Night Swim

by Jessica Keener

  On the train, a few high-schoolers and black housekeepers scattered in the rows down the length of the car. I guessed the teenagers might be going to the city for after school music lessons or jobs, or simple diversion, something to do beyond the boredom of classrooms and suburban life.

  Miss Holloway didn’t talk about love or worry or hope. She held up packages of birth control pills, packaged in plastic disks that turned each day of the month. She passed the tiny yellow pills around. She didn’t talk about feeling engulfed, the thrill of someone wanting you. She displayed latex diaphragms, a god-awful looking contraption that looked like a rubber drain stopper for the kitchen sink. She had tubes of contraceptive cream the color of toothpaste.

  The train clipped past suburban towns, past trees in autumnal dress. I passed backyards, still green and mown, and closer to town yards abandoned to the detritus of carelessness: walkways strewn with children’s toys, plastic balls, old sneakers.

  A man inserts his penis in the vagina, Mother said during our mother-daughter talk about sex. I was eleven. We sat on the divan in her bedroom, the sewing box at her feet. An early afternoon light shone on our knees.

  “I know that.”

  “Do you have any questions?”

  “No.”

  She opened the instructional pamphlet, touching it gently. On my page, she pointed to a picture of a naked woman; on her page: a naked man. The woman’s vagina was shaped like an isosceles triangle; the man’s penis resembled a pickle. Both man and woman looked like people waiting for a doctor’s examination.

  The most important thing to remember is that intercourse is an expression of love between a man and a woman.

  I nodded.

  Here, she said, handing me the little book. You keep it. I hid the book under my bedroom rug. An expression of love. An expression of love. What was that?

  I opened my science book and reviewed the chapter on hormones. I liked the idea that separate organs in our body secreted powerful juices, as if we were many streams interlocking, a series of channels swirling, draining, filling up. Maybe Mr. Bingham was right. Everything connected. I thought how singing tied the network together. When I sang, all internal signals aligned, swooped into a unified flow up and down mountains, rivers and oceans. The tallest mountaintop became climbable.

  The train racing past town after town lightened my gravitus. I grew hopeful again. Hopeful that I would clear the darkness that sponged into my mind since Mother died. If I were lucky, and I thought about God for the first time since Mother died, this nausea would be an instructive scare. Dear God. Please teach me not be so brazen.

  I had a good head on my shoulders. Pregnancy didn’t happen to girls with good grades. I would go on the pill. It would soon be behind me. But if I were pregnant, I would have to go to New York. Abortion was illegal in Massachusetts.

  Margaret knew about this clinic in Boston. She had been there herself the year before. After the miscarriage in the bathroom, she started on the pill. She said it was the century’s best invention. Better than getting the vote. And if I were pregnant?

  When the train stopped at South Station, I walked across downtown’s shopping center, through the crowded intersection where Filene’s and Jordan Marsh department stores dominated, past jewelry stores — so many of them — and the antiquarian bookshop. Sidewalks buckled with years of repaving, heaving cold, mud and ice.

  I buttoned my coat and pulled it around my neck. The sun looked fetal, a tiny clump barely clinging to a rooftop, as if the earth had aborted it, and now shreds of light tangled in the sky, remnants of an unrealized future. I walked through crowds of black teenagers lined up outside a record store. Music blared into the street. The wind gusted. Crisp leaves collided with my feet and face.

  The woman at the clinic who answered the phone told me to cross Tremont Street and head for the State house, its gold dome lackluster in the late afternoon light. I felt so terribly alone. She said, “take a right onto Joy Street.”

  Joy Street — the irony of it — was north of the Commons, on the corner of Beacon Hill, the historic neighborhood patterned with cobblestone sidewalks, gas lamplights, elegant four-story townhouses. “You can’t miss the sapphire blue door,” she said. And there it was, just as she had described. No sign, nothing but blue, this door that opened to young women, too young to be pregnant.

