Admission

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “Orry Chantilly Creil Clermont St. Just,” read the first line. And the next: “Dammartin Crépy Soissons Anizy Laon.” And the next: “Orry-La-Wille Chantilly Gouvieux Creil.” And then: “Compiegne Saint-Quentin Aulnoye Maubeuge.” The only destination she recognized was “London Waterloo,” but something in her recoiled at going back on the very train that had brought her here only a few hours before, so happy and excited to begin. Then, near the end of the list, she found another line of names she could decipher: “Bruxelles Berchem Rotterdam Amsterdam.” A woman with a large suitcase jostled her and moved off without apology. Or perhaps, thought Portia, watching her go, that mumble she’d made had been an apology, and that tiny fact, that there might be some comfort available to her that would miss its mark simply because she wasn’t capable of receiving it, made her suddenly angry. She looked up at the board again, alighting on the few words she could understand, and decided on the spot to go to Amsterdam, where—while English was hardly the official language—at least no one would be surprised, let alone offended, that she spoke no Dutch. It was, besides, a four-hour journey, which meant four hours of being able to sit, staring at nothing out a dark train window, with no one wondering if there was something seriously wrong with her. That the train would deposit her alone in a strange city late that night did not trouble her, given the general precariousness of her situation: Surely four hours would be enough time to figure out how to fix the mess her life had suddenly become.

  At the last stop before Amsterdam, a tall Dutch man with stud earrings and a pink Mohawk got on the train and began passing out flyers to anyone who looked like a tourist on a budget. Portia got one of these: an ad for a youth hostel not far from the station, in a barge on one of the canals, no less. When they arrived in the city, she followed the man, along with a trio of American boys from the Midwest, to this marvel of hospitality, paid her nominal fee, and picked out a top bunk, where she fell mercifully asleep. In the morning she began walking the city, hunched against bitter winds in her red down jacket, hands clenched in her pockets. She went to the Van Gogh Museum and Anne Frank House, numb to both in her private misery, and ate dry sandwiches in a café near the Rijksmuseum. That night, she went with the midwestern boys to a club in an old warehouse, where multiple stages showcased a variety of terrible techno-bands, cafés, lounges heady with cannabis, even a movie theater where some Dutch documentary about tanks rolling into a gray Eastern European city seemed to play on continuous loop. “This is stupid,” said one of the boys, whose name was Dan, or Ben. They got up and left, but Portia stayed, watching the tanks roll on and on through the gray winter streets. In the morning, she went back to the train station and took a train to Munich.

  Later, it was clear to her that any sensible person would have headed south to someplace warm, parked herself in a pleasant spot, and taken a couple of weeks to figure things out; but she was hardly sensible just then. The trains themselves, she discovered, were where she wanted most to be, not the destinations, always in transit and never arriving. On the trains, it wasn’t noteworthy that she was by herself, sitting silently, staring forlornly out the window. That was how people were on trains—all people, not just abandoned American girls who had just realized they were pregnant. At first she worried over her destinations, not because of money (the Eurail Passes she and Tom had bought were good for any train in the network), but because she didn’t want to get to a city in the middle of the night. In Berlin, however, she found the station at two a.m. comfortingly busy, with young people sleeping in alcoves and blearily drinking coffee in the station cafés, and she stopped worrying about this, too. Through the holiday season she took the trains, duly walking the cities, respectfully viewing the landmarks, eating—when she could eat—the culinary highlights of wherever she happened to be, and then moving on, speaking only to fellow travelers and guides, waiters, and hotel or hostel employees. She was not very responsible about addressing the considerable problem she faced, but she did, as the days and then weeks passed, discover that the very fact of the problem was gradually muting the blow of Tom’s desertion, deflecting her pain into the worry about her situation.

