Breezes blowing through a bougainvillea vine I’d recently trained to the eaves, its afterglow crimsoning the painter and me standing in the open doorway of the garage studio where she sometimes painted and I sometimes wrote. It was not an altogether unhappy time. Of late, she’d been doing wide-scale portraits of bruises, but also vertical strings of busts or jellyfish or men floating above themselves for wallpapers she sells to subsidize her medical insurance. In different ways, she and I were both trying to get pregnant, worrying we’d left it to the last minute. My friend was only beginning to mull. Her vagina was atrophying. My uterus was knit to my colon. (Neither of us knew so yet).
Mid conversation she took my elbow. “How strange,” she said, eyeing a notecard above my desk, sharpied in capital letters VIOLET, scrolling on her phone to a miniature portrait of dusk she’d started that same morning. I didn’t think the confluence was odd at all. It made perfect sense to me that she and I would be drawn to twilight. I was on the heels of a third miscarriage. She was dating a Danish masochist who’d recently convinced her to string him by rope at nightfall in the manzanita tree of a Palm Springs Airbnb where they were vacationing. All of my friends are suns and anyone they date dims in comparison.
All that year, I’d be deep in needles and wands, drips and bandages, dealing with my uterus. My friend would get heavy into vaginal healing diets, gluten purges, estrogen rings. Then it would be two years, three. To distract each other, we’d text violet bits.
Stuck in traffic on the way home from a wallpaper meeting in Santa Monica, she’ll send a car snap of a cruddy parking lot’s violet sidewall, someone’s violet brocade petal pushers at a Hollywood press meet and greet, a Pantone color of the year swatch, a clip of Courtney Love in runny eyeliner ravenously belting out Hole’s grunge anthem, the roadside sign for a soon defunct beauty salon on Glendale Boulevard, Violet Olga.
Stuck in a fertility pharmacy, I’ll text back: Psyche-wise for Goethe, the color violet symbolized the unnecessary. Waiting, waiting, I’ll be wanting to snatch vials of sesame progesterone oil from the elderly man with mutton chops behind the counter packing them in ice so painstakingly, pull down my pants then and there, stick the serum in my left flank—nothing polite about one’s hormones jacked up this high. At least a woman might get a jump on the crosstown lockjam? Win a few minutes of her life back?
Unnecessary: These torturous delays baked into the decorum of obtaining fertility drugs. What explanation other than a new inconvenience iterated by the patriarchal construct to skewer the female body? If you’re looking for me, I’ll be here with all the other women of my privileged demographic in the specialty pharmacy on Wilshire on the brink of pituitary belligerence, waylaid indefinitely.
According to the French physiologist Charles Fere, who began treating hysterics with colored light therapy in the 1880s, building on Goethe’s intuitive color theory, violet should be reserved for putting excitable persons to sleep. Violet should never be used on persons who are negative or melancholy in disposition as it would add to their depression and might even cause mental derangement. Mental derangement: Where any woman finds herself by age twelve, vis a vis her own body image.
The color violet is like Pluto. Luminous, a little trippy, fluid and changeable; it’s been rudely downgraded by modernity. Newton named violet among the seven core colors because he was superstitious and believed in the number seven, but also because, unlike indigo or purple, violet is visible to the human eye as an individuated strand of light in a prism’s spectrum. One of those afternoons, I’m planting a border bed when the girl next door wanders over. An avid composter and a different feminist for Halloween each year— Jane Goodall, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Ruth Bader Ginsberg—she’s wearing a crazily colorful outfit, opens a fistful of worms slowly to add to the soil. We toss in the worms. Talk about how they are hermaphrodites with five hearts, breathe through their skin. At some point, she casually mentions it was ROYGBIV day at school. What’s ROYGBIV? She wanted to know. She—who could tell you that the feet of a horsefly are ten thousand times more sensitive than the human tongue, that bees pollinate one in three mouthfuls we eat, that ants don’t have lungs. Purple is a remix of red and blue. Violet is real. Tell me then why do kids no longer memorize it mnemonically as a color of the rainbow? Violet is so modern it’s post-modern. A zone between light and shadow we no longer articulate, seeable, unspeakable.
