Story 6: Deirdre, in Xeriscape: Geometry

I can always tell when Jodi has done something I won’t like. The first time she sees me, she ducks her head and gives me that Princess Di look, only Jodi’s eyes and hair are dark. Otherwise the resemblance is uncanny. But I have learned to wait. So we go to lunch and talk about the end of this semester. About being sophomores next year. Not that I was ever a freshman. But nobody cares about this one little sexist word like I do. I look up and see that Jodi’s eating like a pig, wolfing down an enchilada in seconds while I’m just picking at my lunch because let’s face it, Food Court food is always greasy or bland or salad. Which is what I got. She stops and stares at me, finishes her bite. Then she starts to talk.

“You know Natalie and Debbie have found an apartment?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, a three-bedroom up on 30th near Valmont. They were looking for a two-bedroom, but somebody recommended this place and they liked it.”

“Oh,” I said. I find it easier to be friends with Natalie and Debbie when they’re not together. When they’re in the same room, they focus on each other until I feel like I disappear. It reminds me of being around my parents when they’re talking about their patients; it just makes me crabby.

“They asked me to live with them.”

That revelation frees her to devour the second enchilada, apparently. I’m stunned. I crunch croutons for a while, then ask: “And where will I live?”

She says defiantly, “How am I supposed to know? Do I look like a housing service?”

Now Jodi never talks to me that way. Sweet is the only word that really describes her. I say, “You don’t want to live with me?” Then I try to cover it up, but I can’t. I stutter a few words and blink so tears will stay in my eyes. Of course, she’s done eating now. She gets up to bus her dishes.

“I want my own place,” she tells me when she sits down again. “But I can’t afford it right now. And if I lived with you, it’d be your place. You had everything planned.”

Well, excuse me, but that’s what she’s always liked about me. I took her to Rocky Mountain National Park once in high school, and she told me afterward how nice it had been not to have to do anything, just follow me up the trail and eat my picnic, right at the edge of Alberta Falls. My favorite place. Jodi told me that day I was better than a boyfriend. I’m good at detail. I know what works best. Just look at the Food Court, for instance. All these round tables placed an equal distance apart. It needs a couple of obvious lanes, front to back and side to side. Then people wouldn’t mill around with trays held at diners’ eye level and hit people in the head with them, which happens to me at least once a month. But while I’m musing, Jodi gathers up her stuff.

“Bye,” she says. “Got to get to class.” And that’s it. Then I cry. I even put my head on the table and sob a few times. Then I get an ice cream bar and coffee and blow off my history class. It’s only review, and I know more than everyone in the class put together, probably. Finally, I go back to my dorm room, and luckily Jodi doesn’t come back until much later. I force myself to calm down when I hear her turning the key in the lock. When she gets in, I look up, say “Hey,” and go back to my book, but the whole time we’re in there before dinner, I keep mentally surveying the room, thinking about the pretty curtains I made, and the little cabinets I bought and hung near each bed so that we could just grab our shampoo and stuff but not have tampons all over the room. You know, when boys come to visit. Girls can cope. And I think of my toolbox. How many freshwomen own complete sets of screwdrivers and wrenches?

It’s time for meal number two of this day, but I’m not that hungry. When we go down to the cafeteria, I pretend. I get the macaroni and cheese and eat it methodically, two ’ronis on four tines, over and over. Then Natalie and Debbie come over to chat, and Jodi asks them, right in front of me, when they need to go sign the lease. They all look at me sideways, thinking, “She knows!”

“Let’s go tomorrow,” Debbie says, finally. Then they leave. By this time, I’ve progressed from the main course to dessert, which is a spongy chocolate cake with thin frosting that I just adore. But tonight I’m not enjoying it so much. I look up, and Jodi is staring at me.

I say, “You won’t live with me because I slept with Josh. Isn’t that it? You think that once you’ve slept with him, he’s yours, all yours. Even though you don’t love him, and I do.”

This look crosses her face that I’ve never seen before. I realize it’s contempt. I get my fork underneath the cake and flip it at her, right in her face. Then I walk out as fast as I can and go to our room. Jodi comes back after I’ve gone to bed. I lie rigid under the covers because I’m waiting for her to throw something at me. But she just gets in bed. That’s it.

Read more

Why I Love Deirdre Cannon Most of All

Planttalk is my favorite story in this book. It's a variation on the theme that began in the first Deirdre story, "Tundra Trail," which is, "Does anybody really like me?" That theme informs all the Deirdre stories.

Deirdre really has only one friend--Jodi--and Planttalk tells us how Deirdre almost loses her. Not intentionally, which at least would show some gumption. And, what's even worse, because of a man who bores Jodi. Deirdre wants him, and gets him in the way just about any woman can "get" Josh. He likes people, and he likes physical intimacy, and he's not particular about sharing like Jodi.

So a love triangle forms: Josh pines for Jodi, and Deirdre pines for Josh. He's had Jodi, and afterward she's forever out of his reach. He doesn't know what to do because he's used to standing around and waiting for people to fly to the warmth of his personality.

Originally there was a scene in the title story in which one of Natalie's lovers, the one who got her pregnant in that version, wonders if Josh has a "magic dick." I took that scene out because it didn't fit Natalie. But it is an apt comment about Josh.

Some of the readers of these stories commented that the Deirdre stories weren't really stories per se: Where's the conflict? What's the point? and so on. I suppose they're right; her stories are more like sketches or moments. I meant for her to comment on Natalie and Debbie, since those three never really get comfortable with each other. I'm not sure her stories actually do what I intended, but still her character is close to my heart.


Read more

Story 5: Deirdre in Xeriscape: PlantTalk

From my stone bench between the spruces, I call Planttalk on the cordless phone. Even though the sound isn’t as good as our other phones, I like using it from the bench in the yard, where all the neighbors can see me and my cordlessness. If they are looking. I want to hear that man’s deep buzzy voice again. It’s Friday night, and since I’m stuck here at my parents’ house for spring break and Jodi is on vacation with her parents, I have no plans other than to garden tomorrow.


Depending on which way I face and whether I bring my binoculars out with me, from this seat I can peer into the other houses perched on this hill. I always think they look like those big gaudy pins that old ladies wear, hanging off their chests and weighing down their polyester blouses. Our house is the hill’s cap, and it fits, snugly. Or I can turn inward to the yard I have been slowly revising, square foot by square foot, since high school. My neighbors don’t understand xeriscape. They don’t think it applies in a mountain town like Evergreen. That’s why we’ll have a water crisis in twenty years. Just you wait.

