“You sure this is what you got to do?” I nodded. “You got the money?”
“Yes ma’am,” I said, and took two ten-dollar bills out of my skirt pocket. She smoothed and folded them, then tucked them into her blouse.
“Mary Alice,” she said, “you come with me and this white girl.”
She led us through a doorway into the women’s restroom. The restroom held one sink and three toilet stalls, none of them with a door. It smelled like it hadn’t been cleaned lately. She must have seen the look of revulsion on my face, because she said, “You want a nice doctor’s office, you come to the wrong place, white girl. You want to change your mind about this?”
“No ma’am,” I said. “I’m just scared.”
“Ought to be,” she said. “This is scary business. Sad, too. How come you not want to have this child?”
“I can’t,” I said. “I just can’t.”
“Course you can, baby,” she told me. “You just won’t. ‘Can’t’ not the same thing as ‘won’t.’” She pointed at the third stall. “You need to pull off your panties and raise up your skirt. Sit on that toilet and scootch up to the front of the seat. You got to spread your knees wide and hang your bottom off the front edge so I can get in there. But you ought to pee first, if you can.”
I stared from her to Mary Alice and back again. “It’s all right,” said Mary Alice. “She’s done this a hundred times. She knows what she’s doing. I’ll be right there beside you. You go on and use the bathroom, and I’ll come in when you flush.”
I sat down on the toilet and bent over to hide my face while I peed, then reached back and flushed the toilet. Then I pulled off my underpants, and Mary Alice squeezed into the narrow space between the toilet and the wall.
“Now scoot on up here and open up your legs,” said Mary Alice’s mother. “I know you know how to do that.”
“Mama!” Mary Alice sounded shocked.
“Mary Alice, don’t you start with me,” she said. “I know you’ve been opening yours for a while now, too. Women been gettin’ told to open their legs since the fall of man. That’s one part of the Lord’s curse. This here’s another part.”
She pulled a small bottle from her apron pocket, uncorked it, and handed it to me. “Here, drink this down. Absinthe. Help you relax.” The liquid in the bottle smelled like licorice, but it burned like whiskey going down. Within seconds I felt the heat in my stomach, then felt it spread through my belly and out into my arms and legs, and my head began to hum. Next she took a handkerchief from her apron and tied it into a fat knot. “Open your mouth,” she said, and when I did, she jammed the knot between my teeth. “Now you bite down hard. This gonna hurt some.” I clenched my jaws, and felt the knot begin to flatten under the pressure. “Mary Alice, you get ready.”
Somehow, despite the narrowness of the toilet stall, Mary Alice managed to turn and swing one leg over me, so she was straddling me — one leg on either side of the toilet — facing me, her chest in my face. She reached down and took my hands in hers, lacing her fingers through mine. I felt her mother kneel between my knees. “All right, easy does it,” she said. “If you can relax, that’d be good. If you can’t, you hold real still. This be over before you know it.”
I felt something cold and sharp pierce me to the core, and I heard a scream burrowing its way out of my throat and through the knot of fabric. My knees jerked up and my shoulders strained forward as my body fought to curl itself into a ball. “By God, white girl, you hold still. If you want to stay alive, you hold still,” she said. “Mary Alice, you got to hold her good.”
My nose closed from my tears, and the handkerchief filled my mouth. I could not breathe, and I began to gasp and gag. Everything started going black — everything except for the white-hot flame of pain. Then, just when I was sure I was dying, I felt the fabric yanked from my mouth, and I could breathe again and see again. “Done,” I heard Mary Alice’s mother say. “Done. Lord forgive us, it’s done.” I felt my belly cramping, and every spasm felt as if I were clenching shards of glass or slivers of metal deep within me. “I got to put these rags inside you,” she said. “Catch the blood. You wait till tomorrow evening to take ’em out.” I gasped when she prodded at me again, but it was a duller pain this time.
Mary Alice let go of one hand and swung her leg back across me, so she was beside me again. She gave my shoulder a squeeze. “You done just fine,” she said. “You’ll be all right now.” I shook my head and cried.
I heard water running in the sink, and a moment later Mary Alice’s mother stepped into the stall again, holding two damp cloths. She handed one to Mary Alice, who mopped my face; with the other, she bent down and swabbed my blood-smeared thighs and bottom.
Suddenly there was a series of raps on the door. I nearly cried out with fear; the two black women exchanged swift, worried looks. More knocking, louder now. “Mary Alice? Miss Beatrice?”
“Yes, what is it?” Mary Alice said.
“Y’all about done in there? Y’all just about ready to get your picture took?”
I started to call out — I have no idea what I would have said — but luckily Mary Alice laid a hand over my mouth. “Just about,” she said. “One more minute.” She hauled me to my feet. “You splash some water on your face and comb your hair and put on this lipstick,” she said. “Then we got to get out there and act like everything is fine.”
In a daze — the cramps searing and my head buzzing — I rinsed my face and dabbed on lipstick. Then Mary Alice took my hand and led me out the restroom door. It was as if I had walked on-stage in a play: a card table in front of us glowed in a pool of light, and as Mary Alice and I stepped forward dozens of faces watched. Most of the faces were black, but several were white, and I recognized the uniforms and black armbands of MPs.
A few books were stacked on the table, and one lay open, its spine broken. It was the Bible, and it was open to the story of Adam and Eve. Westcott stepped toward us and ushered us into two chairs, which were angled at one corner of the table. “Ladies, you look lovely,” he said, though he looked at me closely, with what appeared to be concern. “Lean forward over the book a little, Beatrice. You, too, Mary Alice, and point to a word, like you’re asking Beatrice what the word is.”
Mary Alice’s index finger — blue-black skin, with a pink, pearly nail — traced a wavering line down one page, then came to rest beneath a verse. “What this Bible verse say right here, Miss Beatrice?” Her voice was a singsong caricature — like a darky in a Hollywood film — and I wondered if it was me she was mocking, or Westcott, or the segregated city and nation in which we lived and worked.
I looked, and I read the verse aloud: “The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
“Amen,” said Mary Alice as the flash blinded me.
The MPs — sent by the bus driver, apparently, to make sure the white woman wasn’t set upon by sex-crazed black men — stayed while Westcott packed up his his camera and lights and loaded them back into his jeep. Mary Alice and I had remained seated while the gear was packed. When everything was loaded, I stood up to go, and when I did, I felt my dress sticking to the metal folding chair. I looked down, and the seat was sticky with blood. Mary Alice glanced at the chair, then quickly stood beside me, an arm around my waist. With her free hand, she signaled to her mother, who came and stood close behind me. We walked that way, the two black women and I, out of the building and into the night. Mary Alice helped me onto the bus, and as I stepped up into the enveloping darkness of the bus, I heard one of the MPs say something to the other.