  She had never questioned the right of women to terminate their pregnancies, and she certainly did not question it now. With Susannah, she had boarded the middle-of-the-night buses at the gates of Smith College for the long, long drives to Washington to march for the right to keep abortion safe and legal. Not in denial of the life it terminated—like most sane advocates of abortion rights, Portia certainly acknowledged that there was another life involved—but because a woman’s ownership of her own body trumped that incipient (not yet viable) life. She had always taken it for granted that were she ever to find herself in precisely these circumstances, abortion was the option she would choose. Not—certainly—without regret, but with sober acknowledgment that termination was the right decision in some cases. That it had happened to her, that there was actual life inside her, did not compel a sudden reversal of her convictions, but she wasn’t stupid. She was only a little pregnant, despite what anyone said. She had some time. And she had no wish to experience an abortion in a foreign country where she might not have the language to ask—for example—for more pain relief or an extra blanket. And she was far from ready to face Susannah and hear what Susannah had to say about all this, to defend her scrupulous use of the diaphragm and her alliance with Tom, who was far, far from the reactionary dolt he—all right—appeared to be, but a real, complex man who, just like her, struggled with the transition from who he was raised to be to who he wanted to be. A few more weeks, she could stay away from her mother, away from the inevitable clinic and table and stirrups. A few more weeks of her now almost cherished trains and blurry landscapes of farmland and dreary cities, the screeching of steel on steel as they slowed into a terminal, the echoing loudspeaker voices in French or Dutch or German and then in languages she couldn’t immediately name. She spent Christmas in a hotel room in a nondescript town on the French-German border and New Year’s in the restaurant of an inn near Prague, fending off the attentions of two drunken Italians. She dragged herself through Mozart’s Salzburg birthplace and inspected the carefully worded memorial stone before Hitler’s childhood home in Linz: Für Frieden, Freiheit und Demokratie nie Wieder Faschismus Millionen Tote Mahnen. Finally, in Vienna, she bought a ticket to an afternoon demonstration at the Spanish Riding School and sat in her chilly seat, watching the great white horses parade and pirouette beneath their grim-faced Napoleonic riders, leaping like frogs in their jangling tack. This is stupid, Portia thought.

  And then she went home.

  It’s 11:38 on December 31st, and I have 22 minutes left to write my essay to Princeton, my dream college. What should I say to let you know that Princeton and me are a perfect fit?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I’M NOT HERE NOW

  At the bus station in Boston, Portia was about to buy herself a ticket to Northampton when she suddenly realized that she didn’t live there anymore. Only a few months earlier, she had helped her mother pack up the house and ferry her belongings up 91 to Hartland, where she then spent a couple of days repainting Susannah’s bedroom lavender with white trim. And all of this, she now understood, had simply slipped her mind as she had numbly made her way across the ocean, unthinkingly imagining herself back in the house and on the street where she’d grown up. She stood at the ticket window with two shuffling bodies behind her, waiting for this curiously elongated transaction to conclude so they could get wherever they were going, but Portia had abruptly found herself without a destination and taken on the general demeanor of a pillar of salt. There was no longer any reason to be in Northampton. She felt no desire at all to go back to Dartmouth, where she wasn’t supposed to be now and wasn’t at all sure she’d ever want to be again. And something in her quailed at the idea of going to Hartland, presenting herself to the three of them—Susannah, Frieda, and Carla—a wayward young lady indeed. Those women, veterans of protests and marches, s
trikes, actions, sit-ins, initiatives, drives, and boycotts—they would encircle her with comfort and affirmation, assure her that she had been horrendously victimized, shelter her from the wackos at the clinic (if the state of Vermont had managed to produce any), and make sure she got all the pain pills she was entitled to. They would do this out of love and also pride, because wasn’t this precisely what they had worked and petitioned and agitated for? So that she, a young flowering woman who had every right to determine what was best in these unfortunate circumstances, would not have to put herself in the hands of some slimy practitioner or stick a wire hanger up inside herself and bleed to death?

  And she did want to be taken care of, didn’t she?

  And she did want that clinic, and the pain pills, and for it all to be over. Didn’t she?

