She Effin' Hates Me

by Scarlett Savage

  “Let’s just time these stomach cramps,” she suggested, “and see if there’s a pattern to how far apart they are.”

  Suzanne, suddenly terrified, realized they’d begun around noontime. It was now almost five, almost time to leave for the school. What if she had waited too long? What if she was going to give birth any second now? And worst of all, what if it was too late for the doctor to give her the epidural she’d been promised, and she’d actually have to feel it?

  “Ten minutes apart,” Ava said calmly. “Plenty of time. Do you have your suitcase all packed?”

  Suzanne shook her head miserably. Her due date was two weeks away, and the doctor had told her—had practically promised her, dammit—that first babies were always late.

  “Well, then, let’s get that settled.”

  Ava strode into the bedroom, found the backpack Suzanne used for textbooks, and emptied it. Within minutes, it was filled with Suzanne’s favorite pajamas, her toothbrush, makeup kit, and a loose jogging suit that would be among the few clothes of her own that she’d fit in after the baby came.

  Ava also took it upon herself to throw into the bag a couple of books off the nightstand, plus Suzanne’s Walkman with the three tapes lying next to it: Nirvana’s Nevermind, Hole’s Live through This, and the best of Guns ῾N Roses. A graduate of the nineties, she would always be an nineties girl at heart, in regards to both music and fashion.

  She also remembered to pack the white cotton gown and matching booties one of her AA pals had knitted to bring the baby home in.

  “That’s sorted out.” Ava came out, smiling. “Now, let’s get you off to graduate.”

  “Graduate?” She stared at her mother, in horror. Was she serious? She really is crazy, even stone cold sober. “But Mom, you just said . . .”

  “I said they’re ten minutes apart,” Ava told her, reaching for her hand. “If I took you to the hospital right now, they’d send you right back home ’til they were five minutes apart, and that could be hours from now. Isn’t that what your doctor told you?” She didn’t wait for Suzanne’s answer. “There’s no reason we can’t get you graduated, and then take you.”

  Graduation suddenly didn’t seem so important. “But Mom . . .”

  “But, nothing,” her mother told her. “Maybe you’re not valedictorian, but you’re in the top ten, and that’s something that I wish I could brag about. It’ll only take a couple of hours, and by then, maybe it’ll be time to get you to Portsmouth Regional.”

  Maybe? Suzanne felt like she had little choice as Ava marched her to the car and strapped her in. She even insisted on coming into the back rooms with her at the school to help her with her hair and makeup—and to struggle with the zipper on the gown that would barely close.

  Oddly, Suzanne was grateful for her presence; no one dared snicker or giggle with a mom around.

  “I have to find Steve and tell him,” she said, drinking her third pink lemonade from the newly-installed soda machine in the cafeteria. She seemed terribly thirsty all of a sudden, and no matter how much she drank, she couldn’t quite quench it.

  “I’ll go find him. You just stay here and rest until it’s time to take your place in line.” She kissed Suzanne firmly on the cheek, then wiped off the coral lipstick smudge.

  She strode out before Suzanne could say another word; in a way, Suzanne was glad that Ava would be the one to tell him. Although she was sure (at that time) that Steve was the love of her life, and soon he’d be rolling in record deal offers and money, suddenly she felt, as she breathed carefully through another contraction, slightly angry and very annoyed with him.

  Finally, the band had begun to play the ever-familiar tune of “Pomp and Circumstance,” and Suzanne and her classmates marched slowly down the hallway of the auditorium. The speeches, the songs by the chorus, the scholarship announcements, and finally, the handing out of the diplomas—all of it seemed to take forever.

  She barely heard any of it; she was too busy watching the clock. It seemed to her that the contractions were getting closer together, but it was harder to tell with all this noise, all these people distracting her.

  Finally she heard her name, and when she stood up, something happened. For a horrible moment she thought she’d wet her pants, because her gown was sopping wet from the waist down. She looked up at the principal, who was waiting with her diploma.

  She didn’t know what to do. The girls on either side of her were scooting away from her on the bench, so as not to get any on their gowns, which were still a pristine white.

