Authors: Catherine Greenman
“Well done, you clever girl, as my mum used to say to me once in a blue moon,” Mom said, standing up and coming toward me. “You pulled it off and now my baby is flying the coop at last. But you’ll be a stone’s throw away. I’m getting the best of both worlds. I can hardly believe it.” She stood up and walked over to me with her arms extended, and I saw myself in our flecked mirror above the stereo console as she hugged me: a smiling, rooty blond girl with a thorny secret.
I kept my laptop screen tilted away from my bedroom door. It was January—a month since my un-abortion—and I jumped every time the radiator in my room clanked, thinking it was Mom coming home from dinner. No, I did not want to become a member of Babylove.com, I just wanted to quickly see what it looked like. I signed in as a guest, and the Web page asked for the conception date. I didn’t know for sure but guessed it must have been sometime in late September, after Will moved up to Columbia, since he’d been away with his family before that. It took me to a page that said my twelve-week-old baby was two inches long and developing reflexes. The page said, “Click here to see what your baby looks like.”
I’d called Dr. Moore’s office the afternoon I got home from the un-abortion in December, afraid they’d call me and Mom would answer. They’d asked me if I wanted to reschedule, and I’d made another appointment for the following Friday. I gave them my cell phone number and asked them to call that, not my house, to remind me. When Friday came, I’d left school early, without saying anything to Vanessa. I’d gotten a 6 train to Moore’s office on the Upper East Side, but as the train flew past Eighth Street, then Fourteenth, I started to feel sick, the collar of my down jacket choking me. I focused on the lawyer advertisements plastered up and down the train, but I felt dizzy, like if I took my eyes off the subway ads, the rest of the world would go black. So I got off at Forty-Second Street and grabbed a shuttle to the West Side. I thought if I could just tell Will how sick and scared I felt, he’d understand and know what to do. I got on a 1 train uptown and when I
got to Will’s hall, I spotted him in the lounge, sitting at a card table doing a million-piece puzzle with a red-haired girl. I paused to spy for a moment but didn’t get the sense that there was anything going on with her. As I moved toward them, I realized the puzzle was all white. Every single tiny piece.
“G-Rock!” He looked surprised but happy to see me. “It’s the Beatles’ White Album,” he said, maneuvering me onto his lap. “Melanie and I have committed to finishing it by Sunday. Right, Melanie?”
Melanie nodded and we smiled at each other. The air around her smelled like cigarettes.
“You’re going to help us, right?” he said, nuzzling my neck, sending a delicious chill through me that for a lovely moment overpowered everything else. “We neeeeed you.”
So I ended up staying and doing the puzzle, thinking we’d go off to his room and I would tell him everything, that I hadn’t had the abortion yet and that I didn’t know what to do. But we didn’t go to his room. He seemed so happy that night—so unlike the lovelorn soul he was on the phone with me, complaining about how it was too loud in his dorm and how there were too many people around and how maybe this place wasn’t for him. It sounds lame considering what was going on, but I didn’t want to spoil it. Or maybe I just wanted to escape it too. Someone turned on the TV and then a stereo blared out of a room near the lounge, and someone brought in some beer, and Will smoked pot with a guy in a purple rugby shirt, and we did the puzzle and talked with whoever came through, until it got late and I told him I had to get home, and he walked me downstairs and got me a cab.
I clicked on the tab to see what my baby looked like. Someone had done a line drawing of an enormous head on top of a
small tadpole-like body. Big, wide-set black eyes and holes for ears. So, this was my baby, I thought. How had someone drawn it? Had they studied a printout of an ultrasound or was it something else, where the baby wasn’t alive anymore? Not ready, I said to myself. Not yet. I pushed away the thought that I was almost three months pregnant, that the tiny person inside me was now larger than a quarter, and as I heard Mom’s keys in the door, I felt a strange, visceral urge to defy the hopelessness of it all.
I had to ask Ms. Jedel for a recommendation to get into an English seminar at NYU. I’d sent the application in, but the recommendation was way late. When would I ask her? At the end of the day or the beginning? Which day was the best day to ask for something like this? Friday? Inside the classroom or outside? What would I say?
