by Maddy Wells
Forty-five minutes passed. The mercury vapor streetlights snapped on, making us look like ghouls. Alex started to cry. “Maybe they aren’t coming,” she said. A half hour passed.
“Let’s get out of here,” John said, and we all stood up, jumped up in relief really, when a black Buick four-door with tinted windows pulled up to the curb.
The passenger side window opened a crack and an unnaturally high voice asked, “Which one of you is it?” Alex raised her hand like a little girl in kindergarten class. “Did you bring your payment,” and Alex held up her envelope like an admission ticket to an amusement park ride. “Get in!” high voice commanded and when the back door opened I saw another girl in the back seat.
“Hey,” John said, “What do we do?”
“Wait. We’ll drop her off later,” high voice said. The window rolled up and the car pulled away and I had the scary thought that we would never see Alex again.
Later, Alex told us that the procedure itself didn’t take so long, but they had to drive around, picking up four other girls first. They let them out at the service entrance of an apartment building, rode the service elevator to the fifth floor, and went through a kitchen into a large apartment that had been turned into a kind of hospital emergency room: florescent lights, gurneys, heavily curtained windows, two doctors and two nurses. They lined the six of them up in adjoining hospital beds separated by curtains, did the procedure, gave them Tylenol and a sanitary napkin, then loaded them back in the car dropping them off in the reverse order they picked them up. It was way past midnight when the Buick pulled up and Alex got out, looking wiped out.
“We should have never let her go through with it,” John said. “I would have raised it.”
“Leave it alone,” I commanded. We had spent the almost four hours we were waiting drinking beer John had brought in brown paper bags and arguing about what ifs and I was sick of it.
“No one talked to me the whole time,” Alex said, as if the impersonality of the way she’d been treated was what had impressed her the most. John put his arm around her and pulled her down the subway stairs and we went home to a loft where Dr. Lombardi was alone, watching television.
Alex ignored Dr. Lombardi who said, “How ya holding up, sister?” and she immediately conked out on her new mattress in the corner. The contents of her purse had spilled out when she threw it on the kitchen counter and when I gathered up the stuff from the floor to shove back in her bag I picked up a yellow packet that looked like a dial with Ortho Novo embossed on the top. Pills were encased in a plastic ring around the inside of the dials. The Pill. The people at the abortion clinic must have given them to her. I found a bottle of bourbon that Lance had been hoarding. The Guru appeared with a joint and a deck of cards, (“Life,” he said, “must go on!”) and it seemed as if we were going to have a poker game but John wouldn’t play and we all got sad from the dope and the booze and stared glumly at the baby ghost floating around the room.
“At a regular wake, we would have stories to tell about the deceased,” John said. His voice, subdued, belied the turmoil in his face.
“John, there is no wake,” I said, “There is no person.”
He leaned forward and grabbed my hand, holding it hard. “She was your niece.”
I began to panic as I realized I was letting a temporarily deranged person define how to view this thing. This it.
Alex shot up. “For God’s sake, John. She was nothing. A little nothing. And I want us to stop talking about the damned thing right now.” She turned her back to us and the floating baby ghost.
I felt an indefinable ache that I tried to beat out of myself by banging my head against the doorjamb but it did nothing to relieve the feeling of helplessness. Hopelessness. I have felt that same thing in later years when people I loved have left me or didn’t want me in the first place. But the first time, as they say, is best and that night the pain in my soul was so excruciating, it almost crossed the line into pleasure. But of course, I had a history of turning pain into pleasure.
Dr. Lombardi, the only one of us who was vaguely knowledgeable about death had ingested one of his pocket comestibles and was lying on my futon, staring up at the ceiling. The Guru was shuffling and re-shuffling his deck of cards. John and I held hands, and when Lance came in, noisy and wondering that our little wake was still in session, for the first time I felt real joy on seeing him.
“What do we do?” I was on my feet ready to follow instructions from anybody who would tell me that if I did or thought one particular thing, everything would be all right.
“You girls certainly botched this thing, didn’t you?” he said. He saw his bottle of bourbon on the floor and confiscated it. “Two idiots pretending to be grown-ups.”
“Just one thing I ask,” he said, pointing an index finger at my brother then a thumb at the door. “Got it? It’s not a hotel.”
John, by this time, had started sobbing. I put a hand on his shoulder then pulled him to the door. He and the Guru followed me down the stairwell and, reluctant to be alone, we sat on the steps and smoked cigarettes and talked about our families until the sun finally came up. And that, as they say, was that.
I tried to pretend that everything was normal after that, but everything seemed to have shifted two steps back. I couldn’t find the nerve to go back to the button store. I didn’t even call Shel to tell him what had happened to me and he probably thought I had died. After his kindness, I owed him more than that, but it wasn’t until much later that I realized how thoughtless I had been to leave him wondering and worrying. He probably took on another project. There are people who seem helplessly attracted to projects, and, this is not a value judgment on Shel or his kind, it is just recognition that I am not one of them. That’s what I learned that summer: what I am capable and incapable of, how much I am different from my fellow humans, but mostly how much I am like everyone else. We aren’t unique like snowflakes, as they tell you when you are a child. Yeah, everyone is slightly different, though the variations aren’t enough to find solace in. But neither are they enough to make you despair.
Anyway, I never again allowed myself to pass Shel’s Button Emporium because what would I say to Shel? Better that he think the worst of me and know that nothing he had to give would have freed me from my own rotten self. And there have been others in my life, other places where the parting was so unsatisfying that I never again allowed myself to walk down that street, and soon I found myself, like everyone else, living in a narrowing section of the world. The only difference between me and others is the names of the streets.
