So the writer decides to make me narrate the story now, when it’s way too late to have what she might call agency in it. I didn’t know she got pregnant, I’m not a seer, I was just one of those guys in a band she was so turned on by back then. Back when it mattered, I was barely a close third, and suddenly I’m omniscient, but that doesn’t mean I’m able to make sense out of it, does it?
The beginning makes perfect sense. We met way-back-when in New Haven, where all the Route 8 rock-star wannabes ended up when we realized we couldn’t compete with The Strokes. We didn’t have to bother getting to know each other; who we were was built into where we were and what we wore. For the guys it was pre-frayed Dickies and construction T-shirts that came from the backs of our dads’ closets or the Goodwill stores where their clothes ended up when they died at fifty from suicide or heart disease, not like there’s much of a difference. For the girls it was spaghetti straps their dads would’ve called them sluts for wearing, had any of their dads stuck around long enough to witness their puberties. The guys played in hardcore bands in high school and post-punk bands after that, and the girls dabbled in bass guitar and amateur photography. Everyone hated the Yale kids, except I admit I wasn’t averse to the ones whose dads were famous enough classic-rock musicians for me to overlook their rich fuckery. I wasn’t so jaded yet that I didn’t want a chance to meet those dads.
What stood out to me about her was that she dabbled in six-string instead of bass, and that she carried around a notebook instead of a Canon. I was too dumb at the time to know these were just different timbres of the same note. Plus, no matter how she tried to look, she ended up looking sloppy, and it was kind of a turn-on: big sloppy boobs, big sloppy hair, such sloppy gratitude for any guy who took her seriously that she’d fall into a bramble of bedsheets with them so fast they’d never take her seriously again. Her eagerness was a turn-on and turn-off in one, like one of those tap-lights you hit once for illumination and again for darkness.
But we didn’t hook up for a long time, because she ended up with a boyfriend who was a good friend of mine. The forbiddenness made it hotter—is that what the writer would call a trope? They invited me to their place for dinner. She was taking her first creative writing class at the time and just learning the importance of concrete detail, so here’s some of that: when I entered their apartment I noticed an ancient gas heater, a rusty horror-movie prop that had to be leaking carbon monoxide, so at least they’d be in a deep, woozy slumber when the thing inevitably blew up. The second thing she learned in that creative writing class was to use active verbs, so here you go: a Costco dining set wobbled on the far end of the brown carpet in the combo living/dining room, the fibers so matted with decades of crud dragged in from slushy duck boots that every surface undulated. She learned later in the Advanced Fiction that the active-verb rule is bullshit, so the futon was just being a futon, and that’s where I was sitting with her Telecaster on my lap, plucking notes on a scale, let’s say Mixolydian, something vaguely show-offy even without amplification. She was seated across from me in one of the Costco chairs, plate of something she was too shy to eat balancing on her lap. We were triangulated: me, her, and her boyfriend, and if he ever stopped talking, he would’ve noticed the eyes me and her were making at each other. That last sentence should properly read the eyes she and I were making at each other, but that’s not how I talk, and the intersection of language in character is called voice.
In any case, the eyes were risky, but I figured when you live that close to death-by-gas-leak you end up taking some risks.
That’s the last concrete memory either of us have until a few years later, when we ended up in our own sloppy bramble of bedsheets. Neither of us remembers how that happened, and I’m starting to see the appeal in that fiction she was learning to write: I can just invent something that makes all the little fragments come together into some kind of logical whole, even if the blanks would tell a more authentic story than the filler ever could.
A story calls for causality, though, so I’ll give it causality. I’m just saying flat-out that this is unreliable.
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We met again when my band played a show in Brooklyn, where she’d moved after dumping the boyfriend and thinking she might land herself a Stroke. (This, everyone agrees, is a cliché.) Those gigs always sucked—nobody showed, you didn’t get paid, and at the end of the night you’d have to haul the drummer’s kit up the stairs and into the car on account of the drummer chatting up a bartender he never seemed interested in talking to until it was time to load up the gear. You didn’t get laid. That wasn’t just true for shows in the city, although women there did tend to peace-out of conversations once they found out you didn’t live in Williamsburg, as if they thought you were only talking to them to get your Williamsburg green card. I hated that borough, and I said yes to every single gig we got offered there, because maybe, just maybe, this one would be different.
