“I am hungry for Hungarian soul food this afternoon. My body says eat food for the soul. Let’s go out to my mother’s early, so we can have some of every dish she is making right in the kitchen before the others come.”
Who said we were going to Brooklyn? No one, I answered to myself. But now you’re pregnant, you’re a Szabo. You’re going to Brooklyn whether you like it or not. It’s not so had, I said to myself. Everyone out there is awfully nice. You can bring your papers and correct them with the TV movie Mr. Szabo will watch. It’s just this once. Once! No, it was the beginning of forever. Of wifedom. Of a highly sophisticated metaphorical kind of purdah lite. Of having to fight for every single inch or having a will-less life.
I went to the bathroom.
“I’m sick,” I said when I came out. “Oh,” I lied, “I hope I can go to Brooklyn. I hope I’m not too sick.”
“Take off your clothes! Put on your pajamas! Get back in bed!”
Great ideas.
“I will take charge of this day,” Tilla said. “I will make lunch for you, and the rest will go in the refrigerator and you can eat that for dinner. You will stay here. You mustn’t travel. I will go to Brooklyn later on myself, and after rehearsal tomorrow I will come here.”
He got busy. Out to the supermarket. Into the kitchen. Over to me.
“Put those papers down! You cannot give energy to papers. Rest!” he commanded. He was exhausted and imperious. And afraid. All this activity was cover. And soon he threw the cover off.
“I’ll have to get a different job, you know, Tilla.” I hesitated, then began again. “I can’t teach children and have a child, too. I just couldn’t be good enough to the child. I’ll have to look for a different job.”
“I have no money, Molly. I cannot help with money.”
“Well, do you think you could get a part-time job?”
“How can I do that!” he exploded. “What about the troupe? I am their father! I am first in their minds.”
“Well, if I work full-time, the baby needs someone at home until I get back from work.” I was taking the plunge. I was saying that I would work in an office and that I would support Tilla and the baby, and that I would be the chief breadwinner and the mother and play the role of chattel that Tilla still could order around. Tilla would not be a sexist when it came to having me support him. Somehow, I knew, he felt I should support him. He deserved it.
“And I would be househusband, you mean?”
“Well, yes, you would hold the fort till I got home.” (And handed you my paycheck since you didn’t believe I could handle my money well.)
“I would be good at that!” he declared. “I am good at staying home! I could direct the troupe and have the baby by my side…until you came home.”
“I’m going to have a full-time job and a baby and support you and somehow make poems,” I said. A panic was setting in, but it was a low, interior panic. It was not loud.
“Molly,” Tilla said, holding my hand. “I can be househusband, staying home, but I cannot be Mother.”
“Well, you’d have to be a part-time mother. Just till I got home.”
“I cannot, Molly. The baby will cry, my little son will need me. And I will dance. And I will meet with the music mixers. And the performers will be needing my direction. And I will not answer my son’s cries. I cannot be Mother.”
This time I heard him. He was honest and clear. He would not do it. He could not surrender to it.
“Go get some soul food,” I said, “and call me tomorrow night, but you don’t have to come over. After school I’m going to see Ruta. Then I’m just coming home and going to sleep. I know you have a late rehearsal tomorrow. We can talk tomorrow night on the phone.” My voice was firm and calm and mothering.
“All right,” he said, and left me to the rest of my Sunday. I immediately called Maggie, who was living in Queens, having sublet her West Side apartment to make ends meet until her string quartet got established. By the time I spent the afternoon talking things through with Maggie, I wasn’t feeling pregnant at all. I took a nap, paid some bills, and got ready to meet her for dinner. In the midst of paying the bills I saw Mike Groden’s unopened letter again, and stuck it under the paperweight that held down a pile of other things I had no idea what to do about. But when I got to Bangkok Thai, Maggie wasn’t there. In my hunger to keep on talking, I’d mixed up our arrangement. It was the wrong night.
“I’m a murderer.”
“Do you really believe you’ll be a murderer if you have an abortion?” Ruta asked from her chair just behind my head. I was encased in yet another kind of womb, the sunlit therapy room, which was also her living room with its glass table and Persian carpet and Dutch landscape painting and her own watercolors hung on the creamy walls—a far cry from the operating room I was contemplating.
