by Yasuko Thanh
I directed my anger toward cab drivers, cashiers, waiters—anyone but Avery. I never questioned our relationship; I never wondered whether we belonged together. We were together, as if married by custom or arrangement. The question wasn’t why but how we’d make what we had work. That’s what Michelle said.
* * *
—
Later that week Avery came into the bedroom while I was folding laundry. He moved aside a pile of clothes and sat down on the bed. “I need to tell you something.” He turned to me and clasped my fingers in his palms. “I love you. Do you believe me?”
Why was he telling me this? What had he done? It had grown dark outside, murky dusk and parking lot lights. The signal that I’d have to go to work soon.
“I love you, Suko. I really mean it. But. I got to tell you…Don’t get mad.”
Here it comes, I thought.
“A girl chose me last night.”
I closed my eyes. Not again, not again, not again. Who did I have to share my man with now?
“She chose with fifteen hundred dollars.” He handed me his money clip with its wad of fifties and hundreds. “What was I supposed to say, baby? No?”
I flung the money to the floor like a snake. “That’s exactly what you say.”
Avery left the money where it had landed and bent down to wrap his arms around my knees. “I love you. Because you’re not a loser. Like me. The only way I’m getting anywhere is with a woman like you. You know that, don’t you?”
I yanked my knees out of his grasp. “You are a loser. It’s why we’re renting a condo and don’t own a house.”
“I thought you liked this place.”
“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about getting ahead. Like, we don’t even have a bank account.”
The point wasn’t the house or the bank account but the effort of keeping my eyes directed ahead, on the prize, despite the dawning awareness that I might never retire.
That night, I knew one thing to be true: if I continued to put on my makeup, my stockings, go to work, buy condoms, I’d be a hypocrite.
Avery was still standing there, his money clip on the carpet, staring at me.
“Is it Cassie?” I asked. Cassie was a friend of his who’d recently come out West. I wasn’t supposed to be jealous, even when they spent whole days together, because she wasn’t a ho.
“Why would you say something like that?”
I rolled my eyes.
Bam. His open hand had struck my face.
“Don’t you ever,” he said, “roll your eyes at me.”
My face stung. I opened and closed my mouth, not even looking at him.
I drifted away while Michelle resumed folding clothes. Folding and folding, as if packing for a long journey. I had only to step out that door.
* * *
—
The day I found out I was pregnant we were in the Happy Café, a bad name for a place whose carpet, tables, booths were so dingy. Vancouver rain outside the window.
“You look sick,” Frances said, her face a mixture of motherly concern and intrigue. Two years from now she’ll go missing, and I’ll never hear from her again.
Avery lit a cigarette and I pressed my forehead to the window. The cars, the rushing people, made my stomach roll. I fought back nausea. “I feel like crap.”
Frances snapped her fingers. “Pregnant,” she said. “I’ll bet you’re pregnant.”
I looked down at my underdone sausages, eggs over easy, hash browns, white toast. Mistake. I shifted my gaze to my worn shoes, slanted at the heel, the leather pavement-scuffed.
Finally I pushed my plate away, threw down my fork. “I’m going to throw up.”
In the bathroom I stood over a toilet bowl. Rust stains flitted in and out of focus. I steadied myself by putting my hands on the rim of the seat, the black plastic cool against my fingers. The cubicle turned a seaweed colour.
Five minutes later I rinsed my mouth under the tap and returned to the table.
* * *
—
The clinic was only a few blocks from the track, but I’d never been inside. I wasn’t thinking of a baby at this point. I was thinking of the way strangers on the street would stop a mother to chat, to look into the stroller. Girls I knew from the track who’d gotten pregnant had given their babies names like Gemini or Maximilian or Julius. They took pictures of them with fourteen-carat gold knuckle dusters or surrounded by hundred-dollar bills or sitting atop a fur coat. Could I honestly do the job, be a real mother? It wasn’t that I liked the idea of fixing bottles or changing diapers or rocking a little football-sized thing to sleep, but the idea of something between me and Avery as unique as a human being warmed me inside.