The first time, I miscarried at my desk. It was early on enough that I hadn’t told anyone outside my family yet and I was typing on my computer, prepping for a big meeting when I started hemorrhaging. Giddy, I stood from my rolling chair then sat down again, dialed my OBGYN. Asked my boss, a friend, to drive me in lunchtime traffic to Century City since the nurse said I should come in right away for an ultrasound. I was excited, jubilant even. I thought this was implantation spotting and now I would get to preempt a look before insurance would normally authorize. Plus, my boss and I were not looking forward to our meeting and I got to tell him I was pregnant – how else to explain?
It was so blue out. I put my sweatshirt beneath me. The cars all around were dazzling. We were barely moving, inching along the freeway, blasting the 40s station on satellite radio. Duke Ellington. Louis Armstrong. Billie Holiday. Chipper, dizzying, transcendent. I felt young. Not childish or innocent, but exuberant with possibility, like I wouldn’t for a long time after.
Inside my OBGYN’s office it was chilly. There was a pause before he turned to me to explain what he was seeing on the ultrasound screen. There was so much I was capable of, and I wanted to think this pause heralded a felicitous new chapter in my life. It didn’t.
The second time, I miscarried at my desk again. Again, my boss drove me. It was after hours, dark out. This time my boss drove me home directly afterwards and we cried.
Violet, a state of slippage. Color of falling through the cracks, of everything that can’t be fixed, which is to say all that can’t be remedied or held in place but also all that can’t be stilled.
By the third one, my job was gone. A good development in certain lights. I’d grown so tired of bargaining with HR for time off to undergo the hysterosalpingogram, the polypectomy, the in vitro consults.
Who is this person dumping pony packs of violets into her cart I don’t even like violets! I text one morning. So obvious it’s not even Freudian. Since I can’t singlehandedly refarkle my ovarian landscape, let me perform high-stakes surgery on my yard. Scattering mad drifts of gladioli, narcissi, hyacinth like this intricate drip system is so waterwise where yesteryear irises and violets belong is not on some grannie’s church hat or within some Victorian glasshouse, but here, in the East Los Angeles semi-desert. God, even the word nursery. Even the word drips.
Our first in vitro consult colored all those that followed. I could not take it seriously (the traditional sign a condition is serious). Across a curved desk from us in the Beverly Hills clinic, sat the lead endocrinologist. Lean and heavily braceleted with feathery hair, a thick folder of our medical workups pinned beneath his elbows, he smiled welcomingly, his hands clasped in what might have been a show of empathy or an attempt to showcase his jewelry. His office was bright and spare. Beside his desk stood a single towering glass etagere with shelves of tiny prismatic figurines. Behind him, tall windows afforded a vista of the surrounding knolls and so much sunlight streamed through them that for the entirety of this initial portion of the consult, his lavender lenses remained progressed.
First, he led us through a flipchart of the female reproductive system, launching into a spiel emphasizing the many eggs to be harvested via an aspiration procedure he professed to have “down to such an art” that most of his patients “won’t even recall it afterwards.”
The colorful charts looked retro, ready for kindergarten. The figurines were shimmering, faint rainbows thrown across walls of diplomas and photos of happy couples with their babies. It wasn’t until my partner inquired after his own lab results halfway through the meeting that I realized the endocrinologist had kept his purplish gaze trained on me, as though I was the one being assessed for a job, not the other way around. Jovial, waving my partner away, beads rattling he chuckled: “I’m afraid you’re irrelevant! This is all about her.”
In fairness, I could’ve challenged him; I didn’t. My partner and I’d landed ourselves in what increasingly sounded less like a clinical conversation, more like a luxury car sales pitch. In the United States, in vitro fertilization like orthodontia, adoption, family leave or abortion is a privilege open to those fortunate enough to rally the resources. The costly fertility treatments I would undergo were mostly not covered by insurance because societally, when we say we are pro-life, in addition to all the other sanctimonious pretenses, what we mean is only if you don’t need any help along the way and are a woman willing to press pause on certain career ambitions for a significant period, because that’s what IVF, like motherhood, currently requires, no matter how much one multitasks, pulls up her bootstraps, leans in. Something that first afternoon in the sunny room with sweeping views in the scope of the endocrinologist’s slick authoritarianism felt so out of whack that laughter became the only plausible response. Reverting to my adolescence, suddenly it was all I could do to stifle a laughing fit.
