Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,70

It turned out they were all on the boards for something. The shared interest could be anything—everyone in the group enjoyed cooking, or they were all lawyers, or they had attended the same private girls’ school thirty years ago. This was where women met now. Where they told one another their secrets.

Elisabeth’s friend Amy was on the message boards because she hated her stepkids. She wasn’t expecting to feel that way. Her coworker Maisy was on a board for married women pondering lesbian affairs. They would never post. But they lurked and lurked. None of them read books anymore.

When Nomi went in for an ultrasound at nine weeks, there was no heartbeat. She had to take a drug to force herself to miscarry what was left inside her. She was nervous, as the women online reported a great deal of pain and bloodshed. One woman said she wanted to warn others: You might see the baby’s eyes.

Elisabeth went to Nomi’s apartment and played race cars with Alex, her three-year-old. Nomi felt crampy. The drug could take four days to work fully. The doctor gave her twenty pills and said he hoped she wouldn’t need them all.

Elisabeth made them lunch, then put Nomi and Alex down for a nap.

Back at home, she tried to write. But she was distracted. In the next two days, she would visit Nomi twice more as this baby, or this idea of a baby, left her body. She would go to the organic children’s store on Court Street and buy three precious outfits for friends who had just had babies, or were about to. She would order the hormones that, starting next month, Andrew would inject her with nightly, in the hopes of making a baby of their own.

Elisabeth was three weeks into it, bloated and hormonal, at the annual holiday party at her agent’s office. She had been feeling Scrooge-like all day, but this event usually cheered her. Afterward, a bunch of them went to a bar. They sat around a table, drinking whiskey. A former Times colleague of hers commented that a mystery writer in her fifties had just been chastising a young hipster novelist for riding a bicycle without a helmet, and now the mystery writer was outside smoking.

“We are all allowed one deadly vice,” the hipster said.

A while later, an intern from the agency pulled a chair up beside Elisabeth and said she loved her books. In the next breath, the girl was telling her that she rescued French bulldogs, a breed so sickly that they can only mate via artificial insemination.

“If you can’t get pregnant on your own, that’s the universe telling you you weren’t meant to procreate,” the girl said. She sipped her beer.

It was so piercing, the feeling.

She wasn’t talking about you, Elisabeth told herself. She smiled back.

Her friends had gone off the pill, charted their basal body temperature. They wanted it. But still, a lot of them wept when they got a positive test. They weren’t ready. They didn’t think it would happen so fast. This was one more thing the whole IVF experience had robbed her of—the right to be ambivalent. Why would you subject yourself to all that if you were not sure? But she wasn’t. She wondered how many others in that fluorescent-lit waiting room felt the same way.

Andrew took it in stride, as he did most things. He appeared to, anyway. They laughed through the shots and the sad early mornings waiting for blood draws, even though she had read that couples who went through IVF without success almost always divorced. At first, Elisabeth felt a bit smug about how well they were bearing up. But then came the losses. They didn’t seem to hit him like they did her, and it was infuriating. The more they happened, the more hormones they pumped into her, the more she saw how this could pull two people apart.

She almost gave up several times, but doing IVF was like having a gambling addiction. The suspicion that the next time might be the time kept her coming back.

It was like gambling in another way too. The money they poured into it was twice what they’d agreed to spend. There was a dollar amount, a line they would not cross, but then they crossed it, and crossed the second line they drew, and the third. She knew people who had taken out bank loans to pay for IVF. The clinic handed out a pamphlet for an IVF-specific