What Alice Forgot Read online

  I just want you to make it stop hurting, please, Dr. Hodges. That's why I'm paying you the big bucks. I just want to feel like me again.

  I have wandered off from the point again. My point was that I've been imagining what it would be like if I lost memory. So, I hit my head, and I wake up and I discover it's 2008 and I've got fat and Alice has got thin and I'm married to this guy called Ben.

  I wonder if I would fall in love with Ben all over again. That would be nice. I remember how it crept up so slowly on me, like that agonizingly slow old electric blanket which used to almost imperceptibly heat up my frosty sheets, second by second, until I'd think, "Hey, I haven't shivered in a while. Actually, I'm warm. I'm blissfully warm." That's how it was with Ben. I moved on from "I really shouldn't be leading this guy on when I have no interest" to "He's not that bad-looking really" to "I sort of enjoy being with him" to "Actually, I'm crazy about him."

  I wonder if Ben would try to protect me from bad news, the way we've been skirting around certain subjects with Alice. He's a terrible liar. I'd say, "How many children have we got?" and he'd mumble, "Well, we haven't much luck there," and he'd scratch his chin and clear his throat and look away.

  I would bossily insist on all the details, and eventually he'd just have to go ahead and say it.

  Over the last seven years, you've had three IVF pregnancies and two natural pregnancies. None of those theoretical babies became real babies. The furthest you ever got was sixteen weeks and that one broke both our hearts so badly we thought we'd never recover. You've also been through eight failed IVF cycles. Yes, this has changed you. Yes, it has changed our marriage, and your relationships with your family and your friends. You are angry, bitter, and, frankly, you're often a bit strange. You are currently seeing a counselor after an embarrassing incident in a coffee shop. Yes, all this has cost a lot of money, but we really prefer not to go into the figures.

  (Actually, Dr. Hodges, I've had six miscarriages. But Ben doesn't know this. I only got to five weeks, so it barely counted. Ben was away on a fishing trip with a friend, and I'd only done the pregnancy test the day before, and then the next day I started bleeding and that was that. He was so happy and dirty and sunburned when he came back from that trip, I couldn't tell him. It was just another lost little theoretical baby. Another tiny astronaut adrift in space.)

  So, what would I say after Ben told me this long sorry story?

  Well, this is the thing, Dr. Hodges, because I remember the old decisive, take-action, nerdy me and my first thought was that I would say something bracing along the lines of "if at first you don't succeed." After all, I was the woman who used to start each day by looking at a framed picture of a snow-capped mountain with a quote from Leonardo da Vinci: "Obstacles cannot crush me; every obstacle yields to stern resolve."

  Good one, Leonardo.

  But the more I think about it, the more I think that maybe I wouldn't say anything motivational at all.

  It's quite possible that I might briskly slap my hands against my knees and say, "Sounds like it's time you gave up."

  Chapter 15

  It was Alice's mother who finally broke the silence. She said, "Gina was a friend of yours." She placed the salad bowl on the table without meeting Alice's eyes. "Actually, I think this bowl was a gift from Gina. That's probably why you thought of her."

  Alice looked at the bowl and closed her eyes. She saw crumpled yellow paper. She tasted champagne. Possibly heard a peal of feminine laughter. Then nothing.

  She opened her eyes again. Everyone was looking at her.

  "Well, I really have to go," Elisabeth said, looking at her watch.

  There was a flurry of relieved activity. "I think I've parked you in!" Roger said happily, pulling out a huge set of keys from his pocket and jumping to his feet.

  "Don't forget to listen out for that call from Kate," said Elisabeth as she hurriedly backed out of the room. "Otherwise you're hosting a party tonight."

  "I'll come and wave you off," Barb said as she and Roger followed Elisabeth down the hallway, obviously wanting to speak to her privately.

  When it was just Alice and Frannie left alone, Alice picked a cherry tomato out of the salad and said, "So how do I know this Gina?"

  "She lived across the road," said Frannie. "I think they moved in just before Olivia was born. You don't remember anything about her?"

  "No. So she doesn't live across the road anymore?"

