by Siel Ju
She hands you a styrofoam cup, this time with your name on it. This clinic’s bathroom is nicer, chrome and fake marble with a rectangular hole in the wall where you deposit the cup. Through it, you see what looks like a lab. As you squat to pee, you see a male hand take the cup that’s already sitting at the hole’s ledge. Place your cup in its stead.
Outside, a different woman gives you a locker key on a wristband, the kind that looks like a circular telephone cord. Then she hands you a blue outfit to wear for the procedure, complete with thin blue plastic pouches with elasticized ankles for footwear. “The opening should be in the back,” she says. She points to a door. “Go in there when you’re ready,” she says, and leaves.
Step into the closet-sized locker and change, then go through the designated door, one poufy step at a time. The room’s packed with thirty or so other girls, all like Smurfettes in their blue robes, and as you sit, someone yells out your name. It’s Helen, a girl in your chemistry class. “Oh my god,” she says, “we’re both here!” The girl next to Helen giggles. “Oh, you guys know each other?” Smile back at both of them. Helen’s had the same boyfriend for the last two years; he takes the same bus you do, gets on and off three stops closer to school. Sam must be Helen’s ride.
The room quiets down again. Wait. After fifteen minutes, ask the overweight girl next to you how many girls go in at a time. She shakes her head, then turns back to her Cosmopolitan. Notice her eyes are swollen.
A woman in pink and purple scrubs comes in, holding a clipboard. She calls your name tentatively, like she’s apologizing. Raise your hand. She gestures for you to come out into the hall. Shuffle out. She has your proof of pregnancy form in one hand and something square in the other. The square has a blue minus on it. “I’m not sure what happened,” she says, “but you’re not pregnant anymore.” Nod. Say, “I thought maybe I was miscarrying.” She relaxes, gives you back the money order. Ask, “Do I need to—do anything?” She shakes her head. “You’re free to leave,” she says, then gives you a big congratulatory smile.
Change back into your clothes and put the robe and shoes next to the trash can, which is already overflowing. In the waiting room, Ryan’s deep into a football game. When you call his name, he startles, then rushes over. “What happened?” he says. Say, “I miscarried.” “What?” he says.
Turn around and start up the stairs. He’ll follow.
It’s still sunny outside. In the car, say, “I got the money order back.” He nods. You’ve forgotten where you put it, and after emptying out the purse, you find it in the pocket of your jeans. Cross out Family Planning Associates on the Pay To line and replace it with his name, acknowledging the change with a signature. “The bank won’t take that,” he says. Argue about banking procedures. Say, “If it doesn’t go through, call me, and I’ll just pay for it.” “That’s not what I meant,” he says.
Realize he’s driven all the way down Third Street into Koreatown, long past the Wells Fargo branch you stopped at earlier. Now he can’t find another Wells Fargo. Pass three Bank of Americas looking for one until he stops at a residential area and asks a dog walker in red for directions. When he follows them, you spot the bank. The ATM line is long. Wait.
Watch him weary in line. A woman in a gray business suit keeps changing her mind, pulling out transaction slips and her card before reinserting it and starting over. When he’s finally at the machine, he takes a while, hitting the wrong buttons. He comes back with four twenties. His hands are sweaty when he hands you the money. He asks if you want to go to the bank now. Say no.
When he pulls up in front of your apartment, say bye opening the car door, without looking at him. “Bye,” he says. Walk down the narrow alley, turn left to go up the stairs. He’s still there; you can hear the engine of his old Ford Fiesta, running hoarsely.
Don’t turn to look. You don’t know it now but you’ll see him again, when you call him three weeks later. “Just checking to see how you’re doing,” you’ll say in your best casual voice. You’ll go out to watch Batman Returns, then have sex in his car on the third floor of the parking lot of the Beverly Connection. It’ll be a lot like the first time, quick and furtive and uncomfortable, though this time, you’ll use a condom. Afterwards he’ll hold the door on his side ajar and drop the used thing on the concrete with a soft plop. He’ll do this casually, almost confidently, without comment. For a minute it’ll feel vaguely like you’re both just following a script, acting out a long-ingrained habit you never knew you had.
