Free The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi Page B

details, lots of drug names, advice: Expect bloating as you produce more than one egg per cycle; Make sure you have comfortable clothes with elastic waistbands .
    All I could say, all I could think, was, ‘You’re selling your eggs?’
    Amy Eleni turned very white; either I was making her angry or she was about to throw up. ‘I’m not selling them, all right? The clinic pays expenses, but they’re not allowed to pay donors for the eggs.’
    I nodded. I said, ‘That’s . . . wow. I could never do something like that. Giving infertile couples a baby and stuff. That’s . . .’
    ( You’re giving your eggs away, just right out from inside you like that? )
    ‘I don’t mind clinics.’
    I tried to make Amy Eleni sit down on a bench with me, but she kept walking, fast, almost at a jog. I barely managed to keep up with her.
    ‘You remember when I was going out with Sara? Well, when I told my mum about her, my mum just gave me this look, like . . . ugh. I don’t know. That look. It was kind of disgusted and kind of resigned. As if she’d eaten something that she knew she wasn’t going to like and she was thinking, ‘Yeah, nasty, but I knew it.’ Then the first thing she said was, ‘So you think you’re a lesbian. But what are you going to do with your fertility? You’re just going to waste your fertility like that?’ And I didn’t have an answer for her. I had answers for almost everything else, like if she started crying and saying she raised me wrong, then I could have given her a stupid hug or something. Or if she tried to send me to church, we could have had it out. But she didn’t even seem to give a shit. It was like, Oh, my daughter, the lesbian, the waste of time.’
    I put my hand on Amy Eleni’s arm, to make her slow down and, also, to be touching her.
    The Elegua head on the coat stand is pitching forward a little. Papi must have tried to take it down. I set it aright
    (something rattles inside its hollow),
    I am careful and lift my hands away as soon as it is safe. The Elegua head has a clammy feel, like wet clay, or skin beginning to perspire.
    I find Papi on the sitting-room sofa, crumpled and bemused in the same white shirt and brown trousers Chabella and I left him in, and I know that he has slept the night there facing the pale bubble of wallpaper left in the wake of Mami’s altar. The bedrooms are upstairs, and with no one around to pretend full health to, Papi has not bothered to attempt the stairs. He blinks at me sadly. ‘Maja,’ he says. ‘No es justo.’
    I throw myself down beside him and put an arm around his neck to nuzzle him just beneath his earlobe, where his jawbone begins; that’s a part of him that has never changed, and with my eyes closed I imagine him as a much younger man, surprised, thinking, Who is this girl near me, older than me and younger? I imagine him unable to understand what it is to have a grown daughter.
    ‘I know it’s not fair. But just think, Mami hasn’t given you trouble like this before.’
    ‘So what?’ Papi retorts. ‘When trouble comes, you don’t sit around thinking, Oh, but at least I haven’t had trouble before. The point is that you forget all other times. That’s what’s so bad about trouble, that’s what makes it trouble – you can’t see your way around it.
    ‘When I met her, mi Dios , such a woman. You could see . . . good, just good, all soul – she was studying German but she also went to lectures that had nothing to do with German. Like my lectures. If you knew someone like that you’d call them a boffin or nerd or geek or neek or something, wouldn’t you? You think it’s so wonderful not to know anything. But your Mami, she came up to me with a copy of my book on the Cuban conquistadors and a list of questions. And she just listened to me with her face like someone who has not lived and is trying to begin.
    ‘You, Maja, you wonder why the people who have to teach you never like you; it’s because you sit there looking