  I stood at the door to summon my courage. This horror of ridding myself of child, a seedling of some-one’s future ignited by Gregory’s impulsive burst of salty liquid one night in a misted wood or was it Anthony? Easy jack off while my lips kissed his, as if somehow this mingling of juices, this act of conception would transform us. Just one night. One day. Two stupid moments that changed everything. Where was I inside them? I missed my mother. Mom. Mommy.

  I hesitated at the step outside the sapphire door.

  I could barely utter these words to myself. Mother, I said slowly. I had a mother, a disappearing mother, a mother who was not here. I repeated this to myself. Not here. Somewhere. Out there. Like swimming in an ocean. The currents taking you without realizing it. You notice when you look back at the shore and see that you have drifted downstream, hundreds of yards away. Maybe thousands.

  I reminded myself that I once had this comfort, this possession of having a mother, owning one. She was home, upstairs in her bedroom reading magazines, sipping her drink. She had been there whether I liked her there or not. The sight of her sitting on the loveseat in her bedroom, with the pleated lampshade by her side, blinded me for a moment. I swooned. I wanted her to see me. Stay with me Mother, please. It mattered. Who was it, Gregory or Anthony? I wanted to get this over. Start over. Start again.

  Inside the clinic foyer, I stepped across black and white marble tiles. I hooked my jacket on a coat tree and followed a sign up a small stairway to the right. At the top of the stair, I gave my name to a woman with short, red hair. She wore a black sweater. Her thumb was pen stained.

  “You’ll need to look these over.” She slid a sheaf of papers across the desktop. She glanced at me with hard but compassionate eyes. I had entered a private club, one where no one wanted to belong. She pointed to a room at the end of the hall. I passed an old dumb-waiter. Could the original owner imagine vials of blood instead of teacups?

  In this room, another woman in a white overcoat tied a rubber band around my arm and took a vial of blood. She did this without looking at me. She un-snapped the rubber band and labeled it. She asked me to state my last name, then assigned me a number. 302. This was to insure privacy.

  302. What if I forgot?”

  She said my telephone number would do.

  By the time I made it back to the train, it was dark, the kind of darkness that is cold and brown, like an empty oil drum. Cars honked up and down the street. Rush hour began its manic impatience. I lit up a cigarette, curled it into my palm, an expert at smoking now. I blew the smoke, inhaled, blew the white breath, then snapped the stub onto the sidewalk and twisted it out.

  On the train, I rehearsed my excuse for arriving home late. I would say that I stayed late for choir. Not even Dora would question that.

  The train filled with men in overcoats and heavy raincoats, men with leather briefcases and freshly folded newspapers. Men with wing-tipped shoes, and cuffed suit pants, and blue and red dotted ties. These men wore their hair short. They parted their hair in boxy, geometric shapes.

  The man next to me excused himself when his bulging briefcase touched my foot.

  “My wife keeps telling me to get a new one,” he said good-naturedly. “Coming back from school?”

  “Dentist appointment,” I said.

  I folded the brochure into my hands. It was full of questions. Are you really ready for sex? What are your beliefs about sex? Are they different from your parents’? What kind of protection is best for you? Do you know the potential side effects of the pill? Another brochure said, No margin for Error: Why diaphragms succeed or fail.

  The train began to thin out as it
went further north, stopping at commuter towns, until the man next to me got up and nodded good-bye. At my stop, I slid the curled-up pamphlets under my seat. I walked up the station stairs to the center of town and the familiar walk in the dark, under streetlights beaming misty halos in the cold air. I passed raked front yards, and finally turned to the house that from the beginning of my life had always been there.

  The FOR SALE sign on our front lawn said: SALE PENDING.

