Motherest

by Kristen Iskandrian

  I am warm now. I feel ready.

  “So,” I begin, not entirely sure where I’m going, “this week, at Joan’s, I—”

  Tea Rose interrupts, like the words had been beating against his mouth with every step we took to get here. Now they rush out. “I’m in love, Agnes.”

  We are angled toward one another. In my booze-headedness, I wonder if he is about to propose. I wonder if he somehow knows I am pregnant and wants to, I don’t know, do the right thing, as it’s been called on TV. Did he say, I’m in love with you, Agnes? Did he say you? Didn’t he say that? Wouldn’t that kind of announcement explain the oddness of tonight? I thought we were going one way, but we’re going the opposite? The moon, eavesdropping through a bit of cloud cover, now nudges closer, and by its light I can see Tea Rose clearly, the smooth marble of his face carved into a grimace. He takes a small sip and hands me the bottle once again. This time I just hold it, the defiance I felt a few minutes ago gone. In its place, a whispery fear.

  “I met her the day before we left London. I can’t explain it. I mean it’s just one of those freak things. I went into this tourist trap shop near the hotel where we were staying—I was looking for something funny to bring home for you actually—and she was in there, and we just kind of kept looking at each other…”

  I feel like I might throw up. Tea Rose is talking to his hands. I take a few deep breaths, hoping the night air will steady me.

  “It’s okay. You don’t have to—”

  Tea Rose puts one hand on my thigh without looking at me. “No, I do have to. I have to tell you this. Because it’s crazy to me. I need you to know that I guess it’s only something this crazy that could make me ever want to not be with you. Like, it’s scaring me.”

  “I have no idea what to say to that,” I say, swallowing down more air. “You want my blessing? You want me to feel bad for you right now?”

  “No! No, just listen.” He takes his hand from my thigh and rubs his face. “So I notice her and she notices me and it’s like we kept noticing each other, over the racks of crap. I mean, like, the second I saw her, I couldn’t not see her. We didn’t even say anything. I went back to the hotel and paced around and that’s when I called you, because I thought hearing your voice and making plans to see you would just, I don’t know, set me straight. But you were weird on the phone, and I was, and when I hung up I still just felt crazy. Like that girl put a spell on me or something!”

  Oh, but I hate him right now. I hate being made to endure this. Has he always been this stupid? Am I actually pregnant with his baby? I fight the urge to run to Joan’s house and swipe another pregnancy test. If this isn’t a dream, maybe it’s just a massive mistake, a multitudinous mistake.

  “After we got off the phone, I went for a walk. As I’m walking, I see her again, a block ahead of me. And for whatever reason she stopped and turned around and saw me, and waited for me to catch up, like we were, I don’t know, old friends. Agnes, we just talked. We just walked and talked for maybe five miles. Like I can’t even describe it. We just fell into conversation like, yeah, like I said, we were old friends, but more than that, like we’d known each other in another life! We like all the same bands—she’s just as obsessed with Nirvana, maybe even more so than I am. She’s seen them three times in concert. It’s like we…we’re—”

  “Oh my God, please don’t say soul mates. Just spare me that much.”

  Tea Rose takes a hit from the bottle. Even in the almost-dark I see that he is fuchsia from having actually almost said soul mates.

  “Okay, whatever. The point is we talked all night. We went to a pub and talked. When I realized that my parents were probably out of their heads worrying, we went back to the hotel and talked. Even they were like, who is this girl? Like they felt something special too. I mean, I’m telling you, this kind of thing doesn’t happen. And if it does, you have to, I don’t know, go with it. I mean, I barely even feel like I have a choice here.”

  At this I start to laugh. I laugh like I haven’t laughed in a long time. I watch his face go from sincerest choirboy to hurt, hurt in a way I’ve never seen him be, and I take some paltry satisfaction in it.

  “You don’t have a choice?” I say, the irony almost too dense to be shaped into words. “That’s really hilarious.” But under my laughter I feel something else. Relief? At not having to find the words for something I don’t know how to talk about. At not having to tell this most hidden, most frightening, most unreal secret. At not having to weigh his reaction against my own. At not having to fit him into a world I cannot fathom, whether this thing, this baby, stays in it or not.