  Ava was already up and on her feet, striding down the aisle while the crowd began murmuring. She gestured to the principal, who stood at the podium, looking back and forth from Suzanne to her mother, completely perplexed.

  “Give me that, you idiot,” Ava hissed, snatching the diploma from the red-faced principal, and then proceeded to go to her daughter, putting her arm around her as if it were the most normal thing in the world to have your water break at graduation. “Come on, honey, this means it’s time to go the hospital.”

  She marched her daughter down the aisle. Suzanne gasped; the contractions were much more painful now. Ava motioned to Steve, and the three of them made their way to the car.

  At the hospital, Steve insisted that he and Suzanne be alone when the baby was born, and Suzanne felt a pang of regret watching her mother wave to her as she was pushed directly into the delivery room. Looking up at Steve’s handsome, nervous face, suddenly she wanted her mother more than she ever had before.

  Two hours later, Molly was there, with her little toes and little fingers and curly hair. They had told her that her eyes wouldn’t open for several days, but Molly’s eyes were already open, dark blue eyes gazing up at her. As she touched her little face, Molly’s tiny fingers had wrapped around her pinky, and Suzanne was so touched, she almost stopped breathing.

  Is this how my mother felt when she had me? she wondered. Is it?

  With each month that Ava miraculously didn’t fall off the wagon with an audible thud, Suzanne found something returning that she hadn’t ever expected to see again: her trust in her mother. When Molly was one, Suzanne forced herself to test this trust, to ease herself out on the ice, to see if it held strong or if it broke and threw her and Molly into the freezing dark currents.

  She began asking her mother for rides to the dentist when she knew he was going to give her gas, bring over the occasional cup of special coffee just to talk, or help her plan out a dinner menu for her first dinner party.

  Then came the first truly terrifying test. After screwing up her courage by chain-smoking half a pack of cigarettes, she had called her mother, hands trembling.

  “Hey, Mom,” she said, as casually as she could. “There’s an office management class and a computer class over at UNH I’d like to take. It’s three nights a week, for ten weeks. Do you think,” she had to stop and clear her throat, “do you think you could watch Molly for me?”

  There was a long pause, and Suzanne thought that maybe, just maybe, Ava wasn’t prepared to look after an active toddler so often.

  “Of course I’ll watch Molly for you,” Ava replied lightly, sniffling back her tears. Suzanne could practically hear her smile through the phone wires. “You know that I’d just love it.”

  “Great, great,” Suzanne said. Working days at the Pic ’n’ Pay on Islington and three nights a week at the Blue Mermaid left little to put away for Molly’s schooling. Their budget was stretched as thin as a tightrope, and Suzanne was sick to death of struggling so hard to make ends meet.

  Night school seemed like a step in the right direction. More education meant a better job.

  She remembered every detail of that first computer class, every time the professor scratched his head (he had dandruff), and every tick of the second hand on the clock. She tried to take notes, but she couldn’t focus on anything the professor was saying.

  How could she have left that helpless little baby alone with her mother? Ava had only been
sober for three years; anything could set her off, and Molly would be defenseless without a responsible adult there to stop it.

  Suzanne began biting her nails, and during the class break, she resisted the urge to call home just to “check” by sheer willpower alone . . . That and the Rastafarian guy who smelled like patchouli and pot had beat her to the pay phone.

  Fifteen minutes before the class ended, she couldn’t take it anymore.

  She sprinted to her car and proceeded to break every speed limit on the way home. Her heartbeat was deafening as she fumbled for her keys to the front door. She burst in, fearing the worst, that she’d come home to a passed out mother and a dead child.

  “Mom!” she shouted, bursting through the front door. There was no answer. Her heart threatened to pound right out of her chest. “Mom! Where are you?”

  “In here, dear,” Ava had called, and Suzanne followed her voice to the bathroom.

  She opened the door to find Molly playing happily in the bathtub with suds up to her chest and her hair in soapy horns. The front of Ava’s shirt was soaked, Molly had placed a crown of suds on her head, and they were both laughing hysterically as a Barney tape whined cheerily in the background.

