This piece was first published as part of Quarto’s 2020 Spring Print Edition.
Illustration by Anna J Chavez
“We’ll try it once,” Sarah had told Hagar that morning, as Hagar ironed the tapestry that read “Your offspring will number the stars” on the floor of the den. It was a quote from God. Sarah had had the words embroidered in gold stitching onto a sheet by the tiny Mrs. Anderson, who lived downstairs and had a sky-scraping level of respect for Sarah. Each night, the tapestry blew in the breeze from the open window as it hung over Sarah and Abraham’s four-poster, like a talisman.
God had told Sarah about the descendants, and the requisite pregnancy, almost two years ago now. Hagar had just moved in, and she observed the excited, agitated way Sarah began to conceptualize their existences. She was a founding mother now, after all, and everyone’s perspectives ought to widen a little, encompass a little more of the after beyond their lives.
“Abraham’s very uncomfortable about the whole thing,” Sarah had continued as she pointed out a wrinkle in the top left of the fabric, where Hagar’s arm didn’t quite reach. Hagar had lifted herself onto her knees and clamped the hot machine down on the rumpled corner. “But we haven’t got much else choice.”
Hagar had nodded, offered Sarah a corner of the sheet when she began to cry. While Sarah made a return to the craft store on 77th, Hagar and Abraham would try to conceive.
Sarah had had her eggs destroyed a month before she took over the carseat company. A senior adviser and trusted mentor had recommended the procedure right before Sarah had been published in Forbes’ 30 Under 30, nearly twenty-five years ago. With as fast as HappyRide was growing, no one could imagine the CEO applying for a Release-from-Duty waiver for something as trite as maternity, not even Sarah. The year before Sarah’s promotion, the president had gone into labor in the Oval Office. The post headlines had carried mixed tones of awe and repulsion about it. There was a New York Times piece that asked what it meant to live in a society where leaving work to have children was considered backwards and indolent. “Successful, empowered women simply don’t want to infirm themselves for nine months,” a designer from Los Angeles commented on a Good Morning America segment. “Something about pregnancy is deeply offensive to contemporary feminism,” a conservative from Sarah’s hometown had lamented on CNN. No matter the nay-sayers, it was commonly taken for granted that child-bearing was what the Waiting Women were for, if you were a wife who was desperate.
Sarah had decided she wasn’t.
But the message from God, confirmed by Abraham’s having the same dream as Sarah about a thousand children surrounding the couple in the building lobby, had flipped everything. Hagar listened weekly to Sarah complain about the doctors she was haggling.
“It’s ridiculous,” Sarah would begin from the sofa, where she watched marathons of the Kardashians and scoffed. “I tell these med grads God himself instructed me to become pregnant, and what do they recite? The shit they print on fertility.gov: Egg incineration is irreversible and permanent.”
“Ridiculous,” Hagar would say, before touching her stomach. The suggestion of her being the one to bear Abraham’s heir disturbed her, but it also anchored her in the precarious inclusion she had in Abraham and Sarah’s scope of concern. Sometimes, they didn’t leave any meat for her at dinner.
When Hagar arrived at nineteen to become one of the Waiting Women, she’d watched the sleekly dressed twenty-somethings, with their swank, affectionate mistresses, stand at the Lennox Avenue bus stop with their host families. The Waiting Women were always beautiful in that very effortful, self-conscious way Hagar suspected had something to do with careful instruction and expense. Still, Hagar had been jealous of that decisive air of belonging that they walked with, the way the older mistresses walked next to them with a protective hand on one shoulder. All the care that followed being one of the young women who sold her womb. When Hagar looked at the picture of her and her sisters, five sets of straight white teeth set in five dark faces, she considered herself fortunate to be picked to come so far, to a place so white and neat.
The first month, she’d paid her rent with the money she made from sweeping up hair in the braiding salon near the boarding house. It was the same salon many Waiting Women were dropped off at to have their hair fixed, usually after their pregnant bellies had deflated and their mistresses were feeling grateful.
One of Hagar’s first evenings there, before God had spoken to Abraham, she cleaned the house alone as snores escaped Sarah’s bedroom. She was picking up the pieces of debris the expensive vacuum never sucked up. As she pulled at bits here and there of the living room carpet, she thought of the things she’d memorized about the house so far.
Abraham was quiet and did not watch the evening news with them at 6 p.m. Instead, he went on walks around the neighborhood and planned out the next forty years or so of his retirement. When he came back, he’d tug Sarah into a hug and whisper something like “Morocco” or “scuba lessons.” Sarah would find Hagar’s face, usually bent over the kitchen sink that felt so deep it could swallow her, and roll her eyes, the corner of her mouth twitching.