Cake Time
I met Ben the day I moved off-campus, into Carrie’s spare bedroom. Carrie was a girl from my music appreciation class. She had beautiful, dark brown eyes, though it was hard to notice them; she hid behind a scrim of mousy hair and soft chub, which gave her the sodden air of someone who’d found a tenuous contentment on Paxil. Her pale olive skin hinted at Greek ancestry. She was technically a townie; her mom worked in the college’s printing department, so Carrie got to attend tuition-free.
I was on scholarship, which was the sole reason for my staying at this no-name liberal arts school in rural Pennsylvania. Our two-bedroom apartment had a tract housing feel with cheap, greenish carpeting that pilled and faintly stained my socks. The walls looked like they’d been repainted fairly recently but poorly so; clumps of rubbery paint clotted under the windowsills.
I was breaking down a cardboard box when Carrie knocked on the open door. Ben was standing behind her. He didn’t wait to be introduced.
“Whatever she’s told you, they’re all lies,” he said, taking my hand in a grand, debonair gesture, then shaking it with a cocky smile. He was, admittedly, a good-looking guy. He looked to be in his late twenties; he had an adult rakishness about him that agitated me. You could tell he was Carrie’s brother—they had the same dark hair and liquid eyes—but he was close to six feet tall, lean without looking skinny.
“I didn’t know you had a brother,” I said to Carrie. My voice came out in an excited, lilting tone, which made me flush.
Carrie turned to Ben. “She just moved in.”
Ben shrugged. He asked me what my major was, and when I said English, jauntily offered his opinion that English was a catchall major for people who didn’t know what to do with their lives. Then he winked. I asked him what he’d majored in.
“I studied economics for a while,” he said. “But I left. In business, you need real life experience more than book smarts.”
“So what do you do now?” I asked. The phone rang then, and Carrie went to get it.
“Internet startup.” He put on his shit-eating grin again. “Top secret. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
“Really,” I said. “Good luck with that.” By this time I’d managed to bring my high-pitched tone under control, and my words sounded more sarcastic than I’d intended. He opened his mouth into a look of surprise, then closed it for a grimace. I tried to think of something smart and ingratiating to say, but the moment tensed then tore, leaving each of us with a jagged half.
“It’s Mom,” Carrie called from the living room. “She wants to talk to you.”
He went to get the phone, then left without saying goodbye. After that he didn’t bother to make conversation when he came around, just gave me a disparaging nod of acknowledgement when he saw me, before turning his attention back to Carrie.
But I learned plenty about Ben anyway. Carrie had a high opinion of him, though I gathered that he basically just worked at the Dairy Queen, where his girlfriend Marcy also worked, and spent his nights drinking beer with his friends. Whenever Carrie and I talked I felt like she was feeling over my brain in search of a crack, then on finding one, scrabbling in her fingernails. “He looks out for me,” she said, her eyes drifting up moonily. “He doesn’t want me dating the losers around here, even the ones at college, because they’re all from hick towns too. Right?” There was a desperation in her eyes as she asked this that grated against her usual flaccid expression. She said that since she’
d turned sixteen he let her drink at his parties. “Just one drink though, so I don’t get in any trouble.” I could imagine Carrie at these events, in a dingy house like our own, nursing her warm beer quietly in a corner until the pretty girls left and Ben’s friends noticed her as an easy target. Maybe it was a good thing Ben kept her under his thumb after all.
I asked her if any of Ben’s friends were cute, if she had dated any of them, and she shook her head confusedly, like the idea had never occurred to her. I wondered if she was a virgin. I wondered if she thought I was. I imagine she thought me bookish and naïve, since she didn’t spend enough time on campus to know anything different.
In fact I’d screwed things up there starting the first week of my freshman year, when I’d met Allen, an upperclassman who’d had a way of making me feel like the urbane, provocative woman I’d wanted to be. He’d also had a girlfriend at another school. When I met her at a party I told her, “You’re so lucky, Allen’s a great guy,” before getting drunk and yelling from outside his door about how he was doing to her what he’d done to me last week. “You have a lot of nerve, calling here after the shit you pulled last night,” he’d said the last time I’d called him. “And we’re gonna be fine, so fuck you.”
