We married without a wedding. I married Christopher without anybody. In Montana you need neither witness nor official, just a third person to look at you both and say, “You’re married.” That’s sort of how the proposal came, too.
We lived in an eight-sided log cabin by a creek. Christopher chopped wood for our stove. Black bears tore through our garbage at night. I was a waitress, we owned a blue heeler puppy, a breed I hadn’t heard of before moving to Missoula. We had visited the pregnant mother, Sunday drives down the Bitterroot Valley. We didn’t care about papers or talents, only that we’d decided to do this together and our landlord had said okay. We named her Ruby.
Ruby whipped us into joint action, united concern. We traded turns driving back to the cabin midday from work to unlatch the crate and follow after her in the driveway. At dinner we reported on her—and then she fell over! and then she chased a bee!—glancing at her on her dog bed ($34, more than we allowed ourselves for anything), a tucked-in ball, no bigger than a melon. We enrolled in a dog-training class and let friends tease us that we were training for parenthood.
Ruby became increasingly difficult, and the trainer asked us not to come to class. In her ninth week, her tenth, she lunged for bigger dogs, ignored sharp jerks on her choke chain, bucked with a strength no puppy should have. At the sound of a command, she worked herself into fits as Christopher tried to hold her in his lap. She writhed hard, her eye vile, shit dropping on the floor. We were astonished. I would talk softly, and she’d sink her quarter-inch teeth into my forearm, scraping and biting as I tried to rid myself of her. In a snap, she was peaceable again, nosing the edges of her dish, happy tongue for the crumbs on the floor. Only a month of her, and we were wrenched with love, depleted by vigilance and worry.
“Look,” the trainer said one afternoon after a private lesson we couldn’t afford. “There are too many good dogs in the world to spend so much effort on a bad one.” Ruby—agile, flop-eared, short-muzzled—had flipped into the air and seized the teacher’s sleeve, shredding cloth and snorting. We watched from the porch as the teacher launched a tremendous kick to release our dog. She didn’t think Valium would help, or training, or anything. The next day the fourteen-week-old puppy savaged Christopher’s hand, puncturing skin, unable to give up, her own intention the transforming hypnotic.
We took her to a kennel so we could visit Christopher’s parents for Thanksgiving. I didn’t confess how good I felt, knowing someone else would be the one to open her cage for a few days. In Salt Lake we played Scrabble and did dishes, but driving home, the long gray hours, we knew we needed to decide.
“What do you want to do?”
“What do you want?” Neither of us could answer. I was thinking of the velvet spot beneath her jaw, even when she was fuming and fierce.
“We need to put her down,” Christopher said.
“I know, I know.”
We were both crying the same way, hope lost, betrayed by our own efforts.
He pulled into a rest station, where the bathroom echoed with doors, flushing, women in their dull moments. She was just a young puppy. I hunched over my knees, sitting on the toilet, one hand looking for reassurance against the cold wall of the stall. We hadn’t even had her two months, but she wasn’t any good, and we couldn’t bear trying more.
I found Christopher by the snack machines. He looked timid.
“I know something that might cheer you up?” he said.
“What?”
“Do you want to get married?”
We liked to do things this way: pushed into some hole of privacy and hard sorrow, we would emerge with a decision, a start at something better. When Christopher’s father fell from the tree he was pruning and severely injured his head, we returned from the solemn hospital vigil and decided to move in together. When he took a turn for the worse, we got the dog. We were drifting off from others, using our discrete griefs to build our life together. You could trust sorrow, straightforward and undiluted, and people left you alone. To us it was love.
The last half of the drive, hesitant and flirting, we fretted about the wedding, no mention of Ruby. Imagine when we tell our parents, imagine them meeting. But after the jokes, we didn’t like it, especially my mother, of course, sorting painkillers on the bar, dropping the appalling remark to some uncle.
“When do you want to do this?”
“Soon. Why not?”
“Let’s not tell anybody, and we’ll get married right now.”
Christopher scheduled the vet. I made him take her, but he couldn’t stay in the room, came home in surrendered tears.
The relief of Ruby’s death opened into a few quick plans, three days until we married. I asked at the florist’s how much a bouquet might be ($14), ordered it for the Friday. I went to a vintage shop, Lucinda Williams on the speakers, and found a black dress from the forties ($27). At Planned Parenthood we had rubella tests ($12 each). We found gold bands in a pawnshop ($40 each), and then we couldn’t spend any more. There was nothing else to do, no one to call, no effort except the effort of holding it in. So this was privacy, boundaries, selfhood.
