Free A Perfect Life by Eileen Pollack

lifted her glass and took a sip, then asked me when I was going to be seeing this stepbrother of mine again.
    The next morning, I said. For brunch.
    â€œBrunch? ” The word must have sounded as strange from my own lips as it had from my father’s. “I hope I’m not standing in the way of your plans for tonight.” Maureen sniffed. “I mean, if you’d rather go dancing with your stepbrother.”
    Maureen and I went dancing all the time. The first time she had asked me to go with her, I had assumed she needed company. The nightclub might have some stairs, or the bathroom might be inaccessible. But later I came to think she was using her disability to force me to leave the lab.
    â€œDon’t be silly. Of course we’re going dancing. Just wait here and I’ll go in and change.”
    â€œNothing too risqué!” Maureen shouted from the kitchen.
    She made the same joke every week. “Aren’t you ever going to give up?” I shouted back.
    â€œI’ll give up when you start having sex on a regular basis.”
    â€œWhat’s the point of having sex if it can’t lead to anything?” I yelled. I knew I was putting her at a disadvantage by making her shout, but I stayed in my room.
    â€œYou don’t have to marry every guy you sleep with!”
    I went back to the kitchen.
    â€œWhy, jeans and a T-shirt, what a surprise.”
    â€œListen,” I said, “it’s not so weird the way I act. A lot of people at risk for Valentine’s decide not to get married.”
    â€œThat doesn’t mean they have to give up sex. It isn’t healthy.” Maureen fiddled with an earring, which she always did when she talked about sex.
    I reminded her that she was a biologist. What did she think was going to happen if I didn’t have sex? Would all those sex juices get bottled up inside me and explode? What I didn’t admit was that my own theory was equally bizarre: the less often a person had sex, the more she thought about having sex, and, since sexual obsession was one symptom of Valentine’s, it was best for a woman in my position to have sex with someone she didn’t really care about every few months. “Besides,” I said, “the last thing I need is to get pregnant.”
    â€œEver hear of birth control?”
    I reminded her it didn’t always work.
    â€œEver hear about abortions?”
    That’s all I needed, I said. To have an abortion.
    â€œSo have a kid!” she said.
    Have a kid. I nearly cried. From the moment I had learned that every baby mammal grew inside its mother, I was amazed by the prospect that one day I, too, would be granted this privilege. Once, when I was young, I had glimpsed my mother nursing my newborn sister, and I couldn’t take away my eyes. I couldn’t stop thinking about the miraculous idea of feeding someone from my own body. I never lost that image. Sitting in a classroom, studying in the library, running blots in a lab, I would slip into a daydream in which I was sitting in a field nursing a newborn. I imagined taking a toddler for a walk, listening to all the strange, garbled ideas he or she thought to say. The truth was, I had loved taking care of my baby sister, and I wanted more than anything to have a child.
    Well, Maureen said, why didn’t I just assume that I didn’t have the disease and get on with my life? It was a gamble, she said. Like whether God exists. If you led your life being good and then found out God didn’t exist, you would kick yourself for having missed all those exciting times.
    â€œYou call that logic?” I said, then started to explain why her argument made no sense.
    â€œIt’s Saturday night,” she said. “I am not going to sit here listening to a lecture on logic.”
    But I wouldn’t give up that easily. “Here’s an analogy,” I said, although I usually hated when scientists used analogies.