This particular show was no different until I spotted her. I’d like to say spotted her in the crowd, but there wasn’t one, so her awkward, friendless posture drew attention to itself. We weren’t in touch by then; she avoided New Haven on account of the now-ex-boyfriend who got rights to that town in the split. I didn’t tell her we were playing, aside from some half-assed Myspace posting I admitted to myself only then that I hoped she would notice, so when I saw her standing by the bar looking around as if for someone, the certainty that it was me she was looking for made me nervous and instantly horny.
Hey! I said. In other circumstances, with other girls, I would’ve worried that it came across too eager, but in hindsight that was the best thing about the two of us together—we let ourselves be eager.
Hey! she said.
It was the early-to-mid-aughts, and she, like a lot of peripheral hipsters, was experimenting with an Americana look: big belt buckles and boots and a corduroy trucker jacket, despite her people being barely American and growing up in a state whose horses were used exclusively for dressage. It was cute, though. Her Western shirt was snapped to just above her bra-line, and the jacket buttoned to just below that. She looked like a gift bag with the tissue paper gaping open, so you could see straight down to the present inside.
We still had to do the dance, though, the what’ve-you-been-up-to, how’s this-or-that person. She didn’t try to pretend that things were going great. This wasn’t what I thought living here was gonna be like, she said. On Sunday nights I cry thinking about the next day. On Monday morning I think about throwing myself in front of the train.
I didn’t need to ask her why, and not because of this omniscience she gifted me. We were what, twenty-five, twenty-six? That age where we were just starting to understand that life was as agnostic to us as our dads were, that age where you start to hate yourself for still saying yes to all those pointless shows held after-hours in bagel shops on Bedford Avenue.
I’m glad you haven’t, was all I said, though, and because it was a little sad how grateful she looked to hear it, I added, You’re the only person who’s probably gonna show up to this show, and I need the gas money to get back.
You can stay here tonight, she said, not responding to the joke. You should stay here tonight.
We were five minutes into small talk, and she was already inviting me to sleep over. I admired that about her, how direct she was about filling up her vacant spots. Acknowledging desperation makes it a little less sad, like acknowledging a fart.
Will you buy me breakfast? I asked.
If you come back after I get paid, she said.
I did come back. We had a nice thing going for a while, furtive trips back-and-forth on the Metro-North. We encouraged each other in certain good ways; for example, my vocab started to include words like furtive. She decided to apply to grad school, and I like to think I had something to do with that. I like to think I encouraged her to be a little ballsier, to see it as a kind of freedom that she had a life she’d have no problem quitting and a family it was easy to leave behind. Even if the truth was that she just started getting embarrassed about the amount of time she spent complaining about what amounted to pretty boring angst, is there anything really so wrong with that? The outcome was the same. She got into grad school, which meant she’d be moving somewhere the MTA couldn’t take me. We weren’t exclusive and we were blunt about that, stopping just short of describing sex with other people, but I freely admit I felt an unexpected little pang when she told me she was leaving. It was nice not having to impress her because her dad wasn’t in Deep Purple.
You should come visit! she said, and it felt a little like her writing keep in touch! in our yearbook.
Yeah, that’d be cool, I said.
No, I mean it, she said. She got serious, and I know she was serious because she kept her head buried in my armpit instead of looking at me. I’m taking out a loan, I could buy you a ticket.
You don’t have to do that, I said.
I think I do, she said. What if this could be a thing?
The pit she was buried in must’ve gotten dank real fast, because she turned her head away and sucked in audibly for air.
We already are a thing, I said.
We are?
Yeah, I said.
That’s all I said: a thing. I meant a good thing, that’s all, because that’s what it was. Not a forever thing, not a nothing, just a small, good thing, which is a literary allusion I wouldn’t have known to make at the time. I thought we were on the same page when I said it, but I understand now that she was holding out a little longer-term hope for us, though I also understand it was less about hope for us but hope for just someone halfway decent to stick around for a while. She, like that whole generation of fatherless daughters, had been convinced by a Liz Phair album that they were all going to spend their whole lives alone, and she didn’t recognize anything self-fulfilling about it.