  Suzanne stood there in the bathroom door, feeling ashamed, as her heart rate slowly returned to something approaching normal.

  “You’re back early,” Ava observed, but her eyes were soft and kind.

  “Yeah,” Suzanne nodded, trying to breathe evenly. “First class, they let us out early.”

  Ava looked up at her; their eyes met for just a moment. And after a decade of Suzanne taking care of her mother, the mother-daughter relationship finally rearranged itself to the proper order.

  And now that my kid might be following in my steps, I guess might be a good time to finally ask The Question About Which We Do Not Speak, Suzanne realized, taking a sip of her cooling coffee.

  “Well,” Ava began, haltingly, “truth be told, I was a little disappointed. No, no, make that very disappointed. Not in your behavior,” she said hastily, “because teenagers will do what teenagers will do, and Lord knows I’m not one to judge anyone. Your father and I . . .”

  “I can and will vomit in the middle of this open market if you talk about sex and Daddy, Mom. Just you watch me,” Suzanne warned.

  “Oh, all right, fine.” Ava picked up several McIntosh apples, tossing them into her sack; that meant apple pie tonight, Suzanne knew. Yummy. Suzanne wouldn’t think about what it would do to her waistline. Everyone knew that the autumn, which was right before the holidays, was a crappy time to start a diet. Plus, she wouldn't be living with Ava the uber-chef forever.

  “Where was I?” asked Ava.

  “You were disappointed in me,” Suzanne said breezily, trying to keep the tone light. This was, after all, a lifetime ago—Molly’s lifetime ago.

  “Oh, no, sweetie!” Ava poked her finger at her to make the point. “I said I was disappointed, not disappointed in you. You were a kid, and kids make mistakes.”

  She stopped, debating over a plate of homemade peanut butter fudge, wondering if she could safely fall off the diet wagon this week and still fit into her pants the next. Deciding against it, she continued on.

  “But the reason I was disappointed was . . . well, as you found out pretty darn quickly,” she linked her arm through Suzanne’s as they walked, “that once you have a child, you have to stop being a child, and awfully darn fast. And I didn’t want you to have to stop being a child. I wanted you to . . . Oh, I wanted you to go to football games and frat parties. I wanted you to spend your junior year abroad in France and come home a bilingual person. I’ve always wanted to speak two languages myself, you know.”

  It was perhaps the three hundredth time her mother had shared this particular confidence.

  “I know, Mom. It’s still not too late, you realize.”

  “Oh, you.” Ava waved her off, moving on to the stand that sold homemade raspberry jam, Molly’s favorite, as well as her own. For reasons Ava could never understand, Suzanne preferred apple jelly from the store above all else. “You have to learn that stuff when your brain is young and fresh. My brain spent a lifetime getting stuffed with all kinds of data and then about fifteen years being pickled.”

  “Mother!” Suzanne giggled, a little shocked, looking around to see if she’d been overheard. Mom didn’t often joke about her disease, and she certainly did not while in public.

  “Well, it’s true.” She paid for the two Mason jars of jam and stuffed them into Suzanne’s tote.

  “So, was that it, then? Disappointed because I lost out on my childhood?” Suzanne ventured.

  “Well . . .” Ava fingered a homemade friendship bracelet, wondering if it would be too corny to buy matching ones for herself and her two girls. “That was most of it. And Steve wasn’t my idea of the kind of man for you. I knew he’d suck you dry—that refusal to work, or contribute, that sense of entitlement he always had. So sure that the world was going to just walk in and hand him what he wanted.”

  “I think—I’m not sure,” Suzanne said slowly, “but I think Daddy wanted me to get an abortion.” It was another question she’d never dared to ask, certainly not while Jimmy was alive.

  “Oh, yes, he certainly did.” Ava nodded rapidly. “He didn’t want to pressure you about it, because, well, he was brought up in a strict Catholic household and he didn’t want your soul to be damned for all of eternity.” Ava rolled her eyes all the way back in her head and snorted. Many an argument they’d had was about how Ava’s nondenominational God was a lot nicer than Jimmy’s Baptist one. “So, on the one hand, he was hoping that you’d have one, and on the other, he didn’t want you to burn for it.”

