“I don’t get what he saw in her,” I said. “I mean, she was nothing special, as far as I could see. She had no fashion sense whatsoever and she was probably double his size.”
“Maybe Chagall liked substantially sized women,” Mr. Ackerman said. He laughed when I rolled my eyes at him. “You’ve had enough, Miss Davies. You want to go home.”
“I want to eat.” I pulled myself to my feet. “I haven’t had anything all day.”
—
He knew a place in Southbank that was nice and quiet, with white tablecloths and waiters in half aprons. He furrowed his brow over his menu like he did in class when someone gave a wrong answer, and he chose my meal for me because I couldn’t decide. Then he asked me what had brought me to the “wrong side of town.” So I told him about the formal dress, and the sewing lady at my dad’s factory who had put straps on a strapless gown, and how I wished I’d just gone to Chapel Street and bought something off the rack like all the other girls had, because now I didn’t even think I should go to the formal because I’d probably be the only one in straps. He was silent through all this, looking around the room at the empty tables, the waiters chatting near the kitchen, then out the window at the river.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Oh. Nothing. It’s just a little strange, I suppose, sitting here.”
“Do you want to go to the food court?”
“No. I just—I haven’t eaten out in a restaurant for a long time. But this is nice. This is fine.” He looked at me. “You’re hungry.”
“I’m ravished,” I said, and he nodded and smiled down into his bread plate.
Halfway through our risottos, I finally got up the nerve to ask him if he was married. He had been, he told me, for three years, but it was over now and he didn’t say why.
For a while after the divorce, he told me, he had stopped reading books. He couldn’t sleep properly, either. For the longest time, he said, he would go to see movies, dramatic movies, and keep his eyes closed the whole way through. Just so he could be moved by the music. I asked him why he didn’t just stay home and listen to songs in the dark, and he said he liked the ritual of buying the ticket, smiling at the popcorn sellers in their vests, and sitting among the couples and groups of kids who didn’t bother turning off their phones before the main feature started. He said he liked the way the score kept up throughout a film, dipping and rising, like someone’s chest as they lay sleeping. It was cathartic, he said.
“Like, calming?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “More like healing.”
“So now you read books again?”
“Yes, I’ve started to. And I guess I’m becoming more social.”
I had waited through the last few hours for him to tell me something about himself, something personal like this, but now that it had happened, I didn’t know how to respond.
As he talked, I found myself imagining the scene at home when I got back. The quiet that would greet me once I’d shut the big door behind me. The laughter of my sisters coming from somewhere in the back of the house. I saw myself going to the pantry and standing there, surveying the shelves full of lunchbox food: Le Snaks, fruit leathers, apple purees, and twelve-packs of Twisties. Leaving the kitchen without taking anything, I would sneak upstairs to my room unnoticed and lie on my bed, fully clothed, with my schoolbooks open on the desk, Natalie Portman grinning down off the wall, and the duct on the ceiling slowly exhaling its heat into the room.
“Excuse me, sir, this card’s been declined. Did you want me to try it again or use an alternative method of payment?” The waitress stood beside him with her hands behind her back. The two of them looked down at his card lying on the tablecloth.
“Uh, give me a second.”
“Of course.” She unclasped her hands but stayed where she was. Mr. Ackerman fumbled through his pockets.
“Shit,” he murmured. I bit down on the inside of my lip. I shouldn’t have eaten a main course, I thought, should have asked for a soup or salad. I shouldn’t have said I was hungry in the first place.
“I have some money,” I said. I took out a twenty and two fives, and handed them to him.
“Thanks, Sascha. I’ll pay you back. I have the money, it’s just in a different account and I have to transfer it.”
When the waitress came with the change, neither of us touched the two-dollar coin on the plastic tray. The kitchen staff were loitering near their window, looking out at us. What are they thinking? I wondered. She’s too old to be his daughter, probably, and too young to be his sister. I wondered what they’d finally decide.
