I told my mother about Nicole’s new Triple Five Soul sweatshirt and Candy’s plans to go abroad next year. Pages rustled in the background. My mother told me how Mrs. Wilson from down the street thinned all her hair out, leaving braids in too long.
“She’ll be back by Easter,” my mother said. “She won’t let anybody else do her hair for Easter Sunday.”
“Uh-huh,” I started to agree, but my mother had already interrupted herself to read out loud from the catalogue she was thumbing through. Health crystals, mood-balancing jewelry, a guide to spiritual belly dancing.
“Spiritual belly dancing, Angel. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
I imagined myself dancing for a minute, and then I imagined my belly fat, swollen, with stretch marks, and felt most unspiritual. I told her I had a test to study for.
“OK,” she conceded. “You should go out later, though. Your horoscope says it’s a good day for Pisces to be in the right place at the right time.”
I hung up and thought to myself that the right place was two months ago in Rafael’s bedroom, but I wasn’t sure what my horoscope could do about that.
In the morning I skipped a review session and took the C train to Brooklyn to visit my father. He opened the door to my still-raised fist and seemed pleasantly surprised to see me.
“Angel. To what do I owe the honor, Miss Lady?”
My father had called me Miss Lady since I was four years old, and though I had not been prissy enough to deserve the nickname since then, it stuck. Uncomfortably, dishonestly, but it stuck. I walked in without answering his question. My visits were always like this. I liked to disrupt him. Interrupting people was the only way I could be sure of my presence in their lives.
My father’s apartment had been painted red since the last time I was in it. I could still smell the newness of the paint. It looked as though he had painted it himself; whoever did it had forgotten a drop-cloth, and the furniture was flecked with red.
“Better not let the cops in here, Daddy. They’ll think you killed someone.”
He didn’t hear me. Instead, I heard the pop of two bottle tops and then he walked into the living room and handed me a soda. My father drank only the kind that came in glass bottles; he believed aluminum was unhealthy, and wouldn’t drink or eat anything that came out of a can.
“I want you to hear something,” he said, before I had a chance to open my mouth. I occupied myself by running my tongue around the rim of the bottle. My father had his back to me and was messing with the ancient stereo in the corner of his living room.
My father was into radio then. My father was always into something; he was a collector of hobbies and habits. Sometimes I wondered how my parents could have been in the same room for long enough to conceive me, let alone be married for four years, but my mother had amassed her own fair share of collections over the years. I imagined their marriage was just a phase during which they had collected each other until something more interesting came along. A year ago my father was into the stock market, but then he invested the few hundred dollars he’d made initially in a company that marketed giant tomatoes, and lost it all. Now he planned to get famous doing radio commercials.
The tape started. I watched its wheels spin as my father’s buttery baritone echoed out of the brown speakers, their wood paneling peeling at the edges. In two minutes of tape, my father sounded convincing selling: cars, liquor, a swanky restaurant downtown. He sounded unconvincing selling: study aids, season tickets for the Knicks, diet pills. He sounded downright ridiculous selling: golfing equipment, stain remover, the Daily News.
“What do you think, Miss Lady?” he asked when the tape stopped.
I said, “Daddy, I’m pregnant.”
My father said nothing, finished his soda in a few sips, and rested it on top of the speaker. He left the room and I heard creaking in the kitchen, the squeak of hinges, and then the rustling of cabinet clutter. He emerged triumphantly, smiling, and handed me a sticky, half-gone bottle of molasses.
“Take a spoonful of this every day, it’s good for the baby. Your mother took it when she was pregnant, and look how good you turned out.”
From the looks of the dusty amber thing he had just handed me, the letters on its label faded into nonexistence, my mother had taken her spoonfuls from that very same bottle.
“I might not keep it,” I said.
“Oh.” He looked uncomfortable, as though he wondered why I was telling him this. It was simple. I had screwed up, I wanted to punish somebody. He sat beside me on the couch and held my hand.