  I hastened up the driveway.

  ~~~~~

  Inside, I met Dora in the kitchen stirring sweet potatoes and dishing additional chunks of broiled halibut onto a serving platter. She raised her eyes at the clock.

  It was 6:12.

  I thrust off my coat and hung it in the hall closet. Sherry’s beige mohair coat was warming up next to Father’s. Robert and Father looked up at me expectantly.

  “Mr. Edwards asked me to sing another solo.” I sat down next to Elliot at the dinner table and fussily filled my plate with fish and salad.

  Sherry smiled pleasantly. “Congratulations.”

  Father nodded. “Very good.” He scooped a forkful of potatoes into his mouth and waited for Sherry to take over. She had established herself here as a regular dinner guest.

  “I’d be happy to pick you up after practice, sometime,” she said.

  “That’s okay. I saw the sign,” I said to Father.

  “Sold it,” Robert spat out.

  “Not quite,” Father corrected him.

  Father put his fork down and in a calm voice that I rarely heard anymore, a voice that said he had everything in control and that things, despite appearances, would improve with time, told us that a family from Pennsylvania had made an offer. Loved the house. The garden. Saw the potential.

  “Assuming everything proceeds, we will close on the house in December, during vacation, so as not to interfere with school.”

  “I don’t want to move,” Elliot said.

  “Oh, Elliot,” I said, affectionately. I touched his arm. I loved the way he said what we all felt. He didn’t shout or lecture either.

  I looked out the dark windows of the dining room, at the reflection of the round, globular chandelier shining back.

  “Did they say they loved this light?”

  Father smoothed his hair, ignoring the remark. He leaned back in his seat.

  “It’s not a good market. We’re lucky to have this offer.”

  “Not according to Uncle Max,” I said.

  “You know,” Sherry said, and once again it surprised us all the way she inserted herself into our business. “I moved when I was twelve. I can promise you that I didn’t want to do it, like you, Elliot. Absolutely fought it. I told my parents I would sleep in a tent in the backyard. You know what? We moved and I liked our new place better. Life is funny that way.”

  “You mean like Dad meeting you because Mom died?” Elliot asked.

  Dora came swinging into the room, the door thumping behind her.

  “Who wants seconds?” she asked loudly. She looked determined and watchful as she walked around the room holding a dish of white rice mixed with mushroom soup. The mention of Mother changed the mood in the room. Father sighed. Dora flitted around the table, her Cardinal wings intent on keeping predators away from Father, who slumped over the table and reached for his glass of wine, emptying it in a smooth roll of his wrist.

  Dora stood next to me holding a bowl of rice in her hands, waiting for me to scoop out a portion but I shook my head. My queasy stomach returned. Nauseous again. Dora noticed a shifting expression in my face, nodded and moved on to Elliot who plopped a scoop of the wet rice onto his plate. His unanswered question curled around the chandelier like invisible smoke and vaporized as if no one had heard him. Father plunged another forkful of rice into his mouth, corking up his son’s question, his pure, unfiltered attempts to get at the truth. Sherry politely spooned another helping on her plate. I didn’t understand her. She was earthy and awkward, insightful and intrusive.

  “I just don’t see why we have to move,” Robert said.

  Father rose from his dreamy state and looked at us with a threatening eye.

  “When you’re older, I’ll explain it to you again. I don’t expect you to understand. That goes for all of you.”

  Two days later, I called the clinic from the pharmacy pay phone and heard the words I dreaded. Positive. I was pregnant. I couldn’t think but I knew I had to make a decision. The house sale loomed. My breasts felt tender to the touch. I wanted to hold someone. I leaned against the pay phone and called my brother. I needed an endpoint.

  Peter answered the phone and I burst into tears.

  “Sarah. Look. This is manageable. I swear it sucks but it’s manageable. Call Sophie. She’s a decent friend.”

  He kept talking, reasoning while I cried, sobbed, unable to calm down. I plugged another dollar’s worth of coins into the phone. People walking in and out of the pharmacy passed by the glass booth but no one noticed me. Kids came in to buy bubble gum, longhaired trolls. Housewives came in for toiletries, nail polish and lipstick. An elderly lady walked out with a white prescription paper bag, like Mother’s paper bags. Those pills. Why was it necessary? What had gone wrong?

  “You are going to be fine,” Peter assured me again. “I promise.”

  ~~~~~

  Sophie took charge in a way that completely surprised me, insisting that I sit in front while Benny drove us to the airport. We told our families that we were taking a day in the country, to look at the leaves. Everyone did that.

