dark liquid. But someone would know. Someone in a sterile white room stuffed with urine samples from my doctor’s office. Someone with a yellow school education who got paid to sift through the effluvia of pregnant women and tick boxes. Someone who hated her job so much she wanted to take out that hate on another someone, especially the wife of the man who’d invented the tier system and the Q rankings and pushed the importance of both at every opportunity.
And more important, what’s your baby’s Q? Petra continued.
“What a lot of silliness,” Oma said. “A baby’s a baby. Who cares about its Q?”
I wanted to say Malcolm gave a shit. Two or three, maybe.
“Do we even know what this Q is?”
I try to answer her as best I can, cobbling together pieces I’ve heard from Malcolm and the news. The algorithms have become so much more complicated than the initial grade-point-average equivalents they used to be. “It’s a quantifier, Oma. A quotient.”
“Explain to me what is being quantified,” she says.
“Oh—grades, of course. Attendance records and participation. The same things we’ve always calculated.”
“And that is all?” There’s doubt in her voice.
I continue ticking off the components I remember. “Parents’ education and income. Siblings’ performance. All the other Qs in the nuclear family.”
“You also have this Q?”
“Everyone of school or working age does. And each month it’s recalculated.” The fact is, I don’t even keep track anymore. My numbers have been in the high nine-point-somethings since the Q rankings rolled out a few years back. This is partly thanks to my own degrees, partly because I keep acing my teacher assessments. But I’m stupid to think the numbers are all my own—Malcolm’s position undoubtedly adds a few tenths of a point, maybe more. As deputy secretary in the Department of Education, he’s only one degree of separation removed from the president, for chrissake.
Oma fiddled with her earpiece and then turned up Petra’s television pitch. Phrases came out from the screen like sharp little darts, piercing.
. . . especially for those of us over thirty-five . . .
. . . earlier is better . . .
. . . a prenatal quotient gives women the information they need to make that all-important decision . . .
. . . before it’s too late . . .
A number flashed in red on the bottom of the screen, along with a website address of the Genics Institute, while Petra advised all mothers-to-be to sign up for a free consultation with one of the institute’s experts.
“Here is something true,” Oma said, turning away from the television and facing me, “you really can’t tell what they are going to be. So you take a test, and the test tells you your baby will be ‘average.’ What does that mean? There is only one measure?” She tipped her glass with a gnarled hand and went on. “When I taught art—oh, too many years ago—I had a student who could not make the change from a dollar. But she had different talents. Do you know where that girl is today?”
I knew where the girl was. Fabiana Roman was in every gallery from coast to coast, or at least her paintings were. Malcolm once looked at the splattered canvases that were half–Jackson Pollock and half–Edvard Munch, with a sprinkling of Kandinsky thrown on top for good measure. He called them “degenerate.”
“Maybe I should go in and have the test. Just to see,” I said, scribbling the number and URL on one of the parenting magazines from the coffee table.
Oma reached over and snatched it from me.
“What?”
“Elena, tell me you are not seriously considering this,” she said. “The amniocentesis I understand.” She pronounced “amniocentesis” carefully, the unfamiliar concatenation of sounds tripping up her tongue. “But a prenatal intelligence test? Was this maybe Malcolm’s idea?”
“No,” I lied.
Of course we’d discussed the testing—several times. Each argument ended with Malcolm telling me it was my decision, whatever I thought best was fine, no pressure. I knew better, though. I knew exactly what Malcolm thought was best.