Every Little Thing in the World

by Nina de Gramont

  I put down the letter and marched straight to the phone. Mom picked up at work and spoke in her fake professional voice, all silky and confident. “Alicia Sincero,” she said.

  As soon as she heard it was me, her voice turned from silk to sandpaper. “Sydney,” she said, “my mind’s made up. For the next two months you belong to your father. If you have any problems or complaints, I suggest you bring them to him.”

  “But what about the pool?” I said. “They’re expecting me to start next week.”

  “I’ve already told them that won’t be possible.”

  A surge of fury overwhelmed me. That was my job. I’d earned it by spending last summer measuring the pH balance of the pool, skimming leaves, and bussing outdoor tables of potato chip bags and soda bottles. Sometimes I’d been able to sub for one of the regular lifeguards, wearing a red suit and a shiny whistle. Everyone I knew was jealous of my job. I’d worked hard for it. She had no right to tell them I wouldn’t be there, and I told her so.

  “I think you have a very skewed idea about what I have the right to do,” said Mom. “You are a minor child. I am your mother. I am fully within my rights making a decision about what you will do during the summer.”

  I started to say something about her being a hypocrite, preventing me from making money when she claimed it was so hard sending me to private school. But then I remembered that in the few jobs I’d ever had, babysitting or working for the country club, I’d never given a penny of what I earned to my mother. I’d never pitched in for my own necessities, but just spent the money on little luxuries. Most of my friends came from such wealthy families. It never seemed fair that I couldn’t have the things they took for granted. Why shouldn’t I spend the money I earned on myself ? It was just the barest fraction of Natalia’s weekly allowance, which her parents immediately supplemented whenever she asked.

  “This is completely unfair,” I told my mother. I knew the words were cliché teenager, but they were so accurate—so true—that I couldn’t prevent them from coming out of my mouth. I was equally powerless over the petulant, tear-shaky tone of my voice.

  “That’s a very predictable reaction,” Mom said, predictably, and below her icy tone I could hear a faint note of glee that she had gotten to me. “I’m sorry that you feel that way, but I can only hope this will make you think for a moment the next time you feel like stealing a Cadillac and attending a keg party.”

  Tears sprang to my eyes. It was so … unfair. That was the only word. I hadn’t had any choice about that party and taking Mrs. Miksa’s car. I was pregnant. Telling Tommy had seemed, at that moment, like the most important thing in the world. It had almost felt like my only responsibility had been getting to Tommy and telling him I was pregnant, and then the whole situation would somehow, magically, disappear.

  But of course I remembered how that had gone. And I admitted to myself that if I hadn’t been pregnant, Natalia and I would probably have gone to the party anyway, and we probably would have stayed a whole lot longer.

  “Sydney?” said Mom. “Are you still there?”

  I made a little noise in my throat.

  “I have to go back to work now,” she said.

  “Fine,” I said. “Thank you so much, Mom, for all your help. I feel like a better person already. I feel reformed. I’m going to run right upstairs and start working on the New Me. I think first I’ll end world hunger, then start writing my application to Harvard. Because your new method of discipline, it’s just taught me so much about myself and the kind of person I want to be. It’s given me so much wisdom and maturity.”

  “Good-bye, Syd,” Mom said. And then she hung up.

  I slammed down the phone. Even though my mother didn’t know I was pregnant, I still felt like she was abandoning me when I needed her most. It didn’t matter that she didn’t have all the information. The fact that I couldn’t tell her—that she made it impossible to tell her—felt like its own kind of cold, uncaring desertion.

  It seemed to me that everyone always focused on the wrong things. For example, Mr. and Mrs. Miksa thinking that Natalia shouldn’t date a boy who wasn’t Jewish. What did it matter? It wasn’t like she was going to marry someone she met when she was sixteen, or have his children. They didn’t care that I, her best friend, wasn’t Jewish. So what did it matter about Steve?

