“Until the whole sky caves in,” Krista answered from the kitchen as she placed two mugs in the microwave.
“Hey, Kris, you can’t be pregnant,” he said as an afterthought. “You were using your diaphragm.”
“Failure rate,” she told him glibly, “is four percent.”
“What is that? A chance in a million?”
“I don’t know, and won’t for another three weeks. Unless you want me to take a blood test. Do you?”
“No,” he said as she stepped into the shower with him. She shampooed his hair. Then he picked up his pace, finishing in the shower, drying himself, grabbing his clothes and peeking out the door, looking both ways before descending the stairs.
“Put something on,” Krista called after him in a low voice. “Someday you’re going to get caught.”
“By whom?” he asked, looking over his shoulder.
“D.B.,” she answered.
“You think he doesn’t know already?”
*
Krista’s day was slow, pleasant. She strolled, telling herself she was on vacation, for the first time in ages, not dancing. She walked around the Village, sat in Washington Square Park, fed pigeons and drank too many cappuccinos. What if… she asked herself, the pigeons and the summer sky. What if I am pregnant? She scrambled the features of her potential child – straight blond hair, Michael’s brown eyes, slender palms, long fingers, male, female, tall, short, curly hair, blue eyes. Sometimes she could see it. She touched her abdomen, smiled and daydreamed.
Whenever she found herself reading a dance poster, a thing that had become second nature to her, she stopped and reminded herself that she was no longer dancing. Maybe all of this was meant to happen. It was fate. Fate that Madame Chevalier should excuse her permanently from class, that she should be pregnant now. A simple twist of fate, nothing more and nothing less. She continued walking, letting her mind drift and wander as it seldom had due to her class schedule and because before now she had always fled from anything that might take her away from her primary duty: to wait. Preverbal, she sighed to herself, recalling her classmate. Preverbal – what was that anyway?
Krista trailed one woman, then others – the ones pushing baby carriages. She thought she could spot the mother from the nanny, and guessed correctly the identity of a famous grandmother posing as a nurse. Pregnant women walked differently, she thought. They seemed less preoccupied by any awareness of self, all their attention fixed elsewhere. Krista became newly sensitized to the existence of babies all around her. Did these specialist shops spring up overnight? She noticed window displays of pastel clothes, toys of every kind, foods she had known all her life – Gerber’s, Heinz – child-sized beds, lamps, desks and chests full of miniature drawers. Whole stores, she saw, amazed, were devoted to them. She took notice of schools tucked away on side streets. Windows were covered with runaway sweet-potato vines and children’s handprints, cut from blue construction paper and covered in foil stars. The schools had wonderful names: Sunglow Day School, Country Lane, and The Olde Schoolhouse. Krista stole glances inside and imagined how in a month the coat racks would be overloaded with sweaters, lunch pails and stray rubber boots. She fantasized the growth of her child. If she were pregnant.
She daydreamed about Justine, Deirdre’s baby. Krista remembered her mother going with her to visit Deirdre in the hospital, the day after the child was born. Krista remembered her friend holding the newborn girl, wrapped in a pink blanket. She had uncurled each finger and counted each one of Justine’s toes. She described the moment when she saw her daughter’s head. She would not relinquish Justine to any of her admirers. Lovingly, she asked repeatedly, “Doesn’t she look just like Mary?”
No one disagreed. Did she want Justine to be her twin? Though Krista did think the child looked like Mary. When they left, she asked her mother, “If I had a child, do you think it would look like Daddy?”
“No,” Helen said brusquely. “A new life is not a replacement for an old one. Your father is dead. Mary is dead. Deirdre is playing at keeping her alive.”
Krista crossed the street and wandered towards the piers. She liked seeing the water. It made her think of Ilsa, even if the brownish New York water would never match the brilliant violet and sea-coast green of her grandmother’s watercolors. As she stepped off the curb, a taxi swerved in her direction to avoid a hot-dog vendor moving his cart. A bicycle messenger barely made the narrowing gap between the silver box belonging to the vendor and an ambulance turning towards St Vincent’s Hospital. Krista put her hands protectively over her abdomen as the taxi veered in her direction. It was instinctual. She did not have time to turn away. The cab grazed her knuckles. She stared at the driver. Then she heard the siren, which must have been screaming for several blocks.
“Lady,” the cabbie hollered, “wake up!”
Krista stood frozen. She was frightened, not for herself, but for her baby. She crossed the street and walked away quickly. She started to run towards home. Her knuckles burned. What if I were pregnant? She unlocked the front door. She started crying as she let herself into Michael’s apartment. She picked up a book, tried to read, sipped from a bottle of water that stood by the empty fireplace. If I am pregnant. She put the book down. I could have been hit. She had been daydreaming. She had not heard the siren. Madame Chevalier’s voice echoed in her mind. She heard the cane handle beat against the dressing-room door. A full extension, a body with life. She closed her eyes, sitting with the blinds drawn, the air conditioner on high and humming. Upstairs the phone was ringing. I am not pregnant. She felt disoriented. She felt lost, and yet, at the same time, buoyed up. She felt new life quickening inside her.