  I was so thankful that Benny didn’t judge me when I got in his Datsun. He looked kind and patient. I got in, holding my handbag stuffed with birthday cash I’d saved up over the years. The sun spread across a blue dappled sky. The air felt cold and clean. After today, I vowed to myself, I would start over. I would get a boyfriend like Sophie. I would learn to be happy.

  The plane was full of well-dressed women in houndstooth woolen suits, off to New York for a day of the latest fall fashions. Lord & Taylor, Bonwit Teller’s, Saks. It was something mother used to do. Down in the morning, back at night.

  At LaGuardia airport, Sophie took my elbow and spotted the man in thin brown pants and leather jacket holding a cardboard sign that said Ranch River Estates. That was the secret code word. Sophie shook the man’s hand. We’re from Beacon Hill, she said. This is what the clinic told us to say to him. Connection complete, he nodded. I didn’t speak. Sophie talked. She talked about anything. The flight. The weather. The airport. He nodded and led us to his car outside.

  Sophie sat next to me in back. The man was listening to a radio talk show, a sports talk show and the announcer talked cleverly about the New York Giants, the quarterback, the wide receiver. The talk clattered in my ears. I looked out the window and followed the dashing white lines on the highway. I sat back. I told myself to stay calm. I was halfway there. It would soon be over. Over.

  The car jostled and slowed and he swerved out of a lane to the side.

  “Oh shit!” the man said. “Goddamn. Jesus. Shit.”

  “What’s the problem?” Sophie asked in her chirpiest voice. She leaned over the front seat to see.

  “Flat, flat. We’ve got a flat. Never mind. I know how to fix it.”

  “How long will it take you?” Sophie persisted.

  He yanked on the emergency brake and opened the car door.

  “Sit tight, ladies. I can do this in my sleep.”

  I closed my eyes, nauseous from car fumes. Hundreds of cars raced by, thousands of people couldn’t care less about my dark world.

  Sophie opened the back door and called out.

  “How does it look?”

  “Flat. Give me three more minutes.”

  It was a milder day, warmer in New York than Boston. Thin clouds streaked overhead. The trees were not as stripped here as they were at home. I wondered how far Gregory lived from this highway. I didn’t call him. I wouldn’t call him.

  The car hiked up once t
hen bounced.

  “Want us to get out?” she called to him.

  “Nope. Almost done here.”

  In a few more minutes he was back in the car, driving faster now, smelling of oil and rust. Once he exited the highway, he turned down a side street and parked outside a small, indistinct brick building called the Long Island Medical Center Association. He acted as if he had done this a thousand times. I knew he had.

  Inside, I walked into a clean, brightly lit reception area full of women. Women sat in chairs, others slept in La-Z-Boy chairs lined along a hallway. At the front desk, a woman handed me a clipboard with more papers to fill out. When I handed them back, she told me to go into the exam room.

  “Doctor will be right in.”

  Sophie walked with me. She hugged me. Her skinny arms held tight. “You know, it’s almost over. I’ll be here when you come out.”

  It was a small room. A huge, rectangular light shone from the ceiling. I shut myself up. I told myself, just get this over with. You are here. Remember this.

  I undressed and followed the nurse’s instructions. Put the apron on. Underwear off. Okay to keep your socks on. I lay back and the doctor came in. A man with a determined but pleasant face. I was in this place, an almost mother, lying on my back. I would get this over with. It was almost over. He put the needle in my wrist vein and told me to count to three. I didn’t remember counting.

  And then I woke up.

  A nurse helped me up off the table, easing me across the hall to one of the La-Z-Boy chairs I had seen earlier. I fell back asleep. I woke again, sobbing, gulping hysterically, sucking in the loneliness, more regret, the soreness in my vagina, cramps, and relief.

  “Look, Sarah, I got you a teddy bear,” Sophie said. She placed a small, furry object in the crook of my arm. “We can go home now.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Jewels

  On Sunday I stayed in bed with a headache, cramps and fatigue. Father accepted this and left me alone. On Monday, he called up from downstairs.

  “Sarah! Fifteen to eight. Let’s not be late!” He started up to my room. I quickly tugged the quilts around my shoulders.