I settle for number 2013—“spring frosts and snows”—and wait for the voice, which really says, “Snow is a great insulator.” But I hear, “You have great tatas! Lay here!” Well, I do. Even if lay isn’t grammatical. I wonder if this man’s voice would sound sexy in my bedroom. The log walls tend to absorb sound, but I’ve never had a man there to really test them. After I listened to this entry the first time, two falls ago, I dug up all the south-facing tulips and planted them on the east side of the house. My tulips will not be seduced by the southern sun, at least, not before they are truly ready. Now they bloom long after the ones at the University of Colorado, which I secretly enjoy. Everyone else is talking about summer, but at home, in the mountains, the seasons take their sweet time. And I have the latest tulips. I want to have the latest of everything.

Sweet time. I lie back on the cool stone and absorb the man’s voice for a little longer. Then I turn off the phone, close my eyes, and remember the night Josh and I made love in the grass along Boulder Creek. We had been walking along the creek, using a book I had just bought to identify plants. In one especially marshy spot, he took my hand in his and ran my fingers along the sedges. “Sedges have edges,” he said. “That’s how you tell them from grasses.” We teetered from one hummock of grass to another and happened on a meadow surrounded by bushes. The ground there was dry but cool. I told him the sound of trickling water soothed me and lay down, propping the book on my chest. Neither of us was wearing a coat. An extremely warm night for March, that’s what it was.

“I need a pillow,” he said, rearranging himself with his head on my stomach. After a while, the feel of his hair through my thin shirt drowned out the creek, and I reached down and mussed his hair, not that it was ever that neat. He turned over and kissed my belly.

Jodi had told me all about Josh: he was exactly as slow and thorough as she’d described. Jodi doesn’t love that about him; she likes men who take control. I don’t know exactly what type I like, since Josh was my first, but I didn’t anticipate a problem with sharing. Jodi, it turns out, had a different view. When I told her, she acted as if Josh were a plant in her garden. I explained that I’d always liked him but that she got there first. Then when she said how gentle he was and how she thought he might bore her, I decided I could like him again. It didn’t help. I don’t understand why she wants to claim plants for her garden that she doesn’t love. And I never got the impression that Josh thought he belonged to her.

The bench is cold. Even the memory of Josh doesn’t change that. I want to see how long I can stand it against my shoulder blades. I try to flatten the part of my back between into the bench but can’t. The stars are really clear now. The phone is silent. Tomorrow I’m going to buy a plant that reminds me of Jodi and install it in a secret corner of my yard. Maybe pussytoes, with its soft flowers and distinctive gray leaves. I won’t tell anyone, but that way Jodi will have to forgive me. It will be like casting a spell.

Sometimes people remind me of nothing so much as perennials. When they overgrow one bed, I can divide them and move part of them to another. To make a match, I can try one plant and then another for the contrast—as long as their seasons of bloom follow each other from June until September. In the mountains, with their abbreviated growing season, that is all I can hope for.

Read more

Must we be logical?

On Valentine's Day, I published a letter to the editor in the Broomfield Enterprise. I was responding to a letter by John P. Cardie, "Definition of life must be logical," dated January 6. In that letter, Mr. Cardie stated that if we defined death as the absence of brain waves, then we must define life as beginning at that point when brain waves can be detected in the fetus--about 8 weeks. Here is my response:

Definition of life not right answer

I write in response to John P. Cardie’s letter of January 6, 2008, “Definition of life must be logical.”

Mr. Cardie makes an interesting point about defining human life to begin when brain waves can be detected in the fetus. I am not a doctor or medical researcher, so I will not challenge the information he presents. I would like to make another point, however.

When people say that human life begins at conception, they often fail to mention that defining human life that way changes the definition of personhood under the law. A “person under the law” has certain rights, including the right not to be killed. One’s enemy in war is not a person under the law; nor is someone sentenced to death a full person under the law: both of them may be killed without that killing being defined as murder under the law.

In the history of US law and English common law on which it is based, an unborn child has never been defined as a person under the law.

Some people in the United States sincerely want to change that, thinking that they will save lives. However, to define human life as beginning at conception would change that ancient precedent and create a kind of civil rights conflict that we have not faced before: two persons in the same body competing over rights. That situation would not be good for anyone.

If fetuses became persons under the law, that new status would not be used to benefit them, for example, to guarantee prenatal care for those women who wished to be parents. It would instead be used to further restrict the ability of women to have abortions when they do not wish to be parents.

Reducing the number of abortions is a laudable goal that should be accomplished by providing comprehensive sex education and making contraception easy to obtain. Trying to reduce abortions by redefining the beginning of human life will only cause more problems and lead to lawsuits.


***

Let me know if you agree or disagree.

Read more

Story 4: The Contest

“For the next week,” Dr. Porreco said, his discolored, crowded teeth showing, “we will be conducting an experiment, a contest in your ability to change. For one week I want you …” He stopped for a moment to enjoy the hilarious giggles at the phrase “I want you” and then continued, “to act completely out of character. Not every minute of every day, mind you, but at least five times a day, for seven days, you must do something that is difficult for you, frightens you, even.”

The class shuffled around me. I whispered to Natalie, “Maybe you could try being honest.”

“And maybe you could try being my friend!” she shot back.

“Enough explanation,” Porreco said. “Now it’s your turn.”

I checked my watch: only five minutes into the lecture. Porreco usually talked for an hour and answered his own questions. All this on a Monday too. Jeff sighed, which instantly got the teacher’s intention.

“You, Jeff, tell us your plans. What’s out of character for a CU running back?”

Jeff appeared stunned. He hadn’t spoken in class all spring, and now he had to show self-awareness too. He leaned on his left elbow, hoping the appearance of indecision would rescue him. Porreco assumed an intrigued expression, folded his arms, and waited. Then from the back of the room a clear female voice called, “Communication!” I laughed out loud when Porreco compelled the woman-in-the-back to admit to a bad habit of finishing people’s sentences, and he glanced my way for a second. “Your assignment,” he told her, “is not only to listen until every woman you are speaking with finishes a statement, but also to nod for a few seconds afterward to encourage her to continue speaking. Because God knows men don’t need encouragement. They love to hear the sound of their own voices.”

And so it went around the room. Most students admitted something. We all knew the psychology majors in the front row would dig down for the behavior they most wanted to change. As usual, Porreco avoided calling on them.

Ending his classes by quizzing me and Natalie always amused him. Natalie usually had an answer ready, but by the time he asked her what assignment she planned, it had fled from her mind, as my grandmother used to say. She sat there, trying to get it back. The class began to mutter, and finally I shouted: “Say the first thing that comes into your mind!”

“Well, Natalie,” Porreco said, “I think Debbie has chosen for you. Now you may choose for her.” He grinned at us. I knew he had planned it.

Natalie found it much easier to devise a regime for me than for herself. How typical. She said, “You can’t plan anything. As soon as something occurs to you, you have to do it.”

