Mom’s eyes are on the ultrasound as she inserts the catheter into my cervix. Her latex gloves are purple and make her hand feel less cold against my knee. I turned twenty-eight today, and she thinks I’m ready. My grandmother had impregnated her at twenty-four, but Mom says it’s gauche to get pregnant so young in this century. The instruments then were different, but the result has always been the same. I feel a pinch and wince. I haven’t had alcohol in months. I’ve been eating organic. I’ve been tracking my ovulation and noting the viscosity of discharge. I have not forgotten to take a single multivitamin. I’ve been painting a mural in the extra room in my new house, the two-bedroom I always knew I’d have. We aren’t a family of excess, and I won’t be needing any more space.
“Done,” she says, removing the speculum. She throws away the device and peels off her gloves. There are benefits to having a mother who is a gynecologist. This is not one of them. “You can get changed now,” she tells me. “Good job, baby.”
I take my time standing, feeling sore and cramping from the invasion. My bladder is uncomfortably full with the water I drank to prepare. “So, I take the test in two days to make sure?”
“Mhm. You’re pretty lucky, actually. With you I had to wait two weeks to get a result.” I shuffle to the bathroom as she speaks, leaving the door open a crack to hear her. “Unless we asked your great grandma. She could always tell those things.”
I press the soft flesh above my pubic area, feeling for some difference, before pulling my dress over my head and sliding on my underwear. “What should I name her?”
“Anything you want. That you can choose.”
I think I already know.
Mom has these stunning hazel eyes; they look like planets with gold and green and flecks of blue in the left one. I am missing the blue flecks and cling to this evidence that we are not the same. Her pattern of freckles and moles varies slightly, her accumulated scars are more numerous, and her skin is folded and lined. In every other way we are identical, in appearance and otherwise. We both like pepper in our macaroni and cheese. We tap our right foot to the same pop songs on first listen, and neither of us can parallel park without using automated drive. If she’d practice, she’d probably paint just as well as I do, understanding the ways colors form and blend. Mom says this is why we get along, that it’s easier to love and care for yourself. Though she’s my best friend, I’ve never been so sure this is true.
I think of all the lovers I’ve had, how their bodies compare to my own. Their hands smaller or wider, their anatomy different or the same. Eyes like clear lakes or dark and deep. I’ve tallied the ways they were different. Kinder, larger, more beautiful. I remember their voices, their smells, the things I might have loved about them. I wonder what it would be like to mix myself up with someone—make something new.
When people see Mom and I together, when they meet her at my gallery showings, they brighten with recognition. “You look so much like your mother.” She’s never missed an event, and her colleagues from other practices decorate their offices with my work. She laughs and carries a glass of wine, a skewer of cheese. “Good genes,” she says. Mom has always been better with people. They gape when my grandmother joins us, her silver hair long and wild. It’s like a gradient of age, side-by-side comparisons showing what happens over time.
When I lose inspiration or fall into melancholy, mom and I take long drives to new places—wide redwoods or deep valleys of evergreens. We camp and roast marshmallows, eat s’mores with peanut butter cups. We listen for the hoots of owls and the coos of mourning doves. She tells me what helped her through her sadness when she was young. She has done so much for me. She reads aloud while I paint the corners and creases of insect bodies, the moss under rocks and places where shadows meet, the joints of saplings grafted onto the rootstock of other trees.
We have one photobook in the drawer by Mom’s bed, the same one where she keeps her dream journal amid emptied tubes of Chapstick and overstretched hair ties tangled with long black hair. She pulls it out every few years and we sit cross-legged on her bed. This time we are eating popcorn with M&Ms mixed in to celebrate my procedure, and I search the bottom for melting candy amid the kernels. Usually we avoid photographs, but once or twice Mom has pulled out an old camera to document a special event. She will bring it to my baby shower, to my daughter’s 1st and 18th birthdays. Until then, I will paint her, mask her in impressionism or cubism. I’ll add her to my portfolio alongside watercolors inspired by satellite images, acrylic triptychs of animal embryos sharing the same womb.
This photobook is old. Some of the pictures are printed on flat, dimensionless photo paper, like Mom’s medical school graduation ceremony. Others are faded and peeling, printed on polaroid squares that Mom says her great grandmother pulled from the camera and shook to get the image to show. It’s eerie looking at so many generations of my face, as if I’d lived through all these centuries. There I am in black and white with a broken arm at a drive-in theater. There I am wearing a cat on my head like a fur cap. There I am smoking a lipstick-stained cigarette and leaning against the brick wall of a building that burned down before I was born. There I am, sitting with a rag over my shoulder and arm out of my bra strap, holding myself.
On federal documents I don’t bother with a suffix; I don’t know how many of us there have been. My grandmother told me that once there were twins, the same first name with different middle initials. The embryo split in two, a replica of a clone. This is why we hide the book, because it’s harder to ignore the uncanny resemblance when there are no years in between. Because cloning is still illegal. Because even I don’t fully believe my mom when she tells me how they used to do it before. Because in all the photos there is not one man.
When I take the test, it is positive. I decide to name her Evelyn, just like me. Just like Mom, Grandma, and other women who came before. The name has never troubled me. “Good choice,” says Mom, brushing my hair from my eyes and kissing the bridge of my nose. She makes a few calls to colleagues to schedule my tubal ligation, rather than perform the procedure after delivery, because I will have a home birth. I won’t be able to have more than one, and though I rarely have sex with men my mother wants to be sure. It is important that my baby receive all my nutrients, all my attention for her own. It is important that she carries the same, undiluted code. A means of preservation.
