LITMIR.BIZ

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and, in literature, for the journals of Madame de Staël. He liked to quote that witty lady’s opinion on the German language, which held that German wasn’t good for conversation because you had to wait to the end of the sentence for the verb, and so couldn’t interrupt. Uncle Pete had wanted to become a doctor, but the “catastrophe” had ended that dream. In the United States, he’d put himself through two years of chiropractic school, and now ran a small office in Birmingham with a human skeleton he was still paying for in installments. In those days, chiropractors had a somewhat dubious reputation. People didn’t come to Uncle Pete to free up their kundalini. He cracked necks, straightened spines, and made custom arch supports out of foam rubber. Still, he was the closest thing to a doctor we had in the house on those Sunday afternoons. As a young man he’d had half his stomach surgically removed, and now after dinner always drank a Pepsi-Cola to help digest his meal. The soft drink had been named for the digestive enzyme pepsin, he sagely told us, and so was suited to the task.

      It was this kind of knowledge that led my father to trust what Uncle Pete said when it came to the reproductive timetable. His head on a throw pillow, his shoes off, Madama Butterfly softly playing on my parents’ stereo, Uncle Pete explained that, under the microscope, sperm carrying male chromosomes had been observed to swim faster than those carrying female chromosomes. This assertion generated immediate merriment among the restaurant owners and fur finishers assembled in our living room. My father, however, adopted the pose of his favorite piece of sculpture, The Thinker, a miniature of which sat across the room on the telephone table. Though the topic had been brought up in the open-forum atmosphere of those postprandial Sundays, it was clear that, notwithstanding the impersonal tone of the discussion, the sperm they were talking about was my father’s. Uncle Pete made it clear: to have a girl baby, a couple should “have sexual congress twenty-four hours prior to ovulation.” That way, the swift male sperm would rush in and die off. The female sperm, sluggish but more reliable, would arrive just as the egg dropped.

      My father had trouble persuading my mother to go along with the scheme. Tessie Zizmo had been a virgin when she married Milton Stephanides at the age of twenty-two. Their engagement, which coincided with the Second World War, had been a chaste affair. My mother was proud of the way she’d managed to simultaneously kindle and snuff my father’s flame, keeping him at a low burn for the duration of a global cataclysm. This hadn’t been all that difficult, however, since she was in Detroit and Milton was in Annapolis at the U.S. Naval Academy. For more than a year Tessie lit candles at the Greek church for her fiancé, while Milton gazed at her photographs pinned over his bunk. He liked to pose Tessie in the manner of the movie magazines, standing sideways, one high heel raised on a step, an expanse of black stocking visible. My mother looks surprisingly pliable in those old snapshots, as though she liked nothing better than to have her man in uniform arrange her against the porches and lampposts of their humble neighborhood.

      She didn’t surrender until after Japan had. Then, from their wedding night onward (according to what my brother told my covered ears), my parents made love regularly and enjoyably. When it came to having children, however, my mother had her own ideas. It was her belief that an embryo could sense the amount of love with which it had been created. For this reason, my father’s suggestion didn’t sit well with her.

      “What do you think this is, Milt, the Olympics?”

      “We were just speaking theoretically,” said my father.

      “What does Uncle Pete know about having babies?”

      “He read this particular article in Scientific American,” Milton said. And to bolster his case: “He’s a subscriber.”

      “Listen, if my back went out, I’d go to Uncle Pete. If I had flat feet like you do, I’d go. But that’s it.”

      “This has all been verified. Under the microscope. The male sperms are faster.”

      “I bet they’re stupider, too.”

      “Go on. Malign the male sperms all you want. Feel free. We don’t want a male sperm. What we want is a good old, slow, reliable female sperm.”

      “Even if it’s true, it’s still ridiculous. I can’t just do it like clockwork, Milt.”

      “It’ll be harder on me than you.”

      “I don’t want to hear it.”

      “I thought you wanted a daughter.”

      “I do.”

      “Well,” said my father, “this is how we can get one.”

      Tessie laughed the suggestion off. But behind her sarcasm was a serious moral reservation. To tamper with something as mysterious and miraculous as the birth of a child was an act of hubris. In the first place, Tessie didn’t believe you could do it. Even if you could, she didn’t believe you should try.

      Of course, a narrator in my position (prefetal at the time) can’t be entirely sure about any of this. I can only explain the scientific mania that overtook my father during that spring of ’59 as a symptom of the belief in progress that was infecting everyone back then. Remember, Sputnik had been launched only two years earlier. Polio, which had kept my parents quarantined indoors during the summers of their childhood, had been conquered by the Salk vaccine. People had no idea that viruses were cleverer than human beings, and thought they’d soon be a thing of the past. In that optimistic, postwar America, which I caught the tail end of, everybody was the master of his own destiny, so it only followed that my father would try to be the master of his.

      A few days after he had broached his plan to Tessie, Milton came home one evening with a present. It was a jewelry box tied with a ribbon.

      “What’s this for?” Tessie asked suspiciously.

      “What do you mean, what is it for?”

      “It’s not my birthday. It’s not our anniversary. So why are you giving me a present?”

      “Do I have to have a reason to give you a present? Go on. Open it.”

      Tessie crumpled up one corner of her mouth, unconvinced. But it was difficult to hold a jewelry box in your hand without opening it. So finally she slipped off the ribbon and snapped the box open.

      Inside, on black velvet, was a thermometer.

      “A thermometer,” said my mother.

      “That’s not just any thermometer,” said Milton. “I had to go to three different pharmacies to find one of these.”

      “A luxury model, huh?”

      “That’s right,” said Milton. “That’s what you call a basal thermometer. It reads the temperature down to a tenth of a degree.” He raised his eyebrows. “Normal thermometers only read every two tenths. This one does it every tenth. Try it out. Put it in your mouth.”

      “I don’t have a fever,” said Tessie.

      “This isn’t about a fever. You use it to find out what your base temperature is. It’s more accurate and precise than a regular fever-type thermometer.”

      “Next time bring me a necklace.”

      But Milton persisted: “Your body temperature’s changing all the time, Tess. You may not notice, but it is. You’re in constant flux, temperature-wise. Say, for instance”—a little cough—“you happen to be ovulating. Then your temperature goes up. Six tenths of a degree, in most case scenarios. Now,” my father went on, gaining steam, not noticing that his wife was frowning, “if we were to implement the system we talked about the other day—just for instance, say—what you’d do is, first, establish your base temperature. It might not be ninety-eight point six. Everybody’s a little different. That’s another thing I learned from Uncle Pete. Anyway, once you established your base temperature, then you’d look for that six-tenths-degree rise. And that’s when, if we were to go through with this, that’s when we’d know to, you know, mix the cocktail.”

      My mother said nothing. She only put the thermometer into the box, closed

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