SUNDAY, MAY 11, 2008 - Gravida Hills, CA
...In other news, a Southern California suburb received a special Mother’s day gift this morning. Eight of them, in fact. At 6:36am, Gravida Hills resident, Ava Pleonexis successfully gave birth to octuplets via cesarean section at Gravida Hills General Hospital. Doctors present commented that the mother was surprisingly calm and composed during the 45 minute procedure.
A behavior not unprecedented considering Miss Pleonexis has been a frequent guest of the Gravida Hills delivery room, having visited for the births of six preceding children including a recent set of fraternal twins.
Now a mother of 14, 32 year-old Ava says she’s grateful for the blessing of so many healthy children.
Now turning to the local-
BZZZIP
Sally scowled sourly at the blank screen as the last static hum of color and image receded into the dark grey television tube.
“That bitch is going to make millions,” she thought to herself as she pulled her large frame from the wooden rocking chair, “and she’s probably not even a real Christian.”
Tossing the remote haphazardly over the back of the couch, Sally ambled into the kitchen where her husband Richard was sitting at the counter reading the Sunday paper. He was still wearing his sport coat while his favorite tie fell in a lopsided wilt where he had loosened it upon returning from church.
“Hey honey, did you see this article about the woman with the eight babies?”
Sally cringed visibly at his question as she retrieved a box of snack cakes from the cupboard above the sink,
“It was just on the news,” she replied with the enthusiasm of a recently crippled cheerleader, “I don’t think it’s fair! I’ve been wanting a baby of my own for years and she just gets eight all at once?!”
Her exclamation came out louder than she’d intended causing Richard to put down the paper.
“Sweetheart,” his tone was almost as deflated as her uterus, “I’m sorry I haven’t been able give you any children.”
“Well it would help if you actually tried every once in awhile!” she snapped while unwrapping the creme-filled cupcake.
They had the same argument every Mother’s day. When Richard Wiltington had first met Sally Baron the two of them agreed on one thing: Children. And lots of them. However, as a result of their strict adherence to premarital abstinence, neither had been given the opportunity to realize that Richard had a serious problem until after they were signed, sealed and committed.
Their wedding night had been nothing short of a travesty. After hours of coaxing, frisking, and multiple attempts at soggy felatio (she was desperate and she felt God would understand), Sally eventually went to sleep telling herself it was just Richard’s nerves. Richard went into the bathroom and cried.
With every following wedding anniversary and Mother’s Day, Sally and Richard’s hope for offspring diminished faster than Richard’s sperm count. As a means of filling the awkward void left by their painfully lacking sex life, Richard turned to various publications of the men’s study Bible while Sally turned to food. Richard’s avid studies eventually resulted in the publication of his own men’s devotional while Sally’s avid consumption resulted in her weighing over three hundred pounds. And now in their seventh year of being the only couple from their small group without a maternal excuse to miss the usual Sunday evening meeting (everyone else was having Mother’s Day brunch at Denny’s then doing something family-ish like picnicking or watching Veggie-Tales) the two of them felt ever more despondent over their shortcomings as good Christians.
“I’ve tried everything I can, dear,” Richard’s dejection was made all the more palatable by the cracking in his voice, “you know I have.”
Sally had to admit Richard’s efforts had been nothing short of valiant: prayer, counseling, and even a small amount of *gasp* masturbation (again, God would overlook it due to Sally and Richard’s honorable intentions).
“Oh, Richard,” Sally said through a mouthful of greasy chocolate cake, “I didn’t mean to come off so critically.” She had begun to feel terribly cruel for blowing up all over Richard when he was all but desperate to do the same for her.
“It’s just that we’re running out of excuses for the Quiverfull group. What are we going to say the next time they ask us what we’re doing to contribute to God’s army?”
“We can always say just what we’ve said before: we’re waiting until God tells us it’s our time,” Richard offered.
“I don’t think they’ll accept that much longer,” countered Sally, “and soon they’re going to ask us to leave the group. You know sometimes I think I ought to just...”
Sally’s voice trailed off.
“What,” asked Richard somewhat urgently, “you ought to just what?”
After a pregnant pause, Sally spoke, “I’m just saying that it might be a good idea for me to visit Dr. Foreman and discuss my options.” Sally neglected to look at what she knew would be an expression of dented pride on the waxy brow of her now crestfallen husband.
Long ago they had mostly ruled out the option of artificial impregnation. Richard said it felt emasculating. But Sally was desperate.
Another pause allowed Sally a fresh mouthful of frosting while Richard fought the building indignation that threatened to squeeze its way out of his well-used tear ducts. Sally swallowed and then went on, ignoring his display of weakness.
“If only I could just find a baby and bring it with us next week.” Richard shifted uncomfortably on his barstool.