“Ms. Jedel, I know I haven’t been doing so terrifically, but I wondered if you would consider …”
Ms. Jedel had a very formal demeanor, and she wore tailored pencil skirts and navy patent-leather pumps, which made her stand out even more next to the bedraggled male teachers in jeans and sneakers. When I had her freshman year, she stood at the blackboard, holding the chalk in her fingers like a cigarette. “If you cannot spell
separate
, you are not up to par,” she would say. I’d imagine her going home at night to her apartment with a single paper grocery bag nestled in her arms—dinner
for one—and I imagined her pushing her glasses daintily up her nose as she undressed next to the closet door. I always pictured her wearing a beautiful cream silk slip under her skirt and blouse, and imagined her getting undressed down to that, then padding off to the kitchen to ladle her take-out risotto onto a white plate and eating it sitting down with a tall glass of water. In some weird way, she gave me hope that my adulthood would be elegant.
“Ms. Jedel, I have a big favor to ask you.…”
Then senior year something happened. I took her film class and she discussed
Dog Day Afternoon
and
Raging Bull
, in her same skirts and pumps, and she was too far removed from real life. She was a nerd. And a spinster. I ended up getting a B-plus for the fall semester.
“Ms. Jedel, believe it or not, after my less-than-stellar performance so far in the film class, I’m actually thinking of majoring in film. I know, I know, but this year has been hard for me. I’m deeply in love, and now I’m with child, actually. Could you cut me a break, Ms. Jedel? Could you?”
I endlessly put off asking her, until I finally got up the nerve on February twelfth, my eighteenth birthday. I thought that asking her on my birthday, even though she didn’t know it was my birthday, would somehow mean she’d say yes. I was wrong.
Vanessa was waiting outside in the hall.
“What’d she say?”
“I can’t believe it,” I said. “She turned me down.”
“No!” she said, her eyes widening. “So obnoxious. I’m sorry, Thee. I can’t believe it. Come with me later and we’ll do birthday ice cream, and you can help me buy tennis sneakers. I’ll cheer you up.”
“Okay,” I said, thinking, This birthday is turning out to be
complete rubbish, as Mom would say. Mom had asked me if I wanted a party, but my last big birthday, my sweet sixteen, took place at Dad’s squash club with too many kids I didn’t know smoking pot on the dark empty courts. I just wanted this one to come and go.
I went with Vanessa after school to buy tennis sneakers on Thirty-Fourth Street. She’d picked the last semester of our senior year to join the tennis team. I was jealous because I knew she’d be good at it and probably get really skinny, whereas I was a depressed slob, getting fatter by the second, coming home from school every day and crashing onto the couch like a plane.
A mop-topped boy brought out a stack of boxes and popped the lid off the first one.
He bent down and took the heel of her foot.
“How’s Fiona?” Vanessa asked. “Still howling at the moon?”
“She’s okay,” I said. “She just sold her second apartment, so she’s all excited. Maybe the real estate thing will be her … thing.”
“That’s so great. She’s found her calling, I know it.” She looked at the white leather lace-ups that made her already narrow foot look even narrower. “What do you think?” She twisted her ankle around. “You’re coming to my first match, right?” She grinned and gathered her long brown curls into two ponytails on either side of her head. “Promise margarine?”
I nodded, trying to conjure up watching a game on the shiny new aluminum bleachers in Battery Park. My favorite sunglasses had split in two at the nose when I had sat on them the summer before. They were still on my dresser, sitting, sitting, sitting, as if one day I’d magically take them into the
kitchen and Scotch tape them perfectly together. Why couldn’t I just throw shit out?
“Ness, I’m really fucked up,” I said, a shelf of misery forming in my throat.
“What is it, babe?” she asked, taking the sneaker off and gripping it. “You still thinking about the you-know-what?”
“I would be,” I said, staring at the stack of boxes. “If I’d
had
the you-know-what.”
She froze. “What do you mean?”
“At the appointment, I don’t know, I freaked out,” I said. “I hopped off the table.”
“Thea, that was way over a month ago—why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I honestly didn’t. “I’m going back. I just had a little moment that day. I’m going back.”
“Aren’t you running out of time?”
“There’s still time,” I said. “It’s not too late.” The boy returned and paused in front of us with another box, which he set on the floor by Vanessa’s feet.
