If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go

by Judy Chicurel

  “Except for the mice in the walls,” the woman said, smiling. “Who come out at night and keep us awake.”

  “This house is too beautiful to have mice,” Liz said loudly. “This town is too beautiful to have mice running around.” I turned to look at Liz. I had never heard her use this fawning, kiss-ass tone before, not to her parents or teachers or even Dr. Steadman, our high school principal, that time she was caught cutting so many classes that she almost didn’t graduate.

  “Maybe that’s what attracts them,” the woman said.

  “Who?” Liz asked wildly.

  “The mice,” the woman said gently. Then she asked, “You have something for me, yes?”

  Liz stared at her blankly.

  “I said, you have something for me, yes?” the woman asked again, still smiling.

  I nudged Liz, tapped her purse. “Oh!” she said. “Oh! I’m so . . . sorry, man, really, I’m . . .” She rummaged in her purse and came out with an envelope. She held it out to the woman with a shaky hand. Her voice was making me sick. I wanted her to lose that fake, fawning tone and sound like Liz again.

  The woman didn’t take the envelope. She sat gazing at Liz. She had the calmest eyes I’d ever seen, green or gray, it was hard to tell. The light in the office was dimmer than it had been outside in the foyer, which was fine. All that streaming sunlight made me nervous. It was a perfect beach day, not a cloud in the sky. It was like a painting you could have named July. The breeze through the window carried the scent of the ocean. Wind chimes tinkled on the porch. The whole thing was giving me the creeps, everything so white and bright and airy. It should have been raining. The curtains should have had dirty edges, filthy hems from sweeping against a sooty windowsill. A body should have been falling out of the closet, bathed in blood. We should have come at night, in the dark, when children were asleep. But Beth had told us two o’clock on Thursday afternoon, so here we were.

  The woman said, “Before we go upstairs, I’m only going to ask you once, yes? Do you want to go through with this?”

  Liz took out her Marlboros, lit two, and handed me one. She began flicking ashes in the largest seashell, the kind we picked up on the beach at home all the time and used for ashtrays in our bedrooms.

  “Because if you don’t, you can walk back out that door right now and that’s the end of it,” the woman said. She didn’t sound mad. She didn’t look like she cared one way or the other.

  Liz blew smoke up at the ceiling fan. Beneath the huge frames of her sunglasses, her cheeks were still stained and splotchy from crying on the bus.

  “I can tell you this is safer and less painful than childbirth, and will take far less time than a root canal,” the woman said. I could see the corners of Liz’s mouth turn down, her lips begin to tremble.

  The woman focused on me. “And you are her good friend, yes?” I nodded.

  “And no matter what goes down in the next few minutes, you both know that whatever happens here is confidential, not to be talked about outside of this house, or I could lose my medical license and that’s one less option for women to be safe.”

  The word “safe” echoed through the cool room. I thought it was a strange choice of words. It was not a word I would have chosen. It was only after she’d spoken those words that I realized the woman was the doctor. I had thought she was a nurse, an assistant, someone who took care of the preliminaries. I thought the doctor would be short and mannish-looking, with pinched lips and close-cropped dark hair and lines in her forehead, wearing a dirty white coat. I wondered if the woman had children herself, if she sent them to day camp or to the beach with a babysitter, with strict instructions not to come home before a certain time. Or if they were grown, our age, and suspected but weren’t sure what was going on in their own house. I tried to imagine how I would feel if I suddenly found out my mother was performing abortions in the basement or out in the backyard shed. I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t get my mind around such a thing. There were no family pictures on the doctor’s desk, in the office room. There were no pictures of real people anywhere around.

  The woman put her elbows on her knees, rested her chin in her hands. Liz crushed her cigarette in the shell on the coffee table. A single spark refused to die. She took a deep breath.

  “Okay, man,” she said. “Let’s do it. Let’s do it now.” She sounded like Liz again. She stood up and held the envelope out again. This time the woman took it. She went to the desk, opened a drawer, and the envelope disappeared. She walked to the door and opened it, then beckoned us through with a graceful finger. I’d been so engrossed in looking around that until now I’d forgotten to look at her hands. She wasn’t wearing polish on her fingernails. They were cut short and square. They looked short and square and strong and clean.