“Actually no.” By now I knew I didn’t have to carry the world on my back, no matter what anyone said. “But,” I said to her, “I’d be putting an end to something.”
“Maybe you’d be saving something.”
“Me, you mean?”
“Possibly.”
“Or the baby itself, saving it from this situation.”
“Yes.”
“Or Tilla.”
“Yes.”
“Look, Ruta, people don’t usually think of abortions as saving people.”
“What matters is what you think,” she said.
“Can I support the three of us financially,” I started to cry, “spiritually, physically, emotionally, socially? I can’t do it!” After I sobbed for a while, the release of the weeping let me feel pregnant again, both vulnerable and fierce. “But,” I began again, “I can’t, I can’t see a way to do it that won’t destroy me, and destroy all of us. There has to be two, there has to be a father. I can’t do this alone. I need help. Not just helpers, real help, like from a husband.”
I struggled against my bodily contentment. “I like being pregnant. I like walking around thinking, I’m pregnant. I love knowing that my body works. It works! I can have a baby!”
“You could have another baby, then, couldn’t you?” Ruta said.
“Yes, I could, couldn’t I? I could do five thousand tons of exercise and get really strong and try it again.” I stopped and lay there silent, then continued, “I’m sad to lose this feeling.” Then I sobbed again.
“Can you tell me why you’re crying?”
“Because.” I sat up and blew my nose on a tissue from her continuous source of Kleenexes, then lay back down and reached over my head for her hand. “Because I’m sad, I’m sad for me all alone and I’m sad for me with a baby.”
I lay there, simply breathing, and finally said, “I’m sad because I’m going to do this. I’m going to have an abortion.”
—
I arrived at the same Thai restaurant for the second night, this time with swollen eyes no makeup could hide. There was Maggie, uncharacteristically on time and waiting for me.
“You sounded so terrible I knew I had to be on time,” she said, her ruddy face pale with concern. She took her long flat fingers and pulled back her hair. “Oh, Molly, I’m so sorry you have to endure this.”
We talked for a while about my decision, which had been hers nearly twenty years before. I watched a sympathy in her face play behind an almost-frown, her responses monosyllabic. This was still a trial for her.
“I know Tilla will go along with it,” I said aloud. “And he won’t even have to pay for it, I found out in school today. The insurance pays.” I knew, of course, that I would have written the check in any case.
“Oh, Molly.” Maggie reached out her hand and touched my sleeve. Her face stirred up then clouded, like sediment disturbing a pond. The waitress came back to our table again and again to see what we decided to order. We numbed our states by ordering shrimp in coconut sauce and vegetables in a ginger sauce and salad and chicken satay, and normalcy crept in.
“You know they have shrines in Japan for unborn fetuse
s,” Maggie said as we waited for our food. She had played in Japan the previous year. “The temples there are piled with little dolls that look like babies. Women dress them up as babies. The culture gives them a way to mourn publicly for what they’ve lost.”
I took comfort in the idea of those shrines, in open mourning for what cannot be. Tears for the choice you do not make. The road you do not take. The bed you make you will not lie in. A shrine for regret. A shrine for what must be grieved for.
—
No one grieved harder than Tilla, who wept in the hallway outside my room in Roosevelt Hospital. Whatever he was, he was honest about fatherhood. He did not deceive me or himself about his inability to take it on. And he wept as openly as I have ever seen a man weep, and felt as severely this loss, this impossible situation that we had acknowledged to be impossible. We had not lied to ourselves or to one another. We had called together for the appointment. He had driven me to the hospital and would wait for me, then drive me home.
The abortion was an outpatient procedure, a matter of a few hours. We waited in the lemon-walled room that was my home for the afternoon. Tears slid down Tilla’s cheeks, while I, who am so easily moved to tears, sat frozen instead into one position, yet alert as an animal, sniffing for danger.
