“We’re getting pregnant tonight,” my wife says.
I am up on the roof where the last thing I do every Thursday evening as the sun goes down is squeeze fifty pounds of grapefruit juice over shingles and rain gutters and down the chimney. It is a ceremony. After half a day at the office crunching the numbers, still in a daze from the morning whirlwind my wife calls making love but is more like animal acrobatics that belong on the nature channel, I pick up the weekly crate of grapefruit we get wholesale from Red Dahlquist, swing by General Lee’s to listen to The Electric Prunes on the jukebox while I sip a whiskey sour, then storm through the door of the house where my wife gives me a precoital kiss that always tastes like red wine and I change clothes before heading into the garage to get the ladder, and then into the yard where I haul the crate of grapefruit onto the roof and start squeezing like a man possessed. And every Thursday as the sun goes down my wife pokes her head out of an upstairs window and reminds me: We’re getting pregnant tonight. Ten o’clock. Don’t forget.
I lie on the gablet roof of a house that has been in my family three generations and suck a grapefruit to the rind as I take in a view of the sky. I’m familiar with this picture. Soon, ten o’clock will come and go and before long the sun rises for the whole experiment to begin one more time.
My hands are cramped from squeezing too much grapefruit so I come inside to soak them in a bowl of hot water. My wife is washing dishes and she reminds me again: We’re getting pregnant tonight. Ten o’clock. Don’t forget.
“I’ve already started the grapefruit,” I say, holding up my hands as evidence.
“No, grapefruit is on Thursdays,” my wife says without looking at me. I can sense the resentment in her voice. “Today is Friday. Friday is eggs. Don’t mess this up, Jack. I swear to God, don’t mess this up for me tonight.”
I sit there confused, staring at my hands. “Wait, today is Friday?”
My wife takes advantage of this moment to call her sister into the room. Ann came to live with us once we got rid of the cat. This was near the beginning of the conception mania when my wife read an article about litter and toxoplasmosis and saw photographs of thalidomide babies with fingers that looked like chopped carrots. That was the end of the cat.
Ann is a kind of perfectly human but surrogate pet. She is seven months pregnant and round as the moon. When we first found out, my wife was ecstatic. We had Ann on twenty-four hour surveillance. I took notes: how many steps she took each day, the shape of her bowel movements, what television shows she watched, the decibel level of her laugh, and what flavor of gum she chewed. My wife was convinced Ann’s pregnancy was an information system that would unlock the secrets to her own uterus. We no longer discuss it.
The two of them empty a fat, manila envelope and consult the ovulation charts and compare them with the annotations on the fertility calendar. There are graphs of ovulation phases and grids to track daily body temperature, coital assessments, and levels of cervical fluid. Our marriage has been reduced to a series of colored grids, bubbles, and bell curves.
“You lose, Jack,” my sister-in-law smiles. “It says clearly right here: Fridays are reserved for eggs.”
I rub the sides of my head. “I thought we agreed to stop wearing underwear on Fridays?”
My wife leans back in her chair with a disgusted look on her face. This is a love trial, she calls it. Bringing life into this world is all about love, but sometimes that love has to hurt. She looks like she might cry. She lights a cigarette. As part of our agreement she gets one every day and I do not complain about the fertility exercises. Ann is not pleased and stands on the other side of the kitchen, wafting away smoke while complaining that if her baby is born sickly then it is my fault.
“If this baby pushes its way out of my vagina and they find out it’s retarded then I’m going to blame you, Jack. This baby isn’t going to live in my womb for nine months, Jack, then come out my vagina, my vagina, Jack, and be retarded because you can’t control your wife.”
She blows a kiss towards me. I pretend to dodge out of the way and gaze out the window where the kiss might have floated away. She laughs. I wink.
“She’s your sister,” I say.
“You two have no consideration for my vagina,” Ann says.
Ann likes the word vagina. She is obsessed. Her vagina must not be excluded from any civilized conversation. She uses the word freely as a noun or adjective, and even a verb. My vagina dilates ten centimeters at delivery. I vaginaed to the store. Have you ever vaginaed like that before? What a vagina day, don’t you think? What the hell are they thinking, that stupid vagina vagina? It aches. It’s sore. It burns. My vagina’s lonely and talks to me at night. My vagina doesn’t have a father. On more than one occasion I’ve glanced casually under the table during dinner to make sure she is not sneaking her vagina any scraps.
“Maybe we should mix it up tonight,” I say, turning to look at my wife and not wanting to entertain for the moment the love/hate relationship I have with Ann. “Get out of the routine? Just a glass of wine and some good music. Maybe slow dance naked in the rain. Wasn’t that in the book?”
When we got serious about making babies we went to the library and looked for a book about conception. The librarian recommended some bestsellers on pop psychology but my wife wanted to go old school. She went through special collections until finding Cunningham’s A Brief Chronicle of Human Fertilization Vol. I. He was a student of Lazzaro Spallanzani. The book was published in 1843. It is four inches thick. We read the damn thing cover to cover, every line of pseudo-scientific bullshit.
