Ordinary Magic

If there’s one thing you learn working on a carnival, it’s how to be invisible. Despite all that bling and zip and wow, a carny’s goal is to straddle the distance between spectacle and crowd: to entice people toward the ticket booth, then slip into the background. In my family, it’s a long-standing tradition. Tricksters and circus folk, we’ve made our living on the road for generations, and growing up on that carnival route, I got much more used to being looked at than seen.

Our show began when most did: at the cusp of the twentieth century, when carnivals as we know them today were invented. Along the margins of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition—a grand showing of alabaster buildings and new creations, from Cracker Jacks to the Pledge of Allegiance—something else caught America’s eye: the midway. Suffused with belly dancers and Buffalo Bill’s wild ride, it captured more ticket dollars than the primary event, and for the next century, those thrill rides and games of chance toured the nation, from my great-grandparents’ early years through my own, wringing dollars from pockets for a few days at a time—before they disappeared.

Decades later, during my first visit to a fertility clinic, I discover that there, too, in all practical terms, I don’t exist. “Can you tell me,” I ask, “what my chances are?”

Not good; I know they can’t be—not at nearly forty. Not alone. But so often, we defy our chances willfully. My uncles, as carnival barkers, knew this: what people are willing to wager, often beyond reasonable odds. “Tell me,” I insist. “I want to know.”

But they can’t. No statistics are kept on single women. Or lesbians, for that matter: women like my mother who, if she’d had the choice, may well have had me without the help of a man—even if I, finding that my only option, wish I didn’t have to. But none of these details matter because the only available data, my doctor explains, is on married women who can’t conceive.

So how, then, to calculate such a risk?

“You have no idea?” The cost of in vitro fertilization—my only viable option, the doctor assures me—is a year’s salary.

Her head shakes, though there are ways, she promises, of increasing my odds. Genetic testing, for instance, can be done a week after laboratory conception: my eggs, fertilized in a petri dish. “It’s a good idea,” she confirms. All that minute examination of genes and cells and possibilities. “We need to be as certain as we can.”

Fifty years after Chicago’s initial world’s fair, it hosted a second, this time known as the Century of Progress. A spectacle of science, the new fair boasted such innovations as aerial trams and infant incubators. Perhaps most notably absent, though, was another feat also accomplished in 1933: the first successful in vitro fertilization. Conducted on rabbits, it had been achieved by Gregory Pincus, a young Jewish researcher at Harvard—though the world was not ready. Creating life in a petri dish? His senior colleagues shook their heads, and Pincus lost his job—even if those questions endured. How to manage life’s conditions? How best to create or recreate?

At Chicago’s new fair, the Hall of Science speculated where it could, staging booths for genetics or anthropology, and another newly minted endeavor: eugenics. Established half a century earlier by a cousin of Charles Darwin, eugenics posed a grand theory of human improvement—though there in Chicago, its public launch was modest. Four illustrated posters laid out like logic puzzles invited the American public to consider the means of planned heredity. At that first “Pedigree-study of Man” exhibit, those intricate diagrams mapped out a future, whittling down the genetic code toward a recipe for perfection: all those ways we might combine and recombine ourselves in the best possible dimensions.

“But is it safe?”

In my office, a student sits uncertain, proposing research topics for her term paper—because, all these years later, I’ve escaped the carnival, or it’s escaped me. A college professor, I’m sought out now for knowledge, not ticket stubs—though the results can feel similar. Who, after all, really sees me? A woman alone at forty—quietly trying to will another life into being?

“What about donor eggs?” she suggests, and I flinch. “They could be good,” she supposes, “for couples who need it.” And clinics, she’s aware, want women like her—young, healthy, and often white—to donate. They offer a hefty price. She shudders, though I can see that it intrigues her, too, what she could do, even if nothing about her—stable home life, married parents, tuition comfortably paid for—suggests a need to sell her eggs. Besides, she considers next, shifting back to her more academic focus, “What if they take things too far?”

