Leaf Peepers

After my cousin canceled her wedding, Dave and I still decided to go. We had invested too much in the idea of it, plus a new dress, a room reservation at the small New England inn, a route to peep at the changing leaves on the way in and way out of the state. We had been counting on the year after to buy them a present, though, as most of our remaining funds were diverted.

There was going to be an open bar, but Dave had purchased a flask via credit anyway, planning to hide it in his interior suit-jacket pocket. I had caught him practicing using it in our room the week before, in his pajamas, his suit jacket over top, a clandestine sip in the mirror.

“It’s water,” he said.

“Maybe it should be whiskey,” I said. It was a Tuesday. The ovulation stick had given us the go-ahead. I was gearing myself up physically and emotionally, which is another way to say I felt only dread.

I was planning on not being able to drink at the wedding because of the baby. But by the time we got the news of the canceled wedding, there was no baby still.

The news came by email, with the subject line “Wedding’s Off!” I felt a kinship with that exclamation point, its desperate energy. It came from my cousin Grace, who was to have been one of the brides. I imagined her and Rayne, the other bride, dividing up the names, who would email who, and wondered if they had written this email together, if it was the last task of their betrothal. Or if Rayne had said, “I don’t give a shit—you do it,” and Grace had emailed us all. I felt, also, her potential martyrdom in the exclamation point. Of course it would be our side of this thwarted family that would be responsible for the logistics.

“I don’t give a shit—you do it” is not a great choice of marital phrasing, FYI, if you plan on getting married or staying married. It’s also not a phrase available in certain situations if you’re a woman. You can’t say “You do it” about the drug injections or the blood tests or the ultrasounds. I had said it only once, the previous month, pointing at my vagina. I wanted Dave to do it himself. I no longer wanted to be involved.

The reason we wanted to go the charming New England inn was to see if we could have sex in a way that still expressed mutual love and connection. We had spoken these exact words. Then we’d picked out the flask on Amazon, crucial to the “loosen-up” phase of the plan. The thrill of the whole thing was that I would not be ovulating. The sex would be only for fun!

When we arrived at the inn—even the lobby was charming with its complimentary maple candies and fragrant coffee station—we were handed a decorative bag filled with wedding favors: a rainbow-flag bumper sticker; an eye mask; a pack of peanut-butter crackers, what Dave’s family refers to as nabs. “They were already here,” said the receptionist, pointing to a flock of bags behind the desk, still hopeful looking. I had the ridiculous thought that someone should tell them what had happened. “You can have as many as you like,” she said. “Enjoy your stay.” There were gummy bears too, the good German kind, and I handed them to Dave in the elevator. He always succumbed to anything gummy, even though I knew he was worried just then he might have a cavity in a back molar. I could feel the ache as he chewed, the way the gummy bears went right to that tooth.

We both flopped on the bed. We had agreed, years before, that this was how to handle the awkward moment of arriving somewhere new. Just get on the bed and take stock. We looked up at the ceiling and around at the drapes. The framed pictures were of trees, also what you saw if you looked out our window, away from the ocean. We took in the scents, the cleanser from the bathroom and the faint smell of cigarette smoke, from back in the days when the world operated in denial of the consequences of its vices—those chain-smokers who started wrapping absolutely everything in plastic, our predecessors. Fertile, though, seemingly all of them, because here we were, so many of us, still inhaling their smoke. Dave grabbed a magazine from the bedside table. “Lobster roll?” I asked, looking at the cover. We were both very hungry. “Lobster roll in the hay,” he said, because he was always saying things like that, as if solving a before-and-after puzzle on Wheel of Fortune.

I unpacked my toiletries first, my toothbrush and antiaging serums and medications and prenatal vitamins. When I came out of the bathroom, Dave had already put the lube by the bedside. “We don’t want to have to fumble for it later,” he said, and I tried to gauge whether he was joking. There had been no fumbling since our early thirties. The empty gummy bears wrapper sat on the bed beside him, smelling of someone’s idea of lemon. I liked to imagine my sense of smell was constantly waxing, as I knew that was a gift of pregnancy. If I willed the symptoms into being, would the baby feel more welcome?