“Don’t you think they’d be a little suspicious if you and I just showed up to group with a baby when you haven’t been pregnant at all up until now,” he asked.
“Not if we tell them we’ve been keeping it to ourselves,” Sally responded with an odd glint in her glassy eyes, the last of the snack cake now framing the corners of her chomping mouth. She continued while reaching for another cellophane-wrapped snack.
“We could say that we weren’t wanting to bring attention to ourselves and we could just tell them I don’t show easily!”
Her excitement was so thorough at this point that the still-wrapped snack cake had been squeezed to a nearly unrecognizable pulp.
“But where are we going to get this surprise baby,” Richard inquired without shielding his incredulity.
“I don’t know,” continued Sally, still elated by her strange plan, “that woman in Gravida Hills has fourteen kids! I’m sure she could do without one.” Sally’s gaze was now straight ahead looking at nothing in particular as she tore off the corner of the once decorative confection and proceeded to shovel the decimated morsels into her plump face.
Richard was beginning to feel slightly alarmed at his wife’s fervor and tried to think of a way to calm her down before she did something brash. The last time she had tried to scheme up a child she had proposed volunteering at the local Zoo’s lost and found and taking home any “leftover babies.”
It had taken Richard nearly two weeks and countless boxes of snack cakes to curb Sally’s “brilliant idea.” And as much as it pained him to suggest, Richard knew that the only way to convince Sally of an alternate course of action was to give her something she wanted.
And he was pretty sure that snack cakes wouldn’t do it this time.
“Why don’t you make an appoint with Dr. Foreman first thing tomorrow?”
Everything in the room stopped for a moment. Richard looked at Sally. Sally looked at Richard. A hefty squeeze of white filling dripped from the corner of Sally’s mouth and onto Richard’s paper.
“Really?” Sally’s inquisitiveness softened her slightly.
“Really,” responded Richard, relieved to see her calming down, “I mean, we don’t need to make any final decisions right away but it would be a good idea to know our options.”
“Richard, I- I-” Sally struggled to think of a way to express her gratitude to the waifish little man in front of her, “Thank you. With everything in me, (“and everything I hope to have in me,” she silently added), thank you.”
With that, she bounded from the room heading to her closet where she hoped to pick out the perfect muumuu for her visit to the Sperm Doctor.
Richard turned back to his paper, wiping the creme off of the photo of Ava Pleonexis adjacent to the article he had been reading.
* * * * *
Sally had arrived at Dr. Foreman’s office twenty minutes prior to her afternoon appointment. Having called just after dawn, she’d left several massages requesting to be put on the wait list in the event that any of the doctor’s Monday appointments happened to cancel stating that she was “very much anticipating him getting her pregnant”.
The receptionist called her just after 9am, immediately asking rather dryly if she knew that Dr. Foreman was a fertility specialist and not a male escort. Sally laughed a gooey and shrill staccato guffaw, informing the woman that she was fully aware of the doctor’s profession. If there’s one thing Sally was never called, it was quick.
The receptionist grudgingly proceeded to make an appointment for Sally in the early afternoon and then promptly hung up, bringing the call to a curt close by hurriedly informing Sally that the doctor would answer any questions she had during the appointment.
After two sizable breakfasts, a donut break, lunch, and an early first dinner, Sally didn’t have any other meals to distract her before the appointment so she ate some snack cakes and then drove herself downtown to the doctor’s office.
She busied herself in the waiting room by looking through the baby magazines she’d purchased along with her box of chocolate covered donuts from the gas station on the corner.
By the fourth time she approached the receptionist’s desk to ask about how soon the doctor would see her, the receptionist refrained from responding in speech and simply handed her a tissue from the box on her desk.
Sally took it gratefully, using it to noisily blow her nose. The receptionist had intended it for the donut crumbs on her cheeks.
Just then Dr. Foreman stepped through the door behind the desk and Sally’s already overhauled heart went into turbo as the anticipation overtook her massive form.
“Sally Baron-Wiltington,” his voice was immediately drowned out by the overzealous noise made by Sally. What was originally intended to sound something like “yes” or “here” came out as an elephantic trumpet blare of thrill and exuberance.
Dr. Foreman looked over his clipboard first at Sally and then at the receptionist with whom he shared a “what in the bloody Hell is this monolith doing in my waiting room” look.
He then escorted Sally with a saccharine smile into the first examination room where he stated that he would be with her shortly. Sally was so elated that she couldn’t sit still. She then decided it better if she get ready for the doctor before he returned in order to save time.
