“Jack’s a feminist, too, I might add,” Bernie said. “Read all of Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir. He understands women better than most women do. We’re both tuned into the battle for equal rights.”
“I’d beat the faces off the sons of bitches who try to dispossess women of their fair share,” Jack said, sitting back down now, a male radical feminist streetbrawler.
Bernie shushed him, apologizing, “We’re still trying to work out a few bugs in the male evolutionary system — aggression, tendency towards violence, defence of the indefenceless by punching their lights out, that sort of thing.” She sounded very professorial just then. Clearly, we weren’t going to shake Jack from the room. No book of nineteenth-century piracy or even twentieth-century feminist rhetoric would lure him away from our nearly public real-world crisis.
“It’s nice to see you both again,” Gwen said.
Bernie looked her in the eye. “Haven’t talked to you for a while, Gwendolyn. You look all grown up. I remember the day you arrived. Another family of Yanks. So how do you like it here on the island, compared to The United States of America, I mean?” She asked the question like Gwen had only been around for maybe a week. Old people had this funny thing about time.
“It’s not so bad, really, I guess,” Gwen answered, “except for the fact that I’m pregnant and I don’t want to be.”
There. It was out. Didn’t surprise me any. Jack lifted his eyebrows a couple of centimetres above their normal at-ease status. Bernie was taken back for only a second. It would have been a sign of defeat for her to show any real shock or surprise. “I like that,” she said to old Jack. “The girl has balls. She comes here with a problem looking for advice. Cuts through all the small talk and gets right to the point. That’s something.”
Jack nodded.
Bernie reached her hand out to Gwen. “Give me your wrist, honey. Jack, could I have your watch.” Gwen held out her hand. Jack set his watch down on the table beside his wife. Bernie grabbed Gwen’s wrist, pressed her index finger down on the vein and watched the seconds tick by. After a full minute of silence, she said, “If I had the proper instrument, I’d really like to check the blood pressure, but you have a good count and the pulse is strong. You’re in good shape. Probably no reason why you shouldn’t have the baby if you wanted it.”
“It’s all wrong. I just don’t think it’s the right time,” Gwen said defiantly. “After all, it should be my decision, not anybody else’s.”
Bernie was scratching at a longish hair that was growing out of her neck. Jack was the one to answer. “Damn straight. About time women had the right to control their own procreative processes.” You could really tell he’d been reading the female liberationists.
Bernie went over to a bookshelf in the kitchen that held maybe two hundred cookbooks and one other volume not usually kept near the wood stove in the kitchen. “There,” she said, handing it to Gwen. It was an oversize volume of something with a slapdash cover that looked more like a catalogue than a book. The title shouted out in big bold letters, OUR BODIES, OURSELVES by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Bernie leafed through until she found what she was looking for. “Read this chapter. Then, if you’re still sure it’s what you want, come back. We’ll talk. How far pregnant are you?”
“Not quite eight weeks.”
“Then we better talk soon. Read it tonight, honey. Consider all the moral implications. Consider the future. You’re gonna have to do what you believe is right and you’re gonna have to trust yourself. Come back tomorrow. If you are sure you want it terminated, you can fly to Boston. I’ll phone and make the arrangements. I’ll pay for the tickets. Ian will take you down and stay with you. I’ll come if you want me to.”
Gwen seemed now reassured and relaxed for the first time in days. She took the book, promised to read it carefully. “You won’t need to come. Ian will be enough. He’s the best friend in the world.” Gwen took my hand and squeezed tight.
I bet that Bernie and Jack believed her one hundred percent, and I bet they knew immediately that I wasn’t the father. They would never hint at it. I think my grandmother was thinking just then about the night Casey was born and how I’d braved the hurricane to come find her. This was a curious reversal. I was older now, and I was helping someone I loved avoid childbirth. For me, it most certainly did not seem right. But Jack had said it. It was her body, her decision. Someday, perhaps, we would all be liberators of women, we would all be willing to let people decide for themselves what was right.
