The extras are Moroccan women of all ages, wearing clothes appropriate for a mosque. You watch as they store their shoes in the small shoe compartments that have been built into the prayer rugs and kneel toward Mecca. You wonder if they are actually using this time to pray.
The director calls you over and instructs you to enter this room of the mosque as though in awe. This is not difficult. You enter the room and admire the architecture. You walk over to where the women are praying. You remove your shoes and store them in the prayer rug’s compartments. You adjust your scarf around your head, making sure you’re more than adequately covered, and sit back on your heels. You assume the same position as the women around you.
One of the younger extras is carrying a baby in a sling. You cannot see the baby’s face, but still you stare.
As you relax on your heels in the mosque you are thinking of your sister’s nine-week-old baby. Your niece.
You think of your sister, of how she invited you over to her home that early spring morning, over a year ago now, when the flowers in her garden were the colors of Easter. You sat on her deck, in matching deck chairs with red pin-striped cushions. She worked an as interior designer and had directed immeasurable attention toward the purchase of everything in her home. She turned toward you and cried as she told you that after five years of miscarriages, it was definitive: she and her husband, Drew, had resigned themselves to the fact that they would not be parents. All she ever wanted was a child, she told you. “I just know it’s because of that hatchet job of an abortion I had my senior year.” Of course you remembered it: you had told her you couldn’t drive her to the clinic because you were meeting with a recruiting coach, but it was a lie. You were tried of always bailing her out of trouble. Your sister drove herself, and for this, you have always felt terrible.
She moved herself to your deck chair and positioned herself so she could literally cry on your shoulder — which you also now realize was part of her dramatic ploy. At the time you fell for it, though: you offered to help her however you could.
She lifted her head from your shoulder and said, “Really?”
Later you would think about how quickly she said this. Later, the alacrity of her response would make you question whether her crying was calculated, would make you wonder if she had been manipulating you all along. Her relationships were as well choreographed as her home — no vase had been set down temporarily on a table, no throw pillow was accidental in color, no rug was a square inch too big or small. She designed and selected everything according to her specifications. On this particular Sunday morning she sought your pity, she wanted you to sacrifice your body for her needs. She preyed upon the fact that you had always wanted to be closer to her than she wanted to be to you.
The following day you accompanied her to her fertility doctor, but instead of examining her, the doctor performed tests on you. It was established that you would be a suitable surrogate for her child. “A gestational carrier” was what he called you. If you had been identical twins he could have used one of your eggs, but because you were fraternal twins your sister wanted to use hers. You knew this choice of hers had to do with the fact that she felt her genes were better than yours, but you tried not to be insulted. Her superior beauty had always been a given. IVF would be used to fertilize your sister’s eggs in the laboratory. If fertilization was successful, the doctor said he would transfer two or three of the resulting embryos into your uterus. He said this, and then removed his examination gloves, balled them together, and threw them in the trash.
Your husband rolled his eyes when you told him about your decision to carry your sister’s child. This should have been a sign. The rolling of eyes is rarely an appropriate response for any momentous announcement, and certainly not for an act of sisterhood as profound as the one you had decided to embark on. He accused you of doing anything for your sister, and you wondered if the subtext of that comment was that you did little for him. You and your husband had previously and repeatedly discussed whether you wanted to have children together, and you were both ambivalent and swore to each other your ambivalence had nothing to do with your feelings toward each other. But of course it did.
After the second attempt at IVF with your sister and her husband’s embryos, you became pregnant. They both accompanied you to the checkups, first on a monthly basis, and then on a weekly one. You read the books on pregnancy, and tried to skip over the sections on motherhood. You read in a newspaper that peppers were healthy for the fetus, and after that you couldn’t stop eating them. You ate red peppers, yellow peppers, orange peppers. Every week at the grocery store you’d buy a dozen. You read poems aloud. You sang simple songs your mother had sung to you and your sister. You felt more alive than you’d felt at any time during your twenties, when you didn’t have a career. You still didn’t have a career, but now you had a purpose.
“Isn’t there anything else you could be passionate about?” your husband said to you repeatedly during the pregnancy. You explained that helping your sister was the first thing you’d felt strongly about doing since diving. And you couldn’t exactly make a career of diving. “You can’t make a career of carrying your sister’s baby either,” he said.
Your sister’s husband was kinder to you than your own. In the second trimester your husband had stopped trying to sleep with you altogether, and at night you wrapped yourself around the large body pillow the midwife suggested you use. You and your sister could never agree on the proper possessive pronoun for the midwife. Your sister called her “my midwife”; you called her “our midwife” or referred to her by her first name. You hoped your sister would start doing the same but she didn’t.
When you suspected you were in labor, you called your sister and she came over, and when it was time, she and her husband drove you to the hospital. Your husband wasn’t home; he was in Indiana on business and couldn’t make it back in time. You did the math to see if he was lying and your conclusion was indecisive. Your sister’s husband waited outside the delivery room while your sister knelt beside you and the midwife and the doula. Your sister soaked washcloths in cold water and placed them over your forehead. She whispered reassuring words to you. “You can do this,” she said. “You can do this.”
It wasn’t pain so much as the most intense sensation you had ever experienced. First the feeling of the baby trying to crawl its way down and come out into the world. Why did it feel as though it was crawling through your back? “It’s trying to come out of my back,” you told the midwife.
The midwife and the doula decided that to ease the pain you would be moved into the shower. They turned down the bathroom lights. The doula used her hands to massage your back while you stood in the shower. At one point, the doula asked your sister to take over massaging; she wanted to involve your sister in the delivery. Your sister’s hands were not as effective.
You felt something pass through you quickly, and you screamed. The baby was coming out! You tried to catch it with your hands — it was an unwieldy shape but it fell to the shower floor and you felt an explosion of liquid on your feet. You screamed. Your sister screamed. The midwife came running back into the bathroom. “I think the baby just dropped on the shower floor,” you yelled. The lights were turned on. It was explained that your water had broken.
The midwife told you you were close. You were toweled dry and moved out of the bathroom and onto a mattress that had been pulled off the bed and placed on the floor. Your sister held your hands during what no one had prepared you for — the intense burning sensation.
You tried to picture the baby. You hoped you would love it after it had tortured you so, but you immediately erased the thought. You knew you would love her.