I didn’t give her any excuses, just told her I was sorry.
I should say right here that Angie’s tried hard to be a mother to me, and I’m grateful for the effort she’s put into it. She’s never hit me, and she doesn’t drink up the money she gets from the State, or spend it all on herself. She’s worked at the state prison as “Chief Secretary to the Director of Rehabilitative Services” for two years. She tends to take up whatever psychoanalytical fad happens to be current at the prison, partially in an attempt to analyze why Dr. Malcolm hasn’t asked her to marry him yet, and partially to deal with the discomfort I cause her.
Somehow I cause her a considerable amount, though I don’t mean to. As a child, I read voluminously, not speaking for hours at a time; my immersion in science fiction, coupled with my family history, caused her to worry that I had “schizotypal personality disorder,” the next best thing to schizophrenia. How else can she explain a genre she doesn’t comprehend, except as a symptom of illness?
She wonders where she’s gone wrong, because I didn’t turn out as the slim, well-socialized extrovert with a Blassingame wardrobe she tried to make me into.
I find Angie’s relentless pursuit of middle-class respectability pathetic and futile. She finds my fascination with writing dangerous—my real mother was a writer, a good one, and she fears I’ll follow in her tragic footsteps. I guess you could say Angie and I love each other, in a labor-intensive sort of way, when we’re not at each other’s throats.
I won’t go into gory details about how our evening went. I was starving and tried to eat before I told her about it, but she kept asking me where I’d been all afternoon, so I had to tell her. Suffice it to say that I didn’t get to eat dinner until practically midnight.
The last thing Angie wants is an unwed daughter with a bastard grandchild, especially with all the babble in Washington about family licensing. She dropped the marriage idea the instant I told her where I met Joel. After explaining that I was entirely too calm, that she was sure I would need her to pick up all the pieces of my shattered life, she signed her permission on the dotted line.
June 17, 2003—Saturday
What a beastly morning! I made three trips to the porcelain god in the hour of rosy-fingered dawn, as the Greeks used to call it. Nature is indeed a bitch. Why has the human race lasted so long if this is what we have to put up with to reproduce?
Angie basks in vindication. “Gillian, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, your problem is that you refuse to accept reality. Now you’re finally going to have to face up to it, aren’t you?”
1 know the State would pay my medical bills if I had the baby and gave it up for adoption. How independent of Gillian—poor broke taxpayers paying for her mistake. They already are paying, of course.
The other problem is, if the Family Licensing Act passes—likely under the current Congress—it’ll make illegitimate kids count against the two you’ll be legally entitled to have. Which will make it harder for me to get married, unless I find a man who wants only one kid. Not an impossible task, I guess, but I don’t feel like much of a bargain this morning.
The other thing is that giving birth isn’t without risk. I could die. No, it’s not common, but the quality of State doctors oscillates madly now that they’ve lowered standards to make up for the shortage, and you’re not allowed to pick and choose.
Angie would have a cardiac arrest if she knew I even contemplated going to college pregnant. As she is fond of reminding me, people just don’t do that nowadays.
What kind of a job could I get that would support me—on my own and in college—until the baby’s born? I can’t think of any. Would I be sick during morning classes? Probably.
I cast about madly for an alternative, something that will show her I can face reality and fix my own problems. But what?
Finally I pull myself together and take an autocab back to ROE. When I get out, I see the religionists are demonstrating outside, Christians and Muslims by the looks of them. While inside are the Jewish doctors… it makes me think of the Dome of the Rock, where all three religions claim the same piece of sacred ground. I wonder if the Rock is egg-shaped.
So I start to go inside, and of course the minute I head for the door, the religionists come rushing over to stop me. They don’t know I didn’t come down here for a Negg patch, but it doesn’t matter, they’re against that, too.
I do sympathize with the Christians. Their money is being used to pay for something they regard as a crime, and a destroyer of society. On the other hand, they got rid of RU-486, and they regard me as a threat, which I have a problem with. Still, I can empathize with them more than the Muslim fundies, who are pushing for a law mandating female genital mutilation.
FGM means painful sex, so women won’t stray from the straight and narrow, and decadent Western society will be brought to a golden age of stability and goodness. Brilliant, right, except they left the male sex drive out of the equation.
All religions are crazy on the subject of sex. Except pagans, who are crazy for it.
Anyway, this group of long-haired men and bald women in Birkie Boots comes pouring after the religionists in a wedge attack, shouting, “Escort! Escort! Every woman’s entitled to one! Rifkin v Smith!”
But this wiry old gray-haired man happens to be standing in front, and he’s obviously a Christian: stern gray eyes, long countrified sideburns, white leather Bible in his hands. I brace myself for the M-word. He fixes me with those eyes and says quietly, “You’re going to regret this decision for the rest of your life.”
“It’s not my choice,” I tell him. “I have no real choice.”
Something strikes me about his face, in the split-second we stand there staring at each other. Condemnation, I expected that. But I see a softness lurking in those hard planes and angles. I imagine him taking his grandkids to Disneyland and maxing out his Newdollar card on Mickey Mouse hats and cotton candy.
The long-haired men shove their way past him, and do this arm-link blockade so I can walk to the clinic door. I walk surrounded by them, feeling ridiculous. The guy next to me has greasy black hair and a handlebar mustache, and is wearing a pink T-shirt that says Socialists Ensure Xylophones.
I shouldn’t have come here on a Saturday.
There’s a struggle at the door when a fat woman with big hair tries to strangle the SEX guy with her rosary beads, but I make it inside.
The same bored-looking parasites are sitting in the same waiting-room chairs, reading the same magazines and playing barrasta. A girl in the corner smirks at me—Forrie Hanover-Gish, an illiterate tobacco smuggler for a shag house in Donia Fells. I sign in at the desk and sit down as far away from Forrie as possible. Maybe I’ll ask one of the barrasta players to tell me my fortune.
Screw it, I don’t want to hear about my future right now. I’m in a funk, the worst one since Mom died.
I could tell by the way Angie said good-bye this morning that she’d no intention of volunteering to come along and hold my hand. It’ll be good for my pathological notions of self-reliance to see how much I need her. Therapeutic, you see.
I’d rather die than go crawling back to her. Everything she offers has strings attached. What’s wrong with being independent? I don’t want to be like my mother, so clingy and dependent that in spite of her success as an artist she couldn’t let go of a good-looking creep with the emotional development of your average brick. Would she rather I were more like other kids: no job, doing poorly in school—if they go—and no ambition to do anything but get rich booting leaf, flashing Lucifer, or acting as a bodyguard in a shag house?