After This

by Alice McDermott

  Susan looked at her, smiling. “How far?” she said. They were not friends, but might be becoming. Jill admired Susan. She liked her wit, her self-possession, her feline languor in the classroom, the way she slumped and curled into chairs. The way she let her eyes close slowly, never bothering to put her head down, when a teacher grew boring.

  Like most compulsive liars, Jill O’Meara was skeptical of the reports others gave of themselves—the incredible dates, the wild parties, the insane mothers and alcoholic fathers—but she had always trusted what Susan had to say. Susan’s brother had gone to Vietnam and had come back a basket case. (This offered in a history class discussion about the war.) She had spent a year convinced her parents were really brother and sister, they were so identically boring. (This during a retreat day at school when the girls had been broken into small groups to discuss ways to bring Christ into their daily lives.) She had written her initials in love bites around the navel of the boy she was taking to the junior prom. (This declared amid much laughter at a table in the lunchroom.)

  Jill sipped her drink, nodding slowly. “God,” she said, as if at the recollection of some astonishing memory. “We went far. Really far.”

  A laugh, sophisticated, worldly-wise, broke from Susan and she said, “Start saving your pennies now,” and opened her smock and put her hand on her stomach, although what she thought of as her paunch was mostly invisible to Jill, and to everyone else.

  “This ain’t pizza,” she said.

  At the end of a boring summer (no boy at the lake or anywhere else, only a hopeless crush on the UPS guy who stopped by the card shop every day and called her Kid), the revelation, the sudden tears in Susan’s voice, were high drama.

  Jill O’Meara had nearly two hundred and fifty dollars in her senior prom fund. (It had been her junior prom fund last year but she hadn’t found a date.) She told Susan—the summer suddenly become interesting—“I can lend you the rest. You want me to go with you?”

  Susan spent the night before at Annie’s house so in the morning they could walk to the bus stop. They both told their mothers they were accompanying the other to the famous hair salon in the city to give her moral support while she got a new cut. (The story would be that in the end Susan/Annie had chickened out on getting something totally new and just got a few inches cut off, you could hardly notice the difference.) They took the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station and then rode the hot subway uptown. Of course, they didn’t run into any neighbors or relatives who worked in the city, or anyone else who knew them, but that was no matter—the haircut story was already in place; they were, until they got off at the eleventh floor and not the third, precisely where they were supposed to be.

  Susan filled out the forms with Annie’s name and placed Annie’s fake license and birth certificate under the clip on the clipboard before handing it back to the woman at the reception desk. The woman, handsome and serene, with a small face and an old-fashioned French twist, merely slipped them out from under the clipboard and handed them back to her—no question of hazel or brown. “That’s fine,” she said, sweetly. “And how will you be paying?”

  The day before, Susan had gone to a bank near the mall and exchanged her collection of money for six crisp fifty-dollar bills, sensing somehow that the neatness of her payment would confirm the authenticity of her age. She handed these to the woman, still in their yellow bank-provided envelope. The woman merely attached the money to the same clipboard and then said again, “That’s fine.”

  “We’ll call you in a minute,” she said.

  It was ten thirty on a Tuesday in late August and there was no one else in the waiting room, which was very small and comfortable—a pale lavender sofa and two plaid chairs, shaded lamps that might have been in someone’s living room. Annie had brought the last of her summer reading books—A Farewell to Arms—which she was only halfway through and Susan herself had not yet finished. “Boring,” Susan said, glancing at it. “A lot of war stuff.”

  Although they would have said they were prepared for it, they both were startled when a woman—a nurse in a white uniform—came through the door beside the receptionist and said, “Anne Keane.” After only a moment’s hesitation, Susan stood.

  “Good luck, Annie,” Annie whispered and Susan laughed a little. “Thanks, Susie.” Like the spunky, place-trading twins from a sitcom.