  My mother was all hung up on obedience and truth. My father was obsessed with values and ideals that no normal person could ever live up to; even his wife snuck products containing high fructose corn syrup into the meat loaf, and I knew she kept a stash of Snickers, Pop-Tarts, and Marshmallow Fluff hidden under the floorboards of the Pearsons’ chicken coop. I had sat out there with her on rainy days, dribbling melted chocolate and marshmallow onto frosted raspberry while the twins tormented the roosting hens.

  I didn’t exactly know the alternative, what my parents should be focusing on instead of the incident with the car. But I knew there should have been something—something that would make it possible for me to explain my situation. Because talk about focusing on the wrong thing! Here I stood, steaming at my mother because I’d lost my summer job, when what I really needed was a Planned Parenthood, pronto, because the secret inside me would grow bigger and closer to reality with every day that passed.

  I looked through the kitchen drawers and found an old, frayed phone book. To my surprise, “Abortion” was the very first heading in the Yellow Pages. I would have thought that word would be too obvious. But there it was, the first word on the first page. Abortion. The first organizations were actually under the heading “Abortion Alternatives,” which had three listings. One was called A Woman’s Concern. Then there was Birthright of Northern New Jersey, and New Jersey Citizens for Life. I knew that if I called any of them, I would get a lecture on the evils of abortion. They’d call it murder. Being against sex education themselves, they probably wouldn’t have taken it, so they might not know it was illegal to inform my parents. Probably they would drop the name Jesus Christ into the conversation and tell me that fetuses screamed during D & C’s. I’d learned in health class that this was false. It’s not possible to scream if you don’t have functioning lungs.

  At any rate: The New Jersey Citizens for Life would pretend to care about me, but their real goal would be nine months down the road, a nice white baby for a nice white—and Christian—family.

  So on to the next set of listings: “Abortion Providers.” These had friendlier and more familiar names, like Women’s Health Services and of course Planned Parenthood. All of them were located in West Falls, a town I’d never even heard of. I dialed each number, only to receive that annoying succession of tones and a recorded voice telling me I had to first dial a 1. If I did this, the numbers would show up on my father’s long-distance bill. I had no idea what his habits were regarding that particular document, but I couldn’t take the chance that he went over it the way my mother did—like an Al-Qaeda operative lived in the house. She always dialed any unfamiliar numbers.

  Besides, what would calling Planned Parenthood do for me? I had no car and no driver’s license. I still didn’t know how much an abortion cost, but I guessed it was more than the eighteen dollars in my wallet—all the money I had to my name before my job at the pool started (or didn’t start) next week.

  It seemed ridiculous that I didn’t know exactly what to do and exactly how to do it. After all, Linden Hill Country Day was a good, liberal academy. Starting in seventh grade, we’d had health class, otherwise known as sex education. The teachers had drummed certain facts into our heads, repeating them over and over again. We knew that we should always use condoms, always, because one time was all it took to get pregnant or catch an STD. We knew that coitus interruptus was no form of birth control, because that tiny drop of semen at the end of an erect penis contained about a zillion sperm. We knew we were legally entitled to private birth control counseling, and also private abortion counseling. I could walk into any clinic in the country and get birth control pills or
an abortion without my parents ever finding out.

  I’d thought I knew everything there was to know. Until those two pink lines came up on that stupid stick, I considered myself properly educated. My education had, after all, served me well with Greg—who had been in the very same Health class. Whenever we had sex, we always used a condom plus an extra dose of spermicide.

  But with Tommy, I hadn’t felt like I knew him well enough to remind him about the condom issue. It seemed so stupid now, but at the time it just felt so priggish to raise the topic, as priggish as saying no would have been. There were Natalia and Steve, all rapturous and adventurous and in love. I would have felt like such a killjoy bringing up a technical and unromantic word like “condom.”

