“Namesake”

By Susan Meyers

Namesake

“What will you call him?”

It’s a reasonable enough thing to ask someone who is expecting a child. Though I’m not pregnant—not yet.

“Well,” Dana assures me, “you’ll figure it out.”

Still, there’s so much else that needs to happen first. Like now, weaving among those familiar signs—Keep your Rosaries off my Ovaries and Pussies Grab Back—along Seattle’s hilltop. Each January, my friend and I join thousands of others in thick-knit pink hats, our sheer numbers reassuring. Even Dana’s own son: “He’s making friends at school,” she explains, “with kids from other cultural backgrounds.” In a sea of liberal protestors, this is supposed to make sense: Things are getting better. “You know?”

But I do not know—not yet. Protestors wedge along the start line, peering down the city’s steep slopes toward Elliot Bay, all skyline and shimmering sea; and, four blocks south of where we’re standing, ten stories in the air, a cryotank holds all my hopes: the frozen embryo that I am waiting to implant. Male, the doctors tell me: a son of my own.

“Good for you,” she nods as we filter through those crowds waiting patiently among the rainbowed streets of Capitol Hill near Cal Anderson, the park that, eighteen months later, in the summer of 2020, will briefly become an autonomous zone, as the nation roils with protests larger still. But we don’t know that yet. For now, sudden violence and police indiscretions seem always to take place elsewhere; nothing here is yet burning.

“I just never thought,” I admit, “that I’d be doing this alone.”

The clinic appointments, and fertility drugs. The extra jobs to pay for it all.

But that’s not what Dana means. “Your son,” she reminds me, because there is little we can predict, though we do know this: “He won’t be white.”

The crowd leans forward, compressing along the start line; and we follow. “Not everyone gets it yet, though,” her head shakes again. Other women with her on the PTA, for instance. “They just don’t understand.” The need for broader curriculum, representation, change. “It’s a shame,” she looks up knowingly—both of us white, middleclass—though raising a child alone, I likely won’t ever be on a PTA, won’t have time.

“That’s brave,” my friend confirms as, behind us, a bullhorn picks up: brief speeches about domestic violence, indigenous rights, disappeared women. So many injustices that we are not a part of. “You could have done it another way.”

Another way, meaning, not using sperm from my gay friend: a man as excited as I am to see our son come into the world. A man who happens not to be white.

“That must have been a hard choice to make.”

Choice? There are many things I don’t control—being single or not, at forty, and running out of time. Still, technically she’s right. From a database, I could have chosen the baby’s eye color, hair, physical dexterity. All those descriptions at the sperm bank read, ironically, like dating profiles: athleticism, musical interests, the perfect dimple, or a talent for science. So much presumed perfection.

But it’s true; that’s not what I’d chosen. “I just wanted my child to know where he comes from. I wanted him to be loved.”

Around us, signs bob: Not My President. Nasty Women Make Herstory. Fight Like a Girl.

“Still, it must be scary,” Dana insists. “Those boys who aren’t white—they get hurt so much more.”

It is 2019. George Floyd is still alive. Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend has not yet answered their apartment door. Ahmaud Arbery has not yet gone out for his afternoon run. The park where we are standing now has not yet become a free state—CHAZ, then CHOP—and the man whose presidency we are protesting has not yet threatened to send military forces to dismantle it. But we don’t know this yet.

Around us, the January air is crisp. No memorials yet, no masks. The wind lifts, and people shuffle impatient along the line; it is nearly time.

“You must be proud.”

Proud of what?

As the crowd presses forward, my stomach sinks—They get hurt so much more often—and I’m not sure which part chills me more: the truth of what she says, or the ease with which she says it. “It must be so hard,” she says, and I cannot disagree—though there’s the instant shame of it. There are many things I’d wondered about raising a child alone, one whose skin tone won’t match my own: the assumptions that people will make about us, their quick confusion, and the countless stories I’ll need to tell. Or the countless ways that my son, too, will have to learn to tell his own story. So many things I’d wondered—though this, until now, had not been one of them. Violence, danger, all those things I truly don’t control.

“It’s a brave choice,” she assures me again, and it’s her quiet confidence that shakes me: all that we don’t see, by believing that what we do see is enough.

By now, though, feet are lifting; the bull horn quiets; and we are all pressing forward, leaving Cal Anderson Park to flood across Broadway: slogans and pink hats and urgency. But it’s not enough, I want to tell her, still wavering from the nausea of fertility drugs as the crowd presses us now toward the heart of downtown. All along the way, apartment dwellers—here, in the most expensive city lofts—cheer from open windows, waving orange spray-painted babies and anti-Trump signs; and in the distance, the cryobank towers quietly over the city: all precision and sheen. The pace slows as our numbers swell, pressing forward with chants and testimonials—all those overlapping messages—while my son, frozen, sits waiting behind us. And still, we are marching through these streets, voices high and signs waving in a rage that has become so familiar, you’d think by now it would have a name.

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 Susan Meyers has lived and taught in Chile, Costa Rica, and Mexico and currently directs the Creative Writing Program at Seattle University. Susan’s fiction and nonfiction have been supported by grants from the Fulbright foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, 4Culture, Artist Trust, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, as well as several artists residencies. Susan’s novel Failing the Trapeze won the Nilsen Award for a First Novel, and it was a finalist for the New American Fiction Award. Other work has recently appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Rumpus, Per Contra, Calyx, Dogwood, and The Minnesota Review, and it has thrice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.