The Girl's Guide to Homelessness

by Brianna Karp

  I was tight on funds since being laid off again, though I was picking up temp work. If I was careful budgeting my paychecks, perhaps I could bring Matt out to California for Christmas, as we’d planned, but it would be iffy from there, and we’d probably have to stay in the trailer. There would be no money for presents and a hotel or a similar rental for a couple of days over the holiday, especially if we wanted to eat. Matt didn’t want to spend Christmas in a trailer. It would depress him, he said. He was already willing to leave his daughter with Lori for her first Christmas, so that he could come out here and marry me, but it was just too much for me to expect him to spend Christmas in the trailer and be away from his daughter. He wanted to rent a cabin in the mountains or something, to feel like it was a real holiday. I knew how important Christmas was to him—it was his favorite holiday and had always held a special meaning for him; it represented memories of better times for his family, in his childhood.

  Granted, I’d never celebrated a Christmas before (my last attempt had, after all, resulted in Dennis breaking up with me two days before), so I didn’t really comprehend the full magnitude of what was, after all, just another day. I mean, we were both atheists, and while there was definitely something to be said for tradition, and I wanted my first Christmas to be with Matt, I supposed I shouldn’t make it an issue. I wouldn’t be able to afford to give him a fairy-tale cabin in the snow for Christmas, so if he needed to spend it with Kelsey, then he should.

  We agreed that he should stay in Scotland and celebrate with Kelsey while I continued to save up until we could afford to bring him back to California. I would have next year, and every year for the rest of our lives, after all.

  I set out putting the extra temp money to good use instead, choosing Matt’s Christmas presents carefully. For someone who was never allowed to celebrate birthdays or holidays, I’ve always prided myself on giving meaningful gifts.

  We’d visited the Circle, a historic circular block lined with antiques shops and ice cream parlors, in the city of Orange on the second day of his very first visit. I wanted to show him something quaint and beautiful and quint-essentially American apple pie, besides a Walmart. We’d spent hours wandering through the antiques shops, pointing out the things we’d buy to furnish our fixer-upper one day, when we’d have no worries in the world, least of all about money. He loved anything Georgian, and I adored Victorian stuff, but not fussy Victorian. I loved overstuffed, tufted leather gentleman’s club chairs, dark woods like mahogany and cherry, chandeliers and rich, deep colors. We zeroed in on all the same things, and he could tell just by looking at a piece whether it was truly of the era, or a reproduction.

  He pressed his palms and nose against a glass case, like a little boy, and homed in on a first edition of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He dreamed of owning his own library, as did I, but he didn’t want the books to read. That was for me. No, he wanted a wall of only beautiful, antique, leather-bound, gold-embossed books. He wanted them so that he could feel like a classy, well-bred, rich gentleman. He wanted that first edition simply to own it, to smell its ancient pages and binding and know that he was, in a very small way, part of something old and grand, from a more nostalgic time and place, if not a better one.

  “I’ll buy you that book, one day!” I insisted. He laughed at my ridiculousness—that book may as well have been the moon—but I repeated my assertion earnestly. And then we wrapped our arms around each others’ waists and continued up the block, speculating in our most silly manner on the grand Victorian carriage we’d own one day, with a hefty Shire draft horse to pull it, and we’d let Matt drive it around in a top hat and a monocle, insisting that everyone in upstate New York address him by the title of “Lord Barnes,” as though he were a Duke or something. And he’d have a grand study that looked like something out of From Hell, the Jack the Ripper movie, with a cabinet of curiosities and a biology lab and exotic old instruments. I’d have a phonograph with a huge morning glory horn and a four-poster canopy bed, and an art deco vanity with a giant round mirror and guilloche hairbrushes and empty perfume bottles, and a window seat with long, green velvet curtains, where the sun spread over the bench like butter. I’d play the piano badly and he’d sit in his study full of old books without reading them, and bouncing Kelsey on his knee. It would be perfect, even if it was all a dream for now. We had agreed together, it was a perfect day.

