Which for some reason was how I felt now in the cab, with the cabbie, and our all laughing together. I felt, perhaps because of the pot, like we were all planets in the same solar system — which was all I had ever wanted or asked from people, anyone, ever.
“Thanks,” we said when we got out. And we tipped him twenty dollars, “just to blow his mind,” Sils whispered.
“Do you think we did? Do you think we blew his mind?”
He hadn’t looked to examine the bills. He’d just stuffed them into his pocket.
“He’ll look. He’ll see,” said Sils.
When we went inside, only Claude was still up. He was sprawled on the couch, under a blanket, watching TV like a sick person. In the last six months he’d been growing in the pale, disproportionate way of adolescents and leggy plants — his limbs and feet sending themselves out past his cuffs like antennae. But he was still a little boy and self-conscious. I always suspected him of having a crush on Sils.
“Hi,” he grunted, turning his head just slightly to see us, then he blushed and turned back to the television.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi, Claude,” Sils said a little flirtatiously.
“Hi,” he said again.
“Did LaRoue already come in?” I asked, suddenly worried.
“Yeah,” he said absently. That was all. We tiptoed back to my room, trying not to squeak the floorboards and bring one of my parents down to lecture us for staying out late and being generally inconsiderate what was it with us girls.
When later in life she would appear — in a dream with a group of people, or in a thought about friends I never saw anymore, those I’d consented to lose and live without — she often appeared, in sleep or pensiveness, as she did the next morning when she awoke, dashed to the bathroom, and threw up. She came back to the room gray and perspiring, and I gave her my bathrobe to wear. It was a white seersucker robe, and her hair fell to the inside of the neck of it, making a kind of pageboy, a frame, like the hood of a cape around her face. It was the way she often looked in winter, when she wore a coat: her hair tucked inside, looking as if it had suddenly been bobbed. I knew all the hairstyles and looks of her; there were a dozen or so, and I knew them all. Each time I saw one again, I would say to myself, “Oh, yes, that one.”
“I’m going to have to make an appointment and just go,” she said.
I brought her orange juice and ice water and toast buttered so hard it had ripped the bread.
“I’ll go with you,” I said. “We’ll call Humphrey, and we’ll go.”
Which is what we did.
The following week Sils went to the local doctor, was given a pregnancy test and a referral. Then we phoned Humphrey, our cabbie, got him to meet us at the rear entrance of Horsehearts Park, near the pond where the heartless horses had reputedly been tossed, and we hopped into our cab to Vermont.
“Glad to see you girls again.” The drive was along the old Boston Post Road, and then up through farmland, mountains, past little orchards and churchyards with saintly white churches and graves. It was going to cost seventy-five dollars, round-trip, tip included. I remember thinking that once there had been a time when women died of brain fevers caught from the prick of their hat pins, and that still, after all this time, it was hard being a girl, lugging around these bodies that were never right — wounds that needed fixing, heads that needed hats, corrections, corrections.
“Glad to see you, too,” I said.
Now the countryside rolled by us, in a timeless way, and I felt like Robin Hood within it. Rob, pay, give away: however improvised, there was beauty to thievery; there were also rules. But I felt I understood them. I felt the pure priestly rush of their fulfillment swell and shrink and swell again within me.
We had the address of the clinic—217 Elm Street, Rutland — and we had six hundred and fifty dollars in fives and tens, a few twenties. Sils was wearing a shirt of mine — a green floral blouse with puffed shoulders and tiny buttons down the front. For some reason she’d wanted to. She’d stood in front of my closet and pulled it off the hanger. “Can I wear this to my abortion?” she’d asked, and, startled, I said, “Sure, if you want,” though the request frightened me and caused me to think too much about blood. I wondered whether I should have said yes at all. But now she sat beside me, wearing it, looking better in it than I ever could, her breasts pushing out at the fabric, whereas mine always shrank and shivered behind the hollow drape of it.
We passed through Hope, Argyle Hall, Mt. Bliss, and East Creek, the site of the East Creek Doll Hospital, where, when I was little, my mother would take my dolls to be repaired, an old Victorian house filled to the rafters with broken dolls — Barbies and baby dolls sitting bright-eyed all on top of one another in the parlor, on the stairs to upstairs, in the casements of the windows. The old woman who lived there collected dolls for their spare parts, eyes and limbs mostly, and if your doll had anything wrong with it, you could bring it to this woman, and she would fix it, keep it overnight. “We’ll just keep her overnight and give her some tea and some rest.” She was crotchety and doddering but with a magic wink that softened her face so that children could see she wasn’t scary; she wanted that known. Many of the grown-ups in town, the ones without daughters, didn’t know for sure. Her house seemed a witchy one, with spiders on the porch and a skyload of bats flying from her chimney at dusk.
Now that we were passing the house I wondered whether the woman was still there. Ten years had gone by — how old would she be now? I remembered years before seeing boxes out behind the house, boxes of just arms, or just legs, or just eyes, and I wondered what it would be like to see those boxes now, on this particular errand, from this particular cab. I twisted to see, as the taxi sped past, and could see heads and faces and little dresses in the front window. The house was still white with pink trim; there was still a porch swing, and a wishing well in the yard, but there was now also a gas station and a Qwik Stop next door.
“There’s the doll hospital,” sighed Sils, “with all its cheap irony.” Cheap Irony was the name of her brothers’ old band.
“Yeah,” I said. I twisted back toward her, to look at her, but she turned quickly away, leaned up against the armrest, and looked out at the hot road.
In those days in Horsehearts nothing, no building, had air-conditioning. After a summer rain, humidity soaked into the wood — the moldings, railings. Windows swelled at the sashes and joints. The steps and banisters went pulpy soft, the varnish gummy, the doors sticky and suddenly trapezoidal. The steamy heat fogged the glass, made every cracker in the house go stale. Earwigs roamed and measured the sinks. The hot tar roofs and rubber-lined gutters filled the air with a damp burnt smell.