“Congratulations,” she remembered to say. “About your…conception.”
She wanted to be light, casual, and instead had chosen a word that sounded unfortunately clinical. But what was she supposed to say? She didn’t want to make the mistake of calling something a baby before someone else did. “That’s so great,” she added. “So great.”
“No, no,” said Gaby. “I’m not going to keep it.”
Dorothy, who felt that the dramatic import of Gaby’s statement permitted a concomitant physical response, let her hand drop from Gaby’s arm, where it had been lingering too long; then she doubted her timing, realizing that it could be perceived as unfeminist to withdraw physical affection at the first expression of a nonmaternal urge, and put the hand back, gently, near the elbow, as a sign of solidarity and sisterhood. Then again, if Gaby did not need solidarity—if that in some way made the moment more dramatic than it should be, if Gaby believed—correctly!—that terminating a pregnancy was NBD and did not call for any special expressions of sympathy and support, then Dorothy would have been right to drop her hand. Fuck, she really did not know what to do with her hand. No wonder Gaby had smoked for so long.
“What does Brian say?” asked Dorothy.
“He says it’s up to me,” said Gaby, extricating her arm from Dorothy’s hand in a casual way that suggested she appreciated the support but was done with it. Dorothy pretended to have an urgent itch on her head and scratched furiously, which had the effect of making her head actually itch. Gaby ducked her own head a little guiltily to the side, her eyes searching but searching inward, as if looking not at Dorothy but deeper inside her own psyche. She rapped a knuckle on her teeth. “What do you think?”
Before Dorothy could hazard a guess, Gaby was explaining, the words falling out of her mouth, absorbed and somehow muffled by the softness of the room, the stuffed animals, rug, blankets, upholstered furniture, and sheepskin acting as, if not a literal sound barrier, an emotional and psychological panic room. Brian, Gaby said, wanted to keep the baby. They intended to have another at some point—the marriage had been better ever since they “trained” Sherman to sleep, which had, it seemed, solidified their bond by uniting them against him, as well as helping Gaby’s brain heal from the torture of sleep deprivation, although she admitted that there was something evilly neoliberal about the notion that a baby should learn to soothe himself, like what had happened to care? And what was this obsession with self-reliance?—and he felt that the pregnancy was some kind of sign or, more accurately, he was the kind of person who went with the bird in the hand rather than waiting—and here Gaby pointed to her crotch in a lewd gesture, the kind that she rarely made when sober but always did when drunk—on the bush. But while Gaby definitely wanted another baby “someday,” she wasn’t ready. She still felt postpartum. She did not want to be partum. She wanted to be prepartum, nonpartum, for as long as possible.
“My mom always said she wished she had waited longer to have me,” said Dorothy.
“See?” said Gaby. “Maybe she should have.”
“But then I wouldn’t be me,” said Dorothy. “I would be somebody else.”
Gaby stared at her like she was assessing how seriously to take her. She rooted around in the toy bin and pulled out a wooden bus. Even the bus had a face. It was deranged, when you thought about it, this impulse to put a face on everything. “So you think I should have it?”
“No,” said Dorothy. “I mean, I’m here. I’m already me. I’m just saying. This baby won’t be that baby, of the future.” She cringed. There it was: baby.
“I need my bodily autonomy,” Gaby said grandly, words that seemed to come from an internal teleprompter or an article she had read online. And then, with bitterness: “I don’t want to be some mammal reproducing constantly.
“Did you know,” she said, spinning each wheel on the bus in turn, “that nursing whales produce two hundred gallons of milk a day?”
Dorothy wasn’t sure if she was supposed to answer this or not. But: “You told me that before,” she said.
Gaby touched her breast and winced. “I have to go pump soon,” she said. “Gross.”
“How did you get pregnant while nursing?” asked Dorothy. “I thought that was impossible.”
Gaby shrugged. “It happens. I’m just incredibly fertile, I guess. Very womanly.” She tossed the bus into an open bin—it also had a face—and dropped her voice conspiratorially. “You know what’s crazy? I haven’t even gotten my period because of the breastfeeding. There was literally no period to skip. You know how I figured out I was pregnant?”
She leaned in closer and Dorothy involuntarily held her breath.
“I just felt it!” Gaby shouted, and fell on her side laughing. “Motherhood is nuts. I’m a fucking psychic now!” She covered her face like they were about to play peekaboo. Skulls and lightning bolts alternated on the perfect almonds of her nail beds.
“You didn’t take a pregnancy test?” asked Dorothy.
“No, I took one later,” Gaby said, deflated by the dull practicality of the question.
“When are you going in for the…procedure?” asked Dorothy. Using the word “abortion” felt taboo, even obscene, in part because of the infantile milieu in which they were ensconced but more because the word was overly precise or somehow gauche, like asking someone how much they paid in rent.
“I have to go to the clinic and get the drugs,” said Gaby. “I’ll do it next week.”
“What are you waiting for?” Dorothy asked. “Don’t you feel like you should do it soon?”
Gaby reached out and hugged Dorothy. “It’s fine,” she said. “I’m on it.”