Friday in the near dark of the ending day, I picked Christopher up after work, and we parked by the courthouse, which looked like a courthouse.
“Your mother’s full maiden name here,” the clerk said, just as she instructed all registrants, but I resented my mother’s intrusion. We signed for our license ($42 noted on the handwritten receipt) and waited outside the judge’s chambers as he finished with the juvenile DUI.
Fifteen minutes later the judge, with a weekend’s good mood, sent married us out into the hall again, where I felt dizzy and had to sit down. I needed crackers from the vending machine ($1, in quarters). Then we drove in a snowstorm to a restaurant out of town, hurried through our steaks because the blizzard was getting worse and got back home to the cabin at the end of the driveway already choked with snow.
We gave ourselves one secretive day, feeding the woodstove and making love with unexpected reverence, and then I called my mother.
“How could you do this to your sister? You know she’s been waiting to be your bridesmaid.”
“I didn’t do this to her.”
Christopher looked up as he heard me, surprised. I wasn’t, only redirected. I had wanted to tell her what getting married was like, what my getting married was like.
“Of course you did,” my mother said. “You eloped, had a civil ceremony—this isn’t like you. I know you,” she hissed. “I know what you wanted, that Renaissance dress, a huge celebration with all your friends. But what the hell is this? This isn’t you. This is Christopher.”
I had to defend him, us, but she did know me, and she was right.
“Congratulations, then,” she said. “If that’s what you called for. I would put your sister on but she’s way too upset right now.”
Christopher and I were careful. We had adapted the pause for birth control in our lovemaking and assumed equal liability for its success. We shared the cost of spermicide, and he came with me to the cervical cap fitting. We understood the muffled threat of pregnancy, sex’s invisible double.
Now I felt unwell in an unusual way. The body knew what it was. I went to Planned Parenthood for the free test, a redbrick building on a quiet sidewalk.
“Okay, so,” the counselor started. “You are pregnant.” I wanted her to back out of the room, never to be coming back in, to unsay this. There was no mistaking, no gauzy possibility. I was pregnant. “Is this your first pregnancy?”
My mother had had two children and five miscarriages, which became this map for me, a guide to expect the same. I was conceived, she always said, in an airplane bathroom between London and Paris. “And that was a short flight!” My mischievous parents stole into the loo. She described the faces of the passengers when she emerged and walked down the aisle. “Your father had only to look at me, and I’d get pregnant.”
“How do you know?” I’d ask. “How could you tell that was me?”
“Because I always threw up the exact moment I conceived, and I did, before we landed.”
“My mother could tell the second she conceived,” I told friends; you have to understand the magic in my mother. She’d had three missed pregnancies before me and two between me and Penelope. I tried to calculate her uterine math, but I never quite understood it, and I gave up.
She was explicit about birth control. “An IUD,” she told me when I was seven or eight. “That’s what I use, and thank God.” It was a piece of wire, she explained, pushed up inside her womb.
“How do you get it out?” I asked.
“There’s a little string that hangs down that the doctor can pull on. But you don’t have to get it out. It stays in a long, long time.”
Was that the string, the glimpse of white cotton thread hanging between her legs sometimes, like a chain on a lightbulb?
“But the IUD is best if you’ve had a baby already. What you will use,” she would say, “is a diaphragm.”
When I was nine or so she took me to her OB in New York, to “get you checked,” and she stood beside him as he inserted the pediatric speculum and opened me. She kept describing a discharge I’d had, that word, and I wanted to die—a man, the cold metal, her fake camaraderie. She said to him, “You know I have a tipped womb. I expect Susy has, too.”
My first diaphragm came from a Taos clinic, which sat at the edge of a field in a battered trailer a few miles out of town. I didn’t want to deal with Daphne’s keen interest and her discussion with the doctor. I phoned her best friend of the week from a pay phone in the plaza and asked her to give me a ride.
“I’m going to get a diaphragm.”
“Oh, you are. What does Daphne say about this?”
“I’d be grateful if this stayed between you and me.” Although I was thirteen, I understood the wily uses of confidence.
“I see.” She was quiet. Maybe she was wondering if it was legal to take someone else’s thirteen-year-old.
“It’s not like we’re going across state lines,” I said.
I didn’t think of myself as cheating on my mother, although asking her friend gave me a thrill, which should have made it obvious.
The friend dropped me off to return in an hour. The grass was yellow under the tin steps. I came in nervous. The pamphlets on the walls were faded, and the doors didn’t fit right in their frames. Would they report me or turn me away for being too young? They seemed used to secrets.
“Are you sexually active now, honey?”
