The Secret Society of Demolition Writers Read Online Free Page A

Minus. Look at it. B–. Like a pair of sideways breasts with a slash at the skin. My mother’s cancer went to the brain. I did yet another egg retrieval and picked a couple in a farmhouse in Nyack, New York, where there was, so said the profile, a salmon-colored living room, a woman with strawberry blond hair. I began to worry that something was seriously wrong with me. Never had I been anything but good at what I did. B. Minus. My instructor said I had a bad eye.
    THERE ARE THEORIES, there are stories, and there are facts. Color is all three of these things. Eggs are just facts. The fact is that a baby girl is born with over fifty thousand tiny fresh eggs in her ovaries and she loses them month by month, so by the time she’s ready to have her own baby, she’s diminished; she’s down. I didn’t know this ahead of time, but I read it in the waiting-room literature. There are other ovoid facts. For instance, every egg has a tiny little X inside it, a perfectly shaped letter, a crossroads, two fine lines jointed just right. The most amazing fact, says Ike, is none of these things. The most amazing fact is that every single one of us, thieves and terrorists and adulterers and greedy ones, every single one of us is truly a good egg. Otherwise we would have miscarried. If this is true, and it so obviously is, then why did my mother’s cancer spread to the brain? Why can’t I manage my color wheel? Why did I get a B minus and why was there a boy murdered in the weedy woods, where the mall parking lot stops and the crow-darkness begins?
    MY LAST EGG retrieval happened on a Thursday. I didn’t know it would be my last one, because I was getting rich, cash piling up as my storehouse diminished. My mother was babbling on and on at night now about angels in her tapioca pudding. I wanted them to move her to a hospice. I sometimes came to her and put quarters under her pillow, like I remember she used to do for me when a tooth fell out, and I’d sleep all night on silver.
Oh
mom, what can I give you?
I couldn’t kiss her, couldn’t stand the feel of her skin on my lips, or maybe it was my lips I couldn’t stand, the way I started to see them as earthworm pink, segmented and ominously plump.
    I went for my last egg retrieval. I had two moments that are of note. That they happened almost side by side is important. Sometimes I get what I call these “flashes of notice.” They can happen anytime and they never come with warnings. Sometimes it seems to me that the world steps out of its skin and shows me its original beauty, or its ugliness. On the way to the clinic that late fall afternoon, doused on drugs that were maybe making my own mind a little whacked, I saw light swimming in the top of a tree, light fractured by leaves and swimming like little fish up there in the treetop sky, and I thought, “I am looking at a mass of light.” That was a moment of notice. Then I got to the clinic. I stepped in and sat down. Next to me was a woman too old to be there. She had a map of lines on her face and sunken eyes. She was, I’d say, fifty. She was wearing tasteless black-velvet leggings and a long tunic top and all in all, she had a beaten-up, trashy look. And I had a flash of notice then. I saw her ugliness absolutely, same as I’d seen the light’s beauty. I saw the cells spilling down her aging face and teeth, each one a tombstone. I felt, then, a pure and rising fury. I felt a tightness in my throat, like I’d swallowed a red rubber ball. I was going to cry soon, even though, come on, come on, we’re all good eggs. I sat down. Women whooshed in and out, hands placed protectively on their lower bellies. “What are you here for?” I said to the woman, really brazen, I didn’t care. I figured she was waiting for a daughter, and that, it turned out, was right, in a way. “I’m here to receive my first donor egg,” she said, and I felt punched in the gut, for it had not occurred to me, anyone can get a donor egg, you can