The class laughed, but I was pissed off. Natalie pretended to respect the way I planned ahead, but really she thought I was nothing but utilitarian, no romance about me. When I recently pointed out that my unromantic nature had kept me from getting pregnant and having an abortion, as she had, she abruptly reminded me that she was on the pill. I told her that was a step in the right direction, but not nearly enough.

“So what would be enough?” she asked me. I didn’t answer. It seemed so obvious.

Porreco was finishing up over the din. “Begin tomorrow by doing five things out of character. Be prepared to report in class on Wednesday. I’ll try to get at least one verbal report from everyone by Monday. Also on Monday, turn in a written report of your week’s experiences. This will affect your grade.”

“Thanks a lot,” I told her as we left class. She just smiled. Natalie was always saying I tried too hard, but she did have certain attitudes about herself. Oh yes, she did.



Tuesday

We sat up in our twin dorm beds and looked at each other. “Tuesdays suck,” Natalie said, and I lay back down. “I can’t plan anything,” I said, feeling small. Maybe it was the green cement-block walls.

“You can’t even talk about planning,” Natalie told me.

“Well, saying ‘Tuesdays suck’ doesn’t count.”

“Sure it does. Normally I would just grin and bear it. Now go take a shower without doing inventory of every toiletry you have.”

I obeyed, which is just easier sometimes with Natalie. Once the shower water was hot enough, I closed my eyes and grabbed a bottle from my basket. I squeezed some into my palm and applied it to my hair. From the smell and feel of it, I realized I was washing my hair with body lotion. Trying hard not to calculate which bottle was closest, I grabbed another bottle and repeated the process. Five bottles later, my hair was clean, I smelled like everything in my basket, and I had wrapped my robe around myself to dry because I kept taking stock of which body part to towel off first.

As I approached our room, I could hear Natalie shouting, but I couldn’t make out the words.

“You’re not allowed to practice!” I said as spontaneously as possible, just as soon as both feet were in the room. “That’s not saying whatever comes into your mind!”

She shrugged and then laughed. “I know!” she said. “I’ll call my father. I can tell him anything, and he won’t get offended. I’ll call him every day.” She stretched languidly under her bright floral comforter.

“And tell him about your abortion?” I asked.

She glared at me and said, “You have to give me your To Do list and your address book and your calendar.” She held out her hand. “Now!”

“No!” I rubbed my robe around my ankles to dry them. “I have all sorts of important meetings this week. I have to have my calendar!”

“Give it to me so that you won’t be telling me what to do for a week!” Natalie said, sitting up. First she tried to take everything I needed to get through the day, and then she acted like a bitch. Then Natalie added, “And I think I should only have to be honest with each person once a day.”

“I’ll agree to that.” I opened my closet to look for my favorite sweater.

“Just pull out pants and a shirt and shoes and put them on.”

“OK, OK! But I’m going to follow you around as much as possible and make sure you’re really honest with people.” I didn’t believe she’d really open up.

“You can’t plan like that,” Natalie said, laughing.

“Well, then, I’ll just drag you around campus until we find someone!”

I saw Natalie looking suspiciously at my outfit and gave her a reproachful look. So everything in my closet was color-coordinated! She could do the same. I handed Natalie my To Do list but said I had to check my calendar once in the morning and once at night. She could have it during the day. Maybe I could take it to bed with me and memorize it.

After allowing her a little bit of a lead, I shadowed Natalie on the way to her Chaucer class, remembering how both of us once got lost among these pink stone and red-tile-roofed buildings that gave the CU-Boulder campus its characteristic look. Every so often, she muttered to herself about the shapes made by cracks in the sidewalk, desperate to keep her mind blank and avoid seeing anyone she knew. But Josh outmaneuvered her. Just as she veered right to cut through the Mary Rippon theater, he touched her arm. I came as close as I could, and she sighed and looked at the snow on the red stone seats encircling the stage.

“I’m doing an experiment for psychology class,” she told him.

“What’s that?”

“I have to say the first thing that comes into my mind.”

He grinned at her. He still hadn’t seen me. “You’re stalling.”

Natalie took a deep breath and asked, “Have you had sex with everyone in our group but me?”

He didn’t even look embarrassed, just nodded. Why did she have to ask that question?

“You slept with Debbie and neither of you told me?” She looked in my direction, but I ducked behind a really tall man who was just standing there, reading his notebook. I knew I was in trouble now.

“It was just last weekend. When you were too tired to go out. Debbie was telling me how she’d decided not to get involved with anyone for a while but she still wanted to have sex occasionally.”

“Oh. So you offered yourself.”

“I’m here to serve.”

“Slut,” Natalie said viciously. Josh stiffened. I backed away from the two of them, but I still heard the end of the conversation. “You slept with Jodi and Deirdre?”

They were quiet until Natalie said, “But they’re best friends.” Josh’s face was a little sad. Then Natalie stomped off to class. I could hear the April slush fly in every direction.



Wednesday

A buzz ran through psychology class on Wednesday as people filed in, smiling slyly at each other or furtively sliding into their chairs. Porreco commented that everyone appeared to be in attendance and asked if anyone wanted to volunteer a story. I had nothing to say. Since Monday, I’d bumbled around trying not to think about what I was doing, which as yet hadn’t been disastrous. But I wondered if I was planning how not to plan. And I worried when Natalie would confront me. Why hadn’t I been honest about my sex life?

While I was distracted, Natalie raised her hand. With the other hand she was pushing her reddish-brown hair behind her ears, which she did when she was nervous. Oh no, I thought, and then she was telling a college professor and everyone in the class about the conversation she had with Josh. Porreco looked at me, amused or a little shocked, I couldn’t tell, and I felt my face go bright red. I slumped down in my seat, noticing how pleased with herself Natalie looked.

Then Jeff stood up, silencing the women in the class by standing with his hands on his perfect hips, while the men muttered. It was hard for me to admit about a football player, but I would always be grateful to him for his self-absorption at that particular moment. He proudly told all of us about his “communication” with his roommates: “I told them they had to clean out the tub after hairing it up and that they should stop leaving my CD player open all the time because the dust will break it. That was all I had time for before my workout, but I’ll try to make it up by the end of the week.”

“We wouldn’t want you to neglect your health for this, Jeff,” Porreco said seriously. Jeff appeared pleased.

For the rest of class, Natalie faced straight ahead, not looking at me. She had never given me the silent treatment before. When class ended, she stood up and pushed past me. I stayed in my seat, arranging and rearranging books in my backpack, until everyone had left. Porreco studiously flipped through his papers, ignoring me, but I could hear his thoughts circling from across the room. I walked out as if nothing had happened. I had no idea what I would say to Natalie when I saw her next, so I avoided her for the rest of the day.