On the way out, Dave asked for another goody bag from the front desk. “Maybe you can just ask for the gummy bears,” I said. “What are we going to do with all of those eye masks?”

The lobster-roll place was through the town, past the cheap tourist shop with its leaf peepers T-shirts and the more expensive tourist shop with its local tea sachets and designer kettles. We walked past an ice-cream shoppe (Dave said, “Let’s get some ice cream after from this shopp-y”), a real-estate office with pictures of very old and very expensive homes in the window, a clothing store called Ladies First with prim skirt suits on the mannequins. (“Ah, so this is where the lady senators shop.”) The lobster-roll shack sat near the sea. You ordered at the window and then chose your ketchup-splattered picnic table on a rocky outcrop over the water. A stack of napkins was weighed down by what I assumed was a trap used to catch lobsters. Two other couples were there, all with lobster rolls. I saw the painted toenails on one woman, the gummy bears peeking out of one man’s pocket. Was it comforting or disappointing to realize we were of a tribe? We had all come for the nonwedding. Dave was still holding our opalescent goody bag, like a purse.

Dave leaned forward conspiratorially, even though no one could possibly hear what we were saying for the wind. “Do you see what I see?” He was digging into his lobster roll, and a dab of mayonnaise hovered on his lip, a small white flag. I felt a surge of love for him. I had had this problem for as long as I could remember—that I confused pity with affection. I was powerless against adults with food on their clothes. Watching a person rub their itchy nose made me want to hug them. Was it a pathology, or perhaps a sign I would be a wonderful mother?

“Should we say hi?” I asked. I was sitting on the wrong side of the table, and my sea-ravaged hair was blowing into my lobster roll, preventing me from eating it.

“They’re clearly like-minded individuals,” Dave said, exhibiting the logic that made him a great math teacher.

“Well, we don’t know if they’re Grace people or Rayne people,” I said.

“We don’t know if we are either,” Dave said. “What if Grace cheated on Rayne? What if Grace is actually an asshole?”

It was hard to imagine a person named Grace being an asshole, though it was true we didn’t know her well. I could feel the other couples looking at us too, putting the pieces together. How many of us had flasks in our pockets? How many of us brought our wedding outfits, just in case? Had they had to return their wedding gifts, or had they, like us, been counting on the opportunity to find something later or forget altogether?

I pictured the uteruses of the woman—I couldn’t help it. I wanted someone to know how I felt, but not someone from the support groups tacked to the back of the bathroom doors at the fertility clinic. I wanted spontaneous empathy. The idea of seeking it out made the problem feel too real. I still did not consider myself to be a person with fertility problems. This was another characteristic of my life: that even as things were happening to me, I wasn’t sure if I was the kind of person that these things happened to. I would sit in the waiting room at the clinic and feel sorry for the other women, the truly infertile. Every time I gave my age, forty-two, I felt shocked anew. I felt as if I were still trying out for adulthood and was actually only twenty-seven, that there had been some error in the calculations. Once headquarters got wind of this problem, I would simply arrive at a place where all the things I had been promised would begin to effortlessly appear. Any moment, I figured, my womb would get the message from the universe and my baby would arrive.

One of the couples sitting across from us included a woman who gave no indication that she had eaten a lobster roll, and a man who appeared to have eaten twelve. She was in a long flowery dress with a sweater hanging off one shoulder. I admired its purposeful askewness, as I was a person who very often felt accidentally askew. The man was wearing sandals and dress slacks with a white button-down tucked in. His belly formed a pouch over his belt that made me want to gently touch it. I watched them get up and head to the beach. This was our cue, I understood, and so did Dave. I handed him a napkin for the blob of mayonnaise. We carried our food trays and waxed paper through the wind to the trash can and tried our best to get it all inside without touching the swinging flap. This trash can had never been cleaned except by the sea. The ground was littered with the junk of people who had fought the wind and the flap and lost.