I said, “Not yet.” The nurse looked up. It wasn’t the answer she was expecting. “I want to be ready.” She gave a little smile of approval and marked something on her form, and I was glad I’d pleased her.
The exam cost $13, which stuck in my mind because it matched my age. The diaphragm and the tube of Ortho-Gynol were free. I used up that tube practicing over the next three years.
In senior year of college I missed a period and called my mother.
She said, “What have you been using?”
“Diaphragm.”
“Properly?”
“Yes.”
She assessed the symptoms—“But why didn’t you tell me earlier?”—and announced I was pregnant. This was an event: Susy’s pregnant! We discussed the abortion that I’d be having. She’d never had one, so abortion didn’t mean much to me, a word glimpsed on flyers posted around the women’s studies building.
“Make an appointment straightaway for a test,” she instructed, and I arranged to go in the following morning. I woke up with blood between my thighs, canceled the appointment, curled up around the cramps and called my mother.
“You’ve just had a miscarriage,” she said. “Obviously, we have trouble carrying to term. Well, we dodged that bullet. Imagine Jason a daddy!” We thought up more ridiculous possibilities. “I can’t believe my Sue, pregnant.” We were prone to miscarriages, part of being a woman in my family, our bodies alike, our same elongated tailbones, our pair of tipped wombs.
She grew serious. “What if you can’t have a baby?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “You had miscarriages before you had us.”
“True. You’re such a brave, big girl.”
On medical forms after that I always wrote “1” in the “spontaneous abortion” space, miscarriage. In time, I forgot that I’d never been actually examined after the bleeding. When the counselor in Missoula needed medical information, the truth, I couldn’t distinguish between accurate history and cultivated report. I had to say I didn’t know if I’d been pregnant before, and I was embarrassed to sound so unaware of my own body.
The counselor piled Xeroxed pamphlets into my hand, words in a feminine script font on their covers: options, choice, decision. I held them, frozen with shock: pregnant. “You have three options, and I’ll go over them with you,” she said in a voice monotonous with repetition. Have a baby, give up a baby, end “the pregnancy”—the use of “baby” came to a halt. Something had to be chosen. Something had to be decided. Pregnancy had its own timetable, and Christopher and I would have to compress our thinking and hurry.
I asked the counselor for the phone, banged my thigh on the desk that was too big for the room as I came around to sit in her chair. She left me. I dialed Christopher, fingers cold, thigh aching. I wanted him, but I felt so far away, that union wasn’t possible. The couple had been rearranged, not an “us,” but an “I” and an “I.” I carried a universe, the mineral fact.
“Will you meet me?” I said. “I need to talk to you.” I wished I could wait. I knew it was difficult for him to leave work. This was the moment in our lives of thinnest privation, our demeaning jobs the sort without guarantees. Christopher worked inputting data at a law firm. I was still waiting tables. When we needed a day off, we risked heat and groceries, generic pet food, no-name laundry detergent. We’d lived in Missoula nearly two years, trying to write, and these were my first years without some kind of family money (my grandmother had paid for occasional therapy, my grandfather’s trust provided my postcollege rents). Life was deliberate with the things I couldn’t have. We never ate out, I didn’t buy department-store mascara, and I found gloves and hats secondhand. We lived small like that, but Christopher had taught me to savor the discipline. We were making a conscious effort, and choosing could be its own strength. I had learned how to save up money, plan ahead for a movie. At the restaurant I did my duties and didn’t use the phone. I had learned how to wait in a line, to let go of urban impatience. These sound like small things, but they were revelations.
In its bold crisis, pregnancy would be the exception. I would not wait, wouldn’t have to. Its information thundered forward in my body, whether or not I spoke it, now, later, never, and I wanted to get in front of it.
Christopher came up the empty street, hands thrust down, shoulders up against the bite of the wind. It was March, the town wan and deadened, the granite buildings impassive. We came together at the corner. For one second, taking the last breaths before I told him, my cheek against his coat, I knew something about our relationship that he did not. When I told him, I would change us from then to now, the pregnant couple.
“I’m pregnant.” I’m pregnant.
He held his sigh, complete stillness, and then he released it. “Are you going back to the cabin?” he said.
He didn’t say the word abortion, the word my ear was shaped to hear. We knew each other’s absolutes, but we hadn’t anticipated how to make this decision, the one you get bullied into. No one does.
“Yes, I traded my shift.”
“I have to finish up at the office, but we’re going to think about this. We have a lot to think about.” I tried to read him. He didn’t reveal anything, squinting and fighting off cold weather. Two years of us—how ridiculous and slight, those months adding up to months and a dog, that was all. We still knew whose kitchenware was whose.