—
Outside, a chilly afternoon wind had started blowing, and the clouds over the city were threatening something worse. We walked among the Saturday shoppers, all searching the sky for a sign of what might come next. By the time we reached Collins Street, it was spitting, and I tried to lead him into a shoe shop.
“Don’t worry,” he told me. “It’ll clear up any second.” But a few blocks later, it had turned into a downpour, and the wind was so strong it was sucking people’s umbrellas up into tulip shapes. “Here.” He pulled me into a building and we stood inside the doorway, staring out at the water thrashing onto the road. We looked at each other, the rain streaming down our faces, and laughed.
We had walked into the foyer of an old-school theater. There were a few people sitting along the wall, reading or staring out at the rain, paying us no attention. There were posters behind them advertising films I’d never heard of, and the concession stand consisted of a basket of mixed-lolly bags, selling, the handwritten sign told us, for $1.50 each.
The woman at the box office was glaring at us, as though we should be paying for the privilege of taking refuge in her dingy little foyer. As though he agreed, Mr. Ackerman went over and asked when the next movie started.
“There’s one just started at four,” she told him. “Or the next one’s at five thirty.”
“Should we hide out till the rain stops?” he asked me, and they both watched me nodding.
“One adult and one child?” She coolly met his eyes.
“Student.” We both reached for our wallets. “One adult and one student.”
—
The movie was a foreign one, old and black-and-white, and as we sneaked in he whispered that he’d seen it before. The plot was nonexistent and there were no effects or celebrities, it was just people talking. I ignored the subtitles and studied the main girl, who had cropped hair and sold newspapers on the street. I wondered if he found her attractive. Probably, but why? I was yet to work out exactly what it was that guys found sexy in women, but I knew whatever it was, I had it. My body was still boyish and small and straight up and down, but I knew that it was interesting to men. Not necessarily the guys from school, but other men. I’d known this fact for two years now, since the day on the train.
I had felt them before I saw them, the man’s eyes on me. I had been sitting across from him and his family and looking out the window behind them, at the back fences and side streets, and the lights being turned off in small office buildings. Then, with a snap like a rubber band, I felt the heat of his gaze, and shifted mine until we met.
It had been a Tuesday evening and I was twelve years old, heading home from school with my mind on homework and netball and Survivor, and then suddenly this man had found me, my reflection in the window, and held me there. His arm was thrown around his wife’s shoulders and she fussed with the two small kids beside her.
“Don’t do that!” She slapped the toddler’s hand from its nose. The man smirked at me in the window and raised his eyebrows.
I don’t know how long we sat like that for. My house was pretty close to school, so it couldn’t have been longer than five minutes. But I knew as I sat there in my uniform, my nipples growing hard, my cheeks hot, the terrible secret passing between me and the stranger, that I was being admitted into a new world—that I was growing old or dying or changing or something. A sensation pas
sed over me then, like insects crawling around on my back.
That was the first time. Since then, I had started a list in a notebook in my room of other things that gave me that sensation. Like 50 Cent videos on MTV. A car crash I saw happen on Glenferrie Road. An article I read about peacekeepers and refugees in Africa. Being on a tram without a ticket when the inspectors climbed on. The faces of people waiting outside nightclubs on weekends. A porn site I’d found open on my dad’s computer when I was checking my email in his study one night. And standing in front of Mr. Ackerman in his office and lying to his stern face that I had been shoving tampons up into my vagina, two at a time.
And so today, walking down Smith Street, when I’d glanced up from the sidewalk and seen him sitting there in the window, looking both strange and familiar, like photos of my parents when they were young, I had felt it: the heat, the hardness, the insects. I had turned into the café without missing a beat, as though this were a movie and I was only just now being shown the script. I had had the sudden and full knowledge that there was a reason that I had been admitted into this new world; that here, today, later today, sometime, Mr. Ackerman was going to take this feeling to its real and necessary ending.
