“Yeah.”
“Listen, Norm, I have a friend who tried to have a baby for four years. Four years. Can you imagine?”
Yes, Norma thinks. Yes, I can imagine that.
“Well, what do you think happened?” Damica asks.
“I think that after four years she finally had a baby or else you wouldn’t be telling me this story.”
“Well, you’re right. That’s exactly what happened.”
“How old was she?”
Damica looks cross and doesn’t answer that question, so Norma knows that the girl was probably twenty-two years old or some other annoying age a lot younger than Norma. Or at least her husband loved her. “You know what did the trick?” Damica asks.
“What?”
“Adoption papers. I swear. You and Ted should fill out adoption papers, and then I promise you, you’ll get pregnant.”
“I’ll think about it.” But what Norma really thinks is that all the people who had babies after trying for fifteen minutes should just keep their mouths shut because they don’t know shit about how this feels.
“I have to get going,” Damica says. “Will you hold The Baby for a second while I get my stuff together?” Damica reaches her foot underneath the table, feeling for her diaper bag. She holds The Baby out for Norma to take.
Norma looks over the edge of the paper. “Let me pee first.” Norma folds the paper, grabs her pocketbook, and slides out of the booth.
The stalls of the ladies’ room are made of cool aluminum. Norma rests her head against this coolness. She doesn’t actually have to pee. She just has to stand inside the metal walls of the ladies’ room for a minute alone.
GIVE ME A CALL. 1-800-FUCKIN’A.
Norma fingers the writing. She pulls her cell phone from the very bottom of her purse and dials 1-800-382-5462.
“Hello?”
“Hello, 1-800-DUBL-INC. Doubles Incorporated, providing goods and services for the Procreation by Division Industries. How may I help you?”
Norma swallows hard.
“Hi, yeah. Can I talk to someone in Customer Service?”
“Please hold one moment while I transfer your call.”
Norma holds. The Muzak kicks on. “Sometimes when we touch, the honesty’s too—”
“Hello. Doubles Incorporated. How can I help you today?”
Norma loves that song.
After lunch Norma takes a left off Dead Elm Street onto Larre Road, pronounced “Larry.” Norma can’t stand people who have cars that work. Everyone, it seems, drives a brand-new car. And all these new cars have perfectly functioning air conditioners. No one drives with the windows rolled down. There are no clunkers on the roads anymore, and to Norma this is a sign of America’s great moral failure. Which is why about two months ago, about the same time her car broke down for good and she didn’t have enough of her own money to replace it and Ted told her he wouldn’t buy her a new one since she hadn’t taken care of the first one he bought her, Norma began, slowly at first, dragging her house keys across the doors and hoods of other people’s cars. She didn’t think what she was doing was that bad in light of all the other things she could have done. For example, she could have started carrying a bowie knife to puncture tires or a screwdriver to pry open the hoods of other people’s vehicles and unscrew their oil filters or slice the coolant hoses or reverse the positive and the negative cables on a car’s battery. She hadn’t done any of those horrible things. She hadn’t started blowing up car dealerships yet. No.
Norma takes a right, turning up the driveway of the home for troubled people. She slips inside. “Hello?” she calls, but no one answers. Norma makes her way up a central staircase that twists smoothly as she goes. “Hello?” she calls again, but there is no answer. Norma goes right. “Hello?” she says. She glances behind herself and up overhead. She freezes. Directly above her the ceiling is horribly stained. A large brown mass of dripping discoloration that, because it has spread out in awkward and uneven rings, seems to throb. There must be a leak, Norma thinks, staring at the stain, studying its contours. She circles below it, without taking her eyes away from the mark, neck craned backward, arms linked across her chest. She stares, mesmerized. The stain looks a little bit like a fetus, a fetus with four legs.
“Boo.”
And there she is.
Norma has a question for Dirty Norma. “Where’d you come from?”
“Where do you think I came from?”
“Well, I heard about this thing. Procre—”
“Procreation by Division for Morons?”
Norma says nothing.
Norma also says nothing.
“It’s just, I’d been trying to have a baby for a long, long time.”
“Oh boy. They really got your number. What’d it cost you? That thing’s a racket. R-A-C-K-E-T! Plus,” she says. “Those kits never work. Did you get it at Walmart? Their kits NEVER work.”
“Then where’d you come from?”
“Guess,” Dirty Norma says.
“This again?”
“Guess.”
But Norma knows she’s lying. Norma knows exactly where Norma came from.
She’d paid the extra $19.95 so that they would ship it express. “Sign.” The deliveryman had thrust his handheld computer clipboard in front of Norma’s face for her to sign. The box was no bigger than a supermarket paperback. That can’t be it, Norma thought. But it was. She signed. He shoved the package forward. That was it. The deliveryman was gone and Norma was left holding her Home Procreation by Division kit. She waited in the doorway, staggered. She looked left, looked right. She disappeared back inside the house.
Norma took the box into the kitchen and used a steak knife to stab it open. There was nothing to it. Norma felt like an idiot. Inside the box was a paper foldout of poorly photocopied instructions and a palm-sized petri dish with a cover and a bright red bottom. That was it. $67.98. Magic Rocks, Norma thought. Sea Monkeys. Garbage. She stepped back from the box, and for a moment she felt like such a fool that she was tempted to throw the whole thing in the trash. But she stopped herself. She walked away and checked in with the chat room. Not much had changed there. Still a bunch of women who couldn’t have babies. She turned away from the computer. She chewed at the side of her lip. I’ll just read the stupid instructions. So she did.
Remove lid from petri dish, being very careful not to touch inside the dish. Spit into the petri dish. Make certain you wait at least an hour after eating, drinking, or brushing your teeth. First-morning spit is the most effective, but spit from any time of the day can be used as long as you wait an hour after eating, drinking, or brushing your teeth.
Norma looked at her watch. It was probably at least an hour. She collected a small pool of saliva in her mouth and, hanging her chin directly over the dish, she dropped warm spit from her mouth.