One day as I am leaving work, I trip on the low step leading to the outside exit, and instead of instinctively cradling my midsection, I attempt to rescue my bag. I fall sideways and land on my hip, hard, and my bag, despite my best efforts, spills its guts everywhere. I lie still for a minute, the pain in my hip sharp, before starting to gather my books, pens, papers, and, strewn in a little arc, like cards on a poker table, my pamphlets.
“You okay, missy?” Terrence stands above me on the step holding an industrial-sized baking sheet.
“I’m fine,” I say. “Thanks.” In my desperation to get those glossy, slippery pamphlets back into my bag, I fumble, flinging them farther, repeatedly grabbing, like a bad vaudeville act where I’m trying to catch fish.
Terrence just watches. “You sure?”
“Yep,” I say, kneeling now. He bends down and hands me a pamphlet that has slid past me. It’s the abortion one. He doesn’t look at it, or at least doesn’t comment on whatever he saw.
“Agnes,” he says.
“Uh-huh?” I finally get everything back into my bag and stand up. My hip really hurts. I can feel a bruise starting to form, a slow warmth gathering beneath the pinching pain.
“I bet Figgs would let you take some time off, you know, if you needed to.” He says this carefully, uncharacteristically. “Want me to talk to him?”
The kindness. It’s too much. I can’t look at his face. I look at his hands, my eyes settling on his worn-looking wedding band, dulled by years of bleach and detergent but still managing somehow to shine and glint shyly against his dark skin.
“Agnes? Want me to talk to him, honey?” He’s never called me anything but Agnes or Miss Agnes. This “honey,” it feels unfair at such a moment, gratuitous. I bite the inside of my cheek. I try not to split in two.
“I’m good,” I finally say. “Thanks, though. Thank you. I’m good. I’ll see you Wednesday.” I walk away, feeling like it’s too much; all of this is too much.
* * *
Suddenly it is April. Kurt Cobain has just shot himself in the head, and everyone, predictably, seems to want to blame his wife. Which seems doubly unfair—to her, obviously, but also because suicide, by its very definition, suggests ownership, an irreversible self-possession. I see Tea Rose around campus, the morose version of Tea Rose, as though he is a method actor preparing to play the part of “Mourner Groupie #1,” wearing sunglasses and all black and earphones. I half expect him to seek me out, and maybe quarter hope that he will, to hear Simon’s story again, now that Simon shares this thing in common with his hero. I feel monstrous to even have this thought, but I have it. Tea Rose doesn’t, though, reach out to me in any way, and once in a while I spend a little bit of time imagining his conversations with the new girl, picturing them crying on each end of the phone, running up five-hundred-dollar bills, listening to the same tracks and murmuring sniffy comments about feeling abandoned by their sad, blue-eyed idol. There is a vigil on campus that I walk by on my way to the library, candles and a sparse crowd and a few boys strumming the chords to “Come As You Are” over and over, and I feel sad in spite of my meaner instincts, sad for this person whose only way out was all the way out, sad for these fans who now need to recalibrate everything they thought they knew about loneliness and despair, and sad too for that baby, the daughter who will grow up in a shadow that no amount of light can erase.
As if to deflect all the gloom, nature is showing off. The dogwoods are in full bloom and my pants are too tight. I see the trees, branches outstretched like arms balancing teacups down their lengths, but I resist buying new pants. Buying new pants seems premature. I feel certain that something must happen within me, within my mind, before new pants can be bought. Instead, I loop a hair tie through the buttonhole and around the button as a makeshift clasp. I wear the same two to three oversized tops, which effectively hide my changing midsection as well as the button situation. Some days I wear dresses—long flowy things I took from my mother’s closet back in August when I was packing to come here and my life was still my own. Surprise still gets dressed in the crook of our closet door. We don’t pay attention to one another’s bodies—at least, we don’t admit to doing so. If she notices any change in mine, she doesn’t let on.