After that I’d spent most of my time drinking and hooking up indiscriminately, my living exhibition piece to show how little I cared. I’d tried out bad ideas, and when they didn’t work, tried them harder. Eventually, when my friends started seriously dating the guys that had humiliated me, I’d determined to disappear from campus.
And I had, more or less. Now a junior, I stayed in the apartment except to attend classes, most of them evening seminars that I’d trudge into in a soporific haze, staking out my usual corner seat a few minutes early. The other students would come in in an energetic patter, bounding up the stairs then reconfiguring their gaits to walk in the room with cheerful, attenuated steps. Their expressions seemed always to be holding back a mix of mirth and mockery that in my more paranoid moments seemed to be masking a rumor about me. At these times I felt an indeterminate sense of revulsion and shame.
After class I’d go rejoin Carrie on the couch, who sat with the TV on, wearing a glazed expression and an ill-fitting T-shirt, watching sitcom reruns while haphazardly negotiating her homework. I began to notice her little study habits, the laborious attention with which she formed her tidy block letters, the indiscriminate way she dragged her highlighter over her books, so that in the end, almost every line of text was painted a fluorescent blue. I got the sense she didn’t do well in her classes. Most nights I dozed next to her until she patted me on the shoulder, waking me to tell me to get to bed.
The days shuffled on this way until Carrie’s twenty-first birthday that March. For the occasion, Ben organized to take her—and by extension, me—to a local dive known as The Pub, one of the two bars in town. I knew it would be just me and the townies, but I felt vaguely excited in spite of myself; it had been that long since I’d had a night out.
Carrie too seemed in high spirits. “It’s my night,” she kept saying, plucking and painting herself at the bathroom sink. Her inexpert but dogged manner reminded me of a nurse-in-training repeatedly trying to finagle a needle into a slippery vein. Though she still wore her usual T-shirt-and-jeans combo, she’d dressed to stick out—the denim low enough to show the gentle fat of her midriff, the red top a tight low V-neck. She put on a garish lipstick to match and kept checking her teeth for smears.
Ben honked from the curb right on time, at nine. The pale blue paint of his car was rusting at the edges. Ben’s girlfriend Marcy sat in the front seat. “Nice to meet you,” she said, turning to shake my hand in an awkward fingers-only squeeze. I guessed she was about my age, though she had primped to look older. She wore harsh black eyeliner that made her blue eyes look surreal, like they were on a different plane from the rest of her face. The damaged ends of her bleached hair frizzed out around her face in a halo of blond cotton candy. The car was suffused with the scent of her soft, musky perfume.
Ben gave me his usual nod. “Always a pleasure,” he added this time. Then he saw Carrie and did a double take. He started driving, keeping his hand on the gear shift, and at the first turn, Marcy softly placed her hand on top of his, her long, violet fingernails gleaming under the streetlights. The gesture seemed oddly sensual and illicit, creating a subtle charge that silenced the car until we parked.
The Pub was a longish, windowless room with cheap wood-paneled walls, a no-frills bar positioned at one end. The place was still mostly empty. A few people stood around holding their beers in squat, dissatisfied postures. Three shaky-looking men sat in a row at the bar.
“Mickey,” Ben yelled. “It’s my sister’s twenty-first birthday!”
The bartender Mickey waved, then lined up a dozen or so shot glasses and started pouring tequila. I joined the first round, then asked for a rum and coke. “For Carrie’s friend, anything,” Mickey said, with a gallant bow that made me giggle. He was cute, about Ben’s age, maybe a little older. When he set down the drink he smiled, revealing a silver glint. I slunk back toward Carrie.
“He has a girlfriend,” Ben said, with a sardonic leer.
“And a metal tooth,” I said.
Ben shook his head like he was exasperated, then signaled Mickey for another round. Carrie reached for another shot. “Take it easy,” Ben said, grabbing her arm. “Pace yourself.”