I had a harder time seeing things the way Gwen did. If it was up to me, would I not have a child because I thought I was bringing him into an evil, incorrigibly violent world? That assumed a belief that some day the world would be better — fixed, as Gwen had called it. I didn’t share the vision. The world would get better; the world would get worse. I didn’t think it would ever be fixed.
“Ian’s a good boy,” Bernie said.
“The best,” Jack added.
30
It was a bright, clear morning as we sat in the Air Canada plane on the runway. Gwendolyn pressed her-self tight up against me and held my hand as we watched the stewardess show us how to adjust our seatbelts and what to do if the plane were to ditch in the open water. “The cushion of your seat will act as a floatation device should the plane have to land in the water,” the woman said matter-of-factly.
I looked down at the seat cushion I was sitting on and I thought of the open Atlantic Ocean — frigid, uncaring, always willing to absorb the death of one or hundreds. No, I didn’t think the piece of foam rubber I was sitting on would do much good out there. It was my first plane ride and the first for Gwen as well. Maybe everyone on their first plane ride has this sensation, but it seemed frightening and unique to me; I felt like I was leaving Nova Scotia forever. We would crash, we would burn or we all would drown; the plane would be hijacked to Cuba and we’d never be allowed to leave. Or when the doors opened at what was supposed to be Boston, we would have arrived in some twilight zone alternate universe and there would be no point in trying to use our return ticket.
Gwen closed her eyes and leaned against me. She was more nervous and worried about this decision than she had let on. But we both knew it was the right thing for us to do. We’d read OUR BODIES, OURSELVES and I had been suddenly thrown into the world of women’s concerns — anatomy, gynaecology, politics and liberation. Like Jack, reading the book had turned me into a feminist, a liberator of women. First stop on the road to liberation: Boston, for a legal abortion as Gwen asserted her right to have control over the biological processes of her body.
Miraculously, her parents didn’t know. They knew we were both flying to Boston alone for a weekend. They knew the trip was being paid for by Bernie. We were to visit museums, universities, take in a Boston Red Sox game and stay, in separate sleeping quarters, at the youth hostel just off Harvard campus. Her mother approved. She trusted me immensely. Her father was a little leery of the trip, paranoid that the CIA or FBI would try to kidnap his daughter in order to bring him and his military secrets back into the country. In the end, it was Duke who persuaded him it was okay, that we were old enough and dependable.
I told my mother the same lies as to why we were going, but I think she saw through the story instantly. Nonetheless, she didn’t say a word. Once more, I knew that she was not only seeing past the lie and into the truth but even deeper than the surface facts, into what my motives were. She regretted that I lied to her and so did I, but I could not bring myself to tell her part of the truth without telling all of the truth and what I did not want her to know, if such a thing was possible, that it was Burnet, not me, who had made Gwen pregnant.
My sense of foreboding began to dissipate as the plane took off. I felt a rush of adrenalin as we left the ground, and as Gwen leaned across me to look out the window, we both stared in wonder at the spruce trees that turned to green matchsticks beneath us, at the cars on the highway to Truro that suddenly became toys and
the houses so miniature, so perfect, so orderly. To a veteran flyer, these sights would not mean much, but to us it was a thing of much magnificence.
My arm had found its way around Gwen as she leaned across me and it was all very dreamlike — her warmth, her body pressed into me and the vision of Nova Scotia transforming beneath us into a three-dimensional, almost cartoon-like map of forest and rivers. As the plane arced out towards the sea, I saw the ragged caricature of a coastline and the brilliant, flashing blue and silver of the sea. Beneath us, all those lakes, each stretched like a snaking finger north to south, all left there by the scratching retreat of glaciers a million years ago, the same glaciers that had scraped off the topsoil and left protruding bedrock. Then the pilot banked the plane and we were back over the centre of the province, so high up in the sky now that we could see water on both sides: the Atlantic to the south and the Bay of Fundy to the north.