“I just want the goddamn eggs, Jack,” my wife says with a no-nonsense voice.
“Okay, so we get eggs,” I say. “How many eggs do you want?”
“However many it takes,” she says, but I know we’re not talking about the same eggs anymore.
My wife knows better than most that you cannot make a baby without first scrambling some eggs. Somewhere in that manila envelope there is no doubt mention of our forty-four visits with eleven different gynecologists in three different states, to say nothing of the six meetings with an unlicensed pregnancy specialist and the fourteen visits to the fertility clinic, including the time we had a coital performance review by a three-panel medical board. There is certainly a file on her four miscarriages and the ill-effects of a sewn cervix. We are well acquainted with week nine during pregnancy because that is when the human heart finishes dividing and our babies have never made it past week nine because their hearts have too many holes. It’s a family defect. Her gynecologist insists the data on her ovaries is positive. Her tubes are twisted the right way. Her womb has an exceptional twenty-eight degree tilt. My internist insists there is no such thing as an overly erect penis and some of my sperm might have three heads and no tails, but so does any man who listens to The Electric Prunes. My wife refuses drug therapies and will not grow a child in a petri dish. She insists we are not Dr. Frankenstein. I’m beginning to believe we are but have just learned to call ourselves by another name.
One day I came home for the usual 12:05 coital assessment and found my wife watching the home shopping network. There was a man, a genuine idiot, trying to sell mud from the Holy Land. He said his life changed years ago during a trip to Jerusalem when he had tried to drown himself. This was when he had no wife, no job, no hair, and suffered from constant urinary distress. So he rowed himself out into the middle of the Dead Sea and did his best Jesus impersonation. He made it three steps on the water before losing his balance.
“Best bath I ever took,” he told us.
He had not bathed in six years. The host raved about the smell of the mud and salt in his hair. He had impregnated three different women and they all lived together on a ranch in southern Utah. Later, we read his story in the North Star Gazette.
“If you want to reach the impossible you have to attempt the absurd,” he told the television camera.
The man was a fool, but foolishness is the salt that flavors a marriage.
Since then I have been delivered into mad bouts of pregnancy. On Mondays we take raw honey and aloe vera juice enemas. Tuesdays we eat an all-yogurt diet. Wednesdays we shampoo all our body hair with mail-order breast milk so our reproductive organs feel like they are in a safe environment. On Thursday I sprinkle grapefruit juice over the house to drive out unclean spirits. Fridays are a variety of eggs, minus the yolks which are bad luck. On Saturdays we wash the linens with coyote urine which helps increase sperm count. On Sundays we rest as the good Lord intended.
Not everything works. Lifting your legs like an acrobat after coital assessment is useless because sperm do not obey conventional laws of gravity. We’ve eaten carrots shaped like uncircumcised penises. My wife held her breath for two minutes after a coital assessment. I painted fertility symbols on my chest with fish guts. I howled at the sky and jumped up and down trying to alter the gravitational pull of the moon hoping it would tilt my wife’s uterus back into place. We mastered the Weeping Willow position. We even applied a homemade balm from equal parts turmeric and garlic. At first we thought we were doing it wrong because nothing was happening and the book promised I would feel something. So, we sautéed the garlic and turmeric and mashed it into a fine paste, then my wife rubbed it all up and down the shaft. I felt it then. I wouldn’t recommend it. Especially because I didn’t get a blowjob for a month.
We are still awaiting our answer from the gods. Any gods are welcome.
The grocery store is full of eggs. It’s almost midnight. My wife was expecting me home hours ago but I kept driving down one road until I came to another and then followed the streets in an endless loop. All the streets looked like vaginas to me and all the lampposts like penises. I can’t understand why we build our cities to look like reproductive organs, unless it means it is the great illness of our time. Even the stars are conspiring against me tonight and look like a thousand ova floating past each other in elliptical orbits, so close but always out of reach. That’s all it takes, according to the book. One touch from a single sperm and a crust forms around the ovum to prevent a double fertilization. The sperm slips inside and the cellular bomb goes off. My wife and I have spent the last three years of our lives so close to each other her skin feels like my skin and there is barely room to breathe but our molecules have no chemistry.
Inside the store there are plenty of options for eggs. White or brown. Farm-raised or hormone free. There are jumbo, extra-large, large, even peewee-sized eggs. Want variety? Try eggs from chickens, quail, snake, duck, goose, pheasant, even emu. This doesn’t begin to cover how to cook them: fried, poached, scrambled, boiled, pickled, deviled—the possibilities are endless.
There is a woman at the other end of the refrigerated aisle looking for eggs. She opens and closes the cartons inspecting them. Sitting in her cart is a young boy in pajamas. The kid can’t be much older than two. He looks miserable, like he cannot believe he’s been taken out of his crib for this nonsense.
“Shouldn’t that baby be asleep?”
The mother gives me a nasty look and I realize I’ve been speaking out loud without knowing it. “You wouldn’t understand,” the mother says, continuing her search for the holy grail of eggs. “You must not be a parent.”
