The Secret Society of Demolition Writers Read Online Free Page B

be eighty years old and get one implanted, it is never too late to harbor life, and that seemed awful and wrong to me. It seemed polluted to put a young fresh egg in an ancient vessel. It was like a taboo. I had the thought that maybe one of the women I had picked was really like this woman, looks good on paper, but dying; of course. Color is God’s way of laughing. I thought of that myself. Here’s something else I thought of. Every moment you are with a person, you are with a dying person. There’s no way around that.
    I stared at this woman. “Aren’t you a little old?” I said, my voice high and frantic. The woman blinked. She had so much mascara on that her blink left little black dots on the belly-bags beneath her eyes. Everyone in the waiting room turned to listen.
    “Old for what?” the woman said snippily.
    “Old to be getting a donor egg?” I said. “I mean,” and the rage kept rising, “I mean, at some point you just have to admit, it might be too late.”
    The woman didn’t say anything, just looked away, fiddled with the gold clasp on her purse.
    “Well,” I said, laughing, and I’d like to add here that months and months of fertility drugs can make you crazy, although I know it’s more than that, there are many facts, theories, stories that underlie a mind, “well,” I said, “I’m a veteran at this and let me tell you it sucks. It sucks,” I said. “They put you on a table, spread you wide, and then blow the eggs up you like they’re bubbles.”
    “Would you shut up,” the woman said to me.
    “Would I shut up?” I said. I thought of my mother then. She kept talking tapioca, angels with wet wings. Why wouldn’t she shut up? Would I shut up? “Fuck you,” I said. “You’re too old to have a baby.”
    “Please,” the woman said, holding up her hand, “please, stop.”
    “I’m just trying to tell you the truth,” I said. “They spread your legs wide and stuff things inside. Like a flaxidermist.”
    “You mean taxidermist,” she said.
    “That’s what I said,” I said.
    “Tiffany,” a nurse called, coming to the door, and the woman looked up.
    “Your turn,” I said. Outside the plate glass windows, the trees were glorious, but I did not have a flash of notice; the glory stayed separate from me. Tiffany, old, with a big fat butt, moved off, her cells falling onto the floor with a tinkling sound, like goblets being broken. Only I could hear it. I sat there, my eyes closed, listening.
    THE SEDATION, THAT last time, felt particularly fine. I was covered in a net of fluff and borne away with Winken. The retrieval needle seemed sheathed in silk, and I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I was in the recovery room, sun streaming in, falling in bold strokes across the squeaky floor. In the bed next to mine, Tiffany was lying there, moaning. I could see her bare bottom through the sheet, the extra bags of fat. “Tiffany,” I whispered, “Tiffany, Tiffany,” and she turned slowly towards my sound, and opened her hurting eyes, and looked at me. “What,” she said, and then, I don’t know, she tried to get up, she wanted to escape me, or she just thought it was time, but in order for implantation to succeed, a woman should lie flat. “Don’t move Tiffany,” I whispered, “you have to lie flat for thirty minutes,” but she kept struggling to stand. I should help her, I thought. I should just take her hand, lead her wherever it is she wants to go. For how long, after all, can a person dwell in a perfectly decorated sphere? My egg store was getting depleted. My colors could not be managed. There are discordancies: angels in pudding, babies in ancients, and then there’s plain old pain. It cannot be helped. In a farmhouse, in Nyack New York, there are built-in bookshelves, fir floors. Janice, she could be four months along already, I’ll never know. What I knew then was Tiffany, struggling to stand, so I gave her my hand, and I pulled her up, and we walked across