Maybe I had a fever, I wasn’t sure. There were cramps in my abdomen, like mice squinching through narrow tubes.
“It’s food poisoning,” she said definitively. “That cafeteria is shameful. I keep telling you not to eat there.” She thought for a moment, then asked if I wanted her to wake up the RA.
I shook my head. That would just be the beginning of a chain with every next person passing off responsibility, right through to my parents, who’d end up handing all decision-making back to me anyway. “You should go,” I said. “You’ll miss your train.”
Ellen considered my advice, but some fundamental sense of ethics prevented her from taking it. She dropped her bag, opened my closet, and dug through my suitcase for clothes. She helped me slip on a pair of sweatpants and replace my T-shirt. When it came time for feet, she knelt on one knee and sucked back her lips with determination, manipulating the shoes, never once checking her watch, though surely she was thinking she might miss her train.
The transaction was extraordinary, not because we were strangers, but because the business of helping was obviously new to her. If I regretted having to inconvenience her with private problems, I appreciated the changes in her as she condescended to assist me. There was a give to her stiffness, an elongating of her cheeks, a paling of her complexion. She looked smaller when not so confident, and genteel, like a lady from a mannerist portrait. I thought to tell her, but it would not have come out right.
“Okay, let’s get up,” she said, taking my elbow. “One, two, three.”
There was blood on the sheets. I tried to cover it, but my hand skimmed the blanket ineffectually. She could not have missed it, though she said nothing. Despite my obvious abnormality and her absorbing fear of contagion, she conducted herself graciously, which I decided had to do with good breeding.
There happened to be two available cabs rolling down Tenth Street. Ellen hailed both at once with a superhuman whistle and a mighty wave of a mighty arm. She put me in the first. “You gonna be all right?” she asked.
I managed to say yes. “Sorry about your train.”
“There’s another one in fifteen minutes.” She handed me a twenty-dollar bill. I declined but she insisted. “If anything happens to you, who knows who they’ll stick me with.”
She got into the car behind mine, and the two cabs waited side by side at the red light on the corner. I sat, she sat, each of us awkwardly chauffeured. I imagined what it was to be Ellen Christopolos of the ubiquitous E.S.C. monogram, charging up to Grand Central to catch the 7:55 to Rye, popping into Zaro’s Bread Basket and ordering with a certainty that was enviable and supreme a toasted raisin bagel and a coffee before buying magazines to breeze through on the train as she anticipated the luxuries that awaited her at home—Jacuzzis and tuna salad with fresh dill and a full-time housekeeper. On Friday night, there would be a movie and Chinese food with her grandparents. On Saturday, a few hours at Saks. No one would have guessed at her association with a hemorrhaging girl. I would have liked to make it up to her somehow, find a way to erase the knowledge she’d received prematurely concerning the dizzying and rancid phenomenon of carnal life.
The light changed, and her cab flew east across Tenth, while mine made the right down Broadway. I could see by the ponderous set of her jaw that she’d been making a picture of me as well. She’d been envisioning the squalid uncertainty of modern disease and remedy, the putrid working back to probable cause, the foul business of changing and cleaning bloodstained linen, the dismal occupation of a life without guardians, without ethnic net or religious shield, without refuge or resource. How unnecessarily expanded her mind must have been to review a life as luckless as mine. How relieved she surely was not to be me, poor and parentless, desired but defiled by the opposite sex.
The cab left me at University Place near Health Services, which of course was closed at seven-thirty in the morning, since any respectable student illness occurs during business hours. The walk to the Astor Place subway was macabre, with chained storefronts and cyclones of trash whisking down the Eighth Street corridor. I would have taken a cab, but I thought to save Ellen’s leftover money for later. I must have thought things might get worse later. I recall being cold except for the parts of me that were hot. I recall the sheer slope of subway stairs going from street level down to the train platform. I know the train arrived: there’s an image of the owlish face of the Number 6 implanted in my head. And the train’s crippled dynamics, the labored jerk and groan of the brakes, the spitting inside-out puff of the doors, the garbled declarations by some recently paroled conductor, the porpoise-gray benches, the scattered souls.
