“That must be pretty hard to take.”
Alicia shrugged. “We avoid each other. I was closer to my dad. I know he would’ve gotten off on being a grandfather, that was something he always wanted. I think part of Mom’s problem is her trying to deny a bit of latent DC voltage of her own.”
“So you’re facing this all by yourself.”
She shrugged again. “I’m doing OK.”
“Having and raising a child all by yourself doesn’t frighten you?”
She stared at her hands. Her nails were bitten to the quick. “Maybe a little. But I want this baby. I think I’ll make a good mother—I sure as hell intend to try. I have a good job, and my boss is totally supportive. It’s just—” She shook her head and spread her hands in a broad, all-inclusive gesture.
“You mean this place? This procedure?”
Alicia sighed. “You got it.”
“You really shouldn’t be. This is like, well…” A puckish grin appeared. “This is like the bum-in period they put computers through before shipping them. If there is any problem they find it and fix it now, before it leaves the old baby factory.”
Alicia chuckled, tickled by that way of looking at it. “Bum-in. I like that.”
The other woman laughed. “See? Nothing to get upset about.”
Alicia’s pleasure faded, her smile with it. “I wish it were that simple. I knew this was coming, but I kept myself from thinking about it. Things a couple friends said only made me avoid it all the more. But going through the amnio kind of made it impossible to do that any longer.”
She checked her watch. “In just a few minutes the doctor is going to call me in, give me the results of the genescan, and I’m going to have to— to—” She shook her head, her tongue locking up as she tried to say it.
“To what?”
She forced it out in a harsh, hopeless voice. “To decide what to tell the doctor if she tells me the tests turned up the gay gene.”
Understanding flashed in the other woman’s eyes. She started to say something, stopped herself. Instead she put down her needlework, reached out and covered Alicia’s clenched hands with her own.
At fourteen she’d thought she would rather die than live with the urges and impulses blossoming inside her rapidly changing body. At fifteen she’d begun trying to forcibly change by dating boys and even letting them have sex with her. It was awful, and repetition only made it worse. Drinking had helped for a while, numbing the disgust with herself, what she was doing, and what she wanted to do instead. But in the end it had led her to spending the night of her seventeenth birthday in the hospital having a quart of cheap tequila pumped out of her stomach.
Then the following summer she had met Carrie, sweetly Men in love, and been loved back. It was then that she began to repair her heart, and come to terms with her own sexuality.
By the time she was in college she knew exactly what she was, and had grown comfortable with it. Her dad knew, and accepted it and her without reservation. Her mom was another story. She refused to accept it, and after her dad died she veered off into uncompromising righteous rejection.
Even so, the nineties weren’t that bad a time to be a gay woman. For a while there it had been almost chic, what with k.d. and Melissa and Martina and other such popular icons. The Millennium came and went with a brief fuss and little change. Most people knew you weren’t some sort of perverse monster who preyed on little girls. Most people had gotten past the point where lesbian conjured up an image of some man-hating, combat-booted, cigar-chomping, swaggering bull dyke with a flattop and a physique like a pro wrestler, and gay didn’t automatically kick off a knee-jerk revulsion.
Most.
Alicia gazed off toward the reception area where soon a nurse would appear and call her name. Once again she protectively cradled her belly.
“There’s nothing wrong with being gay,” she said with a quiet certainty it had taken years to gain.
“Nothing at all,” the woman agreed.
“If I hadn’t come to terms with myself I probably would have killed myself drinking.”
“One of my friends went through something like that himself.”
“But what about my baby?” She hung her head, feeling like there was a million pound weight on her back.
“I think about how my mom acts, and what it’s like to be on the receiving end of her attitude. I think about how great my love life has been.”
“You don’t have to be gay to have your partner bail out when a baby enters the picture. Women always have gotten left holding the bag, and I guess they always will.”
“I know that. Then I think about Dave, the man who helped make this possible. Hell, I don’t even mind calling him the father.”
“Is he causing problems?”
“Not like that. It’s just…”
She sighed, hunching her shoulders. “He’s in the hospital right now because he was the victim of a gay bashing. Four real men’ damn near killed him. They did kill his dog, just stomped poor Zippy and kicked him and—” Her voice broke, and the tears she had been holding back finally began to seep through her tightly squeezed lids. He’d looked like a truck had run over him. Maybe it had. A truck named prejudice, a monster ten-wheeler loaded to capacity with fear and hate and cruelty, an uncaring unswerving behemoth that would relentlessly flatten anything unfortunate enough to be in its way.
How could she in good conscience leave her child in the path of such a terrible thing as that?
The hands of the woman beside her closed tightly around her own, gentle and reassuring.
“Let me tell you a little story,” she said in a kindly tone. “My husband and I started our family in another time. Back in the late sixties, which might as well have been another age. One where a meat-grinder named Vietnam was chewing up young men and spitting them back out either physically and spiritually damaged, or in body bags. We came very close to not having children. How could we, when the draft and the war were what they stood to inherit? But someone passed on to me a bit of wisdom that changed our minds, and I’m glad it did.”
Alicia lifted her head to look at the other woman, was given an encouraging smile.
“Vietnam ended. The draft ended. My children grew up and started their families wondering if they could in good conscience bring children into a world where AIDS seemed to be the medical equivalent of Vietnam. But now even that’s finally been licked.” Her grip tightened, and although her voice was filled with conviction, her gaze was tranquil. “What I was told and what I have learned to be true is that you can’t know what sort of world your children will inherit. Or what kind of world they will make, or what sort of place they will find in it. You just can’t.”
She patted Alicia’s hands. “If the doctor says your child carries the gene for cystic fibrosis or Down’s or something like that, have it fixed and be thankful that you live in a world where such a wonderful thing is possible. But unless you think being gay is some sort of disease, leave that be. Tell the doctor you don’t need or want to know. If you believe in God, leave that up to him.” She grinned. “Or if you’re an old pagan like me, leave it up to Her. Just because a choice exists, that doesn’t mean you have to make it. The basis for your decision could change, and completely invalidate it. For all we know, maybe next week they’ll discover that there’s a hate gene, a prejudice and intolerance gene, which would mean that your mother and those gay bashers and every one else with the bitter cinder of bigotry in their hearts are the ones who need the gene therapy. Not you. Not your child, if she or he even has it.”