Hagar’s room, which had once been a walk-in closet with a window, was five feet from Sarah’s dressing table. When she retired to it at ten o’ clock each night, she could hear the rustle of Sarah slipping into her pajamas, and the click of the moisturizer pump. Sarah had explained that Hagar should take the closet instead of the narrow bedroom on the opposite end of the hall because it’d be more like they were a family. “And I like to keep an eye on everyone,” Sarah had mentioned one day with a wink Hagar pretended to understand.
Hagar tried to recall the sounds she had fallen asleep to before: her parents putting pots away in the kitchen, the swell of locust music, her youngest sister’s breathing on the mattress nearby. It was hard to imagine who they might be with the money she’d been exchanged for. There were so many things it could’ve solved: Duaa’s medicine, the down payment on the newer apartments in town, Lillith’s tuition. Hagar couldn’t bear to respond to the last letter they’d sent and ask them. Her mother had written I hope you’re doing your part to keep the house clean. They thought the Waiting Women program was a kind of adoption. That they were trading Hagar’s womb for her to be protected by faraway people in a land she’d afterwards get the best of: an important job, a house with carpet, her own American children. They didn’t realize that, while Hagar waited for her fertility to be remembered, she had to earn her keep. Beyond her womb, they’d purchased her hands and muscles.
Though there was a kind of love involved: if Hagar could get pregnant, if she could deliver on God’s promise, Sarah would look at her like she was a miracle. She’d touch Hagar’s body like it was something ethereal. Those were the moments she tried to imagine when Sarah’s allusions to “helping them out” threatened to choke her.
***
Hours after Hagar had finished ironing and rehanging the tapestry, she sat in her bedroom with the door closed. She’d left Sarah and Abraham at the table alone after serving dinner. She’d felt nauseous since Sarah’s visit to her that morning, and the garlicy smell of the stew made her want to vomit. Every time she glanced at the withered but solid bulk of Abraham and imagined herself beneath him, she felt her stomach twist.
A few evenings ago, Hagar had entered the bedroom while Abraham and Sarah finished dinner downstairs. She’d wanted an ibuprofen, and the bottle was missing from the bathroom cabinet. She scanned the room first--the rumpled bed she hadn’t made that morning because Sarah had left it covered in used Kleenex, the cluttered dressing table, the book shelf. She crossed the room and peered over Sarah’s nightstand. Then, ignoring the guilty stiffness of her arm, she grasped the nightstand drawer knob and tugged.
The small white bottle rolled across a calendar covered in hectic red pen marks. Hagar lifted the calendar delicately, and did not stop herself when she read OVULATION printed across the top.
In between the red hieroglyphs and doctors’ names that covered most of the days in February, a tiny black H enclosed in a circle stamped the week starting with the 14th. A trail of oblong eggs filled the space just beneath the symbol. The 14th had been two days ago. “Ideal” Sarah had scrawled. “Talk to Abraham.”
It was one thing to be Sarah’s surrogate, another for the woman to know the intimate details of Hagar’s fertility cycle. It dawned on Hagar that Sarah was counting on her to conceive that very week. She’d been planning it for who knew how long.
Now, as she waited for Sarah to leave her and Abraham alone, Hagar tried to make her face look triumphant in the little mirror that hung over her chest of drawers. She lowered her eyelids and set her mouth. Perhaps Abraham would look at her in that same way he looked at Sarah when she salsaed during the jeopardy theme song. Perhaps he’d be excited and sorry.
Sarah stopped by for a kind of pep talk on her way out of the door for the craft store. She had just finished telling Hagar about Ruth Jensen, who had had a few of her Waiting Woman Joanna’s eggs artificially inseminated and then inserted back inside of her.
“The amount she paid—wow. That’s what happens when it’s all underground. I have to say I’m glad they outlawed most of those procedures,” Sarah said. “Those instruments are incredibly invasive. And so artificial,” she continued as she spritzed a curtain of her daily perfume at Hagar. Then she made a face, as if she regretted it, and returned to stuffing knitting yarn in the plastic shopping bag. “How much time should I give you all . . . no, don’t answer that. Ha ha.” Then she paused again. “I don’t know why I’m so nervous. This is your job. Women all over the country are doing what they need to do to—”
“Car’s ready, Sarah,” Abraham called from the hall.
“Well, goodbye. Thank you. Loosen up.”
