"Hair on my palms, you mean?"
"Can it do that?" he blinked.
"Can what do that?" Even reaching the conclusion that we didn't get each other was endlessly difficult.
He leaned toward me confidentially. "Safeguarding." I stared, unable to crack the euphemism. "Here we've been happily tilling the fields for weeks, with nary a mention of prevention. That leaves, to my knowledge, only two possible methods by which you___"
His speech ground to a halt. He locked eyes and stuttered, "Uh-oh."
I laughed a monosyllable. "Idiot."
"I suppose I should have asked beforehand, huh?" He was abashed only a second. "Which is it then? I don't want you using anything that's going to give you___"
"Don't worry."
"What do you mean, don't worry? I'm worrying."
"We don't have to worry about pregnancy. Or any birth-control side effects." We dressed slowly. I stood looking outside, wishing for all the world that we could go for a walk.
After a respectable pause for a man, Todd broke into Cockney constable. "What's all this then?"
I faced him, as self-possessed as a health professional. "I had a ligation."
"You what?" Dead silence. "You're not even thirty."
"Pretty soon," I said, suddenly too girlish.
We lay back on the bed, fully clothed. He put tentative fingers through my hair. "Mind if I ask…?" I waited placidly, relaxed, until he put it in so many words. "What prompted you… or did you need to?"
"No. Tuckwell and I decided that, with our lives, our careers, we would never do well with babies."
"But I didn't think___Did you expect…? Did you think you would live with him forever?"
I snorted — a sharp exhalation that expanded my lungs as it emptied them. "Evidently I must have, on our good days."
"Jesus. One of you must have been pretty certain. I mean, 'permanent' means—"
I discarded the argument that the operation could conceivably be reversed. The odds against that loophole made it irrelevant. Permanent meant permanent. "He had nothing to do with it, really." I was sorry I'd mentioned Keith at all, ashamed to have tried to palm off on him an interest in the decision. "It was all me. The idea of passing on accumulated adult knowledge to a helpless infant — how to expectorate phlegm and not swallow it, how to tell the difference between 'quarter to' and 'quarter after,' how to stay off the stove, how to tell when people were trying to hurt them — was too much. I couldn't see myself selecting all those clothes and birthday presents year after year, keeping them from inserting screwdrivers in electrical outlets, nursing them through the destruction of favorite toys."
"Jan. No. You're joking." Franklin was pale, shaking. "Motherhood is tough, so you tied your tubes!"
I could have crushed him with one word. It would never be his pregnancy. He wasn't even responsible enough to have thought of prevention. The male model of parenthood: everything between ejaculation and tossing the football with the twelve-year-old is trivial. The matter didn't concern him in the least. The fight had begun, after all, with his wanting to avoid contributing to any child of mine. I had made an irreversible decision, a choice self-evident at the time, one that would have been made for me anyway in a few more years. I did not care to reproduce, and although I was still relatively young, removing that possibility meant clearing the anxiety from my remaining sexual life.
"How hard would it have been to leave the door open…? Bad metaphor. Sorry." Todd smiled queasily, about to be sick. "I mean: as negative life insurance, the pill would have been cheap at the price. Suffer the less radical premiums for a couple years, against the outside payoff if you change your mind. Or partner," he added sadly, touching me on a flank already changed to terra-cotta.
I shook my head. Having come this far, all I could do was explain the variable that had swung the calculation. I told him why it was not a question of my mind or situation changing. A few years before, I'd found on the Question Board a request for the latest scientific line on mongolism. My first response was mild irritation; any modestly educated adult ought to have been able to find a satisfactory answer within minutes. I started at the obvious place, followed the well-marked trail through reliable sources, and delivered the broadly established explanation: Down's syndrome is the result of trisomy — a third chromosome 21. Airtight, complete, exact. I couldn't imagine improving upon it.
But the day after I posted this answer, the board carried a follow-up: What causes trisomy? I felt ashamed at not answering the first question at all. I went back to the sources, beginning to appreciate the issue, how much subtlety the research in fact required. The immediate mechanism was undoubtedly genetic. But nature and nurture were not entirely distinct. That extra chromosome, research suggested, may in turn be the result of an older ovary in which chromosome 21 fails to separate in egg formation. I attached a rider to the first explanation: chromosomal nondisjunction, while not entirely understood, increased in frequency in proportion to the mother's age.
Two days later, a third question: How old is an at-risk mother? "I was exasperated," I told Todd, crawling back under the weight of his arms. "Someone was putting me through the hoops. You know: like a child, repeating 'why?' until the word evaporates?" Todd shook his head, made me continue.
The day after the third question, before I could form a definitive response, a woman materialized at the Reference Desk asking if I was J. O'D. She reached down into a stroller and lifted an infant for me to inspect. The child had the unmistakable spatulate features of deformity. She said she was twenty-three.
"I could still see, for probably the last week, a faint profile of normal boy already being drowned out by the crosstalk of that extra twenty-first chromosome. I finally knew what she was asking. Was it her fault? I asked what her doctors had told her. Her answer destroyed me: 'They're less helpful than you.' I spent the rest of the afternoon with the two of them. I showed her how to follow the citations, and we pushed them hard. At the end, we discovered two distinct etiologies. The first was sporadic, without inheritance patterns, some slow, possibly viral cause. The second, the minority of cases, was a permanent chromosomal attachment in the mother, a translocation trisomy, a fluke of a fluke that struck mothers of all ages equally.
"After some hours, I apologized: the library would have to be a lot more current and specialized, I myself would have to have a medical degree to move her any closer. But by then she was almost grateful, having learned along the way about cretinism, microcephalia, PKU, anencephaly, spina bifida. Oh, Jesus! The whole, grisly catalog."
In the middle of the list I broke down, scaring Todd witless. He sat by helplessly, uncertain whether to comfort or cower in a corner. I tried to compose myself, aggravating the shakes. My voice was still wild when I spoke again. "The girl thanked me for the one promising bit anyone had thrown her since her boy's birth.
The books said that an extra twenty-first often leaves mongols with the sweetest dispositions."
Todd did not need the rest spelled out. The endless catalog of things that can go wrong — so comforting to this woman, whose punishment began to look like commutation — had killed me. I felt a dread I previously couldn't have imagined. Because of a lucky statistical aberration, because I and everyone close to me had been born healthy, I had assumed that childbearing was a perfected process with a few tragic accidents impinging on the periphery. I now saw that the error-free lived on a tiny, blessed island of self-delusion. I could hear my own mutations accumulating; it was either hurry into a baby-making I was not ready for, or wait, Russian roulette, for my own blueprint to betray me.