Andy and I never used birth control. My little hysterical pregnancy in Brunei aside, I didn’t really think I could get pregnant. As a result of starving myself in high school, I didn’t get my period for a year straight. And I had never been regular after that. I thought I had turned my own insides to stone.
So it wasn’t my lack of a period that alerted me to something being wrong; I just knew. But I peed on the stick and it came up negative. I peed on sticks again and again and my doctor insisted the sticks didn’t lie. When I finally demanded a blood test, I was almost three months pregnant. Andy was strangely unfazed when I showed up at his work with the news of a pregnancy. He consoled me with a brief hug before going back to work, leaving me frozen in front of the orange elevator doors with the receptionist staring at me.
She and I must have had warring astrological signs or something, because our interactions were always bristly. She was the one who screened my calls when Andy didn’t want to be disturbed. He denied it, but I knew it was true. I stuffed any display of weakness or emotion and planned to have my feelings when I got somewhere private. But when I got home, I couldn’t find the feelings I’d put aside for later. That’s the danger of pretending. You can forget what you were pretending not to be in the first place.
Andy assumed that I’d have an abortion, because there was no other option in his universe. When he came home later that night, he started talking details, like when he would have to take off work to take me to the clinic and whether he’d have to take a whole day or a half day. I made him a BLT and served it to him on our crappy sleeper couch. I had picked out the couch while trying to be thrifty, and it was terrible. It was made of black canvas and was tilted and lumpy, and the cushions were always sliding out. We had to put them back in place ten times a day. That albatross of a couch dominated the living room. It was an indictment of me, a visual reminder that I couldn’t do anything right. I wasn’t even woman enough to pick out a good couch.
“I’m not sure I want to get rid of it,” I said.
Andy generally complied with my wishes without protest. It was a good trick he had. He made people feel like they were in control, but actually he was getting them to take care of everything for him. Sure, I could decorate the place any way I wanted, but the catch was I had to do it all myself. That way when things went wrong, like with the couch, it was never Andy’s fault.
In this instance, however, I saw a side of Andy that I hadn’t before. He was quietly decided and direct. It seemed that he was capable of having an opinion after all. He may have had opinions all along and just hadn’t been letting on.
“If you want to have a baby,” he said, “you’ll be doing it alone.”
In high school, I had bussed down to Washington to march with pro-choice advocacy groups. When the militant antichoice organization Operation Rescue attacked New York in force during the Democratic National Convention, I volunteered with the National Abortion Rights Action League doing clinic defense. We gathered at various clinics at six a.m., locked our arms, and protected the entering women from screeching picketers with gory, unforgivable signs. I had rarely felt such a clear sense of being a participant in the fight of right against wrong. We were right; they were wrong.
I didn’t really tell Andy or anyone else how badly I wanted to keep the baby, how my heart twisted in protest against the decision my head had made. I was nineteen and my boyfriend didn’t want a baby. I would rather have chewed tacks than asked my parents for help. My friends were career-minded artists. My choice was spelled out.
I hung out in Penny’s kitchen, my old kitchen, and drank tea.
“It’s a loss,” she said. She’d had an abortion a few years before. “I don’t regret it, but it still haunts me.”
“Nineteen years ago my birth mother had this same conversation with her best friend. She came up with a different solution.”
“She was a different girl in a different time. This is your life, not hers.”
But I thought about my birth mother probably more than I ever had as I made my decision. And in my thoughts she wasn’t a long-limbed ballerina in a spotlight; she was a girl like me, imperfect and feeling totally screwed. I wondered if, like me, some part of her had believed that her boyfriend was going to turn around and tell her that she wasn’t alone. His eyes would have the tilt, the gleam of a man who had changed his mind. He would offer her a family, a little bohemian tribe. And she would offer him one right back. And her life would change in dazzling and unexpected ways.
When I had thought I was pregnant in Brunei, the choice to keep the baby against all odds had seemed so simple, so noble. Maybe deep down I’d known all along that I never was pregnant.
I thought of my adoptive mother newly married and vacuuming the brown rug in her New Jersey apartment as again a month came and went without anything taking root inside her, her insides slippery and hollow and out of her control. I thought of her ticking off each interminable minute of each month until doctors became lawyers and creating a family became a project of proportions neither she nor my father had ever dreamed of.
But then there was the baby, the perfect and whole baby in her arms, wrapped in a pink blanket and sleeping through the flight from Chicago to New York, breathing in and out and smelling like sweet, powdery newness. My mother’s life changed in dazzling and unexpected ways. And for a moment, she was happy.
It was the end of summer, the beginning of September—usually my favorite month in New York.
But this was what savvy girls did, postfeminist girls, girls with futures, right? They tried hard not to get knocked up in the first place, but if the unfortunate accident happened they grimly proceeded to Planned Parenthood and exercised the choice their mothers had fought so hard to guarantee them. They did it and maybe went to some therapy. They did it and acknowledged the scar tissue, but they did it.
