eggs inside, each looking so tender and pale that you held your breath before venturing to touch one. I was unhappily familiar in my girlhood with another sort of animal egg, that of a cockroach; usually I found the empty egg case after its cargo had safely departed, a sight as disturbing as that of a spent shotgun shell and more evidence of the insect's supremacy.
The symbolic impact of the egg in many cultures is as an oval. The egg of the world, thick toward the bottom to ground us, thinner at the apex as though pointing toward the heavens. In medieval paintings and cathedral tympana, Christus Regnans sits in a heavenly ovoid: he who gave birth to the world was born unto the world to secure it from death. At Easter we paint eggs to celebrate rebirth, resurrection; in the egg is
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life, as life is cradled in the cupped, ovoid palms of the hands. The Hindu gods Ganesha and Shiva Nataraja sit or dance in egg-shaped, flame-tipped backdrops. In painting her vulval flowers, the petals opening onto other petals like abstract pastel matryoshkas, Georgia O'Keeffe evoked as well the image of the egg, as though female genitalia recapitulate female procreative powers.
The egg of a chicken or other bird is a triumph in packaging. A female bird makes the bulk of the egg inside her reproductive tract long before mating with a male. She supplies the egg with all the nutrients the chick embryo will require to reach pecking independence. The reason that an egg yolk is so rich in cholesterol, and thus that people see it as gastronomically risqué, is that a growing fetus needs ample cholesterol to build the membranes of the cells of which the body, any body, is constructed. The bird gives the egg protein, sugars, hormones, growth factors. Only after the cupboards are fully stocked will the egg be fertilized by sperm, sealed with a few calciferous layers of eggshell, and finally laid. Bird eggs are usually oval, in part for aerodynamic reasons: the shape makes their odyssey down the cloaca, the bird's equivalent of a birth canal, that much smoother.
We gals have been called chicks, and in Britain we've been birds, but if our eggs are any indication, the comparison is daft. A woman's egg, like that of any other mammal, has nothing avian about it. There is no shell, of course, and there really is no yolk, although the aqueous body of the egg, the cytoplasm, would feel a bit yolky to the touch if it were big enough to stick your finger in. But a human egg has no food with which to feed an embryo. And though one springs to fullness upon ovulation each month, it most certainly is not the pit-faced, frigid moon.
I have another suggestion. Let's reject the notion that men have exclusive rights to the sun. Must Helios, Apollo, Ra, Mithras, and the other golden boys take up every seat in the solar chariot that lights each day and coaxes forth all life? This is a miscarriage of mythology, for a woman's egg resembles nothing so much as the sun at its most electrically alive: the perfect orb, speaking in tongues of fire.
Dr. Maria Bustillo is a short, barrel-bodied woman in her mid-forties who frequently smiles small, private smiles, as though life dependably
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amuses her. She is a Cuban American. Her features are round but not pudgy, and she wears her dark hair neither short nor long. As an infertility expert, Bustillo is a modern Demeter, a harvester and deft manipulator of human eggs, a magician in a minor key. She helps some couples who are desperate for parenthood get pregnant, and to them she is a goddess. But others she cannot help. For those others, it is no metaphor to say they flush many thousands of dollars down the toilet with each cycle of IVF or GIFT or other prayers by alphabet. * That is the reality of infertility treatment today, as we have read and heard and read again: it is very expensive, and it often fails. Nevertheless, Bustillo smiles her small amused smiles and does not coddle gloom. She manages