“I’m going to take these, thanks,” she said, pointing to the sneakers and quickly getting her boots back on. We went to the counter and Vanessa pulled out a crumpled wad of twenties. I didn’t know what she was thinking; she’d gone mute. I’d been sort of coasting with this fuzzy problem in the back of my mind for weeks, but the look on her face—she looked like she’d seen a ghost—brought it raging to the front.
We got outside and the tide of people on Thirty-Fourth Street coaxed us toward Seventh Avenue.
“Will doesn’t know, does he?” she finally asked. “You have to tell him.”
“I’m going to tell him. It’s so hard to find the right time.”
“There won’t be a right time, Thea, it doesn’t exist. Just get it over with.”
“I know.” We got to the corner and waited at the light.
“Thea, do you really think you and Will are going to go off and, like, just blow off college and get sucky jobs and live on love in some prairie town, with a baby?” she asked. “What’s going on? What’s going on in your head?”
“I—I don’t know,” I stammered. “Maybe part of me thinks that. I can’t help it. What’s wrong with me?”
“If you decide to go ahead and have it, I’ll shut my mouth, but right now it seems like a bad idea.” She held her knapsack, with its prickly pink rubber key chain dangling off it, in front of my face, as if to prove a point. “We’re really young, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“How different would it be if we were, like, twenty-four?” I asked.
“That’s still young!” she exclaimed. “But at least you’d have a college degree. You’d have a shot.”
“Is college really necessary anymore?”
She shook her head. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know, is it?” I shrugged.
“I don’t know what to say, Thee,” she said, brushing her hand across my stomach. “Jesus, babe, what a moosh you are. You can’t let go of anything, can you?”
I got it into my stupid head to tell Will at Dad’s Pave the Way benefit a few days later. I didn’t know what I’d say or how I’d say it, but I thought a gorgeous candlelit ballroom would help romanticize the whole thing and make him see things my way, even though I wasn’t sure what my way was. I’d found an old forest-green suede tunic of Mom’s and dressed it up with long beads and a black chain belt that hid my stomach and showed off my arms.
“That is so Fiona,” Vanessa said when I tried it on for her that afternoon. “I’m so having a visual of Fiona with her bangs and her huge black leather bag, walking around in that a few years ago. God, she has the best clothes.”
“It’s okay, right?” I asked, tugging at the sides and cinching the chain belt around the narrowest part of my waist, which at that point was up around my rib cage. I looked up and caught Vanessa staring up at my bulging stomach.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said, still staring. “You haven’t told him yet, have you?”
“No,” I said. “Check out my scarf.” I gestured to the balled-up crochet project still on my bedside table. “It’s coming out lopsided. What am I doing wrong?”
She looked at me long and hard and I braced myself for a lecture. She’d been silent on the subject and I, of course, never brought it up, so it was hard to know what she was thinking. She just rolled over and grabbed the scarf while I quickly pulled the dress over my shoulders.
I was the first one to arrive at the hotel that night. I was
watching a guy in the lobby jewelry shop take coral necklaces out of the window boxes when Will slid through the revolving door, eyes darting around. He spotted me and walked across the lobby.
“Hey.” He gave me a nervous kiss. “You look great.”
“So do you,” I said. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said, looking at me like I was crazy. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Why are you answering my question with a question?” I said.
“What, does that bother you?”
“Does it bother me?” I asked.
“Does it bother you?” he repeated.
“Shut up.”
“No, you shut up,” he said.
“No, you.”
Dad came up the steps behind us. I was sure he’d heard Will tell me to shut up.
“Hello, kids,” Dad said. His tux was blacker than Will’s. I’d thought black was black, one shade. “Good to see you again, Will.” Will missed a beat before shaking Dad’s outstretched hand.
“You too, Ted.”
“Where’s Elizabeth?” Dad’s eyes started darting around the room like Will’s, and I thought maybe it was a survival thing men did when they were nervous. Elizabeth Ransom was Dad’s friend from growing up on Charter Island. I didn’t think they’d ever done it, but I wasn’t positive.
I shook my head. “We just got here.”
I wished Will would say “Thanks for inviting me,” or “What does Pave the Way do, exactly, Mr. Galehouse?” But he
just stood there, his tux accentuating the broadness of his shoulders.