Thursday

After informing me that she’d already made four out of five honest statements for the day, Natalie stood in line for a taco salad. I followed her, quiet. The Food Court was packed full of chattering students. People constantly sidled through the lines, reaching for a bagel or a drink.

Then Natalie turned around and spat this question at me. “Wasn’t it just Monday that you were telling me to be more honest?”

I stood there, holding my tray. People surrounded me. There was no room to move.

She continued. “When are you going to be honest about screwing Josh?”

“Not right now!” I said, getting more and more furious.

Natalie spoke even more loudly this time. “Don’t you know he’s been with everyone? He probably has five different diseases.”

Several people in front of us turned their heads, the better to hear our conversation. “We used a condom,” I said in a low voice.

“And that makes you responsible?”

“More responsible than you,” I said.

“Sometimes birth control doesn’t work,” Natalie pointed out.

“But that’s only if you use it!” I snapped. “Besides, this conversation isn’t about me not telling you. You’re just angry because he hasn’t slept with you.”

“For your information,” Natalie replied, “my love life has always been better than yours. I think anyone would say so.”

Natalie moved closer to the counter and ordered a salad with “halapee-nos” but no olives. I followed her to the counter and spoke to the woman taking her order. “She means jalapeños. She just forgets how to pronounce it.”

Natalie didn’t bother to lower her voice. “It’s in the dictionary both ways!”

“I don’t see why you can’t learn one common Spanish word!” We were shouting at each other, and people began to sidle away from us.

“Hey, people don’t even say my name right sometimes! I don’t yell at them in front of the entire Food Court!”

The manager came out of the back and put his hand on the woman’s shoulder, thinking we were yelling at her. To Natalie he said, “Don’t yell at my employees. Here’s your salad.”

Natalie pointed at me. “I was talking to her.”

I left to get my soup and sandwich. When I got to the cashier, Natalie was waiting for me. I wished, for the first time ever, that she would just leave me alone. She said, “I can’t believe you yelled at me for mispronouncing a word.”

The cashier, an older woman, laughed and asked her, “You’re here to learn, aren’t you?” Natalie stood there glaring until I pulled her over to a table.

“I think you’re taking this assignment a little too seriously,” I told her.

She shouted, “You’re always criticizing me!”

I banged my tray down on the table. “You should know how to say it. You’re always saying Spanish words incorrectly. I’m surprised somebody hasn’t corrected you before now.”

“Well, I think my best friend could have waited until we were alone.”

We didn’t say anything else during lunch. Natalie threw her tray into the dirty dishes rack and stomped off to government class. She was doing a lot of stomping this week. And then she came back early. When she opened the door to our room and saw papers and books and clothes covering every available surface, she pushed some off her bed, lay down, and cried. I continued what I was doing, saying only, “I’m not organizing. I’m working on a portfolio for writing class, and I have to spread things out.”

But then I began to feel guilty. Maybe because of Josh, but is it because I slept with him or because I didn’t tell her? Why can’t I have some things to myself? Or had I been too hard on her for keeping secrets from her boyfriend and her family? I cleaned up the room, pulled the comforter over Natalie, and wheedled a piece of chocolate cake out of the girl down the hall. She got a care package every week, so she could certainly spare some. I even poured Natalie a glass of milk from our tiny refrigerator and left the snack by her bed. I am her best friend. I always have been.



Friday

It was wild in class. Following Natalie’s example from Wednesday, the other students competed to tell the best story and mocked each other’s failures. Even Porreco could hardly control them. I admitted that I hadn’t actually done anything spontaneous, but I had refrained from planning anything that hadn’t already been planned. Porreco yawned. Natalie huddled in her seat, gloomy. When class ended, she joined the crowd around Porreco, everyone eager to get at least one anecdote in, and told him, “I hate this assignment. It’s exhausting.” Then she escaped before he could respond.



**

Friday night I dragged Natalie to the party at Josh’s Mom’s house. We had been invited, and I wasn’t about to miss one of his parties to satisfy Natalie’s pique. Armed with bottles of beer from the refrigerator—I didn’t want a man slipping me something—we squeezed into the large red chair, the only empty space left besides the floor. I talked about my writing portfolio, and we sang along to the new ’Til Tuesday album. We were pretending to be friends, and it hurt me. Josh and Deirdre wandered through the living room and chatted. Luckily, not too long, because Natalie was starting to glare at them after two minutes.

Then I noticed Jeff, standing in the arched doorway to the kitchen, hoisting a bottle to his lips and talking to someone in the kitchen with the mock-seriousness of college men. The skin along his profile glowed. I walked up behind him and shouted over the music, “Have your roommates cleaned the bathroom yet?”

He was talking to Josh. Both of them swung around to me, startled, and then eyed each other.

“Debbie,” Jeff said, “we were just discussing psychology class.”

Josh grinned. I blushed and pointed to Natalie, who had fallen asleep in the red chair, which was faded enough to match her hair. “You’ll have to talk to her about that. She was the one who announced it in class.”

“Wouldn’t want to interrupt her beauty sleep,” Josh said. He turned away to fetch his mother a drink and then left the kitchen.

Perhaps I was seeing with beer eyes, but up close, Jeff had long, dark blond eyelashes and green irises. Josh’s secret was his Elizabeth Taylor eyes. They had worked on me and, from what I heard, just about everyone else. Usually I avoided men who went through women the way he did, but his honesty saved him from any resentment—at least on my part.

Jeff said, “It’s hot in here. Want to go outside?”

In general, at parties, I don’t accept invitations from men to leave the main room, but the terms of the contest forbade me from thinking about anything too much—that would have been tantamount to planning. I let Jeff lead me outside. Josh’s house, like the others in his neighborhood, had a big yard. We walked to the end to escape party noise. Jeff took a big drink from his beer and said, pointing, “Do you know which constellation that is?”

“Which one?”

He tried to show me the stars under Orion’s belt, explaining that I’d have to look at them sideways, but when I turned my head, he kissed me gently.

“I’ve always wanted to do that,” he told me.

I felt sleepy and a little bit drunk. Last week, Josh and I had started out on the bench in the corner of the yard. Josh had built it from scraps of wood when he was a teenager. Jeff backed up to it and sat down, beckoning to me.

“Did you bring me out here because of what Natalie said in class?” I asked, still standing.

“Well,” he said, “I thought that if you could like Josh, you might like me.”

“I might,” I confessed. I sat sideways on his lap, noticing the way the light in the yard behind us turned his hair dark and shiny but hid his face. He could be anyone: Jeff-the-football-player, Jeff-the-astronomer, surprisingly-nice-guy-Jeff.

We stayed outside on the bench, kissing and speculating about constellations, until the moon set behind the mountains. I woke Natalie and dragged her home, thanking Josh on the way out. He didn’t look angry about anything; obviously he didn’t mind sharing, unlike some people I could name.