In the flicker and dark of the movie, I closed my eyes. There was no soundtrack but I listened to the up-and-down lilts of the language as though it were music. I leaned my head onto his shoulder. His jacket still held the cold of the rain and it smelled like outside when I breathed into it. Mr. Ackerman put his hand on my hair and stroked it. I felt dizzy and humid, like I was flying above myself in the dark. I imagined him standing below me like that painter guy, getting ready to catch me before I hit the ground.
“Mr. Ackerman,” I whispered, my teeth against his jacket.
“Are you tired, Sascha?” His mouth found my ear and he took his eyes off the screen. “Or do you want to go somewhere else?”
“There’s this story about a girl who goes to see her gynecologist,” I tell the gynecologist. “She gets up early on the morning of, while her roommates are still sleeping, and goes for a run. When she comes home, she’s all sweaty, but she doesn’t have time to shower before her appointment. So she grabs a towel and wipes herself off. You know, down there.”
“Uh-huh,” says Dr. Hill as she holds the speculum against my thigh. “This might be a bit cold.” She inserts it into me. It is a bit cold, and uncomfortable. I worry for a moment that there will be a sharp edge or angle on there that she doesn’t know about. “Go on,” she says. “So she wipes herself off—”
“Yeah. Then she goes to the gyno and takes off her pants, gets on the chair, spreads her—oh.” I hold my breath as she cranks the thing open. It squeaks as it pushes against me.
“Lie back,” she says. “Breathe. Concentrate on the bear.” I press my head back into the chair and stare at the poster stuck to the ceiling above me, a photo print of a bear standing on a grassy hilltop. “That’s it,” she says, as she gets me wide open.
“So the girl spreads her legs, and the gyno comes in—it’s a man—and he comes into the room, stands in front of her, looks between her legs, and says, ‘Oh, I see you dressed up for me today.’ ”
Dr. Hill scrapes a cotton swab against my cervix. The discomfort feels real and far away, like someone yelling your name outside your front door while you’re sleeping.
“And the deal is, the girl lives with this raver chick, and the towel she grabbed to wipe herself off was covered with the chick’s face glitter. So the gyno thinks she’s applied it especially for him.”
“Urban legend,” says Dr. Hill as she winds the speculum closed.
“Really?” I say, sitting up and leaning back on my elbows.
“Absolutely.”
I inhale as she pulls the metal out of me. Inside I feel like I felt in eleventh grade, when Becky Addis and I got drunk in the park and she shoved her hand down my jeans and put her fingers inside me with fingernails that were too long.
“Vaginas don’t sweat,” says Dr. Hill. “Not inside anyway. I’ll go to the lab and check on your other tests. Why don’t you get dressed and meet me in my office.”
—
I expect AIDS, because I had sex with this Irish guy who told me he’d gone to see prostitutes in Amsterdam. I expect herpes because this drummer Chris went down on me and I found a tube of Zovirax on the floor under his bed the next morning. I expect HPV because I saw a segment about it on 60 Minutes last week. I expect chlamydia, gonorrhea, hep A, B, C because I’m a floozy whose back catalog of lovers should be organized with the Dewey decimal system. But I do not expect a fetus. And that’s what it is.
“Do you know who the father is?” Dr. Hill asks me.
“Yes,” I say.
“Was this something the two of you planned?”
“No,” I say. “Complete accident.”
“What precautions were you taking?”
“He was, uh, pulling out.”
“The withdrawal method?” she asks. She shakes her head as I nod mine. “Very risky.” She opens a desk drawer and takes out a pamphlet with a photo of a pensive-looking Asian girl on the front. Above her head it reads, SO…YOU’RE PREGNANT.
“I don’t need that,” I say.
“Are you sure?” She holds the pamphlet toward me like a stubborn canvasser on a street corner.
“I know my options,” I say. “I don’t want the baby.”
She puts her hands in her lap. “Well, then,” she says. “I guess you’re looking at adoption, or a termination.”
“I want a termination,” I tell her. “Is that still legal in this country?”
She leans back in her desk chair and sighs. “Thirty-five years of fighting to maintain our rights and every second girl who sits in that chair asks me that question.”