  “We almost did, you know,” Suzanne admitted, then drew a deep breath of salt air, throwing her hair back to let her face be cleansed in the breeze. To this day, it was hard to talk about. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m still pro-choice and all that, and I don’t think anyone who doesn’t truly want a baby should be forced to have one, but . . .”

  “But, what happened?” Ava prodded gently.

  “Well . . .” Her breath caught again, just a tug this time. “We had the appointment. Steve drove me there, and he was going to pay for half of it . . .”

  “What a gentleman,” Ava remarked sarcastically. “A true prince among men. Tell me, is that what passes for manners in the new millennium?”

  “Yeah, well, I thought I was in love, you know? And for a while, I guess I was.” Those times had gotten harder and harder to remember in the past ten or so years. In fact, she had trouble remembering what even liking Steve had felt like at all.

  “So.” Ava moved swiftly past the dandelion wine stand. Suzanne shuddered to think that even such a disgusting concoction could tempt her mother. “So, what happened?”

  “Well, we were there, we were actually at the clinic, and I was in one of those Johnny gowns, you know, where the back swings open for all the world to see your butt. They showed us this cheesy little film on abortion, how it’s difficult but it’s a necessary evil in this world . . .”

  Ava frowned, fingering a green sea-glass necklace. It would look so pretty with Molly’s hazel eyes, but she wasn’t sure if it was appropriate for a former drunk to give her granddaughter jewelry that had once been a beer bottle. “They actually used the term necessary evil?”

  “No, no.” Suzanne bought a homemade cookie from a sprightly elderly woman, split it in half, and handed the bigger half to her mother. Ava pretended not to want it, but in the end, she gave in. “So, after the little film festival, they tell Steve to wait in the waiting room . . .”

  “They don’t let them stay in there with you?” Ava asked in dismay. “That seems awfully cruel.”

  “I asked about that,” Suzanne agreed. “Apparently, if someone’s holding your hand or something, and you’re tensing in any way, it can completely screw the procedure up. Don’t ask me how. They’re probably more afraid of the emotional scenes causing problems
than anything else.”

  “You’re very likely right.”

  “Anyway,” Suzanne plowed on, knowing that if she ever stopped, she’d never start again, “they told me to lie down and put my feet up in the stirrups, and . . .”

  “And?” Ava asked softly.

  “Well,” Suzanne began, “and here’s the big part, the part that might very well convince you once and for all that your daughter was certifiably insane.” Suzanne swallowed, hardly believing she was about to reveal her deep dark secret. I must be more vulnerable than I thought. “As soon as I lay back, and my feet were in those ice-cold stirrups, I heard, literally heard a voice in my head that seemed to come from every part of my body say, ‘Don’t! ’”

  Her stomach still fluttered thinking about it, and she knew she wasn’t going to be able to finish the cookie. She handed the rest of it to her mother, who wrapped it in a napkin and put it in her purse.

  “Really?” Ava turned to her in astonishment. A man in a Boston Red Sox shirt bumped into her, but she waved away his apology, completely fixated on Suzanne. “A voice said that to you? You actually heard a voice?”

  Suzanne nodded. She’d always been nervous about telling anyone this, but she found herself tingling with relief more than burning with embarrassment.

  “That was it. That was the reason I decided I had to have Steve’s baby. And then everyone was talking to me about my options and how I was throwing away my precious last days of childhood . . . But from that single word, I understood that I was supposed to keep her and raise her. It seemed to come from inside of me.”

  She had never told anyone this story before, because once you tell people you’ve heard voices, she knew, people started prescribing drugs like Haldol and telling you that you couldn’t go outside without an attendant. But finally speaking the words after all these years was such a relief that it spread from her toes to her head, making her almost giddy.

  “The voice,” she went on, “was so . . . comforting, so loving, so strong, and completely firm. It was like, I didn’t even think to question it.”

  “Was the voice male or female?”