I feel bad that I couldn’t offer her any kind of assurance against that at the time, but now that it’s all said and done, we both know that was for the best. Look how well things have turned out long-term for her—would she have achieved anything if she’d gotten any of the unambiguous affection she thought she needed back then? If I or anyone else had filled that empty space she was always looking to fill, would she have bothered to become the writer at all?
▴ ▴ ▴
That’s not really how it all happened. Like I said, neither one of us remembers the specifics, just the gist, just the general direction. Is it all a lie if it ends up at the same place, though? If it leads to the same conclusion, if it conjures the same feelings? It’s not as if I’m trying to convince you I went to prison when really, I went to jail for a night just so I could sell a book. I’m not even trying to sell you a book. That’s what she’s doing.
▴ ▴ ▴
She did buy me that ticket, though. Here the memories are more memory than fiction.
I remember an old yellow house subdivided into a half-dozen apartments, including hers in the darkest, dankest back corner, a place that got neither sunlight nor floodlight, which meant it got instead flying cockroaches, which she could hear and sense and sometimes feel if they flew into her while she fumbled getting the key into the lock. There was a serial rapist on the loose at the time, and walking through the twelve feet of absolute darkness to her door at night seemed reckless, a risk hardly worth taking, but she took it anyway, because suddenly she had places to be, and she freely admitted that she’d rather be murdered than spend any more time alone in an apartment wondering what not-sad people do with their nights. It was clear to me quickly that things changed with the move; she’d been living in her new town for only a couple of months when I visited, and we couldn’t make it a half-block without running into some new friend, which I knew even before omniscience was mostly code for dude she bonked. It muddied the point of my visit—she didn’t need me to fill up the interminable nights between her and her inevitable lonely death anymore, and she was pretty eager for me to see that, like I’d be proud of her for enacting real change in her life. I was happy for her, I guess. Categorical change was the whole point of her decision to leave New Haven and New York, those cities that, despite their names, offered her the same old shit. But it also made her less quiet, and the more she talked, the less space there was for me to imagine what went on in her head during the silence. I thought there’d be more substance to her, to be honest. Something about silence from women just makes them seem more profound.
But I’m a music guy, who am I to quantify value by decibel?
She was tired from doing things and I was tired from flying, so we napped when we first arrived at her apartment, before we even had reunion sex. In retrospect that was probably when things started to change for us, when fucking no longer felt imperative. Her mattress was on the floor in the bedroom, and chunks of plaster from the ceiling fell onto us when we did finally do it. I remember vividly that place was a real dump.
I remember also wanting to participate in the fun she seemed to be having in her new life, which was why I suggested we pull in when we later drove by the Family Fun Center, a roadside attraction which promised enough irony for it to live up to its name. I remember thinking it wasn’t a great idea to keep her purse on her lap when we got on the go-karts, and sure enough, three minutes in, she took a sharp corner and the purse spilled a dozen tampons over the track. I don’t think there was anything else in the purse, just wads and wads of tampons—who needs a wallet when all your money goes to tampons, I guess was the statement. I was trying to negotiate whether it was more gentlemanly to help pick them up or to ignore them when she pulled her kart next to mine and said, very solemnly: There’s been something I’ve been meaning to tell you. I have a condition that makes me bleed from my vagina several days every month.
That wasn’t a thing she would’ve said the previous time I saw her.
I remember driving out to the grounds of an abandoned prison and taking pictures of the signs warning women to lock their belongings in their cars. We discussed why only women were subject to this warning, if perhaps “belongings” was a euphemism for their libidos or for shivs, both things which scared the general public. I don’t remember why we stopped there—maybe it was just somewhere we passed by and she got a fancy, her version of a Family Fun Center.
I remember thinking that night, when I had my arm around her at a music venue that was also a laundromat, that she did seem really glad that I was there. It was nice and all, just different than what it used to be, and that’s what that whole time was about—trying to do something different.
I remember also when she dropped me off at the airport the next day that she teared up a little, and I knew it was less about her missing me than it was about feeling bad for not really missing me at all. I admit it stung my ego a little bit to have to look my replacements in the face, but I got over it fast enough—I’d liked how hungry she used to be for me back in the day, I admit, but we both knew that I was never going to sate it.
▴ ▴ ▴
Eh, what am I talking about, these aren’t my memories. This isn’t even remotely my voice.