We agreed to three days, Christopher’s suggestion. He could always put things into order, comfort us like that, the sort of man who cleaned up after dinner before turning on a movie. We would do this deliberately, and because of our effort and consideration the answer would present itself. First, we’d assume we were having the baby. The second day we’d say we were ending the pregnancy. On the last day we were to measure instinct, see which experience made the most emotional sense (adoption was beyond us). That’s how we had decided to try again with another dog, decided to rent the cabin up the creek. We took our time, no one got overruled. We knew we could do that.
The first day my body seemed almost obscene in its scheme. It had me in its thrall, and I stood under the shower and looked at the familiar skin, beneath it someone unimagined. “I’m pregnant,” I said, and water ran into my mouth. “Mother,” I tried, an old word, freighted, invincible, her. “I’m going to have a baby,” I said into the mirror, pretending I was telling my father and stepmother. What did I look like now that I contained someone else?
The next day, no baby: an abortion. The word had lost its dictionary decency; it was intimate, me, my guts and fluids. I’d only known “abortion” as a newspaper item, a legal term, but now I couldn’t get a grip on the word, hard, empty. It disappeared when I reached for it, replaced at every opportunity. The handouts were vague on the “procedure.” Even at the clinic, the act went nameless and separated itself from the reality. No one wanted to say it out loud. To turn unpregnant, I would have a procedure, its efficiency emphasized in a lavender pamphlet, along with its brief duration and prompt recovery, the easy access to sedatives. The act would propel my treacherous body on from this plot point, restore my uterus to its regular story. “Abortion,” I said to Christopher at dinner, forcing him to put down his wine. “Abortion, abortion, abortion, abortion.”
I turned stony and private, wished Christopher out of the house so I could wallow in this rich trick, this astonishment of my body turned by natural alchemy from body to home. We were supposed to spend this day thinking “abortion,” but I kept thinking, absurdly, grandly, of the Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation, Mary with head lowered, showered by golden light, her clothes already draped around abundance. This accident of conception had cast an enchantment, and I was miraculous. I wanted Christopher to see this definition of me we hadn’t known was there. The golden threads were everywhere. Look.
Christopher and I stayed in different parts of the house, made room, but a bleak space opened between us, sheets unwarmed in the bed, limbs not touching. We were waiting for this to be over. When the pregnancy dilemma was resolved, its temporary importance ended, we’d come back together, the recently married two of us. We would be in charge again of deciding our life.
The pregnancy hurried us forward, days ticking, growing, and we would have to decide. The accident had forced parenthood on us; we were already parents. The third morning, Christopher went to his office, I went to my restaurant. I wiped down two dozen salt shakers and the peppers. I was exhausted by the never letting up inside my head. I pulled the rug sweeper from its cubby and rolled it over the cold rice scattered on the carpet the night before. I went through the dining room with a soapy cloth, chillier from table to table, and swiped at seat backs and chair legs. The other girls on with me (we called each other “girls” because in Montana you couldn’t stop the men from it anyway) did the same chores, folding napkins, tossing those too badly pilled, pulling the blue cheese and ranch dressings from the walk-in fridge and pouring them into metal tubs. The kitchen guys arrived by the back door, turning on the rock station, tying on bandannas and calling out their lewd jokes, tugging at us lewdly as we passed between fridge and dining room, arms loaded. Usually I liked the united activity and laid-back rush, all of us pursuing the same theatrical feat, the continuous motion of plate from kitchen to tray to table, the flirting out of boredom. Restaurant work went off seamlessly, a purposeful coordination that was almost sexy. You did what was asked of you, and you knew when it was time to stop.
But today the hostess station looked cramped and fussy. I hated the boys in the kitchen for being crude and stupid and hated the one waitress who showed up after the rest of us every morning.
“Hey, Susy-Q!” people said to me. “How’s it going?”
These words were tin and spit. I wanted to say, “I’m deciding about having an abortion,” but no one would welcome that word. I was caught in an appalling silence. An epic decision made in hiding. I couldn’t even mention being pregnant—fatigued today and distressed and oddly achy—because all anyone knew how to respond to that was “Congratulations!” I hated Christopher that I was here in a restaurant in Montana. I hated hard, wanted out. Not me, I shouldn’t be here. I should be home, real home, New York, upstairs over Eighty-first Street, on my mother’s bed and spilling gallows humor over what was to be done, let’s order something to cheer us up. I wanted a mother, but not Daphne’s exaggeration and stage entrances. Not for this.
