Bitch Is the New Black

by Helena Andrews

  Two weeks later, I sat corrected in that same building. I was too scared to purchase a pregnancy test from the neighborhood Duane Reade. Peeing in a cup and coming back for the results would be more private.

  “So, according to this you’re about three weeks pregnant,” said a closeted gay man with a skinny tie and khaki pants.

  “Really?” I asked, straining my neck to get a better look at whatever official papers he was getting his information from and hoping that maybe he’d read someone else’s file by mistake, the file of some slutastic idiot who didn’t know how to use a condom or self-restraint.

  “Yep. Definitely. Pregnant. So, whoever the father is, now we’ll see if he’s really a real man.” I had absolutely no clue what he meant by this, except maybe to say that Grant’s masculinity was predicated on his reaction to the news, which was something like, “So I guess I have to pay for an abortion now?”

  Weeks later, I tucked the stack of twenties he gave me in a pillowcase and rode the train alone to the P-Squared in Greenwich Village, because I supported their mission and figured no one would find me there, not that anyone was looking. My roommate, Stella, wanted to come with, but this wasn’t a fucking shopping spree. Plus, I couldn’t look at anyone looking at me like I was broken, ruined, condemned, or whatever. One soundless and snotty cry in the women’s bathroom was all that was allowed. All that I could take.

  I should have taken the Valium.

  “I’m not nervous,” I said, interrupting my counselor’s soliloquy while folding in half one of the brochures she’d handed me about the “procedure” and what to expect when you want to stop expecting—touching the two edges together, then pinching the fat bulge in the middle and smoothing it down from one end to the other until it was perfectly flat. It’s funny, the tiny bullshit things we remember when our lives are forever changing. “I’m just anxious.”

  A “technician” upstairs had the sadistic task of giving me an ultrasound. She told me the baby was five weeks old, or more mercifully, that I was five weeks along: still, I wished her a violent death. Up until then I’d been hoping this was all a terrible mixup or a practical joke orchestrated by the same zealots who do those “hell houses,” where instead of a vampire jumping out a coffin, they’ve got a blond cheerleader getting a bloody abortion.

  Just as gruesome were the hospital gown and vacuum hose I got. Whatever medieval torture techniques I’d previously imagined, it definitely wasn’t that, but it was close. I also thought maybe they’d roll me into a white room with talking bunny rabbits and caterpillars and a magical blue pill that read “EAT ME” in cursive, which upon swallowing would make whatever was inside me grow smaller and smaller and smaller until it ceased to exist. Simple. Instead, two masked men debated for five minutes over whether or not they’d “gotten everything” with the Hoover attachment they had shoved into my womb, a part of my anatomy that I hadn’t given much thought until that day. Numbed below the waist, I laid there for what seemed like forever, feeling like I’d been abducted. Finally a woman with a white coat walked in, reminded them there was “a patient on the table,” and everything was taken care of.

  No, I didn’t have someone waiting for me down in the lobby. It was just me. No, nobody was going to pick me up. It was just me. No, I didn’t need to call anyone. It was just me.

  Changing back into my clothes, I felt fixed, glad to even be able to say “just me.” What kind of monster was I? According to the unfolded pamphlet in my purse, a normal one. I checked to make sure I wasn’t some horrible baby-killing fiend who danced naked on the tiny graves of the unborn at full moon. “You may have a wide range of feelings after your abortion. Most women ultimately feel relief after an abortion,” it said under the heading “Your Feelings….” I wished there was a less opinionated word for whatever had just happened to me, but I was happy for the second to my emotion.

  I walked the long way back to the train station and caught a glimpse of myself in a storefront window. Hair? A little mussed. Nose? Normal. Lips? A bit dry and, in the middle, cracked. Teeth? Crooked on the bottom row. Cheeks? The same. Chin? Fat. Eyes? This game was stupid. There were flowers waiting for me on my extra-long twin. Stella. I fell asleep with plastic-wrapped carnations cradled in my arms.

  I told Darin, my soon-to-be first stalker, all of this not too long after he first said he loved me. He needed to know what he was getting. “I could have a fucking kid right now,” I said, waiting for his disgust. “Lots of people could have kids right now,” he said, wrapping his arms even tighter around my shoulders and shushing me to sleep. Right before winter break he gave me a card that read on the front, “All I want for Christmas,” and then on the inside, “is YOU!” with a pop-up finger pointing straight at me.

  So, the beginning of us was mostly just him promising me that I wasn’t going to hell. When I broke it off two years later because I was twenty-one and that’s what twenty-one-year-olds do, he made a decent living trying to send me there personally. A different finger was getting some exercise now. Darin was known on campus for being sort of militant—he was the strongest man pound for pound on the wrestling team and wore the same dark jeans and black Nikes every day unless I begged him to change—but aggressive love is what I needed then. Then when I didn’t, he got on the offensive.

  There were the random Darin sightings outside my dorm, because this was supposedly the quickest way to New Jersey, where he worked; the time he showed up at a party I was throwing with a “friend” he just couldn’t seem to find, but since he was “already here, why not let’s talk about us” the spitting incident, which he later claimed wasn’t all that bad, because the loogie landed near me, not on me; then the “accidental” tour down a flight of stairs, courtesy of his open palm to my back, and finally the trip to the police station.

