Agorafabulous!

by Sara Benincasa

  “Oh my God,” I said. “That is so fucking broken.”

  I’d had that happen before, back in college. I’d gone to Planned Parenthood and taken Plan B. It had been a frightening thing, and my Papist programming was so strong that I wasn’t entirely sure I hadn’t committed an unforgivable sin and paid for an extremely early and gentle abortion. But at least I’d had a boyfriend to support me through it. This was an entirely different challenge.

  On the upside, I immediately stopped crying. I inherited my mother’s ability to snap into crisis-response mode. On the downside, I think Andrew began to fight back tears.

  “Let’s not panic,” I said in the voice I reserved for dealing with hysterical adolescents. “This is entirely fixable. May I use your computer?”

  He looked at me blankly. I suppose my rapid transformation from emotional wreck to proactive project manager was rather unsettling.

  “May I use your computer?” I asked again. “I need to see what time Planned Parenthood opens. I’ll go and get the morning-after pill.”

  “Are you—are you sure that’s necessary?” he asked hesitantly. “I don’t want you to—I mean—I just feel so bad about all this. You were crying, and then the condom, and—”

  “Well, it’s better to be safe than sorry, right?” I patted his arm. “Don’t you worry about a thing, Andrew. Everything is going to be all right.” I rose, naked, and sat in front of his laptop at his desk. “And I do apologize for my earlier outburst,” I said over my shoulder. “You’re really very good at sex. I’m just in a weird place right now, emotionally speaking.”

  “I guess . . . I am, too,” he said faintly. He watched as I went to Planned Parenthood’s website and looked up New York health centers.

  “The Margaret Sanger Clinic opens at seven thirty on Saturdays,” I said. “That’s, what, four hours from now? It’s in the East Village. I’ll get a car service. Totally convenient.”

  Andrew looked at his hands. “What are we going to do until then?”

  I lived on the Upper West Side, a good hour-long train ride away. I could call a car service, but I didn’t relish the idea of riding around in a random town car with a stranger in the middle of the night.

  “I’ll stay here, if that’s okay,” I said. “I know it’s weird.”

  “No, it’s not weird at all,” he said. Nice people tend to lie in these sorts of situations. “Let’s go to bed.”

  As I lay beside him in the dark, with sleep utterly out of the question, I heard him begin to gently snore. Some guys will sleep through anything.

  After a few hours of staring at the ceiling and wondering what would happen if the morning-after pill didn’t work this time, I got up and shook him gently awake.

  “I’m leaving,” I said.

  “Good luck,” he whispered. I knew it was the last time I’d ever see him. I nodded and walked toward the door.

  “Sara?”

  “Yeah?” I turned around. He looked so cute there in the blue morning light, his eyes only half-open. I remembered how I’d giggled to myself back in Boston when he recognized me and said hi in the library.

  “The front door locks automatically. Just make sure it’s really shut.”

  I left.

  As it turned out, I didn’t even need to call a car service. A yellow cab happened to roll by as soon as I left Andrew’s building, and I hurriedly flagged it down.

  “Bleecker and Mott,” I said.

  As we glided through Brooklyn, I took the opportunity to assess the situation. I was exhausted, emotionally spent, and hungry. Everything seemed to whiz by quickly and crawl by slowly, all at once. And yet, somehow, I didn’t detect panic anywhere inside me. Mostly I just felt confused and increasingly disoriented.

  By the time we arrived at the Margaret Sanger Center, I was carsick, overtired, and glumly resigned to the fact that I was pregnant with three dark-haired triplets. On some level, I had always known that God would punish me for having sex outside of marriage. He’d allowed me to take the morning-after pill with success once before, but this time I was shit out of luck. Even if I took it, it wouldn’t work. And then I would have to do the most terrible thing in the world and literally kill my babies, all three of them. Well, I’d pay some doctor to actually do it, but the fault would be mine and mine alone. I’d probably bleed out on the operating table like Penny almost did in Dirty Dancing, only Patrick Swayze wouldn’t be around to ask Jerry Orbach to save me. And then I’d rot in the Hell I pretended not to believe in but still totally knew was real.