We followed the route of the pioneering couple, through the small parking lot and then over some wooden slats to the sand. The sun was out but the air was cool. We were used to Jersey sand, its scorching heat, so we did not take off our shoes. We joined the couple by the water. The woman’s sweater was lower over her shoulder now, so I could see a birthmark there, the shape of a country I was sure I would be able to identify if given more time. I wanted a child with a very visible birthmark, and the opportunity to convince her it was beautiful.

When we turned to look, the third couple was behind us, as we knew they would be. We lined up at the water’s edge. We were like some kind of coven, I thought, brought there to enact something momentous. I assumed we all felt this way.

“Grace or Rayne?” Dave said, looking around. “Which side of the aisle?” He was trying to make a joke. The third couple looked too young to want to hang out with us. He was Latino, and she was a redhead who should have been in a shampoo commercial. I could smell her hair, or someone’s, as the wind gusted. Coconut.

“Rayne,” the man said, turning to look me in the face. He wore sweatbands on his wrists, had a two-day stubble. He was handsome because these choices seemed somehow uncalculated, as if he’d grabbed the sweatbands from a pile of haphazard accessories on the way out the door.

“We didn’t know until we got here,” the redhead said. “About the wedding. Who reads email anymore?”

So Grace had been the emailer. My heart ached for her. Writing the thing, Rayne’s friends not even reading it.

The man from the original couple finally spoke. “I think it’s only us at the inn. I don’t think they got their money back because the cancellation came so late. The dining room is all decorated. There’s karaoke ready to go in the bar.”

We were shouting, those of us who were talking. There was so much wind. It seemed clear that we just had to take the party back to the hotel and all those table settings. We began the walk back through town like an expedition on its way to base camp. Past the skirt suits, the ice-cream shoppe, the tea sachets. The receptionist seemed momentarily surprised to see all of us together, and then she picked up the phone to call the bartender, who had not had time to make other plans. We set up shop around the bridal table with its elaborate cornucopia. It would only be a matter of time before Dave gently banged his fork against his water glass and looked expectantly at the other couples.

Couple #1 was Katherine and Len. Katherine knew Grace from college, “back before she was a lesbian,” a statement I found problematic for obvious reasons. Couple #2 was Marta and Max, the perfect name for a line of vegan dog treats. The bartender, Kevin, had brought our drinks and now stood a respectful fifteen feet away, hands clasped behind his back, waiting for refill requests. I wanted to tell him he could go, but Len had put a hundred-dollar bill in his tip jar, so that settled that.

We were consuming large quantities of gummy bears with our vodka tonics, actually inside our vodka tonics where they fizzed slightly and began to bloat. Even the gummy bears looked pregnant. I could already feel the hangover forming. I tried to push past it, to channel the laugh-riot alcoholic I had been in my late twenties. My college friends still talked about her as if she were a person separate from me.

“I’m not that into small talk,” Max was saying. “I want to know what you guys are about.” He was not drinking, and Marta shot him a look of admiration. This schtick would get old, I wanted to tell her. But then again, what did I know.

“I want to know what those wristbands are about,” Dave said, which might sound combative, but Dave has a way of asking aggressive questions that engages people. The night I met him, he had asked me, “Who wears something like that to a horse show?” For example.

Max didn’t blink. “I’m incredibly sweaty, actually. I have, like, a sweating problem. I sweat everywhere, and it can actually be really gross. I wear these when I think I’m going to shake a lot of new people’s hands.”

“His friends in high school called him Schetty Swins,” Marta said, laughing in a way that could only be described as adorable. “His shins leave these little puddles in the bed while he sleeps.”

“It’s a lifelong problem,” Max said. “It has no cure.”

All of this made me want to be Max’s mother, which maybe goes without saying.

“Life is full of burdens,” Len said, in the style of a claims adjuster. “In the scheme of things, that one doesn’t seem so bad.”

Marta and Max didn’t say anything.

Katherine said, “Len just lost his brother in a parasailing accident.” “Jesus,” Max said. “I’m so sorry, man.” He reached out to take Len’s meaty palm, but Len wasn’t having it.