  Last Monday

  “You swear on your mother’s life you didn’t tell Beth it was me?” Liz asked Nanny for like the ninetieth time.

  We were sitting in the Shot Glass Saloon up in the Point, at the other end of Elephant Beach. It was dark and dim and everyone looked familiar even though we didn’t know them. We’d purposely come here because it was several miles from the Trunk and anyone we would run into. Even so, Liz had insisted on us wearing dark sunglasses and black jeans and tee shirts and bandannas so that no one would recognize us. It was four thirty in the afternoon and we were sitting at a table in the corner, drinking whiskey sours on the rocks and planning Liz’s abortion. She’d gotten pregnant after balling Cory in an AMC Gremlin, her least favorite car on her father’s lot, but the only one that had been available. It had been a cramped and hurried encounter; she said she wished it had happened in the Pontiac Bonneville, classically restored and big and roomy as a bed, but it was a premium seller and Cory was afraid her father might notice something was amiss. When she’d told Cory she was late, he’d just nodded and said, “Bummer.” The next day he gave her two hundred dollars and told her, “More where that came from if you need it, just get it taken care of. I don’t want to know the details.”

  Nanny shook her head. “I told you,” she said patiently. “Beth doesn’t want to know. She says the less people know, the better. She’ll make the call and set up the appointment. Then she’ll get back to me with the day and time.”

  “How does Beth know her again?” I asked. Beth Fagan was in her last year of nursing school at Joshua Stern Medical Center in Manhattan; she’d been the midwife at Maggie Mayhew’s home birth. She said it was a deep and life-changing experience, even though everything had gone wrong and Aunt Francie said it was a miracle the baby had been born at all.

  “From Joshua Stern,” Nanny said. “It’s kind of like an underground thing, but all the nurses know about it.”

  “If it’s so underground, what’s she doing living in Silverwood?” Liz asked.

  Nanny snorted. “Would you think to go looking for an abortion doctor in Silverwood?”

  “So, what, I just knock on the door and say, ‘Hey man, I’m, like, here for my abortion’?”

  “Pretty much, yeah. Beth will tell us everything we need to do.”

  “And she doesn’t have to know my name or anything?” Liz squinted through the cigarette smoke.

  “She doesn’t want to know your name,” Nanny whispered. “Because if anything happens, she could lose her license, go to jail—”

  Liz was staring hard at Nanny. “What is this ‘if anything happens’? What’s going to happen? If nobody’s looking in Silverwood for this abortion doctor, then please, somebody tell me, what the fuck is going to happen?”

  “Lower your voice,” Nanny hissed. Heads at the bar were beginning to lift and look us over.

  Sure enough, the cocktail waitress came by. Her face had that creased look of too many cigarettes and her voice was chipped and hoarse. “Everything all right over here?” she asked, and Liz burst into tears. Nanny and I looked at each other helplessly. The waitress peele
d off some cocktail napkins from the stack on her tray and handed them to Liz. The napkins had “The Shot Glass Saloon” written in bold red script, and beneath the letters, a cowboy brandishing a six-shooter, standing next to an old-timey saloon with swinging doors. There were no cowboys in the Shot Glass, only drunks with nothing better to do than sit at the bar drinking boilermakers, listening to Frank Sinatra’s voice from the jukebox singing “It Was a Very Good Year” forty-seven times.

  The waitress looked at me and Nanny. “Boyfriend problems?” she asked. She lit a cigarette and laid it on her tray with the smoking end outward.