Saturday

By the weekend, I had decided enough was enough. I took Natalie to Tra Ling’s for lo mein.

“There is no lo mein as greasy as this,” Natalie said. Our table was right by the big window. Cars and people streamed up and down and across Broadway. “I can’t ever move away.”

I didn’t want to think right then about graduation or Natalie moving away. We ate in silence until Natalie laid down her chopsticks with a sharp click and raised her chin to me, which I just hated. I knew she was about to make a speech. I poked her face with my chopsticks, but gently.

Startled, she frowned and then said: “When I found out about Josh, I was so angry, but I don’t want to sleep with him, Debbie.”

I was still holding my chopsticks, poised to strike again. For a moment we glared at each other.

“Just admit it,” she said. “You’re a hypocrite. You did the same thing I did.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head in exasperation that she didn’t get it. “It wasn’t the same. I was just having fun with Josh. You were lying to Michael when you were with him over Thanksgiving.”

“And you lied to me,” she said.

“I didn’t lie!”

“You’ve always told me about your guys, but not this one,” she pointed out.

I went on the attack. “I can’t take it anymore, Natalie. The way you just won’t tell people things.”

“I tell you everything! Obviously you don’t.”

“Well, now I think you should tell everyone everything.”

She shook her head. “When are you going to stop being mad at me?”

“I don’t know,” I told her.

“I need you to stop. I need someone to talk to about the abortion who isn’t always judging me.”

I did judge her for it. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t promise just then to be more accepting, so I got up and ordered beef with broccoli and some cream cheese wontons. When I sat down again, I told her, “My week was better than yours.” But not in a triumphant way. It was just a fact.

“You got to be on Josh’s bench two weekends in a row,” Natalie said, too sweetly.

“You do want to sleep with him, don’t you?”

“I don’t want your backwash,” she said through a mouthful of noodles.

“Bitch.” One minute she was asking for support, the next minute, a remark like that. The food arrived. I tipped the waitress $5.

Natalie didn’t waste any time helping herself to half the wontons. “You’re feeling generous.”

“It has been a good week,” I repeated, trying to stay positive. “I think it’s even been good for you.”

“I don’t know. I’m beginning to see the value of my mother’s approach to conversation.”

I didn’t tell her she was already an expert at concealing her feelings. I simply said, “No way. You just need to practice more.”

“You do too,” Natalie said, suddenly all bristly. “Have you put Josh in your report?”

I stared at her. “I don’t need to. You announced it in class, remember?”

“I did, didn’t I,” she said, lowering her eyes and chin.



After lunch, I obeyed my sudden urge to sit by the fountain in the sun and read a romance novel. On Monday I planned to ask Porreco something that had puzzled me: if I had an urge to do something fun and followed it and then had a compulsion to do something responsible like study, did I then have to give up the first for the second? Did acceding to a desire to be responsible fulfill the requirement of acting on impulse? Or did it fit the letter but not the spirit of the contest?

I was pondering such things between medieval bedroom scenes when Jeff plunked down next to me, holding two pieces of carrot cake. My slice boasted the largest, orangest carrot I had ever seen, and I was tempted to lick it. Then I noticed his expression: serious, even a little nervous.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” he told me. I had just read a passage in which a yeoman said that to a milkmaid. Maybe there was some truth in romance novels after all. Jeff lowered his eyes.

“Last night was really nice,” he told me. “Romantic, even.”

I’ve heard this tone before, I thought.

But he didn’t blow me off. Instead, he said firmly, “I think we should have a real date.”

Suddenly the orange carrot seemed terribly suggestive. “Jeff,” I admitted, “I do like kissing you.”

“That’s a start,” he said.

He fed me a bit of cake before I could ask what he meant. It was everything I had expected at one glance: rich, filling, and sweet. Then he kissed me.

“Friday?” he asked me. I nodded.

“We’ll talk about it in class,” he said, and got up.

“Thanks for the cake,” I said, thinking, This is going in my report to Porreco. I’d better get an A in this class. And wait until Natalie hears I have a date with a football player!

I stayed at the fountain until I finished the novel. I even sang a few lines from “Wild Thing” under my breath. The yeoman and the milkmaid went their separate ways, so the novel wasn’t entirely predictable. It had some good sex and some bad sex and interminable discussions about what women and men deserved in that area. Maybe that was a romance novelist’s idea of feminism.



Sunday

Natalie was still in bed when I went to shower. She said she had too much to think about to get clean just yet, especially before eight o’clock on a Sunday morning. When I got back, it was too quiet. “What happened?” I asked, sitting down after I’d dressed.

“Michael called. I told him about the baby.”

“Oh my God,” I said, a little shocked. “I thought you had decided to leave him out of that loop.” Part of me was pleased. Maybe my pressure had worked.

Natalie continued. “He told me that I had seemed distant for the past couple of months, and I said, ‘Well, that’s because I got pregnant and didn’t tell you.’”

I imagined those words coming out of my mouth. They sounded so harsh. “Did you tell him about the abortion?” I asked.

She gave me a sideways look and fiddled with the comforter. “He said that we should get married. And then, Debbie, I couldn’t stop. This whole week, it’s been so hard to tell people what I really felt as soon as I felt it. But with Michael, I guess I’ve been wanting to say something for a long time.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him exactly how I’ve been feeling since the fall and how I was hoping things would be better when we were together, but they weren’t. I told him what the abortion was like.”

“So you’ve broken up?”

“I guess so.” Natalie started to cry.

I asked the contest gods: Is that enough for us both? Can we stop being honest and impulsive now? I put my arms around her.

After a while, she said, “It’s finally in the open.”

“Do you feel better?”

“No, relieved,” she said. “But I’m dreading the next phone call.”

“The last time he was mad at you, he wrote letters,” I reminded her.

I realized how alike Natalie and Michael were. He hid behind letters; she hid behind silence.



Monday

The moment we held out our reports to Porreco, I wanted to snatch them back. I had a feeling he wouldn’t be teasing us as much afterward. He might not want to speak to us at all. Last night, after Natalie and I had proofread our reports for the second time, I pretended I was typing something for another class, but really it was an epilogue for my report. This is what I wrote:

“Natalie is pretty hard on herself in her report, but really she’s very romantic. I’m not. I thought relationships were something I could approach like any other goal, and I tried to get Natalie to see things that way, but I’ve decided that in love, what you plan for doesn’t always come to you. The person who appears to be the best choice for a lover often isn’t what you need at all.”