I’m a patient man. Any husband trying to impregnate his wife must be. But I hate this woman. Not because she deserves it, but because she can no longer conceive of a time without her child. Her existence is absolute because she exists in relation to another. She is a mother. That leaves an indelible scar all the way down onto the genetic code. Me? My mother died ten years ago. I never knew my father. Those wounds have healed. I am nobody’s son. The closest thing I’ve fathered is a fetus the size of a grape with a heart full of holes.
I drop one of the eggs on the floor. It shatters. The boy giggles.
I crack another two dozen, quickly, until there is a nice thick layer of yolk. The shells crunch under my feet as I do a little dance. The mother takes a step toward me. I don’t hesitate. I wind up like Sandy-fucking-Koufax and hurl that goddamn egg right for her oversized noggin. It sails right past her and smashes into the kid’s face. I hear the kid scream, but everything is happening in slow motion so I watch the egg explode—the shell and yolk and whites suspended in the air.
The mother keeps screaming and I can’t understand why until I realize it’s not because I threw the egg. She’s not screaming at me. She’s screaming because that was no normal egg. A puddle of yolk expands on the floor. At first it was just a little trickle but now it flows down the aisle. The more it travels the faster it expands.
People run out of the store. They shut the doors and windows behind them trying to keep the yolk contained. I’m trapped. The yolk is rising. I know I am not dreaming because only the ridiculous can feel this real.
In a matter of minutes the entire store is a pool of yolk and I’m struggling to keep afloat. Then I stop trying to resist. I go limp. I remove my clothes. I sink inside the yolk. It fills my ears and the insides of my nose. I breathe it. It’s warm. Then I understand what Cunningham wrote in his Chronicle of Human Fertilization: “The life of a mammalian sperm is a dull, pointless exercise whose singular outcome is death. Even the sperm that fertilizes commits a kind of suicide once inside the ovum. To be a sperm is not about finding existential closure but learning to ride the ejaculatory wave.”
Outside the store people have come close to the windows to watch me swim. I alternate between butterfly and the breast strokes. I must look something like a bizarre merman in a primal, Freudian scene. The yolk fills to the ceiling and the pressure intensifies. My ears ring, so deep it upsets the beating of my heart. The glass windows crack and eventually shatter. The yolk spills like a tidal wave into the street and I glide on the waves, lunging in a sea of fertile yellow.
I open the door to the house with a carton of eggs and a pink citation slip from the sheriff who was kind enough to drive me home. There is a crusty glaze of dried yolk on my hair and skin.
Ann pretends to be asleep on the sofa. I pull the blanket over her and kiss her forehead. My hand drifts down her neck until it settles on her belly that is round like the moon. It would be so much easier if she had actually swallowed the moon. I feel the baby turning. He must be like his father, the prisoner of some strange aquatic acrobatics. Ann looks at me with a half-smile, her hand over mine pressing down and the baby’s hand on the inside pressing out, and for a moment I feel like the equals sign in a balanced chemical equation.
Before I can get under the blanket with her Ann pushes me away gently.
“Not tonight,” she says. “She needs you. Go to her.”
My wife waits for me under the sheets. She works on her breathing rhythms. The lights are off. If we see each other the whole spell might be broken.
In the bathroom I crack the remaining eggs into the sink, careful to separate the yolks from the whites. Dabbing a finger, I draw fertility symbols over my chest. I take a handful of kosher salt and sprinkle that over my skin and in my hair until it forms a nice crust. I look ridiculous. Nobody believes this is the way their life will turn out. This isn’t in the handbook. Nobody tells you you’ll be a thirty-something standing in front of a mirror bathed in yolk and crusted in sea salt looking like a grotesque spermatozoon. Nobody tells you how to hug a naked wife who can’t get pregnant. Nobody tells you how to keep a marriage going when you’re both empty vessels with so much dead-end love. Nobody tells you how to come to terms with being what you are. Nobody changes. Nobody evolves. We are tiny little molecules swimming in a vast cosmos, bumping into each other, shedding energy, gaining entropy, trying to replicate our own misfortune. From blastocyst to the grave this is what we are. We are what we are.
But for now I forget all that. I do my stretches. I stretch my arms and legs far apart until I look like an X or a man condemned to a medieval torture wheel. I do this more than a dozen times. My wife read in one of the books that sperm assume the shape of their hosts and since she wants a girl whose hair she can braid I had better adjust my posture into an X as often as possible because she does not want little boys that look like me.
When I’m ready I go to her. I curl into her body, the two of us assuming the cross-eyed Margaret position. When I open my mouth to tell her what I’ve done, to confess my betrayals, she fills it with kisses. She whispers in my ear the word for egg in fifteen different languages. I do not speak. I am an enormous spermatozoon and I have one objective for the next thirty minutes: self-annihilation. She attacks me with more kisses. My arms go numb. My legs are twisted around her and dangle off the side of the bed like the tail of some hideous creature. She licks the dried egg off my body. The salt flakes away. With each kiss I can feel myself getting heavier, my head bobbing side to side, and then it is as if I am being swallowed and falling down a long tunnel, and I cannot breathe—like there is a yolk wedged deep in the gallows of our throat.