  When I paid the cabbie and stepped out of the car, I was surprised to see a Santa Claus doppelgänger standing on the curb. He didn’t have the red suit or the big sack of toys, but he did have the white hair, robust white beard, and round jelly-belly. He was wearing a pair of denim overalls and a plaid workshirt, and he looked just like one of the older farmers who sold his wares at the farmer’s market outside the French Broad Food Co-op back in Asheville. There was something else familiar about him, too, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. I felt relieved when I saw him. It was like he was waiting there just for me. And God, did I ever need to have a nice, normal interaction with a man.

  “Good morning, sir,” I said with a small smile.

  Then I caught sight of his Bible.

  However long this interaction was going to last, it was not going to end well.

  The sad reality is that when you run into someone with a Bible on the streets of New York City, chances are your day is about to take a turn for the uncomfortable. The Mormon kids are usually nice, but I think they carry the Book of Mormon, which is a bit of a different game. Plus, you know they’ve chosen to do their mission year in New York City, so they’re probably the weird, artsy and/or secretly gay ones from their synod back home in Utah or Missouri or wherever. They’d probably make nice dinner companions and would lend you money if you needed to get on the bus. But the folks with the Bibles aren’t interested in selling you a membership to a modern desert cult with a kickass show choir. The folks with the Bibles—the men with the Bibles—want to tell you about Hell and why you deserve to end up there.

  Have you ever been on the receiving end of authentic hatred? I don’t mean resentment or rage. Anyone who’s ever taught or raised a teenager has gotten those dirty looks. I’m talking about real-deal, genuine, wish-you-were-mauled-to-death-by-bears hatred. It’s the kind of gaze that carries a physical force. It’s palpable. Over the course of my life, I’d made plenty of people angry, exasperated, and unhappy, but I realized in that moment that I’d never truly known hatred. His eyes bored into me like a pair of drills. For a split second, I wondered if he was going to hit me.

  Instead, he opened his mouth and let out the angriest sound I’d ever heard.

  “MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWDDDDDDDRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!”

  I couldn’t even make out what he was saying, so loud and deep and uncontrolled was his rage. He sounded like a demonically possessed grandfather clock. His hateful wail bounced off the buildings around the Sanger Center and echoed back in the early morning light.

  Then he did it again, his eyes burning into me, and this time I caught his meaning.

  “MMMMMUUUUUUUUURRRRRDDDDEEERRREEEEER!” Murderer. He was talking about me. Me. Me, who hadn’t even gone into the center yet. Me, who hadn’t even taken a pregnancy test yet. Me, who hadn’t even paid for the Plan B pill yet.

  “MMMMMUUUUUUUUURRRRRDDDDEEERRREEEEER!” Again! I was aghast.

  If I’d been of sounder mind, I might have come up with something wittier. Instead, I went with knee-jerk honesty.

  “Not YET!” I blurted out. “I don’t even know if I’m pregnant!”

  Apparently, this was not the response he was looking for.

  He opened his mouth to yell again. I craned my neck wildly to see if another cab was coming, so that I could run away to my bed and bury my head in the pillows and make myself very small beneath the blankets, so that God and Satan and S
anta Claus couldn’t see me. I just really hated myself in that moment, maybe even more than he hated me, and it occurred to me that perhaps I deserved whatever was coming to me.

  But before the old man could let out another hate-moan, somebody else piped up. Because where there are devils, angels are often present, too. And my divine guardians had arrived, albeit in a form I hadn’t expected.

  “Oh. My God,” came a female voice out of nowhere. “I. Love. Those earrings!”

  I turned my head to the left and saw two very pretty, stylish young women grinning at me. They had funky haircuts and perfect eye shadow, and they wore fun boots and skinny jeans. They looked a lot like the gorgeous people I’d seen on the street the night before in Andrew’s cool neighborhood, with one major difference: they were wearing bright orange vests that read ESCORT.

