Ms. Conception

Shortly after my return from Alaska, The Bulletin appeared in my mailbox, unsolicited. I glanced through it as I walked up the steps to my flat. Then I saw the headline on page three.

The universe had heard my discussions with Steve and my thoughts in Alaska — just as I always imagined it could when I was a child. What the universe then sent me was an advertisement. The universe (if not the subscriptions department of the Bulletin) provided me with a clear next step that both thrilled and terrified me. Getting pregnant inadvertently was one screwy thing. I had rolled those dice with Steve and failed. Making it happen was another.

I wanted to act. Of course I was afraid to act. Even the simple task of calling to find out more information on what I read in the paper, seemed too half-hearted and at the same time, like too much of a risk.

“I already know what I want to do. I’m just seeking others who want to do the same thing. I’m looking for a network and resources, “ I said on the phone, sounding surprisingly confident and certain. “Can you tell more about what I saw in the paper?” I asked.

“I’m a social worker,” the woman on the other end of the line said. “At 40 I decided I wanted to have a child. I was going to try having it on my own. I got pregnant, fell in love and married, as well as adopted a second child, roughly in that order. So I’ve faced single motherhood, insemination, infertility and adoption. I organized this group for women facing any and all.”

“Sign me up,” I said.

Posted by Linda D. at 6:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Steve took off his shirt and his pants. He was tall and thin and tan, full of that same naked bravado I had seen in the hot tub only a week before. He was wearing a cross on a chain.

“You’re a closet Valentino, despite your cool Nordic looks,” I said, touching the cross. The right side of his mouth curled up. Then his face became serious again.

He took off the pink thermal shirt I was wearing. I didn’t resist. After all, it was his. Then he moved me back onto the bed. I put the exposed and dangling cross in my mouth and kept it there as he was leaning over me, kissing me. He was like a slippery elegant fish, an eel, with a penis as long slender and oddly bent as his conservative views. Oddly bent in a way that seemed to touch something inside of me perfectly. I could not account for it. Was it Alaska? Was it just chance, that out of all the people to end up in a kayak with, I ended up with one who seemed to know exactly what to do? And the odd curve of him knew it over and again, for as long as we remained together in that part of the world. I’ll never know exactly what brought me to that prone position and that decision , if it was the rushing streams, the dense lush foliage, the spawning salmon, or just that we were total and absolute strangers in a far away land. I didn’t think we agreed on anything. But we did.

Posted by Linda D. at 1:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One popular topic of conversation for me was asking him the same thing over and over again. “What are you doing here? Why have you stayed?” I liked to needle him, to constantly challenge him. “I do not understand how you reconcile this sojourn with me and your fundamental beliefs,” I said, sitting against him on the banquette in the hotel’s Victorian dining room.
“I’m in the throws of a moral struggle,” he told me seriously.

“A moral struggle?”

“You don’t understand? I am a very spiritual person,” he said to me. “I’m testing myself.”

That night he flunked the test.

Steve walked into my little room unannounced. He didn’t bother to knock. The room had only one window facing onto a wall, like a New York hotel room. The bathroom was down the hall. In the same way that spring and summer were compressed up there in Alaska, in this tiny hotel room, now so were we.

He sat down on a chair opposite the opaque glass door. Here was a man who didn’t believe in birth control sitting in my room in the middle of a primordial rainforest. I was starting to wonder if God was testing me.

“I’d like to stay,” he said.

“It’s the salmon.”

“What?”

“The salmon. The spawning salmon.”

“What?”

“What if I get pregnant?”

“I would like to have as many children as possible,” Steve said.

“What about your wife?”

“The idea of seeing the variety of children with different women is intriguing.”

” You’d want to know?”

“No.”

“But you would know. I’d tell you. Would you ask me to get an abortion?”

“No.”

“Then what are you doing here?” I shouted. “If I am ever going to have a kid, I have to start now. You can’t trust me out here with all the salmon running upstream.”

I had given him fair warning.

“There is only one problem. The kid needs a dad,” Steve said, stroking my hair.

“There’s no time for a dad.”

“Don’t have a kid on your own,” he said, grabbing my chin, looking at me.

“Why not? You are the one who says how wonderful, how important it is.”

“A kid needs a father.”

“The world reproduces. Every living thing.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t believe in birth control? Is that correct?”

“True.”

“You don’t agree with abortion?”

“True.”

“And you have left your room to come here and say you want to stay with me?”

“Yes.”

“But you tell me that as a grown woman with some resources and lots of intelligence, that I am not allowed?”

“A kid needs a father.”

He paused and looked at me, touching me, fingering the LL Bean pink long underwear shirt of his that I was wearing. He had already given me that much to take home.

“By travelling with you, I’ve opened the door,” he said. “I never expected to care for you this much. When I opened the door, I thought it would not make a difference. But it does. I feel very torn.“

I picked up my bear bell from the night table and gave it a shake. It tinkled, like a pint-sized church steeple, the kind whose peel marks time and announces weddings, marks deaths and some times even births.

“A small souvenir of Alaska,” I said, handing it over.

He didn’t blink.

“I ‘ll let you know if there will be any others,” I said.

“You will need this after I’m gone,” he said, shaking the bell.

“I have no intention of coming between a mama bear and a cub,” I said.

“The fact is,” said Steve, putting his arms around me, and pulling me towards him, “Neither do I.”

Posted by Linda D. at 6:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)