A handful of times I excuse myself from class or work to vomit in the bathroom. The vomiting offers no relief. The urge comes as a kind of ray of hope amid the staggering nausea, like nothing I have ever known—flu and motion sickness and food poisoning, the last of which I’ve never had but can acutely understand that word, poison, the body trying to rid itself of a toxin. And then I wonder, is this my body revolting against this being? Is this thing inside me toxic? Or is this my body’s way of protecting it from whatever matter, ideas, germs, influences I am ingesting all day long? I throw up eagerly, ecstatically even, believing it will stop. But it doesn’t. It comes right back, sometimes worse, sometimes with a slightly different character. I have no appetite, except for when I wake up at 4:00 a.m., ravenous, and go down to the dorm basement, as if in a trance, to buy a can of ginger ale and a package of something, cookies or chips or cheese crackers. I sit in the chair next to the machines, my flip-flopped feet icy cold, and I gulp and guzzle and belch as though I am the only person left, a stowaway in the basement of the earth. Increasingly, this is the only way I can eat: in the dead of night, semi-cocooned by sleep, alone.
I have always skulked. I remember being young, nine or twelve or one of those years, and waking up from a bad dream, which so often happened, and scurrying to my parents’ room, which I’d often done. Their door was closed and I’d hesitated there, wondering if I were brazen enough to walk in without knocking, since knocking would have been even more brazen. I finally entered cautiously and stood by my mother’s bedside, my eyes adjusting after a minute or two enough for me to see her sleeping form, her mouth slightly open, her eyelids smooth and lucent like the inside of seashells. Her right hand lay open-palmed by her head on the pillow, and her left hand rested on the mattress edge close to me. Ever so lightly, I’d touched the watch she’d fallen asleep wearing, unable, for some reason, to touch her, her body. I didn’t know if I should wake her to tell her I was there, or how to wake her. I knew that just being in the room, close to her, had made my fears subside—already I was forgetting the dream—but I knew that if I left, the dark something would be waiting for me in the hallway.
After a while I’d laid down on the floor, proud that my need to be there hadn’t disturbed anyone, and, with the sound of my parents’ breathing like an incantation against fear, fell asleep. I’d woken up when the first light shown grayly through the curtains, less because of the light and more because of movement above me, on the bed, in the bed. I sat up and almost as quickly lay back down, having seen in that flash of a second my mother atop my father, her back curved and bare, the ridge of her spine visible, her knees bent on either side of his body, her head bowed over his and her arms along his sides. It knocked the wind out of me.
Down on the carpet, I’d feigned sleep as though my life depended on it, afraid that my wakefulness could be somehow heard. I screwed my eyes shut tightly, and then, worried that betrayed too much effort, focused on relaxing my face, gentling my eyes from the inside. I held my breath involuntarily and had to keep reminding myself to breathe without gasping. I heard more movement, murmurs, mouth sounds, that I became wild trying not to hear. It was an imprisonment, an oppression, my being there, a torture I had inflicted on myself by invading their privacy, which I hadn’t realized I’d done until they went from being my parents, straightforwardly mother and father, to being woman and man with bodies who share a bed.
What have I done, what have I done? was all I kept thinking to myself, and alternatingly, Let it be over, let it be over. The shame of the witness is the worst kind of shame. After what felt like twenty-four hours, I heard a rising from the other side of the mattress, my father getting up and approaching where I lay on his way to the bathroom to shower and get ready for work. I h
eard his footsteps stop short when he saw me. I heard him tap the end of the bed, my mother’s feet, possibly, to get her attention. There was a moment when the whole room seemed to draw its breath at my discovery, and I fought hard to maintain my façade of sleep, of innocence. A minute later I heard the adjoining bathroom door close and the shower turn on. And a minute after that, my mother was tapping me awake, roughly. “Get to your room,” she said. “You’re too old to come in here in the middle of the night.” I got up and left, mortified. I never went in their room in the middle of the night again.