  The nurse—square-jawed and deeply tanned but with warm brown eyes—advised Susan to leave her purse with her friend, and in that moment of turning back to hand over the strap of her bag, Annie saw that Susan was trembling, trembling slightly, almost imperceptibly, but also thoroughly, from her fingertips to her shoulders to the smooth flesh of her pretty face, lips, scalp, even the ends of her pale hair.

  In that moment she saw, too, how Susan had fixed her eyes—brown not hazel—on some distant point, some point out of the room, out of this particular ten thirty on a Tuesday morning in late August, out of this strange office building in Manhattan, and onto a place after which this would be done, gotten through, gotten over.

  Annie took her friend’s bag but did not aim, again, to smile at her or to offer any encouragement. Later, wading through the war stuff, she wondered if what Susan had shown her in that moment—trembling, looking ahead—could be called courage. And wondered why it was assumed that courage was always put to some noble end.

  Inside, Susan gave a urine sample and then undressed and was examined, and when the pregnancy was confirmed, the procedure was explained to her. The strange words: cervix and uterus, dilation and curettage, felt like a steel blade against the edge of her teeth. In religion class, Sister Lucy had said, more simply, that they break the baby’s arms and legs and drown it in salt water.

  Pain like a pretty bad period, the doctor said, some heavy bleeding afterward.

  There was another paper to sign and she was halfway through her own first name when she remembered and went over the S and the U.

  “My hand is shaking,” she said, apologetically, and the tanned nurse whispered, “No worry,” and gently took the botched form away.

  The woman who did the exam and all the explaining was small and wiry with wiry red hair and a humorless face. She had been introduced as the doctor but still Susan expected a man to come in for the abortion itself. Someone stooped and gray in a white coat and a tie who would call her “young lady” and look at her over the top of his glasses both to reprimand and to forgive. Who might say something old-fashioned and complimentary, something like, “Well, I can see why your young man might have been carried away. You’re a lovely girl.”

  But only another nurse came in, a pretty Asian woman who might have been alone with the doctor in the small and crowded room for all the notice she paid. The doctor said, “Are we ready then?”

  The tanned nurse stood right beside her. She complimented the sun streaks in Susan’s hair and then held her hand when she drew a sharp, unsteady breath at the cold touch of the instruments. She told her, “Go ahead and say ‘Ouch’ if it hurts,” but Susan only turned her head, her eyes now fixed on the woman’s white uniform, which was the same woven polyester of her Woolworth’s smock. She could smell the sweet clean odor of the detergent it had been washed in. “Not much longer now,” the nurse said. And, “You’re doing great.” She was supposed to be in what they’d called, so prettily, a twilight sleep, but the pain was on a steady rise and in the midst of it, Susan gripped the woman’s hand and raised it to her own mouth to stifle a sob. There was the smell of hospital soap on the nurse’s skin, sharp, medicinal, and, because of the pain, somehow cruel. It was a scent that would return her to this moment for the rest of her life.

  They brought her to another room to recuperate. She had not worn a sanitary napkin and a belt since she was thirteen and the thing felt like a diaper between her legs. There was a kind of chaise longue for her to sit on, a small table beside it with grape juice and a few cookies: a kindergarten snack, a clean sheet, and a light blanket. The tanned nurse lowered the light a l
ittle further and said she would go tell her friend she was okay. She could go home in an hour or so, depending on how she felt.

  “Rest a bit, honey,” she said, like a mother, before she left the room.

  Susan could hear the traffic rising up from the street, the bang and rattle of trucks, taxi horns, a warning shout and a whistle and then a man’s laugh. She could picture the men in the street below, men pushing carts and backing vans into narrow parking spaces, men in suits, men with briefcases, going to lunch, ducking into cabs, running their hands down their ties as they walked across a subway grate. She closed her eyes but knew she wouldn’t sleep. She had never gone to sleep in New York City.

