Scrolling through odd job listings on Facebook, I stumbled across an ad that was no doubt targeted at unemployed 21-year-old females such as myself: a blonde woman beaming on a park bench with a latte, framed by the following: Earn up to $24,000: Become an Egg Donor with Generation Next! The finer print read that this process was highly confidential, and they would pay you every step of the way in increments of fifty, seventy-five, one hundred dollars, and so on for incrementally invasive procedures. The maximum for first-time egg donors was $8500. Repeat donors could earn up to the grand prize.
This apartment that did not belong to me smelled of desperation. With my laptop burning hot in my lap, I propped my feet up on the end of a magenta velvet setee, which had been crammed against an equally-magenta wall cluttered with Vogueish black-and-white shots in sparkly frames. The leaser, a 42-year-old woman who subleased me her spare room (painted pale pink) for eleven hundred dollars a month, was out of town. I spent a lot of time in her living room cheaply replicating what I considered to be the ambiance of sad, useless person. I’d surrounded myself with the litter of empty Tall Boy cans from the bodega, I’d crumpled shiny bags of pretzels between couch cushions. I’d kept a mostly supine position and cried intermittently while playing episode after episode of Sex and The City on my roommate’s Roku. I didn’t brush my hair. Et cetera. It was this atmosphere of curated sadness that inspired what could be called a certain entrepreneurial spirit, something caught between nerve and gullibility, a willingness to do anything as my checking account dwindled toward dangerous sums.
It was March then, I’d just been let go from a retail job in Williamsburg because they were “low on cash.” I hadn’t been employed there for a full quarter, which disqualified me for the unemployment benefits that everyone else had been reaping with delight for the past year. Rent was due and I was fucked. Between a desktop littered with minutely tailored resumes and a streak of magical thinking, I was waiting for something. I’m not sure what—to hear the song of an ice cream truck outside, or the tree outside my window to blossom, a sign of Bushwick’s barren scenery turning up in my favor. That tree has been dead for years, my roommate told me later. I don’t think it’s ever going to show another sign of life. But who knows.
==
Step one was the profile, which promised fifty dollars mailed by check. I spent no less than three hours in the back corner of a café filling out forms to appear as my best and most fertile possible self. While I could easily invent sports I’d never played or an Ivy League I’d never attended, I began to struggle thirteen pages in, lingering over columns that required the exact height and birthdate of my paternal grandfather. I drew blanks when asked my favorite food or favorite song. For the former, I arbitrarily typed persimmons. It seemed safe to go with fruit for the sake of theme, while maintaining the air of uniqueness, class, and originality I’d curated with my taste for 1960s Tropicalia. On the last page, I uploaded mildly filtered images of myself where I hoped to appear glowy and intelligent, classy yet slightly busty, and ultimately nondescript.
==
Having never received a check to reward me for my fabrications, I’d forgotten about this by April. My craigslist roommate had hooked me up with a hostess gig at a ritzy restaurant in the Village, two weeks before informing me that she’d be moving back to St. Louis and the rent of her apartment would be increasing by nearly double. In my Craigslist frenzy, I’d briefly considered crowding my belongings between a shower curtain and a fold-out bed in a 56-year-old man’s living room for $800 a month, but instead lucked out on a different sublease nearby the restaurant with a gaggle of NYU students for roommates. This was safe and convenient enough, and I figured would make just enough to make rent if I garnered some cash handshakes during dinner service, stopped taking the trains altogether, and ate between four and five meals a week.
I received a call from Generation Next at a serendipitous moment. I happened to be sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park in the middle of the afternoon and weeping. There was piano music, it was warm, and there were trees indeed blooming, the sound of an ice cream truck indeed somewhere. I’d been cut early the night before after graciously accepting a shot of espresso from a back server in the middle of service, and less than twelve hours later was informed by a manager with braces that I would no longer be afforded any more hours on account of my youthful gullibility and lack of intuition. We reviewed your profile and think you may be a great candidate! said a chipper receptionist in a voicemail. We are ready for next steps. Please call back to schedule a blood panel and an ultrasound.
==
Having been a product of fertility science myself, I imagined this could be a form of poetic requital if I went all the way. The pain of shots in my stomach and horrors of egg harvesting aside, perhaps I could see what my offspring would one day look like without any true labor. I could gather six months of rent, or reopen the savings account that had dried up months ago. I could consider myself useful for at least one thing. Even so, I knew I probably wouldn’t. But I would at least entertain the baby steps and make a buck.
I found the Generation Next office in the east side of Midtown, on the block between the Trump Tower and a place famous for its frozen hot chocolate. I struggled to find the correct address until I realized that it was only accessible across a lavish, Grand-Centralesque lobby, decked out with chandeliers and a doorman who stopped me in my tracks to ask where I was going. I suddenly couldn’t remember the specific arrangement of words in the clinic’s name, stumbling through something like Next… Generation…, but he simply nodded and called down an elevator.
I rode up to the 11th floor with a sense of antsy heroism. A machine with a long, robotic arm was meant to take my temperature before I could approach the front desk, and the receptionist interrupted me as I pulled out my driver’s license. We just need your first name. After being instructed to stay in place, I gazed down the corridor at the waiting area, where I could make out a grand piano planted in the center of the white marble floors beneath an enormous LED ring light. Floor-to-ceiling windows framed tesselate views of the city. Leggy orchids sat poised on every surface.
Someone fetched me and led me down a hallway on the opposite side of the entryway. I was told to wait in a room roughly the size of a janitorial closet, adorned with the sparse decor of a middle school detention room. A rubbery grey desk with one chair sat facing a door that did not appear to have a handle. I grew nervous.
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