When the attendants came with a gurney, I got on. They wheeled me to an operating room, and there was my gynecologist, Sarah. I did not say “No! No, stop this! Let me get off this cart!” or yell for Tilla, or for God. I had had to sign papers to the effect that I was sure about doing this. And I was. I was going, by my action, to free myself and Tilla, to enter the new path of our lives, since of course our lives would never be the same.
The anesthesiologist in her green gown gave me something which kept me vaguely conscious throughout the suction procedure. I was partly awake as the gurney was wheeled into the operating room, and an image of a fox in a trap grew into my drugged fog, and I wondered if I could chew off my own leg to be released from the trap. Just before the anesthesia did another level of its work, I saw myself lean to my ankle with a set of canine teeth, pointed, ready for the shock of my own blood as I sank them into the flesh of a leg that could never again carry me away from danger. Then the anesthesia did the deepest level of its work, and the procedure began. As the doctors and nurses joked above me, the operating room seemed like a grease pit in a car dealership, the medical personnel insular and softly jocular, like mechanics working on a car on a lift, joking and teasing one another. I suppose I could have resented being worked on like a car…as they expertly turned a screw, as they fished out a ripped hose and replaced it, fixing, fixing…but I felt I was being repaired, returned to an original state.
Then the garage was gone and the fox in its trap was back. Now the procedure was nearing completion, the anesthesia changing levels again, and I was again the fox, poised over my leg, though the teeth in my mouth were human now, and human hands were opening the trap, holding it so wide I needn’t even scrape my shaven, human, female leg.
After I woke up fully in the recovery room, wondering what that terrible bleating was—it was a woman, crying then howling, down the aisle—I was wheeled back to the lemon-walled room where Tilla waited. While I rested in bed, he held my hand and the sun rays grew oblique. High in a hospital in an electric city, again I was too exhausted and stricken to cry.
That evening I walked to the elevator by myself, Tilla at my elbow, and we went down to the street. It was Easter week. Death and resurrection were not lost on us. Tilla drove me home, parked, walked me quietly to my building. The leaves were freshly out on the ginkgoes. We rode the elevator up to my place, clean, as I had insisted on leaving it for my return, although he had felt it vastly unnecessary, complaining loudly that we would be late. Late for our abortion. But we had been on time, and now I was bleeding, but not as profusely as I thought. I had left the sofa bed out and all made up and fluffed. I had bought myself flowers since I didn’t think anyone would send them. Who sends flowers for an abortion? Yet I knew I would need to look at them. I carefully took off my clothes and put on my nightgown. Then I led Tilla, mildly protesting, to the door. Now he could go back to his life. And I would keep my life as I had built it, with one more aspect, a kind of wholeness of thought.
When I turned the locks and was alone, I released my parrot from her cage and she sat on my shoulder as I fell asleep, waking wildly at the unexpected buzz of the doorbell. It was a delivery, but I hadn’t ordered anything.
“Flowers! Flowers!” the man shouted hoarsely through the intercom. It was a basket of magenta hyacinths, from Maggie. There was someone, of course, who knew why flowers should be sent. They nodded on their swollen stems as I guided Cookie back to her perch, then lay in bed and watched TV. It was school vacation. I didn’t have to get up the next day, Good Friday, on which it rained in torrents.
People held their umbrellas against the wind as rain sheets ploughed the streets. I sat at my desk looking out at the wind-whipped locust in the courtyard, talking softly to Tilla on the phone. I was fine, I whispered, I was fine. We were strangers with a bond, a bond of refusal. A little green cotyledon of a fantasy was gone. It was a fetus, Molly. Cut the crap. It couldn’t have lived outside you, a sturdy no-nonsense voice inside me said. All right, all right. I sighed. My adult soul, new and green, grew as a weed amid fragments of glass, and set bud in the Good Friday rain.
Where did I put the grief that I’d becalmed? I swaddled it and laid it in a wicker boat and floated it among the bulrushes. I grew it into flowers I harvested and wheelbarrowed to a shrine. I clutched a rattle of grief seeds until time pried my fingers from it one by one.
“I’m broken,” I declared to Ruta, lying on her beige couch. “It’s as if I’ve been in an accident and need surgery after surgery to get fixed, and I know I’ll never really be fixed. And each operation is so painful.”