▴ ▴ ▴
Back in New Haven, I met a librarian. This I remember. The librarian was serious and quiet and never made a to-do about tampons. Much of our courtship took place in an XandO-slash-Così. If you don’t know what that is, you didn’t go to Yale in the nineties or aughts. I also didn’t go to Yale, and neither did the writer, though she likes to tell people she went to school in New Haven to see what they deduce from that. Then she tells them she went to a state university that U.S. News and World Report rates “least competitive” to clarify that she’s not the elitist she led them to believe she was, but also to hedge in case they deduce from further conversation that she’s not as smart as she thinks she is.
That was the kind of thing the writer began to fixate on in grad school. She didn’t know what a master’s degree was until someone mentioned it as a means of deferring undergraduate student loans, but once she landed there, she pounded cheap beer like she should have in regular college, had she gone to an actual one instead of the kind you commute to after putting in eight hours at a computer warehouse. That lifestyle freed up some of the energy she used to dedicate to crippling sadness, so she channeled the surplus into class rage, because the byproduct of advancing to an even moderately competitive academic environment was being surrounded by the middle class, a group to which she only then realized she had never belonged.
I’m glad I wasn’t there for that, to be honest, because I would’ve found it kind of annoying. It was kid stuff, armchair Marxism, whereas the librarian could discuss actual textbook Marxism. The writer assumed the people around her had never had their own struggles if their bones hadn’t also calcified on government cheese, and at the same time kept talking about the point of writing being to generate empathy. It was like she mostly wanted others to empathize with her, which basically guaranteed nobody would. We talked on the phone a few times after my visit, but all she wanted to talk about was George Dubya and the rich cunts who drove big-ass SUVs to their big-ass beach houses down the road from her college, as if she was shocked that studying in a beach town would mean living alongside people who owned beach houses. She was hitting her punk stride just as her peers were coming out of it, and it also coincided with her peak fertility, which meant her pheromones attracted plenty of D while most everything else about her repelled it.
The librarian just did her work and let other people do theirs. She harbored no bitterness, which was wildly attractive. Plus, she lived so close by.
So the librarian and I started getting serious, and the writer and I fell out of touch. Despite how she’d changed, I didn’t harbor any ill will toward the writer. It just seemed like the right thing to let us become past tense, both out of respect for the librarian and for practicality’s sake. We lived hundreds of miles apart, we were forging different paths. It wasn’t like she was blowing up my phone, either. The fact that she wasn’t was the only reason I did answer when she called that Saturday night—enough time had lapsed since our last call that it was almost novel to hear from her, no pun intended.
Hey! I said.
Hey, she said.
What’s up?
My whole family’s in town because my brother killed himself and there’s nowhere for me to sleep. Can I come over?
It was so odd how casually she said it. I wondered at first if it was a joke, and if it was, it meant she’d become an even worse person since the time we last spoke.
But she wasn’t that bad, and actually her jokes were usually pretty good.
Yeah, yeah, come over, I said. Truly I don’t recall what I said besides that, but I wouldn’t doubt it if that’s all I came up with. I had forty-five minutes minimum to come up with more, and I’m sure I rehearsed some platitudes, I’m sure I readied my arms to embrace her when I opened the door and she fell into me, weeping, as she surely would, because that is how grief is expressed, according to all renderings of it I’d seen. But when I opened the door, she didn’t fall into me, weeping.
She just said Hey again. It was like our secret word.
We hugged. It was innocent. The librarian was away at a conference, but I planned to tell her about it. It would be a truncated truth: my friend’s brother died and she needed a place to stay. The subtext would be that you can’t deny a friend in that kind of need, and that a friend in mourning has innocent needs. Tissues, whiskey, that kind of thing.
Mostly it seemed like she needed sleep. She seemed more tired than anything. It was kind of a relief, to be honest. I had soft seating and a bed; I could handle that much. I wanted to be the kind of person who could attend to anyone in a crisis, but the truth was I was nervous to see her again. There were probably things we should’ve discussed prior to her coming over, such as my status with the librarian. The writer would see the extra toothbrush and figure things out herself, at least if she were actually learning to pay attention to that kind of detail, as a writer should. Then she might feel awkward, too, when she should’ve been focused on feeling other terrible things.