“I’m not American,” I remind her. “How soon can I get this done?”
“Well—” She pushes the mouse across the mousepad to wake her computer. “It’s too late to book you in somewhere today, and most places will be closed over the weekend.”
She types something in and I look around her office. It’s almost empty, except for the desk, the two chairs, the computer, a phone, and a poster on the wall telling me to ask my doctor about the IUD coil.
“What’s the IUD coil?” I ask her.
“One thing at a time,” she says. “I found an open appointment, on Monday at two thirty, at a center in South San Francisco. They offer a free and confidential counseling service onsite. I also suggest you talk this decision over with someone beforehand. A close friend or family member. The father, perhaps?” She looks in the drawer for another pamphlet.
Suddenly I’m aware of how alone I am in this city, how far away all my best friends and family are. Suddenly I’m wishing that my teenage experimentation with Becky Addis had taken; that she and I were now living together in a cottage on the coast of Brighton, clipping our fingernails as foreplay, flushing our contraceptive pills down the toilet, and laughing triumphantly at our risk-free lesbian life.
—
Being unexpectedly pregnant is like learning that someone you love has died. You remember, then you forget, then all of a sudden it dawns on you again. The brain separates the enormous shock into many minor shocks and doles them out at five-minute intervals. I walk to the BART station. I’m pregnant. I buy a ticket. I’m pregnant. I ride the train and get out at 24th Street. I’m pregnant. I buy a pack of cigarettes at the corner store. I give the woman seven dollars and she hands me coins. I’m pregnant. I go to see Luke at the Common Room.
“Hey, I’m pregnant.”
“What?” He can’t hear me. He’s standing behind the espresso machine, his manager Katie is at the roaster, and Slow Club is crooning through the speakers. “Did you get my text messages?” he asks loudly.
“Probably not all of them,” I say. “You filled up the memory on my phone so I couldn’t receive new ones.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have to send so many if you just answered one.” He doses
into the portafilter and tamps it down. “What are you doing here anyway?” He slams the instrument harder than he needs to into the machine and positions a cup under the spouts. “I told you it makes me uncomfortable to see you.”
Then we have the same fight we’ve been having for the last three weeks.
“I’ve been coming here since the first day I got to the city. Way before I even met you.”
“Well, I was working here a year before you even arrived in the States.”
“This café is one of the reasons I moved to this neighborhood.”
“Well, there are other coffee shops in the Mission District.”
“Why don’t you work in one of them, then?”
“Are you fucking serious?” he says. “Low-fat latte for Allie,” he calls out.
I’m pregnant, I think.
“Look,” he says. “I still love you. If you don’t want to be in contact with me, you can’t come in here.”
“Oh yeah?” I say. “If you’re so in love with me, why did you change your MySpace status to single?”
“You’re the one who said you wanted a clean break.”
“And you took my band out of your top twelve.”
“Americano for George. Why do you even care? Why are you even checking my MySpace?”
“It’s bookmarked on my computer.”
“So un-bookmark it.”
“Fine,” I say.
“Fine.” He glares down at me over the row of glasses and mugs on top of the machine. I glare right back. “I created a new espresso blend,” he says. “A Colombian microlot and a Cup of Excellence from Brazil. Ripe cherry acidity with a maple syrup finish. Really sweet.”
“What’s it called?”
“Straight Shooter. Wanna try it?”
“Sure.”
—
On his break we go into the green bean room. I sit on a sack of Santa Isabel. He leans back on a stack of Bolivians. It’s cooler in here than the rest of the café; the beans absorb the heat. I’m pregnant, I think, looking him up and down. But it’s not the baby that’s making my stomach churn. He’s wearing his tight black jeans and a very low-necked white T-shirt, and an open gray-and-blue cowboy shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His hair is messy, his eyes bright blue, and he’s got a few days’ worth of stubble on his face. I can see three of his tattoos: the EKG squiggles over his heart, the vintage gun on his right wrist, and the numbered lines on the inside of his left arm:
Hot Little Hands Page 3