  I’ve never been a morning person, and by that point, my mind had accommodated all the new experiences it could handle. My powers of logic collapsed. Therefore, I came to the natural conclusion that these women were call girls. After all, that’s what professional “escorts” are, right? Seven thirty A.M. on a Saturday, and I’d somehow stumbled into the center of the Venn diagram where sex workers and Bible thumpers overlapped. I had no idea what these high-class hipster hookers were doing wearing identifying vests, as that would seem to invite the attention of the vice squad. Were they that special feminist kind of prostitute, the ones who protested for legalization of the world’s oldest trade? This was the East Village; it wasn’t out of the question.

  “MUUUUUURRRRRDEEEEEREEEEEER!” yelled Santa.

  “They’re so fun and dangly and they totally work with your outfit,” Escort #1 said, smiling and walking up to me.

  “But I feel like, also? They could work with something more formal,” Escort #2 said, cocking her head to the side. “Like they could easily go from day to night, like if you had them on at the office you could change and just go to a party at night and you’d be fine.”

  “I caaaaan’t handle how cute they are. Where did you get them?” Escort #1 demanded.

  Now, I may have been utterly exhausted. I may have been terribly scared. I may have been carrying three extremely small bastard children. But I was also a young woman who had spent most of her life in suburban New Jersey, where the chief recreational activity is shopping and the most sacred house of worship is the nearest mall. And these whores were speaking my native tongue.

  “Target!” I said.

  The girls gasped in unison.

  “No way!”

  “But they look vintage!”

  “I know, right?” I said proudly. “Nine ninety-nine. I got them in El Paso!” Suddenly we were walking, as a little group, and I didn’t know how that had happened but I didn’t mind, because one of the harlots was telling me about the one-day sales at the new Target in Brooklyn, which apparently were epic and not to be missed.

  “But you have to get there by ten A.M. because all the good stuff gets picked over after that,” she said. “This is Carlos; he’s going to check your bag and take you through the metal detector. We’ll see you later; have a good appointment!” Startled, I realized she and her associate had somehow pried my frozen feet from the curb and walked me ten yards to the entrance of the Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger Center. At the same moment Carlos the security guard greeted me, I remembered my friends who had volunteered as safety escorts for patients at the local Planned Parenthood health center back in Asheville. As Santa continued shouting in the background, the girls waved and shut the bulletproof-glass door behind me. They were like little feminist helper-elves, relying on their training and their knowledge of retail to get one frightened Jersey girl where she needed to go. And in that moment, I became a Planned Parenthood fan for life.

  I entered my name in the log and waited my turn alongside a girl who looked to be about the same age as my ninth-graders back in Texas. Her boyfriend was with her. There were a lot of men there that day, waiting patiently or anxiously, listening to music or reading magazines. I learned that only patients were allowed beyond the second door, which was also bulletproof and rigged with an alarm.

  Later, in the exam room, a nurse told me, “I don’t think we’ve ever had someone come in just four hours after a broken condom. That’s some impressive speed.”

  “I’m kind of neurotic,” I said.

  “Welcome to New York,” she replied.

  I went home with two pills and instructions to take them twelve hours apart. I took one combined with a Xanax, because by that point I was so tired I couldn’t sleep. Lulled into a chemical slumber, I dozed peacefully for several hours, then took the second pill as directed. I prayed for support and forgiveness, but to the Virgin Mary, not God. I figured she’d be more sympathetic to the whole unplanned pregnancy thing, especially since she and I both knew I wasn’t carrying any messiah. And I’d always had a sneaking suspicion it was Joseph who knocked her up, anyway, and the Archangel Gabriel thing was a less secular version of the stork story. The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe had been omnipresent back in Texas, so I prayed to that Mary as well as the more familiar Italian Catholic one.

  When I didn’t get sick from the pills, I felt relieved. But I also had this nagging feeling that the whole thing was too easy. Something was wrong. Something was missing.

  A few weeks later, it became apparent that at least the latter prognostication was accurate. My period was MIA. Concerned, I called Planned Parenthood.

  “You’re a week late? Oh, don’t worry,” the woman said. “Plan B can knock your cycle off for a month or two. You said you took Plan B a few hours after the incident? Well, statistically, chances are very, very slim that you’re pregnant. If you get really worried, come in for a pregnancy test. It’s free.” I thanked her and hung up. As much as I’d enjoyed my interaction with the angelic escorts, I didn’t greet the idea of a return trip with any enthusiasm.