I took a urine test and then waited for the result, wondering what kind of parents Avery and I might make. The test confirmed what my body knew.
They called in a counsellor. I felt trapped by the small room, in a chair opposite the woman, a table separating us. I twisted my hands in my lap. What part of the procedure was this?
As she talked I looked out the window and thought about how I would tell Avery I was pregnant. Whether I would tell him at all.
He must want a baby; otherwise, why have sex without a condom?
I thought of Frances, her pregnancies, and knew the answer had nothing to do with babies. Pimps didn’t wear condoms. The idea was outrageous. Who did we think they were, tricks?
The street nurses had said two girls had been diagnosed with HIV. They’d caught the virus, not at work, where they were meticulous about safe sex, but from their men.
Before I left the clinic the counsellor suggested I write myself a note. “Make a list of the reasons you’re getting the abortion,” she said. “Put it in an envelope with your name on it, and seal it. Keep it for yourself, for the future.”
She’d assumed that’s what I wanted: to get rid of the baby.
I nodded my head.
* * *
—
As soon as I unlocked the door to our condo, a prickly rush of anxiety washed over me. This had been happening more and more these days. I lit a joint and smoked it, lying on the carpet. More relaxed, I flipped open a pad of yellow paper and grabbed a pencil. The pages had warranties and receipts stapled into tidy columns next to “Notes to Self” and “Goals in Life” and “Earnings” and “Expenditures.” I loved lists. While turning tricks I’d make mental lists of all the movies I’d seen and all the ones I wanted to see. Lists of the colours of sweaters I owned. Lists of favourite songs.
On a clean sheet I drew a white-tailed deer, copying it from a photograph in a magazine lying open beside me. I was stalling.
Writing had been a favourite subject of mine in high school. Solitude had always inspired my creativity. But now, when I turned from the deer drawing to a new yellow page, its blankness swallowed any notion of words. I took another drag and turned back to the deer, adding shading to the hard black lines.
Deep down I knew what the counsellor took for granted: a working girl like me had no choice, only reasons. Moreover, they did not have to be poetry.
I went back to the blank page. Inhaling sharply, I wrote: “I am getting an abortion because of the baby shower.”
A ho had gotten pregnant for a pimp who was black. Everyone went to her baby shower. But when the child was born it was white, as white as she was blonde. Everyone stared.
“His skin will darken up,” the mother had said, as if convincing herself. “They all start out pale.”
But the worry was clear in her face. We turned away in shame. Maybe a condom had burst or slipped off. Maybe she was the kind of ho that didn’t give fake lays, maybe she hadn’t used a condom at all, was that kind of nasty ho that let a trick come inside her for money.
Next I wrote: “Because I had sex with Delbert.”
Delbert had been a one-night fling. I hadn’t particularly wanted a fling. A couple of months earlier, while we were still living at the Century Plaza Hotel, I came home on
e night to find that management had double-locked our door: Avery had spent our rent money on crack. I couldn’t get hold of him, and I had nowhere else to go.
Not knowing what else to do I went down to the hotel bar, which was full of handsome men; only two were black, so I sat with them. Delbert wasn’t handsome but he had a beautiful body and an apartment where I could spend the night. I had sex with him in exchange, I thought, for his hospitality. I didn’t expect the anger I felt later. All I could think of was the night Pat and his brother had tried to force themselves on me. The fact that then, too, I’d had nowhere else to go.
I wrote that the news of the baby was the real world colliding with my pretend perfect life with Avery. The one where I pushed a designer stroller down a picket-lined street. Then I wrote that the news was also, ironically, its exact opposite: having the baby was the reality of ending up on a trashy TV show like Montel. A teenage prostitute and her pimp.