“I don’t feel it,” Len said. “I can’t even accept your condolences because my brain is just rejecting the information.” He picked up his vodka tonic and chugged it, waiting as the gummy bears made a slow sticky slide from the bottom of the glass toward his mouth.

“We’re going to the funeral tomorrow,” Katherine said. “This was supposed to be a kind of last hurrah. We don’t live too far from here. Len’s parents made us come. They said love was the antidote to death.”

Dave grabbed my hand under the table. He was bristling at the “last hurrah” phrase. What did it mean, that their plan was to never have fun ever again? After tonight?

“That’s really sad,” Marta said. “But maybe not the worst way to die, I don’t know. Parasailing feels like flying. I’ve done it. If I have a choice, I want to go out like that.”

“Well, he was actually decapitated by a motorboat,” Katherine said. “A series of horrible events that ended incredibly badly. Is that too much information?” She looked sideways at Len.

“Death is death,” Len said, his mouth full of gummy bears. “Maybe there is no good way.”

“But that seems especially horrible,” Max said.

It did. The silence stretched in search of a transition. Dave cleared his throat aggressively, subconsciously. The bartender came immediately to refill our drinks. I was feeling panicky. My fight-or-flight instinct had kicked in, and I was forcing myself not to run to our room for a Klonopin. Before trying to get pregnant, I had not realized that my children could possibly see me decapitated, and I tried to decide if this was a reason to lean in to infertility.

“Do any of you have kids?” Dave asked. Which wasn’t a bad transition if you weren’t married to me.

“We have four,” Len said, quickly. “Oldest is twenty-four, youngest is fifteen. They’re home with their grandparents. They all urged us to come here. We didn’t tell them the wedding was canceled. It was all too much at once. Too much loss.”

This was something Grace surely could not have anticipated, that her email would be the straw that broke the back of the camel named Too Much Loss. It was probably one of the hardest things she’d ever had to write and the worst day of her life, but for the recipients, it was just something to delete, something to tell or not tell your kids. The first thing I’d thought of was the present we didn’t buy—that’s how much of an asshole I am.

“We don’t believe in kids,” Marta said.

“Oh, they definitely exist,” Dave said.

“But we don’t believe in anyone having them,” Marta said, rolling her eyes. “The planet is succumbing to our mistreatment and won’t be habitable, like, very soon.”

“We don’t want to bring children into the world to have to deal with that,” Max finished.

Pinpricks of sweat arrived on my wrists. This was what I wanted, for someone to turn my fertility problem into a righteous gift. If I could look down on all the procreators, could I stop crying every time I left the doctor’s office? Could I, Jesus, could I stop going to the doctor’s office?

“But doesn’t that feel hopeless to you?” Dave asked. “I mean, if you say that, what’s the point of anyone doing or not doing anything?”

I tried to think of something to say without completely contradicting Dave, whom I loved.

“The planet is melting and on fire. We’re already here, and we need to try to fix it. One way is by taking care of what we’ve already made and trying not to pump out more resource-sucking kids,” Marta said.

I bristled at “pump out.” I wanted so badly to pump something out. I also agreed with her.

“We’re all barreling toward a tragic end,” Len said, and we looked down into our drinks.

Karaoke was the next logical step.

I had had too much vodka and was starting to get that devil’s-advocate feeling where you want someone to go head-to-head against your deepest desires so you can see if you’re able to defend them. I had been an only child—still am, I suppose—and felt fully in control of all my family’s convictions until I was in the presence of literally any other family. “My parents make us eat together at the table,” I would say, cackling, eating Salisbury steak off a TV tray in my friend’s den. I was fickle, my parents said. You could call me empathetic, if you wanted to be nice to me. I saw what was good in whatever was in front of me.

Would this make me a traitor unto my own children, or would I be on my kid’s side no matter what ridiculous thing they came up with next?

