FROM

KINSHIP THEORY

 

 

Maggie  Crown was pregnant with her daughter's baby, and she was alone. Her imagination insisted on veering toward peril during the long pacing minutes and the solitary wait in the chill of an ultrasound examination room. She was a scientist, and so at first her mind presented her with clinically detailed pictures of a baby with missing limbs, its organs gnarled as walnuts, its skull filled with dishwater. She was a mother as well though, and next saw a narrow-eyed fetus (vaguely resembling her ex-husband) hugging his knees and smirking at her. But women who are going to have babies always feel a little undone by fear; she wasn't alone in envisioning the worst. Awake, they dream of their children born with the ears and tails of dogs, of their mothers, of their past, of disappointing lovers, of the things in life that break your heart.

Nervous sweat iced Maggie's face and her nausea rose so fast she thought she might be sick in the metal sink. Why wasn't Dale there with her now? She had counted on her daughter's company and calm to assure her that everything would be fine, that the day would reveal something wonderful. But Dale had said on the phone the night before that she wouldn't be able to pick her mother up, they would have to meet at the appointment instead - and now, oddly, she was late. The music in Dale's apartment had been playing too loudly when they talked, so that her voice had only the thinnest edge of intention.

To distract herself, Maggie moved through the room and opened drawers jumbled with tubes of jellies, flat-ended wooden prodders, scrapers, a hundred sharp implements. Rubber gloves in a cardboard box slithered and sighed when she poked at them. On the counter, diaphragms were lined up like dishes in a doll-house plate rack. Women came in different sizes, like men, but she found it funny that no one ever talked about this or what it might imply. She'd have to bring it up with Doris. Her closest friend might be embarrassed at first in her vaguely prissy way, but would be eager enough to get into it later. Through the thin, female-colored walls, Maggie heard the murmur of professionally pleasant voices and the amplified sound of a fetal heart beating.

Soon, a hazy picture of the baby would appear on the screen of the ultrasound machine; but such technology, she knew from years of her own work in the eye lab, was cold, heartless in its goals, unconcerned with outcomes. In the end, it would send people back to Ouija boards, to hand-holding, and silent prayers at night. She distrusted it not only for what it might reveal later, but more for what it could never divine and make sense of, that she was forty-eight, and that this baby she was growing was not hers at all - not genetically, biologically, or legally - but Dale's. The list flowed through her mind in a well-practiced, rational way. The machine might detect fetal abnormalities or not, but it could never know that this baby was the product of a request, a promise between mother and daughter, a cautious pact between warm body and cool technology, the emotional, the bloodless, the oldest and the newest forces in the world in edgy, untested alliance. It could not know this baby was for her to love, but not to keep.

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