The Lit Report

by Sarah N. Harvey

  Ruth was in no condition to help, so I grabbed some paper out of her printer and started without her. I knew from experience that it wouldn’t be long before she would get bored under the covers. One of the great things about Ruth is that she has a moth-flame relationship with catastrophe. She is more than a Drama Queen—she is a Drama Empress. Another great thing is that she’s really creative, and I’m really pragmatic, so between the two of us we can usually figure something out. I started with the facts.

  Ruth was pregnant. I was pretty sure about that, but I wrote down Home Pregnancy Test? anyway. Under PRO I wrote Know for sure. Under CON I wrote Where to buy? False results? Cost? and Know for sure. The Know for sures canceled each other out, which left zero pros and three cons. I could always use my Big Mac money to go across town to a big chain drugstore and buy the test. And the false result thing was mostly about false negatives anyway. I was pretty sure we didn’t need to worry about that. Ruth was still snuffling, so there was no one to argue with my logic. Next I wrote Father? Then I crossed it out. I didn’t think I’d win that argument. Underneath that I wrote the word Abortion. I sat and stared at it until Ruth surfaced. She wandered off to the bathroom, and when she got back I saw that she had washed her face and brushed her hair and put on some mascara. It was safe to say the crying was over.

  One good thing about being at Ruth’s is that her mom never sticks her head in the door and asks what you’re doing or whether you’d like something to eat or drink. That happens a lot at my house. Ruth’s parents leave her alone with her phone and her computer, which Pete checks every once in a while for evidence of skanky surfing. If he ever finds anything really raunchy, he yells at her and shuts her down for a few days. Ruth is pretty stealthy when it comes to computers. She knows how to hide her tracks. Unlike her dad, who watches porn on her computer when she’s at school. Ruth says that bit of information may come in handy some day.

  She sat down next to me and looked at what I’d written. Then she grabbed the pen and paper away from me, scribbled for a few seconds and handed it back. Under Abortion she had written Pro = It’s My Life and Con = Eternal Damnation. Ruth doesn’t mess around with the paper prophet. I could have added to the list, but I already knew which way we were headed.

  Three

  There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

  —Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

  I first read Jane Eyre when I was eleven and in my Brontë phase. I devoured all the Brontë girls—Emily, Anne, Charlotte—one November when I had the flu. I briefly adored Wuthering Heights, which also has a pretty great first line, but plain Jane eventually won me over. Catherine and Heathcliff are such useless twits. The most famous line from Jane Eyre doesn’t come until the last chapter, which begins “Reader, I married him.” How great a line is that? Not “Reader, he married me.” Big difference. But back to the first line. What’s a girl to do when she can’t go for a walk? When her choices are limited? When everything seems hopeless? She can, like countless heroines of bad literature, find a man to save her or, like Jane, she can work on her other options. And maybe get the guy in the end. I love Jane Eyre. It’s got everything: a smart brave heroine, a flawed hero, true love and a madwoman in the attic. All eleven-year-old girls should read it, but they don’t. They’re too busy shopping and downloading movies. They won’t be as ready as I was for the madwoman.

  On Friday morning I told my mom I was going to the downtown library after school to do research for a biology paper. It wasn’t a total lie. I really was going to go to the library, but my research wasn’t into the kind of biology that’s on the school curriculum. I always try and tell interesting lies that contain a grain of truth—not too much detail, plausible, easy to remember. I went online at the library and printed out information about abortions and where to go to talk to someone about getting one. I couldn’t risk using the computer at home. My mom isn’t suspicious like Pastor Pete, but we live in a tiny apartment—my mom sleeps on a pullout couch—and we share the computer in the living room. We could probably afford a bigger apartment if my mom wasn’t supporting about ten African AIDS orphans and donating (or tithing, as she calls it) a percentage of her income to a shelter downtown for battered women. I wished I could talk to Miki or my dad about Ruth’s problem—Miki’s a baby doctor, after all, and he’s a baby nurse—but it was too risky. It would have been a relief to talk to an adult, especially a smart adult with specialized medical knowledge. Miki’s a bit brisk, but I’ve gotten used to her. My mom hasn’t.

