The ride home took her breath away. The wind whipped against her face, scouring her skin; she forgot about how dirty she was. She felt wild and adventurous, even sheepishly cool inside the borrowed badassed-ness of the leather jacket.
When Mike pulled up in front of her little house and she awkwardly climbed down off the motorcycle and handed the helmet back to him, she was beaming.
He grinned at her. “Makes you feel like a different person, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
He seemed to hesitate so she just stood there, grinning back at him, until she realized she was still wearing the jacket. She didn’t want to take it off. An hour ago, she had wanted nothing more than to be home, alone with a cup of tea and a novel. Now, she didn’t want her adventure to be over.
“Are you in a hurry?” she asked suddenly. “I could shower . . . I’ll buy you dinner if you want. As a thank you, I mean. There’s a great taco truck near here.”
“Sounds great,” he said, his eyes sweeping over her. “I love tacos.”
CHAPTER 36
Jessie
Mike the Motorcycle Man, as Jessie had first called him to herself, was not her type. But neither, it turned out, was he the type she would have expected from his motorcycle and black leather. His hands, when he took off his gloves, were soft, almost pudgy. He was not the rugged, back-to-the-earth type she usually fell for, but neither was he the badass motorcycle man she had first taken him for. It seemed, in fact, that he wore his bike gear as little more than a costume, a convincing enough disguise for a twenty-something-year-old man who still lived in his parents’ suburban basement, had a meaningless job in a warehouse, and spent most of his free time playing what, as far as she could tell, was basically the computerized equivalent of Dungeons and Dragons. Although it would be months before she would admit it to herself, the more she learned about Mike, the less appealing he became.
Nevertheless, for a few months she relished in the thrill of leaning into curves taken at breath-catching speeds, the delicious moment when she pulled off the borrowed helmet and shook out her hair. When she was with Mike, she referred to herself, half-mockingly, as his motorcycle bitch, and oddly, when she zipped up the black leather jacket he soon let her borrow full-time, she felt more feminine than she had in her life.
Jessie knew enough about herself to recognize all of this for the performance it was. The jacket and helmet were little more than a costume she enjoyed losing herself in on a Friday night. But just as with all costumes, there was also the lightness she felt when she took it off and donned again the Goodwill jeans and old road race T-shirts that were her usual attire.
Still, the thrill she felt in those first months had easily encompassed Mike, and she had looked forward to their time together. She recognized in him the awkward, nerdy boys whose friendship was the only thing that had made high school tolerable for her, and even once his allure had begun to fade, she felt for him a sympathetic affection that fueled them through another few months together. And although Mike had almost zero interest in the things that inspired her—mountains, gardening, science—he was, like her, a voracious reader, so they never lacked for things to talk about.
Jessie was not, in general, judgmental about the bodies of others, sensitive as she was to the ways her own body might be judged. She looked away from the hairy, white-pink belly that pushed out from beneath Mike’s T-shirt, the squishy feel of his upper arms. For a while, she relished in the unexpected pleasure of being in bed with a man on his way toward fat: the way, in bed with him, her own body seemed especially lithe and firm, the gasping thrill of his weight on her. And Mike was good in bed in the way she had found most nerdish men to be: attentive, eager to please, almost grateful in his pleasure.
Still, after five months together, it was all wearing thin. She still enjoyed riding through the desert hills on the back of his bike, and their sex made up for in reliability what it lacked in passion. But Jessie had begun to feel a stab of annoyance when she heard his voice on her answering machine. She was ready to move on, she knew, but, disinclined to confrontation, she bided her time. The spring semester was winding down, and come June she would be moving to Missoula for the summer for an internship at the University of Montana. It would be a natural break.
And then one day, she found she couldn’t stand the smell of him. There was a sickly odor emanating from his left ear; she gasped in disgust when he hugged her. At the end of their evening, she did not invite him in, exaggerating how early she had to be up the next morning, how tired she was. She watched him peel away down her street with an overwhelming sense of relief. But a few minutes later, when she opened the compost container to take it outside, she gagged at the smell. Her heart raced as an unwelcome thought immediately took shape in her mind.