Dimpled chins and blue eyes, blond hair, or the perfect nose—as though infants could be ordered up off menu boards.

“That’s not quite how it works,” I caution, though even what is possible leaves me raw with wonder. My own eggs, removed from my body, sit frozen now in tiny, hair-thin vials while I work extra jobs to save up for the next steps of IVF. “There’s a lot we don’t know—what all science might be capable of. Or not.”

And what, after all, are the chances? My child’s earliest days expanding in a laboratory, without me? Or a technician extracting samples from that embryo’s filmy veneer, examining its genetics: all that possibility for life? How is it possible, six days in, to know so much?

First, though, I must choose a sperm donor. By now, databases brim with anonymous men’s smiling infant photographs, paired with descriptions of their languid height, their natural gifts for science or math. Each donor’s pseudonym is approachable and sweet—Paisley or Chester or Hank—pale eyes and easy athleticism, a sharp-cut jaw, a winning smile. So much imagined perfection.

“I just don’t know,” my student worries, more rightly than not, even if not for the reasons she imagines, “whether you should be able to choose something like that.”

I was raised on the idea of choice. Women a generation ahead of me hadn’t had it, and now that I do, I’m told to use it responsibly. But choice is not new. Until the late 1880s, just a decade before Chicago’s first massive fair, formal legislation didn’t yet exist about women’s bodies, or what they might do with them. Long into the nineteenth century, midwives helped women endure pregnancies, or end them. Not until later, when other things became more visible—factory jobs for women, narrowing family size, new waves of immigration—did things begin to change. As white birth rates declined, while numbers at Ellis Island rose, one state after another made a crime out of what women had once done in quiet community. And so it was that the US criminalized abortion fully in 1884, just a year after Darwin’s unwitting cousin had coined the new field of eugenics, creating a more consistent means of managing birth lines—giving a name, finally, to that enduring will to preserve what is most visible and known.

“You have,” my doctor reminds me, “so many options.” Those donor profiles, after all, boast every known benefit, though none of what I most crave: connection. Already, the loneliness of IVF feels familiar, like crowds swelling a carnival: the invisibility not of being alone, but overlooked.

“I need to do this differently,” I tell her, because perfection, after all, comes at a cost: all those anonymous men, such perfect fathers, each of them, whom my child would never meet. “I have a friend,” I explain, whom I’d chosen instead. “He wants to be involved.” If not as a father, then an uncle: someone to be present in my child’s life.

“Well,” the doctor pauses, “that process will be more complicated.”

And I nod, ready to do whatever it takes to work with a known donor, rather than an anonymous one.

Forms and disclosures—she explains the specific requirements—will have to be signed, along with a litany of other things: medical archives, contracts and interviews, blood tests and genetic exams. “But if that’s what you want.”

What do I want? All my life, I’d been told to procreate. After all, I live inside the kind of body that our nation’s rules have sought to replicate: white, cisgender, straight. My donor, in contrast, is not these things. A gay man and an immigrant, his is the kind of body that those same rules have aimed to keep out.

“There will be a lot of tests,” my doctor warns, as though concerned. As though she cannot quite understand why I would choose such a challenging path.

All right, I agree, though why, I wonder, is it so much more difficult to bear the child of a man who loves me, even as a friend, than one who will never appear?

“We just want you,” she assures me, “to have the best chance possible.”

And I nod again, wondering already if the risks I’d imagined are the wrong ones. “We’ll do anything you ask.” As though I, or any of us, might engineer perfection—or want to. But this, apparently, is what progress is supposed to look like. It’s what Chicago’s second fair had celebrated and my student now worries over: how the promise of new technology may frighten or reassure; though, once you’re inside it, it may just leave you numb.