“We’re doing the right thing,” Gwen said, sitting up now and kissing me lightly on the cheek.
“I know we are,” I said.
“Ian, do you know what a quasar is?” Gwen asked, a typical shift for our conversation, away from the immediate and into some abstract realm.
“Is it a kind of television?” I asked. I knew it was; I had seen it advertised on my own TV. But I also knew it wasn’t what she was asking.
She sat up and punched me playfully on the shoulder. “No, silly. My father says they are some kind of star or something way out in space that gives off funny electromagnetic signals because they are moving away from us at such high speed.”
I wasn’t sure what to do with the information. “Why are they moving away from us?”
“I don’t know. They just are.”
“Maybe we frightened them.”
She knew I was teasing. “I think it has more to do with the universe expanding. Everything is moving away from the centre of the universe where it started. The quasars seem to be moving away faster.”
“Do you think they know where they are going?”
“Do we know where we are going?” she countered.
“Yes,” I said. “We’re going to Boston and I love you. I’d love you and stay with you even if you were a quasar and racing away from me. I’m that kind of guy.”
“I know you are,” she said. She held tightly onto my arm again. “And I think I’m falling in love with you. I think I had forgotten how much I needed you just because you were always around. I guess I thought you were still a little kid and that I was a little kid, too. I think I expected that I would wake up one morning and you’d be outside in the sunshine waiting to take me for a walk around the island — to put the jelly fish and the starfish back in the water.”
“Yeah, I keep thinking the same thing. How did we grow up so quick?”
“Like quasars, something was driving us, racing us away from where we started. I want to go back.”
For a split second the crazy euphoria was broken; I thought she meant that she wanted to go home, that she had changed her mind about the abortion. “You do?”
“I want to go back to being a little girl. I want to go back to a time when I didn’t have to think about war and about stupid mistakes. I don’t like feeling so responsible for everything.”
I was a little surprised by what she just said because that was how I felt so often. I felt like I had too much responsibility; I was never free to be myself or to just goof off. But right now, I wanted to be the martyr. I wanted to take on all of Gwerr’s worries. “I want you to stop thinking about anything at all. I’ll take care of everything and I’ll be with you the whole way.”
The immigration agent in Boston airport was a tough young man with a black mustache who leered at Gwen and asked us insulting, stupid questions. I guess we were both a bit sensitive about the abortion. We didn’t mention it was why we were there. I told him we were there for the museums and the ball game. “Good. We like tourists here,” he said. “We just don’t like radicals who come in to stir up trouble. Remember that.”
“Right,” I said. I had no idea what he was talking about. As we walked through the terminal, I saw quite a few other kids our age, maybe a few years older. They all had long, long hair, both the guys and the girls, and they wore bright flowered shirts and torn blue jeans. One tall character with a knapsack and major beard looked at Gwen, at her peace earrings, and flashed us both a two-fingered V. At the far end of the terminal I could see a group of maybe fifty long-hairs had gathered and were chanting something, holding up signs as a small knot of American soldiers were lined up at the ticket counter to Delta Airlines.
Gwen’s interest was aroused and we walked through the crowd of business people and tourists to where the contingent of hippies were now shouting, “No more War. Stay home and fight the system!” Just as we got there, one of the soldiers broke out of line and smacked into us on his way toward the beard who had flashed us the V. In a second he was on top of the beard, smashing him with his fists until two other soldiers came to pull him off. I led Gwen quickly away from the demonstrators and outside to the bus that would take us downtown.
I guess we didn’t look too far off the mark of the local hip community because it seemed everywhere we walked on the city streets, other long-hairs would flash us the peace sign or say, “How’s it going, man?” or just smile and nod. Heck, my hair had always been longish and uncontrolled. I had on country clothes — slightly beat-up dungarees and an old flannel shirt. We both had knapsacks.