I counted out dollar bills for the bussers and kitchen, stuffed the rest in my back pocket, the soft cash that smelled of soy sauce and dish towel. Missoula looked thin to me, meaningless. I didn’t belong here, and that afternoon, driving home from the lunch shift, $11 my total take, I had the clear impulse: the baby would fill this emptiness. The baby would be the reason I had moved here. I backed away from that thought. I knew that wasn’t how to make a healthy decision. Christopher needed to not have a child. I didn’t want to push him into a fatherhood he didn’t want, couldn’t handle. I didn’t want to use a baby.
I managed the car down our rutted driveway and walked out into the field beside our house, which was dense with high winter grass. The frost crackled underfoot, pale afternoon sun on the stubbly earth. The creek was rushing. This wasn’t me. I felt all gone, cracked in the false pioneer effort, revealed as the soft little me, wanting and wanting. When Christopher got back he plucked his bag from the backseat as usual and slammed the car door, heading to the house, but he changed course when he saw me and came out through the grass.
“What is it?” He was alarmed, as if something had happened to our dog.
“I want to have a baby.” I hadn’t touched these words once. When that dull counselor asked “What do you want?” I hadn’t said a thing.
He dropped his bag to the ground and folded me into his arms. I knew we’d decided. We weren’t having the baby, but I had to put my voice into it and lay claim. Christopher had done everything right, respected me, hadn’t forced me to choose the abortion. I didn’t feel forced. I knew the couple, in its early, shaky, thoughtful start, needed to not become parents. We needed the abortion. But I would have to shut down my own instinct in order to get through the thieving surgery. “I do, I’m sorry, I want to have a baby.” Words like that have no accuracy until they’re in your own mouth.
“You will, we will. Just not now,” he said, and he held me, our shoulders shaking together. What? What? He surprised me, and a well of future opened inside me, all the possible futures for us, including a babyless possibility. Christopher in his three days had stepped toward the possibility of having children and, in a dance-like turn, I stepped back. A child didn’t seem essential. I could let go of the wanting, air out the room, release my stern conviction that I had to be someone’s good mother. I could wonder if I wanted children. Ambivalence arrived, made itself at home.
We had something to do. I made the clinic appointment and filled out their forms. “You’re too early,” the nurse informed me. She took a slow tone, the patience of condescension. “You’ll have to wait.”
“Not now?” My body had tricked me. It didn’t seem bearable. “I’m really nauseous,” I said. “And so tired. Is there anything I can do?”
“That will go away after the procedure.” She gave me an appointment for my seventh week, ten days on. As soon as I was choosing abortion, no one would let me be pregnant.
In the waiting time I snapped Christopher off. I picked fights, looked for injury. If his boots were in my way, if he pulled too hard at the sheet in the night. I fought when he got out of the shower, before he reached his towel, about our grocery list, what he’d forgotten to pick up. The world shrank into mundane qualities. The $350 fee drummed against us, almost impossible to manage—how many restaurant shifts, cleared tables, day labors, matinees abandoned.
“We offer a mild sedative for the procedure,” the counselor said, uneasy with me in her small airless room because I couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t want to be crying, wanted to look like I believed in this idea.
“You can’t force someone into parenthood,” I said. The words came out too loud.
“Did someone force you?”
“No, not me. My husband.”
I wanted her to know how much love was in this awful decision, that I loved him deeply, that love directed us both. What it felt like from the inside, I wanted her to know, was ghastly and complicated and different from the appearance. “You can’t have a good family that way, and I want a good family.”
She pushed back her chair to be closer to the door. “Should I go get someone?” she said.
She said “procedure” several more times. “What would you say your reasons are for choosing the procedure?” She stepped warily around each word, as if someone might burst in and stop us. Wasn’t the clinic supposed to be comfortable, the one place where it was okay to be getting an abortion? I tried to offer this very young woman in her clogs what it meant to make decisions in a marriage, together, that it wasn’t just you anymore. But I also knew—she worried the consent form on her desk, the line still empty where I was meant to sign—that I was supposed to assert my decision, to announce myself. The law handed me the right, and as a pregnant woman I should seize the moment. I had to look like I wanted this. I had to look grateful. And that, finally, was more than I could do. This wasn’t my decision, or only mine. Another entity had revealed itself, a third force in our house: the couple.
March 30, 1995. I wouldn’t let Christopher come in with me. Let him feel its hours by himself in the waiting room. He could be kept out, as the clinic had a tedious way of reminding me. They kept saying “what you want.” I received the injection of Versed, and the room pulled away. The doctor loped in, didn’t address me, stuck something up into me that hurt without relenting. The nurse held on to my hand and passed him equipment with her free hand. I tried to see what. “You’re doing great,” she kept saying, calm and familiar. She had experienced lots of women’s abortions. They too must have done great. The doctor slapped his used gloves on a tray and left. The nurse swept me into the after-care room, recliners, paper cups of juice, other dozing women. One of them looked at me. “It hurt,” I said. She nodded.