“Whatever you think is best, baby. You were always the smart one.”
The smart one. That was my other nickname growing up. It was only recently that I had been able to convince people it didn’t necessarily apply, either. I got up.
“I gotta go, Daddy. I’ll call you.”
I walked quickly and let the door slam on his parting fatherly advice.
I wanted to hurt somebody, and so far it wasn’t working. My mother, when all was said and done and she finally found out, would be devastated that she hadn’t been the first to know, but I couldn’t even have that yet. I went to see Rafael not so much because I thought he should know as because he was woundable.
Rafael is an artist, in the most clichéd college-student, nude-self-portraits-on-the-wall kind of way. There are also nude pictures of me on his wall, though I am not identifiable in any of them—an elbow here, a belly button there, an arched brow, the curve of my thigh. The one with my breasts is in his portfolio but didn’t make the wall. “I don’t want other guys staring at my girlfriend’s tits,” he said. He does not, however, mind people looking at the picture of his penis he has pasted to the ceiling, though he did take it down when his little sister came to visit.
Rafael was raised in Miami by Catholic parents who left Cuba just before Castro came to power. His father did work for the League of Cuban Voters, his mother was the president of an anti-Castro society and the most respected woman in the church that he attended twice every Sunday until he left for school. He started sleeping with me the same week that he took down the family portrait beside his bed and replaced it with a photo of Castro. I was not stupid enough to believe this was coincidence. I imagined him on the phone with his mother: No, I’m not a virgin anymore and maybe Castro was right about you and do you know what else, Ma, she’s black, even darker brown than Grandma Margarita, what are you going to do to me now?
Probably this conversation never happened. I didn’t particularly care if it did. I rather relished being his own personal Eve. It felt reckless and romantic. When I played I Never with my cousins over winter break, they raised impressed eyebrows when I drank to both Have you ever devirginized somebody? and Have you ever done it with a Catholic? People thought I was the good kid, but going to college was pretty much the only thing I’d done that they hadn’t.
Now, though, confronted with Rafael, I would have traded all my good grades to know what to say to him. I had gone there to hurt him without knowing that I wasn’t capable of it. He rambled about how we really only had to be part-time next year to finish and we could get an apartment somewhere uptown and he’d just take the train to class and we’d get summer jobs to save money, floundering when he tried to be more specific and making grossly obvious mathematical errors when he tried to compute our budget in his head. He was adorable and lost and I wanted to hold him until he felt better, but then I realized I was the one in trouble.
“Rafael, shut up,” I said.
“I love you,” he said. It was almost an afterthought.
I could hear the subtext to it, the desperate chord underneath. I love you. I love you enough. But I knew what enough turned into. One day you could have enough, and the next you had a house full of mood crystals or an apartment full of the sound of your own voice in stereo.
“I don’t think I’m keeping it,” I told him.
“Angel,” he said, then stopped. I could see him struggling. We’d had this conversation before, in
the theoretical sense. For most of his life he’d been told that abortion was a mortal sin, that to even let a girl do it was to shirk his responsibility as a man and a Christian. Those voices echoed somewhere deep, somewhere I had never been. Then there were the more recent voices: his newly declared agnosticism that called those other voices archaic and self-righteous; the voices that asked who was he to ever tell a woman what to do with her body, as though he were the boss of her. He had been told so much and become so accustomed to his own opinion not mattering that at the critical moment he seemed not to know what his own thoughts on the matter were and couldn’t finish his sentence. Or maybe it had nothing to do with that. Maybe it was just him being selfish the way that most artists are, part drawn to the idea of something that would outlast him, part worried that he couldn’t control it.
“Angel,” he said again.