  “We’re going to be New Yawkuhs, baby!” I’d squeal, intentionally mispronouncing the word to sound like I had a tough New York accent.

  “New Yokers.” He failed miserably at the accent.

  “No, honey. You sound more like a Southerner. New Yawk. Yawwwk!”

  “New Yoke.”

  We collapsed into gales of laughter every time we did this bit. It never got old.

  “Yawk.”

  “Yoke.”

  I went back to Orange and, with a lot of haggling, bought that book. I also got us a huge 110-year-old art nouveau photo album, all bound in leather and brass, with softly browning pages and gilt edges. We’d talked about starting a scrapbook of our life together, and I figured that now was a good time to start.

  Lastly, I picked out an engagement ring for him. I’d told him, back when he slipped mine on my finger, that I wanted to.

  “I don’t get why the woman has all the fun and gets all the tokens of eternal love and affection. I want you to have one, too.” He thought it was the sweetest thing ever, and told me that it was just another thing he loved about me. Never before had he been with a woman who would have even considered that.

  He already had a signet ring that his mother had given him ages ago, upon his graduation. I’d asked him if he wanted to pick out his own engagement ring, but he asked me to surprise him. The only guidelines that he offered me were that it be unique, and preferably a Georgian antique.

  It took ages for me to find. The Georgians weren’t as big on rings as the later Victorians and Edwardians, especially not rings made of precious metals. In the Georgian era, I learned, those sorts of rings were liable to get you mugged and to get your throat cut. But finally, after an excruciating search, I found it. It suited Matt and his taste to a tee.

  The ring dated to the 1820s. It was gold with a dark patina and an oval bloodstone, a deep green stone flecked with shimmering bits of red. Either side of the shank boasted two serpents, twisted into figure eights that called to mind the infinity symbol. Serpents, I learned in my research, were Georgian-era symbols of eternal love and commitment. In other cultures, they also represented fertility and wisdom. The bloodstone, on the other hand, was used in healing and protection by the ancient Egyptians, Aztecs and Greeks. It used to be the birthstone for both March and December (our birth months). It is also known as the “Stone of Courage” and supposedly revitalizes love, relationships and friendships. This was Matt’s ring, all right. Symbology was important to the Georgians. He’d love it.

  Right around this time, a neighbor also held a garage sale. Included among the boxes of random junk were hundreds of her granddaughter’s baby clothes. I bought as many of the cute ones as I could afford. Some still had tags on them; some had clearly only been worn once or twice. I stocked up on outfits in sizes ranging from newborn to two years old. Matt would be putting a lot of his money into child support for Lori, who had never had a job in her life and would, he assured me, be living the rest of her life in a council flat and receiving benefits. I was sure that these clothes would come in very handy. Perhaps Lori would even see them as a peace offering. Over gtalk that night, I listed all the new clothes to him and told him I would try to get them shipped over in time for Christmas. He was excited about the clothes, sad that we wouldn’t be together for Christmas, but at least he’d get to be with Kelsey. We’d waited this long to be married, though, and we could hold out a smidge or two longer. All the waiting and hassle would be worth it.

  I’d noticed, a few months earlier, that I’d been putting on a lot of weight, and that my skin, already no
t in the greatest state, had erupted into the worst series of acne breakouts I’d ever had. I was also tired and listless a lot, and when I wasn’t doing temp work, I stayed in bed sleeping for up to eighteen hours at a time—instead of sending out résumés for permanent jobs, as I should have been doing. I just didn’t want to move. Half the time, I felt too exhausted to drive back to Riverside from my temp job in Irvine. At one point, I pulled off the road into a post office parking lot, crawled into the back of my car and slept for hours until I felt as if I could make it home without veering off the road.

  I figured it was a residual effect of the crummy diet I’d been on for nearly a year. Living off affordable stuff like ramen noodles and fast food had taken its toll. I had been slowly gaining weight over my year of homelessness, but now my weight was skyrocketing up. I was bloating all over, and my breasts and thighs and stomach were beginning to boast the beginning of stretch marks. Even the bones in my nose felt as if they were spreading across my face—I felt paranoid and gross. I cut out coffee, sweets and burgers altogether, and forced myself to drag my ass to Costco, stocking up on every type of fruit and vegetable I could fit into my shopping cart, along with cartons and cartons of fruit juice and water. Surely, this would help.