Next, for the ultrasound stage of the appointment when the endocrinologist typically assesses the outcome to be expected based on the patient’s ovarian output, in a different, darkened room down the hall, I would wait nude and prone on an examination table, further denuded without my partner who’d had to leave for a work meeting, sweat dampening under a napkin, watching along on a screen while a female nurse dragged a lubed sonic wand across my slicked belly. What I wanted to know once the endocrinologist finished ticking off my follicle count was if how many I had was normal. “More than normal,” he said, spinning on his stool to my cheekside. “Your follicles are primed and open for business. We’re going to get a lot of eggs out of you!”
Afterwards like the examination had been a massage, he stood waiting for me in the hall with a Dixie cup of water. The sight of his purple glasses again nearly sent me into hysterics, and I was flustered, wanting the exit, when he led me into a side room decked with pamphlets.
“Sorry,” he said, eyeing the wall. “I’m trying to see if there’s anything here that pertains to you.” By anything, I took it he meant recurrent pregnancy loss.
But he looked at a loss for words, lost in general, like maybe he’d never set foot in this antechamber before, or had fallen out of practice winning over candidates like myself hellbent on telecasting to him that he had failed to win their business. In the purview of the ballooning infertility complex, recurrent pregnancy loss represents a relatively rare condition, with only an estimated 0.5 percent of women experiencing three or more consecutive miscarriages, and accurate diagnoses possible in only sixty percent of cases, according to Yale University’s pioneering genetics research center. Occasional evasiveness on the part of practitioners is one element of the conundrum a woman with the condition can expect. More than anything, so we could be done, already, I started to help the endocrinologist scour titles. As soon as my sightline followed his, I understood the problem. A jolt of comeuppance, like falling on a bicycle bar. Some of the wall’s pamphlets were infertility oriented. Most were for mommy lifts. Advertisements for nearby businesses: tummy tucks, butt sculpting, nipple mapping to determine whether lactation droop makes you a good candidate for teardrop implants.
Not knowing how to react, I just stood there, every part of my body aching to have a kid. I couldn’t even get to the kid part and already the writing on the wall was fixing to fix my feminine aspects, should I breach this physical impasse. As is often the case in moments when faced with my own objectification, I was struck by a deep desire to disown the commentary and an immediate identification with it. It was as if the advertisements returned me to the body they promoted. The body I had when I was twelve. So nubile, strange and foreign to me back then it may as well have been made of silicone. One morning when my brother had driven me to junior high, a cool thing, with a pageantry I hoped my peers would note, his friend in shotgun had stepped onto the asphalt and slid his seat forward to allow me to clamber down. Backpack braced over my shoulders, I was readying myself to trundle off when the friend remarked, whistling through his teeth, “Wow, those sure are childbearing hips.” I don’t know whether or not my brother heard, or if he said anything. After that, the friend hopped in and they drove off.
Unnecessary: From the earliest experiences of intersubjectivity, many girls encounter the world as assessor and judge of their body’s value without ever identifying this experience as originating outside their own psychic terrain. That’s feminist scholar Cressida Heyes. Beanpole. That’s what my grandparents had affectionately called me since I could remember until I was in my teens when they started teasingly grasping at my waist, saying “Can’t pinch an inch off me,” per a Special K commercial that aired throughout that adolescence I regressed to in the endocrinologist’s office. I always “ate like a bird,” so my grandparents couldn’t understand when I started to diet, newly refusing their fried chicken and okra Sunday dinners. How could I explain to them? I never ate to stay thin. I ate to coax my hipbones straight. Erase my own shape.
Violet the word in English derives from the Greek, Io, after a beautiful girl Zeus turned into a heifer to protect her from his wife Hera, not that it worked. Spotting the auspiciously attractive creature munching flowers in a field, Hera sent a fly to mercilessly pester it until out of lunacy Io leapt headlong into a sea later named for her, like the flower, Ionian.
Violet the flower may symbolize the maidenly beginning or the morbid end of this story, depending on where in the Western Hemisphere one lives. The flower, funereal, is considered taboo for a bride to carry in a wedding in Italy, still. Ancient Romans carpeted children’s graves with violets.