  After my trip to the library, I picked up a home pregnancy test at the downtown London Drugs. The clerk looked at me kind of funny when she scanned it, but home pregnancy tests aren’t like cigarettes or booze—you don’t have to show ID to get them. I smiled brightly and told her to have a nice day. She said, “You too,” and that was it.

  As soon as I got to Ruth’s, she grabbed the drugstore bag from me and disappeared into the bathroom. While I waited for her to come out, I looked at the most recent additions to her installation. Next to the orange thong was a condom, still in its wrapper, and a Bad Religion CD. I assumed these items were commemorative; I hoped I would have something slightly more romantic to show for my first time. A flower, maybe, or a poem. After a while she came back to her room, shoved the drugstore bag at me, threw herself face down on her bed and yelled, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” into her pillow. I didn’t really need confirmation, but I fished around in the bag and found both tests—both used, both showing a pink stripe. Big surprise. One more reason for Ruth to hate pink. I buried the bag at the bottom of my pack and waited, pleating into fans the pages of information I’d printed out for her at the library.

  Eventually Ruth sat up and said, “This is bad. This is so bad.” Her face was all blotchy, and her lips were cracked and sore looking.

  “Yup,” I said.

  “I mean, this is, like, the worst. I keep thinking that it’s going to go away, but it’s not. Whatever I do—it’s not going away—ever. Not if I have an abortion. Not if I give it up for adoption. Not if I keep it.” Ruth’s voice rose to a wail, and I reached over and turned on her stereo to mask the sound of her grief. Because that’s what it was—grief. Any decision she made would lead to more grief—or eternal damnation if Pete and Peggy were to be believed. I wondered again why she hadn’t used a condom, but again I didn’t ask. I didn’t need another visit to the clinic for stitches. Ruth’s PMS episodes were formidable enough. I hated to think what pregnancy would do to her moods.

  I handed Ruth the fans I’d made and listened to Coldplay while she smoothed out the pages and read all the stuff about manual vacuum aspiration and dilation and evacuation—stuff that had made me feel kind of queasy when I read it, and I wasn’t the one who was pregnant. I tried to imagine how she felt. Trapped. Confused. Angry. Sad. Helpless. Maybe even a tiny bit excited. When she had finished reading, she crumpled the pages into a big ball and threw it at me, which I felt was a bit unfair. I know what I felt at that moment. Confused. Angry. Sad. A tiny bit envious and a tiny bit excited. But not helpless. And not trapped.

  “There’s no way. I can’t do it,” she said, squeezing her lower lip between her thumb and forefinger. A droplet of blood appeared on a crack in her lip.

  “Okay,” I said. “No one said you had to. It was just an option. You know, a choice.”

  “A shitty choice,” she muttered, still squeezing.

  “If you say so,” I said.

  “Well, I do,” she said. “And not just because of the burning in hellfire thing, either. I mean, I don’t really believe that shit, you know I don’t. But it still seems...wrong.” I turned the music down. Now that Ruth had downgraded from wailing to moaning, I didn’t want Peggy storming in, demanding that we listen to the Oakridge Boys. Not with a drugstore bag full of used pregnancy tests and a big ball of information about abortions in the room.

  “Okay,” I said, taking my shoes off and crawling onto Ruth’s bed. “Here’s the deal. You’r
e down to two choices: having the baby and keeping it or having the baby and giving it up for adoption, right?”

  Ruth stared at me, her red-rimmed brown eyes wide. “If I keep it, I’ll have, like, no life. So I have to give it up, don’t I? Right, Julia? I have to give it up.”

  I knew Ruth better than to try and tell her what to do. “Keeping it doesn’t seem like a great idea to me,” I replied. “I mean, can you imagine being one of those teenage welfare moms, taking your baby to the free clinic, hanging around the park, smoking and talking about your badass boyfriend. No education, no future.” I shuddered. “No thanks. Do you really want that? Don’t you want to graduate and move away from here like we planned? And do you really think you’re ready to be a mom?”

  Ruth was silent for a minute. I could hear Two-Percent blowing his nose in the next room. Gross. “I guess not,” she finally said. “I can’t even look after a hamster, let alone a baby. Remember what happened to Morton?”