I put my list in an envelope and sealed it. I printed my full name on the front and placed the envelope in a tote bag filled with pens that had no ink, stuffed-animal key chains, half-used lipsticks, introductory offers for products I didn’t need but saved anyway, and two Christmas cards signed by all the street nurses. I replaced the bag under the bathroom sink.
That night I woke up with the bedsheet bunched in my hands. I’d dreamed I’d snatched a baby away from a kidnapper and escaped into a forest. But I’d discovered there was nowhere to hide—the groves had been thinned and were as sun-dappled as a Robert Bateman painting from the mall.
At breakfast I told Avery. Any fantasies of motherhood were crushed into the ground at the precise moment when I said “I’m pregnant” out loud.
I wanted to have a baby for all the wrong reasons. I believed it would make our family more solid, give me comfort. In having a baby to love, I’d be lovable. The transformation from worthless to holy would occur through osmosis.
I can’t remember Avery’s exact reply. When I told him I’d been to the doctor, that there was no doubt, I imagine he said something like “Wow, shitty,” or, with a smile, “Sucks to be you,” or, bluntly, “When you getting the abortion?” But it wasn’t only the fact that he didn’t want the responsibility of parenthood. It was that he didn’t want to be a father to my baby, get pregnant with me. How did I know that?
Because he had a son. So people said. The mother, Maria, happened to be in the lobby of our hotel one night, when we still lived at the Robsonstrasse. She was with her son, Avery’s son. Jeremy was about four or five. I couldn’t see the resemblance and thought, She’s lying about that kid being his. He ran up to Avery and encircled his legs with his arms, saying, “Daddy, Daddy.” Avery froze. Looked down at the boy as if he were watching a parasitic worm trying to enter him through his flesh. Glared at Maria, who I knew from the track, who had a reputation for mouthiness. The cleaning ladies in the lobby began to cry. I crumbled. Little pieces of myself broke and fell like shards of ice.
Either shortly before or after this incident, Avery confessed that he’d given Maria money for an abortion as soon as they found out about her pregnancy. She’d left town, gone to Calgary, and claimed that once there she’d booked herself in for a D&C. He discovered her lie only a few years later, when financial documents outlining the money he owed in child support came in the mail. The sum was small, a hundred dollars a month. But it had added up to thousands over time.
Each time I thought of the boy my skin crawled. I railed about a corrupt system that would force Avery to pay arrears, skim any legal earnings or tax returns, dip into his bank account to compensate the mother—when she’d tricked him! Wasn’t the onus on her to raise the kid without Avery’s support? Blackmail. It was as bad as that.
The abortion implied that I was cleverer than Maria, faithful. I’d never play head games. Never mind she was a ho like me and didn’t need Avery’s money. Unlike her, I’d never sign any piece of paper that authorized officials to put him in jail for being a deadbeat dad. There was no such thing. Only mothers who pushed men into taking on responsibilities they’d never asked for. Who sanctimoniously preached for the right to give birth to an unwanted child. Who, having loudly claimed this right, would run back to a man like a dog with its tail tucked between its legs, needing help. This is what asking for child support was. This is what asking for paternal acknowledgment was. A weak return.
Looking back today, I think it was a self-imposed sense of responsibility that influenced my decision as much as Avery did. Despite what I did for a living, I thought of myself as mature and stable, a dutiful eighteen-year-old who had everything together. The barefoot-and-pregnant-teen stereotype would crash up against that idealized self-image; it would destroy me and fuck up an innocent child in the process.
Besides, it wasn’t a child yet. Wasn’t even an infant. If I tried hard enough I could convince myself that I had a tumour, not a baby clinging to me for life…
The image of Avery’s son hugging him in the lobby lodged itself inside me like the fetus. What parent could stand to watch their child reach out for affection only to be pried off as thoughtlessly as a man scrapes barnacles from his boat?
The later revelation was that this image in my head would persist. There was no way of erasing it. No way it would join the ranks of forgotten things.