Meanwhile, something irreparable seems to be happening between Joan and me. The clear channel that connected us has become scrambled with static. We see each other in class and chat afterward, but it’s dodgy and tense. I avoid the music library altogether. I know it’s my fault, the fact and lie of this pregnancy, along with whatever chemical changes are altering my behavior in a million infinitesimal ways.
One day we eat lunch together. I have gotten used to eating alone, and sitting across from her, I am newly distracted by my body. I can’t find a comfortable position, first crossing my legs and then tucking them underneath me, scooting my chair close to the table but then, put off by how my breasts almost rest against it, crossing my arms and then holding my drink awkwardly. I’m so consumed by how to sit that I miss most of what she is telling me.
“…refusing. I’m pretty sure this is the end.”
I am too embarrassed to ask her to repeat what she was saying. This constant sense of myself is so far the worst part about being pregnant. My body is like a too-occupied room. I pick at my turkey sandwich. The pamphlet says I am not supposed to eat lunch meats but they are one of few foods I have any appetite for. I swipe pieces from the prep station at work. I like how they are cold and slick and salty. They seem very far removed from what meat is. From what flesh is. Trying now to decide how to respond to Joan’s last half sentence, I open the sandwich, move the cheese, and eat the turkey beneath. I close the sandwich.
“How are you doing with it?” I ask carefully.
Joan looks at me like she knows that I don’t know. Like she possibly even knows why. It is a penetrating look.
“Doing with the fact that my sister is now actively killing herself? Yeah, not so great.”
I feel hot and suddenly nauseous. I so badly want to have an appropriate response but my body keeps interfering. I think of Simon, of my mother’s face after Simon, how it wore an expression it had never worn before and would never unwear thereafter. The kind of sadness that engraves you with sadness.
“She’s calling it a hunger strike, which is, you know, funny in its way. Seeing as how she has been hunger striking for seven years.”
I try some shallow breaths, as surreptitiously as I can. “What is she striking against? Does she say?” My voice is toneless because I am trying not to throw up.
“Oh, she has a long list. The president. She reads the newspaper now and listens to news radio all day. Sanctions in the Middle East. Oil greed. The pillaging of the earth. Told my parents they were contributing to it by not being a certified organic farm, when she knows full well how expensive it is to do that and how clean their practices are. She’s angry, like all of a sudden she’s really angry.”
My stomach roils. I imagine this emaciated, yellow girl—sallow-eyed, putrid-smelling—lying on some worn homemade quilt, newspapers strewn all around, the blinds pulled tightly. Wrongly, perhaps, I feel some peace in that image. The soft quilt. The quiet dimness, slatted with sunlight. The decision made: goodbye, misery. Goodbye, world. I don’t know if I am envious or what I am more envious of—the solitude or the being done.
“Sounds like she’s striking against being alive,” I say, and I am about to say more, about to find within myself some words of comfort to make up for my strange and off-putting behavior, but the bile starts its meteoric rise and I throw my napkin on the table and run to the bathroom instead.
I vomit for probably ten minutes, which, in vomit, feels like an entire day. I think of Joan’s sister, her pain. I vomit so hard I fear I will cast out the baby, or at least do it harm. At some point someone comes into the bathroom and quickly leaves. When the spasms finally stop, I dab my mouth with toilet paper and get up shakily. I lean against the cold enamel stall door. I slowly make my way to the sink and rinse my face, swish and spit, rearrange my hair. My eyes are bloodshot and there is a spot of puke on my top, which I try to scrub out with a paper towel. When I get back to my seat, Joan is gone, her place cleared.
Dear Mom,
I have become all schoolwork, all the time. I feel as though I may not be back here, so I am trying to make it count, every review session, every footnote, every article. Professor Donald was surprised to see me when I showed up at her office to drop my final English paper off two days early. My sociology exam was yesterday, a mixed bag of multiple choice and long essays. It was easy. The hardest part was how my hand and fingers ached from actually writing the essays.