Mom and Grandma take me to my first ultrasound. We decide to go to another gynecologist so Mom can enjoy it fully, so it all feels more official. My great-grandmother missed this day by less than a year. Breast cancer. Grandma had her breast tissue removed last week, and Mom plans to do the same in a few years. In fact, she’s already called and made an appointment. I’d been chopping banana peppers for our morning omelets, and she’d been arguing with the receptionist about the date. If there’s anything my family knows how to do, it’s plan ahead.
Which is why, the morning before my in-vitro, I lied to my mother for the first time I can remember. She’d invited me out for brunch, but I told her I was meeting with the gallery owner, and I’d meet her at her practice later. Really, I was washing away evidence. I’d been thinking about this for years, doing research and driving by the fertility clinic, though until the days before my procedure I wasn’t sure I’d go through with it. But when I called, they told me the process couldn’t be rushed. I panicked. I called an ex from college. I’d see him every few years if one of us wasn’t seeing someone. I held his hips to my body with my legs while he finished, then woke up early the next morning to drive an hour back home. Even though I didn’t say a word, I suppose that was a lie too.
“Do you want to know the baby’s sex?”
I look at the screen. The doctor is about to press a device to my belly. He has warmed the lubricant before applying it to my skin, over genetically predisposed stretch marks left over from puberty. I imagine them long and pink, widening as my stomach grows. I remember their itch and sting.
“I already know it’s a girl,” I say, though I don’t really.
My grandmother tightens her grip on my shoulder, wrinkled knuckles flexing white. The doctor makes a joke about a woman’s intuition, but still his eyebrows raise in modest surprise when he locates the parts that identify her as female. He explains the image to us, and my mother lets him, pretending she doesn’t already know. I don’t know what my mother would do if she knew what I’d done when it was still early enough to undo it, if the baby were a boy. I wondered if she’d remove him herself. I don’t know what it would do to us if she knew I’d deceived her. I look at the screen to see the fist-sized daughter I’d always been told would be mine, and I suppress a sigh of relief.
To me, most babies look the same—the way their eyes start out grey, their noses round protrusions on fat-cheeked faces, potato feet, hair or no hair. I have never held a baby. I have no nieces or nephews or cousins. Since college, I’ve had few friends beyond my mother and grandmother, many of them artists like me, and none of them have children. Nobody has ever asked me to hold their child in line at the grocery store, and I’ve never been asked to babysit. I wonder how many babies my mother has held, fresh from the womb and crying. I’m always surprised when I remember a baby is not born with teeth. Once, I had sex with a pregnant woman at a conference, and I swore something moved as I felt my way around inside her. This is as close as I’ve been.
I’ve never seen two women who look completely alike. Mothers, daughters, twins. My eyes train like missiles to the points on their faces that are most unusual. I was in love once, with a woman who had a single dimple near one eye and a spot on her front teeth where the dental bonds showed whiter. A shovel to the mouth in her childhood, mucking goat stalls with her older brothers. When I went to meet them, they were loud and rowdy with brown or red hair and dirt under their fingernails—nothing like my own family. On the quilt sheets of her childhood bed, I held her and traced her curls, the smell of bacon rising up the stairs. She asked me what I thought our children would look like, and I told her we couldn’t have any and that I couldn’t explain. My mother has never explicitly told me so, but I know that Evelyns don’t get married. Even if I could have told her, I was too afraid. She’s adopted a son now. But I imagine our babies would have had my freckles and dark hair; her teeth, still spot-free.
When my baby is born early, it is a surprise to all of us. She is small and pink and wrinkly, and it doesn’t hurt as much as I’d imagined. They worry at first about her lungs, but after a few days she is fine. We have a baby shower at my new house, and I invite people from the gallery. Mom invites a few friends of her own, and everyone takes turns holding my daughter. Grandma says she has so much less hair than I had, and Mom assures her that it’s because she had less time inside me to grow it. Someone says you can tell a baby will have hair if you have heartburn. I try to recall all the things my body has felt these past few months. Someone else asks about the sperm donor, and my mom says something rehearsed. I watch my mother and grandmother wearily as they groom her, wiggle her tiny toes. So far, they do not seem suspicious. My sterilization appointment is not far away.
Evelyn is a quiet baby and seems to always sleep. She likes when I strap her to me as I work. Sometimes I sing to her, songs they used to play on the radio. I paint landscapes now of distant rivers and inland lakes—places she and I might go. I count the moles on her body, memorize where they are as she drinks from me. My favorite is low on her back, on the chubby fold over her coccyx. It’s a small pinprick and cherry red. When I lay her over my stomach in the dark, her head turned sideways against my chest, I can feel how it’s raised. I do not know yet if she is me or if she is someone else, what we will have to do. I put my daughter’s tiny fingers into my mouth and chew down her fingernails so she cannot scratch her face. They are smaller than my smallest teeth.
Hayli May Cox is a PhD student of English/Creative Writing at The University of Missouri, though she’s really a Michigander, and currently serves as an assistant nonfiction editor for Sundog Lit. Her work has found homes in Hippocampus Magazine, Doubleback Review, DIAGRAM, Crab Fat Magazine, Sundog Lit, and others. In her free time Hayli paints, builds Lego worlds, and hikes around with a backpack full of field guides. She occasionally tweets @haylimayli.