How to Be Single (37 page)

Wei was standing on a little stage that had been set up, singing a song in Chinese while the karaoke machine displayed the words on the screen, along with a video of a Chinese man and woman walking along a babbling brook. I don't know what she was singing about but—wait a minute—could she be singing about—I don't know—love? Do you think? Just as she was finishing up her song and everyone started clapping, I stormed up on the little stage and stood right next to her. I looked out on this sea of twenty-something Chinese girl cuteness and men in suits going along for the ride. I grabbed the mike out of Wei's hands.

“I just want you ladies to know that you should think very carefully about what you're doing,” I said loudly into the microphone. Everyone stopped talking to stare at the crazy lady. Wei just looked at me. She cupped her hand over her mouth, covering a smile.

“You think you have all the time in the world, you think that it's so fun to be so free and independent. You think you have all these options, but you don't really. You're not always going to be surrounded by men. You're not always going to be young. You're going to get older and know more about what you want and you won't be willing to settle and you're going to look around and there will be even
fewer
men for you to choose from. And you're not only going to be single, but you're going to be childless as well. So you should understand there are consequences to what you're doing now.
Very serious consequences!
”

No one said a word. Clearly, they all thought I was a lunatic. I handed the mike back to Wei. She kept her hand over her mouth and laughed.

“Oh, Julie, you're so funny! You are so funny!”

Back in the States

It was the day Ruby was to be inseminated and she didn't have anyone to accompany her. And, really, what could be more depressing than that? By this point Ruby was bloated. Fat. Her breasts felt as swollen as if she were already pregnant. She imagined someone pricking her with a needle and having the water just come gushing out of her, and bringing her back to her normal size again. She had also been really emotional for the past three days, which she attributed to the hormones, but, really, let's face it, it could also be because she was about to be ejaculated into by a syringe and then possibly spend the next nine months pregnant and alone. I'm just saying.

Her good friend Sonia was supposed to be her plus-one to the ejaculation, but she canceled at the last minute because her daughter was sick. Ruby didn't want to call Serena because Serena had told her what was going on at her job and she didn't want to bother her. She called Alice, but she didn't pick up. Ruby would have asked her gay male friends but she was still mad at them. The only person left was Georgia. They really didn't know each other very well, and Ruby thought Georgia was a little crazy, but maybe it would be better to go with a crazy person than no one at all? She wasn't sure.

But then, Ruby considered the alternative—getting in a cab, going to the clinic, lying on a table, getting shot full of semen, hailing a cab home. Alone. So she picked up the phone and called Georgia. Alice had told her about the daily shots so she wasn't taken completely by surprise and she said yes immediately. Georgia was desperate to have something to do besides think about the upcoming custody fight with Dale and the visit with the court-appointed social worker that was happening later that day. The kids were at school, as opposed to at home, unattended, and she was free to think about someone else's life for a change.

When Ruby got to the clinic, Georgia was already outside. Ruby relaxed. It was nice to have someone there for her, waiting for her.

“Hey Ruby,” Georgia said, sweetly. “How are you feeling?”

Ruby just smiled and said, “Fat. Nervous.”

“This is really exciting,” Georgia said as they were about to walk through the revolving doors. “You might become a mother today.”

“I know. Isn't that weird?” Ruby replied, putting her hand on the revolving door and pushing it.

Georgia followed right behind Ruby and said, “You know what?
It's all weird.
”

The waiting room was mercifully quiet. There were only two women there, both pregnant—which seemed like a good sign to Ruby. Ruby signed in and she and Georgia sat down to wait.

“I think it's fantastic that you're doing this. Being a mother is one of the most wonderful experiences in the world. Really,” Georgia said.

Ruby smiled. She was happy to hear that right now.

“You'll never really be able to understand it until it happens to you, but it's like this awesome responsibility is given to you—to take care of another human being on this planet. That little person becomes everything to you.” Georgia seemed to be lost in thought. “It's incredibly sweet.”

Ruby looked at Georgia. For once, she seemed soft. Vulnerable. Gentle. Not crazy.

“So, you're going to do it as a single mother. What does it matter?” Georgia added. “We all end up getting divorced and becoming single mothers anyway. You're just starting out that way.”

Ruby thought that was a little bleak, but perhaps Georgia was just trying to make her feel better about being single. Ruby glanced over at the magazine rack filled with
Woman's Day
and
Redbook
and
People
. Georgia continued her pep talk. “It's a fuck of a lot better for the kid this way.”

Now Ruby wondered where this was going.

“At least with you they won't be subjected to an asshole father who wants to go to court to prove that you're an unfit mother. At least there won't be that.”

“What?” Ruby said, taken off guard.

“Oh. Yeah. That's what's going on right now. Can you believe it?”

Ruby never let her gaze stray from Georgia, so as not to reveal in any way the thought crossing her mind, which was “
Well, actually…”

Georgia took a breath. She picked up a
Parents
magazine and started to flip through it. “But today is not about me. It's about you. And my point is that you shouldn't feel badly about this. Why deprive yourself of having children just because you don't want to be a single mother? By the time we're fifty, everyone we know is going to be a single mother.” She stopped to look at a photo of the “Five-Minute Brownie.”

“The problem with single mothers is we're all competing for the same men—the ones who are willing to date women with kids. I mean, how many of those guys are there in New York? How can we all possibly find one?”

Ruby had the impulse to put her hand over Georgia's mouth and not take it off until her name was called. Instead, she leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes, and sighed. Maybe it wasn't a good idea to have invited Georgia to her insemination party after all.