Fairs are designed to overwhelm: the games, the crowds, all those enduring scents of cinnamon and grease. Popping gears and twirling lights and screams: half terror, half delight. This, after all, is how we’ve survived—blurring reality enough to distract—so people thrill, they overspend, going home dizzied from belly aches and glee. My uncles, the carnival barkers, knew this: how easy it is to draw people in, to tempt them toward something they hadn’t planned on. How raw-edged and petty desire can be—because often, it is not the object itself that we crave so much as the sensation of wanting it.

These are lessons I’d also learned early on. Often, before the main event, we worked parades, walking the dusky streets with jangling grocery carts bedazzled by candy and balloons. Listless in that early light, crowds would hail me: a young girl selling cotton candy in the street. I was nine when I first dragged one of those lanky carts, sticky with treats and five times my size, along the margins of a parade route: those free shows that cost nothing beyond a willingness to rise early and claim your spot. And from those dewy stubs of sidewalk, people watched me curiously—even if, later on, their mood would shift, grumbling once the show began, shoving me out of the way with an easy venom that surprised me: grabbing hold of my cart, wrenching it past their view. But before light had fully broken, while they were still yawning and checking their watches, ready to be entertained, I learned my own small power, which had nothing to do with me. Because my uncles were right: it was startlingly easy. People, after all, want to be tempted—all that directionless desire within them. Here, I offered, here—and here. A bloated balloon, a trinket, a swirling sugar stick: so many things that none of them needed. More and more and more. In this way, I learned how carnivals consume us, as much as we consume them.

What eugenics relied on was thorough counting: all those traits most desired, most beneficial for passing on. Based on those assumptions, the rest was easy: a simple if exhaustive inventory. Lists upon lists upon lists. Eye color or an inherited curvature of hair. Levels of tooth decay or self-respect. Loyalty, a sense of humor, musical ability, or a love of the sea. Anything, it seemed, could be measured. At a private institute on Long Island, data accrued throughout the early twentieth century, neatly tracked amidst sea foam and so much inherited certainty: This, this is what humanity should look like. More and more and more—a cacophony of data that could not easily be ignored—until finally, Congress listened. The first group eliminated—legally forbidden to marry—were epileptics. From there, prohibitions became broader, if murkier—“degenerates” and the “feeble-minded”—though who could say, really, what that meant? Poor women, native women, disabled women, institutionalized and incarcerated women, curios and circus women. Women pregnant outside of marriage, no matter the conditions. State after state passed laws enabling the government to sterilize at will, and by the century’s end, tens of thousands had lost their wombs.

Decades later, when IVF first goes mainstream, its formal regulations are few. Clinics must report their success rates to the CDC, counting things once again: live births, or attempted ones. Apart from that, though, the only other regulation comes from the FDA. Donors must be healthy, their policy reads. Any prior disease—anything that could be passed on during pregnancy—must be treated beforehand. In and of itself, this is a caution I can appreciate, and it is one that my donor and I follow through on: reviewing our histories, testing and confirming, checking and rechecking every detail of his physiology and mine.

So, weeks later, when the clinic calls to tell me that I cannot, after all, choose my child’s father, I do not understand. The problem, it seems, is mathematical. Something about antibody levels in my donor’s blood: molecular details that I do not comprehend. All I know is that something in my friend’s body reveals the fact that danger, now absent, had once lingered there.

“But we already reported that infection,” I remind the nurse. “And it was treated years ago.” Though the titrate levels, apparently, are a razor’s breath too high.

“Does that mean he’s sick?”

No.

“Or that the infection has gone active again?”

No.

“Or that it could hurt me—or the baby?”

No—still no.

But numbers, it seems, matter; they alone condemn us: “You’ll need a different donor.”

By then, everything had already been revealed. We’d tested and disclosed it all—every detail of our medical backgrounds, lifestyles, down to each turn and nod of our DNA. “Isn’t it enough,” I insist, “that the thing was treated? That there isn’t any threat?”

The nurse is silent; she has no answer, perhaps because I’m asking the wrong questions.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and I understand that this system does not necessarily preclude us, though neither does it see us. A gay man—a man who also happened not to be white—and me, an unmarried woman. And invisibility, I know by now, is never accidental.

