The Spin Doctor's Wife

Chapter 3: Megan’s Menu

Chapter 3

Megan’s Menu

Jagged strands of mid-morning sunlight hit the stainless steel and white marble kitchen bench tops where Megan stood scooping out mushrooms. The French windows looked out onto Sydney’s glittering harbour. She checked the ingredients in the How to be a Domestic Goddess cookbook, and listened to Mozart’s ‘Clarinet Quintet’ on the radio.

Laurie was still asleep in the spare room. Megan hadn’t heard him come in last night but figured it must have been late. She was glad she hadn’t gone to Chad’s party. She couldn’t face all those breeders. Mothers always looked at childless women with such pity.

Megan had the luxury of having the whole day to prepare for tonight’s dinner party for Laurie’s clients. Since she had sworn off alcohol while trying to get pregnant, she was a better hostess. Red wine made her argumentative and increased her ‘jokelepsy’ as Laurie called it.

But without alcohol, the client chitchat bored her to tears. She found solace in cooking – it was one of the few things she could control and it temporarily took her mind off IVF. Part of the fun was tracking down the very best and freshest ingredients, even if it meant crisscrossing town – caperberries from the Italian delicatessen in Leichhardt, salmon from the Pyrmont fish markets, kipfler potatoes from the farmers’ markets in Redfern. Megan would make pastry from scratch and stew plums from her garden. The eight-seater Tasmanian oak table was oiled and ready to be dressed with her best tablecloth – a wedding present from Laurie’s aunt – and the candelabra she’d inherited from her grandmother. Should she use the square white plates with the soft green leaf serviettes or the patterned Izmir set from Luxembourg with the matching damask napkins? Megan looked down her ‘to-do’ list: clean windows, iron tablecloth, polish glasses, scrub kitchen floor.

“Why don’t we get a cleaner, for goodness sake?” Laurie often said. “It’s not like we can’t afford it.” But Megan had sacked the past three cleaners – no one took as much care as she did in polishing and scrubbing. Now she was home more often, she had time to notice the way the cleaners cut corners. One of her favourite books was 101 Old-Fashioned Methods for Fool-Proof Cleaning. There was something very satisfying about mixing up a brew of bubbling bi-carb soda and vinegar to remove a stubborn stain.

Even Megan had admitted to her counsellor that her latent OCD tendencies had escalated. While she was teaching, she’d funnelled her energy into interpreting the syllabus texts and encouraging her students to excel in their exams. Their impressive results were a credit to her and her reputation had attracted students to the school. Graduates still stopped her in the supermarket to thank her.

But since losing her job, Megan’s compulsions were less worthy. Anyone opening her wardrobes would be struck by the uniform neatness of her severely pressed clothes. The skirts were arranged from the shortest to the longest; her shoes were kept pristine in their original boxes with Polaroids of each pair taped to the outside. There was an a*******d system to her underwear: two drawers of tightly folded bras and underpants, one for white and one for black. The rest of the house was similarly organised. The towels in the bathroom hung only and always on the third rung of the towel rack. There were never any messy shampoo bottles or creams on display; they were all filed away in their designated places in the gleaming cabinet with stark, silver handles. The shocking sight of a single hair lying curled in the bottom of a drawer drove her to immediately empty the entire contents and scrub it clean.

When setting the table for dinner, even if it was for just her and Laurie, Megan would measure the distance between the placemats and cutlery to ensure perfect symmetry. She abhorred dirty dishes or glasses left in the kitchen sink. The elegant flower arrangement on the dining room table was changed every Wednesday when she went to the farmers’ market.

She eschewed alcohol, caffeine, dairy and wheat. She did Pilates on Mondays, walked along the beach on Tuesdays, swam on Wednesdays after visiting her father, practised yoga on Thursdays and did weights on Fridays. She was fit and lean, but despite her efforts, the only thing she was unable to control was inside her.

For years, she’d endured the countless injections to make her ovaries swell and produce multiple eggs as if she were a battery hen, followed by endless rounds of blood tests and ultrasounds. While she grimly tolerated all of this, the microscopic group of cells with so much invested in them had repeatedly refused to bed down in the walls of her womb; instead they simply slipped away in a stream of blood.

Megan had a part-time job marking English essays and exams online, which gave her time for her clinic appointments and allowed her to follow blogs and online forums from other infertile women trying to get pregnant.