  An Act of Contrition started up in her head. “Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee,” more a habit of mind than a plea for absolution. Because she could not balance any remorse against the dawning sense of relief. However terrible it might be, what she had done, it was over: gotten through, finished. However terrible it was, its immediate effect was that she could go back to school next week, her senior year. She could take the SATs, go to the prom, go to graduation. She could apply to colleges and choose one and move into a dorm in September. She could go out with her friends this weekend, maybe meet another guy. She could sleep late tomorrow (she had already asked for a late shift at the store, three to nine) and go downstairs in her work clothes and her smock—“Going”—her car keys in her hand, her father singing from another room, “It was a lucky April shower, it was the most convenient door,” sweet and affectionate and naïve as he always was because he had no fear of trouble for this beautiful child, no quicksand, no terrible diversions, no nightmares to drive her from the room he and his son had plumbed and paneled with their own hands. “I found a million dollar baby in a five and ten cent store.”

  The tanned nurse came in again to take her temperature and check her pad. She came back a little while later to say the doctor would be in to talk to her once more and then she could get dressed and go. “Although,” she said, blithely, “I’m not sure where your friend has gone off to.”

  Susan almost said, “Annie?”—but instead pursed her lips to show she had no answer.

  The nurse glanced at her watch. “I thought maybe she’d gone out for a bit of lunch, but she’s been gone awhile now.” She gave Susan the full, professional warmth of her brown eyes. “Pam at the desk said she just kind of flew out.”

  Susan nodded. She and Annie had agreed to have lunch together, if she was up for it, at a diner on Third Avenue. Vanilla egg creams and greasy cheeseburgers, they’d said.

  “We can’t let you go home alone, you know,” the nurse told her kindly, deliberately. “Is there someone else you can call? If she doesn’t come back?”

  Jill O’Meara came to mind, but Susan suspected she was probably at work now. Susan didn’t even know the name of the card store. Jill would be two hours coming in from Long Island anyway. The Jackass had a car—a GTO, the whole problem—and lived in Queens, and it would serve him right to get the full weight of the whole summer delivered to him in one phone call (You screwed me, you dumped me, I just had an abortion, and you need to drive me home), but she wasn’t that crazy. She knew he caddied on Tuesday and Thursday anyway; she’d made enough plans this summer to casually drop by the golf course.

  Slowly, she shook her head. “She’ll be back,” she told the nurse. “She said she might run over to Bloomingdale’s.” And then, when the nurse had gone out again, wondered how messed up she was to find herself praying, praying earnestly this time, that her half-assed lie was true.

  The doctor, without a smile, gave her a lecture about venereal disease and a prescription for birth control and told her about the new risks a second abortion would raise. Then she handed her a small white business card, the name and number of a social worker.

  Frowning at her from behind the wire-rimmed glasses, the doctor suddenly asked, in quick succession, “You live with your family? Mother and father? Are you afraid of your father? Is he violent? Does he hit you?”

  After everything, Susan was surprised to feel herself blush. There was a time when she might have been afraid that her father would hit her. When she and her brother were kids, he had often shown them the back of his hand, and though they’d never once been struck, they had always flinched. But that was long before Tony went to Vietnam, and came back, and disappeared. Long before the night she saw him weeping in their father’s thick arms, not like a baby or even a kid, but like a lunatic, one of her father’s own patients, God’s mistakes, as he called them, saliva veiling his open mouth. Or the day he put his fist through the living-room wall. Or the day their mother told Susan that it would have been easier for their father if Tony had been killed in the war.

  “My father’s never hit me,” she told the doctor. “Not at all.” After everything, it was the first time she saw them suspect a lie.

  The nurse had just handed her the first month’s supply of pills in a little case that looked like a pink compact when she said, cheerfully, “Your girlfriend’s outside.”

  Annie was on the same couch where Susan had left her, but it was clear, even in the warm light of the waiting room, that she’d been crying.

  There were two other, middle-aged, women also in the room so Annie whispered when she said, “You okay?” and Susan whispered back, “Yeah, are you?”

