Marlow clenched her fists at the sound of the line. It was so accurate, so smooth, so out of sync with Floss’s sputtering reflexes. The sentence must have been in the wings for years, Marlow realized, waiting for its cue. Its scripted patter gave her a horrible thought. The thought came out of nowhere and out of everything. It came from being used to finding out, again and again, that something she thought was real was not.
She had broken her contract once already today. Why not shatter the spell?
“Did they cast a different dad for me?” she whispered to her mother. “They can’t do that, right?”
Floss gasped. She grabbed Marlow by the elbow and dragged her down the hall, to her master bath. She slammed the door. “How dare you?” she hissed at her. “How dare you talk about the network like that—and on camera? Shame on you. After all they’ve done for us, the life they’ve given us—” Floss stopped to catch her breath. Her chest was heaving beneath her dress, which was too tight everywhere, Lycra burrowing mercilessly between the soft shelves of her flesh. Marlow noticed, for the first time, that her mother was wearing a necklace with diamond-stacked letters, spelling NANA.
And she noticed something else: her mother’s walk-in shower was crammed with vases, with hundreds of roses in a dozen different kinds of pink. There were roses the color of a shell’s pale inside and roses the color of the scorching lipstick Floss wore in the summer and roses every shade in between. They had been shoved in here, to dry and wither, because Floss hadn’t wanted to wait on the florist order for the sowing until Marlow and Ellis picked a sex. She had simply ordered both pink and blue, then cast aside the one she didn’t need.
Strangely, that was what Marlow was thinking of—all those flowers cut and dying, for absolutely nothing, behind sealed glass—when she said it: “See, Mom, this is why we don’t want the baby having any of your genes.”
Floss was silent as she walked to the sink. She rummaged in her bin of endless products, found a pot of eye shadow, and finished what the makeup girl had started. Marlow could see, as she crept closer, that there were more tears in her mother’s eyes, threatening to fall. And then they simply didn’t. They went away on their own.
Floss snapped the eye shadow shut. “It’s time,” she said. She opened the door, pushed past Marlow, and went back out into the hall. A moment later, Marlow heard the French doors that led to the backyard clicking open, then closing with a slam.
Jacqueline had tactfully retired to the kitchen while Floss and Marlow fought, but now Marlow felt her hand on her back. She looked up and saw her friend behind her in the mirror, holding the yellow gown open at the knees. Marlow stepped in, and Jacqueline zipped it up.
When Jacqueline led her back down the hall a minute later, Marlow could see her sowing beginning. Just beyond the French doors, at the base of the deck stairs she was to walk down, the string quartet was seated in their spots, bows sawing. She could hear the violins.
Jacqueline walked Marlow to the doors and rubbed her back. Once, gently, in a circle. Then she was gone, too.
Marlow took in the scene on the other side of the glass. This was it; she should be out there. The music had stopped and started again—Brahms, it was always Brahms, when the mother-to-be was about to appear. Jacqueline was in her place, up front and to the side, her floor-length hem circled by her children, standing with her as a reminder of what this was all about. Ellis stood in front of the crowd, waiting for Marlow beneath an arch draped in bluebells. He was smiling at the guests, cracking jokes that didn’t seem to land. Bridget twisted in her front-row seat to note who was and wasn’t laughing at her magnificent son. Floss sat across the aisle from Bridget, staring straight ahead, all clues to her expression hidden by the swollen back of her updo.
Come to think of it, Marlow thought, it wasn’t just about her mother. She didn’t want to make a baby out of any of them.
There was one bot left behind Marlow, sorting cocktail napkins in the kitchen. She turned and walked over to it. She looked it right in its crystal eyes. “Move,” she said.