NONFICTION

Body Work

By Kate Lister Campbell     VOLUME 55 No. 3 & 4

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The reception room at the fertility clinic is pleasant enough, white walls and blue chairs, a coffee urn, the tasteless mini muffins served in corporate conference rooms. On the walls, framed magazine articles tout the success of Dr. Z, who will not be my doctor but oversees this floor and the bigger one upstairs. BABY BOY JOY AT 45 shouts one cover, alongside an attractive blonde holding a newborn. BABY HAS THREE PARENTS shouts another about Dr. Z’s innovative, if out-there-sounding, mitochondrial DNA replacements. Dr. Z is pictured on a video monitor. He has berry-pink lips and a delicate hollow at the base of his throat, visible above the lapels of his white coat. A tinkle of piano drifts from invisible speakers, anesthetized classical favorites. A large ficus separates the waiting area from the blood-drawing chairs. My husband and I sit on a blue plastic couch to fill out our forms.

“I like this guy,” my husband says, taking in the magazine covers. “He seems a little crazy. Seems like he’ll get it done.”

I laugh. That first day, we both laugh a great deal in the waiting room, mostly at the packet of information they’ve given us. A diagram page shows how many injections are required for each type of in vitro fertilization—conventional, mini, and “no needle” (which still requires a needle or two). Clusters of emoji-like blue syringes hover over three timelines. The medications and their functions are explained, with no mention of cost.

“Oh my God, I’m not doing that one,” I say, pointing at the sixty-needle option. I lean over, guffawing.

One brochure in our packet—there are more scattered over the coffee table in front of us—promotes “ovarian ozone therapy,” which entails being shut up in a plastic pod, with only your head sticking out, while something happens inside. Pressure, heating, cooling? It doesn’t say, and I never learn.

The other patients are mostly women alone, but two other nervous-looking couples shift in their chairs across from us. No one speaks above a whisper except my husband and me. We breezily discuss our dinner plans as well as other mundane but ego-affirming topics—the tennis clinic we’re going to in Saugerties, the consulting projects we’re working on. I’m wearing a full-skirted black dress and heeled sandals, crossing and re-crossing my legs, flipping my hair. We’re performing. This performance is a way of holding on to the selves I could feel slipping away the moment we crossed the threshold into the blue-and-white room. Our play is called We Are Very Happy In Our Lives Just As They Are. This is both true and untrue. We’ve been happy for many years, but something is changing.

“I feel it in my body, this desire for a child,” my husband says in our therapist’s office. I don’t feel it, though I’ve been waiting to for ten years. Neither do I feel a not-wanting. A mushy, idealized yes inhabits the right side of my chest, alongside memories of my younger sister and niece, their baby heads heavy in the crook of my arm, their child-forms leaping and laughing. A heavily protesting no inhabits the left, screaming at my rank sentimentality, reminding me of the fate of other mothers in my family—the truncation of freedom, depression, a warping of their lives that led to cruelty or endless drifting. The two sides of this argument pull against each other like demons who will rip me neck to navel.

I want to stop that ripping.


Our appointment with Dr. M is at ten, and we’re called in at eleven. The music stops, and we’re in another, even whiter, room with a view overlooking Columbus Circle and a sliver of Central Park. Dr. M is a slight woman, very mild, with the face of a little girl though she’s middle aged. She wears her hair in the kind of long, even curtain worn by my mother in her ’71 Chi O sorority photo. Her white coat covers her wrists and goes almost to her knuckles. In high school, we girls were always told: Take your hands out of your sleeves, get some confidence. On Dr. M, I find the shyness comforting. I don’t fear her, though not fearing isn’t the same as liking.

“Sorry for the wait. Everyone’s ovulating today,” she says. “Sorry for” are the words I’ll hear most often from her over the next year and a half. Her voice is a graveled squawk. She doesn’t speak in a hurried way, but as we ask questions, it becomes clear some words are worth her time and others she’s subcontracted out to the nurses to speed things along.