  Apart from the nausea, Portia had done a pretty good job of repressing the whole thing. Her clothes still fit, though admittedly she hadn’t worn anything very form-fitting in her tramp around Europe. It was true that she had avoided the mirror, unwilling to confront the more subtle changes under way, but that was very deliberate on her part, as she had no wish to subject herself to more distress. Now the termination couldn’t be more than a few days away, and she might come out the other side without ever having seen herself pregnant. But when she tried to imagine where this liberation would take place, she found her head spinning. The line behind her grew longer and more impatient. There were too many options and nothing she could hold on to. Boston itself, of course. Portland. Providence. Burlington. New England must be jammed with politically evolved places for a girl to get out of trouble. There were hotels everywhere. There were pharmacies and hospitals. Did it even matter where she went? Just as long as Susannah wasn’t there, she thought suddenly. And this thought was so alarming that she quickly stepped out of line and let the person behind her move up to the window.

  It made no sense, thought Portia, shouldering her backpack again and walking across the room to an empty bench. Why should she do this without Susannah? Her mother would want to help, to support her and be of use. And Portia obviously needed the help; no one should have to go through an abortion alone—she knew that much. A few minutes ago, she’d been so intent on finding her way home to the nest that she’d forgotten the nest wasn’t there anymore. Now she was prepared to go anywhere her mother wasn’t. Because, she thought, beginning to prod this paradox, I don’t want her to know that I was dumb enough to get pregnant? Because I don’t need to hear her opinion of Tom, thanks very much? How about, she thought, moving closer to it, because I don’t want her to know what I am going to do, in case she tries to stop me?

  She smiled at this initially absurd notion.

  Susannah, who had once claimed to have written the slogan “If you’re against abortion, don’t have one”? Susannah, who had been a volunteer at the clinic in Springfield, holding a blanket over the scared girls as she led them inside, taking the brunt of the curses herself?

  And of course, I believe in it, too, thought Portia.

  She just didn’t want to.

  She began to sweat, still in her warm winter coat, clutching her backpack against her belly.

  Because it was murder to kill it? she thought very, very carefully.

  It was not murder.

  Because I want to have a baby? I want to be a mother?

  She did not want to have a baby or be a mother. It was absurd to think of doing that—that was for later, when she was no longer a child herself. When she was with someone. She didn’t want to do it the way Susannah had done it. She wanted the normal things: love, partnership, hearth, and home. Of course she wanted children. She just had never thought about it before.

  By then it was early evening, raining faintly. She had slept a little on the plane, but she was still tired and very dirty, with rapidly diminishing reserves. She felt, more than anything, the need for a decision, even a working plan to get her to some place of rest, where the next decisions could at least be made in some comfort. Portia got to her feet and went back to the ticket booth, taking her new place in line. She looked at the destination board and read down the list: “Worcester, Albany, Providence, Hartford, Lawrence.” She had been to all of these places, except for Lawrence. She knew no one who lived in Lawrence or who had ever lived there, and not much about the place at all except that it was not so small that a pregnant stranger would be noted. That realization was suddenly thrilling, because it meant that she could be invisible in Lawrence. Full of purpose, she bought a one-way ticket, a transaction that felt otherworldly, magical. No one would find her in Lawrence, she thought, climbing aboard the bus and making her way to the back. She had not realized until that moment that she had been trying to disappear.

