surprised you didn’t want to wait,” said Frank, who looked as though he was trying to puzzle it out. “For the right guy. I mean, you’ve still got time.”
“Why should I wait?” asked Sarah. Her voice was a bark. The only thing she had been waiting for was this exact question. She’d had a feeling her parents were not quite unconventional enough to avoid asking it. “Why should I have to wait for a man?”
Frank, mild as always, only shrugged.
“What kind of a man donates to a sperm bank?” asked Gretchen, though Sarah could tell from her tone that it was neither a judgmental nor a rhetorical question. Her mother was huddled under the quilt, her chin bobbing in a thoughtful bounce on her knee.
“Someone generous?” said Sarah. “Open-minded?”
Elliot came back from the stove with red cheeks. “I did once,” he said. “Actually, a bunch of times, in college. To buy my car. But it was for research, not babies.”
“Are you kidding?” said Sarah, almost as tickled as she was bewildered. “Was that when you were dating Keisha Delille?”
“Yes, dating,” he said. “And then dumping.”
“Keisha?” said Gretchen. “I always liked her.”
“But…why?” asked Sarah.
“Why did I dump her? She was too good for me, remember?”
They both laughed. “That’s not what I meant,” said Sarah.
“Did you look at a magazine?” asked Gretchen, with interest.
Sarah knew her mother had argued both sides of the feminist pornography debate, though more convincingly—to Gretchen’s continuing chagrin—from a pro-censorship position. There were papers in academic journals using Howe (1981) to combat Howe (1997).
Elliot just shook his head.
“Wait. Where did you do it?” Sarah almost spat out the words.
He gave her a sharp look. “Back in Massachusetts. I think it’s closed down now, though.”
“Oh thank God,” she said. She swallowed, leaned her head towards her knees. She’d gone to a place on West 59th Street, across from the park. The ginger ale in her glass tipped out onto the floor.
Gretchen began laughing until she nearly cried. It was a terrible laugh, thought Sarah, who was almost on the point of retching. “Stop it,” she said, her voice croaking.
Her mother chuckled, throwing off the quilt. “Oh, come on. Really, what would have been the odds?”
“Pretty good, I should think,” said Frank. “I just read about this in the Times. Now that more women are refusing anonymous donors, there’s a shortage.”
“Stop it, Dad,” said Elliot. He smiled at Sarah from across the room and she immediately felt calmer. “It was ages ago.”
* * *
—
Sarah was lying on her bunk, having kicked off her shoes, stretching her feet out in small circles and repeating under her breath what had become her new mantra: All that matters is that the baby is healthy. From the other room, she could hear Elliot and her parents talking about some friends of theirs from the university who were looking into buying property nearby.
“There goes your getaway,” she heard Elliot say, and Sarah snorted. She imagined bringing her child here in the years to come, initiating them into all their bizarre family rituals—secular Christmas, paddling with Plato, keeping a sharp lookout for the Larsen Cabin sign in the dark—and by doing so, tacitly endorsing them. With her baby, she would finally have to decide whether she was part of her crazy family or not.
After all these years, the people up here still took them to be Larsens. Anybody would. Sarah’s parents never bothered correcting anyone or letting them in on the joke. They were only ever up here in the summer or for the odd weeklong stretch, and they maintained their share of the road, which was all that had ever concerned the neighbours. Once, years ago, Sarah had been lying on the dock, the cabin perched high and derelict on the hill above her, and a woman had come paddling up, quiet and swift as a minnow. Shading her eyes against the sun with one hand, the woman had called out to Sarah, “You’re that Larsen girl, aren’t you? Is that where I am now? The Larsens’ place?”
And Sarah, glancing up from her book with a mute and graceless look of panic, was caught between the guilt of exposing her parents’ meaningless deception or the inanity of propping it up, which might be worse. In the end she only nodded, and the woman nodded back, dropped her hand from her face, and paddled away.
* * *
—
Gretchen was talking about her fear of the woods when Sarah returned to the living room.
“It’s a perfectly natural