4. The Question (cont.)

My mother’s face slammed shut.

I knew what that meant. No more questions. No more answers. So I took the bit of information I had gleaned back outside and thought about it some more, taking small nibbles of the egg as I did. Careful nibbles to avoid the dry and unappealing yolk.

My mother wasn’t being entirely forthcoming—that was clear—so I had to put the pieces together myself. But I was a resourceful child, and I soon had it all sorted out, the whole story of the way babies come into the world.

It was, after all, an operation. And this was the way it worked:

After a man and a woman got married, they went on a honeymoon. I knew all about honeymoons. But before they left for their honeymoon, they did something that grown-ups, for reasons that were beyond explanation, never discussed. They stopped by the doctor’s office for a bit of surgery.

The doctor cut the man open and took something out. I even knew what the thing he took out looked like. It was round and pink and kind of glistening, and it had bumps on it. It had a bump for each baby the couple was going to produce. Then he cut the woman open, and he put the round, pink, glistening, bumpy ball inside her tummy. Then he sewed them both up and they went off on their honeymoon.