  “Agnes, I’m sorry. I’m trying to be honest. No, I’m not trying—I am being honest. I guess I’m trying…not to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  We are quiet.

  “So where is she?” I ask, trying to make my voice calm, neutral.

  “She’s still in London. She’s studying there, finishing a year abroad. Then she’ll go back home to Canada, where she’s from. Montreal. We’ll visit this summer—I’ll go there and she’ll come here. We are...I don’t know. We’re making plans. Plans I assumed I’d be making with you.” Tea Rose rubs his face, his hair, as though drying them with a towel. “It’s just so nuts.”

  “You keep saying that, how crazy it is. But…you’re…happy. You’re happy, right?”

  His look is pleading. “Yeah. I’m happy. I’m—”

  “You’re in love.”

  “I am.” He sounds relieved, like I have given the right answer. “I love her.”

  We sit. I take the final sip from the bottle and hug my knees to my chest, needing to hold something, needing to cover myself. Tea Rose hunches forward, arms crossed around his middle like a player who’s been sidelined. Now he moves to the row below us and sits down facing me, looking up at me full in the face, his long legs between us.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” I say. “It’s good. We’re good. We don’t have to do some dramatic thing.”

  “I just wanted to look at you,” he says.

  “Okay,” I say.

  If it were a play, I’m thinking, this would be the last act, the last line of the last scene of the last act, and the curtain would come down on us just like this, facing each other in partial moonlight. But it’s not. I get up after some moments have passed and pause just long enough to squeeze his shoulder on my way down the bleachers. I hear the brief clinking roll of the tiny bottle before it drops off into silence. I walk back to my dorm, heavy and light.

  Dear Mom,

  Today I went to Planned Parenthood, which I really think should be renamed Unplanned Parenthood, under the circumstances. Or is it like a piece of advice? Half a statement: Planned Parenthood (is better than the alternative)? I don’t know. But I went there after my last class. I walked down to the Texaco and called for a cab. I bought a Coke while I waited, drank half, and immediately felt the need to throw up. I don’t know if it was because of the pregnancy or because of my nervousness about the pregnancy, about the little field trip I was going on. Whatever the case, I managed to make it to the bathroom, puke pretty cleanly, and be back out on the curb by the time the cab was pulling up. I felt funny telling the driver where to go. It felt the same as telling him that I’m pregnant, which I’ve said aloud to exactly nobody. And writing it to you feels even less like I’m sharing—if anything, it feels like I’m pushing the secret further inside myself.

  Outside the clinic, practically blocking the entrance, a skinny, visibly pregnant woman was smoking. I didn’t mean to meet her eyes but I did, which I think felt automatically to both of us like I was judging her, and she met my stare full-on as though daring me to say something, until I looked away. I mumbled “hello” as I stepped past her to get to the door. I could feel her behind me, feeling like she’d won. Inside, a woman who looked kind but tired (probably tired of being kind) sat behind an ancient computer inside a glassed-off cube. She gently pushed a clipboard through the small tunnel
and asked me to sign in.

  “I don’t have an appointment,” I told her.

  “Oh,” she said. She straightened her back and patted her thick curler-ironed bangs absently with a pudgy hand. “Well, you might be waiting for a while. What are you here for? Dear?” she asked, her eyes hooded by her heavy lids and her concern, which, however practiced, sounded genuine. “What are you here for? Birth control? An exam…?”

  “I’m…” and I found I actually forgot the word. I stood there openmouthed, my eyes starting to ache from not crying, and gestured dumbly toward my lower half. “I’m having a…but I’m not sure if I’ll actually, you know, have—”

  “Okay, honey, that’s fine,” she said, actually rising in her seat slightly to touch the top of my hand where it rested, like somebody else’s hand, on the clipboard. “Why don’t you just fill one of these out and take a seat. The nurse will call you back and you can just have a talk with the doctor or nurse-practitioner, okay? You don’t have to do anything else today.”