From the yard next door, she could hear their neighbour Matthew playing with his kids on the trampoline.

‘Ring a ring o’rosie/

a pocket full of posies/

a-tishoo! a-tishoo!/

we all fall down!’

The girls squealed. “Again, Daddy, again!”

The sound of high-fluted children’s voices cut her to the quick. She closed the French windows. Matthew waved to her as she did. Megan smiled and turned away to clear the dining room table. The brochure on the donor eggs caught her eye. She put it away in a drawer and flicked through the magazine she’d taken from the clinic. Its ripped pages suggested the office manager had torn out advertisements for disposable nappies and commercial baby food, so as to not upset their clientele. But her hard-wired baby hunger immediately honed in on the photo of the brown-faced Sherpa baby. It was bundled in swathes of colourful cloth and tied tightly to its mother’s back, while she herded a long line of shaggy yaks in the Nepalese Himalayas. But Megan focused only on the baby’s face. She dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands to stop the tears. Stranded in her designer stainless steel and marble kitchen with the postcard harbour view, she’d trade it all for a baby of her own.

The door of the guest room opened slowly. Squinting against the light, Laurie shuffled into the kitchen while tying his dressing gown. Megan could smell alcohol and cigarettes on his skin, and something sweeter. She put her hands on her hips and turned to him.

“What did you get up to last night?’

“What do you mean?”

“You smell as if you’ve been smoking!”

He snorted. “Not me. Some of Chad’s friends were. They send their love. Everyone missed you. How are you feeling?”

“Fine. What time did you get in?”

“Not too late.” He filled the coffee machine with filtered water. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

“Were there many there?”

“The usual suspects.”

Like a politician he was irritatingly adept at avoiding questions.

“Ellie said she’d organised a singer. Was she any good?”

“Ah, she was alright.” He drew his dressing gown more tightly around his waist. “Didn’t take that much notice really.”

Behind the steam of his coffee mug he appeared absorbed in the newspaper.

“Wow, the Bullets beat the Eagles last night. Would have loved to have seen that game.”

Their sunny kitchen was silent except for Erik Satie’s piano music playing through the built-in speakers.

“I saw the embryologist yesterday.” She turned to look at him and leant against the marble bench top, hoping her rehearsed pitch sounded casual.

“How’d it go?” He was still reading.

“She says if these last three embryos don’t work, we should look for an egg donor.”

Laurie lowered the paper and looked at her over his reading glasses.

“You know I’m not comfortable with that.”

“Of course, darling. I’d rather have our own biological child too but I’ll do whatever it takes to have a baby, no matter whose DNA it is.”

Laurie looked back at the paper.

“We should at least consider it,” she said. “All the gay guys are doing it. My hairdresser and his partner went through an agency in L.A. They bought the eggs on the internet from an American medical student, then Fedexed his frozen sperm over there and had the embryos transplanted into a fitness instructor in Seattle. They talked to her on Skype every week of her pregnancy and went over for the birth. Brad said it was so beautiful he cried.”

“Brad would.”

“And now they have a gorgeous little girl called Morgan. He showed me a photo.”

“That’s too weird. Who’s the poor kid’s mother, for God’s sake?”

“She has two very loving and devoted fathers. Anyway, it would be different for us, because I would be the mother, of course.”

Megan realised the hairdresser story hadn’t worked. To win an argument with Laurie, she had to be prepared and focused, and stick to her key messages.

“I don’t know. It costs an absolute bomb,” Laurie said. “Those agency guys are scum, real bottom feeders.”

“We could find a donor in India or Greece, it’s cheaper than the States.”

“I just don’t feel comfortable about the whole business. IVF is bad enough.”

“What if we put our names down to adopt from China?”

Laurie looked at her as if she were a pleading teenager asking dad for the car keys.

“We’ve been through this before. I don’t want the bloody Department of Community Services sticking their noses in our business for the next 20 years. They make you promise to maintain cultural links and scrutinise everything you do. Besides, the waiting list is up to five years – we’ll be too old for a kid by then.”

“But we’re the perfect candidates.”

Laurie sighed. “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. We’ve got this cycle to get through. Who knows? Maybe we’ll finally hit the bloody jackpot.”

Megan turned back to the kitchen bench, picked up a spoon and pounded a mushroom into mulch.