  I busied myself with school and student teaching. I ate a lot of chocolate, because I’d read or imagined that it could jump-start a period. Optimistically, I wore a panty-liner each day—just in case my period arrived. One month passed, then two. Nothing. Not even any cramps.

  One night I was sitting in a graduate seminar listening to a girl named Rhoda Wasserstein explain how listening to Hot 97.1 (Motto: “Blazin’ hip-hop and R&B!”) for an hour each day really helped her relate to her class of thirty-five black teenage boys, when something inside me snapped like a wishbone and I began to bleed.

  It was very sudden, and there was no warning, and then just a tsunami of pain. It was electric, coursing through me as if it were a power unto itself and I merely its conduit. I felt it in my uterus, in my stomach, in my pelvis, in my quadriceps muscles. I’d had my period since I was eleven years old, and it had never just shown up unannounced like this. There were always a few days of cramps and spotting before the main event. I remembered, dimly, that my period had arrived right on time after I’d used emergency contraception for the first time, back in North Carolina.

  A classmate asked if I needed help—she said I looked like I “didn’t feel so hot.” I thanked her distantly, from some faraway place where my normal, polite self had gone on vacation. Abruptly, I excused myself from class. I forgot my winter coat, but no one noticed until later.

  Out in the hall, I was shocked to feel my hands begin to tingle in the telltale way that augured a panic attack. My last one had come soon after I moved to Texas, when I grew overwhelmed by the seemingly endless sky. The embarrassment of having a sky-induced panic attack was mitigated somewhat by the fact that the attack was relatively light and manageable. I popped a Xanax and took some deep breaths, and it passed. Based on the warning tremors, though, this New York City panic attack was going to be bigger. And tougher.

  “No, no, no,” I whispered as I took halting, painful steps toward the bathroom. “No, no, no. It’s been over a year. You’re going on a year and a half without any. You can’t have one now. Focus on getting to the bathroom. One foot in f
ront of the other.” I felt as if I were hip-deep in mud, so acute was the sensation of slogging through a thick, stubborn substance.

  The bathroom door felt unnaturally heavy, and I leaned on it before it glided open. I was raised to avoid the handicapped stall at all costs—What if a nice girl in a wheelchair needs to use it, and you and your perfectly healthy legs are hogging it?—but tonight I needed it. I needed it because it was big, and because I was going to pass out unless I lay down. First, though, the toilet.

  I don’t remember how much blood there was. In my memory, there is none, not even a drop or a spot. But this seems unlikely. Still, I can’t honestly say what I saw when I looked down between my legs. What I do remember is sitting on the toilet and rifling furiously through my purse, looking for the bottle of Xanax I always carried with me, like a talisman. I used it so rarely that the bottle always expired months before I emptied it, but I liked knowing it was always there.

  Except that tonight it wasn’t.

  I dumped my purse upside down on the tile floor. Some loose change rolled into the next stall; a pen from my local bank branch skittered toward the sink. My wallet flopped open. But there was no familiar orange bottle with the white top.

  There’s really no convenient time for agoraphobia to flare up, but flare up it did, borne on the back of a rip-roaring panic attack, four floors up in an old stone building at the corner of West 120th Street and Broadway.

  Fuck fuck fuck.

  You know you’re in a bad way when the thought of lying on a dirty public bathroom floor seems perfectly acceptable. You’re in an even worse way when you curl up beside the public toilet and start to cry.

  What do you do? Do you yell for help? Do you stay on the tile floor with the tampon wrappers and the stray pubes and the dirt from two hundred New York City shoes and mewl like a kitten? Can you survive there? How long until someone discovers you and tries to make you leave, without understanding that you really and truly can’t go?

  And what if you get the courage to get out of there? Do you get up, take the creaking elevator down to the ground floor, and ask the security guard to call for an ambulance, even though St. Luke’s is only a few blocks away? Do you go home and wait it out? What if you don’t even know what It is?