Who knows where I was headed. I seemed to have had an East Side hospital in mind. Lenox Hill maybe. I was born at Lenox Hill.
The streets between Fifth and Madison Avenues on the Upper East Side are like halls of windows reflecting infinitely onto themselves, canals of pink-gold boxes repeating across the narrow streets. I sat on the stoop of a brownstone near Mount Sinai waiting for nine to come so I could go and meet Dr. Mitchell. Maybe that’s not right. Maybe time does not come. Maybe you come to time, or through it. Or maybe you are a wheel and it is a wheel and periodically you line up.
July made sense. Hadn’t I felt unwell in August? I’d been nauseous all the time. And then in September there was this tenderness, an ache disentombed like being bruised all over. What I’d felt were messages, weaving and unweaving, a new thing: half me, half Rourke. I would have guessed such a mix would survive, but how could it when those who brought it into being could not find the purpose to carry on? How was a baby to be strong when everyone else was weak? As a child I’d wondered such things too, and often.
There are those who would claim that I’d done nothing wrong, that it had been an accident, that nothing was killed, but rather, something had ceased to live. But the same people who say things such as, It wasn’t a baby; it was a zygote, also say, It’s cruel to wear fur. Then again, those who advocate killing animals for sport or fashion are equally hypocritical to speak of the sanctity of life. Maybe a deer has feelings, maybe the origin of a child is in the protoplasm; frankly, it’s impossible to know. And yet, people keep trying to assign logic to sensation and consciousness in beings and entities other than themselves.
No one can say for certain that the grief of failed life does not enchase the walls of a woman. God knows you see so much sadness out there. There’s proof enough of peculiar transmissions if you choose to seek it. I’ve heard that cows release adrenaline into their flesh as they’re slaughtered, which in turn can alter you when you eat it, and organ transplant recipients can develop the dead donor’s habits.
I did not have to envision a dead infant to make myself sad; I had only to think of what had happened in fact to what in fact had been: a minuscule cluster of cells artlessly awaiting the assistance of its life system, its world and its home, seeking sustenance—whether hormonal, electrical, or food-like in nature—but receiving nothing—nothing consistent, nothing adequate. I had only to think of atrophy in me, and my heart broke again, and worse.
The very brevity of the thing’s existence was sacred to me—fine force and gossamer essence. In its economy there was a lesson I needed to learn having to do with windows of opportunity being fantastically small, with powers I had that were hidden. It had never occurred to me that I possessed such aptitude for damage. For several days I cried for Rourke and I cried for me and I cried most especially for the soul that had come and gone like a solitary flicker of the tiniest light. When I thought of the fluttering quills of an angel, consecrated and divine, flapping, flapping, slower and slower to sleep, I cried until the water in me dried; then I did not cry again. For years I did not cry.
“Date of last menstrual period?”
I did not know.
“Form of birth control?”
“The pill.”
The nurse was preparing a needle. She wore a plastic heart pin that leaned to one side. Like a heart blowing. “Did you eat
today?”
“She’s not getting general,” another nurse said. “She’s getting Demerol.”
“You’re Dr. Mitchell’s patient?”
“Yes.”
“Dr. Mitchell’s nice.” The nurse drew blood, her head bent. Her hair was dense and coarse, like chocolate wisteria, twining like woody vines into a twist. Her skin was caramel with acne scars that were blackish by comparison. I asked her name. She said Lourdes.
“Are you Puerto Rican?”
“I am,” she answered as she snapped the rubber tourniquet off my arm. Her eyes drooped lazily. “Open your fist for me, baby.”
The syringe filled rib-red and she withdrew the needle, pressing cotton to the prick. I wondered if her life was nice. Maybe there were bridal showers and dowager aunts. A mother with hypertension and a cherished dog. “It’s a hard decision, honey,” she said. “I’ve had to make it myself.”
“I didn’t make the decision,” I confided. “The baby made it for me.”
