— But Mom, a bunch of scenes back I quit my singing career to jump on a boat and make babies. Why do I keep trying to audition for things?
— Weren’t you the one who said this story was nonlinear?
—. .
— Is that storyline resolved for you, in real life?
—. .
The Services
The Pill is increasingly popular, but after weighing your options, you land on the diaphragm and decide to stick. It’s a messy pain in the ass that makes you certain a man invented it, but the phrase “weight gain” was enough to cross the Pill off the list of choices. It’s not like you’re out sleeping around anyway, you’ve always been a one-man woman, but by now there’s been a series of ones, you dumped the last one just a few days ago, and having another child right now is not under consideration. The child you already have is only in second grade, but you’ve spent the last year wondering why elementary school couldn’t go nine to five. Nine to seven. Thirty. That would leave time for bath, book, and bed. Quality time. Perfect.
Your monthly time has never been anything other than an alert, something to set a clock by. You’ve been marking a special calendar (kept in your nightstand drawer, a tiny one picked up for free at the pharmacy) since just before you got married; you never had a sex talk with Grandma, exactly, no more than the beginning of a talk about relations when you were eighteen and yes, still a virgin, though you were aware of how the parts went together, enough to tell her she didn’t need to say more, to her great relief. And of course it wasn’t long after this that Dad came into the picture, and the day after your engagement, Grandma suggested that you start marking your calendar, thinking less of prevention than of planning.
Double-checking the calendar, this year’s with the unfortunate image of a top-hatted Baby New Year on it, you see that your monthly time was due yesterday. Surely everyone is late once in a while, yet signs indicate otherwise this time. You haven’t felt so much as one cramp thus far, and you’ve never had a period yet without at least one day beforehand when murder seemed comprehensible.
Three days go by. Still no cramps or twinges of any kind, nor so much as a drop of blood. On the fourth day, you make an appointment with a gynecologist, but they can’t get you in until the seventh day, at which time you are given a test and told that they’ll call with the results in a week to ten days. You refrain from noting that you’re now already a week late, and that in a week or ten days you expect to be sure one way or another, extremely clear on what the results will say. But denial can be an intoxicating lover. There could be some good medical reason you haven’t gotten your period. Maybe you just need to eat better. Maybe you have some minor medical condition. Could be a million explanations, really.
The eight days that follow have extra hours in them. There is no possible way that these eight days have not gotten progressively longer, twenty-five hours at first, you could have slept through that and not noticed, but it feels like thirty hours on the second and forty on the third and so on, until, on the last day, looking at the clock, you see that the second hand is clearly moving in increments of a minute at a time. Finally a nurse from the doctor’s office calls and makes an appointment for you to come in for your results.
The doctor says Congratulations; you burst into tears. You get up to leave. He asks if you don’t want to go ahead and schedule a series of appointments. All you can do is shake your head and go.
You’re pregnant and single and you earned about four thousand dollars last year. You couldn’t afford another child even if you did think you wanted one; nor is it an option to announce your single motherhood to the world. The world still hasn’t forgiven Ingrid Bergman for getting pregnant out of wedlock, you don’t imagine they’ll be easier on you — not that you could ever tell your mother, or father, or best friend, and definitely not Stan, who effing did this to you. That guy would freaking beg you to marry him. Putting the baby up for adoption is the only option, and that’s going to fuck up your next six months pretty royally. Maybe, for the first few months, you can say you’ve gained a little weight if anyone asks. Your career has hardly even begun. You’ve failed.
Another few days of crying go by before you remember a conversation with that woman Evelyn, the aspiring model you’d met at the Barbizon. She’d couched it in language you hadn’t really understood at the time, or at least, hadn’t wanted to. Evelyn had spoken frankly about not wanting kids, said that she took care to make sure that didn’t happen because she knew what her options were if she were to find herself pregnant. That was more or less the extent of it, but you recall being struck at the time by the tone of what she was saying, that there was a vague implication that there might be options you weren’t aware of, even if they weren’t terribly desirable.
You call Evelyn immediately, leave a message with her answering service to call at her earliest convenience. When she calls back later that evening, you catch up briefly before telling her the real reason for the call. She gives you an address in Queens. You’ve never been to Queens. You ask for a phone number. Evelyn says There is no phone number. What kind of doctor’s office doesn’t have a phone? you ask. It’s not exactly a doctor’s office. There’s a doctor. Every lick of good sense in you says this can’t be right. This is how it is, Evelyn says.
You study your subway map, tell me you’ll be out for a few hours, that the babysitter will take me to the park; you take the IRT to almost the end of the 7 line, which takes nearly two hours. You’ve got a paperback book, a romance, but it’s hard to focus. You might have considered that romance wouldn’t take your mind off things today. Everyone on the subway looks like they need things taken off their minds. You get out of the subway in an unfamiliar land, notice a deli outside the subway stop called Flushing Foods. Flushing? Honestly? That seems like a cruel joke. You find your way to the address Evelyn gave you. It’s a nondescript two-story residential building on a side street. You enter into a waiting area that was once a living room, walls lined with wooden folding chairs, not so much as a tattered magazine or a sad clown painting to look at. One of the women waiting points to a clipboard on the wall, tells you to put your first name at the bottom of the list. You sit down on one of the chairs, feel a splinter pulling at your skirt. The mood in the room is a level of somber that’s new to you. Almost every woman here is alone, silent. A couple of them are crying, a couple of them look terrified. One looks to be about sixteen, the rest around your age, women of every imaginable kind. One by one they are escorted into another room; the waiting room fills with still more young women. Two hours in, an unshaven man in a lab coat comes out and calls your name. Why didn’t he shave? This strikes you as the worst impression a doctor could make — until you are taken into the back room, which looks like someplace a kidnapping victim would be held. One wheeled stool for the doctor with a rip in the vinyl, one table for the patient, one small sink, one metal tray with one long, sharp-looking metal instrument. The unshaven guy — is he even a doctor? — asks you a few questions. Are you married. How many sexual partners have you had. How often do you have sex. Have you ever been pregnant before. Is this your first procedure. No, but this is your first time hearing the word “procedure” used in such an ominous way. You spy blood in the sink. There will be no proceeding here. You leave. You’ll sooner have another baby.