  Nanny looked at me. “Kind of,” I told her. The minute she’d missed her period, Liz had started planning her wedding. The ceremony would be on Comanche Beach at sunset, and the reception would take place at the new Knights of Columbus catering hall, right on the bay. Liz would wear a red velvet granny dress with a matching crown of roses in her hair. We’d all be bridesmaids and wear any shade of velvet we wanted, except green, so it didn’t look like Christmas. Cory would get promoted to manager of her father’s dealership and they’d buy the house that had been for sale forever on Weber Avenue, by the bay, where all the bedrooms faced the water. Even though Cory McGill had never taken Liz to dinner, met her mother, or hung out with any of her friends.

  The waitress looked at Liz and nodded. Her eyes were winged with eyeliner at the corners and her roots were showing through at the crown, at her temples. She dragged heavily on her cigarette, placed it back on the rim of her cocktail tray, laid the tray down and put her hands on our table.

  “Let me tell you girls something about men,” she said. “They’re all a hundred years out of the trees, and there’s not a Goddamned thing you can do about it.”

  Last Night

  The night before, Liz and Nanny were supposed to come to my house so we could go over our plans for the hundredth time. We were going to take the bus; Liz didn’t want to drive in case anyone recognized her car, even though Silverwood was at the other end of Long Island and no one we knew ever hung out there. After it was over, we’d be staying overnight at the Dancing Dolphin Motel; Nanny had the good idea to call the Chamber of Commerce and get a recommendation. It sounded funky and cheerful, and we told our parents we were taking the train to the city to shop at Macy’s and see a movie, maybe The Godfather, and stay overnight at Nanny’s grandmother’s apartment in Washington Heights. Liz still insisted on us wearing our incognito outfits, even though I tried telling her we’d only draw attention to ourselves since nobody in Elephant Beach wore black in summer unless they were going to a funeral. Liz thought that if we wore our black bandannas and shades either no one would recognize us or they’d think we were too crazy to deal with and leave us alone.

  We usually didn’t hang out at my house, because I lived farther away from Comanche Beach and Eddy’s and all our other hangouts. But Liz didn’t want to talk at her house, and Nanny was terrified of her mother overhearing us, since the walls of their bungalow were thin. Wednesday was my mother’s mah-jongg night so she and her friends would be playing in the kitchen and wouldn’t have heard a bomb go off once they got going. We would have the back porch to ourselves. I waited out there, lying on the chaise lounge, munching on mah-jongg food, nonpareils and M&M’s, reading a book about growing up in the 1950s when life was simpler with happier endings.

  “What, no street corner tonight?” My mother came out on the back porch, shaking the dry mop over the porch railing.

  “Nope,” I said, chomping on a nonpareil. I felt safe, knowing she wouldn’t start in on me with her friends due to arrive any minute. “Liz is coming over, we’re gonna just hang out, take it easy.”

  “Let me have a cigarette,” she said, leaning against the railing. On my eighteenth birthday she had given me permission to smoke because she was tired of me stinking up the bathroom with hair spray to hide the smell; that drove my father crazy. She didn’t smoke much herself, only when she played mah-jongg or canasta. But sometimes, when I came home late and she was sitting in the kitchen doing the crossword puzzle, we’d have a cigarette together and talk about things. Her voice always sounded younger then, especially when she put her hands over her mouth so that the sound of her laughter wouldn’t wake my brother or my father.

  My mother lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply, leaning against the porch railing, gazing up at the sky. I lit one, too, to be sociable, even though I’d just had one.

  “What’s with Liz lately?” she asked me. “She sounded upset when she called before. What is she, having boyfriend trouble?”

  I sighed. “Kind of,” I said.

  “The trouble with you girls is, you make everything too easy for these boys,” she said. “Make them work a little, then they won’t treat you like a pair of old shoes.”

  “Mom—”

  “I know, I know, the mothers, we never know anything,” she said. “You wonder why I get so upset with you running down to that corner every night. I want you to expect more out of life, not less. But who knows,” she said, the smoke from her cigarette curling above her head like a gauzy crown, “maybe it’s our fault as much as yours. If we had more to give you, you’d expect more. You do the best you can, but sometimes it’s not enough.”