Dr. Jorge Foreman was an average man. Five foot ten, just under 190, full head of greying brown hair, and a job he really hated. With every new day he came into contact with more and more people so mindlessly oversexed and hopelessly irresponsible that he wished he could just diagnose them all as infertile and feed them cyanide tablets. If it weren’t for the fact that these greedy breeders paid his way to Hawaii and back twice a year, he would have quit years prior and tried his hand at acting.
No amount of acting could have disguised his reaction upon entering Sally’s room.
She stood in the middle of the white-walled space with her arms out stretched and her legs spread like a Staypuft marshmallow version of DaVinci’s man. And she was completely naked.
Jorge wanted to shut his eyes and turn around but it would have been no use. The ghastly image of Sally’s gargantuan form would be forever burned into his memory. He wanted to vomit.
“Miss Wiltington-”
“It’s Baron-Wiltington. There’s a hyphen,” interrupted Sally with an eager smile. Jorge was surprised she knew what a hyphen was.
“Miss Baron-Wiltington-”
“Misses Baron-Wiltington. I’m married. See?” She said, gesturing toward the ring on her left ring finger. Jorge noted that it was the only article she’d kept on. Most likely because she couldn’t remove it from her pudgy finger.
“Misses. Baron. Wiltington,” Jorge tried to maintain himself, “please put on your clothing. This is not a physical examination. I’m simply administering an intake.”
Sally’s whole demeanor shifted and it seemed like the cheer drained from her and she appeared to momentarily sag a bit more than usual. Jorge stepped out in order that she might sheepishly redress. Once she was finished and he reentered, the remainder of their interaction was terse and brief.
“Have you ever seen a fertility specialist before?”
“No.”
“Are you having a regular menstrual cycle?”
“Yes.”
“Does your family have a history of infertility?”
“No.”
“Are you presently sexually active?”
Silence.
Jorge looked up from his notes and realized that Sally was staring quite intently over his shoulder. Checking behind himself, Jorge noticed that the chart where she was looking depicted a cross-sectional rendition of a penis penetrating a vagina.
“Miss-” Jorge caught himself, “Mrs. Baron-Wiltington?”
Sally started slightly and looked at Jorge as if he’d just woken her from a light nap.
“I’m sorry, I must have gotten distracted,” Sally laughed nervously following the excuse and immediately began fumbling through her purse, retrieving a candy bar.
“Look,” began Jorge, “why are you really here?”
“I’m here for the same reason as anybody,” replied Sally overly cheerily as she focused on tearing open the wrapper, “I want to have a baby!”
Jorge thought carefully before responding, “Sally, have you thought about just why you want to have a baby?”
“Dr. Foreman,” said Sally with a tone of familiarity (he had seen her naked after all), “I don’t expect you to understand this but God wants me to have a child- well, children, really. We’re all called to have children in order to add to His holy army!”
Jorge was dumbfounded. Sally continued, “In the Bible, God calls us to have a family like a quiver full of arrows. Always at the ready to uphold His name.”
The contrast between the gravitas in her voice and the smile on her face made Jorge mildly uncomfortable. What had originally been meant as a heartfelt line of questioning had now become a venture into yet another form of the twisted psyche that made abortion clinics across the nation install bullet proof windows and escape tunnels. And Jorge was no longer interested in playing audience to an obese fundamentalist’s views on the holiness of parenthood.
“Well Mrs. Baron-Wiltington, that’s all well and good but I’m not sure if you’re at a point physiologically where it would be wise to attempt pregnancy. I’m recommending you receive a full physical- and psychological assessment from your family physician before I take you on as a prospective patient.”
Sally’s smile disappeared completely. She shoved the partially opened candy bar back into her purse.
“What do you mean I’m not at a good point? Are you saying I can’t get pregnant because I’m fat?!”
“Of course not,” Jorge responded quickly, “I’m simply stating that your body would be put through a great deal of additional duress if you were to conceive and it would be a good idea to understand how ready you are to sustain such rigors.”
Sally stared at Jorge’s face, blinking in surrender.
“I’ll have my receptionist make you a followup appointment for a month from now. Visit your personal practitioner for a check up and have him compile your results and send them to my office.”
Jorge removed a small set of stapled sheets from his clipboard.
“Give this examination sheet to your doctor and have him fill it out and send it back to my office. It will let me know whether or not I ought to continue with this procedure.”
Sally took the stack of paper cautiously and was about to place it in her purse as well but thought better of it and tucked the sheets beneath her arm instead.
“Thank you Doctor,” she said crisply as she stood to leave, “I can assure you that I am in excellent health and I’ll look forward to seeing you in a month.”
And with that, she left. Jorge sighed heavily and then went promptly to his desk to look up flight schedules to Hawaii. Just after he instructed the receptionist to have calls from Sally’s home number blocked.