Krista imagined Michael as a husband and father. He always joked about it. She could not picture him in those roles. She only saw his mannish beauty. Over two years ago she went with another dance student to Central Park, to the annual bicycle race. They spread a blanket on the ground for themselves and popped the cork on a bottle of champagne, making toasts and eating grapes. Who ever had time off? Both girls wore their hair loose, and long cotton skirts. They watched the cyclists take their turns for the speed trials. Krista did not pay attention until Michael rushed past.
She pointed. “Look at him,” she told her friend.
The two girls watched, considered.
“Careful,” her companion warned Krista.
“Careful? He’s beautiful.”
“Tell him then, after the race.”
“Tell him what?”
“That he cycled a good race.”
“Here he comes again.” Krista shifted her weight, and rose to her knees. “He’s going to win! I can’t believe it. Have you ever seen someone who looks exactly the way you’ve always dreamed he would look?”
“You mean the big he?”
“The one you’re supposed to fall in love with.”
“No.”
“I think I will tell him…”
“Tell him what?”
“That he cycled a good race.”
The girls smoothed their skirts, walked towards the finish line. Krista handed the stranger a glass of warm champagne. He did not, after all, finish first, coming in third eventually. He didn’t seem to mind. Krista introduced herself. They exchanged numbers. Michael was whisked away, but true to his word, he did telephone the next day. That was what she remembered. Since then, it seemed he had always been there – tall, blond, dark-eyed, athletic. He would be reproducible, she thought. If I am pregnant.
*
For three weeks, Krista spent her days in the same fashion. She took long walks, watched colors become brighter and felt sound as something that assailed her. She almost cried when she saw a stray wildflower growing up from a crack in a pockmarked sidewalk. She protected herself from noises – subways, horns – and tried to choose carefully when she read a menu, something telling her to eat for two. If I am
pregnant.
She never returned to the nursery after the night she felt she conceived. She made a pretense of allowing Michael to think it was because he had asked her to sleep downstairs and because he disliked sleeping in the nursery. The truth was she feared sleeping again under the ceiling her father had painted. Something had changed there. During the daytime she oscillated between thinking she was pregnant, knowing she was pregnant and then knowing absolutely that she was not. When she found herself considering what she might do if a pregnancy test read positive, she distracted herself immediately. She believed that if she started to think such things, it meant she really knew she was pregnant. I am not pregnant, Krista would remind herself.
Sometimes she would know for sure, especially when she awoke from a recurrent dream that troubled her for almost the whole waiting period. In the dream, on a solid, marble table, she became a sculptress, taking great care with her vision. The material she worked with was both solid and pliable. It seemed to have a heartbeat and emanated a soft light. She worked vigorously and playfully. She fashioned a face – high cheekbones, long nose, smooth jaw. The spine she played like a tiny keyboard. There were a poet’s hands, a curving dimpled rump. Beyond lay a magnificent landscape, a place she had never been. Then she would awake in terror, feeling she had been tricked. There was no heartbeat or pliable stuff. There was only Michael’s blank ceiling and his bare back.
Krista would touch her sleeping bedfellow, then get up and go to the window. She would stand with her arms crossed over her chest, looking at the brownstones across the street, the street itself, and the twilight she found more familiar than daylight on the street where she had lived all her life. Her breasts hurt. The nipples were sore. They were swelling. But maybe, she hoped, it was only from imminent menstruation. She tested the muscle above her pubic bone. It had toughened. This was a sign she recalled Deirdre describing. But didn’t all dancers have especially well-toned muscles?
At the window she peeked through the blinds. She watched an old man hobble down the street. He stopped at two aluminum trash cans and began to rummage. Krista felt pity for him. Michael turned over in his sleep. She wept. None of this had been planned. She had not asked for any of it, she told herself. She did not ask for a baby. Did she? Life enter here. No, she told herself, she did not have that kind of power. Something else was controlling her. Quite suddenly, she knew what she would do if the test proved to be positive. She would have an abortion. It was as simple as that. She would do it right away. She would find a good doctor. It would be safe. Abortions were legal. There would be nothing to endanger the time when her situation was better, when the decision to have a child was planned, when it was not an obscure, bolt-from-the-blue twist of fate. Life enter here. Was she that powerful?
She realized for the first time how much she cared for life and how responsible she wanted to be as a mother. She wanted to be a parent who was fully committed and present. Her child would not be the extension of a fantasy, a roll of the dice. Her child would be someone planned, anticipated, truly wanted. Maybe it would be with Michael, and maybe it would not. Did she even know him? This child had come about purely because of the rain. Krista cried because being pregnant made her realize how much more than anything else in the world – more than a career, a way to prove herself to her mother – she did want a child, children. One day, when it felt right. She wanted a baby to love the way her father had loved her. But this was the wrong time. A woman could know it was the wrong time, or the wrong reason. Couldn’t she know that, in just the same way she knew whether she had conceived or not? That split second. Krista wanted a child. She did want to create life, but the time and the circumstances now were not right. Krista knew she was not yet ready to be a mother, the guide and compass to a new human being.