  “Yeaaaah,” I said looking around the “precinct,” thinking how much it resembled a public elementary school front office. “I think I need to get a restraining order.” I was there on my lunch break.

  “No problem, ma’am. Let’s go sit down over there,” said the black lady with lacquered nails and freeze-dried hair, pointing to a long metal table that would have been just as at home in an OR. We sat down to gossip. She typed while I talked. Turns out I had to file a “domestic violence incident report,” which made me want to forget the whole thing. I wasn’t a battered woman, just a bitter one. When your love life belongs to Dolly Parton’s discography, you know it’s time to switch gears. That’s what I thought I had been doing when Abortion Monkey showed up, throwing bananas in my tail pipe.

  It’s hilarious that after all this time some people still seem to think themselves much more important than they truly are. I’m positive you’ve been waiting for me to send you a reply to this ridiculous e-mail all day long and I have never been one to disappoint.

  Understand that I am in a place right now where your silly messages mean nothing to me. Continue to send them or don’t, I could not possibly care any less.

  It’s interesting how when someone finds love, makes a great career move and is going somewhere purely positive in life someone else feels the need to drag them down (most likely from a complete lack of positivity in their own lives).

  Darin, please get a life because mine has absolutely no room for you…. Helena

  That would show his crazy ass. I raised my index finger high above my head, slamming it down on the send button with all the force of a carnival sledgehammer. Take that, monkey ass! I wanted to show him how much better at life I was. As evidenced in the line, “I could not possibly care any less,” because so many “smart” people say “could care less,” which implies that there is a rock bottom of caring that you have yet to strike, thus and therefore you do, in fact, care—most likely the exact opposite of what you were trying to say in the first place. Proper syntax was empowering when dealing with the man who once argued loudly that the correct phrase was not “get the gist” but “get the just.” And that diarrhea was when you drank too much w
ater and constipation was from not drinking enough. The e-mails kept coming:

  FROM: Abortion Monkey

  TO: Helena Andrews

  SUBJECT: Re: Mighty Joe Young

  Just hoping you‘re not still walking around with spit in your face, LMAO. By the way, congratulations on you and your new fag, I mean boyfriend.

  We went for one more round. Me, spending an entire day crafting, spell-checking, editing, grammar-checking, revising, workshopping, and then copying and pasting the only two hundred words in the world capable of cutting him down a notch. Him, shutting me down with just two—Abortion Monkey. No matter how much high ground went into my e-sermon, once Darin hit his reply button—“Don’t worry about responses, since I’ll just delete anything else you send before reading it. Have a nice life, Mighty Joe Young!”—I’d get yanked from my pulpit, forced to lay my cursor hand on those two abject and filthy words. I was scared of them, felt sorry for them, and refused to delete them. I started solely referring to Darin as “the devil,” hoping that he was, in fact, a liar.

  Involving Frances in all this was out of the question—obviously. I’d handle Darin on my own, like always. Like the whole abortion situation. I refused to tell her then, because I knew she’d want to pray to father/mother God through the phone or make me wave a bushel of burning sage over my broken body. I couldn’t take being taken care of. When I first started having sex, we had an ad lib conversation about penises and vaginas. Where have you been, little brown-eyed girl? Downstairs. With who, that new boy? Yep. What kind of birth control are you two using? Ma! The sponge, the condoms, dental dams? The pill! Good. She said if I got pregnant she wouldn’t be angry—“Just send the baby down for me to raise until you finish school.” Obviously, I’d decided not to take her at her word. In the process of becoming childless, I’d grown into a motherless child—untethered—not knowing my mother felt the same about herself once.

  Two days after graduation, we were on the floor of my first real apartment, leaning on old couch cushions Frances found somewhere on or around 125th Street in Harlem. She does these things, setting out on her own in the morning (“I’m just gonna go around the corner and see what’s going on”) and coming back hours later with somebody’s trash and no man’s treasure. I heard her in the stairwell before opening the door to see what she’d brought back now.

  “Jesus friggin’ Christ, woman! That’s out on the corner for a reason, you know,” I nagged, one hand on my hips and the other already reaching for my “new” toaster, futon frame, computer keyboard, or TV stand–slash–dinner tray–slash–“extra seating!” This time she was dragging three large sofa cushions in free clinic gray.

  “Whaaa? You guys need this stuff,” she answered, pulling her prizes into the hallway. I remembered how much I used to love her finding me funny-shaped sticks and seashells on the beach as a child, making me believe the ocean built all these things only for me. She lifted from the earth like a klepto—a bone-white stone, a retired snakeskin—and placed everything in my tiny accomplice’s hands. For me? Yes, sweet the beat, for you.

  The gray cushions would become our very own doctor’s couch. With my new roommates gone and the thrill of graduation long gone, she started a serious talk about my so-called life, seeing as how the day before I burst into tears during the gospel song “I Feel Like Going On.” The woman sitting next to us on the church pew handed Frances tissues that she passed on to me without a word. I hate church, and she knows it. She’d guilted me into going to the storefront chapel on the corner only because that Sunday had been Mother’s Day. Funny.