It was violets, after roses, that were Josephine Bonaparte’s favorite flower. So, it was violets Napoleon promised to return with after he was exiled to Elba. He did, although by then Josephine was dead. The violets he picked from her grave were found in a locket in 1821 with his body when his own life ended. The provenance of violets in his personal history survived him. His second wife, Marie Louise of Austria, would make the super-fragrant violets of the Italian island of Parma famous, although it wasn’t until the Victorian era that chemists developed a process to isolate and distill violets’ aromatic ionones, and that is when the flower ascended to a Westernized symbol of love, romance, courtship.
A signature scent connoting femininity, violet notes rank among the most prevalent in the mainstream perfume industry, aroma of choice for perfumed Valentine’s Day cards and the scratch and sniff stickers that decorated my girlhood notebooks. To press a violet, you don’t need any special tools. You go out in the morning, pluck a few, plunge them in ice water, snip the ends off the stems, forget them for a long time between the pages of a heavy book. The scent will be gone but not the sentiment.
All true violets are wildflowers. Not to be confused with the hybridized offshoots I bought in bulk that day at the nursery, pansies and violas, or with African violets which belong to an entirely separate subspecies, largely endangered in the wild, Streptocarpella, native to Tanzania and Kenya. Many violets can typically be found growing along creekbeds, in prairies and woodlands, diminutive with more leaves than their five petals.
Roses are red, violets are blue, is a nursery rhyme in Spencerian verse but its earliest known publication in English appears in Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel, Les Misérables, translated from the French as part of a refrain sung by the working class mother Fantine, on her deathbed in a tubercular ward, having sold her teeth, hair and body to provide for the daughter she leaves behind. It’s true. Most violets do belong to a twilit blue color range. Although Beckwith’s violet, native to the Pacific Northwest is maroon with a splashy marigold yellow beard, and some say all violets, like MacCloskey’s violet, were originally strictly white, that it was only after Mary’s anguish seeing her son hang on the cross that they purpled, only after the shadows of his body fell upon them that they hung their heads.
For their overall shape, in Japanese, the word for the flower is sumire, ink container.
My friend texts back an 18th century Japanese woodcut of violets and primroses. A detail from a Henry Darger painting. A link to a vintage Hole sweatshirt on eBay. The next day she drops off a Palo Santo bundle wrapped with dried violets and an amethyst quartz crystal from a psychic outpost in Echo Park. I don’t remember when she left behind a violet yarn doll from a textile sourcing trip to Mexico, but each time I find that handwoven horse on my son’s nightstand or in some basket of odds and ends in our kitchen, I remind myself again to return it to her so that her daughter can have it.
Some say both the flower and the color violet are a conduit. In Hinduism, the color violet illuminates the crown shakra, a precipice between the body and the universe. In Chinese painting, to paint with violet is to invoke the duality of transcendence in the yin yang. And in keeping with New Age practices, violet assumes the radiance of the seventh ray, reflecting the relationship between spirit and matter.
Once, after a Westside hormone therapy treatment, I took myself out to the Inn of the Seventh Ray in Laurel Canyon for a creekside lunch of reverse-osmosis alkalized diver scallops prepared with violet vibrations, but nothing happened.
Once my painter friend summered in Spain at a nudist villa and brought me back a box of violet pastilles I display on a glass shelf among perfume bottles in my bathroom to this day.
And once, while a nurse was dilating a balloon up my cervix to pipe radioactive iodine through a canula into the fallopian tubes, I noticed on the wall above the sink a hyper-pigmented photograph of a sea mollusk, trundling sand. The prevalence of aquatic themed décor schemes among fertility clinic examination rooms had come to my attention before, especially since these were the same sorts of underwater symbolism making it more and more into my friend’s illustrations for wallpapers. Pulsing jellyfish, frilled crinoids and other oceanic embodiments of the embryonic, systematically hung to coax a patient’s subconscious towards her “goal.”
The procedure had me lightheaded. The dye was filtering up me. The administered Klonopin had just kicked in. I was loopy. “Do you happen to know what species that is?” I asked the nurse. Graciously, glancing up from her gloved hand between my legs to the photograph, she answered: “Can’t say that I do.”
Across from her, an X-ray technician was scrutinizing fluorographic film of the iodine as it coursed up to the uterus, screening for deformities that might deter implantation.