“You can go,” someone said after she recorded my vital signs for the last time. I tidied my expression for Christopher as I went through the door that separated the surgery from the waiting room. I thought I wanted to punish him, but then I saw him and just wanted a hamburger. We drove to a restaurant, and he watched me eat. At home—opening our car doors together, together climbing the icy porch steps—I got into soft clothes and under the covers, wanting him gone but making him stay, desperate for him to do something for me, anything.
I grieved. Didn’t want to be awake because I thought about it. The loss was unbearable, and I felt certain that every future thing I longed for would be lost. How would this resolve itself? At first each week was noticeable for how my body adapted to rude medical invasion and arrested hormones. A little bleeding, light cramps. “Call if you develop a fever,” they’d said. “Otherwise, these things are normal, don’t bother calling.” Cramps, bleeding, depression. The counselor had doled out minimal information. “Use only pads for two weeks,” she’d said, her hand stressing “only,” as if I didn’t understand maturity. “You stupid dumb bitch,” I wanted to say. “I’m from New York.” I was so angry. Angry that I had the abortion, and he didn’t. He sat in a waiting room as my body was pried open, scraped out, emptied. Briefly, I’d assumed the most primal state, and I understood the meaning, angles, rigid rules of abortion in a way Christopher would never catch up to. The abortion became its own force in our marriage, beneath our routines. We didn’t talk about it, its silence a polite agreement, but we had welcomed a mute chill, a hardness and ache. I saw that the two of us could be cleaved apart, that the couple wasn’t unassailable, that married love was utterly different from what we’d been doing. We were no longer enclosed in our sweet pageant. In addition to the Provincetown romance, the move to Montana, the lost dog and the new dog, the both being writers, loving García Márquez and Alice Munro, etc.—now we were also what happened in Susanna’s body.
The first period was normal, the second. I passed my hours in the restaurant, my body as altered to me now as it had been after losing my virginity. Something huge had claimed me. I refilled people’s water glasses and said “coffee” and “you bet” with as much Montana in my voice as I could push. Did I sound like me? Was I still me? Christopher and I went to movies and drove to high spots up creeks and rivers for fishing. We used some money to buy me waders and a rod, and I learned knots for flies and cast poorly. I would glance upstream, Christopher in the better spot I didn’t begrudge him, his hand, arm, shoulder all employed in something that made him whole. He looked himself standing in the river. Eventually I just stayed in the car reading The New Yorker with the door open, one leg hotter than the other in the sun.
Sex was different—a shadow over us, a presence intruding in our bedroom. We made love every day, but the sex had turned cautious, less oxygen to it. We knew what it could do to us. April 30, May 30.
June 30, July 30.
One day, on a drive through Yellowstone, on our way to Salt Lake City, Christopher said, “I’m ready to have that baby now.”
He looked accomplished. This had been work for him.
I had wanted to hear those words for every one of the three days we were deciding, the ten days before the abortion, for the five months that followed, so I forgot to be furious and collapsed into the relief. He wants it! The shadow is gone! We got out of the car, a canyon stretching before us, a lake below, yellowing sky, orange rock. The world looked edible, and we knocked against each other with shy adoration as we walked to an overlook and leaned against the guardrail. I surveyed the massive vista and thought, “Here is where we decided to have a baby.” Before we arrived at his parents’, we stopped at a bookstore, our decision a few hours old, and we bought a couple of pregnancy primers. Anyone could see me, there she was, carrying What to Expect up to the register, healthy with conviction and purpose. I wanted to be radiant and celebrated, but no one looked. In the car I held the books on my lap in their bag, and Christopher kept reaching for my bare arm, touching my bare knee to say again that we had set something in motion, the next ecstatic step.
But wait. Now you’re ready? Viciousness filled me. My body. When my body was primed, you couldn’t be ready, and together we shut it down. That baby, you’re ready to have that baby? That baby’s gone for good.
I felt my usefulness, the canny industry I held.
“What happened?” I said. We lay in his parents’ guest room.
“I’ve thought about fatherhood. When you got pregnant I realized I’d never thought about being a father before. I just had a position. But through all that deciding about the abortion I began to realize what it all meant.”
“So now you’re sure?”