We got our reports back the following Monday, and I got a B. Porreco answered my question about impulse versus duty by saying, “This may sound strange, but acting on your feelings as you have them will protect you.” I was puzzling over that remark while Natalie paged through her report, and I peered over her shoulder. I was so relieved to see that Porreco hadn’t included my little confession in her report that I didn’t even notice her grade. But I kept wondering about his response. I had tried to be honest with Natalie about her treatment of Michael. She had tried to be honest with me. But if all that had protected us, I guess I didn’t know what the word meant.

Read more

Middle Ground or Not?

Here's an interesting 2006 article about dueling abortion demonstrations.

San Francisco Abortion Showdown

Read more

Story 3: Price of Silence

Most people don’t associate an abortion with a BLT. But I do.

**

“The ineluctable modality of the visible,” I quoted to my high school boyfriend, Michael. A very nice boyfriend, like well-salted mashed potatoes with brown gravy. In his parents’ living room, which had an elegant Berber carpet. “What the hell does Joyce mean by that?”

“What don’t you understand?” he asked.

“I know what the words mean,” I said in a snotty tone. “OK, so I had to look up ‘ineluctable.’ But what if you’re blind, for instance? You could escape the visible that way.”

“But you’re not blind, Natalie.”

“No, but what’s more important? That you can’t escape seeing? Or is he really talking about how we see? Modality means “one of the main avenues of sensation.”

“You had to look up two words out of six?”

I shrugged.

“Especially when two of the six are ‘the’?”

I glanced sourly at Michael, who was grinning at me. I could never find anything wrong with him. No matter how hard I looked into him, his good qualities always confounded me: his teeth were straight, he was kind, he had wavy but short brown hair and brown eyes, and he liked me. Everyone thought he was quite the catch. I examined him again, carefully.

“I can explain it to you,” he said.

“Really?”

“Turn around,” he said, “and don’t look at me again until I tell you.”

I complied. Fabrics moved and disturbed the air behind me. I began to blush.

“Now you can turn around.”

He stood by the couch completely naked. I realized I had never before seen a whole, nude male body—I had only felt parts in the dark. The couch was beige. I shook my head. There was a red throw folded over its back. He spread it over the cushions.

“I’ve never heard of a girl bleeding every time,” he said.

“The second time,” I informed him. I stood up, and my arms hung at my sides, relaxing. I was tired of maintaining distance.

“I think second place is better than first,” he said.

**

We parked twice over Thanksgiving break my freshman year of college. That first evening, on Thanksgiving night, we stopped behind a row of shops on 28th Street, north of Pearl, in Boulder. I hadn’t brought a condom, but Michael always had one, so I didn’t worry. And besides, once we had curled up close together on the front seat, I didn’t want to talk about birth control. I didn’t want to talk at all. I wanted to be nothing but physical.

He rested his chin on my head and played with my hair, twisting it gently this way and that with his fingers. I put my hand up to where his pulse was beating rapidly in his throat. I had hoped that seeing him again would bring back my old affection for him, and it seemed to be working.

As our bodies arched and lengthened across the back of the seat, he pulled me on top of him and pushed up my skirt. I didn’t even bother to take off my underwear. I found myself wondering over him: curly hair in need of cutting, soft blue wool sweater, brown eyes closing to reveal how long his eyelashes were, breaths that began to show as November air seeped into the car. I felt lost.

When we had finished, we turned on the heater and huddled until the car warmed up. He pulled a photograph from his jacket and pressed it into my hand. It showed a jagged, scarred piece of metal.

“That’s my UFO,” he said. “Come see it in New Mexico next semester?”

I nodded, and he drove me home. He kissed me for a long time before he let me go, promising to call first thing in the morning.



I knew in October I didn’t want to be with him anymore. I caught myself enthusing over him to other people, mostly women, and the looks they gave me told me how fake I was. But I couldn’t help myself. I had to dredge up every ounce of feeling for him, wring it out, and hang it up to dry in my soul. He was my second boyfriend. I felt he had saved me from rusting into disuse after my first boyfriend, Ben, who didn’t think to ask before he deprived me of my virginity. It’s not that he took it that bothered me; it’s that I didn’t have the chance to give it to anyone. I’m left with the memory of a gift that has no practical value.

By the week before Halloween, I had picked up the phone five times to call Michael and break up with him, and it hurt me to mouth the words that I would have to use. I couldn’t bring myself to say “I don’t love you anymore” to my second lover.

But he was also second in another way—second in my emotions. I hadn’t loved Ben—it’s not that. I realized I didn’t love Michael either. I had mistaken gratitude for love. And I also realized that if I had avoided Ben, Michael would never have appealed to me. Ben and Michael, Michael and Ben—they were a perfectly matched pair. To staunch the bleeding caused by Ben, I had to have someone who bored me. After less than a year, I was ready to move on.

**

After I came back from Thanksgiving break, I didn’t get a pregnancy test right away. I hoped for my period for one week, then two—the strangest weeks of my life.

I was clenched tight the entire time, but a few times every day a word would erupt into my consciousness: “Pregnant!” I was so afraid that word would come out of my mouth that I’d lose focus on whatever I was doing, and people began to give me odd looks. Debbie, best friend that she was, told them it was a reaction to finals, but I knew people were talking about me since I’d gushed so much about Michael in the weeks before Thanksgiving, mostly in an effort to convince myself that I would be happy to see him again.

Finally, Debbie took me with her to the drugstore one day to purchase a test and then went to the library so I could be alone. I sat on my bed and watched the test go positive. An alarm was going off in my room, and I couldn’t turn it off.

Debbie came back earlier than she had promised. “I couldn’t stand the suspense,” she said, picking up the test. Then she put it down and sat at her desk.

I plucked the picture of Michael’s UFO from my shelf, remembering Michael’s arms around me. Over Thanksgiving, his sensuality had reminded me how I’d fallen in love. Now, looking at this picture, I could easily imagine him proposing as soon as he knew I was pregnant.

Suddenly, Debbie said, “I blame this on Ben.”

Startled, I looked over at her. She had turned away slightly, her hands upturned and open on her knees. I knew what that meant: she was trying to be gentle but say what she really thought.

“Ben!” I said, brightly. “Now there’s ancient history.”

“With Ben, you were cautious, but I told you not to be. And ever since Ben, you’ve gotten more reckless.”

I glared at her. I wasn’t in the mood for this conversation. “Oh, so now I’m reckless.”

“I’m trying to apologize!”

She got up and came over, leaning against my part of the wall-long desk. “You keep trying out different things since Ben. Not dating. Dating a nice guy who’s boring.”

One part of me still wanted to defend Michael, but I said nothing. Debbie stuck to her program. “Ben didn’t let you choose whether to have sex. I think you’re trying to choose. Two years later.”

My hands were folded quietly in my lap. “I don’t understand why you’re apologizing for Ben.”

“Because I encouraged you to go out with him. I’m sorry.”