To stay with Avery would be to remain childless forever. To give up my dream of raising a large family. A huge family—seven, eight, eleven kids, pit bulls and Rottweilers, tomcats, budgies, goldfish, guitars, sunny porches, the door always open. A pot on the stove day and night for anyone who came by. Who hungered. Who knew that, at my house, any comer would find nourishment. Love.
* * *
—
With my hair in pigtails and only lip balm for makeup, wind whistling up my baggy shorts, the street nurse—the one who’d agreed to go with me—didn’t recognize me. The one who came to the track every evening, handed out condoms and KY packages that looked like single-serving packets of ketchup, and had just spent eight months in Veracruz. As we left the parking lot and drove along Cambie Street I told myself to calm down, the nurse was with me, nothing bad would happen.
In the waiting room a woman and her mother wore saris that seemed warmer than my own shorts and T-shirt. I shivered and looked to my left. Another family, with a young woman in a mint-green jogging suit, spoke a language I didn’t understand. I flipped through a pile of out-of-date women’s magazines and then turned to the nurse. “Hey. Thanks for bringing me.”
Fifteen minutes passed, then a woman in scrubs called my name. Nothing to it, I told myself. One foot in front of the other. I gave the street nurse a last look and followed the woman in scrubs.
As the anaesthetic made me drift off I thought about the note I’d written, reminding myself of all the reasons why what I was doing was the right thing.
* * *
—
When I’d recovered enough to figure out where I was, I asked for my clothes and got dressed. The street nurse was gone. Still groggy, I laced up my canvas sneakers and went to leave the hospital.
“You have to have someone come and pick you up,” a nurse said.
“But why? I live only two blocks away,” I lied.
“We can’t release you unless you have someone come and pick you up.”
“Like who, my boyfriend?”
I knew no one was coming for me.
“Sorry.” She rubbed her angular forehead. She truly did look sorry. “It’s policy.”
I looked her in the eye and tried to imagine how she thought she’d keep me here. What would she do if I popped her one on the chin right now? Flattened her against the wall, kicking her to the floor?
And why wasn’t Avery with me in the first place?
I marched to a pay phone and called my drug dealer, Debra. She used to have a different name. Then she went to a nameologist to find out why she was having such bad luck in her life, why her relationship with the owner of an auto body shop was disintegrating after
fifteen years, why she couldn’t find a decent apartment in the West End for less than twelve hundred a month. He told her, Change your name to Debra. I was calling her partly because I had no inkling where Avery was and partly because the thought that he might say he was too busy to come was too much to bear.
* * *
—
We lived in the condo in Fairview Slopes for three years. Then, when I was about to turn twenty-one, we moved into a rented house in a suburban neighbourhood on the outskirts of Vancouver known as Burquitlam. This was a move up. To distance oneself from where one plied one’s trade, to have more property, more square footage—these things represented evolution. Progress.
* * *
—
Some memories arrive unbidden like packages in the post, waiting to be opened. Others come to me like whispers from another room, half-recalled phrases, a stance, an inflection, muted by drugs and time. From these remnants I reconstruct a conversation held on the track. The details I don’t remember.
What comes back to me is a woman named Tanya. Blond and bubbly, she had the face of a high school cheerleader. But my impression of her townhouse near the Vancouver–Burnaby border, the rundown banality of it, evoked the question: “Why bother working the track if this is where you live?”
As we must have on other days, we strolled around the track, “doing a loop.” The high school equivalent of doing a loop—half designed to increase your visibility, half to show off to the other hos who your friends were—would be deciding whether to sit with the in-crowd or the losers at lunch.
I was younger than Tanya but made more money, dressed better, and never drank at work.
The memory takes place in daylight, so I must have been working afternoon shifts, reckoning with either a police curfew or a red zone.
At some point in the conversation, Tanya revealed she’d slept with Avery. She compared who he was then, years ago, to who he was now.