Gaby had the power to decide when she created life, and she also had the power to delay terminating it until a more convenient moment. She was a god of fertility and chronology. The law had made her thus. If the casual way she wielded her temporal majesty offended Dorothy, she also found it, objectively, admirable. The revolutionary power of feminism depended on convenience; you couldn’t break the glass ceiling and cook a meal from scratch. Their mothers had struggled just so that one day Gaby could make her life convenient, so she could be free to arrange it as she wanted. Not Dorothy’s actual mother, who was against abortion, except in cases of rape, incest, and where the mother’s life was in jeopardy—but the women of the past, the general mothers who had made the world that they had inherited, where it was possible for them to wear pants, study science, open a bank account without a husband, etc.
“I can come over and help you,” Dorothy said. “It’s kind of stressful at home. You shouldn’t be alone when you do it.”
“How do you know?” Gaby said. She looked at Dorothy with something between suspicion and curiosity, like Dorothy was a most unusual specimen and Gaby was on the verge of an interesting discovery. For a moment Dorothy almost believed that Gaby could see everything, that she was, as she had attested, psychic, or at least intuitive.
Dorothy dragged her palm over the soft fur of the murdered sheep’s hide. The raft children would call them barbarians for decorating their nurseries and dens with the skins of mammals. As a display of power it was gratuitous; no one doubted that the sheep were not in charge. Then again, what was the substitute? A synthetic that did not biodegrade? Was sustainability barbarism?
“Hello,” Gaby said, her hands wrestling each other in her lap. “How do you know what it’s like?”
Dorothy wanted to tell her. But she did not want to shift the terms of the conversation from choice to contingency. She did not want Gaby to start feeling bad for her, to ask if Rog had been excited, to hold her hand and grieve. There was nothing to grieve. It was just another false start.
“Do we know someone who’s done it at home?” Gaby pressed. “Who was it?”
“It was me,” Dorothy said to the airplane mobile.
“You had an abortion?” Ga
by asked. Her tone of disbelief cut Dorothy and emboldened her. Why was Gaby so surprised that she had had an abortion? She could have an abortion if she wanted! She could have an abortion just the same as anyone else! She had the right to control time and maternity!
“Yes,” Dorothy lied. “I mean, a medication abortion. At home. Like you’re going to do.”
A pain she had barely been aware of subsided, and Dorothy felt the satisfaction of the late reveal: I am a person with experiences of which you know nothing! I have depth and interiority! Dorothy knew it was wrong to resent Gaby for not knowing things she hadn’t told her, but she also knew that sometimes you resent someone for the wrongs they have done to you and sometimes you resent them for the wrongs you have done to them. Even though she didn’t think that she had done anything wrong. Even though it felt like she had.
“When? Why didn’t you tell me?” Gaby’s eyes were cloudy, wounded.
Dorothy shrugged, helplessly, to herself. She felt herself swimming farther away from safety with no way to get back. What Dorothy was really telling Gaby was that while Gaby had come to her for help, Dorothy had, in the same situation, not gone to her for help. There was no way for Gaby not to understand this as some kind of judgment. But it was also true that no one should have to tell anyone everything; that isn’t friendship, it’s extortion. “I’m telling you now,” she said.
“When? Whose was it? Rog’s?” Gaby wanted to know.
“No,” said Dorothy quickly, afraid of whatever karmic retribution would befall eliminating, even in the realm of language, another of Rog’s unborn offspring. “Someone from before. A one-night stand. Do people still use that expression?” Now the lie involved a fictional character. Now it was attaining its own dimensionality, becoming more solid but also more slippery.
Gaby swatted Dorothy’s arms. “Secrets!” She giggled. “Woman of mystery!”
Dorothy shrugged, affecting modesty. She could be sophisticated. A modern woman who went out and had abortions and didn’t even need to talk about it.
“Were you okay?” Gaby asked, looking closely at her. The bracelets clinked as she played with her hair.
“It’s a lot of blood,” said Dorothy.
“No, I mean emotionally,” said Gaby. “Are you okay with it now?”
“Of course,” Dorothy said, remembering her lines. “I wasn’t going to have a baby with a stranger.”
“A stranger?” Gaby said. “Like you picked him up in a bar? That’s not like you.”
Before the deception could acquire an unmanageable degree of detail, Dorothy waved a hand. “He was a grad school person,” she declared, forcing herself to look at Gaby, counting on how boring her nonacademic friends found everything to do with her institutional life. “Not a stranger-stranger.” As predicted, Gaby lost interest in the imaginary father immediately.
“Wow, this is so cool,” Gaby said. She gathered her hair into a nest on the top of her head. “That we will both have had abortions!”
There was something appealing about being the same as Gaby. It was sisterly, like sharing clothes—something they had never done.
Gaby paused, seeming to remember something.
“So all those times with Sherman when I was really sick in the mornings and saying to you, ‘You’ll see one day,’ ” Gaby said, “you already knew? How far along were you?”
“Not far,” said Dorothy. “Ten weeks.
“And I didn’t get nauseous,” she lied.