She took the calendar down off the kitchen wall. When had she last had a period? As she counted the squares, she felt somewhat reassured; she was not due for another few days. Still, she tossed and turned as she lay in bed that night. Maybe Mike’s ear did smell bad—hadn’t he complained of an earache only a few days before? But Jessie was not squeamish; compost had never made her gag before. Finally, she pulled on some sweatpants and rode her bicycle to the 24-hour Walgreens a mile from her house.
She almost reconsidered when she saw the cost. Almost twenty dollars for the early-detection pregnancy tests, and on the twenty-fourth day of her cycle, they promised only sixty percent accuracy. She and Mike hadn’t been that sloppy with birth control, she thought. Surely her period would come. Still, there was no point ruining her weekend with needless worry. She paid cash for the test, not meeting the cashier’s eye.
She read the entire instruction booklet when she got home, and even though it recommended testing with the first urine of the morning, she decided to use one of the two enclosed sticks that night. She followed the directions exactly, catching her pee in a plastic cup, then submerging the stick in her urine. She perched on the edge of the tub, watching the seconds pass on her digital watch. She did not look at the test until the requisite two minutes had passed, but when she did, her heart sank. The pale blue cross was unmistakable. She was pregnant.
She barely slept that night. The kitchen wall calendar was on the floor by her bed. She’d marked the date when she’d gotten her last period, then counted forward. She stopped when she reached thirteen, and her stomach lurched. The thirteenth day of her cycle had been last Wednesday; the timing couldn’t have been worse. That afternoon Mike had been waiting for her outside the biology building when her class let out. She had been looking forward to the walk home, alone in the cool of the evening, but had done her best to hide her disappointment at the sight of him.
“It’s such a nice night. I thought you might like a ride.”
It had been exhilarating to race down the empty road, the pavement glowing almost silver in the moonlight. When they reached the BLM land north of town, he had slowed the bike and turned, without speaking, down an unlit gravel road. Jessie had said nothing, nor did she protest when a few minutes later, he stopped the bike and spread out a fleece blanket between the sage bushes. She recognized the blanket from his parents’ house, which annoyed her; beneath it, the ground was lumpy and hard. But the moon hung in the sky like a polished silver dollar, and the cool desert air was scented with sage. She tried to put out of her mind all the reasons that she should be home by now, and to squelch the persistent irritation she felt with Mike. She recognized this drive, with the blanket under the full moon, as his best attempt at romance. She could sense him watching her for her reaction, and it had seemed cruel to ruin it for him. Soon enough it would all be over; why not try to enjoy the night?
And she had enjoyed it. She couldn’t deny that, even now. But during the sleepless night after the pregnancy test, she groaned aloud in frustration—at herself, for putting off the breakup she knew was coming, and for foolishly acquiescing to Mike’s desire, even when he had whispered apologetically that he’d forgotten the condoms. The condoms,
she thought now with disgust, but not the blanket.
It was only nine days since that night, but, incredibly, she knew she would be counted as three and a half weeks pregnant. The zygote inside her was a microscopic raspberry, burrowing into the lining of her uterus, its cells relentlessly dividing. By nine o’clock tomorrow morning, when she told herself she could realistically expect the Planned Parenthood clinic to open on a Saturday, it would have almost twice as many cells as it did now.
She cried when, the next morning, her anxious call was picked up immediately by a recording. The clinic was open one Saturday morning a month, but today was not that Saturday.
The weekend felt endless. Jessie buried herself in her work. She turned off the ringer on her cordless phone and worked her way through the stack of grading for the Intro to Biology class that she was TAing that semester. When that was done, she forced herself to meticulously outline the journal articles her dissertation advisor had recommended. When she couldn’t focus on the work, she cleaned her house or went for long runs, pushing herself harder than she ordinarily would, so that all her attention was required merely to make her legs keep up the pace. On Sunday evening, she tried to read but couldn’t concentrate, so she biked the three miles to the video rental store and rented a documentary about the making of the Panama Canal. Forty minutes in, she fell into a dreamless, exhausted sleep.