  Frannie paused. She seemed to be struggling with the right thing to say. She said, "No. The family moved to Melbourne. Not that long ago."

  Suddenly Alice got it.

  Something went on between this Gina and Nick. It explained everything. That's why everybody had behaved so awkwardly.

  Gina. Yes. The name was definitely associated with raw pain of some kind.

  Why had she thought she was exempt from infidelity? It happened all the time. It was one of those tacky soap opera events that always seemed sort of vaguely comical when it happened to someone else but was earthshakingly horrible when it happened to you.

  Alice thought of poor Hillary Clinton. Imagine having the whole world know that your husband had cheated on you in such a messy way. You would have thought being president of the United States should have been a pretty distracting sort of job. It could happen to Nick.

  After all, she realized with a shock, they'd been married for over ten years by now. Maybe Nick caught a slight case of the seven-year itch (which was practically a medical phenomenon, not really his fault), and then this awful manipulative woman took advantage of him, seduced him.

  The bitch.

  He was probably drunk. It probably just happened once. Maybe there was a party and Nick kissed her (quickly! hardly at all!) and Alice had overreacted and Nick had apologized but Alice wouldn't budge (stupid!) and now they were getting a divorce because of it. It was all Alice's fault. And Gina's fault.

  She must be very beautiful.

  The thought of her beauty, and the thought of Nick finding her beautiful, hurt so sharply that she groaned out loud.

  "Are you remembering?" asked Frannie anxiously.

  "I think so." Alice massaged her forehead.

  "Oh darling," said Frannie, and when Alice looked up and saw the utter sympathy on her grandmother's face, she knew it had been far more than just a kiss.

  How could you, Nick? She wouldn't throw her arms around him on Sunday night. She would beat closed fists against his chest. How could he make her feel so safe in their relationship, so smug, so comfortable--and then maliciously rip it all away? Make her look like a fool?

  Still, Hillary was prepared to stand by her man while his semen stains on another woman's dress were analyzed. Poor old Hillary.

  It occurred to Alice that the whole Monica Lewinsky affair must be ten-year-old news now. She wondered if Hillary's marriage had survived.

  The phone rang.

  Alice stood up automatically and went to answer it.

  "Hello?"

  "Alice? Kate! I've just been doing a million things at once and I've only just now picked up your sister's messages! I was so worried when I saw you at the gym yesterday morning, I've been telling everybody, and I meant to call you, but I'm just run off my feet right now, as you well know, and then Melanie said she saw you laughing in a car at the traffic lights at Roseville, so I thought, Phew, she's okay! But now, your sister says you're possibly not well enough to host the party?"

  Alice recognized the terribly cultured voice. It was the sleek blond woman she'd seen at the gym before she'd been sick all over George Clooney's shoes.

  "Ah," said Alice.

  "Of course, normally I'd say no problem! Have it here! In an instant! But what with the renovations, and Sam's mother staying with us, it's just literally, physically impossible. I mean, you don't have to do a thing tonight, you really don't, if you've still got a bit of a headache. I'll take care of everything. I have to admit I haven't been feeling that well myself, but I'll be all right, just a touch of the fl
u. Melanie said to me, 'You're a superwoman, Kate, how do you do it?' And I said, 'Well, no, Melanie, not a superwoman, just an exhausted woman trying to do what she can.' Sam says I just need to learn to say no and stop putting myself out for everyone, but I can't help it, I've always been that sort of person. Anyway, as I say, if your head is aching, I promise you can just put your feet up tonight, and we'll all rush around and bring you drinks. I mean, it's not like you have to cater or anything."

  A strange inertia had crept over Alice as Kate spoke. Was this woman really her friend? Alice couldn't imagine wanting to talk to her for more than five minutes. She'd take Jane Turner's brisk snippiness any day over this woman's prissy sweetness with its razor-sharp edges.

  She said, "Oh, okay, fine."

  Who cared if hundreds of strange people turned up on her doorstep tonight? Her life was a nightmare and she may as well let it continue on its nightmarish way.