  Late the next day, we leaned on those old cushions, and I told her all about what I’d been up against. “There should be some kind of summer camp,” I said, “because this business of being tossed out on our asses into the real world is shitty.” Darin had just recently pushed me down a flight of stairs because he loved me and wanted to get back together. I didn’t have a job with which to float my $550 share of the rent. The dark blue folder Dean Whomever handed me at the end of the graduation stage was empty because we owed Columbia more than a thousand bucks. And then there was the issue of the toddler that should have been cheering me on with the rest of the family.

  “They told me to get rid of you, you know?” she whispered, sitting on the floor next to me, not looking at me. I was having growing pains, and she wanted to show me some of her own stretch marks, I guess. “But I didn’t want to do that again.”

  It was 1972, and Frances was a pregnant sophomore in college. The story sounded so familiar, I wanted to stop her before she got started. Wait a minute; we’ve seen this one already. Do a quick channel check. She was the exact same age I’d been. In the middle of our mother-daughter bonding session, I learned we almost weren’t mother and daughter.

  She’d been in and out of love with my father Billy since high school, as well as a few girls she’d met at Humboldt State. She told me she’d gotten pregnant at nineteen and waited until the last legal minute to end it. Billy, who was in the navy, wanted to get married. He had it all planned out, she said. Frances would move back to Los Angeles—in with his mother—and wait for him to come back from long tours on a boat filled with men. She thought this idea ridiculous.

  “Wendy said, ‘Okay, Frances, if you’re going to do this you have to do it now,’” she recalled my godmother telling her while her belly was getting bigger and she was still a teenager. The two drove up to San Francisco and got everything “handled.” All I could think about was the scene in Dirty Dancing when Penny gets a botched abortion that no one really talks about aside from Baby’s dad calling whatever “doctor” Penny went to a “butcher.” I wonder whether Frances went to one of these dirty-wire-hanger-type places and whether whatever I did was any better.

  My father was told after. So when Frances realized I was trying to exist in 1980, she wanted me—badly—and he was…blasé.

  It might make other people feel, I don’t know, uncomfortable to find out that they could have been aborted. That they could very well not be alive—conscious, in existence, present, or whatever right at this moment—as they think, process, and type. Not me. Well, not me, really. I was chosen. Cho-sen. Didn’t that count for more? Or maybe I’d been waiting in the wings since 1972, made invisible by a magical blue pill.

  She told me that my grandmother and aunts, the majority of whom had found themselves pregnant before their eighteenth birthdays, sat her down to explain ever so calmly that babies weren’t in her future.

  “You can’t bring a child around all that,” my mother recalled them saying. All that, I’m guessing, meant freaky sex orgies—which most everyone can agree aren’t childproof. I picture her mutinous then, defending her right to get knocked up just like everybody else. By then she was the only one of her seven siblings without a child and quickly approaching thirty (which is like forty when you adjust for inflation since 1980). I’m also guessing the grandchildren quota must have already been reached, or at least the grandchildren-from-lesbians-with-armpit-hair quota, which was obviously zero.

  As a kid, I thought cameras and camcorders had not been invented before I turned five, because there does not exist any physical evidence of my being born. When I told her this, she laughed. You didn’t start the world, Raggedy Ann.

  It’s really because my mother pretty much did the whole thing by herself.

  For my last twenty-seven birthdays, we’ve had only one constant tradition—she must tell me the story of my birth. When I was smaller than her, I’d climb into her bed during the dark part of the morning and spread myself across her stomach, staring at her hard until she opened her eyes. Then I’d yell, “Tell me about when I was born!” She’d pretend not to hear me, squinting in my direction, staring at me through her eyelashes. I’d flail about my arms and legs as if drowning in her mommy tummy. “Tell me, woman!”

  “Okay, okay, sweet the beat. Don’t you get tired of hearing this?” she’d ask, already knowing the answer. “Every year it’s ‘Tell me
about when I was born, tell me about when I was born.’” She sounded annoyed, but I knew she wasn’t. Just the opposite. Who else would she tell her war stories to?

  Frances was alone when her labor pains started. She took a cab to the hospital, where my grandmother worked as a nurse. “When I got there, everybody kept whispering, ‘Oh, that’s Effie’s daughter.’ So she knew I was there,” my mother remembered in a sleepy voice. Then of course came all the horrible pushing and screaming. “My eyes turned blood red because I was holding my breath the whole time. The doctor kept yelling, ‘Which way do you want her to come out?’”

  I returned to her at 6:52 p.m. on October 28, 1980, three weeks late. She wanted a Libra—masculine, extroverted, and positive—so she started power walking in the hope that gravity would shake me awake and out. I missed the planetary alignment by five days and became a Scorpio instead—introverted, feminine, and negative. But somehow she still managed to love me.

  We went over all this on my new couch cushions like high school best friends catching up at a reunion, surprised by how much they still had in common after so long, and sad about all the stuff that had changed. Frances wanted to know why I hadn’t called to tell her about me and Grant. I told her I was fine.