  I nodded. Morton the hamster had died when Ruth left him on his own in the backyard. We never found his body—only a sad little pile of hamster fluff. Ruth told her parents that she had witnessed a hamster rapture. Morton had ascended to the sky in a shaft of golden light, she said, even though we had both seen an eagle circling the trees near her house that day. She never had another pet. Now was not the time to start.

  “So you’re left with your other option, right? Having the baby and giving it up. Which has its own problems. Pete and Peggy will send you away for sure, and we don’t want that.”

  Ruth shook her head vehemently. “No way. I’m not going to some Bad-Girl Bible camp. But what can I do? They’re gonna freak. You know that. And there’s nowhere else for me to go.”

  “I know,” I said. “But I think there’s another way. I thought of this on the bus coming back from downtown. I’m pretty sure it’ll work.” Ruth nodded and sniffled and wiped her nose on her Holly Hobbie bedspread.

  “You know how you hear about girls who give birth on prom night in the girl’s washroom and leave the baby in the garbage and no one even knew they were pregnant?”

  Ruth nodded again.

  “Well, I figure that if you don’t gain a lot of weight and you dress in sweats or something, we can hide your pregnancy. And after the baby’s born we’ll take it to your dad’s church and make sure someone finds it, and then it’ll be adopted and no one but you and me will ever know. And you won’t get sent away and we can finish high school and get outta Dodge, just the way we planned.” When I finished speaking, I was as out of breath as when I have to run around the track for PE class. Ruth was staring at me as if I had grown a third breast.

  “Are you fucking nuts?” she hissed. “This isn’t some dumb movie-of-the-week. I’m pregnant. I’m going to get as big as a VW bug. I’m going to give birth. And it ain’t gonna be quiet, I can tell you that right now.”

  I interrupted her before she could come up with more objections.

  “I know all that. Just listen to me. I did a lot of reading today at the library. Not only is it possible to conceal a pregnancy, it’s also possible to have a baby without going to a hospital. Lots of women do that by choice these days. They hire midwives so they can have their babies at home. Miki talks about that all the time—how women have to be careful and choose a good midwife and go to the hospital right away if there are any complications. But most of the time it’s okay. And you wouldn’t believe how many babies are delivered by taxi drivers or pilots or the baby’s father. I can do better than that. There are tons of books I can read. I can find out about nutrition and I can teach myself how to do checkups and everything. You know how I love a big research project. This one just won’t be for extra credit.” I grinned and poked her leg with my toe.

  Ruth snickered and absently rubbed her stomach.

  “I’m bigger already,” she moaned.

  “No, you’re not,” I said. “You just think that because you’re lying around all day obsessing about it. The first thing you have to do is get up, get dressed and try to act normal.” I looked around at the walls in Ruth’s room and thought about the inflatable scene on the front lawn. “Or what passes for normal around here.”

  “Then what?” she asked. I could tell she was warming to the idea already. She could see that I was offering her a chance to crawl out the bathroom window of her life.

  “Then you do everything I tell you to do.” I laughed. “That’ll be a first.”

  We sat in silence for a moment. I could hear Peggy yelling at Pete, and I heard Two-Percent’s motorcycle start up. I could hear Ruth’s breathing. She still sounded stuffed up.

  “Okay,” she said. “What do I do first?”

  “First, you have to agree to let me name the baby. Even if you’re not going to keep it, I get to name it.”

  “Sure.” Ruth shrugged. “It doesn’t make any difference to me. Name it anything you like. Beelzebub would be awesome. Then what?”

  “Then I figure out what to do about the morning sickness so you can go back to school on Monday. Then I buy a stethoscope and some vitamins and you stop eating crap.”

  That got her attention. “But that’s all we ever eat around here. Peggy can’t cook—you know that.”

  It was true. Peggy knew everything there was to know about cleaning, but her idea of good nutrition was extra coleslaw with the bucket of KFC. The only time Ruth ate a balanced meal was when she came to my house. I was pretty sure my mom would notice if she started eating all her meals with us.

  Ruth continued. “I don’t know how to cook. And there’s no way Peggy’s gonna listen when I say I want organic greens or some other gourmet shit. And have you thought about how much it’s gonna cost—all this good nutrition?”