  But as the months floated by in a quasi-haze, I was still putting on weight, and I was still exhausted. None of it made sense.

  My belly, in particular, was expanding, and it didn’t feel squishy and wobbly like fat, but hard and distended. I laid flat on my back in bed one night, staring down at it. Could I have cancer of the belly? Was there even such a thing as cancer of the belly? I pressed my finger into it as hard as possible. It felt numb. Numb and hard. A terrifying thought flashed across my mind, but I pushed it out as fast as I could. Surely I couldn’t be. I had my IUD. Those suckers were more reliable than the Pill. They were, like, 99.9999 percent reliable, right?

  Just to put my mind at ease, I decided to take a pregnancy test the next day. It was stupid, really—a complete waste of money. There was absolutely no way. I’d made sure to cover my bases. But then, I’d take the test and I’d feel better, and you can’t put a price on peace of mind.

  I stared down at the pink line on the test.

  There was absolutely no way this was possible.

  I took a second test the following morning. It was supposed to be slightly more accurate in the morning.

  That little fucking pink line was still there. I wanted to go haywire on it, smash it in a million pieces like I was Arnold Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris.

  Hysterically, I thought of what Matt had told me, that he and his first wife had tried to have children, but couldn’t. Though the doctors did tests and told him it was she who was infertile, he secretly harbored a ton of guilt and uncertainty over it. He was always half-sure that they had been wrong, that he was the one to blame. When we found out about Lori’s pregnancy, I had tried to lighten the mood by laughing nervously.

  “Hey, at least we know now that you’re not the infertile one!”

  I wasn’t laughing at the moment, though. This was absolutely surreal.

  Clearly, Matt has the most fertile sperm in the entire world.

  The first thing I thought to do was to call Planned Parent hood. I wanted somebody to give me an explanation, dammit!

  It seemed to take forever to get a nurse on the line. She immediately asked me a bunch of questions about my cycle to determine just how far along I was.

  Well, let’s see. That was kind of hard for me to figure out. I’d still been having a period, but it had transitioned from a monthly, hard-core, bloody tidal wave lasting ten days at a time, into light, pink, irregular spotting. I’d been under the impression that this was normal; they’d told me this was a possibility when I’d had the IUD inserted. Most women started out with a few months of longer, crampier, heavier periods, and then it often tapered off into normal or even lighter periods, only lasting for a few days. This had sounded all right to me at the time; I figured I could deal with a little extra pain for a few months. I just took more aspirin until my uterus felt so dead you could probably kick me in the gut and I wouldn’t have noticed.

  I tried to think back to the last time I’d had one of the heavy periods. I thought it might have been twelve or fourteen weeks earlier…maybe sixteen? I’d never kept particularly close track of such things. I didn’t need to. I had safe sex, right?

  I vaguely thought I might have had some light spotting the week before Matt flew back to the States, the week I was on CNN with Nicole Lapin. My head hurt. I couldn’t remember.

  “OK, so you think you might be somewhere between twelve and sixteen weeks? Then you’re just finishing up your first trimester.”

  “Screw that. More importantly, why am I pregnant?!” Clearly, this woman didn’t grasp the gravity of the situation, or the real issue here. “I have an IUD in! That’s supposed to be absolutely the most effective form of birth control to date! It sits there in your uterus, there’s nothing to forget, and you don’t get pregnant! The end!”

  “Well, this happens occasionally. It’s more common than you might think. Many nulliparous women find that their IUD can be dislodged or expelled within the first year.”

  It sounded like she’d said leprous. I was a leper now? I sure felt like one.