Alex recovered after a brief convalescence, in which Lance and I, despite our swearing that we loved her no longer, competed for her favor. She did go back to work, but the jobs were fewer and paid less well than before. She had dried up a little, which seems like a funny thing to say of an eighteen year old girl, but it’s true. Her little baby took a little of Alex with her into the Jersey City sewer system. Mother Nature has seen many great beauties of all species bloom, and an equal number of great beauties fade in a ruthless inevitable procession.
I did try out for a play. I danced nude in front of a handful of people, all wearing business suits and peering out at me from the dark audience and I felt….nothing. I wasn’t exhilarated; I wasn’t anything, really. My nudity had lost its power to shame or excite me. I put on the mask I had learned to create as a little girl, recreating the scenes of my own life that I saw in my father’s film, and I knew I was doing a credible job. But the thrill was gone.
“I see the fire in your heart,” the casting director told me as he wrestled me out of my clothes in his office after the audition. He was a blubbery man who smelled of liquor and what I later found out was Fixodent. I had never kissed a set of dentures before and I couldn’t stop thinking of George Washington. I told him it wasn’t him, that I was very confused sexually, that sex had never been as much fun in reality as it was in my fantasies, which I then found out was the most provocative thing a
woman could tell a man and I barely escaped with my bottom still attached.
He was, however, willing to forgive my frigidity. He thought I could act. He thought I could dance and he wanted me in his play.
“This is going to rock Broadway. Then London. This is your way into the world. Believe me, Nadia, once the world sees you naked, they won’t stop thinking about you.”
There it was. The thing I had been waiting to hear all summer. But it was too late to cheer me, and when he suggested we try a position from the Kamasutra to get at that damned frigidity, I told him I had changed my mind. I didn’t want to act anymore. I was going back to school.
Chapter Twelve
Most everyone recovers from youth, and I suppose I did too. My overwhelming concern of “who am I?” and “how am I special” metamorphosed into the duller, but more compelling issue of, what am I going to now? I applied for admission to Columbia and, perhaps because the nobler minds of my generation were concerned with issues much larger than themselves and were pursuing goals outside of the ivory tower, there was a space for me and I had only to await the spring term to be admitted and some semblance of real life to begin.
Instead of hanging around the loft with an indifferent Lance and a cold Alex, I spent most of my days in the public library reading room, where I was surprised to see the Guru, hunched in a corner, a stack of books in front of him, coolly completing New York Times Sunday crossword puzzles. He looked up once to wet the tip of his pencil with his tongue and nodded at me politely as he would at any stranger, and continued to fill in the answers to the puzzles as fast as he could read the clues. I took the seat next to him and we enjoyed a comfortable sort of chumminess, he solving puzzles and me trying to absorb as much information about anything as I could to make up for my recent mental sloth until the spring semester began. That day in September when I left the library, we smiled companionably. And then I never saw him again.
Alex left one October morning before she thought anyone was awake. Although I heard her, I made no move to stop her and let her get on with her leaving. She took no more than she came with: a Samsonite cosmetics case and some bottles of shampoo. Even though some of them were mine, I didn’t begrudge her. She was never greedy about material goods. Lance must have heard her too, because he wasn’t surprised to see her gone. He did ask, however, when did I think I would be moving out?
Alex got a job on a television soap opera, Through a Glass Darkly. A newfound world-weary look combined with her mesmerizing features proved irresistible to the camera. So she stole that dream of mine, too.
I graduated honorably from Columbia, then went to law school on a scholarship that my brother helped me to dredge up and became a New York public defender, defending such human wreckage as Ethiopian heroin smugglers who for a thousand dollars stuff condoms full of junk worth a hundred times that and swallow them to get past customs. Or poor deranged souls who shove human beings in front of subway cars. My acting ability comes in handy here as I convince myself and then juries that scum is worth defending. Sometimes, when the prosecution is sloppy, I win a case. But they are always guilty, and always I ask the question: What was the name of that road that they decided to go down and how did they get so lost?
I said that everyone survives youth, but that’s not exactly true. Our brother, John, and I fought like crazy after Alex’s abortion. John blamed himself for not stopping Alex, even though I tried to tell him there was no stopping her. Then he blamed both himself and me for being complicit in “murder” he said. Like any two people who know and love each other anyway, we knew precisely where our arrows would do the most harm and so we had some near fatal hits before we just stopped seeing each other. A few years later, I ran into his lover Glenn on Hudson Street, and Glenn said I should really stop by and see John, who was dying of a disease that didn’t yet have a name. John let me hold one of his hands while our father, whom he kept in touch with over the years, came out of nowhere to hold his other hand. Our father, overcome with the emotion of his son’s death, or perhaps just to readjust the count of his legitimate children, told me then that Alex was his biological daughter. Mrs. Pembroke, the woman he eventually left my mother for, had their child and deposited it in our garbage can, because she just couldn’t cope. She thought she was just giving back to him what was his.
I never told Alex, mostly because I never see her in any but the most non-intimate settings. And I want her to be happy. How would it make it her feel to know that her own father and her real mother, her own family, lived on our block the whole time? That her one ace didn’t win her the most basic game of all, a parents’ love? I can’t tell her because I want her to be happy. She’s my sister and I love her. I want her to be happy. I love her. I really do.
About the Author
Maddy Wells is a wife and hopefully one day a mother. Have Love is the first book in the Have a Life series. Have Mercy, the second book, is available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon. She is working on the third book, Have Faith, while trying to figure out what to name her cat. Ideas about that or just to say hi: [email protected]