Sorry if I’m bothering you, she said. She spoke quietly, the way she used to, and it made me suddenly a little nostalgic.
You’re not, I told her, and I meant it. A few minutes before I would not have meant it; I was curious, and then guilty, and then I was a little bit bothered, because I’d planned to meet up with friends I rarely saw since getting serious with the librarian. But quickly I was glad to have answered the phone. It’s shameful to admit how much better I liked her when she was sad.
I told her I was sorry to hear about her brother, which she seemed not to register. Then I told her I was glad to see her, which made her smile a little.
We sat on the couch with the whiskey between us. Do I even have to tell you how this ends? She kept her arms wrapped tight around herself like she was cold, so I brought her a blanket. The blanket looked inviting, so I asked if I could share. I took her hand when she talked about the letter she’d gotten from her brother during his deployment in Iraq, that they really played taps at the burials like they do in movies. She was coasting on fumes from airplane Bloody Marys and the pharmaceuticals her other brother had smuggled from his job disposing of expired diazepam at Pfizer, but she didn’t seem delirious, only weary. I moved my arm around her shoulder in anticipation of more details of the previous days, but she only asked if I would turn on the TV. I did, and then she turned her head away from it and sank into me.
I just want some noise from somewhere else, she said.
I assumed she meant noise from somewhere outside of her head, but I only got the main broadcast stations, and the news was discussing guns and the reelection of George Dubya, which I thought had to be exactly what she was trying not to hear.
Why don’t I turn on some music instead? I asked, and she nodded into my chest but didn’t move to release me, so I couldn’t go for the stereo. I couldn’t reach the remote, either, and the broadcast kept spewing out words that I was certain would trigger her: war, death, Republicans, gas prices. Still, the TV did seem to soothe her. She relaxed more into me, and put her arm around my belly, which made me instantly hard. I didn’t mean for it happen, but I was still in my twenties then, and it didn’t take much. I hoped she wouldn’t notice, but she looked down, and then looked up at me, and she started to laugh, which made me laugh too.
Sorry, I told her.
Is it the sorrow or the rash on my face? she asked.
I hadn’t noticed the face rash until then, but it did look a little like she had a Kool-Aid mustache. I thought it was kind of cute.
But really it was the sorrow. I wouldn’t have told her that, I knew it wasn’t appropriate. I’m not a total asshole.
Long story short, it wasn’t fair of me to do to the librarian, but the whole thing had me feeling really tender toward the writer—the way she held back from crying but not from laughing, even at a time like that. It honestly didn’t feel wrong at the time. It actually seemed like the kind thing to do. And the fact that I never heard from the writer again after that night—I thought it was because the story was finished, because there was finally a satisfactory resolution to it.
▴ ▴ ▴
I know now that the story wasn’t over, just the chapter. She’d been gone from grad school only a week, but it was enough time to create an irrevocable fracture between the life she’d left and the one she tried to re-create when she returned. Like me, her grad school friends were relieved that she seemed to not want to talk about things. They were indignant that one of her professors had given her a B for accruing three absences after her brother’s death, but she respected the professor’s adherence to the policy on the syllabus. It felt arbitrarily punitive in the same way the world did, and congruity during times of distress is reassuring. Another of her professors had the class sign a sympathy card, and then she herself went and died from ovarian cancer, so again with the congruity. It all ended in the same bullshit that she was learning cannot be outrun.
Most of the time it was as if she’d been body-snatched: she looked the same as before, she went to the same classes and worked the same waitressing job and drank the same drinks at the same billiards club, but it felt like her insides had been replaced with a primordial goo that could barely tolerate even the most essential life functions. The food she got down was starchy and the fucking was sad—all the clichéd scenes, all those dudes transitioning from cute local characters to sad local characters, the only difference between the present and future versions of themselves a few years and fifteen pounds of bloat. She thought about me once or twice, even if I was just a surrogate for what she really wanted at the time, which was someone to run to Harris Teeter for crackers and ginger ale and to appreciate her sadness without her having to explain anything about it.