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed and reached for my shoes. I was beginning to feel a bit annoyed with Ruth. I knew she was upset, and I was willing to overlook the occasional hormonal outburst, but I thought I’d come up with a pretty good plan, and she was already shooting it down. Without my help, Peggy and Pete would discover her little secret sooner or later, and then where would she be? On a bus to the Home for Knocked-Up Nitwits, that’s where. The least I’d expected was a tiny bit of gratitude and maybe a smidgen of cooperation.

  “I’m not asking you to do much, you know,” I said, getting up from the bed. “Just watch what you eat—I’ll even read up about prenatal nutrition and tell you how. Who knows? You might even like it. You’re always bitching about your weight. For now, get cleaned up and go get yourself a salad at McDonald’s. No dressing.” Ruth groaned. “I gotta go. I’ve got work to do. I’ll call you later.” I slung my pack over my shoulder and walked out the door.

  As I went down the path to the sidewalk, Pete turned on the lights on the Christmas scene, and the biggest, ugliest plastic star I’d ever seen glared down from the top of the house, illuminating the sorry scene below. A helpless unexpected baby. A poor ignorant young mother. The irony was not lost on me.

  I looked up at Ruth’s window and saw her standing there, watching me leave. I pointed to the scene on the lawn, mimed sticking my finger down my throat and blew her a kiss. She smiled and blew one back. She might be a giant pain in the ass sometimes, but she was my best friend, and besides, she was the one who was pregnant. Whatever else happened in the next little while, I knew it wouldn’t be my breasts that would be sore, my stomach that would have stretch marks, my skin that would break out, my bladder that would leak, my ankles that would swell and my vagina that would have to stretch. I didn’t have something growing inside me. I had it easy.

  Four

  It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

  —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

  When I first read Pride and Prejudice, I was only ten, so it’s not surprising that I didn’t immediately get the irony of that first sentence. I thought it simply meant that it was easy for a rich man to get a wife. Which, ironically, is per
fectly true. I mean, all you have to do is look at a few magazines to know that there’s nothing easier for a rich man. As easy as buying a Mercedes SUV or jetting off to a private resort on the Turks and Caicos for the weekend. If one wife doesn’t work out, well, there’s always another one—usually a younger one—coming down the pike. It took a few readings before I realized that Pride and Prejudice wasn’t all about romance, although it’s just as romantic as Jane Eyre, maybe more so. Anyway, after I figured out what irony was and wasn’t (no thanks to you, Alanis Morissette), I really started to appreciate P & P. I’ve tried to convince Ruth that Jane Austen wrote chick lit long before Bridget Jones came along, but the only similarity Ruth sees is that Colin Firth was in both movies. What she actually said was, “Why should I read about people with poles up their butts when I have you?” I shut her up by telling her that sarcasm is irony’s redneck cousin. Well, at least I have a cousin, was her reply. Which is true and stupid and neither ironic or sarcastic. Strange as it sounds, P & P helped me understand why my dad left my mom and why he and Miki are together. He is Miki’s good fortune and she is his, even though at first he was prejudiced against her because she was a rich doctor, and she was too proud to see that a scruffy singing nurse was just what she needed.

  After I left Ruth’s that Saturday, I took the bus over to my dad’s and let myself in. I go and visit Dad every weekend. That’s been the arrangement ever since he moved out when I was five. At first I went to his crappy little bachelor apartment a couple of blocks away, and then he moved to an equally crappy one-bedroom condo out near the hospital. Now I go to the five-bedroom art deco house he and Miki bought after they got together. I bet Miki made the down payment. A nurse—especially a child-support-paying nurse—wouldn’t even be able to cover the payments on the garage. It’s a beautiful house; every room but one has an ocean view. That one room is what they call the decompression chamber. It’s tiny and narrow and you reach it by going up a little staircase tucked in the corner of the front hall. It’s sort of like being in a boat that never leaves the wharf. There’s a big porthole instead of a window, and a built-in berth where you can read or sleep or stare out the window at an arbutus tree. It’s always just the right temperature and there’s no TV, no radio, no phone. There’s even a Do Not Disturb sign to hang on the doorknob if you don’t want to be called for meals or phone calls. No one is allowed to stay all night in the chamber—it’s strictly for short-term use—and sometimes we fight over it (isn’t that ironic?), but it’s my favorite room in the house when I have things to think about. I planned to get in there soon.