I have to laugh. I get a fair number of glances, especially from the opposite sex, when I’m alone, but when Ellie and I are together it feels like there’s a spotlight shining down on us. Sometimes I forget that we look exactly alike, especially to people who don’t know us. Passersby who think we are carbon copies. Upon first glance, we are. It takes time to notice the subtle differences in our appearances and the way we dress. Ellie has a wider smile, and higher cheekbones, my face is more heart-shaped and I have a prominent freckle near my mouth. These are all observations from over the years, so it’s impossible for a stranger to see the differences at first glance.
Once we’re inside, I focus on finding suits that Ellie would like, but are also different than her usual basic black while Ellie follows me around giving disapproving looks to each suit I hold up for her.
“Trying swim suits on under fluorescent lighting while managing a hangover is not my idea of a good time.” She sighs, rubbing her temples.
The saleslady comes over to gather the pile of suits I’ve collected. When she sees us, she smiles.
“We’ll take one dressing room. It’ll save us the back and forth.” And, if I don’t supervise Ellie, she probably won’t try anything on. I’m trying to do Josh a solid here, and I need her to work with me.
She nods. “No problem.”
When Ellie removes her clothes, I rear back at the sight of the yellowish-purple bruises on her belly that the low-cut swimsuit does nothing to hide. She must see my face.
“Bruises from the injections.”
I’ve seen them before, a while back when they were first starting IVF and Ellie was changing her clothes, but I honestly didn’t think about it at all when I suggested trying on swimsuits. I feel bad now that I’m pushing this. Ellie doesn’t say anything else, she just reaches for the first suit and pulls it on over her underwear.
As she tries on the suits, it appears I misjudged the size of her chest, and I have to send the saleslady out for new sizes in all the tops. We can now add Ellie’s larger boobs to our list of differences.
“Did you get a boob job that I’m unaware of?”
“Fertility hormones. They’ll go back to normal eventually.”
Right. Because they’re going to stop trying. Fuck. I am doing a horrible job of trying to distract Ellie from this topic. Obviously exposing Ellie in a swimsuit is not the best way to avoid observations about her post IVF body. Finally, we leave, me with a new tie-dye bikini and Ellie with a courtesy bottle of water from the saleslady. I guess this store really does have everything.
After we leave the mall, I decide taking Ellie to get ice cream will be a way to cheer her up, since shopping was a fail, and especially after her ice cream vomit in the bushes last night. It’s like when you have a bad sexual encounter, you have to just get back out there because chances are the next one can’t be as bad. All is going well, we’ve each gotten a double scoop cone at Ellie’s favorite spot, Little Man Ice Cream, and suddenly two vans pull up to the curb, an entire little league team exits and soon it’s a clusterfuck of kids. Which in hindsight is poor planning on my part. A sunny, Saturday afternoon in June just screams kids eating ice cream. I should have thought this through better.
There’s this large metal slide, and there’s a pack of kids just going up and down, up and down. Ellie is eating her salted Oreo ice cream while staring at the kids playing. I had hoped to get her out of the house and take her mind off the whole baby thing. Epic fail.
Things won’t get better soon. Ellie teaches middle school math, and while it’s summer and school is out, she picks up nanny and babysitting jobs for extra money, but mainly because she loves kids so much. If I got a three-month break, I would be sipping a cocktail by the pool, but that’s the difference between Ellie and me.
“Do you want to walk around?” I offer.
“No, I’m good here.”
She takes another bite of her cone.
This is not what I had in mind to keep Ellie’s mind off her fertility issues. But I realize there are bound to be kids anywhere we go, especially in this neighborhood. It’s a young family breeding ground, where all the young professionals morph into parties of three within two years of living here. That’s why Ellie and Josh moved here. She thought it was a perfect transitional neighborhood.
“The doctor advised we not do another round of IVF. They think the shape of my uterus is problematic. That it’s not a good environment for embryo implantation.”
My hope had been to distract her from all the baby and IVF talk for a little while, but it’s obviously weighing heavily on her mind. She’s still trying to process it all.
“Yeah, Josh told me. In not so technical terms.” I think he had called her uterus misshapen. Men. Eye roll.
Ellie nods. “Well, it doesn’t really matter. Even if they advised me to do ten more rounds, we’ve spent so much money already, it feels like such a waste.” She licks her cone.
Her comment gives me pause. I wasn’t sure how to broach the subject, but she’s giving me the perfect opening for my idea.
“What about a surrogate? It would still be your biological child.”
Ellie stares at me for a minute before responding. “Surrogacy is an option. We’ve looked into that before, actually after our first try at In Vitro, but realized it was cheaper to do what we were doing, even with the emotional anguish it caused. I don’t know how much you know about it but it’s ridiculously expensive because of the surrogacy service fees for legal contracts and finding the right surrogate. Like a hundred grand or more. I know the surrogates go through intense vetting beforehand, but could you imagine putting your baby into a stranger’s body and having no control over what is happening?”
Not revealing how much I did indeed look into it, I continue, “But would you do it if you had the money?”
“I think I would. Because I want our baby so bad.”
Ellie has made good work on her ice cream, already taking bites out of the cone whereas I’m busy managing a drip situation that requires a lot of licking and some napkins. Even our ice cream eating is telling of our different personalities. Ellie’s more of an ice cream fanatic, I’m more into baked goods. Like cake. And pie.