Nothing is obviously wrong with either of us; I’m just old, forty in three months. We’re not a special case, so we’re in the office for less than ten minutes then taken to a nurse, who explains the medications and other details. We wait again under the BABY BOY JOY article for our blood draws. The veins in my right arm are deep, the phlebotomist says; the left ones are more accessible. By the end of my time here, I’ll be able to direct the nurse to the exact vein she should use on any given day, knowing how recently each has been tapped. I’ll only cry out a couple of times, when new techs are hired who don’t know my veins. I’ll always watch the needle go in, though they tell me not to. I prefer to see the cause of pain.

Our blood flows like wine into vials labelled with our names and birthdays. The nurse directs us to one of the exam rooms Dr. M has been moving frenetically between all morning. A bed with stirrups, an ultrasound machine, the silver-tongued speculum, a pixelated print of Monet’s Waterlilies from Art.com. The blinds are down, but I can hear the traffic on Fifty-Eighth Street. My husband sits in a chair by the door. I want him to watch my examination. I wish his body could do the work of pregnancy. I want his comfort in this room, but I also want to rub something in his face: Look what I’m doing for you, for us. I lean on his shoulder as I remove my underwear, then bunch my skirt around my waist on the table and spread the paper sheet across my lap.

Dr. M and her assistant enter. The ultrasound probe is like a skinny dildo with a little ball on top. She presses it far into my vagina until I’m drawing deep breaths and wincing in pain. The fingers of her other hand press on my lower abdomen, aggravating an old scar from a previous surgery.

“Sorry for the pressure. Your ovaries are posterior.”

Series of numbers issue from her small mouth and are typed into my file by the assistant. These correspond to the dark masses she’s measuring on the screen—follicle size and number, thickness of uterine lining. Here, she speaks with more authority than in her office. A screen over my head shows me what she’s seeing. She makes a yellow cross over each follicle, where the eggs are growing, like a blessing. She withdraws. I close my knees.

“Okay, thanks for coming in,” she says, as she will say each visit as she runs out the door.

When I hop up and get tissues to clean the lubricant from my crotch, I ask my husband to close his eyes while I squat and wipe. It’s too close to a toileting gesture.

We leave the building and separate—my husband heads downtown to a meeting, I stroll up Broadway toward the library where I write. It’s the last day of September, hot, but the noon sun has autumn amber in it as it falls through the leaves of the trees in the medians. On my way uptown, I stop at Duane Reade to buy an economy-sized bottle of prenatal vitamins that rattles in my purse as I walk through what feels like a strange new world.


Later in the day, I receive my first email from the clinic with the subject line: INSTRUCTIONS—92275, which is my ID number. The staff use it to refer to me internally--Is 92275 in Exam Five or Six?—though they try not to call me this number directly. DEAR KATE, the form email begins, though later I’ll receive ones that simply read DEAR ______. I’m told which medications to swallow, inject, or push up my vagina at bedtime and when to return for a blood draw and exam. These are phrased as suggestions--Dr. M recommends—but they’re really commands. On a light week, I’ll learn, I might be summoned to the office twice. Closer to ovulation, once I start IVF, I might have to go six days in a week. It doesn’t matter if I have a meeting Monday morning or if I want to take a long weekend or if it’s Sunday or Christmas Day. My life is irrelevant to my ovaries. They have no interest in my goals or desires. For many years, I feared a child would make me insignificant in exactly this way. I wonder aloud if this process is some kind of training, if the procedures of the clinic are meant to mimic the sacrifices supposedly required in motherhood.

“Having a child isn’t the same as going to the fertility clinic every day,” my husband says, his patience strained.

“How is it not?” I ask, in my outraged voice. “I get up early. I’m exhausted. I don’t have control over my schedule—”

Please stop, his look says.

“I wish you had an easier wife,” I say. He doesn’t take the bait, doesn’t say, me too.



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TO READ MORE FROM THIS ESSAY, PICK UP A COPY OF VOL 55 No. 3&4



KATE LISTER CAMPBELL's writing has appeared in Granta Online, North American Review, Salamander, and Nashville Review, among others. She serves as an assistant fiction editor for Four Way Review and can be found on Twitter at @KListerCampbell.


VOLUME 55 No. 3 & 4