She woke at seven and was immediately suffused with gratitude that the waiting was almost over. She called the clinic at ten until nine, thinking maybe someone would be in early and answer the phone, and, when they weren’t, she called again at nine. At three minutes past nine, she finally reached a human being.
“We can get you in on Thursday at nine-thirty,” the receptionist told her.
“Thursday! You don’t understand. I’ve already waited . . .” She found she could not put into words the agony of the weekend.
“But isn’t it best to take care of this as soon as possible?” she said instead.
“When was the date of your last period?” the woman asked.
“April nineteenth,” she said, then waited impatiently through the silence.
“Ma’am? Even if you are pregnant, you’re not even at four weeks. A few days won’t make a difference.”
“The zygote is doubling cells every twelve hours.”
“Excuse me?”
“The cells in the zygote are constantly multiplying. After twenty-four hours, it will have four times the number of cells it does now. That means that by Thursday, it will—”
“Well, that may be,” the receptionist interrupted her, “but you do realize that we’re talking about something the size of a poppy seed? If that.”
Jessie groaned. “Of course I realize. That’s why I want to do it now.”
“Well, I can put you on our cancellation list, if you’d like.”
“Please. And, um, you’ll . . . I mean, the doctor will do the procedure on Thursday, right? I just want to make sure—”
“Actually, Thursday is just for the consultation. They’ll do an exam and a pregnancy test, but you’ll have to come back for the—”
“Jesus. I thought you guys supported early—”
“Ma’am, I understand your sense of urgency. But no doctor would perform the procedure without doing an exam first. Plus, you have to be offered counseling, and there is a twenty-four hour waiting period.”
Jessie sighed. She felt suddenly exhausted. “Fine. But can I go ahead and make the other appointment for Friday?” She could not stand the thought of enduring another weekend like this one.
After she hung up, she went to retrieve the wall calendar from the floor by her bed. She printed the times of her appointments on their respective squares. She had a meeting with her thesis advisor on Friday afternoon; she wondered if she should call and reschedule. But her advisor was a meticulous and impatient woman who always sounded vaguely irritated. She intimidated Jessie, who was not easily intimidated. No, she would keep the meeting. Jessie had made the appointment for ten o’clock; surely she would be fine by that afternoon.
Jessie had been fine, she remembered now, although the meeting with her advisor had not gone as she’d expected. It was that Friday afternoon that Dr. Hartley, leaning back in her rolling chair and bringing her fingertips together, had said that she was disappointed with her. Jessie sat uncomfortably in front of her desk while her advisor flipped through the laboratory log.
“I was surprised, Jessie, by how seldom your name appears. My other doctoral students spend, on average, thirty percent more time in the lab than you. I have wondered about the discrepancy before, but I waited to speak up. You were such a promising candidate, Jessie. But I cannot dissemble. You are not, I am afraid, living up to your promise. You seem to . . . how should I put it? You seem to lack a passion for science.”
Jessie had bristled at the insult. Of course she was passionate about science! But poring over the minute details of her research did not inspire her. She’d rather spend her Saturday in the woods of the high-country, appreciating science, than freezing in the over-air-conditioned lab, giving herself a headache with the minutiae and the measurements. She would rather be teaching cellular structure, Punnett squares, photosynthesis—anything at all, really—to confused and eager undergraduates than doing research. It wasn’t just that she disliked the research, although that was certainly a part of it. It was that she had begun to suspect recently that she wasn’t actually very good at it, and to wonder if her gift lay elsewhere.
Jessie didn’t want to drown in the details of some narrowly focused research project. She wanted to paint the big picture of biology so that it came alive. She wanted to break it down and build it up again, so that her students saw, not the tedium of science, but the precision, the wonder, the beauty of it. Not passionate about science? Oh, Dr. Hartley had no idea.
