Franky
* * *
“You want me to do what?”
I had expected this would go smoother. What I was asking of one of my closest friends was a rather basic request.
Give me this thing you have no need for, something you produce, often involuntarily, and dispose of every day.
Assuming a healthy male with an average sex drive, his sperm was constantly renewing and regular ejaculation helped to prevent prostate cancer. All I was asking was that Sean Isner, my friend of many years, consider his health and donate some of that product instead of flushing it down the shower drain or balling it up in a tissue.
Basic.
But Sean was not greeting my request with logic—given his job as a director of technology for a bank in Boston, I had hoped for better. As he was visiting his Chicago-based family for a couple of days, asking in person had seemed like the appropriate way to handle this. Phone conversations contained too many pauses and the inability to assess body language or facial cues. Texts were no better, though I did like the idea that I could have written something. Planned the wording.
Perhaps I hadn’t made it clear enough that I wanted nothing more than his genetic material.
“I would just need a specimen, Sean.” Still confused, apparently. “To make a baby.”
The mention of “a baby” seemed to wake him up from his stupor, transforming his expression from vacuous blankness to a darker disquiet.
“You want a baby? With me?”
“Not with you. That’s the point. You would not be obligated beyond the contribution of your sperm. I already have a contract drawn up that would absolve you of any further responsibility. No child support, parental visits, Christmas presents … I would be raising the offspring myself and wouldn’t need a man by my side.”
Rather than shine light on the matter, my breakdown of the facts only seemed to confuse him further. Giving him a moment to adjust, I caught my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Messy hair piled high; a Lakeshore U sweatshirt over jeans; fetching blue duct-taped glasses (broken during a recent field trip to the shores of Lake Michigan in search of a different kind of specimen, a Bithynia tentaculate, also known as a mud snail). Should I have dressed more formally for the occasion?
Or perhaps I had chosen the wrong venue for this kind of discussion. But Rosie had said Sean was leaving for Boston tomorrow, a day earlier than I’d assumed, so I’d hightailed it over to her apartment at her dinner invite—tacos, my favorite—and hadn’t even had time to change or drop off my specimens at the university lab.
I took a quick look at them now. One of them, a Viviparus georgianus, also known as a mystery banded snail, hadn’t moved very far. It was still sitting in the corner of my sister’s bathtub, contemplating its new surroundings. The other, slightly smaller specimen had attached itself to the shower curtain, leaving a trail of mucin—snail slime—as it inched along, looking for an escape.
Not unlike how Sean looked now.
“Franky,” he said, sounding a touch exasperated. Probably because we were discussing something important and my attention was diverted by my work. Story of my life.
“Yes?”
“Why now? And why me?”
I’d already explained it to Rosie and her roommate Summer a few minutes ago in the kitchen. The clock, in common parlance, was ticking. More like booming, a bomb about to explode, where the resulting rubble was a childless future. I had spent the last month making plans and prioritizing my list of candidates.
Sean was at the top of it. He met all my requirements: intelligent, healthy, and unattached. I had a few other criteria, but those were the primary ones. My method was largely scientific, except for one fuzzier variable.
Many of the candidates on my list were hockey players. I knew this world and the people in it, which might seem strange for a woman with my professional interests. Not that I straddled both worlds seamlessly, but my family and friend connections did widen the candidate pool.
After years of studying the hockey player species, I had concluded that they were either hopelessly devoted to one woman (or man) or exceedingly promiscuous. That latter category interested me most, but I was also concerned that they would think I was after their fame or wealth. That I’d be viewed as weird, desperate, or unworthy of a pro-athlete’s genetic waste product.
Enter the other category on my list: friends and colleagues. My peers. Sean was smart, well-adjusted, and possessed of exactly the kind of temperament I would like to pass on to my child. I had assumed that temperament would be more open to my request.
“I want a child, Sean. I’m at the stage of my life where I crave a certain fulfillment that I can’t get from work or friends or my cats.” Apologies, Beaker and Bunsen, you know I love you. “I would like to be a mother and my options for the more traditional route—meet someone, date someone, connect with someone—are limited and becoming more so each day.”
His expression softened. “It’s kind of out there.”
Was it? In this day and age, with women carving their own paths and wielding more economic and social power than ever before, was it so unusual? But then women’s rights, especially reproductive ones, had done an about-face in the last few years. So-called “traditional values” allied with my least favorite mis-prefixed word, misogyny, meant that people often looked at more unorthodox journeys to parenthood with a certain slitty-eyed judgment.
Perhaps he needed more information.
“We wouldn’t have to engage in sexual intercourse. This would be a purely transactional endeavor with no intimacy required. I would need to be present, of course—” At his horrified look, I quickly clarified. “In another room. Ready to receive the specimen.”
