Heart of Glass

by Wendy Lawless

  After we ate the fish and everything else, I helped out with the dishes while Pete went to study in the living room. He was trying to get through Columbia’s premed program in two years instead of three, so he was constantly hitting the books.

  Just as Jenny and I finished the dishes, the kitchen wall phone rang.

  Jenny lit up a cigarette, blowing expert smoke rings at the dingy overhead light fixture. “Oh, boy.” She looked at me. “Why don’t you answer it?”

  I reached over and picked up the receiver. It was Michael.

  “Look, Wendy, I know you hate me right now.”

  “I don’t hate you. There’s a room opening up here, so I think I’ll come get my stuff, if that’s okay.”

  Hee-Jon’s parents were swooping in to take him home—they’d discovered he was seeing a white girl—so his room would soon be conveniently empty.

  After a long pause Michael replied, “All right, if that’s what you want. Sometime tomorrow?”

  The next day, I packed up my few possessions and clothes while Michael pleaded with me to give him another chance. He was sorry about slapping me, and I believed him. But the fight had just been a bad end to a bad idea.

  “What if we get married?”

  “I just think that it’s over.” I put my small collection of books in a milk crate I’d picked up on my way down Broadway.

  “I’ll go to my safety-deposit box tomorrow. There’s a diamond ring that belonged to my mother. I want you to have it. Actually, all her jewelry is in there. I’ll give it to you.”

  My first marriage proposal felt like a desperate bribe. It reminded me of when my mom had offered to buy me a car if I lived at home while attending BU. It hadn’t worked then, either.

  “No, Michael. It just isn’t going to work out. C’mon, we’re really unhappy together.”

  “But I love you. Don’t you love me? I mean, it was a stupid fight, and I wish more than anything I could take it back, what I did.” His eyes looked shiny, and he tried to smile but couldn’t.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t love you. Maybe I did, but I don’t anymore.”

  His face fell. He looked down and nodded. “I see.”

  He walked me downstairs and helped me get my stuff into a cab. I turned to say good-bye before getting in and giving the driver my new address.

  “I guess I can’t make you love me,” Michael said plaintively.

  But he could have made me love him. If he had been kinder, less concerned with turning me into someone he thought I should be. Now there was nothing left to say. I wanted what Jenny and Pete had, and I wasn’t going to find it here.

  “Good-bye. Take care.”

  I slid into the backseat—with the Ciao! bag, the milk crate, and the futon—and closed the door. I didn’t turn around to see if he was watching the taxi head up Broadway.

  A week later, I realized that my period was late. I had felt sort of queasy the last few days, and my boobs were sore. Terrified, I made an appointment with a doctor I found in the phone book.

  Dr. Anna Manska was an elderly Russian doctor who wore support stockings and what appeared to be Soviet-issued beige orthopedic shoes. She walked hunched over, had a mustache, and looked as if she lived on a diet of cigarettes and strong coffee. Perhaps because her examination room had the bleak astringency of an outpost in the gulag, Dr. Manska only charged $35 per visit. I peed into a cup and crawled onto the examining table, my heart pounding in my ears. I couldn’t breathe as I watched her stick a little piece of paper into my urine and flick it, holding it up to the institutional-looking overhead lights. Then she shuffled over to the table and gave me a pelvic exam, moving her hands around inside me.

  “You are pregnant—maybe four weeks or so.” Her hands left my body, and she snapped off her rubber gloves.

  I started to cry. She looked at me as if I were a moron.

  “Do not cry,” she said disdainfully. “You are a young woman. You have your whole life ahead of you.” She walked to the little sink in the corner of the room and started washing her hands. “You can get it taken care of.”

  Drying my eyes, I wrote her a check and squeaked a thank-you. I walked out onto the icy streets, knowing that it was Oedi’s baby, and also knowing that he probably wouldn’t care and that I didn’t want to have it.

  I went home and told Jenny.

