What Alice Forgot

I will admit, however, that he did make a point of asking me whether Alice liked the talcum powder.

Elisabeth’s Homework for Dr. Hodges A funny thing happened when I got home from lunch with the Infertiles. Not exactly ha-ha funny. Just stupid ironic funny.

Driving home after lunch, I kept thinking about “Giving Up.” The idea grew stronger and stronger in my head. It suddenly seems quite obvious to me. I can’t go through another miscarriage. I can’t. The thought of it happening again gives me the feeling of a block of concrete dropping on my chest. I have had enough. I didn’t know I’d had enough, but it turns out I have.

We used to keep setting those deadlines. No more after my fortieth birthday. No more after Christmas. But then each time we’d think, well, but what else is there to do? We’d traveled, we’d been to lots of parties, lots of movies and concerts, we’d slept in. We’d done all those things that people with children seem to miss so passionately. We didn’t want those things anymore. We wanted a baby.

I remember thinking about how mothers were prepared to run into burning buildings to save their children’s lives. I thought I should be able to go through a bit more suffering, a bit more inconvenience to give my children life. It made me feel noble. But now I realize I’m a crazy woman running into a burning house for children who don’t exist. My children were never going to exist. They were always in my mind. That’s what’s so embarrassing about all this. Each time I sobbed for a lost baby, it was like sobbing over the end of a relationship when I’d never even gone out with the guy. My babies weren’t babies. They were just microscopic clusters of cells that weren’t ever going to be anything else. They were just my own desperate hopes. Dream babies.

And people have to give up on dreams. Aspiring ballet dancers have to accept that their bodies aren’t right for ballet. Nobody even feels that sorry for them. Oh, well, think of another job. My body isn’t right for babies. Bad luck.

At the pedestrian crossing I saw a pregnant woman, a woman pushing a pram, a woman holding a child’s hand. And I actually felt nothing, Dr. Hodges. Nothing! That’s a big thing for an Infertile—to see a pregnant woman and feel nothing. No knifein-the-stomach feeling of bitterness. No ugly envy twisting my mouth.

So here’s the funny thing.

I got home, and for once, Ben wasn’t in the garage working on his car. He was sitting at the kitchen table with paperwork spread out all around him, and I noticed his eyes were a bit red and puffy.

He said, “I’ve been thinking.”

I told him so had I, but he could go first.

He said he’d been thinking about what Alice had said last week and he’d decided she was one hundred percent right.

Oh, Alice.

Alice sat on the couch and watched Dominick using a helium tank to blow up blue and silver balloons. He and Jasper had finally got sick of breathing in the helium and talking in chipmunk voices. Jasper had laughed so hard at his dad squeakily singing “Over the Rainbow” that Alice had worried he might stop breathing. Now he was outside in the backyard, using a remote control to expertly operate a miniature helicopter.

“He’s very cute,” said Alice, watching him. She’d gathered that Jasper was in the same class as Olivia. Her daughter. The one with the fat blond pigtails.

“When he’s not being a psychotic monster,” said Dominick.

Alice laughed. Perhaps too much. She didn’t really get parent humor. Maybe he really was a psychotic monster and that wasn’t funny.

“So,” she said. “How long have you and I been, ummm, seeing each other for?”

Dominick glanced quickly at her and away again. He tied the end of the balloon and watched it float straight up to the ceiling with the others.

Without looking at her, he said, “About a month.”

Alice had told Dominick that the doctors had said her memory loss was only temporary. He looked terrified and seemed to be talking to her gently and carefully, as if she had a mild intellectual disability. Unless that was the way he always talked to her, of course.

“And it’s, ah, going well?” asked Alice recklessly. It was bizarre. Had she kissed him? Slept with him? He was very tall. Not unattractive. Just a stranger. She felt both repelled and mildly titillated by the idea. It reminded her of gurgly, giggly teenage conversations. Oh my God, imagine having sex with him.

“Yup,” said Dominick. He was doing something funny and nervous with his mouth. He was one of those awkward, geeky types.

He picked up another balloon and hooked it over the nozzle of the helium tank. He looked at her properly, full in the face, and said, almost sternly, “Well, I think so, anyway.” Actually, he was not unattractive.

“Oh.” Alice felt flustered and exposed. “Well, good. I guess.”

She longed for Nick to be sitting next to her. His hand warm on her leg. Claiming her. So she could enjoy talking, maybe even flirting, with this perfectly nice man in an appropriate, safe way.

“You seem different,” said Dominick.

“In what way?”

“I don’t know how to explain it.”

He didn’t say anything else. Apparently he wasn’t a talker, like Nick. She wondered what she saw in him. Did she even like him that much? He seemed sort of dull.

“What do you do for a living?” she asked. The standard dating question. Trying to unfairly slot him into a personality type.

“I’m an accountant,” he said.

Fabulous. “Oh, right.”

He grinned and said, “Just testing to see if you really had lost your memory. I’m a grocer. A fruit and veg man.”

“Really?” She was imagining free mangoes and pineapples.

“Nah!”

Oh, God, this man was a nerd.

“I’m a school principal.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I’m being serious now. I’m principal at the school.”

“What school?”

“Where your kids go. That’s how we met.”

The school principal. Straight to the principal’s office!

“So you’ll be there tonight? At this party?”

“Yes. I’m sort of wearing two hats, because Jasper is in kindergarten, and this party is for parents of kindergarten kids. So I’ll be . . .”

He had a habit of not completely finishing his sentences. His voice just drifted away, as if he thought it was so obvious how the sentence finished there was no point saying it out loud.