Bolinus Brandaris, I knew from violet texting, the spiny sea snail, is the creature responsible for the violet dye first extracted by 16th Century Phoenicians from its desiccated anal glands, thousands of snails boiled in vats for days. Not a cheap process. The odor was putrid; but the pigment was intense. The rarity and expense attached the color to its persisting associations with richness, royalty. For Bolinus Brandaris, that same prized hypobranchial mucus served a basic procreative purpose: to protect its egg masses from bacterial infection.
Waiting for the dye to do its thing, I had to wonder about the relationship between the purple Iodine snaking through the tubing and the snail suspended in its frame. My uterus felt so cold. Sumire I thought as the nurse and I watched in the focused quiet of a purpled dark room an even darker purple monitor screen fluoresce blue up the mouth of the cervix into the uterine shape. I had to ask myself if what I was doing was wrong, violating the laws of nature, inviting further suffering for myself and my kind by participating in a synthetic practice wherein, if this iodine test came out okay, optimally one’s ovaries are induced to spawn 18, 19 mature eggs at a time when what is normal for the body is one. Skin stretched so tight across the abdomen and thighs from fluid retention to move was to be reminded of another perverse gait, a stylized expression of elite female identity inversely related to the largesse of a woman’s marriage prospects, a tiny foot like a tiny waist. A girl’s foot, like a sea snail, scalded in hot water, oiled and massaged before the sole could be broken, bound back flat and folded again in half lengthwise into a lotus shape until the cleft of the arch could hold a coin in place, an envelope to convey a message about worth.
One of those mornings, beside the violet notecard in the garage, I taped a paragraph from EM Forster’s 1908 novel A Room with A View. Because I want things to be beautiful and just then they weren’t, I looked up from my desk at the paragraph often, reading it as an inducement to the novel’s sheltered British heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, and to myself. On holiday in Italy, Lucy has fallen out of step with her tour group, is scrambling up a Tuscan cliff on the heels of a young local cab driver, Phaeton. Just before a pivotal moment in which the societally-indoctrinated fabric of her life is upended, Phaeton leads her through underbrush to a vista.
Light and beauty enveloped her. She had fallen on to a little open terrace, which was covered with violets from end to end. “Courage!” cried her companion, now standing some six feet above. “Courage and love.” She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth.
Courage and love. That desk and the notes tacked to the wall above it are long gone, replaced by a child’s jumble of toys and drawings. So is the woman who looked up at the vista of violets again and again, imagining a valley leading out to a gentler dimension. It’s only now I see. Phaeton is speaking as much to Lucy as to the old-fashioned world she represents. His shout is primal. The violets are him. His desire is less to rescue Lucy from her milieu, more to wrestle the flower away from societal preconceptions, (all those Italian superstitions; all that British daintiness), to accord with his authentic experience of them.
Phaeton’s violets are no ancillary detail. Much of the narrative pits stiff Edwardian cultural mores against their Italian romantic opposites. A Room with A View is a novel that asks what a good person is if everything society teaches a person to do in order to be considered good turns out to be wrong. At the time Forster was writing it, the color violet’s watershed moment was in full swing. Its Impressionistic purview would’ve been well known to him. For the Impressionists, violet represented an entire vocabulary as yet unspoken, ushering in not so much a new school of painting, but of looking. Their headlong embrace of the pigment became a source of public ridicule, a joke among critics. Monet’s 1872 painting, “Impression, Soleil Levant,” provided the name for the movement but it was mocked in a widely-read newspaper review: “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.”
That same violet would transmogrify how we see light and air, faces, eyelids, jowls, trees, a deep breath, a flooded field, towels in the wind, the way a woman’s dress folds when a plump child sits in her lap, the walls of an empty bedroom, pond murk, prominent monuments, the restlessness of slow moments, a bowl, the underside of an upturned hat brim, umbrellas, boat sails, eddying smoke, a dead fish, bare flesh, the rudimentary in the transient, life.
He was wrong, the endocrinologist. I remember it all.
