One night I came to bed and she was perched naked on the edge of the footstool, wound round three times with a string of garlic. “I thought that was for vampires?” I said. She just parted her lips and held out her arms.
In the next few weeks she must have tried every quack remedy in the book. She kept a toad in a clay pot under the bed, ate soup composed of fish eyes and roe, drank goat’s milk and cod-liver oil, and filled the medicine chest with elixirs made from nimble weed and rhinoceros horn. Once I caught her down in the basement, dancing in the nude round a live rooster. I was eating meat three meals a day to keep my strength up. Then one night I came across an article about test-tube babies in Science Digest. I studied the pictures for a long while, especially the one at the end of the article that showed this English couple, him with a bald dome and her fat as a sow, with their little test-tube son. Then I called Marie.
Dr. Ziss took us right away. He sympathized with our plight, he said, and would do all he could to help us. First he would have to run some tests to see just what the problem was and whether it could be corrected surgically. He led us into the examining room and looked into our eyes and ears, tapped our knees, measured our blood pressure. He drew blood, squinted at my sperm under a microscope, took X rays, did a complete pelvic exam on Marie. His nurse was Irene Goddard, lived up the street from us. She was a sour, square-headed woman in her fifties with little vertical lines etched around her lips. She prodded and poked and pricked us and then had us fill out twenty or thirty pages of forms that asked about everything from bowel movements to whether my grandmother had any facial hair. Two weeks later I got a phone call. The doctor wanted to see us.