What Alice Forgot

Do you like cars, Dr. Hodges? You seem more like an art galleries and opera sort of guy. I see you have a photo of your wife and two small children on your desk. I secretly look at this photo every session when you’re writing out my receipt. I bet your wife had no trouble getting pregnant at all, did she? Do you ever thank your lucky stars you didn’t end up with a reproductively challenged wife like me? Do you give that photo an affectionate look as I walk out of the room and think, Thank God my wife is a good breeder? Don’t worry if you do. I’m sure it’s innate, it’s just biology, for a man to want a woman who can give him children. I raised this with Ben once. I said he must secretly resent me and I understood that. He got so angry. The angriest I’ve seen him. “Never say that again,” he said. But I bet that’s why he got so angry, because he knew it was true.

Before I met Ben, I used to go for witty successful types. I’d never been out with a man before who owned a toolbox. A proper big dirty well-used toolbox full of, you know, screwdrivers and stuff. It’s embarrassing how aroused I became when I first saw Ben selecting a chunky oily wrench from that toolbox. My dad had a toolbox. So maybe I’d been subconsciously waiting for a man with a toolbox. I bet you don’t have a toolbox, do you, Dr. Hodges? No. I didn’t think so.

I used to think that one of my main prerequisites for a man was that he be good at dinner parties. Like Alice’s Nick. But Ben is hopeless at dinner parties. He always seems too big for his chair. He gets this trapped expression. It’s like I’ve brought along a big tame chimp. Sometimes he’s OK if he happens to find another man (or woman—he’s no chauvinist) who can talk about cars, but mostly he’s miserable, and he breathes out gustily when we get in the car, as if he’s been let out of jail.

It’s funny. I had all those years of being driven mad by Mum and Alice and their fear of social events. “Oh, no!” they’d say tragically, and I would think someone had died, and it would turn out they’d been invited to some party or lunch where they’d only know one person, and then there would be all the strategizing about how to get out of it, and the drama of it all and the sympathy they’d pour on each other. “Oh, you poor thing! That would be awful! You absolutely must not go.” I couldn’t stand it, and yet I ended up marrying a man who also thinks socializing is something that’s meant to be endured. Not that he’s shy like they were. He doesn’t get butterflies in his stomach or agonize over what people think of him. Actually I don’t think he has any self-consciousness whatsoever. He is a man without vanity. He’s just not a talker. He has no small talk ability whatsoever. (Whereas Mum and Alice, of course, were talkers, and they were actually interested in meeting other people. In reality they were more social than me. But their shyness stopped them from being the outgoing people they actually were. They were like athletes trapped in wheelchairs.)

As it turns out, Ben and I don’t really go to many dinner parties anymore. I can’t stand them. I’ve lost my ability to chat, too. I listen to people talk about their interesting, full lives. They’re training for marathons, they’re learning Japanese, they’re taking the kids camping and renovating the bathroom. I had a life like that once, too. I was interesting and active and informed. But now my life is three things: work, television, IVF. I no longer have anecdotes. People say, “What have you been up to, Elisabeth?” and I have to stop myself from treating them to a complete medical update. I understand now why very sick people and the elderly have such a compulsion to tell you everything about their health. My infertility fills every corner of my mind.

How things have changed. Now I’m the one groaning when I hear someone’s cheerful voice on the phone asking me if I’m free next Saturday, while Alice is hosting kindergarten cocktail parties and Mum is salsa-dancing three nights a week.

Alice can’t believe she’s got three children. I wouldn’t be able to believe I had none. I never expected to have trouble getting pregnant. Of course, no one does. It hardly makes me unique. It’s just that I did expect so many other different medical problems. Our dad died of a heart attack, so I’ve always been frightened by the slightest case of heartburn. I’ve had two grandparents on different sides of the family die of cancer, so I’ve been permanently on standby, waiting for the cancer cells to strike. For a long time I was terrified I was about to be struck down by motor neuron disease for no other reason than the fact that I’d read a very moving article about a man who had it. He first noticed he had a problem when his feet started hurting on the golf course. Whenever I’d feel a twinge in my foot, I’d think, OK, here we go. I told Alice about the article and she started to worry about it, too. We’d take off our high heels and massage our sore feet and discuss how we’d cope with getting around in wheelchairs, while Nick rolled his eyes and said, “Are you two for real?”

Alice is the other reason I didn’t expect infertility. We’ve always been so similar health-wise. We both get a dry, irritating cough every winter that takes exactly one month to go away. We have weak knees, bad eyesight, a slight dairy intolerance, and excellent teeth. When she had no problem getting pregnant, I thought that meant it would be the rule for me, too.

So it’s Alice’s fault that I never invested the appropriate time worrying about infertility. I never insured against it by worrying about it. I won’t make that mistake again. Now every day I remember to worry that Ben will die in a car accident on his way to work. I make sure I worry at regular intervals about Alice’s children—ticking off every terrible childhood disease: meningitis, leukemia. Before I go to sleep at night I worry that someone I love will die in the night. Every morning I worry that somebody I know will be killed in a terrorist attack that day. That means the terrorists have won, Ben tells me. He doesn’t understand that I’m fighting off the terrorists by worrying about them. It’s my own personal War on Terror.

That was a tiny joke, Dr. Hodges. Sometimes you don’t seem to get my jokes. I don’t know why I want you to laugh so badly. Ben finds me funny. He has this sudden bellow of appreciative laughter. He did, anyway—when I wasn’t an obsessive bore with only one topic of conversation.

I guess it might be sensible to cover this “worrying” issue at one of our sessions because it’s obviously just stupid superstition, and childish, too—as if I’m the center of the universe and what I think actually makes a difference. But I don’t know, I can already guess all the sensible things you’d say, the perceptive questions you’d ask, trying to gently lead me to my own personal “Eureka!” moment. It all seems sort of pointless and dull. I’m not going to stop worrying. I like worrying. I come from a long line of worriers. It’s in my blood.