Every needle I jabbed into my belly, pinching up flab to prize upon a new unbruised patch. Every needle my partner tentatively stuck intramuscularly in my butt, poor man–how I’d hiss like a cat, curse like crazy! The lines of tubing forced by anesthesiologists into the underside of my wrist, inner elbow, for an IV drip of one kind or another prior to procedures, the cannulas threaded into my cervix, the cutterage “spoon” dragged across the lining of my uterus to enhance implantation, the razor swiped across that same surface to surgically remove a polyp the size of a pimple. Thousands of needles by the end of my “journey”—I would know; I kept a tally. I haven’t forgotten a single round of IVF. Six in total. Any more than I have any of the six consecutive miscarriages.
But the endocrinologist in Beverly Hills at that first consult wasn’t the only one grappling with backwards thinking. I’m still in the grips of superficial insecurities of my own on the subject. He was wrong. When I typed those three words moments ago the referent I had in mind– automatically, almost extrinsically, viscerally–was the young dumb jock back on the edge of the raggedy junior high lawn. All at once I’m aware of a tendency to further underscore one’s insufficiency, as if that’s a woman’s only recourse. I want to think the impulse is weightier than that, too. A will to argue against the messages we’re still collectively sending ourselves about what it means for a woman to have a good body that’s wrong. As if we can’t quit looking at women’s bodies the way Medieval apothecaries looked at flowers, convinced a plant’s physical attributes belied its curative properties—liverwort to treat the liver simply because Marchantia’s ribbon shaped margins resembled the liver, violet to treat uterine complaints, and so forth—this idea that female body shape corresponds to its readiness to procreate, morphing importance from one body part to another as the day dictates, from feet to waists or hips, nubile implants, it persists.
And yet, even out of a kneejerk reflex to set a teenage football player straight, I see myself aping the conundrum, placing too much emphasis on my body’s aptitude for breeding. It’s the pettiest fact check on my tongue. Not pert breasts or perfect teeth, but the inability to deliver naturally. A sizing up nonetheless. My hips. He was wrong: When I do give birth, my pelvic cavity will prove too narrow for my son’s head to breach.
But this is before all of that, before the son and the caesarean, before my bedside becomes a laboratory, my abdomen a landscape of black eyes. Before I’ve bankrupted us on bearded iris bulbs, outsized deductibles and furred African violets to pot on the ledge over the kitchen sink like my mother did when I was a child. Before the polypectomy, the laparoscopy, the hysterosalpingogram, the uterine scrape, the intercoastal immunological zooms, the potential cross border blood transfusions, the genetic embryonic biopsies, the intracytoplasmic sperm injections, the DeproLupron injections, the intravenous intralipid infusions, the postcoital screenings, the steroid protocol, the perineal procedure, the hematological panels, the failed implantations and short-lived chemical pregnancies.
What’s your body waiting for? Many women find their skin isn’t as elastic.
Candidates should be finished having children and have realistic expectations.
It is always a combination of procedures, most commonly focused on the breast, stomach and waistline areas, but it can also include procedures designed to rejuvenate the vagina and face.
The endocrinologist has turned away from the pamphlets to return his purpling gaze to me. That’s when I recall an aura trick the first therapist I ever saw taught me in Santa Barbara when my boss at the first job I got out of college, for an impressive nonprofit, kept loudly encouraging me to show off my legs at donor events. (Wind chimes, well meaning…she was more of a good witch than a good therapist.) Imagine a calming color, she’d encouraged me. My choice of violet she found interesting, the sort of thing we might further analyze at some later date (we never got around to it). For the time being, in the midst of my boss’s midlife crisis, she’d suggested that while getting dressed for work in the morning, I imagined adorning myself with protective jewels. Sapphires, amethysts. Around the boss, she advised, visualize yourself shielded in a violet glow he can’t broach.
So, there I stand a decade later in Beverly Hills. Jobless and yet mired in appointments, trying to manage my corporeality like I used to manage my corporate staff, willing myself to hold it together to make it to the other side of this quagmire, wanting to block out the bad body messages and the bad man vibes, being violet.
“Just think, by the time you want a second, you’re going to be what? Thirty-nine?” asks the endocrinologist, answering his own rhetorical question: “I happen to be a betting man. Odds are, you’ll wind up at IVF anyhow.” Maybe it’s the words betting man. Maybe it’s odds are. That’s when I remember the therapist’s directive in the event violet failed. Grab your purse and run. “This way, you’ll have your baby boy in your arms,” the endocrinologist is saying, congenial, confident. “And we’ll have a baby girl waiting for you here on ice.”