  I filled out the form as best I could. I didn’t know all the family health history stuff. The section about smoking, drinking, and number of sexual partners might as well have been called “the reasons why you’re sitting here, you reckless slut.” Then it asked if I had health insurance. I think I do—it’s yours and Dad’s, right?—but I checked no. If I could have, I would have just written a giant NO over the entire page. No to being here, no to all of this. I stuck the pen back behind the clip of the clipboard and returned everything to the receptionist. She was talking to the smoking girl, so I just put it on the counter and sat back down.

  I looked around. There were a few empty seats but most had bodies in them. Female bodies. Three women, including the smoking girl, had pregnant bellies straining against their shirts. One woman’s belly button made me wince. “I should not be able to see that,” I kept thinking as I kept looking. Seems like the best example of “insult added to injury” that I can think of.

  A woman sitting diagonally from me took a large bag of chips from a plastic bag she had with her. The bags were noisy and she ate noisily, milling her food with her front teeth. I again felt the need to throw up and made it to the bathroom just in time. When I was done vomiting, I sat down on the still-flushing toilet and cried silently, just for a couple minutes. I didn’t want to miss my name being called.

  When I returned to the waiting room, another woman had taken the seat right next to mine. Her arms and legs were thin, but her breasts were enormous, and a layer of belly flab hung over the waistband of her pants. At her feet, sleeping in a blue car seat, was a tiny baby. I was fascinated by her body more than I was by the baby. Clearly she had just given birth. She still looked pregnant, her body sort of overflowing with what was no longer inside it.

  The baby’s eyes fluttered briefly and its mouth yawned a perfect little O. The woman sat staring down at it with a perfectly blank expression. Maybe it was her look or the fact of the baby being in that room—a place where babies felt sort of forbidden—but whatever the reason I opened my mouth and words came out.

  “That’s a cute baby.”

  She looked at me and half smiled. “Thanks.” She rubbed at the corners of her eyes. “He sleeps like an angel during the day but at night, my God.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Quincy. After my granddad.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Six weeks. I’m here for my checkup.” Her eyes went to my body for an instant and then back to my face. “What are you here for?”

  I still honestly didn’t know. “Oh, just a checkup.”

  She smiled and laughed slightly. “Ask for some extra birth control, just in case,” she said. “Unless you’re ready for one of these.”

  I smiled. Amazing how nobody will assume you’re pregnant if you don’t look pregnant. I thought about how many women I’ve seen in my life who might have been pregnant. I looked around the room again. Was everyone pregnant? Was the whole world pregnant? Do you only think about pregnancy when you’re pregnant? Is it the only thing you think about when you’re pregnant?

  The baby started to cry. His face turned beet red. He sounded like an angry lamb. I’d never seen anything so tiny make so much noise. The woman unbuckled him with one hand and reached her other one underneath her shirt, unsnapping something. She swept him up, gently and swiftly, to her breast. He stopped crying and started making sucking and gulping sounds. I tried not to stare but I glimpsed her nipple, huge and dark brown, as the baby expertly tugged it into his mouth. I can’t stop thinking about that nipple.

  I don’t know if it was the actual nipple or the whole waiting room epitomized in that nipple or what, but the next thing I knew I was blindly grabbing at a stack of pamphlets with worried-looking girls on the front and fleeing the building and calling for a cab from the pay phone outside. I wanted to tell the driver just to drive, just to go until he felt like stopping, but I didn’t have the guts, nor the money to see such a thing through.

  What, Mom? What now? More than anything I want that superpower that the girl had from that old TV show, where she’d touch her fingers together and time would stop. Not because I want to extend this moment but because I need time. Every minute, every day, this thing inside me is growing. Right? Isn’t that how it works? It only has nine months or whatever to become a person. Nine months to become a person and a lifetime to be nothing else, nothing more. That seems insane. I should have more figured out by now, if not everything. I should have something to show for myself, one success or foolproof theory at least. Maybe the one thing I can do in this measly amount of time is forgive you. Would that make a difference? Would it make you want to be here for me now, at last? Because I’m starting to believe that if it’s not for this, it’s not going to be for anything. I only ever want you, but now it finally feels like I need you. I need you to be real, which is to be here.