This lie was easier to declare. It was like slapping a coat of paint on the walls of the lie to fix it up. Dorothy just had to remember what she was saying, in case she had to repeat herself later. (1.) no nausea; (2.) a grad school person—she could always say it was Keith. Dorothy’s real experience of nauseated limbo was displaced and this new past—unqueasy, academic, decisive—took over. She felt a warm glow of pride, to have participated so completely in the exercise of her legal rights and the hard-won power to shape her own destiny. What good were rights, people said, if you didn’t use them? Could you even call yourself a woman without undergoing this most critical reproductive rite of passage? On what foundation other than personal experience could politics be based? Principles? Principles were theoretical at best.
“ANYWAY,” Gaby said, touching a breast and grimacing. She produced a portable pump out of nowhere and started unbuttoning her dress. From another nowhere came an empty bottle.
“Shouldn’t you wash your hands first?” Dorothy asked.
“It’s fine,” said Gaby.
“Enough about our wombs,” she added as the milk gushed into the bottle. “What else is new with you?”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” said Dorothy.
* * *
—
The bathroom smelled like a restaurant bathroom. Ferns hung from the ceiling and a candle was burning on the back of the toilet. Dorothy raised it above her head gingerly, careful not to spill the wax, to read the bottom. Eucalyptus.
Dorothy would have anticipated feeling guilty about lying to Gaby, but in fact she felt relieved. A version of the truth had come out—Gaby now knew that Dorothy had once evacuated the contents of her uterus at home. It was good that she knew. It was like putting an exhibit into evidence. But the version the court had was distinct enough from the truth that Dorothy did not feel she had lost anything or given it away. She had kept herself to herself.
She turned off the overhead light to better soak up the atmosphere of the candle. She unzipped her pants and sat on the toilet. There was a shadow or stain on the cotton of her underwear so she reached her arm over to the switch and turned the light back on. The tampon was soaked to the string and some blood had gotten on her underwear. It was her regular period. It had returned yesterday. Things would be normal now. She was passing an unfertilized egg, unimplanted uterine lining. The time of the blight was no more. She peed, and the cotton bundle dislodged a little, pushing itself out. She pulled on the string, formerly a pale blue. The wad of cotton came out a winey purplish brown, like a bruise or rotting fruit, and soaked to a gloss. For a moment the tampon bobbed from the string like a dead fish and Dorothy hastened to wrap it in paper before it dripped on the toilet seat or her clothes.
The forty-dollar hand soap smelled like cedar. Dorothy hoped her casket would smell this good. She washed her hands twice and took a black plastic comb from her bag and combed her hair. Brown hairs filled the sink, fluffy and rising. She swirled them together with a little water, then swirled the wet, matted hair mass over the hair that had fallen to the floor and threw it all away. One recalcitrant strand floated up and worked its way down the side of the trash can; Dorothy wrapped it tight around her finger and pushed the coil off. She used a square of toilet paper to tamp down the trash and left it there, like a blanket for the hair ball.
Yellowish plaque was clinging to the spaces between the comb’s teeth. Compressed skin cells, hair product, scalp oils. It looked waxy, aural. Using her fingernails Dorothy dug out the wax and pushed it through the short plastic teeth. She washed her hands again, careful to scrape under her fingernails. She rinsed the comb and dried it with the hand towel.
* * *
—
The party had gotten louder since Dorothy had been in the bathroom. More guests had arrived, or people who had been floating around in other rooms or smoking outside on the fire escape had come back. Dorothy squeezed behind a cluster of Gaby’s friends who she knew from years of Gaby events to reach a hand into the bowl of baby carrots. It was a bamboo bowl and less sturdy than it looked; she almost knocked it over but the bowl wobbled on its axis and righted itself. She ate the carrot, and another, breathing in the apartment like air. The secretary desk. The ten-thousand-dollar sofa. She knew what it cost because Gaby had told her what a great deal they got on it—it was actually worth more. The built-in bookshelves. Art by actual artists, friends who gave it to G
aby when she, of all people, could have afforded to pay for it. Brass objects arranged on a shiny chrome table like a hotel lobby. The drinks and mixers were on a long table protected with a tapestry Gaby had dyed herself. Dorothy poured herself a vodka with a dash of tonic and looked around for a lime. There was no lime.
Gaby lived in a million-dollar apartment and was going to give herself an abortion on a sofa that cost four months of Dorothy’s rent and Dorothy was supposed to put a lemon in her drink. What the fuck, thought Dorothy, and squeezed the lemon in. Seeds floated to the bottom of the cloudy cup.
An immigration rights attorney who Dorothy had not seen since Gaby’s baby shower was talking about her two-year-old son.
“Sometimes when he puts his face right next to mine I have the urge to French him,” the attorney said, raising her voice to be heard over the music. Her tone was confessional but the rapid way in which she delivered the confession made Dorothy think it was not a true confession, compelled to surface in the imperfect moment, but a line that had been worked over and tested in front of smaller, more familiar audiences, before being rolled out on this festive occasion. “Do you guys think I’m a pedophile?”
A man with an athletic build and a square superhero jawline who was a partner in a litigation finance firm said, “If you really thought you were a pedophile, you’d never make a joke about it.”
The woman, the immigration rights attorney, shrugged. “I have thoughts,” she said.
The Life of the Mind Page 16