  "We don't need to change it, then? Well, thank goodness. I knew I could rely on you! I had thought to myself your sister probably had it wrong. She's the bad-tempered career woman with all the infertility problems, isn't she? I guess she just has no inkling what a mother can do when she has to! All right, I must dash, and I'll look forward to seeing you tonight. All right! Bye!"

  The line went dead. Alice slammed down the phone so hard, the cradle shook. How dare that horrible woman speak about Elisabeth like that? She thought about the way Elisabeth's face had caved in when she talked about the baby's heartbeat and she wanted to punch that woman's elegant nose.

  "Is everything okay?" said Frannie.

  But did that mean Alice had been complaining to Kate Harper about Elisabeth? "Alice?"

  There was an old-lady quaver in Frannie's voice. Alice suddenly saw her as a stranger would: tiny and frail.

  She pulled herself together. She was nearly thirty--whoops, forty--years old. She couldn't go and sob in her grandmother's lap anymore.

  "Everything is fine," she said. "I told Kate Harper we could still have the party here."

  "You did?" Her mother had walked back into the room, followed by Roger. "Are you sure you're up to it?"

  "Oh sure," said Alice. "Sure. Why not?"

  "She's remembering Gina," said Frannie.

  "Oh, darling," said Barb, while Roger's face contorted into a horrendously mournful expression which was meant presumably to convey sympathy.

  Apparently Roger had affairs when he was married to Nick's mother. "I'm afraid my ex-husband was something of a philanderer," Nick's mother had once told Alice with a delicate sigh, and Alice had been impressed at the way she could make even a cheating husband sound elegant and expensive.

  Was Roger cheating on her mother now?

  Maybe it wasn't so surprising that Nick had turned out to be a cheat, too. Wasn't there some old proverb about the orange not falling far from the tree? She should say that to Roger, look him straight in the eye and say sneeringly, "So, Roger, I see the orange doesn't fall far from the tree." But knowing her, she'd get it wrong and nobody would understand what she was trying to say. "What do you mean, darling?" her mother would say, brightly interested, spoiling the moment.

  And actually, she had a funny feeling it was meant to be an apple, not an orange. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. She felt a hysterical giggle rise in her throat. She was such an idiot. "Oh, Alice," they would all say.

  "Alice?" said her mother. "Do you want a cup of tea? Or a painkiller?"

  "Or a drink?" Roger furrowed his brow. "A brandy?"

  "Oh, the last thing she needs is alcohol, Roger," snapped Frannie.

  "I'm fine," said Alice.

  She would think about all this later, when Roger wasn't there pulling his grotesquely sympathetic expressions.

  She didn't care how much her world had changed. Apple or orange, Nick was absolutely nothing like his father.

  Elisabeth's Homework for Dr. Hodges Alice gave me such an imploring look, I almost considered canceling my lunch, but it wasn't like I was leaving her alone with Roger-Dodger. That's what Ben calls him. It suits him.

  Anyway, I didn't want to get into a conversation about Gina. My feelings about Gina are complex. Or maybe childish is a more appropriate word.

  I was having lunch with the Infertiles.

  We met about five years ago when I joined this "Infertility Support Group." At first we were meeting at the community center and we had a facilitator, a professional like you, Dr. Hodges, who was there to keep us on track. The problem was that she kept trying to make us be positive. "Let's try and reframe that in a more positive light," she'd say. But we didn't want to be positive, thanks very much. We longed to say out loud all the bitter, negative, nasty things we kept in our heads. The medications, the hormones, and the relentless frustration of our lives make us bitchy, and you're not allowed to be bitchy in public or people won't like you. So we formed our own private group. Now we meet up once a month, at a swish restaurant, where we're not likely to come across Mothers' Groups and their circles of prams. We eat, we drink, and we bitch to our hearts' content--about doctors, family, friends--and most of all about the insensitivity of "Fertiles."

  At first I resisted the idea of splitting the world into "Fertiles" and "Infertiles," as if we were in some science-fiction movie, but soon it became part of my new language. "What Fertiles can never understand ..." we say to each other. Ben hates it when I say things like that. He doesn't really like the group, either, although he's never met them.