Usually when I found myself not knowing what to say to make things better, I kissed him instead. If it were anything else he was upset about, I’d be undoing the buttons on his shirt and kissing circles down his chest until the distressing moment was gone, our fingers in each other’s hair, across each other’s bodies. I would lie beneath him and raise my hips to meet his while he breathed into the curve of my neck and kept a hand cupped under my butt. I would bite his earlobe and think I love this boy and Fidel would watch the whole thing silently. Then it would be over and we would breathe heavily and know where we were wounded but not how to make it better.
Instead, I left, and told him I’d call him once I thought about it. I wouldn’t, though; I decided the least I could do was make him call me. I returned to the dorm to find the girls sprawled across the common-area furniture and thought maybe they would do. It was midterm reading week, but no one was actually reading. My friends were eating chips and salsa while an underfed starlet railed against the injustice of life on MTV, buzzing in low volume while Nicole talked over it.
“You know what Laura has now?” she asked.
Value, I thought, but said nothing.
“Some damn two-hundred-dollar jeans. Can you believe? I’m about to donate me an egg.”
“Please, girl. Who you gonna find wants a Nicole egg?” Candy said.
“Well, then you’re about to haul your light ass in there and donate an egg, then cut me a percent.” Nicole continued, “Twenty seems fair. Could get me some cute jeans anyway.”
“Right. Let me go in there and sign Dulce Maria Gutierrez Hernandez on the dotted line and see how fast they throw me out the office. Who knows what could be hiding in DNA with a name like that. Maybe the kid would only get a 1400 and its whole life would be over.” Candy laughed. I felt sick. Nicole kept going.
“Well, there gotta be some rich-ass black people who can’t have their own kids and think my 1500’s worth something. C’mon, Courtney, your parents got money, right? Think they want another kid? A better one?”
Courtney threw a lime Tostito at Nicole. I walked away without them noticing and tried to imagine telling them. Nicole would say to be realistic. She’d go through numbers the way Rafael had tried to, only hers would add up and show how ridiculous the situation would be. She’d tell me we didn’t come this far to screw it up now. Candy would say it was only guilt keeping me from doing what had to be done right now, and then she’d go on a tangent about the government’s attempts to restrict female sexuality, and when I was about to walk away and she realized what she was doing she’d apologize and then have nothing left to say. Courtney would just keep asking what I wanted, which wouldn’t be any more helpful than me asking my damn self.
I knocked on Laura’s door, not sure what I wanted from her. She looked startled to see it was me knocking; it had been months since we’d had a real conversation. We’d spoken only in passing, when at all: hello, cold today, isn’t it, psych midterm’s going to be a real pain in the ass.
“What do you want?” she asked, not quite rudely but headed there.
“Can I come in?” I said. “I need to talk.”
Maybe she could tell it was serious, because she opened the door all the way and moved aside so that I could enter. Her first few checks had mainly gone to her mother, to paying off her loans, but the last one she’d clearly spent redecorating. The cheap navy comforter had been replaced by something purple and woven. Egyptian cotton, I thought, without knowing where the term had come from. The photos on her walls were not of us anymore; they were of her at clubs I’d never been to with girls I didn’t recognize. Her pajamas were screaming Nick & Nora and her hair had recently been highlighted, and I had to look at the floor in order to pretend she was the same girl I’d once been friends with, the girl who couldn’t say “Blow Pop” because she thought it sounded dirty, the girl who’d been confused about how it was possible to pee while wearing a tampon before Nicole broke it down for her. I told her the whole story, with the vomiting and the not knowing and my mother’s health crystals and my father’s car commercials, and Rafael being all beautiful and tortured and useless. She nodded in a kind of horrified sympathy, and then asked:
“What do you need me to do?”
I needed her to stop looking at me. I needed her eyes to not be blue and liquid. I needed her to understand what she couldn’t possibly: how it felt to not be her. I asked her to come with me when I got rid of it, and she was surprised but nodded.
“I’m asking you,” I said, “because I can’t really tell them. I was thinking, though, that maybe you know what it feels like to almost be a mother.”
I let the door close as she sat there on her purple comforter, looking not sure whether to feel insulted or understood.