Carrie uncharacteristically hardened her face. “It’s my night,” she said, then grabbed a shot and took it, her eyes fixed on Ben. Her look was defiant, if slightly tinged with fear.
For a second Ben looked like he was going to start yelling. But he relaxed and laughed. “Damn right, it’s your night,” he said, thumping her back once, rather hard, with his palm.
The night sped up. The bar filled and morphed into a glitter of glass and ice and amber liquids. People shifted subtly to reveal their fey, glamorous sides. I started to appreciate the small, hopeful efforts that had been put into the night—a gangly brunette’s blowout, the smart crease in a short guy’s khakis, Carrie’s impasto lipstick. I noticed Marcy, the way she stood displaying her nails against her glass of ice cubes, tense and taut in her tiny skirt and scuffed strappy heels as if she was en pointe, standing at the ready for some cue from Ben. She had long, thin appendages and a waistless middle. Once in a while she joined the conversation by saying, “That’s interesting,” followed by a small, knowing smile, belied by her uncertain eyes. That uncertainty reminded me of Carrie, her expression when she’d asked if I thought it was normal that Ben called every night for a rundown of her day. I said I wasn’t a good person to ask; I didn’t have a brother.
Ben seemed to know everyone who came in; I introduced myself to some of them. “So you’re Carrie’s roommate,” they each said. A heavy guy boasted he was Ben’s best friend. “Are you working on the Internet startup with Ben?” I asked. “Startup?” he said, then snickered. “Oh, the shoe store thing.” He said he worked for the city, trimming trees. I said something inane about how great it must be to work outside, and he nodded embarrassedly, perhaps for me.
Suddenly I heard my name. It was Anne, my roommate from freshman year. “I haven’t seen you all semester!” she yelled, spitting a little. “I called your number in the phone book and the girl who answered said I had the wrong number. I thought maybe you’d transferred!”
“Still here,” I said, plastering a grin. “I moved off campus.”
“I missed you!” she said. She lunged in for a hug. She was drunk, but this warmed me to her. We guzzled the drinks in our hands, talking in slurry exclamations. “You know Jillian transferred?” Anne said. “Or dropped out more like?”
Jillian was another girl from our floor, the baby-faced one at the end of the hall. I shook my head. Anne said Jillian broke her hip when a drunk linebacker who was fucking her in the bathroom at Phi Delt dropped her against the urinal. Her scream was so loud people at the party rushed in and saw her, her shirt and br
a scrunched up at her armpits, her bare ass on the urine-spattered floor. It was a while before the ambulance came.
“That snobby cow,” Anne said, then cackled maliciously. “That was mean, right?”
We laughed. I offered to get us more drinks. “On me,” I said.
It was crowded at the bar, but I squeezed through. “Mickey!” I yelled. “Two more!” He nodded affably and started making them. A couple people who’d been waiting turned to look at me with curiosity and loathing. I didn’t care. My mind swam; I drummed my fingers against the bar wantonly. Smiling, I looked around, then startled. Allen was at my right, sneering. Our shoulders were pressed together.
“So you’re fucking townies now?” he said, pointing his chin at Mickey.
At that my heart started thudding in my skull. Allen’s face turned into a violent blur. I turned toward where Mickey was making the drinks. I remembered the last time I’d slept with Allen, at his fraternity’s end-of-year party, months after that final phone call. After getting drunk in the basement, I’d snuck up into his room. He was alone, studying for his sociology final. I said I’d heard he and his girlfriend had broken up. I stumbled over him. “Do you realize how pathetic you are?” he’d said, taking off my clothes.
The drinks came. I picked them up and walked away, focused on staying balanced.
Carrie was talking to some of Ben’s friends. I joined her circle but was too jittery to follow the conversation. I glanced around the bar; every sideways glance I got back seemed stained with disgust and pity. I saw Ben and could tell he wanted to leave too. He was studying the college students with a defensive sneer. “These fucking kids,” he said. “They don’t know how to drink.”