The only action I felt able to take was to become careful. I moved through my life hardly daring to put weight on my bones, carefully keeping up all my correspondence, grading papers meticulously. A substitute parent from 8:30 to 3, I engrossed the kids with a massive video book review project, complete with equipment, props, and volunteer cameraman. My English classroom, now combined with a Center for Learning-Disabled Students, was a hive. Hives thrive, I rhymed to myself as I watched the students I’d taught in middle school now at age seventeen. I had all grades now that I was available for anyone with a writing or reading or study skills problem. Like many of my students, I felt unable to do what other people seemed to be able to do. Yet a kind of creative energy kept me going.
“I’m in a mental wheelchair,” I said to Ruta every Friday. “I look normal, but I’m not.”
Saturdays I wrote the poems of mourning for my loss. It was no use hiding it, my life was the subject of my poems. Other poets could write about walks in the woods, but I could only write about my abortion. Ordinary rhyme schemes weren’t enough. I needed to scheme so hard to get the words out that I rhymed the inner half of the line with the end of it. Then the only way to stop the rhythm was not to rhyme the very end at all, leaving me falling.
I can’t do this alone, yet I am so alone
no one, not even this child inside me, even
the me I was, can feel the wild cold buzz
that presses me into this place, bleakness
that will break me, except I cannot be
broken merely by wilderness, I can only
be lost.
The more that happened to me, the more honest I got. And the bolder I got, the higher my expectations became—my poems were going to lead somewhere. I shouldered the idea without thinking. I was like a woman balancing a jar on my head; the balance came to me effortlessly, unlike having a child.
“Expectations” was the subject of the faculty meetings, high standards. The teenagers I taught often fell “below expectation.” They were terrorized by having to give their best, which was not “The Best.” My own best had been a No. My best was not to be
expecting.
Going down the school stairwell I stumbled awkwardly into Jesse Fried, who held out his arm to catch me. “Whoa!” he said, as if to a twelve-year-old. A tennis fanatic with floppy dark hair and a curiously bulky body, Dr. Jesse the pediatrician came to the school three times a week to conduct his research with a group of my learning-disabled students. Five years before, the first time I laid eyes on him, he was in the school courtyard in the rain yelling, “Mush! Mush!” to my little bereft student Hazel and her pal Niles. He had them running laps around the courtyard, and he had been running, too. The three of them were drenched. I thought of Hazel’s dad and Niles’s mom having to pick the two kids up and wring them out at the end of the day.
“I’m in trouble, Molly,” Jesse said as he helped me right my footing. I let my hand stay on his damp tweed back. Like my students, I had a crush on Dr. Jesse.
“I’m in trouble with Emma.” Jesse was divorced from his first wife, and had been seeing Emma, an art historian at Sotheby’s, for years. He was in his mid-fifties. She was forty. “You can still do it,” Jesse mocked Emma’s mother in falsetto, “you can still dump Jesse and find a nice young, normal doctor who wants a family!” Jesse didn’t want a family, though he spent his life among them, appearing to do a better job at parenting than parents because, of course, he was not these children’s dad. He and I were adult shepherds, playmates, and comprehenders. But we left our students to their mothers and fathers after all. I taught, he doctored, and we went home and closed a shade on them, although both of us could spend half our evenings on the phone with parents, and certainly every Sunday evening as these frantic families faced another school week. Jesse spent every non-Emma, non-tennis waking moment with them, because when he wasn’t actually with them he was writing and lecturing about them, and running his practice.
“I have no room for my own children,” he said to me exasperatedly, “I do not want my own children. That particular kind of narcissism I don’t have. My neuroses lie elsewhere.” Like mine, Jesse’s interest in children was reflective: In watching them, he watched himself, and took the insights about them into himself, and brought the insights of his experience out to them, and connected, or reconnected, to deep emotions, usually unspoken—except sometimes with kids. He gave a few swings with an imaginary tennis racket, whirling around on the stairs and grunting, arms tangled in the fringe of his ancient cashmere scarf.
Paradise, Piece by Piece Page 20