In the procedure room I lay with my legs strapped in and spread apart, knees over padded stirrups, blue plastic sheeting over knees, green foam slippers imprinted with smiley faces flipping halfway off my feet, and a needle with a tube shooting out of the back of one hand—a far cry from his arms in the dark. There were strangers in scrubs, monitoring, arranging. Faceless nurses tearing plastic corners from sterilized utensil packs, laying instruments on metal rolling trays. Their hands were professional hands, like the hands of casino dealers, making your game their business, making your condition real, making it impossible for you to pretend otherwise. Eyes modestly lowered, eyes that know your truth. You think your story is original—it’s not.
“I’m here to help Dr. Mitchell,” a voice said. “I’m Dr. Burstein, the anesthesiologist.” Dr. Burstein was tall. He seemed to teeter, or perhaps it was me, teetering beneath. “I’m going to give you something to help you relax,” he drawled. He lowered himself onto a stool by my shoulder, then shot a filled needle into the top of the IV bag. I wondered if the feeling in his fingers was the same one you get from pulling the trigger on a pistol—the swift push, the mellow thrust. How omnipotent, to narcotize a body with such a small gesture. My arm went cold, my wrist and shoulder went cold. I could smell it behind my sinuses, and taste it. Was it possible to smell and taste it? There was a noise, a papery slap, then a growing whoosh like crickets.
Do people call you Eveline? I opened my eyes. I could not recall having closed them. Dr. Burstein was watching me. It occurred to me to ask how much time had passed. He appeared connected to time and reliable that way. Or do they call you Eve?
Evie, I answered, carefully. I couldn’t tell if I was speaking very loud or very soft.
Evie, how sweet. Can you tell me how you feel, Evie?
I feel really good.
He laughed, and everyone laughed. You might feel a little pressure. Another voice, Dr. Mitchell’s. I looked to see her. She was sitting on a stool or standing low at the base of the bed to my right and people were handing things to her from opposite sides.
Dr. Burstein patted my arm. Good girl, he said. You’re doing fine.
It was nice of him to call me good girl, nice of them all; they were all very kind. It had been a long time since anyone had been kind that way. And then I fell back, and I began to waltz through the wonder of my own sensation, daring to tour regions ordinarily avoided, hunting despite the promise of pain for the wound he’d made. I discovered a lesion of such fury that it was positively viral, like an envenomed entirety, like daylight showing inside a blown balloon.
“You okay to walk?”
Mark met me at the door they admit and release you through. He led me past the girls who had not yet gone in, and he took my bag.
“Here, let me get that for you.”
In his hand my pocketbook looked like all the other girls’ pocketbooks, lilting and suspicious and possibly filled with germy sanitary supplies and other female stuff. In my pocket was a tissue full of Oreos. You get cookies at the end, and Dixie cups of juice like in nursery school. At the end you lie in recliners and watch game shows on a television bolted to the ceiling.
Mark grabbed the tissue before I could throw it away. “What’s this?” he inquired. “Are you supposed to eat these?” He placed them in his pocket. “You’ll eat them in the car.”
He protected me from an anemic flank of abortion protesters on the curb. They shuffled around rattling oak-tag posters with photos of mutilated babies, and they wore ankle-length down coats, though it wasn’t even cold out. The guard said they came every day.
When I was little, my mother and her friends took me with them on a trip to march on Washington, D.C. There was the dieselized rumble of the Greyhound engine and the stench of cheap beer and costly marijuana and the low glandular singing of Janis Joplin’s “Summertime.” Periodically, the driver would pull off the highway and release the passengers onto the shoulder, and everyone would urinate. When hungry they would descend into diners, plunging into booths, terrifying humorless customers, provoking beefy truckers, and confounding nest-headed waitresses by making substitutions, switching seats, paying with penny rolls, and tipping with love poems and pocket contents—jawbreakers and torn snapshots and half-used Chapsticks. If they believed it was the function of the American youth to topple the old guard, to acquaint it with its inequities, to demand that everyone be compassionate and accepting of differences, they neglected to set a good example.