A baby was an unthinkable encumbrance. Having a baby at nineteen was something only girls in urban projects and Midwestern trailers did, girls who knew that it was unlikely that their future would differ from their mother’s life anyway. But my mother had raised me to believe that without question my life would differ from hers.
My body, my choice, I had shouted on the steps of the United States Capitol building. And so it was. It was my choice alone and it was alone that I sat, in an office on the second floor of a building somewhere in Midtown.
I waited in a cold hallway, wearing a gown and paper slippers, craning my neck to watch Batman on the television. The women who waited with me talked to each other with the candor that women have, the ease we often share at nail salons, at the gym, in doctor’s offices. The woman across from me was Latina, with green eyes and cocoa skin. She was wide around the belly but had slim and shapely legs crossed at the knee and covered with goose bumps. She told her neighbor that she had three kids already and had been on the pill when she got pregnant.
“Ninety-nine percent effective my ass,” she snorted.
Every plastic bucket of a seat was filled. My arms brushed the arms of the women on either side of me. I spoke to no one.
Andy’s genes, I thought. Andy’s wonderful, brilliant, musical genes. I recognized that I was on the precipice of something irreversible, far more so than any choice I’d made before that. A piece of me was turning cold, dying. Maybe it was the piece that believed so strongly in my own rightness, in my own goodness, in the fact that I would do better than my mother, my mothers, that I’d outshine them both by immeasurable wattage. I’d outrun them both by a thousand miles.
Instead I shuffled down the hallway, no better than they. Worse. Worse.
One thing they often tell adopted children is, Your birth mother loved you so very much that she gave you away so you could have a better life. That may be true. It may also be true that if she had loved you just a little bit more, she would have kept you.
I didn’t love my baby enough. But I did love her in those last moments. I could feel her with me. And in my head floated the “stages-of-
development” fetuses, the plaster casts on display in the Museum of Natural History, the exhibit my father had taken me to see as a child, the miracle of life.
What did she look like? Her eyelids. Her ears. Her hands folded over her tiny, beating heart.
I lay on the table in the small procedure room with my legs strapped into stirrups, my gown hiked up to my waist, and a three-inch square of paper towel draped across the top of my thighs. I’ve always had difficult veins. The anesthesiologist sighed impatiently and stuck me several times.
“If you would just stop shaking, I could get this needle in.”
Silent tears streamed across my temples and into my hairline. Finally, I felt the sting in the crook of my elbow and then the swell at the back of my throat and then the sleepy warmth.
In the moment before the twilight sleep took me into nothingness, I dreamed of the hospital, of my father. You don’t see a vein; you feel a vein. It was a recurring dream, grounded at least partly in memory.
At age twelve I had ovarian cysts so painful that the doctors almost removed my appendix. As a result, I was in and out of the hospital, but I didn’t mind. I liked the hospital better than school. People took care of me and brought me chocolate bars and I ate floppy string beans and white bread with butter packets and watched TV all day in my pajamas. My dad took off work to stay there with me. He also liked hospitals. Medicine was his true love. He would have been a doctor but for his inability to concentrate, his lack of patience, his poor bedside manner. He says it’s why he wound up in finance instead.
An inept medical tech stabbed at my arm with a needle. This was my least favorite part about the hospital. I looked in the other direction, the same silent tears running down my face. My father watched from the other side of the room until his rage overtook his sense of decorum and he lifted the tech off his seat by the collar of his lab coat and threw him up against the wall. He held the man there by his throat and pointed an emphatic finger a centimeter away from the tech’s nose.
“You don’t see a vein, you fucking moron. You feel a vein.”
He dropped the man and sat beside me, gently and capably feeling for the vein in the hollow of my elbow before inserting the IV catheter in one try.
I don’t know if this occurrence was a hallucination or the real thing, but I know that in my dream replay of that moment, I love my dad so much.
Andy picked me up at the clinic. He cried in the elevator when he saw my face, but he dropped me at home and went back to work. When he came back later that night, he brought me Ben & Jerry’s and moved the television into the bedroom, breaking my adamant no-television-in-the-bedroom rule. It hurt. It did not feel like cramps, as they had said it would. It didn’t feel like cramps at all. It felt like something was clawing its way out of me.
I bled through pad after pad. Andy found a friend who had some Vicodin. I took one. Then I took another, and was magically enveloped in a soft cloud of okay that floated me into a mercifully dreamless sleep.
When I woke, a brick-red stain, brown at the dried edges, was spread out on the sheet beneath me. Something was wrong. I took two more Vicodin and thought, If I just had a Vicodin tree, a never-ending supply, my problems would all be solved, would melt into the ground like butter into toast.
When by the afternoon the bleeding hadn’t stopped, I called my doctor and left a message. I considered a trip to the emergency room, but the thought of a New York emergency room on a Saturday afternoon drove me back to the Vicodin bottle and back into bed, towels folded underneath me. It took a few days before the bleeding finally eased. The doctor told me it was caused by something called “retained products,” pieces of tissue that hadn’t been properly removed. Retained products. You try to scoop out the consequences of your actions but the residue hangs on. She called it harmless—painful and disturbing, but ultimately harmless. I wonder sometimes now—after injecting countless syringes full of powerful hormones into my stomach, after going to clinic after clinic for a series of fertility procedures straight out of the movie Species, all of them failing—if she was wrong.