“Ruby Carson?” a nurse called out, and Ruby stood up immediately. Georgia sat up and squeezed Ruby's hand.

“Do you want me to go in with you?”

The image flashed through her mind of Georgia sitting there while some doctor or nurse put a syringe of semen in her woo-woo.

“No, that's okay, you can stay here, I'll be fine.”

“Okay. But if Julie was here, she'd be in there with you, so I just wanted you to know that I would.”

“Thank you. I appreciate it. I think it's really fast. I'll be fine.”

“Okay,” Georgia said, a little relieved. “Have fun!”

Ruby was undressed and sitting on the examining table. She felt like a little girl, her feet dangling down, clutching at her paper robe. She remembered her first gynecological exam. She was thirteen, and was brought by her mother right when she got her first period. She sat there, just like now, waiting, not knowing what to expect, but understanding that it was a rite of passage, one that would usher her into a whole new chapter of her life, as a woman. The only difference then was that her mother was with her; her mother who now lived in Boston; her mother who raised her as a single mother, by the way; a mother who was always extremely depressed. Her father left them when she was eight, and her mother never remarried.

She closed her eyes and tried to think fertile thoughts. But all she could see was her mother sitting at the kitchen table, smoking, staring out into space. She thought of her mother coming home late at night from work, carrying the groceries. She thought of the three of them at the kitchen table—Ruby, her brother Dean, and her mom—quietly eating together. Her mother, too tired, too depressed to talk, her brother and she trying to lighten things up, with mashed-potato fights, with milk coming out of their noses. She remembered her mother's anger; then often, her mother's tears.

“Don't you know how hard I work? Don't you understand how tired I am?” she shouted once as she got up and grabbed a sponge and walked over to the wall to attack a big gob of mashed potato. Ruby remembered that they laughed at her in that moment. She seemed like just a grotesque caricature, not a real person. It seemed funny to them at the time, their mother with all that crazy emotion. Of course at that moment, at the sight of her children's smirks and giggles, Ruby's mother broke down and cried.

“I can't take it anymore! I can't!” she said as she threw the sponge in the sink, letting out a series of sobs as she leaned against the kitchen counter, her back to her two children. “Burn the whole house down if you want to,” she screamed as she raced out of the room.

Ruby remembers the feeling she had in the pit of her stomach in that moment. She didn't know what it was at the time, but as she got older, she found herself recognizing that feeling over and over again. She had it when she saw a blind person, all alone, tapping along a busy Manhattan street, or once when she saw an old woman fall down on the ice. It was pity. At ten years old, she was giggling at her mother because she didn't know how else to process the sick feeling in her gut of feeling sorry for her own mother. As she became a teenager, as she saw her mother have a string of boyfriends, all in differing shades of lame, she processed the pity in a whole new way: she hated her. Not like this is the most unique story ever told, but for Ruby's last two years of high school, she stopped speaking to her mother. Yes, they didn't get along, yes, they fought about things like curfew and outfits and boyfriends, but more importantly, Ruby just couldn't stand pitying her anymore. So the less she engaged with her in any way, the less Ruby had to feel that queasy, awful feeling in the pit of her stomach.

Now here Ruby was, feeling her naked body sticking to the sanitary paper covering the table, and waiting to be inseminated by a doctor. Why? Because when the music stopped and everyone had grabbed their men, she was left standing alone. The race was run and she had lost it.
She had lost.
That was the only way she could see it as she sat there, naked and alone, waiting.

Maybe if I had been there it would have been different. Maybe I would have joked with her and said the right thing and made her feel that what she was about to do was the beginning of a life that, though hard at times, would be rewarding beyond measure. There would be life and joy and children and laughter. But I wasn't there, and I didn't say anything genius, and Ruby started to slide down into that hole like so many times before.

In the middle of her slide, Doctor Gilardi came in. He was in his early sixties, with a distinguished head of white hair and skin that had the kind of tan that came from entitled living. Ruby chose him because he was handsome and gentle and she felt that, as the man inseminating her, he would in some way be the father of her child.

“So,” he said with a smile. “Are you ready to go?”

Ruby tried to be chipper. “Yep. Knock me up, Doc!”

Doctor Gilardi smiled. “I'm just going to examine you one last time, and then the nurse will come in with the specimen.”

Ruby nodded and lay back, put her feet in the stirrups, and opened her legs. The doctor wheeled a chair over and sat down, ready to take a look.

Lying there, Ruby felt that old feeling again. She wondered if it was called “pity” because it was always felt in the pit of your stomach. It didn't matter how the word was made, all she knew was that she felt it now, for herself. There in the paper robe and the fluorescent lighting and the absence of any man anywhere in the world who loved her, she was pitiful. She thought about all the men she had dated and spent too much time grieving over. There was Charlie and Brett and Lyle and Ethan. Just guys. Guys it didn't work out with, for whom Ruby had cried and cried. She knew they weren't jerking off into a cup right now so some surrogate mother could have their children. She was sure they all had girlfriends or wives or whatever the hell they wanted to have. And there she was, about to be a lonely, sexless, depressed single mother.

The nurse came in carrying a big cooler. She opened it up and the smoke of the dry ice came billowing out. Out of it she took a canister that looked like a large silver thermos. This was filled with Ruby's children.

“Here it is,” the nurse said, sweetly. Doctor Gilardi stood up and took it from her. He looked at Ruby.