  “Holy shit!” She lit a Marlboro Red. “What are you going to do? Have you told Michael?”

  “It’s not his. It’s this guy in Boston, he’s . . . kind of an asshole.”

  “Well, be that as it may—you should call him and ask him to pay half.” Jenny was a feminist and a women’s studies major. Of course she was right. Besides, I needed the money.

  When I finally got up the nerve to call Oedi and tell him I was pregnant, there was a long silence on the other end of the line. I stood in my bedroom, eyes screwed shut, gripping the receiver and feeling ill with despair and utterly vulnerable. Asking a man for money was something my mother did all the time—but this was a first for me.

  It sounded like there was no one on the other end of the line. “Hello?”

  Only then did he speak. “Yes? And? What does that have to do with me?” His tone was glacial.

  “Well, it’s yours.” My hands started to shake, and I tried to keep my voice from trembling.

  “So what do you want?”

  I plowed on, trying not to notice the deadness in his voice. “I’m planning to have an abortion. I was hoping you could, you know, contribute to the cost. Just, like, half. That’s all.”

  “Wendy, I assumed that when you came to my apartment, you were on the Pill. I’m certainly not responsible for you making a stupid mistake. That’s your fault, not mine.”

  “Oh, all right.” I was so flustered by his superior tone, all I could think about was getting off the phone. There was another icy pause, and then he spoke.

  “So give me your address.”

  I managed to jabber it out. “Well, uh . . . good-bye.”

  I quickly pressed down on the button with a click.

  A few days later, I received a check in the mail from him for $25. In his scrawled note he said it was for me to take a cab home from the abortion clinic. It was so nasty and seemed calculated to make me feel small, like giving me a tip. I couldn’t believe I’d had blah sex with this creep and now I had to literally pay for my mistake.

  I called to borrow the $300 for the procedure from my friend Julie, the art student, who had rich parents and therefore was the only person I knew who had that much money in her checking account. It was awkward for me to ask; I could tell she was nervous about loaning me the money. Julie was the kind of person who would bring a bottle of wine to a party, then take it back home with her later even if it had been opened. No matter her instinct or inclination, she came through for me.

  Jenny went with me. We sat in the waiting room of the Manhattan Women’s Medical Clinic on Park Avenue South in the thirties. Other couples in the room were holding hands; some of the men had their arms around their wives or girlfriends, who were crying softly into Kleenex, their makeup running. A girl who couldn’t have been more than fourteen sat with her mom. I just felt numb. Jenny was leafing through a magazine when I heard my name called.

  “It’ll be okay, Vend. I’ll be here when you’re done.” She gave my hand a tight squeeze, and I stood to walk through the buzz-in door into the back of the clinic. I sat in a small room and talked to a nurse at a desk about the choice I’d made.

  “And have you decided that the abortion is what you want to do?” she asked, her face open, no judgment in her tone. It was as if she were asking me if I wanted to drop a class.

  I nodded and said that I was sure. She had me sign some forms, and I was sent to another room, where I sat with a group of about ten women. We watched a film strip in which another nurse explained what wa
s going to happen once we were in with the doctor; a series of increasingly thick steel rods would be used to open the cervix, then a handheld vacuum device would empty the uterus. This was called an aspiration abortion, which I thought was weird—it seemed like somebody’s idea of a sick joke. Aspiration meant “hope” or “desire”; it didn’t seem to go along with what we were all about to do. After the movie, we all shuffled to another counter in the hall, where we were supposed to pay.

  In the procedure room, I lay on the table in a cotton hospital gown. Two nurses moved around the room, getting it ready for the doctor. When he came in, he looked at my chart. He was probably ten years older than me and reminded me of the boys I’d gone to high school with who would grow up to be lawyers or doctors. He looked at my chart, then to me and smiled.

  “Miss Lawless?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m Dr. Cohen, and this is Nancy and Greta—they’ll be your nurses today.”