We had moved to the lounge connected to the reception area, and Max had figured out how to activate the karaoke machine. There was a small stage covered in deep red carpet, and the smell of smoke was stronger. Dave propped open a side door to let in some air, and Kevin the bartender took a seat in the back of the room. He was smoking. That was how my brain was moving as it pickled in vodka: I noticed the smoke and three minutes later bothered to account for it.

Len had untucked his shirt, and its wrinkled tails pointed toward his crotch. Katherine was visibly drunk even through the ends of her hair, and I could see the loss on the both of them, the weight of it. I felt sick with sorrow, a tingling that started in my toes and traveled straight to my uterus. I was doing things like that—feeling emotions in my uterus. I had given zero thought to my uterus before age forty, and I was making up for lost time. My uterus would never go parasailing, that was clear. What other dreams of my uterus would go unfulfilled?

I decided I would sing songs with baby in the title until everyone guessed I was having infertility problems and I could finally talk about it, coax Marta and Max into a debate. I was always looking for a soft opening. Someone buying baby spinach next to me in the supermarket, say. Or Bibb lettuce. Okay, so I would talk about it to basically anyone, but there was something strange about whatever was happening at that charming inn, and I worried that wherever the night went, we couldn’t take it back.

“‘Baby Got Back,’” Dave said. He had his reading glasses on and was paging through the binder of songs. Dave is a little bit psychic like that. I had asked him a million times to reach into the future with his mind and tell me about our baby, but he wouldn’t. I was nervous he had done it and couldn’t see a baby or saw some grotesque baby. But then why would he put me through all of this, then, these goddamn appointments? Why would he do that?

Marta sat on the stage, her boots off, one toe poking out of a hole in her pumpkin-colored stockings. The skirt of her dress was covered in rainbow-flag bumper stickers. Max had put his sunglasses on and was looking over Dave’s shoulder, one wristband hovering damply over the open book. “I could go for some Pretenders,” he said.

“Baby Got Back on the Chain Gang,” Dave said, and looked up to catch my eye.

“Good one,” I said, and tried to wink. There was a new vodka tonic and a pack of gummy bears next to me on the table, but I hadn’t seen Kevin move. He still sat at the back of the room inside a cloud of smoke.

Katherine asked if I would go with her to the bathroom, just like old times, and it was on the way there that I decided the birthmark looked like Ireland. Or what I thought Ireland looked like.

“Are you Irish?” I asked her, which I did understand was not how birthmarks worked.

“Marta’s the redhead,” she said, which I took to mean she perceived me as being very drunk or she was very drunk.

“Your birthmark,” I said. “It reminds me of Ireland.”

“I’ve never been,” Katherine said.

But that’s not what I meant at all. Was it always this impossible to communicate?

We each entered a bathroom stall. I imagined that whatever happened in there, we would leave it smelling like gummy bears. As Katherine flushed, I whispered, “We’re having trouble getting pregnant.” Then I peed, then we stared strangely at one another in the mirror over the sinks as we washed our hands, then we headed back toward the lounge.

“I had my eggs frozen,” Katherine said as we walked. I almost tripped on the carpet with its psychedelic pattern.

“How did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” she said.

I was too confused to sort it out. I let her keep talking.

“I went to an all-girls college, and there was a counselor there on some sort of mission. She said strong women should consider family planning. They should follow their dreams and prioritize their minds and freeze their eggs, just in case. I didn’t want kids until I was thirty-six. And now I have four of them.”

“I see” was all I could manage to say.

“We have a bunch of frozen embryos now. We can implant one whenever we feel like it,” she continued. “I wonder if Len will want a new one now, after the accident. It would be something to distract us, right? I don’t know what else to do, how he’s going to get over this.”

“It’s terrible,” I said, to say something. And I did think that was true about Len’s brother—it was truly terrible. But what was also terrible was the outrage I felt. At Katherine, who made a new baby instead of buying a pint of ice cream or getting a therapist. At my alma mater, Penn State, who had never bothered to hire anyone to tell me to freeze my eggs.