But I was with the librarian, and there were different ways for the writer to distract herself. Friends. Bad stories written furiously. A decent one written painfully. Garbage wine. More holidays. Christmas might have been treacherous if it had any meaning to her or the remaining members of her family, but it didn’t, so there was no pressure to do anything but avoid each other. The writer was invited to accompany her friend to New Port Richey, Florida, which her friend assured her would be as bad as it sounds in the best way possible: old farts, Ron Jon, goth night at a club in Ybor City. She said yes and was barreling through it just fine, even if she felt really, really, really tired, which, based on the symptoms described in Zoloft commercials, she assumed was simply clinical depression.
All of this is so obvious that none of it even qualifies as foreshadowing: the writer was pregnant.
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It was in Florida, sitting on her friend’s mom’s toilet, that it struck her that she hadn’t had to use one of those tampons in her purse in a long time. She knew what it meant immediately but waited until she was back at her own apartment to take the test, which said the results would take three minutes, but she was so absurdly pregnant that the line appeared in seconds. The damn thing had no idea how to build tension. She became instantly nauseous, a symptom that remained until she left Planned Parenthood no longer pregnant, but that wasn’t until several weeks later. I’m just a music guy, remember, I don’t know how to build tension, either.
Aside from nausea, she remembers feeling at that moment only deeply, utterly dumb. She was on the pill, but took it like she took calcium chews later, in encroaching middle age: whenever she remembered, which apparently was not how they’re meant to work. I get that she felt dumb, because that was kind of a dumb move, and I get that she felt alone, because she was definitely alone, this time mostly by design—she felt too dumb to imagine telling any of her friends down there what she’d gone and done, and she was careful to destroy all the evidence. She wrapped the tests in their boxes, the boxes in plastic CVS bags, the plastic CVS bags in plastic Food Lion bags, and all of it in Hefty garbage bags. She told her friends she had mono and wasn’t up for playing pool.
This, though, is where the omniscience stops being helpful. I have access to the whole catalog of events, to the whole catalog of events of an entire lifetime, and still I don’t understand why she wouldn’t have called me. I’d come through for her before during equally desperate moments, hadn’t I?
I could understand being paralyzed by the shock of it. She called the Planned Parenthood and was told the soonest appointment was in two weeks, so she had plenty of time to get over the shock of it, once she was over the fresh shock of the amount of time she’d have to live with being pregnant. In that time she told a couple of people: her old roommate back in New York, a college friend who’d had an abortion. People who could relieve her of the burden of a secret, who could make her feel like she wasn’t an inherently dishonest person. But nobody nearby, nobody she had to look in the eye. Definitely not me.
But why, when somebody could’ve helped? When I could have?
In the two weeks after she took the test and before the appointment at the clinic, she stopped drinking. This was after snorting rails in the bathroom at a club in Ybor City and in a walk-in closet with the depressive surfer she hooked up with on New Year’s Eve. She became suddenly sober, and not just because she abstained from alcohol. She abstained from sex, stupidity, people who encouraged those things. She dove into coursework. She ate eggs until they made her retch and followed them up with green things. She slowed way down, partly because she was almost unbearably sleepy and always on the verge of puking, partly because she was humbled.
There was no reason to be sober. Whatever cellular damage to the embryo developing in her womb during that interminable period had already been done, and anyway, it was going to be ejected. Despite one night in which she spent an hour browsing baby products online, there was no doubt about that.
That hour is interesting. I wonder what that was about.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s no doubt she made the right choice, even if she never gave me the chance to affirm it. By then she was no longer simply broke, or in the pink from car loans or charge cards with credit limits so low they were cute; she was borrowing herself into the deep, deep red of national financial crises and an endless personal one, and it was a debt she was eager to accrue. In exchange for being unable to properly feed or shelter offspring, she thought surely this next degree would buy her passage out of the type of life in which children happen frequently and by accident. It had never been a secret that she herself had been an accident; she would’ve known that even if she hadn’t been explicitly told. Her mother nonetheless took full responsibility for her, but her mother wasn’t a natural with small children, a trait that the writer inherited. That was another reason, maybe the only one necessary: she was intolerant of children. As a kid her only distinct dream was to no longer be one—who cared if she ended up an astronaut or veterinarian or ballerina, as long as she was left to her own devices. Children were helpless, they had no choice but to rely upon adults that should not have been trusted. Growing into an adult herself had confirmed this. It wasn’t the fault of children, but there wasn’t any dignity in being so dependent on others, and it made reflecting on her own childhood unbearable. The only obvious way to not perpetuate the cycle was to end it, and she couldn’t understand how that could be seen as anything but humane, even to the protestors lining both sides of the street, who believed so mightily in their own goodness.