“Going through that process. Yes.” He was so genuinely pleased he didn’t hear the jab in my asking. In the last few months, as I clocked the intensity of my cramps and worried about uterine health and future chances, as sex shed its green romp and bliss, Christopher had been across the room, the bed, the yard, compelled by a new identity. Gradually, he’d come to understand he could enjoy fatherhood.
“I’m not scared,” he said. “Well, not as scared.” He smiled, and his smile, lying down and in the dark, had been the first thing of the real him I had fallen for, and I loved him so much, my heart full with Christopher, instructing me in love, waiting for me.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s wait till we’re home.”
But how little I wanted to make love to him, to embark on some magnificent enterprise. I took it on glumly. The thought kept coming back: I would still be pregnant if he’d realized a little faster. My March 30th baby was due in two months.
We were again careful, this time to become pregnant. Timing, diet, boxer shorts, we were going to start up whatever weird sorcery it took. And it worked.
I went to Planned Parenthood and suggested a post-abortion support group to them. I’d organize it, I said. No one would come, they said. Another clinic was reopening in town, rebuilt after arson had destroyed it. I went there and applied for a job as an abortion counselor. When I had my interview I was eight weeks and two days pregnant.
A few days before the job began, an old friend called from New York. She’d become a senior editor at a magazine, and she needed someone now, don’t worry about the clips.
“Can you go to North Carolina on Monday and interview Melanie Griffith on location?”
Flies whacked themselves against the expanse of glass that faced our creek. Buzzing started and stopped. My friend wanted to cheer me up, remind me I was a writer and give me a distraction from the unrelenting focus on pregnancy. She expected the celebrity profile, its tepid revelations, making meaning out of the food ordered during the interview. I could go on location, a movie set, a distance from Montana. I’d interviewed movie stars at my old magazine, and I was reviewing movies for the Missoula paper. For my mother’s birthday the year before I’d collected a hundred reviews and bound them at Kinko’s. She told people I was a film critic, but in Montana I had learned to say that I wrote movie reviews sometimes.
“Shall I have our travel department call?” my friend said. Travel department, no one ever said that here. A paid-for flight, expensed meals. I missed that sort of validation, which was meaningless among rivers and low-wage hours and oil changes. I’d been imitating this rough, straightforward life for a good while, and maybe it had been enough. If I went, I’d miss the clinic training. Someone else would get my job. Plenty of people wanted to celebrate the new clinic after the notorious arson, which had left Planned Parenthood as the only place in town. My only “option.”
I turned down Melanie Griffith and chose abortion work, which surprised Christopher and everyone who knew me. I’d never done anything of the sort. “Remember how crazy that counselor made me, her doubting, her tentative, automatic comfort?” I said to Christopher. “When I hesitated, she asked me if I was ashamed. She said, ‘Are you ashamed?’ suggesting the word, nothing to do with me or how I was feeling. She didn’t even see me.”
“I know,” he said. “You need your own words.”
The longing to pull my abortion back and undo its hurt had landed me here, which wasn’t where I’d expected to go when I’d struck out for love and writing. No more New York, no more editors calling with assignments. I knew it.
“You’re in danger,” the executive director of the clinic told us. She had stepped into the conference room on our first morning to thank us and cheer us forward. The seven new counselors were dotted around the table. “But you’re making it possible for women to live their lives.” Birth control methods covered the plywood table. Today I would have been in a movie star’s trailer, watching her eat her salad, adjusting my tape recorder. Instead, I was upright and attentive in a concrete building made to withstand bombing. In front of me, not coiffed golden curls and a pretty manicure but a middle-aged woman wearing sneakers, big glasses, nothing to hold back her coarse, gray hair. The rest of us were in our early twenties and our late twenties, reproductive danger on display. In the style of these gatherings, we went around the table with our names and the condensed histories of how we had come to be here.
“I want to hear you say why,” the director said. “Because this isn’t for everyone. You have to know why you’re doing this.”
The women had boyfriends, were single, had worked on rape-crisis hotlines, had been hoping the clinic would reopen. Some of us had had abortions, and said so. We were sexually active, biologically ripe. Danger was in all our bodies, barely contained. As the others spoke, I thought about wanting to get close and look at abortion straight on, to understand what had happened to me, in the space between the sex and the loss. I was looking for the absolute, the right, the good of the choice, because certainty had eluded me then, my counselor asking me was I “sure.” Planned Parenthood had made me feel like I was one of a thousand careless girls doing something wrong. I wanted to know how someone makes an unbearable decision.
“I want to keep her company,” I told the group. “Abortion is lonely.”
