Women in Deep Time Read Free

nature, a plan we shouldn’t interfere with. If we had gone along with most of the others and tried to have PPCs—participated in the boy-girl lotteries and signed up for the prebirth opportunity counseling—why, we would have been interfering.”
    “Did you go to a hospital when we were born?”
    “Yes,” Jane said, still avoiding their faces.
    “That’s not natural,” Letitia said. “Why not let nature decide whether we’d be born alive?”
    “We have never claimed to be consistent,” Donald said.
    “Donald,” Jane said ominously.
    “There are limits,” Donald expanded, smiling placation. “We believe those limits begin when people try to interfere with the sex cells. You’ve had all that in school. You know about the protests when the first PPCs were born. Your grandmother was one of the protesters. Your mother and I are both NGs; of course, our generation has a much higher percentage of NGs.”
    “Now we’re freaks,” Letitia said.
    “If by that you mean there aren’t many teenage NGs, I suppose that’s right,” Donald said, touching his wife’s arm. “But it could also mean you’re special. Chosen.”
    “No,” Letitia said. “Not chosen. You played dice with both of us. We could have been DDs. Duds. Not just dingies, but retards or spaz.”
    An uncomfortable quiet settled over the table. “Not likely,” Donald said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Your mother and I both have good genotypes. Your grandmother insisted your mother marry a good genotype. There are no developmentally disabled people in our families.”
    Letitia had been hemmed in. There was no way she could see out of it, so she pushed back her chair and excused herself from the table.
    As she made her way up to her room, she heard arguing below. Roald raced up the stairs behind her and gave her a dirty look. “Why’d you have to bring all that up?” he asked. “It’s bad enough at school, we don’t have to have it here.”
    She thought about the history the AC had shown her. Back then, a family with their income wouldn’t have been able to live in a four-bedroom house. Back then, there had been half as many people in the United States and Canada as there were now. There had been more unemployment, much more economic uncertainty, and far fewerautomated jobs. The percentage of people doing physical labor for a living—simple construction, crop maintenance and harvesting, digging ditches and hard work like that—had been ten times greater then than it was now. Most of the people doing such labor today belonged to religious sects or one of the Wendell Barry farming communes.
    Back then, Roald and Letitia would have been considered gifted children with a bright future.
    She thought about the pictures and the feeling of the past, and wondered if Reena hadn’t been right.
    She would be a perfect old woman.
    Her mother came into her room while Letitia was putting up her hair. She stood in the door frame. It was obvious she had been crying. Letitia watched her reflection in the mirror of her grandmother’s dressing table, willed to her four years before. “Yes?” she asked softly, ageless bobby pins in her mouth.
    “It was more my idea than your father’s,” Jane said, stepping closer, hands folded before her. “I mean, I am your mother. We’ve never really talked about this.”
    “No,” Letitia said.
    “So why now?”
    “Maybe I’m growing up.”
    “Yes.” Jane looked at the soft and flickering pictures hung on the walls, pastel scenes of improbable forests. “When I was pregnant with you, I was very afraid. I worried we’d made the wrong decision, going against what everybody else seemed to think and what everybody was advising or being advised. But I carried you and felt you move…and I knew you were ours, and ours alone, and that we were responsible for you body and soul. I was your mother, not the doctors.”
    Letitia looked up with mixed anger and frustration…and love.
    “And now I see you. I