I curled around a heating pad and watched Law & Order. I watched it and then I just kept watching. The doctor at the clinic had said that I would be up and around in a day or two, so Andy couldn’t really understand why I stayed in bed for two weeks watching television. It wasn’t the pain. That went away after a few days. And the Vicodin went away a few days after that and in place of warm nothingness I found a pit, a crater, a black hole, the sides of it lined with retained products.
I wanted to fall into that black hole and become so small that the force of the compression itself would send me exploding into a billion pieces, would explode my arrogance and my careless decisions, explode the unshakable sadness, the heavy stone tied around my throat from the inside. I wanted to give up and just explode the self I couldn’t quite find, flailing and unwise. My own big bang. Please, I begged whomever, whatever, let me just fall apart and start over.
chapter 22
Her name was Carrie Gardner. It sounded perky and Midwestern and plain, the name of an airline ticket-counter worker, a waitress at Outback Steakhouse, a kindergarten teacher.
Slowly and on shaky legs, I’d been emerging from my funk for a few weeks. At Penny’s behest, I had begun seeing a therapist named Paul Pavel. I rode the A train every day to his uptown apartment. He was a man of uncommon hope, a man who rescued half-frozen animals from Central Park in the wintertime, a man who had himself been rescued half-frozen in the snow by American soldiers after the liberation of Auschwitz. Paul reached his hand, his tattooed arm, out to me and defrosted me as well. He led me out of the darkest part of the depression that had come hard on the heels of my abortion.
Paul was convinced, among other things, that my biological origins were of far greater significance to me than I was willing to admit. He made a connection between the loss of my birth mother and my crippling guilt over my abortion. And just as my therapy was excavating all this, Johnny called me with my birth mother’s name.
Johnny was home for the High Holidays from yet another boarding school. As usual, I wouldn’t be observing the holidays except to call my parents and wish them l’shanah tovah: for a good year. And while I didn’t miss the hypocrisy, the moneyed religion, the rigidity of the doctrine, I felt a sadness I couldn’t put my finger on. Maybe the holidays made me yearn for a time when I had believed in something as unlikely as God, or a time when I had believed that I was a part of something.
There had once been High Holidays when distant cousins swarmed me in the temple lobby with open arms and lipsticked smiles, smelling of Chanel No. 5. I remember pressing my face into new wool suits that were too warm for a sunny September New Jersey day. I remember sneaking out of the children’s service downstairs and walking around the temple grounds while the sun shone through the turning leaves, colorful and translucent as stained glass. I remember cut apples dipped in honey, so sweet they hurt your teeth.
Johnny, who ten years later would be so religious he would have all these things and more, was at the time a rather gifted criminal. Our parents had always told us that they had no information about our biological parents. The only birth certificates we ever saw listed our adoptive parents as our parents. Period. Any previous records had been sealed permanently. The pieces of paper were insistent and so were my parents. Johnny called that day to tell me that he had uncovered evidence discrediting my parents’ story.
My parents did, in fact, have information about our birth parents. Johnny had found it by breaking into a lock box. He uncovered detailed information about himself, as he was younger and benefited from more relaxed adoption laws. But for me, Johnny had found a name—a name and a brief story pieced together from an attorney’s correspondence, and an old address.
Everything I know about what Johnny found I know from my memory of our conversation. I have never seen the papers with my own eyes. I’m sure my parents would show them to me now, but I can’t bring myself to ask. It is
still a sore spot for them and a source of guilt for me. I’m guilty that we snooped, that we cared in the first place. I am ashamed, illogically, to have discovered that they lied to us.
I vaguely remember Johnny telling me that there were some newspaper clippings about a birth father who tried later to regain custody. But maybe this was a conflation of my life with an episode of Law & Order or a CNN sound bite. It was such a strange moment that I can’t remember exactly what he said. But I do remember that there was confirmation of a story my parents had always told me. I expected to discover that this story had been a lie, too, but it wasn’t. My parents had been telling the truth when they told me that my birth mother had been a ballerina. I realized how much I had clung to this one little thing only when its confirmation flooded me with a sense of profound relief.
A young ballet dancer in Chicago is pregnant with a baby she is unable to care for. . . .
I wrote the name and the Highland Park, Illinois, address on a piece of paper and put it in a drawer. Somewhere there was a woman to whom this name belonged, who had once written this address on the official forms she had signed when she gave her baby away. My music-box mother, locked up safely with satin lining and a perpetual soundtrack, a princess transmuted by a spell into the body of a swan. Carrie Gardner. An airline ticket-counter worker, a waitress at Outback Steakhouse, a kindergarten teacher. A name that wasn’t an answer, it was a question, a question to which I decided to seek the answer; I just wasn’t sure how yet.
Some Girls: My Life in a Harem Page 20