  The nurses also smiled at me. We were all smiling and I was about to kill a baby.

  “It says here that you don’t want to be put to sleep.”

  “No, I don’t.” It seemed fair that I should be awake, to pay for what I was about to do. I deserved it.

  “Let me just tell you that if you were my girlfriend, I wouldn’t want you to feel this.”

  I turned to Greta and Nancy for backup.

  “It’s quite painful, even when we numb the cervix. If I were you, I’d go for the drugs,” Nancy said, and Greta nodded in agreement.

  “Oh. Okay.” Suddenly I was afraid.

  Nancy put the tube in my arm and asked me to start counting backward from ten. Greta held my hand and said, smiling, “It’ll all be over in five minutes, sweetie.”

  Ten, nine, eight, six . . . I laughed as I saw myself flying over an antique map of Spain, and then I went to sleep.

  I came to in a brightly lit, narrow room that was lined with beds. Women, covered with thin cotton blankets, lay in mounds in various stages of waking. It made me think of Madeline, the children’s book set in a French convent—twelve little girls in two straight lines, except we weren’t getting up to have breakfast and brush our teeth; we were emerging from the ether after having our fetuses erased.

  Afterward, Jenny and I went to a café, one of the ones that dot Columbus Avenue across the street from the Natural History Museum, with an outdoor, glassed-in patio that looked out onto the sidewalk. She ordered a glass of wine. I picked at my salad.

  I spent a week shuffling around the apartment in my bathrobe, crying, unable to sleep or eat or go to class. I felt weighted down by all the shit and the agony I was carrying around with me, as if someone were standing next to me and tugging on my clothes, but I also felt empty inside, stripped—physically aching for a way to understand how I’d been so stupid as to allow myself to get knocked up.

  One morning four or five days later, Jenny came into my room. She sat on the edge of the bed, handed me a cup of coffee, and reached over to gently stroke my hair. “So, Vend, this is your best friend speaking. I know it’s been hard, but, you know, that’s enough. You have to pull yourself together—you’ve had time to recover.”

  I knew she was right. I nodded and sipped the coffee. Tough love with a warm beverage.

  “It’ll get easier—you’ll see.”

  I went down to NYU to speak to my adviser. When I explained to him that I had missed so much class and final exams because I’d become pregnant and had an abortion, he looked at me skeptically. I wondered how many times he’d heard this story and how many times it had actually been true. I couldn’t help but cry a little, which embarrassed him. He grimaced slightly, as if in fear that I was about to launch into a monologue about my lady parts.

  “Hmm, I see,” he said instead.

  He offered to reschedule my finals for the end of the week.

  The Friday before Christmas, I walked into a classroom and filled out the blue exam booklets. I knew the material cold and was confident I’d ace it. As I scribbled away, I felt a sense of triumph as well as an understanding that, although I adored the cinema, I no longer wanted to study it. I finished the essay question about Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis, closed the booklet, and handed it to the TA sitting at the desk by the door.

  Then I dropped out of NYU.

  chapter four

  HOUSES IN MOTION

  My modest room at Ninety-seventh Street couldn’t have been more than forty feet square. The single bed was pushed up against the wall where a padlocked black metal gate stretched across the one window, looking out on the air shaft. The apartment was on the seventh floor of the eight-story building, so I could just catch a glimpse of the sky. In a less glamorous version of Hitchcock’s movie Rear Window, I had views inside other people’s kitchens and bathrooms, accompanied by the teeming noises of crying kids, loud Spanish-speaking radio stations, hacking, phlegmy coughs, and flushing toilets. I regularly heard the couple above me having sex at night.

  “Sí, sí,” the man would begin to groan as he approached climax. After usually three or four more sí’s, it all came to a thumping, metal-bed-frame-squeaking end.