She crawled back into bed, curling around Michael, pulling his head to her chest. She kissed the top of his head. He worked his body toward hers, mumbling, half asleep.
“What are you doing up?”
“Nothing,” she said, “thinking.”
“Thinking?” he said. “Not my little dreamer.”
“That’s right,” she said, hushing him back to sleep. She held him securely, as if he were the baby she was about to give up.
She lay holding him as she recognized for the first time what women – mothers – had always had the option to do. They could, like gods, give life or take it away. Did it even matter whether or not it was legalized? This was a power no senate could legislate for. Means would always be found. Biology was not a process of law. The feeling ran so deep, so primordial, so original. She knew she could not share her pain, her responsibility.
“God,” she pleaded, “I do not want to be pregnant. I do not want to have to make this decision. I do not want to cut this beautiful being out of my life. Please help me.”
Krista still hoped the test would be negative. She wished the past few weeks would all have been the fault of her runaway imagination. She begged God to let the pregnancy test be negative, and promised to never again play with the power she had been given. How could she not have known, not understood? She wept. I can create life. She recalled that instant surge of light. The moment of conception was indelibly written in her heart and mind. Who, she thought, had separated sex from producing life?
*
The early pregnancy test kit was a miniature lab; a little clear plastic support for the small test tube, including a mirror, so as to see the results at the bottom without touching the tube itself, a plastic vial with purified water, a dropper with a black squeeze tube that matched the black stopper in the test tube, all fitted over with a neat, clear plastic lid, which could also hold the urine needed for the test.
On the ninth day after Krista’s period refused to begin, early on a Sunday morning, Michael suggested taking the test. He placed the kit on his dining-room table, reading the directions aloud to Krista, who remained in bed.
“HGC… that’s the hormone you have present in your body, Kris. You know what it is? This is real scientific, you know. Did I ever tell you I wanted to be a doctor once? I loved bio lab… even the rats in zoology. There’s something about white coats and clear plastic tubes, blood, veins, arteries. I saw a corpse once, in New Haven. My cousin snuck me into the anatomy lab. I saw this leg, an old man’s yellow leg, and this guy was working on it, cutting away at layers, pulling at the fat…”
Michael walked into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the mattress.
“The fellow who was cutting away happened to be the lab professor, and he looked a little irked that he had been interrupted. But my cousin just said, “Hi, Doctor, this is Michael Parks, he’s a first-year student at Columbia.” After that I had the grand tour. There wasn’t a thing I didn’t see, even the fetuses. You know, Kris, there’s a real thing called a Cyclops baby. They’re born with one eye, right in the middle of their forehead.” He crossed his legs, reflecting on the display case he once saw outside the anatomy lab at Yale.
Krista looked up at him. “Michael, what are you doing?”
“I’m waiting for you.”
“For what?”
“Your urine.” He handed her the square plastic combination lid and specimen container.
“So why are you talking about Cyclops babies?”
“Because I saw them once. Sorry… guess I’m nervous.” He trailed her to the bathroom, where she closed the door. “Should I go out,” he asked, “and start over?”
She laughed. “You can’t start over. We just go on.”
“Hey,” he banged on the door, “lighten up, will you? You know, it could be worse.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “I could have one eye.”
“Or one arm.”
“Or no arms. Or…”
“No urine. What about that?”
Krista came out of the bathroom wearing Michael’s silk shirt. She handed him the specimen. “No such lu
ck, Dr. Parks. There’s extra in case you miss something the first time around.” She went back to bed.
“You are too kind!”
“Michael,” she called from the bedroom, “I talked to a doctor on Friday, a Dr. Blackwell on Madison, near 73rd Street. He’s got a good reputation as an obstetrician and for… anyway, he said he’d perform the abortion.”
Michael was not paying attention to Krista as he removed the glass test tube. He practiced filling and emptying the dropper until he had no trouble delivering three drops accurately. He filled the dropper again. Then, holding it vertical, he carefully let three drops fall into the tube.
“‘Step four,’” he read aloud, “‘add contents of plastic vial… cut tip… squeeze… six… shake vigorously for ten seconds.’”
He replaced the test tube in its plastic support above the reflecting mirror. He set the stand on the most solid surface, his desk.
“Kris, we have to wait for two hours.” He walked into the bedroom. “Did you hear me? We have to wait two hours now for the result. Do you want to sleep?”
“Yes,” she mumbled.
“I’m going to get the paper. Do you want a bagel or anything?”
“No,” she moaned, “what time is it?”
“Seven.”
“Michael, it’s Sunday morning.”
“All right, but this is the ninth day. Don’t you want to know?”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“About what?”
“Blackwell.”
“I heard.”
“Good.”
“I’m going to get The Times.”
“Great.”
As soon as the lock clicked and Krista heard the outside door bolt she got dressed. She wore a pair of blue jeans with Michael’s silk shirt. She turned the collar up and loosely brushed her hair away from her face. She stretched, as any dancer will in the morning. As she touched the flat of her palms to the floor and her head to her knees, she still hoped the result would be negative. She went up on her toes and fell forward. Then, in a straddle position, she pressed her chest to the floor. Weren’t there any other options?
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