At the clinic, we were greeted warmly and asked to sit in a waiting room with one very young looking teenybopper and her overwrought mother who chain-smoked as she kept telling her daughter to stop fidgeting. After about twenty minutes we were led into a smaller office where a woman doctor gave a somewhat bland lecture on birth control and asked us how much we could afford for the procedure. Bernie had already given us the full amount, one hundred and twenty dollars, which I tried to give to the woman immediately.
“Just pay at the front desk please,” she said, refusing to actually take the money. I don’t think she wanted to touch it and, for a minute, the whole affair seemed odd as she suddenly slackened her professional self and looked at us closely. “Are you sure you can afford this? We can perform the abortion for free if you are hard pressed for money.”
I guess we looked like a couple of hicks from Nova Scotia. “We can afford it, thanks. What I’d like to know is if I can stay in the room with Gwen for the abortion.”
“No. But it will only take about twenty minutes and then you can be with her in the recovery room. You’ll be able to leave within two hours after that. Do you have some place to go to where she can rest?”
“Yes,” I said. According to my map, we were close to Harvard and the hostel, but I was having second thoughts about going there.
Gwen was led into yet another room and I went back to sit on the vinyl chairs with the mother and her pregnant daughter. I tried reading. It was the longest twenty minutes of my life. Twice, I think, I felt a wave of hot nausea sweep through me and I wanted to jump up and run into the operating room. The mind that leaps to horrible, tragic conclusions is a weapon of great irrational power. But another voice kept reaching up from within me. It was the voice of my mother, an echoing whisper, telling me to be calm, to keep control of myself.
“You can go in now,” a nurse said at last.
I found Gwen lying peacefully asleep in the recovery room, the shades pulled down to keep out the daylight. “Everything went just fine,” the doctor said to me, then checked her watch and left me with Gwen. She was so full of peace at that moment that I knew she was okay. I knelt down on the floor and put my ear close to her mouth and simply listened to her breathe. I tried not to think about the whole business of abortion but couldn’t avoid it. Nothing is lost, came the voice from within. All things are renewed. It’s the way things are. It was my mother again, inside me. And I knew she was right.
31
Gwen woke up a little groggy but feeling cheerful.
We were given some pamphlets concerning potential problems and a phone number to call if we had any worries. They were very nice people at the clinic. I asked them to call me a cab because I had no idea if I’d succeed at simply walking out into traffic like the Americans could and waving one down. I led Gwen out to the noisy city street. When the cab stopped and asked where to, I hesitated. We would not go to the youth hostel after all, I decided. We would not sleep in separate rooms. That was all wrong. We would sleep together in the same bed.
“A hotel nearby,” I said. “Some place nice but not too expensive.”
The guy looked at us in his rear-view mirror. He looked at the name of the clinic on the doorway we had just come out of, smirked and bit down on a toothpick in his mouth. “You got it,” he said. He drove us eight, maybe nine blocks; clearly we had passed a dozen or so other hotels on the way, all of which didn’t look too fancy, but I kept my mouth shut. The streets were full of university students and pretty freaky looking people — seemed like a lot of police too. Some of them were walking the streets, some sitting in patrol cars, others on horse back.
We were dropped off in front of a sooty brown brick hotel with a sign out front that said, “The Waverley.” I paid the driver and said nothing when he shook his head at Gwen and clucked his tongue. The desk clerk inside the dingy lobby was a very unusual looking man of about forty with yellowish, almost translucent skin that seemed like it was pulled too tightly over his skull. You would have thought him sinister if you did not look closely at his eyes. There was something about them — sad and compassionate, friendly even.
“We’d like a room,” I said. “A nice room.” Gwen stood beside me. She looked very tired, very weary, almost as if she were pleasantly drunk. The clerk looked at her briefly and smiled — not the leer of the cab driver but something deferential and fatherly.
The Republic of Nothing Page 20