Funny how that doesn’t happen when I write these letters. Probably because I’m not aware of the clock, and I’m not having to dredge up the “right” answers or to be thorough and correct and neat all at once. I just write what I want, how I want. I can change the subject—hey want to talk about my baby?—which I can’t do on a test.
My philosophy paper is due at the end of the week but I have already finished it. I’m holding on to it because I think I might want to change the last paragraph around a bit. It’s an essay about free will. I got so confused writing it that I actually ended up writing two contradictory papers and then kind of fusing them together. I think I’ve had enough philosophy for a while, for my life, even. I feel like a person just needs the basic tenets—life is a mystery and ultimately suffering, we are doomed to repeat our failures, we might have everything but everything is illusory, and there is only nothing—and can figure out the rest from there. Tomorrow is my geology exam. It’s open-book, so I’m not too nervous.
And after that…I’m done. I keep getting excited thinking about it—my first year of college over, a whole summer off to look forward to—and then I remember that it’s me, my life, not Surprise’s or Tea Rose’s, and the excitement vanishes.
Sorry, but if this baby died on its own, would I be sad? Is there any way to know that in advance? I can’t figure it out. There is a relief in the difficult thing being done for you. Because I think I at least know for certain that I can’t get rid of it. Still, I can’t imagine it’s exactly thriving or happy in there. On some level it must know it’s not a wanted guest, right? There’s nothing I can do about that. I can’t trick my body into behaving more hospitably any more than I can trick my mind. Once in a while I have the urge to poke at my belly really hard. To say, “Go away. Just do us both a favor and go away.”
It’s like the opposite of what I say to you.
Agnes
Seemingly overnight, spring goes for it, grabs toward summer like a boyfriend making his move. The air is lush, poetic—the kind of air you remember. Birdsong is so strident it makes people pause their conversations or speak more loudly in order to be heard. Flesh is visible, yards of winter white leg and pretty clavicles festooned, as though celebrating their liberation from turtlenecks and heavy scarves. Surprise and a few of the girls from her business classes or young entrepreneur’s club or whatever she is involved with these days—she went from losing me little by little to losing me at a hundred miles an hour—“go tanning,” borrowing upperclassmen’s cars or actually taking the bus to the tanning booth to work on their “base tans” before Beach Week, when much of the college disperses east to Hampton Beach. The freckles Surprise had when we first met have resurfaced. She has a red seersucker bikini and new jewelry from her boyfriend, and she walks like someone who has a lot of staid sex—a clenched swagger.
In contrast to all the tank tops and short shorts, I wear more and more layers. My body rejects this weather, the seasonal call to undress. I smell different. I shower earlie
r and earlier in the morning so there’s less chance of having to share the bathroom. I miss being touched but I can’t conceive of being touched, so the water’s steady pulse against my skin seems like the right compromise. I make it as hot as I can handle, and when I can’t take it anymore, I turn the faucet almost all the way to cold. Sometimes I vomit, quietly, right into the drain. At the end of the night the smell of me—like blood hatching, an eruption of cells in the petri dish that is my body—is so thick that I sometimes take another shower, late, soaping and resoaping every crevice. I wear an old cotton nightgown of my mother’s and I make sure that when I finally pull it on and get into bed, I’m too tired to have any thoughts left in me.
In three days, campus will shut down. I have not begun packing, have not made arrangements to go home. My dad has called and left messages and I have called him and left messages. We always say the same thing: “Hello, I’m just calling to say hello. Call me when you can.” My father says convenience—“Call me at your convenience.” Not inconveniencing people is the first tenet of his religion, a religion based largely on politeness and unobtrusiveness and, yes, good intentions—but one, too, that seems to revile the dirt and grit and pus and indignity of being alive.
Surprise is all packed, her boyfriend in the hall outside our room. “Call me this summer, okay?” she says.
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