  I'm making them sound awful, but they're not. Or maybe they are and I can't see it because I'm exactly the same. All I know is that sometimes it feels like lunch with those girls is the only thing that keeps me sane. And it's Mother's Day next Sunday. (As the television keeps loudly reminding me every two minutes.) That's the most painful day of the year for an Infertile. I always wake up feeling ashamed. Not sad so much. Just ashamed. Sort of stupid. It's a version of that feeling I had in high school when I was the only one in my class who didn't need to wear a bra. I'm not a proper woman. I'm not a grown-up.

  Today we met at a restaurant in Manly right on the harbor. When I got there, they were all sitting outside in a dazzle of sun and water and blue sky, huddled over something in the middle of the table, their sunglasses pushed on top of their heads.

  "Anne-Marie's pregnancy tests," said Kerry when she saw me. "We disapprove, of course, but see what you think."

  Anne-Marie does this every time she does an IVF cycle. They tell you not to do a home pregnancy test after you've had an embryo transfer because the results are not conclusive. You might get a positive when you're not really pregnant because your body still has hormones left over from the "trigger injection" that mimic pregnancy, or you might get a negative just because it's too early to tell. The best thing is to wait for the blood test. I never do a pregnancy test because I like things to be conclusive and I'm a good girl, but Anne-Marie starts doing them the day after the transfer and admitted once that one day she did seven tests. We all have our own versions of this obsessive-compulsive behavior, so we don't scoff.

  I squinted at Anne-Marie's tests. There were three, wrapped up in aluminum foil, as usual. They all looked negative to me, but there was no point telling her this. I said I thought I could maybe see a very faint pink line on one of them, and she said her husband had said he was sure they were all negative, and she'd yelled at him that he obviously wasn't trying. You have to want to see the second line, she'd told him, and they'd had a big fight. Anne-Marie has never had a successful IVF cycle and she's been trying for over ten years. Her doctors, her husband, her family are constantly campaigning for her to give up. She is only thirty, the youngest of us all, so she has time to ruin another decade of her life. Or maybe not, of course. That's the thing for all of us. The elusive happy ending could be just a cycle away.

  Kerry (two years of IVF with donor eggs, one ectopic pregnancy that nearly killed her) said to Anne-Marie, "Elisabeth is ten days past transfer and I bet she hasn't even been tempted to do
a test."

  We all keep up to date with our IVF cycles by e-mail. Anne-Marie, Kerry, and I are all in the middle of cycles. The other three are in between, or just about to start.

  To be honest, all the drama about Alice has meant that I haven't even been considering whether or not this cycle will work. In the early years, when I still believed in the power of the mind, I used to meditate each morning after a transfer. "Please stick around, little embryo," I'd chant. "Stick, stick, stick." I'd offer it bribes: I'll take you to Disneyland when you're five. You'll never have to go to school if you don't feel up to it. If you would just please let me be your mother, please?

  But none of it seemed to make any difference. So now I just assume that it won't work, and that if it does work, I'll lose it anyway. This is meant to protect me, although it doesn't, because somehow the hope sneakily finds its way in. I'm never aware of the hope until it's gone, whooshed away like a rug pulled from under my feet, each time I hear another "I'm sorry."

  The waiter came with our drinks and said, "Let me guess--you've left the kids with their dads and escaped for the day!"

  Ah, the sweet innocence of the Fertiles. They assume any group of women of a certain age must surely be mothers.

  "What's the point of looking like fucking mothers when we're fucking not," said Sarah, who is our newest recruit. She has only been through one IVF cycle, but she's already energetically bitter about infertility. She makes me realize I'm even jaded about being jaded. I admire the way she swears.

  That sets us off on listing the ways we've been offended since we last met.

  We had:

  The boss who said, "Going through IVF is a choice, it's not like getting the flu, so, no, I can't sign your sick-leave form."

  The aunt who said, "Just relax and have a massage, you're not getting pregnant because you're too tense." (Oh, there's always one of those.)

  The brother who said (with screaming child in the background), "You've got such a romantic idea of having children. It's just bloody hard work."