“But this,” my voice fractures, “is my child’s father.”

“I’m sorry,” the nurse answers again, hanging up the phone.

Originally meaning “good birth,” eugenics promised to rid the world of its ills: disease, hardship, the anxiety of difference or change. Its early supporters, the Carnegies and Rockefellers, believed that promise. Harvard and Stanford universities endorsed its potential: a future, a way ahead. The Supreme Court agreed, as did President Roosevelt, because hadn’t “enough imbeciles” been allowed to reproduce already? Even in progressive California, a vision was traced out methodically: a proposal not only to prevent new lives, but to eliminate the ones we didn’t need. No one used the word “genocide”—not even Hitler, when he did it. Though he did cite it later: California’s well-articulated plan, which had laid out a path for him. That science, he’d mentioned later on trial, was ideal: detailed, specific, carefully rationalized. A perfect final solution.

Afterward, of course, the horror, the war crimes. The denial. No one talks, now, about the American roots of the Holocaust: how our early eugenics laws extended naturally toward that end. No one talks, much, either, about the first father of IVF, Gregory Pincus—too young, too Jewish to be trusted—or his unexpected reappearance after the war. But, of course, those questions lingered: How do we create? And who gets to decide? Women, in particular, deserved more say, Margaret Sanger insisted, when she came knocking at his door. A pill—that’s what she wanted. Something simple enough to let women decide when to procreate, or not, as men could. Certainly, Pincus agreed—if she could fund a lab. And so, Sanger, a eugenicist, hired him to create the first birth control pill. Because, after all, wasn’t that choice important? Wasn’t it worth the fight?

When I begin to fight, I, too, return to science, because it’s the language that counts. Seeking out facts and testimonials, I gather all possible proof that my donor’s health is sufficient—that our child has a right to exist.

“We just want you to have the best chance possible,” my doctor continues to assure me—though those chances, I see now, are not what I’d imagined. Because perfection, increasingly, isolates. The fierceness of our nation’s objective—all that enduring will to recreate such narrow versions of itself—hurts. Its single-mindedness hurts.

Instead, I go looking for help: anyone who will examine my case, speak to it, put something in writing. For weeks, then months, I’m citing facts, calling in favors, exploring every possible angle. More and more and more—because, the clinic tells me, one expert letter is not enough, nor are two or three. The burden of that proof overwhelms, until I become equal parts researcher and animal hunger. My child—my child. Everything now within me craves that singular, finite end: not data, but an infant. This one, specifically: the one I have imagined now for months. The one I have already fallen in love with. And so I go on counting, inventorying, trying to amass enough evidence that no one can ignore it: a dizzying array of data, until it becomes so overwhelming, they cannot tell me no.

It is easy enough to believe that I will prevail; it is easy, too, to imagine that I will fail. More than anything, these questions precede me. When eugenics fell out of favor, it went underground, but did not disappear. At county fairs throughout the 1950s, “Better Baby Contests” endured: those festive pageants sizing up baby boomers after the war. The right skin tone or blue eyes or shape of a nose: so much imagined perfection. It was not a new idea. When baby contests first began in 1908, it was in the name of public health. At the century’s turn—before film or radio, when the best way of capturing an audience was still at a carnival—infant mortality rates remained high. Absent information about infection or hygiene, new parents buried one child in ten. Often enough, history cuts both ways. So, for all the harm they did—sizing up one set of features over another, driving a wedge between groups for the sake of assumed progress—those early infant exhibits also saved lives.

Spectacle and survival so often blur, and perhaps it should be no surprise, either, that my grandmother—orphan, war bride, and former trapeze queen—knew this. That, on a balmy summer day, not long after my GI grandfather had returned home, she’d entered their first born into such a contest—and won. To this day, we still have that celebratory snapshot: my father, whose infant images look so much like mine that it’s impossible, beyond the vintage of the photograph, to tell us apart. So it is that I can stare down at that unsuspecting grin, such a casual proxy for my own, crisscrossed with taffeta fair ribbons, spooled and frilled like a 4-H badge across his chest: such a beautiful, perfect child.