We reviewed the biology of reproduction, the clockwork complexities of ovulation, the ratios of sperm to egg, the same lessons from seventh-grade sex ed. We sorted through the contraceptives on the table, passing diaphragms and condoms from hand to hand. We had lists of sexually transmitted infections, descriptions, symptoms, treatment. “You have to be comfortable with all of this,” our trainer said. Sex broadcast its power in a dozen directions.
The doctor appeared the second day to detail the exact methods of abortion, those he preferred, which were safest and when. He took us into the exam room, and we switched on the vacuum aspirator, passed around dilating rods and curettes. The third day the lab tech showed us a shelf of kitchen supplies, Pyrex dishes, strainers, for looking at the “products of conception.” We learned how to run a pregnancy test, and we all handed over cups filled with pee, watching her release droplets on treated strips. I hadn’t said anything yet. I didn’t need to be the star. When my test turned out positive, though, I savored the change in the room, the buzz of excited girls, let them congratulate me, their touch on my arm and the small of my back.
After we shadowed the nurses through three or four counseling sessions, we began to counsel on our own, a sacred trust. Every situation of the world came up. Over the next months I counseled secretive teenagers, single mothers, grandmothers, professors, athletes and pro-lifers; a prosperous lawyer, a Catholic mother of four, a diabetic, a stripper, a quilter, a dog walker, an art student; kayakers, rock climbers, college students, high school students; women from Browning, Cut Bank, Anaconda, a girl from Idaho whose doctor told her abortion was illegal there; a girl raped by her stepfather, women deeply in love and women recently dumped, unfaithful wives, tender lovers, girls who didn’t know what a cervix was, women accompanied by their mothers, or their boyfriends’ mothers, or by the husband who sat listless in the waiting room as a squirming toddler ransacked the toy basket; and I counseled that fourteen-year-old who twisted a ragged Elmo doll between her fingers during her abortion. We allowed every reason—disinterest, fear, laziness and infidelity, burden and education and money, affairs and breakups. I described the surgery clearly. I used a straight, strong voice for the word abortion and gave it to her.
If I had started the job thinking there was a good abortion, a way to have something better than what I’d had, I saw that this was a terrible moment in any life. Each woman was suspended from her daily goings-on by a monumental decision, a choice that drained her as she made it. I listened to why she chose abortion, why she wanted it, why, why, why. I never asked the more slippery question: How do you make a decision that has no right outcome? I didn’t even know how to form that question.
I tried to divorce myself from my baby. I felt impolite thinking of it when I needed to explain to a woman the gestational realities of ten weeks, to give her the information to help her decide. I was twelve or fourteen weeks myself, privately aware that we shared this half-full experience. And then I was more pregnant than my clients, and they rarely noticed, blinkered by the intensity of their emotions. Once, eight months along, I was leaning over my client during her abortion, catching up her hand in mine. My body pressed into the table, her arm buried against my abdomen. My baby gave one of its marine ripples, the rubbery, aquatic rollover. Had she felt it, this unnatural, alien hiccup? I was embarrassed, caught at something indecent.
In the exam room I would stand beside the bed and narrate the doctor’s gestures, passing a quiet volley of information between us for the client’s sake. I helped guide her hips to the precarious edge of the table as the doctor adjusted his head lamp. In the deliberately dim light, I unwrapped the sterile pack and filled a cup with Betadine, dropped a needle among the instruments and readied the cannula he’d need once her cervix was dilated. I could tell from his rustling and metallic sounds when to say, “He’s just starting to dilate your cervix” or “Remember, we talked about how you might feel a tugging sensation.” I prepared her for the aspirator, its motor as abrasive as street machinery. A fine rim of sweat beaded at her hairline. I stood by her head beside the table. This was how her lover must have seen her, features blurred with intimacy. On the other side of the bed, low in a chair, the lover took up her hand, kissed it and held it to his cheek. I wished I had known Christopher well enough to share that moment. I wished I’d been able to ask him, “Help me.”
Come back in two weeks, we told them, and we’ll check that you’ve healed. That your body has healed. Be gentle on yourself, I thought. Stay off your feet for a day, be gentle, but I knew this was the last stop. Only a few came back, and when they did, two weeks beyond their ended pregnancies, they were entirely different, no longer crying or picking at the shredded skin around their fingernails. They came in busy from the parking lot, crossed their legs in the waiting room, riffled the magazines, and when their names were called, they sprang up and followed the nurse.
This is what I’ll tell my sons, when they ask, when I tell them about our abortion: We made a decision to be better parents, and that was what it took. Nothing yet in our lives had given us to understand the sacrifice of love, the efforts of parenthood, the heart flung open with generosity. The abortion was our preface, the beginning of who you would need and who you would know.