  “Fine,” Annie said shortly, and then handed Susan her purse.

  They walked down the hall to the elevator in silence. Although they lived on the same street, although Susan’s father had helped to deliver Clare, they had been best friends only since the first week of freshman year. At mixers with the all-male Catholic schools, they had discovered they were the perfect boy-meeting pair: You ask the blonde, I’ll ask the brunette. They had gone on their first dates together. They had lost their virginity within a week of each other—Annie on the night of the junior prom, Susan a week later in gratitude for the prom and in regret for not having done it, perhaps more memorably, then. They had gone through this ordeal all summer knowing that their places were interchangeable—that Annie could be Susan and Susan could be Annie. Knowing, too, all they knew about breaking the baby’s arms and legs and drowning it in salt water.

  “Did you have lunch?” Susan asked her in the elevator and Annie said, “No. Aren’t we going to the diner?”

  At the third floor, they got the full whiff of the famous hair salon and then watched a tall, beautiful woman get on, her frosted hair blow-dried to elaborate perfection. Stepping back to make way for her, the two girls exchanged a look behind her back, a grimace and a grin.

  If Annie hated her for what she had just done, Susan thought, then she would be alone in the world, as lost as her crazy brother screaming in his dreams.

  In the diner, they found a booth near the window. The cheeseburgers were perfect, flat and juicy and turning the soft rolls beneath them a reddish pink. The sweet egg creams, in frosted fountain glasses, might have been a balm for any number of things. They both put their straws in and then drew them out again and licked the white, vanilla-scented foam.

  “So, where’d you go?” Susan asked, hoping to deflect Annie from saying, How was it? This morning she would have trusted her not to ask “How was it?” but now, suddenly, everything seemed tentative between them. It was possible Annie hated her for what she had just done.

  Annie slipped the straw back into her drink, churned it a bit. Reluctant to speak until finally, she simply said, “I lost it.” For Susan, the thick pad and the cramps and the terrible word—curettage—that set her teeth on edge, all gave way to the sudden descent her heart took. If their places were exchanged, Annie would not have done what she’d done. And there was no undoing it.

  Tears came into Annie’s eyes—green eyes now against their red rims. Susan saw her swallow hard before she leaned across the Formica tabletop and asked, whispering, “Do you know she dies?”

  Susan felt herself draw away from the question, even as Annie seemed to
lean into it. “Catherine,” Annie said. “In the book. Did you know she dies at the end, and the baby’s dead and he walks out into the rain by himself?”

  Annie’s voice seemed to twist away from her and she tried to laugh through it, suspecting she would lose it again were it not for the good cry she had had an hour ago, in a deserted ladies’ room some floors below the clinic—a place she had sought blindly, flying (as the receptionist had said) from the waiting room (another pair of women had entered by then, a greenish-looking girl in her twenties and an older woman who might have been her mother) and into a nearby stairwell where the first sob had broken from her throat and echoed so loudly that she’d run heavily down the stairs just to cover the sound with her own footsteps. Out onto another floor where there was, luckily, an empty ladies’ room. She had locked herself in a stall and sobbed for the unbearable sadness of the story: Catherine dead and the baby dead and nothing at all left for him—like saying goodbye to a statue, he had said—but to walk out into the desolate rain all alone.

  She had cried for what must have been twenty minutes and then went out to the sink and splashed cold water on her face—knowing she should get back upstairs for Susan—and then began to cry again.

  Because it was intolerable: Catherine dead and their baby dead. Intolerable and terrible and made even more so by the fact that within the same hour of her reading, the book had convinced her (there in the softly lit waiting room of the abortion clinic) that despite war and death and pain (despite the way the girl with a woman who might have been her mother seemed to gulp air every once in a while, a handkerchief to her mouth), life was lovely, rich with small gifts: a nice hotel, a warm fire, a fine meal, love.