  Tommy and I had had sex a grand total of four times. After the first time, I thought, Next time I’m going to tell him. But somehow time number two rolled around and I just didn’t, maybe because nothing really bad had ever happened to me. In my head I knew the right words to say, and the right precautions to take, but I had a hard time believing they actually mattered. I could think a thing, I could worry about it, but I still wouldn’t believe anything like a pregnancy would ever happen to me. It was sort of like thinking Margit might be Natalia’s mom. An interesting idea, maybe even a probable one, but too huge and troubling to ever seem real.

  At Natalia’s beach house, I’d finally taken out a couple of condoms and put them on top of the bedside table. Tommy had looked at them and shrugged, like what was the point now, but then bit off the wrapper at the appropriate time. Talk about too little too late. And now, after all that careful education, it turned out that the only thing I knew about abortion was that I was allowed to have one. Thanks to that great sex ed program, none of my friends had ever gotten pregnant. I didn’t know anything about the procedure, if I’d need to stay in the hospital, or if they’d just let me go home on my own afterward. Would I need painkillers? Would I bleed for a long time? Would it be like an operation, or would they just give me one of those pills I’d heard about when my mom listened to All Things Considered ?

  I closed the phone book and crammed it back into the drawer. Upstairs, I heard Rebecca waking up from her nap.

  “I’ll get her,” I called outside to Kerry, who was playing with the twins on the front lawn.

  I trudged upstairs toward the wailing baby. One thing was clear. In order to take care of my current state—in order to end my pregnancy—I had to get back home. At home I could work to get money. My friends could help with transportation. I could figure some way to get an abortion.

  Rebecca slept in a plain wooden crib next to Dad and Kerry’s bed. To my surprise, she stopped crying when I peered in at her. She looked up at me and grabbed her feet, a big smile on her drooly face. She had big dark eyes, which was funny because I always thought I’d inherited that feature from my mom.

  “Hi, baby,” I said to her.

  She reached out her fat little arms in a way that so clearly said, Pick me up, I had to laugh. I hoisted her onto my hip, which seemed to have a little groove that was tailor-made for carrying babies. Rebecca grabbed a piece of my hair and put it into her mouth.

  “Ouch,” I said. “That’s gross.” I could feel her soggy diaper—cloth, of course—seeping into my clean jeans. Hauling her over to the changing table, I peeled off the diaper and threw it into the hamper. My dad didn’t believe in diaper services because of the chemicals they used, so Kerry washed every single one by hand. She had done this even with the twins. When I told my mother, she laughed. “So much for virtue being its own reward,” she said.

  I cleaned Rebecca up and slathered her with Butt Balm—she always had a screaming red rash, which I knew came from wearing the cloth diapers instead of the disposable ones. As soon as I had her all diapered and fresh, she started screaming, like she’d just realized she was hungry and knew there was nothing I could do for her in that department.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, carrying her downstairs to her mother. If Rebecca were my baby, I thought, there would be no one to hand her off to. If I had a baby next year, she would barely be one year younger than my own sister. The idea would have made me wail right along with Rebecca if it still didn’t feel so untrue. In my heart, I couldn’t quite make the idea of a baby seem real. I felt totally normal, not at all like my body was busy spinning little fingers and toes and internal organs.

  I carried the crying baby out into the bright sunlight, back into the arms of her rightful owner.

  When my dad’s truck pulled up that evening, I was waiting for him in the driveway. Kerry worked in the kitchen, basting a free-range chicken while the twins played with wooden blocks underneath the table. I had Rebecca on my chest in a BabyBjörn. Kerry had filled her up with mother’s milk before strapping her onto my body and shooing me out the door.

  Dad climbed out of the truck and squinted at us, his two daughters, as if trying to remember exactly who we were. “I have to talk to you,” I said to him. “I spoke to Mom today.”

  “She told me.”

  “She did?” The thought of my parents talking—maybe even agreeing—was as unbelievable as my pregnancy.

  “She called after you spoke. I told her what I had in mind for you, and she thought it sounded like a good idea.”