After that, I was afraid to open my mouth the rest of the evening because a scream might come out. I might walk up to her and break her nose. Or maybe I should hit myself instead.



The morning after Thanksgiving, Michael and I drive all the way to Cherry Creek North in Denver to ogle the shoppers desperate for bargains. I sit on his lap outside a coffee shop, feeding him thick coffee and chocolates in the cold. As if he were my baby bird, just fledged.

I say, “What if I got pregnant last night?”

His eyes brighten. “Then we get married. You quit school and live with me and my UFO in the desert for seven years. You support me and our children (I laugh at the plural, because I know I want a big family) through law school, and then I take over. I get a job with a New York law firm and you get your degree from NYU and a job with a publishing house and discover all the great new writers. Everyone who told you not to quit school will envy us for how well our lives turned out.”

And that is how it happens. Every year, on our anniversary, we fly from New York to Denver and have coffee and chocolates again, at that same spot. The shop changes, becomes a restaurant and a bar and an office, but we are there every year, always the same.

**

Did you know that the first subject in the Yellow Pages is Abortion Alternatives? “For businesses that advise against abortions and provide assistance, counseling, and/or information on abortion alternatives.” In early January I called one of the pregnancy centers and told them I was pregnant and exploring my options. Strange to offer such an intimate detail after only a few seconds of conversation. The voice on the other end said quietly, “We think abortion is murder, but we don’t condemn those who have one. We just try to get people to see the beauty of life.” Right then, I saw myself shoehorning my belly into desks at the beginning of class next fall, trying to find an adoptive family, having conversations, enduring the looks. I saw myself in the delivery room, with my mother and her mother, both smiling, delighted at the ease with which I’d conceived. But the woman on the other end of the line, safe in her telephone receiver, wouldn’t be traveling with me. She wouldn’t be standing beside me while I made explanations to everyone I knew. What a Pharisee. It was like waking from a dream in which something pressed down on me. I hung up.

And then I waited. I was early in my second month, I figured, and still unsure of my decision. Since Christmas break ended, Debbie had asked me twice what I intended to do. I had no answer for her.

Conversations with my parents gained a new subtext. My parents were both pro-choice; I knew that. But I didn’t believe my mother would support a pro-choice decision by a daughter she’d just managed to bear to term. Every time I tried to tell her, I saw the delivery room again, and one of my female relatives lifting a child from my arms and carrying it away.



Michael knelt down in front of me. “Natalie, will you marry me?”

“No,” I said. I regretted the words as I said them. Not because I wanted to say yes, but because I was being forced to say no.

Once I refused Michael, everyone began to talk to me as if I were a child. I couldn’t stand it. I wrote a letter to my parents, Michael, Debbie, the world:

“I’m going off by myself to have this child. I’ll tell you where I’m going, but don’t come after me. I need to do this by myself.”

I chose Columbia, Missouri. Two hours from my grandparents in Kansas City. More than 600 miles from Boulder and Michael and my parents, those who wanted to make me into a child. Another college town, with lots of people my age. The University of Missouri, if I could ever afford to attend. But I didn’t worry about that at first. I just took a temp job in an office, enjoying the busyness and, I must admit, the necessity of sitting down most of the day. I knew I couldn’t take a job that required me to stand.

I had never been so alone before. In my one-room apartment, three flights up at the top corner of the building, I often stood on the balcony, watching students walk below me, my hands just clasped underneath my belly, feeling her move. I always assumed it was a girl. It was a family tradition, after all: no woman in six generations had given birth to a boy. As the months progressed, her movements became sharper. She seemed anxious about how we would live when she was born.

“I have a plan,” I told her, pulling my belly up slightly.

I wondered if she heard, wanted to answer. I went on musing to myself. I had enough money to live on for a year. I would stay home with her until the next summer, work for a few months, and then enroll in school after I became a Missouri resident. The university had all kinds of programs for students who were parents.

“You’ll be taken care of,” I assured her.

A swirling sensation inside me, as if she’d turned over and gone to sleep.

**

I’ve taken the feminist studies courses. I know the history of abortion is long but not celebrated. Some would have you believe it began with Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, eleven years after I was born, but let’s face it: no woman wants to be number 7 baby machine. We’ve always used whatever we’ve had at hand to dispatch unwanted children.

On the other side, people have always disapproved. Tried to limit us. Tried to confine us to the “natural.”

You’ll notice none of these people refuse medical treatment or forgo flush toilets. They just want conception to be natural—that is, naturally unimpeded.

**

The second entry in the Yellow Pages is Abortion Providers: “For businesses that provide assistance, counseling and/or information on abortions and either perform abortions or refer clients to businesses that do.”

After Debbie prodded me the third time, I said to her: “If I have this child, I’d have to marry Michael.”

It was late on a Sunday night. I was straightening up my side of the room, preparing for Monday’s classes. Debbie sat at her end of the desk, everything in place, doodling with colored pencils. She snorted and scrawled large, multicolored spirals down the page. “I don’t see why!”

“Think about it. Who’s going to take care of the kid while I’m in class or doing homework? You?”

“A babysitter,” she argued.

“Who’s going to pay for that?”

She took her time answering, carefully filling in some of the spirals. “Your parents,” she admitted.

“So why shouldn’t they just raise it? Or one of my aunts?”

Debbie fiddled with her streaked blonde hair. “I think you should make one decision at a time. Do you want this child, or not?”

“I do want to have children,” I said, considering, “but I want to get married first.”

“To Michael?”

The picture of his UFO had migrated to my desk. Debbie walked over and held it up. I tried to hold in my laughter, but my guilt wasn’t equal to the task. Debbie had asked and answered the question for me. Michael didn’t belong in my life anymore, and I wouldn’t bear a child to a man I didn’t want to marry.

I called an abortion clinic the next day.

**

The procedure itself depends on where you go. Some places have you come in twice: on the first day they insert a laminaria, which is a kind of natural dilator, in your cervix, and then the next day they vacuum out the fetus and maybe use another tool to scrape out any remaining tissue. But the place I went to dilated me right on the table. That hurt, but it wasn’t the most disconcerting part.

Inside my belly, a muscle began to cramp rhythmically. It clenched and unclenched, and I remembered those balls, half as big as we were, we used to play kickball in grade school. The ones that were an odd shade of red and textured, that yielded to a foot or a hand. When it was my turn, the kids on my team would start chanting—“Natalie! Natalie! Natalie!”—because I could kick it farther than anyone. It was the only time in my life I felt truly popular. But now, this morning, I couldn’t look at my stomach because there was a hand just under the skin, squeezing my own personal kickball: I lay there with my feet in the stirrups, with the vacuum tube finally inserted through my cervix, my belly cramping rhythmically. I stared at the cheap travel poster on the ceiling and wondered how far inside it had gone. Would it touch the top of my uterus? Cause a perforation?

