CHAPTER 1 My father knocks on the door of a house, and when the door opens, he waves for me and my mother to get out of the car. We hesitate for a moment. The house we''re parked outside of looks more like a trailer whose wheels have been stolen than someone''s home. But we walk across the patchy yard, go up a few steps, and follow him into a dim living room with bumpy linoleum floors and air thick with the smell of Noxzema and fried pork chops. An old brown woman walks up to me and points. "This the baby?" My father nods, but I am not a baby. I am five years old. The old woman tries to smile, but the edges of her brown lips refuse to turn all the way up.

Her eyes dart across my ashy knees, my long noodle arms, and the hook nose that is way too big for my narrow face. I already know what she will say-the same thing the last two old ladies we visited today did. "Humph . She just like ''em. Ain''t she?" The old woman shakes her head and goes into the kitchen while we sit down. She comes back with a piece of chocolate cake and a glass of icy red Kool-Aid. She puts both on the table in front of me and nods for me to eat. I have to take a bite, even though the last old lady, the one who cracked her neck when she looked at me, already gave me sugar cookies and lemonade, and the tall one before her who whistled when she said my name gave me a dish of homemade caramels.

I press a fork into the cake and it gives like warm pudding. I put a small piece in my mouth. Now the old lady''s eyes watch my throat to make sure that I swallow. I know what she is doing. She wants to make sure that I am a real girl who eats and not a ghost. One time, when we visited another old lady in the country, I didn''t eat or drink anything, and she started telling my parents to watch out for ghosts that she called "haints," who slip out of their graves and into new bodies. My mother began to nod her head like she always does when old people are talking. But then she stopped.

My father told that lady that there''s no such thing as ghosts. And later in the car, my mother said the same thing to me. You know that''s just old people''s nonsense, right? I nodded, but I do not know this for sure. Some of the old ladies we visit talk about bad hips and gas prices and those are real. I hold the sweet chocolate in my mouth for as long as I can without swallowing and watch the old lady trying to pay attention to my father and keep an eye on me at the same time. He asks her questions about how other old people are doing, and if that storm that came through last week did much damage out here in the country. The lady tells him who died and who is about to die. My mother says that''s a shame and when the old lady looks at her and moans "mm-hmm," I swallow the cake.

My father lets out a long "well" that means it is time to go. The old lady says that it is too soon for us to leave, we just got here. But my father, who cannot bear to sit in anyone else''s house for very long, stands up and says we have to be getting on back down the road ''cause we have a drive ahead of us. The old lady turns to me with yellowing eyes and her mouth opens, but no words come out. I pick up the glass of Kool-Aid and watch a shiver pass through the old lady''s body. I fill myself with sugary redness. When I put the glass down, she smiles at me for the first time since we arrived. We all file out of the house with the old lady trailing behind, saying she can''t remember the last time she saw us and that we need to visit more often because she''s old and will be dead before we know it.

I worry that she will try to hug me and her old lady smell will turn my full stomach. But when I turn around to say goodbye, she squints and shakes her head at me like I have given her bad news. "That''s something ain''t it? That she could look that much like Maggie ''nem." We get in our car and wave as we pull away. We are done visiting today and I do not know when my father will pick another Sunday afternoon and say, Let''s take a ride to the country. Sometimes we travel out here every few weeks and other times months pass before we drive this way again. I do not know if we will see the same old ladies or other ones because I do not know which ones are cousins, which ones are friends, or which ones will die before we return. All I know is that when my father says, "Let''s take a ride," my eighteen-year-old sister and my sixteen-year-old brother, who both know how to drive their own cars, will have somewhere else to go and I will climb into the green Oldsmobile and ride for a while, so that an old lady the color of pennies or pine cones or margarine can stare into my face again.

Today, my father drives most of the way home in silence while my mother talks about which old ladies looked sick and which ones looked well. Tired and full, I close my eyes in the back seat until I hear my mother ask my father, "Which one does she look like, your mama or your sister?" I open my eyes and see my mother frowning at me like I am fruit that is starting to go bad. "Mostly like Maggie, but Maggie looked like Mama. San looked different, you know, ''cause of all that red hair. But she had big eyes too, just like them," he says. "So she kind of looks like all of them?" my mother says. "Yeah. Just like them," he says.

Experiment Number One: In the kitchen, I crack a brown egg and shift the yolk from one half of the shell to the other, letting the clear thick snot of the white stream into a bowl. I suck the goo up with a yellow medicine dropper that looks like a shrunken turkey baster. I carry the full dropper to my bedroom, where I lie down next to my husband, Reginald, and insert the albumen of a chicken egg into my vagina. I feel the slime sliding back out even before I can squeeze the last bit of liquid out of the dropper. "I think we better hurry," I say. I am thirty-six years old, and I have been trying to get pregnant for six months. All my reading and research has only alerted me to the fact that at my age, my fertility is plummeting like a drop tower ride at an amusement park, one that falls so fast that the riders'' screams hang in the air longer than the ride. I know that mine is a shit-or-get-off-the pot situation and I am determined to shit.

I have spent the last decade in academia, where infertility is the honorary faculty member who never misses a department meeting. The explanation is simple: many women postpone having children to complete PhDs and secure tenure, both of which take many years. Women who have children prior to completing degrees or before publishing enough research to get tenure sometimes lose the support of mentors and colleagues, who perceive them as lacking the necessary commitment to be a scholar. Of course, there are women professors who are childless by choice. Nonetheless, academic hallways are thick with the twin anxieties of research production and human reproduction. At the obligatory dinner parties I attended while in graduate school, I listened to white women debate over frittatas and white wine the best time to have a baby-searching for a moment that won''t impair one''s ability to finish the PhD or leave one visibly pregnant while on the job market. When I became a professor in a department where most of the women led fulfilling, adult-centered lives, it was impossible to know who had chosen not to have children, whose bodies refused to have them, and whose ambivalence had morphed into medical impossibility. Some of the women joked that while they had not had babies, they had given birth to books.

But many of these same women were just a glass of wine and a cheese plate away from disclosing other women''s losses: You know she tried, right? Miscarriage. Twice. I scour infertility blogs and discussion boards and discover tons of women seeking at-home conception solutions, some of them in their kitchens. That''s how I discovered that, apparently, egg whites can create the perfect highway for sperm, making their journey as fast and smooth as a high-speed rail. If a woman is not producing enough mucus to get her partner''s guys to the target and this hypothetical woman is willing to take the risk of contracting vaginal salmonella, the egg whites could be a cheap and simple solution to infertility. It makes sense, as stupid ideas often do. Numerous women in cyber-land claim that it worked for them, and their avatars are pictures of grinning babies. None of these blog posts mention that heterosexual sex with egg whites is like a pogo stick race on a bed of Jell-O-bungling and sloppy.

When we are done, I must lie in bed for thirty minutes to give the sperm their best chance to complete their journey. My husband runs for a towel, but its absorbency is no match for the sticky mess and we are both laughing at the unexpected tenaciousness of egg whites. I feel something light, like a balloon rising in my chest. Hope. I stamp it down. I may be foolish enough to lie in bed with egg whites running down my legs, but I don''t dare admit that I think this trick could work. My mother talks in a loud, high-pitched voice to a baby in the arms of his mother, the wife of a new hire at the factory where my father works. They sit on our plaid love seat.

I kneel on the plush carpeted floor in front of them to get a close look at the baby''s fingers that curl like a doll''s. My mother tells the woman to tilt the baby up so he can see me. "Babies like San," she tells the woman. I do not know why she says this. I am nine years old, and I do not have a little brother or sister. I have never held a baby and the ones that I have seen at church scare me with.