My mother said the march was for women’s rights, for the rights she herself had not had. She’d had to have an abortion in an apartment on East 110th Street shortly after I was born. My parents were too poor for two children. I didn’t even have a crib, just a dresser drawer. When I first learned the story, it made me sad, not for my mother, who recounted it without any desire for sympathy, but for myself. It would have been good to have had a sibling.
That was all I’d been told. But there had been more. Prior to the legalization of abortion in 1973, there was no anesthesia. There were no medics in hygienic disguise, and the equipment that had been used to penetrate a woman’s cervix and pop her amniotic sac might well have been the same object employed to probe slits in car windows when you lock your keys inside. I once heard Aunt Lowie mention this substance they used to spray up there, like a lacquer or an ammonia. Did they use a flashlight to find their way? Did they give you aspirin, or was there whiskey, like in movies about cowboys and soldiers who get limbs amputated? Everyone knows about cowboys and soldiers who’ve had their limbs amputated—these comparatively rare events are frequently memorialized in film and on television. But it’s distasteful to discuss abortions, safe or unsafe, though millions of women have had them, and continue to have them.
At Union Square, Park Avenue turns into Broadway. From the sky you would see not an S exactly, but the limber coil of a pried-apart paper clip. I felt weary. I felt I could not be alone anymore. I’d been staring at dogs lately, each time thinking, A dog would be good.
“Almost home,” Mark said, glancing over.
I had no home. My dorm was not home. There was no home now that I was grown. Being grown means living among strangers. I did not say this to Mark. When you are grown, you can’t speak foolishly. It is not profitable, not wise. You don’t want to offend. You never know who you might need. “Are you going to leave me there?”
“Of course not,” he said. “I took the day off.”
I looked out the window again. In the shelter of his presence, I dared to touch my belly.
35
On the streets of Greenwich Village juvenile trees shaped like lollipops sat spaced like in collectible railroad towns, and when the wind went through them, it did not blow but hiss. Through the casement windows of the dormitory, I could hear the sound like the sound of suffering.
In classrooms and lecture halls, in the gym and the cafeterias, people stared as though they could see on my skin the stain of disgrace. Whenever possible, I avoided interaction; I led a solitar
y life. Days would pass when I didn’t even speak. For meals, I went to eat alone at Loeb Student Center, the commuter café on Washington Square Park, instead of the dorm cafeterias, where boys would invariably come to my table, saying, “Is this seat taken?” or “Aren’t you the girl from the gym?” At Loeb, everybody paid cash for lunch because they weren’t on the housing or meal plan. People there were grateful for college. They dressed nicely. They let you cut in line. They would sit for hours, Korean guys from Kew Gardens and Greek girls from Astoria, waiting safely between classes, ten or twelve at a table, reading the news.
I was obsessed with the news. I read papers everywhere, sometimes twice, snatching up any rag from counters, garbage pails, exercise bikes, asking strangers, “Is this your paper?” I was constantly thinking, Rourke’s out there, somewhere.
Just as he had been during the most difficult moments in high school, Jack was invisibly present during those months. Thoughts of him carried me. Having been loved by Jack I did not think that I could love Rourke better or more than Jack did me, or that my own heartbreak could surpass Jack’s. It was the single equivalency I could find; in fact, it was perfect. By my honest wish to make amends to Jack, I survived the loss of Rourke. I chose an ascetic life and dedicated my efforts to Jack and his well-being. I found contentment in conducting a private reconciliation with him. Sometimes I thought to try to find him, but I suspected there are some doors that are better off remaining closed, locked from both sides.
I had to pay Mark what I owed him.
Five hundred dollars for the private operation and the shot of Demerol, which was worth about four of the five. Lowie once said that a shot of Demerol is like a week in Bermuda.
“Forget about it,” Mark said. He preferred to erase the debt, to pick up after Rourke and own a piece of me, only he didn’t push because he was smart. He knew I would never allow anyone to lessen Rourke. If you ever saw Mark’s eyes, you would always see them figuring.
Anthropology of an American Girl Page 43