Suddenly, sitting there in her advisor’s office, burning with shame and indignation, a low ache deep in her gut, she understood. This wasn’t what she wanted. It wasn’t the science she wanted to give up; Jessie would never forsake the science. But what was the point of going on like this, of struggling for years in a lab to complete a dissertation, only so that she would be qualified to do more research? No. What she wanted was to teach; she was already more than qualified for that. And she was good at it. Her students had told her again and again: This is the first time I’ve really understood . . . You make it all so clear . . . Will you be TAing anatomy, too?
Walking home that afternoon, her mind had raced. She had made some excuse, some apology, to Dr. Hartley, but all the time she had been thinking that sooner or later she would have to tell her: this was over. For Jessie knew immediately, with a sweet certainty that cleared her mind, what she had to do. She would cancel the internship in Missoula. The prospect of two and a half more months in a lab now seemed intolerable. She would turn her unfinished doctorate into a master’s and look for a teaching job at a community college. She was willing to go anywhere if it meant that she could make a career of teaching.
As she walked she put her hand to her belly, remembering her appointment at Planned Parenthood that morning. She felt a prick of guilt that it was today, of all days, that she should have the epiphany that would change the course of her career. But maybe it wasn’t so coincidental after all, she thought. This morning she had chosen to keep her life her own; this afternoon she had decided to make that life match her truest self. It was both the least and the most that she could do. And it was, she realized with another ripple of guilt, a welcome relief to have something else to turn her mind to.
The abortion itself had quickly faded from her mind. Her biggest regret from that time was making such a hash of her relationship with Mike. She hadn’t told him about the pregnancy; doing so would have required an intimacy that no longer felt tolerable to her. He had been baffled by her sudden change of heart, and had left weepy, desperate messages on her answering machine for weeks, which did not endear him to her.
“Oh
, be a man,” she had muttered once as his voice droned on, surprising herself with the sentiment, since she generally did not hold men to manliness any more than she herself aspired to femininity.
She had thrown away the “what to expect” literature the clinic had thrust on her as she’d left. Now that it was behind her, she felt no reason to be mournful. The tiny ball of cells aspirated from her uterus that Friday morning was not even an embryo yet. Every day fertility clinics across the country disposed of hundreds of similar blastocysts, treating them as they would any other clump of cells. Oh, there were a zillion things that happened every day in the name of science that could give you pause. Jessie would not allow herself to lose sleep over this.
But as the years had passed, she had sometimes found herself calculating. “How old would the child have been?” They were idle thoughts, mostly, that had only served to reassure her of her choice. She had been too young, and too selfish: she was just setting out on her own true path. And then there was the undeniable fact that she and Mike together would have been a disaster. If anything, she felt relieved at the collective misery that had been averted.
Mike, she knew, was married now. They were not in touch, but he included her on the electronic Christmas letter he e-mailed each December, which was always accompanied by a digital picture of him and his wife on a motorcycle. The first year he sent it, Jessie was sure she recognized the leather jacket his wife wore, and she felt a momentary pang of loss, not for Mike himself, but because it felt startlingly clear to her that she would never again be that girl.
Once, a few months before she left New Mexico, she had found a motorcycle jacket at her favorite thrift store. Its price tag, even secondhand, had surprised her, but she had fished a twenty-dollar bill out of her wallet and taken it to the register, suddenly eager to feel again that thrill of impersonation she had felt the first time she had put one on. But standing on the sidewalk outside the store in her hiking boots and black leather, she had felt conspicuous, foolish, and much too warm. The jacket had stayed on its hanger in the back of her closet. When, several months later, she had packed to move to Oregon, where she had been offered an adjunct teaching position at a community college in Pendleton, she had thrown it into the pile of clothes to take to the same thrift store where she had bought it.
Give, a novel Page 30