Hagar tried to smile, but Abraham only looked slightly above her as she undressed. The quiet was unsettling. Hagar found herself cold.
He walked over to the bed, reclined, and waited.
And then she was closer than she’d been to anyone in a long time. It did not feel nice, but she bit Abraham’s lip—an impulsive, frantic gesture that she guessed was designed to make him open his eyes.
When it was over, Abraham asked her to take a look at the washing machine. Was it leaking, or was he just imagining the wet on the soles of his feet when he exited the bathroom?
***
A few months into the pregnancy, Abraham began to assist Hagar with her chores. One night after his walk, he swept the kitchen floor while Hagar put away the sliced vegetables.
Abraham had asked her to call the baby Ishmael, if and whenever she talked to the fetus she never forgot. It was hard for him to hide his excitement around Hagar, around the ever- growing thing in her belly. Constantly, he asked Hagar how she was feeling.
As a result, Sarah had stopped smiling at Hagar and cursed when she was late to bed.
Contrary to what Hagar had hoped, Ishmael did not make Sarah love her better. Instead, Hagar felt essential and despised. In the evenings, the proximity between the two women was painful, but the second bedroom was slowly being converted into a nursery.
Hagar had listened to Sarah and Abraham whisper about her one night in the dark cove of their bedroom as she exited the hall bathroom after her shower. “She wouldn’t understand how lonely she makes me feel,” Sarah was saying, “And did you see the look on her face when the Pearsons’ asked to touch her belly? So much . . . satisfaction, Abe. Perhaps Ruth knew what she was doing after all. You don’t know the ego on these girls until they’ve lied with your husband . . .”
Hagar entered the room then, went quickly to her closet, and shut the door loudly.
***
Ishmael was born much darker than Sarah had hoped. She allowed Hagar to nurse him, and grimaced when he came inside from the sun, on a July afternoon four years later, holding a monarch butterfly on his deeply brown forefinger.
“He looks less like his father each day,” she commented as she took Ishmael’s hand to eat lunch.
Hagar slept on the floor of Ishmael’s bedroom, and combed his hair in the morning. She’d heard snippets of conversation, that God was going to do something else, that Abraham’s heir could not be half black. Hagar found it nearly impossible to fathom Sarah’s apprehension about Ishmael. He helped Abraham carry wood, made them Fourth of July cards, and did not whine during jeopardy.
The fact that Ishmael was an heir was both thrilling and gut-wrenching. She had a complicated relationship to the reality that her body had made the heir. On the one hand it was a heartening thing to come this far west and start a lineage that would be forever, on the other she felt achingly inconsequential. Ishmael had Abraham’s surname, and the emergency contact on his school forms was always Sarah. Hagar felt more essentially connected to Ishmael than she ever had to anyone else, but still his future was beyond and estranged from her.
Two years later, Sarah gave birth to Isaac. The pregnancy was a miracle; the baby shower was held at the Plaza, with a harpist and waiters. After the legitimate heir’s third birthday, Hagar was officially dismissed. The three of them stood on the sidewalk in front of the apartment building.
“I don’t want Isaac to grow up confused. And Ishmael is quite rough with him—he doesn’t realize that his brother is very important,” Sarah was saying.
Abraham shook the ice in his Coke and took a long gulp.
“Thank you for waiting. But, really, we’d like to move on now,” Sarah continued, “Do things the proper way.”
Hagar left that evening, with Ishmael’s warm hand in her fingers.
***
On their third night in Central Park, Hagar and Ishmael slept on separate ends of the bank on the Pond and found each other in the morning. They spent the day with their hands entwined when Hagar made the rounds between the community Depositories for leftover barbeque stuffs: half-deflated bags of Lays, wrinkled hot dogs, a sloppy strawberry shortcake. They liked to let go of each other at night, spread out and let the grass absorb their sweat.
That first week, before they looked for shelter in one of the immigrant communities downtown, Hagar liked to watch her son make forts out of dirt, and squeeze his eyes tight when the wind swept it up in swirls around his face.
When Hagar slept, God showed her Ishmael’s children, their princely faces with her nose. She slept easily: Hagar and Ishmael belonged to each other, and it did not hurt.
Imani is a member of the class of 2021 and is majoring in English and African-American Studies. Recent writing inspirations have been George Saunders’ Tenth of December, Narfissa Thompson-Spires’ Heads of the Colored People, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black. Outside of books, she also enjoys consuming unhealthy amounts of Youtube and TikTok. Imani writes for The Columbia Witness, Columbia’s journal of Christian perspectives.