  HOW DO I KNOW YOU’RE REAL IF YOU’RE NOT HERE?

  Agnes

  Lately I’m obsessed with trying to pinpoint how long the other body inside mine has been there. Was it that night in January, or that night in February, or the dozen nights around those nights? I wasn’t paying attention. I mistakenly thought Tea Rose, with his incandescence and his discombobulating effect on me, was exempt from real-time, real-world consequences. I know that I thought this because I never paused, not in the fumblings of midnight, not in the library at high noon, to wonder if we were safe.

  Now I am in a strange fog. I have made no decisions other than to do nothing, which, I’m realizing, is a most certain kind of something. In the moments when I allow myself to ponder this, I feel indignant. It seems unfair. There should be some kind of alternative, some something-else. I consult my pamphlets. I keep them in my bag and pull them out when I am alone, like they are tarot cards:

  Prevent Teen Pregnancy: Practice Abstinence. I never open this one, just stare at the image of an iconic-seeming jeans-clad blond couple underneath an autumnal tree, facing each other and holding hands. Something in me does believe in them and their endangered chastity, although I feel like if the so-called worst happens, they will probably just get married and have a wonderful family life, graduating from cautionary pamphlet to lifestyle brochure.

  You May Not Be Ready to Have a Baby. Close-up photograph of a young-but-not-too-young woman’s face carefully arranged into a concerned expression, eyes slightly squinted, lips slightly tensed. This is the one that talks about abortion in vaguely medical but mostly layman terms, highlights adoption as a “potentially therapeutic alternative,” and emphasizes the importance of talking to one’s partner, parents, trusted friends, counselor, and/or clergy before making any kind of decision—as though eventually, with enough talk, the pregnancy might just disappear on its own.

  Abortion: What You Need to Know. In high school I attended the huge “Right to Life/Pro-Choice” rally—since both were happening simultaneously, one begetting the other—in DC, taking notes for an article I was writing for my sch
ool newspaper. There were words on signs and things in jars. A lot of anger and pageantry and statistics. I imagine being there now and announcing into a megaphone from some high-up vantage point, loud enough for both sides to hear me, I AM PREGNANT. WHICH OF YOU WANTS ME? and being wrestled over like the baby King Solomon, threatened to be cut in half. As far as medical intervention goes, it looks like I have eight options: suction aspiration (first twelve weeks of pregnancy); dilation and curettage (D&C, first twelve weeks of pregnancy); RU-486 and methotrexate (five to seven weeks of pregnancy); dilation and evacuation (D&E, first eighteen weeks of pregnancy); salt poisoning (saline amniocentesis, after four months of pregnancy); prostaglandin abortion (four to six months of pregnancy); hysterotomy (four to nine months of pregnancy); and partial birth abortion (brain suction abortion, four to nine months of pregnancy).

  All of these terrify me only slightly more than the idea of actually having the baby. I guess I am, by nature, a haver. I like having. I want to possess and be possessed. I don’t like giving away and I don’t like cutting out. I fold this pamphlet and put it at the bottom, underneath all the rest, but I have read it more times than any of the others and know all the words by heart.

  Healthy Pregnancy, Healthy Baby. Unsurprisingly there is a chubby, smiling, diaper-clad baby on the cover of this one, as if to remind us all that pregnancy has a function. It is not just a black curtain of horror. Maybe for some it is not a black curtain at all, but rather a long-awaited thing, a joyous forty-week event, a thank-God-I’m-finally, a beautiful diaphanous veil that will, at the perfect moment, be lifted to reveal a beautiful, prayed-over, wished-for creature. I scan this one long enough to get the gist—prenatal vitamins; a balanced diet; moderate exercise; no smoking, drinking, or drugs; keeping your doctor’s appointments and letting him or her know of any problems or changes. I think about the smoking woman. It seems that doing what you know is wrong would supersede most of these. Doing the right thing is such a tiny country. Doing the wrong thing out of naiveté, hope, blindness, desperation, or a moment’s forgetting? That is Russia. Most of us are in Russia.