  A battered dresser leaned against my wall next to the bed, and homemade two-by-four bookshelves stuck out halfway up the opposite wall and reached the ceiling. The tiny closet contained more shelves, so I hung my clothes on nails pounded into the back of the door. Cramped, yes, but I was so happy to have my own room, where I could shut the door, be by myself, and not feel that someone—Michael or the NYPD—was watching me. While living with my mother, a closed door had often been an invitation for her to barge in—drunk or sober. Privacy then had not been an option. In a way, this little phone booth of a room was the first place I’d ever been able to call my own.

  Since everyone else was in school, and I was now a college dropout for the second time, I took it upon myself to cook supper, pick up the milk and the mail, and to lug our laundry to the Chinese laundry on Broadway, where they put your huge bag of dirty clothes on a scale and charged you by the pound to wash it. I was always mystified by the meticulously folded and perfectly square block of clothes that they handed back to me, after I gave them our tickets. After the chaos of constantly moving and the emotional turmoil of Michael, it was fun playing house, and I relished each domestic chore except, of course, cleaning.

  We were all about to take off for the Christmas holiday. Jenny and Pete would be going to her grandmother’s house in Connecticut, before swinging up to visit Pete’s family in upstate New York. Anthony, the Juilliard acting student, would be flying home to San Francisco.

  That Christmas I was joining my sister and we were flying to spend the holiday with our father, stepmother, and stepsisters in Minneapolis. I had visited Daddy that summer, but Robin had only seen him briefly, at Logan Airport in Boston, when he was between planes. Neither of us had seen our stepmom, Sarah, or her kids since we were little girls, before Sarah and Daddy had even been married.

  Robbie and I arrived in the Twin Cities, where the temperature was below freezing, a few days before the holiday. My stepsister Jules was living in the guest room at the house, so we were booked into a nearby motel. The place was kind of a dump, with red shag carpeting and pilled pink chenille spreads on the twin beds. Paint-by-numbers landscapes of mountains and snow-covered pine trees hung on the walls. Because of the Minnesota cold, the floor of our room was heated, which led to a rather fantastic explosion of condensation and steam whenever we opened the door to enter our room or exit into the outside parking lot. We looked like a magic act appearing in a cloud of smoke or rock stars with smoke bombs going off around us.

  Although our relationship had been strained at times, fraught with anger and recriminations in our teen years, my sister and I were the only constant in each other’s life. We had been in touch, mostly by telephone and the occasional letter, while she was at college, sharing the PTSD fallout symptoms o
f our childhood—the anxiety, sleepless nights, weight loss and gain, and the overarching sadness we both grappled with. And so I was glad Robin was with me; it promised to be a surreal experience for both of us—but at least we would be together. Our childhood Christmases were always punctuated by high drama (one year Mother had collected all our toys and presents in a rage and thrown them away in black trash bags because she deemed us ungrateful) or stony silence (sitting at the table eating gray, overcooked roast beef while Mother guzzled Chablis and chain-smoked). Most people approached the season expecting love, warmth, happiness, and familial harmony, but our Christmases seemed to be more about what you didn’t receive, not getting what you wanted with all your heart. So Robin and I both pretty much hated the holidays.

  Compared to our dreary yules of the past, Christmas at Daddy and Sarah’s was like the Little Princess’s (before she loses all her money and gets sent to the attic). Presents galore spilled from underneath a tinseled tree—my stepmother was a buyer for Dayton’s department store in Minneapolis and had a knack for picking out the perfect gift. For me she’d chosen a snazzy pair of tan leather boots with corduroy sides and a trendy winter coat that was olive colored and had big pockets. Robin got a pair of pretty ruby earrings and was touched that Sarah had remembered her birthstone. After opening presents, we feasted on eggs Benedict washed down with Bloody Marys. It was a little disorienting for my sister and me, a totally new experience—this constant jovial feting of food, toasts, and treats. I’d catch Robbie’s eye from across the room and smile, as if to say, Well, this isn’t so bad, is it? And it wasn’t, although it was also a bittersweet taste of all that we had missed out on.