  I looked at my mother, surprised. She always talked like we were better than other people we knew, certainly than the people I hung out with. But there were things we didn’t have; my father refused to buy anything on credit because he’d grown up poor and seen too many repossessions. Our television was black-and-white, and we had a washing machine, but not a dryer. I liked hanging my jeans over the porch railing and letting them dry there; they always smelled like the sun. Billy once told me that I had the best-smelling clothes of any girl he knew. But if I told that to my mother, she’d only ask me why Billy knew that in the first place, and how close was he getting to my clothes anyway, that he could smell them so good.

  “Where are you?” my mother asked. She sounded annoyed. “Have you even heard one word I’ve said?”

  “I was just thinking how I like the way my jeans smell from hanging on the porch in the sun,” I told her.

  “What on earth made you think of that?” she asked.

  “Only that if we had a clothes dryer they wouldn’t smell as good,” I said. “I’d kind of miss it.”

  My mother looked at me for a long moment. Then she smiled. “Next you’ll want me to hunt up Grandma’s old washboard and do the washing out here instead of throwing the clothes in the machine,” she said, laughing. She came over and hugged me close, something she rarely did anymore. I hugged her back, and felt tears pushing up against my eyelids.

  “You’re such a good girl, such a good kid,” she whispered against my hair. “I only want the best for you, can you see that? You think all I do is carp and criticize, but I only want the best.”

  “I know,” I whispered back. My mother held me for a moment longer, then kissed the side of my head and pushed herself away. “Go back to your book,” she said, and went into the house, closing the screen door softly behind her.

  • • •

  About twenty minutes later, I heard the doorbell over the sound of my mother and her friends chattering. Then Liz came banging through the screen door, her mouth stuffed with Almond Joy miniatures. The air was filled with the sound of cicadas and the voices of some kids playing stickball in the street.

  Liz said, around a mouthful of chocolate, “Man, you know I love your mother, but why does she always sound, like, angry?”

  “You’re just feeling sensitive,” I said, but I knew it was true. My mother was the youngest of four kids. My grandparents hadn’t wanted her; they were poor and lived in one of those old-timey tenements on the Lower East Side and my grandfather worked three jobs and was going to night school to learn English when he could fit it in. In those days, they believed that a bumpy trolley-car ride would bring on a miscarriage; my grandmo
ther rode the trolley as much as she could afford to, but it didn’t work. For her first year, my mother slept in the bottom drawer of my grandparents’ dresser as there was no room or money for more beds. Maybe the reason she yelled at us so much was because, despite the odds, she’d managed to make her way into the world, and she wanted everyone to know she was here to stay.

  “Where’s Nanny?” I asked Liz.

  Liz sat down in the beach chair opposite me. “Nanny bailed because she thinks I’m going to hell and she will, too, if she comes along for the ride.”

  “Oh, she did not—”

  “Yeah, she did.” Liz sighed. “She said there’s some christening she has to go to tomorrow, her mother’s dragging them all into the city.”

  I wondered about this. I’d thought it odd that Nanny hadn’t returned my call from yesterday, because we usually spoke daily and now there was all this going on. I guessed she was thinking she’d see me tonight and we’d talk then.

  “Well, you know how it is with family stuff, and Mrs. Devlin—”

  “Katie.” Liz shook her head like I was an idiot. “Tomorrow’s Thursday. You ever hear of a christening taking place on a Thursday? You ever hear of a christening that gave everyone, like, one day’s notice?”

  The night smelled heavily of honeysuckle. Liz got up and walked over to the porch railing. She stood there, gazing down at my mother’s tomato plants. She was quiet for a long time. Finally, she said, “I think—I think there’s something wrong with me, man. I mean, really, I—” She broke off, looked up at the darkening sky. “I mean, when I found out, when I knew for sure? Before I told anyone? I was, like, so happy. I—I really thought, right, I really thought that we’d have a wedding on the beach, that he’d be the manager of my father’s dealership. That I’d be buying hanging crystals from Heads Up for the baby’s room, all that shit.” She shook her head. “We call you the space shot, you live in your head so much, but I’m the one living on cloud fucking nine.”