When I wanted to be especially mean to myself, I imagined there was some kind of Darwinian thing happening: I wasn’t getting pregnant because I was not progressing evolutionarily in some ideal way. My lack of attachment to my mother or my approach to emotional spending, say, was impeding the function of my ovaries. But what Katherine was describing wasn’t survival of the fittest. It was just the survival of whoever knew that one lady.

We were back in the room with everyone else now, and Dave looked up in horror. Something about my face, I guess. I was having trouble righting my features. He knew I had to be rescued, and he began softly to sing “Oops! . . . I Did It Again” in a way I found mesmerizing. I loved him, I did.

Did our baby know I didn’t really want to have sex anymore, and would only come if I could find a way to orgasm it into conception, was holding out for a couple who really enjoyed each other in every way possible? Or maybe it was God, looking down and gauging the deserving by how connected they were sexually, bestowing the embryos on the best performers. Wouldn’t that be a bitch.

We all joined in as a group to sing the chorus, and I felt a little swell of joy right there in my uterus, just for a second.

When Dave was done, Max got up to sing “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” We all really let loose on that one. Katherine’s sweater came off and so did Len’s sandals. I was sweating a lot of different places as I gyrated under the lights on the stage. I thought it might be good to go outside and get some air. Or even to ask Kevin the bartender for a cigarette. I wondered what his story was. I hadn’t smoked in years and knew I would regret it in the morning. But the feeling I got when I imagined holding it in my hand: like I was twenty again, like I could tell myself to stop drinking and go get my eggs frozen.

I went outside the side door into the alley, and that’s where I found Kevin and Marta kissing violently against the side of the inn. Her pumpkin-colored stockings were off, just gone, and Kevin had a ball of her coconutty hair in his fist. I must have stood there for some time, because I can still see these details so clearly. I stood there until Kevin saw me. He did one of those creepy numbers they do in movies where his eyes darted over to me but he was still going at it.

I turned and went back inside, where Dave and Max were now singing “Ring of Fire,” their arms around each other’s shoulders. I walked by Len and Katherine at a small table in the front row, their sad faces upturned but blank, as if they had paid money for this show and were beginning to regret it.

I headed to the front desk. The receptionist was nowhere. I sat down on the floor with the wedding bags, their handles like little soldiers, and wondered how many I could fit on a single arm. Then Kevin showed up, the skin around his mouth all splotchy, a rainbow bumper sticker clinging to the knee of his pants.

“Uh-oh,” he said, which I didn’t understand.

“Give me a cigarette,” I said.

He lit it for me, right there in the lobby.

“You’re pretty drunk,” he said. “I don’t personally drink. I’ve seen too much.”

I wondered if he was trying to gaslight me, another experience reserved for women, thanks to that movie that showed men exactly how to do it.

“You’ve seen too much here? At this charming New England inn?” I didn’t know what it was actually called, even if it was probably written on every item in my vicinity.

“You’d be surprised,” he said.

“Surprise me.”

“Those two are wedding crashers,” he said, gesturing his head toward the karaoke, and then he blew out an impossible plume of smoke.

“Len?” I asked. The parasailing thing had seemed too extreme.

“The other two. Marta and Max.”

“You’re just saying that so I won’t tell Max what you’re up to.”

“They’re not even together. The sweatband thing is their schtick. It disarms people. Have you even seen him sweat tonight? I mean, you just swallowed that right up, didn’t you?”

“But Schetty Swins,” I said.

Kevin just inhaled smoke and squinted his sober eyes at me. “I haven’t heard that part before,” he said. “They’re upping their game.”

“Who wants to go to a wedding every weekend?” I asked. “I mean, what’s in it for them?”

“Besides the gummy bears?” That was the first time I’d seen him smile.

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “What if you’re crashing? What if you’re not actually a bartender? Anyone can make a vodka tonic, and you’re not even dressed appropriately.” This was true, I realized. He was wearing slippers.

“I’ve been watching you,” he said. “That’s what bartenders do.”

“Yeah, and so what?”

“You were raised in the ’80s, am I right?”