* * * * *
Arriving home, Sally felt humiliated. The dream doctor she had cooked up in her head was nothing like the hateful little prick she’d just experienced. Not at a good point? Who the Hell was he to tell here whether or not she should have a baby? His job was to give her one and then step off. At present, she felt he had failed on both counts.
The real truth of the matter was that she knew her physician would say just what he had been saying for the past seven years: “You need to stop the compulsive eating, do some serious cardio, and embrace your sex life.”
Embrace her sex life? She might as well have been telling Sally to go buy a vibrator (something Sally had seriously considered on multiple occasions but never gone through with on account of God’s frowning on the idea). And that made Sally think of Richard. What would she tell him? She couldn’t bear to admit after all of the nagging and pleading that finally visiting the fertility doctor had yielded little more than a much needed membership to Weight Watchers.
As it was, she was home and so was he. The men’s devotional had garnered them a series of handsome royalty checks which permitted Richard to work only part time while spending the rest of his week hunched over the computer composing his next brilliant gem of Christian self help literature. She would need to tell something. Preferably something impressive.
“I’m pregnant!” She squealed.
It just popped out.
“You’re what?!” Richard nearly fell over from standing so quickly.
There was no going back now, Sally was stuck in this one.
“Yeah, pregnant! I, uh, I need to, uh, go in for a, um, series of hormone treatments over the next few months. Yeah, and, um, well...” Sally was unsure how to continue so she just decided to stop there.
Richard slowly sat back down, lowering his head into his hands. Neither spoke for several minutes. Richard just kept raising his head and opening his mouth like he was ready to say something only to close it and lower his head again. Finally, he spoke.
“How could you do this without me?” There were years of hurt and volumes of disbelief in his disparaging voice.
“Oh, Richard,” Sally was caught somewhere between comforting and conniving, “it wasn’t without you. I, um, I felt like I would have your blessing on this. It’s for our quiver.” She finished in what she hoped he would take to be a complimenting and fulfilling tone.
“Whose sperm was it? How do you know for sure? Why do you need more hormones? What about my hormones? Will it even be my baby?” The questions flowed out of Richard like bathtub faucet water.
“It was an, um, anonymous donor,” Sally began to realize that she was in way over her head.
“An anonymous donor?!” Richard’s volume shot into unpracticed heights, “how in the world could you accept the seed of some man you’ve- we’ve never met?!”
“Doctor Foreman assured me that it was a good choice!” Sally knew she was going to need to do some fancy footwork to get out of this. And for someone who had difficulty navigating stairs due to sheer tonnage, the prospect was daunting at best.
“Doctor Foreman? I’ve never even met this Doctor Foreman. What’s the number to his office? I’m calling to talk to that sonuvagun right now!”
Sally suddenly saw the end of her pride (and possibly her marriage) in shockingly close proximity and began to panic.
“But- but-” Sally knew her number was up. Sighing, she resigned to imminent defeat. She handed Richard the stack of papers from Doctor Foreman’s office and he snatched them from her with the passion of a man on a mission.
Riffling through the stack, he quickly found the page with the office’s contact information and tore it out allowing the remaining sheets to fall on the floor.
As he dialed Sally held her breath. There was nothing she could do now. She was so worried she didn’t even want to eat. Richard waited with the receiver to his ear, his face scrunched into a vengeful grimace.
He waited.
And waited.
“There’s no ring,” he finally said. Sally let the breath she’d been holding out. She was safe for a moment.
“I’ll try again,” said Richard with determination. And once again Sally was rocketed into the tension only someone caught in their own trap can experience.
And again there was no ring. Sally knew better than to think it was all over just like that. As Richard reached for the received to dial a third time the digital tone of an incoming call startled both of them causing Richard to actually fall down this time taking Sally with him (no easy task considered her weight being twice his).
While Richard struggled to snatch up the call, Sally had begun to pick herself up when something caught her eye. What was left of the stack of papers from the doctor’s office laid in a disheveled pile just beneath the chair Richard had been sitting in. Sally overheard him standing above her speaking with some level of returning calm and realized that the caller was Andy Watersworth, the leader of their Sunday small group. Neither Richard nor Sally could afford to have their church group know they had been fighting, much less about pregnancy. What would the group think?
Sally was temporarily relieved, assuming that the men would be talking for awhile. This allowed her to direct her attentions to the papers on the floor. As she reached her husky forearm through the legs of both her husband and the chair, she made sure not to disturb him so as to cause his attention to be drawn downward.
Pulling the leaves of wrinkled print to where she could better decipher them, she saw that there was handwriting on the back side of the second sheet from the top of the stack. As she read over it she felt a shiver of excitement and disbelief all at the same time. The writing read:
Ava Pleonexis
1649 SW Clearhaven Ct.
Gravida Hills, CA 91341
* * * * *
(To be continued)