From the inside, fairs are boring: long days, often grueling, and all of them the same. When I think of my own childhood, growing up on carnivals, it was an ordinary magic: a veneer of easy thrills and endless charm. Spectacles, after all, are planned, even if the best ones appear entirely spontaneous: a predictable kind of awe. The kind of wonder you could rely on.

But no one stops to think much about how that same show might look in the next town—or the next. Most of thrill, after all, is anticipation. That spell we crave glitters mainly if it is also willing to disappear. Though invisible things are not necessarily absent, and even an empty fairground holds the shape of what it remembers: grease stains and loose pocket change, smashed debris of popcorn kernels and hay.

Today, there is almost no visible trace of either of Chicago’s famous fairs. The first one burned just months after closing, and structures from the second are scattered now across the Midwest: Viking ships in Illinois, a faux-Norwegian palace in Wisconsin, and once-fashionable model homes nestled oddly among the Indiana Dunes. Strange transplants—reminders we no longer remember why we need. As for the midway, it keeps moving. That, after all, is the singular capacity of the classic carnival: its ability to both woo and disappear, leaving behind its breathless audience, still dazzled. A show like that never apologizes, never rests. Ephemeral and transitory, its best trick, always, is to leave us craving more.

By the time the clinic calls again, nearly a year has passed. Yes, the nurse confirms, finally, it is enough. All those studies and testimonials—so much burdened fact. Now, I can move ahead—become pregnant, have my child. “Aren’t you glad?” she asks, explaining what we already know: that there is no real danger. There never has been.

My heads bobs forward—yes, of course—though all these months later, most of what I feel is small. Exhausted. Hollowed out by fatigue—and doubt. Because permission, I know by now, is not the same as acceptance.

Still, the nurse insists: “I’m happy for you.” And, despite it all, some ventriloquist inside me does what’s expected: Thank you. Because what, after all, are the chances? More than anything, I want this child. And more than anything, I recognize that wanting is not enough. It never has been.

Thank you, I say again, as though I’m being gifted with something, rather than vaguely restored.

Thank you, though that voice sounds nothing like my own.

Thank you, even as my body buckles.

“You did well.” My father, the retired carnival barker, at least, is relieved. And I nod again—of course. Yes. Though still it leaves me breathless: how seamlessly shame and survival can blend.

You did well. He’d assured me the same, years earlier, when I’d returned from that first parade, dragging my emptied cart behind me, rattling like a shipwreck: all poles and empty wire now. Because that, strangely, is what certain success looks like.

Thank you, I’d blushed, wanting to please him. Thank you, I had answered, too, those crowds all day, their coins sliding sticky across my palm—until, hours later, apron pockets plunged heavy at my hips, slung low like some strange anchor.

Thank you, they’d nodded each time, as I’d yanked free a balloon for them, watching as it snapped, buoyant, into the air, to catch against its string. So now, all these years later, this is what I remember most: their faces, listless and expectant, during those hours before the show. Perched along sidewalks still dewy with the new day, they’d watched me, tugging that jangling cart past potholes and scarred asphalt. Such a casual impatience, as of people who know their right to it: sitting there sleepy-eyed throughout those early hours, picnics laid out, and the day barely begun. Though, later on, I remember, too, the feel of those hands on my cart, pushing me out of the way. A shove, a growl, a glare. The quick indignance of that crowd, for reasons I could not yet understand, and my own childhood confusion: being wanted, but not by a public hungry, more than anything, for distraction. What I remember still are warm coats and anticipation and the easy wonder of it all. A crowd waiting, restless, for what it knew was coming: each time the same, though no less insistent. All that bling and zip and wow. And that slim, certain magic of a show they’d never paid for.