I wouldn’t have talked her out of it, is what I’m saying. I would’ve agreed it was the right choice and felt bad she had to go through it, and isn’t empathy what she was always looking for back then?
▴ ▴ ▴
What the writer came to understand, in addition to some humility, was that the mendacity of a surgical abortion is directly inverse to the complexity of the rhetoric around it. Before she could have what clinicians helpfully called the procedure, she was required to undergo an ultrasound, a law which the legislature of her new state cloaked in the language of safety and patient protection, though the subtext, which was not really sub-, was to suggest personhood of the fetus. It was ineffective, although the writer was beginning to feel, for the first time in two months, once again human herself. That is to say, she felt shitty—the nausea, the dumbness, the embarrassment—but instead of the shittiness feeling cosmic and existential, it felt connected to regular human things: hormone shifts, bad decisions, consequences. After the recent nights when it seemed human sensation would never return, she was oddly thankful for that.
She was eight weeks pregnant, the technician told her, because the technician was required to do so. The technician sandwiched this information between talk of the coldness of the ultrasound jelly and that January’s temperate weather, and the writer would for years think of this moment as an exemplar of how weaponized language can be disarmed. In the lobby she scheduled the follow-up, the appointment for the actual procedure, with a woman whose kindness seemed out-of-place behind a glass partition, because in other medical offices that space seemed to generate awfulness. The receptionist told her if she opted for sedation, she’d be required to have a ride home, and then she told her It’s not really very painful without it, which was a compassionate way to telegraph that she knew the writer was alone.
The craft lessons learned from these women were secondary to the ones about basic decency.
The only tear the writer ever shed was when the nurse said it was over, and it was unexpected because she didn’t feel sad. She also didn’t feel unburdened, which was what she’d expected to feel. Instead, what she felt was not incapable of managing the burden, something she didn’t even know until then was a possibility.
▴ ▴ ▴
That’s it, that’s how it ends? I know I’m just a music guy, but what exactly’s been resolved?
Let me try again.
In this version, the writer did call me after she saw those two pink lines. The librarian was home, so I decided not to answer for the first few rings, then decided that was shitty, considering the state she was in the last time I saw her, and I answered on the fourth.
Hello? I said.
I’m pregnant, she said, where regular people put hello.
Whoa, I said.
Yeah, she agreed.
I walked to the kitchen and turned on the faucet so the librarian couldn’t hear. Our pipes clang, and she was in the living room reading something important the writer’s never read, and by the time she asked what I was doing in there, I would have come up with an answer.
I had to think about how to phrase the next questions in case the clanging wasn’t enough.
Does it belong to me? I asked, as if the call might be about a tuner I’d left behind at band practice.
Yes, she answered.
What should we do? I asked.
I’m going to have an abortion, she said.
At this point I needed the water not for the sound but for replenishment, so I brought my mouth to the stream and lapped it up like an animal.
That’s fine, I’m fine with that, I said.
I didn’t call for permission, she said.
I asked, extra quiet because I couldn’t think of another way to phrase the question, What do you want?
The writer didn’t answer right away, and I was waiting to hear her finally come out with it. She wanted a couple hundred bucks; she wanted saltines and ginger ale; she wanted to not be embarrassed to ask for those things; she wanted to not be ashamed of herself; she wanted to accept that she would be; she wanted to have known better; she wanted to know better in the future; she wanted to have called her brother more; she wanted to believe it wouldn’t have made a difference; she wanted to figure out how to say any of this aloud; she wanted saying things aloud to not be so off-putting; she wanted to learn how to say them even if they were.
But the writer remembered the toothbrush, because it turned out she was paying attention to detail after all, and she already knew how this version of the story ends, too.
Nothing, she said, just thought you should know.
But why, why? What’s the point of me knowing, when the version where she tells me ends the exact same way? I’ll ask the same question again in present-tense: what, writer, what do you want?
I just got it, she says.
What? I ask. What did you get?
The denouement, she says.