  “Listen,” I said, the panic rising again. “I think the best thing would be for me to go home and start my job. I can probably still get it back. What if I promised that I’d give everything I made to Mom to pay for school?” As soon as I spoke, I saw my money for the abortion flying out the window. But as long as I could get home, I knew I would find the resources to take care of myself. It was only being out here, stranded, that made me helpless.

  “I don’t know how much they’re paying you at the country club, but I don’t expect it would make a dent in your tuition.”

  “But you know,” I said, “it would be good for me, to work and to make sacrifices.”

  “I don’t see sitting on your ass watching rich people swim as much of a sacrifice,” Dad said. I stared at him. He almost sounded angry, which was at least an emotion. I reached up and took hold of Rebecca’s hands, which she had been waving in an effort to get his attention. So far, he hadn’t seemed to notice.

  “I could help Mom around the house,” I said, my voice getting fainter, the fact of my losing battle more and more apparent. Dad just stood there squinting at me, like a cowboy in some black-and-white Western.

  “Remember I told you yesterday about Bob Pearson’s friend who runs canoe trips in Canada? It’s called Camp Bell Wilderness Adventure.”

  I could hear a cow, lowing off in the distance. A quieter, mewling sound answered its call. A mother, probably, searching for a wayward calf.

  “Well, Pearson’s friend—his name is Campbell—has a farm not far from here, just a mile or two up the road.”

  “Campbell,” I said. “I get it. Camp Bell.” Dad put his hands in his pockets, and I could tell even he agreed this was unspeakably cheesy.

  “Pearson takes care of his place in the summer, when Campbell’s up in Canada,” Dad said. “I’ve worked out a deal with them. You can leave next week to spend July in Canada, canoeing on a lake in Ontario. Then when you return you’ll work at Campbell’s farm in August to pay him back. You’ll live here and spend the day working in his vegetable gardens, weeding and picking, and selling produce at his roadside stand.”

  I tilted my head. “I’m going to spend a month canoeing?” A quick time line formed in my mind. Five weeks plus one week plus four weeks.

  “You used to like it,” he said. “Being on the water.”

  The first three summers after my parents divorced, Dad had taken me river rafting on the Green River in Colorado. We went with one of his friends, a divorced father who had two kids close to my age. We would spend a week winding our way down the river and camping every night in tents on the bank. Before I’d discovered boys, and beer, it had been the most fun I’d ever had in my life. It surprised me that my father
knew this. It surprised me even more that he’d want to give it back to me now. From his perspective, it must have seemed more like a gift than a punishment. And even though I knew the idea should send me into a giant panic—weeks lost, farther and farther from any chance of abortion—for some reason it flooded me with calm.

  “I think it will be good for you,” Dad said, as if reading my mind, “to get back to something healthful, something physical. It will be good for you to go to sleep outside with aching arms. No cell phones. No Internet. No TV. Just campfires and constellations. I’ll give you a map of the summer sky to take with you. It seems to me you’ve got so much noise in your head, you can’t even remember who you are. Maybe this will remind you.”

  My eyes filled up with tears. I pictured myself as the person I wanted to be—not pregnant and escorted home by the Overpeck police, but strong and wholesome, my arms cut and brown from a month of rowing and living on the water. I wondered what the other kids would be like, the ones on the trip, and imagined the cool new friends I’d make. It was so unexpected, this sudden adventure. I couldn’t believe my dad would think of it, that he’d want to send me on a trip like that instead of making me work at his place—the Cinderella stepsister, tending babies and sweeping out the fireplace.

  I thought about myself just floating down a river. Not worrying about where the water would take me, but just letting myself be carried away. It seemed so easy, so effortless.

  “That sounds amazing, Dad,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

  He smiled. Probably he’d expected me to be indignant instead of grateful. He patted me on the head, an awkward attempt at affection, and I stepped forward and hugged him. I put my arms around his waist and pressed my face into his chest. Rebecca squeaked in protest, squished between us.

  Dad thumped my back in an uncharacteristically natural gesture. “Come on,” he said. “I’m starving.” He didn’t know that dinner was more than an hour away.