  That night, she stayed in a motor lodge near the Lawrence bus station. It was not a restful place. Down the corridor, a couple fought with drunken abandon, but she was irrationally pleased to see American television again and fell asleep to Johnny Carson interviewing a celebrity she did not recognize. She spent the next day in bed, too, except for a midday meal at the IHOP across the road, writing lists of things to take care of on the back of her place mat: place to live, something to do (job? volunteer?), Susannah, school, doctor. Doctor? thought Portia. The word had the impact of a needle, breaking into her reverie of independence. It was not that she had decided to ignore the fact of her pregnancy, only repress it for a little while longer. She had also decided to believe that a college-educated woman who’d possessed her own copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves since the age of thirteen must be capable, on her own, of being responsibly pregnant, not like some seduced and abandoned cheerleader who wasn’t even sure how she’d gotten that way. Obviously, Portia had taken a pass on any tests and medications recommended for the first trimester, but she couldn’t have missed anything too important. Women, after all, had been having healthy babies even before Hippocrates, let alone What to Expect. Her European sojourn had featured lots of walking, often with the backpack, so she felt generally well, apart from the daily puking, but that was starting to fade, too—first one fairly good day per week, then three, then five. She had money—that was one thing she didn’t have to wring her hands over. She was supposed to be traveling in Europe, staying in hotels, and eating in restaurants. It couldn’t cost more to stay in one faded mill town, rent an apartment, and keep still. She was not expected home for two months and at Dartmouth for three. These were problems to be addressed, surely. But she had time.

  The next day, restored by more sleep and more showers, she went out and found a furnished apartment to rent, in one of the old textile mills that were being converted to residences. The agent was eager to get bodies in while the construction continued, then out before she hoped (insanely, Portia thought) to sell the units as condos, probably by the fall. Did Portia have pets? Did she smoke? No and no. Was she employed? the woman asked worriedly.

  “I’m a writer,” said Portia. “I’m working on a book.”

  She was, in fact, working on a book. She was working on The Pickwick Papers, which she borrowed from the Lawrence City Library, checking it out instead of the mindless fare she’d originally gone in for. Reading her way through Dickens—Pickwick to Edwin Drood—seemed like a serious project for an English major who had never taken on anything but A Christmas Carol, and that mainly in the form of Albert Finney’s Scrooge. In her apartment, which had been furnished in nouveau mismatched castoff, she lay on the faintly malodorous couch and began the picaresque, finishing it three days later. Then she took it back and exchanged it for Oliver Twist.

  Portia had called her mother on Christmas Day and New Year’s, both times from chilly pay phones located on broad central European boulevards. She called now from the public phone in the library and spoke of thick hot chocolate in the cafés and the smell of chestnuts cooking over coals in the vendors’ carts, the boorish American boys who had tagged along with them for a few days, from Paris to Brussels and then on to Munich… details she pulled from the bulletin board in
the library basement, events and fund-raisers and church sales, promising her mother that she felt fine, felt safe, was happy, would call again soon. She was reasonably assured that the old-fashioned rotary phones in the Hartland house would not betray her secret. She was thinking, she might say, of writing to Dartmouth, delaying her return until the summer term or perhaps even the fall. Dartmouth wouldn’t care if she moved things around or even—if it came to that—whether or not she graduated with her class. That was the point of the Dartmouth Plan, to let her education alter with new interests and circumstances and be personal and idiosyncratic. It was a great thing, actually. And did she mention how educational it all was? The Mozart museum? The villa where the Wannsee Conference had been held?

  It shocked her, how convincing she was, how pleased with herself she sounded. It shocked her how easily she parried Susannah’s objections, which were first resentful of the added time away (from school? from her?) and the apparent longevity of Tom’s affections, then increasingly resigned to the distance, both physical (away from her) and emotional (between the two of them).

  Portia finished Oliver Twist and moved on to The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.

  She needed bigger clothes. A book in the library said she ought to be taking folic acid, so she took it.

  A woman and her sister moved in next door. The sister had Down syndrome and liked to play checkers. Portia, after a game or two, figured out how to lose stealthily.

  She finished Nicholas Nickleby and started The Old Curiosity Shop.

  In March, she found a doctor in an old Victorian on Haverill Street with a downright Dickensian sign out front: SMITHFIELD, BEERKIN, AND NOGGS, INFERTILITY AND OBSTETRICS.

  Hers was Beerkin, and he saw her first in an office that had once been the house’s front parlor, complete with fireplace and window seat. “Who have you been seeing up until now?” he asked her, noting that she was probably at sixteen weeks.