  “Nulliparous. Women who’ve never had children before. About 10 percent of them, within the first year, lose their IUDs. Either their body expels it or it is placed incorrectly and can move up into your uterus. Once it’s dislodged from your cervix, all bets are off. So while you may have been operating under the assumption that you were 99.9 percent covered, for your first year you’re really only 90 percent likely to avoid pregnancy. And if it was somehow dislodged, then you’re just as likely to get pregnant as if you were using nothing at all.”

  “So what do I do?!”

  “You should probably see a doctor for an ultrasound.”

  And how was I supposed to do that? I live in a trailer. I have no health insurance. I just spent most of my money on Christmas presents. “The IUD may still be inside you, up in the uterus with the fetus. Unless it’s been expelled. There’s no danger of miscarriage if it’s in your uterus, though. IUDs don’t pose any harm to embryos or fetuses; that’s a common myth. In fact, they probably won’t try to remove it until you’re much further along in your pregnancy, or even until after the baby is born, if you decide to carry it full term. Trying to remove a migrated IUD during pregnancy can actually cause a spontaneous miscarriage, so it’s generally safer to just leave it there. But, yeah, you should get an ultrasound.”

  “Right,” I muttered dully. “OK. I guess that’s it.”

  “Have a nice day, good luck and congratulaaations!”

  She sounded very singsong-y and perky. I wanted to punch her. Congratulations? This couldn’t possibly have come at a worse time.

  Instead, I heard myself replying, “Thank you very much.” Even stranger, I kind of realized I meant it. I should have been angrier, but through the complete shock, I was feeling a bit of elation? Excitement? Anticipation? Whatever it was, it came with a hefty side helping of terror. But still. Not entirely unhappy.

  Chapter Twenty

  I had to tell Matt, somehow. He’d had some problem the previous week: His internet connection had stopped working, and the company was telling him they’d have to deliver a new SIM card, or something. He’d taken my laptop back to Scotland with him, since his was ancient and on its last legs, and I’d managed to pick up a cheap, tiny Netbook. The 92 percent–sized keyboard took some getting used to, as did reading on a tinier screen, but I actually found it adorable and much lighter to carry around, so I didn’t mind the downgrade.

  Matt couldn’t get online now from his home, though, and had to visit the town library if he wanted to contact me, or text me from the corner of his street, since he couldn’t get cell reception in his f lat. The library would be closing down very soon for Christmas, and he hated to bring Kelsey outside the f lat if it
was snowing, which it often was now. Huntly was having the worst winter in thirty years. Normally, it frosted over a bit, maybe snowed in February for a week or two, and then it was over. But here it was mid-December, and flurries of snow were burying the town, and more was predicted. Matt worried about Kelsey getting too cold. So, for a week, there had been very little contact, though he sent me loving texts and emails every couple of days. His birthday was in a few days, also, a week before Christmas, and I wouldn’t even be able to reach him on that day, except via email.

  It didn’t seem right to tell him something so important online or in a text. I knew that he wouldn’t want to hear it that way, though I also knew that he’d probably be thrilled to hear it at all. He was, after all, the one who had been pushing for me to have kids ASAP. His desire for children with me hadn’t seemed to lessen with Kelsey’s arrival. I’d sort of hoped that it would, that all the screaming and diaper-changing and spitting up would make him think twice about having another baby so soon, but I’d been wrong. He still brought it up far too often. I was still batting around all the pragmatic considerations, but I imagined in response to this news, he would only get as far as hearing “I’m pregnant,” and probably hit the ceiling with joy, the way he went on about having babies with me. He was always waxing poetic about it.

  “You’ll be adorable! And we can have pregnancy sex! You with your little humpable pregnant belly. You’ll be glowing and just as sexy as you are now, don’t worry.”

  I didn’t feel sexy, or glowy. I felt greasy and exhausted and queasy and as if I had giant cratering acne scars popping up all over my face. As excited as I was allowing myself to become, I hated the actual feeling of being pregnant.

  In any event, I had to tell him in person, somehow. It’s what he’d want, and it would be one of those moments you remember forever, right? Like that I Love Lucy episode where Lucy wants to settle heftily on Ricky’s lap, wrap her arms around his neck, and whisper softly, “Ricky, darling, we’re going to have a baby!”