I looked down at my shoes to see if I was wearing too many pairs of socks, that’s how drunk I was. “I was,” I said cautiously.

“Did your parents tell you you could be whatever you wanted to be?” he asked. “’80s exceptionalism. I escaped it because my parents beat the shit out of me.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“That was a joke,” he said, not smiling.

I sat there with my mouth open, unsure how to react. And then located some letterhead next to the fax machine. The inn was called Rabbit Hill Inn. Fucking rabbits!

“You probably won’t even remember this conversation in the morning,” Kevin was saying. “That’s the thing about drunk people. I confess all kinds of things. No one remembers, even when they see me at the breakfast buffet.”

“Fine, yeah,” I said. “My parents told me I could be anything.”

“Do you think that’s true?”

“No,” I said. “I no longer think that.” It hurt a little bit to say it out loud, but forty-two—Jesus, that was how old I was—hurt in all kinds of ways. I would probably need Kevin to help me up off the floor. “Why are you asking? You’re taking a psychology class at the community college?”

“You’re a pretty normal person,” he said. “I can see that it disappoints you.”

Oof, I thought. I thought the word oof. The thing is, he was right. Dave and I owned an okay house outside of DC and had jobs where we made enough money. That was who we were, mostly like everyone else.

But actually, I wasn’t normal. I didn’t get to have what everyone else had. My 2.5 children were missing. If my life was going to be suburban banality, I deserved all of it. The whole fucking stupid picture. Didn’t I? I was having trouble breathing, but from the inside, not from the smoke.

“Marta and Max don’t want to have children, though, right?” I asked. I needed that to still be on the table.

“There is no Marta and Max.”

“She doesn’t want kids. She thinks that’s irresponsible and wrong.”

“Does she?” Kevin said.

That’s when Dave came over and grabbed the Parliament out of my hands and took a wild puff. Three years prior he had decided to quit smoking and chewed Nicorette for a year straight. It had nearly bankrupted us. It was fiscally irresponsible to allow him to take another puff. But I let him do it. I would let him do anything he seemed happy doing. Almost anything.

Dave turned to Kevin. “Why do you think this wedding isn’t happening?” he asked.

“Me?” Kevin asked. “Didn’t you two know one of the brides?”

“Not really,” Dave said, “cousin.”

“We get a lot of lesbian weddings here,” Kevin said. “They mostly always go through with it.”

“Why does anyone not go through with it?” I asked.

“Love, not being in love,” Kevin said.

“Kids, not wanting kids. Money. Sex. I mean, you know. The big stuff.”

We went out to the beach, all seven of us. The wind was less now, somehow, and the sand felt impossibly cold and soft between my toes. I did not remember where I had left my shoes. I looked out at the water, the reflection of the moon on the waves. None of it seemed possible. Maybe that’s the one gift of infertility, to see a process many people take for granted as the miracle it really is—to see everyone and everything as that miracle. The ocean was filled with creatures, and all they were charged with was making more of themselves. There had to be some of them who couldn’t do it, who couldn’t find a mate or lost their babies or just couldn’t get their parts to work. What did they do with themselves, if not raise their young? Take indulgent afternoon naps? They still ate and swam and slept and migrated and dodged our endless trash. Then they died. Either way, kids or no, you still died. That’s what I remember thinking. Right before I vomited gummy bears into the sand.

Katherine put her sweater around my shoulders. And Dave was right there. I was a little bit heartbroken for him, for having chosen me. I pictured the lube waiting at our bedside table, an exclamation point. I didn’t know then, like I know now, whether we could ever make a baby. I wanted it not to matter. I still want it not to.

Len was facing away from the ocean, toward the expanse of trees on that other side of the world. “They’re even something in the dark,” he said.

It was true. We had watched them on the way in and been astonished. We had taken blurry images from our phone while driving and then found a scenic lookout where we could stop to see the array of them, all the impossible colors of them. I decided I would ask Dave to take me to them in the morning, to lay me down on a pile of them and love me like that, before it was all too late.

Read more from Issue 19.2.