I wanted to schedule it in Brooklyn, on the off chance that someone I knew would be at the Planned Parenthood in Manhattan, but Brooklyn was all booked up and they sent me downtown. The whole place was pink pink pink: shell-pink carpeting, puke-pink plastic chairs that wobbled if you squirmed, pale pink walls. I signed in and took a number, imagining I was anyplace else. The DMV, backstage at a beauty pageant, the take-out counter at a restaurant. The lobby was full of mostly girls, with the occasional boyfriend. A boy who looked no older than fifteen patted the round belly of his even younger-looking girlfriend. Another twirled a strand of his girlfriend’s hair while she read through a brochure on contraceptives and occasionally looked up nervously, as though scared someone would see her there. A grown man squeezed the hand of the young woman next to him, who looked panicked and terrified.
Laura looked panicked and terrified, too, mesmerized by the tacky not-quite-tragedy of the waiting room. I imagined (this is what we did with Laura then: we never asked, we imagined) the doctor’s office she’d visited to be screened and tested and have her eggs removed. I imagined it blue, with soft music in the background and fresh flowers on the waiting-room table, next to the New Yorker. I imagined people smiled more and struck up conversation easily. The girls there to donate would feel kinship with Laura, and if the women there to receive were inclined to be jealous of her youth and beauty and fertility, their jealousy would recede once they realized they could afford to buy her.
I wondered if Laura was uncomfortable there. Her childhood was probably free clinics like the one we were sitting in. The shyness of her voice, the way she sometimes slipped up and had to fix a grammatical error—these hinted that maybe she was what my father would have called white trash if my mother weren’t there to say it was a term analogous to nigger and he ought to apologize for using it. Impostor or not, she could hide her inadequacy behind salon-lightened hair and a thousand-dollar leather coat. Sitting next to her, I did not feel analogous. They paid her for her potential babies, and they were about to vacuum mine out of me. I felt queasy. I hoped they would forget to call my number. I didn’t want or not want the baby, I didn’t have any grand political problem with abortion, I didn’t have any religion to speak of and thought that if God existed and expected me to follow any particular rules, I was probably going to hell anyway, and not for this. I just didn’t want to be there, didn’t
want to deal with it, didn’t want to be any emptier than I already felt. I wanted to be full. That was one of the things the girls in Laura’s egg-donor group complained about: the painful part of the drugs they had to take. They felt “full” in their abdomens, swollen with potential for life. I had wanted that forever and had never felt it yet.
“I don’t want to do this,” I said.
“Me neither,” she said, which didn’t make a lot of sense, but I didn’t really care what she was trying to say right then. I looked at her for a second. Her fingertips were pressed into her temples, and I could see her nails, the French polish on them chipping slightly, and her roots, a few shades darker than the blond of the rest of her hair. Logic was never going to save us, but I started talking anyway.
“If I took summer classes, I could graduate in August. Before the baby. I have good grades, I could get an OK job.”
Not a spy. You couldn’t spy with a baby. It would cry and blow your cover.
Laura looked the other way.
“I’ve done this before,” she said.
“This?” I asked.
“The waiting-room thing. With my older sister, when we were in high school. Twice. She wasn’t one of those people who got emotional about it, she just needed me for the ride home.”
“What was it like?” I asked.
“The doctors were sweeter to her than I was,” Laura said. “I was sitting there waiting for her, and I kept thinking everyone in that room knew someone who knew someone who knew me, and they were all thinking it would be me next, and I’d show them, it never would be.”
“It’s not you,” I said. I looked down at my scuffed red and black Pumas. I thought about kicking her, for reminding me where we came from, for reminding me that I used to think of her as one of us.
“Isn’t it?” she asked.
“It’s me. You might as well not even be here.”
“Then why’d you ask me?”
“Why’d you come?”
“What am I supposed to say?”
“I don’t know. What am I supposed to do with a baby?”
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self Page 7