Like the Sun

Abstract

Like the Sun Dana Wilson (bio) After Sarah's third miscarriage, the therapist suggests we take a break. It has been four years: five rounds of IVF, countless arguments about adoption, no vacations, no purchases except the necessities. Doctors' appointments, marriage counseling, groceries, every so often a dinner out. "Take a trip somewhere," the therapist says, looking at Sarah more than me. "Put this out of your minds. A few weeks won't make a difference." Sarah touches my hand, wipes the tears off her face. It is March; the streets are choked with slush, and the tips of her suede boots are still dark from the sidewalk. The therapist's office is muted and comfortless: beige walls, fluorescent lighting, a watercolor of a stone well in a thick brown frame, which touches some deep, hopeless place in me each time I see it. Sarah went on antidepressants after the second miscarriage, but her sadness remains even as she sleeps better, eats more. I have stopped bringing up adoption; for three years I tried to coax her, suggesting as gently as I could that perhaps we shouldn't be spending all this money to have our own child, that perhaps it was selfish, and she only cried and said that straight people have it so easy. When we decided to start our family, I was already thirty-six. Sarah always wanted to be pregnant, and because she is five years younger than me, it made sense that she would carry the baby. There is also the matter of her bloodlines; her sister has sworn off both marriage and children, and if Sarah does not have a biological child, her mother's side of the family will end with her. The idea of a vacation exhausts me: digging through the basement storage unit for our summer clothes, searching tropical places for the cheap resorts Sarah and I have always hated. We are mostly quiet through our lunch at the deli downstairs, and then, when we reach the subway station where Sarah will catch the train uptown to go back to work, she turns to me. "Margaret," she says, "what about Armenia?" She has been talking about going ever since our first date, when I told her about my childhood in Yerevan, how we lived through the dark years before moving to New Jersey when I was fifteen. Each time she brings it up, I make some excuse. It's terrible for gay couples there, I tell her. It is impossible to eat vegetarian. It is depressing, dull, there are so many other places I would rather go. Although these are mostly true, I have held back the real reason: that I could not go to Armenia without seeing Arev. Sarah has caught on to my secrecy over the years, frustrated by my reluctance to talk about Yerevan but eventually accepting it. Each year, on April twenty-fourth, [End Page 162] she cooks a full Armenian meal in honor of the genocide. She listens to my father talk about how his father survived the death march into the Syrian Desert, goes to Armenian church with my mother, teaches herself Armenian phrases: bari gisher, shnorhakalutyun, yes kez sirum em. Good night, thank you, I love you. Sarah is Jewish; her grandmother survived Auschwitz, and in this way she understands my family more deeply than any of the other women I've been with. It is the reason my mother finally stopped trying to set me up with her friends' sons, why she calls Sarah just as often as she does me. Sarah's parents live on the Upper East Side; she grew up going to the Met, to the opera, to Italy, but she embraces the dull New Jersey suburb where my parents live without a trace of condescension. Occasionally she looks at flights to Yerevan, and now, standing at the entrance to the subway in the gray afternoon, I give in. I don't have the capacity to resist her, and it occurs to me that if I am going to see Arev again, it should be now, before I start my own family, before she can lay claim to any more...