Afterward, they twisted a tie around a plastic bag, the kind people use to carry goldfish home from the store. The liquid in it was uniformly red. I couldn’t help searching for some form in it, but there was none: only blood, now separate from me.

I told no one but Debbie.


It stuck with me, that feeling of being vacuumed out.

Once I’d had a conversation with my Aunt Jennie, my mother’s sister, about her refusal to have children.

“I couldn’t stand the waiting,” she told me. “I knew it would take me years to get pregnant.”

“It didn’t take Mom more than a couple,” I reminded her.

“True. But then she had the hysterectomy. Not being able to have any more children hurt her so badly that I just didn’t see how having a child could be worth it.”

I shrugged. Sometimes Aunt Jennie doesn’t concern herself with how she sounds to others. I thought she was making excuses for her inability to stay with a man long enough to raise a toddler, at the very least.

I finished school in Boulder. Then I went to New York. I found new writers for a whole string of publishing houses. They may not have been the best writers in the country, but they were by far the strangest. I enjoyed how they reconstructed reality.

My life didn’t turn out the way I expected. I fell in love again and again and came to crave that new beginning. I sought it in work and men and I always found it. A life of newness is a life of constant movement, appropriate for a city like New York. It was hard to explain my life to my family or to old friends in Colorado. Even Debbie told me my life was unstable. But it wasn’t. After all, a river isn’t unstable, yet it moves constantly. I thought of myself as one of those small Western rivers, transplanted to the East. To people who are accustomed to the seemingly slow-moving, wide rivers of the East, I was nothing more than a creek. I didn’t mind that I couldn’t carry much on my back.

**

When I think about the abortion itself, whether it was a good or bad thing, it confronts me like a monument; like the Missouri River that I must swim, right now; like the keyhole before the narrows on Longs Peak. It was such a relief. I can’t imagine myself without it. How do you approve of or condemn such experiences?

It was so easy to get pregnant. I told myself I had escaped the family curse. My uterus worked the way it was supposed to. So why rush to be a mother?



I always knew it would happen again.

Despite family history, despite mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers longing to be pregnant like so many unmilked cows, I knew my body would have to choose for me, as it chose when I was eighteen and conceived Michael’s child.

But once I’d had the abortion, my attitude about children changed. I had thought they’d be so easy for me, that I’d broken the family curse. And I guess my pregnancy proved that theory correct, in a way—but my certainty that I didn’t want that first child exiled my family ambitions to the hinterlands of my life.

The intervening years can be quickly dispensed with. Finishing school; work: five writers I’m truly proud to have introduced to the world in eighteen years; a string of lovers; travel to every continent.

And then I met Mitch. I saw him across a new restaurant I had been trying to get into for months. I was with friends; he sat with a large group in my line of sight, though several tables away. I glanced at him throughout the evening; he always met my eyes. My friends left for other engagements; I was alone in the booth finalizing the bill when he sat down next to me.

“Have you had dessert?” he asked. I hadn’t.

It started like that, with food, and him asking me if I had had enough. When he was around, I felt as if I could have so much more.

This close, his eyes were calm, not appraising. His hair was so black that I had to touch it before dessert arrived, trailing my fingers through the curls just behind his ear. Then I rubbed my fingers together to see if the color had come off. He paid the bill for dinner and dessert. We went back to his apartment, which overlooked a tiny park.

“It’s not Central Park,” he said, “but it’s the best I can do.”

His best was good. Once I got into his four-poster bed, I didn’t want to leave. With the bed curtains down, we were completely enclosed. They shut out the traffic sounds and, if we wished, all the light. When we opened them, I could read the manuscripts I always carried with me. I stayed for three days, telling my boss I was working from home.

It didn’t happen just then.

Several months later I noticed that my period was late. My fortieth birthday was approaching. My birthday comes three days after Valentine’s Day, so I never get depressed about that holiday. I have always had something to celebrate that time of year. So I figured, what the hell, and bought a pregnancy test on Valentine’s Day. Yep, it was positive. I told Mitch that night, at dinner at his apartment.

He stilled. Even his hair, which had its own electric life, stuck out less righteously.

“Isn’t it romantic?” I asked hopefully.

“It’s a surprise,” he said. It was unlike him to be so diplomatic.

“I’m forty. It’s my last chance to have a baby.”

He shook his head. I hadn’t told him about Michael. Now I wouldn’t. Would I have wanted this child if I had kept Michael’s? So many questions lined up in back of that one I just cut them off.

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“I won’t have an abortion.”

Our relationship didn’t last long after that. He was there for the birth, and I was glad, but I told him soon after, “Only have a relationship with this child if you truly want to.”

He didn’t.

**

The Receipt

Every so often I get out the receipt and look at it. The name, address, and phone number of the clinic were stamped in the lower right-hand corner, with someone’s initials scrawled in large curly letters over them. In the lower left-hand corner, the amount paid: $175. The price of an abortion in 1981. This receipt had my name and the name of the clinic—no, it wasn’t the one in Boulder. I was afraid of someone seeing me there. Not to mention the “sidewalk counselors.”

**

Ten years later, after spending Christmas vacation with my parents, my husband and children and I were driving east along I-70 in Kansas. I woke up drooling, my neck in an unnatural position. Just then we passed a faded billboard: “Abortion stops a beating heart.” And another, and another, all with similar messages. Then a phone number: 1-877-GRIEVE.

It’s as if I were a lake, with a cold current circling from the bottom to the top. By the time we reached Chicago, I had to lie down and weep.

I’d thought having children had erased the abortion, but no. It was still there, hiding, waiting to surface.

**

Countermemory

Now everything seems to radiate outward from the abortion in all directions. It seems to have become the sun in my solar system. Or should it be a black hole? I don’t know, but it does illuminate things about me that I’d rather not see: the limits to my desire for children; how easy it was to say nothing to Michael, to lie by omission. I keep hoping for dusk, but I’m stuck in the northern end of my heart, where the sun hardly ever sets.

After I emerged into the waiting room and wakened Debbie, we went to lunch. Sometime in the middle of my ten-week pregnancy, food had lost its flavor and begun to resemble nothing so much as cardboard. I was lucky I never threw up, but just getting through the day and eating took so much effort. So I’ll never forget the sandwich I had for lunch, two hours after the abortion. We sat at a counter, with Debbie to my left, and I took my first bite of a BLT. The bread was toasted and smelled of butter and wheat. The iceberg lettuce crunched between my teeth. The bacon was crisp at some points and soft at others, as it should be, the tomato firm and a little sweet. I had never noticed before how one plain little sandwich could contain so many flavors and textures.

It tasted like freedom.

Read more