Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (10 page)

I needed her to stop looking at me. I needed her eyes to not be blue and liquid. I needed her to understand what she couldn’t possibly: how it felt to not be her. I asked her to come with me when I got rid of it, and she was surprised but nodded.

“I’m asking you,” I said, “because I can’t really tell them. I was thinking, though, that maybe you know what it feels like to almost be a mother.”

I let the door close as she sat there on her purple comforter, looking not sure whether to feel insulted or understood.

I wanted to schedule it in Brooklyn, on the off chance that someone I knew would be at the Planned Parenthood in Manhattan, but Brooklyn was all booked up and they sent me downtown. The whole place was pink pink pink: shell-pink carpeting, puke-pink plastic chairs that wobbled if you squirmed, pale pink walls. I signed in and took a number, imagining I was anyplace else. The DMV, backstage at a beauty pageant, the take-out counter at a restaurant. The lobby was full of mostly girls, with the occasional boyfriend. A boy who looked no older than fifteen patted the round belly of his even younger-looking girlfriend. Another twirled a strand of his girlfriend’s hair while she read through a brochure on contraceptives and occasionally looked up nervously, as though scared someone would see her there. A grown man squeezed the hand of the young woman next to him, who looked panicked and terrified.

Laura looked panicked and terrified, too, mesmerized by the tacky not-quite-tragedy of the waiting room. I imagined (this is what we did with Laura then: we never asked, we imagined) the doctor’s office she’d visited to be screened and tested and have her eggs removed. I imagined it blue, with soft music in the background and fresh flowers on the waiting-room table, next to the
New Yorker.
I imagined people smiled more and struck up conversation easily. The girls there to donate would feel kinship with Laura, and if the women there to receive were inclined to be jealous of her youth and beauty and fertility, their jealousy would recede once they realized they could afford to buy her.

I wondered if Laura was uncomfortable there. Her childhood was probably free clinics like the one we were sitting in. The shyness of her voice, the way she sometimes slipped up and had to fix a grammatical error—these hinted that maybe she was what my father would have called white trash if my mother weren’t there to say it was a term analogous to
nigger
and he ought to apologize for using it. Impostor or not, she could hide her inadequacy behind salon-lightened hair and a thousand-dollar leather coat. Sitting next to her, I did not feel analogous. They paid her for her potential babies, and they were about to vacuum mine out of me. I felt queasy. I hoped they would forget to call my number. I didn’t want or not want the baby, I didn’t have any grand political problem with abortion, I didn’t have any religion to speak of and thought that if God existed and expected me to follow any particular rules, I was probably going to hell anyway, and not for this. I just didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to deal with it, didn’t want to be any emptier than I already felt. I wanted to be full. That was one of the things the girls in Laura’s egg-donor group complained about: the painful part of the drugs they had to take. They felt “full” in their abdomens, swollen with potential for life. I had wanted that forever and had never felt it yet.

“I don’t want to do this,” I said.

“Me neither,” she said, which didn’t make a lot of sense, but I didn’t really care what she was trying to say right then. I looked at her for a second. Her fingertips were pressed into her temples, and I could see her nails, the French polish on them chipping slightly, and her roots, a few shades darker than the blond of the rest of her hair. Logic was never going to save us, but I started talking anyway.

“If I took summer classes, I could graduate in August. Before the baby. I have good grades, I could get an OK job.”

Not a spy. You couldn’t spy with a baby. It would cry and blow your cover.

Laura looked the other way.

“I’ve done this before,” she said.

“
This?”
I asked.

“The waiting-room thing. With my older sister, when we were in high school. Twice. She wasn’t one of those people who got emotional about it, she just needed me for the ride home.”

“What was it like?” I asked.

“The doctors were sweeter to her than I was,” Laura said. “I was sitting there waiting for her, and I kept thinking everyone in that room knew someone who knew someone who knew me, and they were all thinking it would be me next, and I’d show them, it never would be.”

“It’s not you,” I said. I looked down at my scuffed red and black Pumas. I thought about kicking her, for reminding me where we came from, for reminding me that I used to think of her as one of us.

“Isn’t it?” she asked.

“It’s me. You might as well not even be here.”

“Then why’d you ask me?”

“Why’d you come?”

“What am I supposed to say?”

“I don’t know. What am I supposed to do with a baby?”

“Love it,” she said. Her voice sounded like it was about to break.
Love it.
Like it was that simple. Like loving something ever paid anyone’s rent. I tugged so hard on the strand of hair I’d been twirling that it snapped off. Love it, I thought. Let it be mine. I took a breath.

“I’d need money, though.”

I ran through the numbers again. I thought of my baby like a doll, like one in a row of dozens and dozens of fancy toy dolls, all with price tags announcing that I couldn’t have them. The money was such an obvious problem that I didn’t even get to thinking about any of the others most of the time. It seemed wrong to me, that money should be the difference between a baby and not-a-baby. I had a thing inside of me that I could not afford, and Laura had things inside of her that she couldn’t afford not to sell, and on the other end of it there were women spending tens of thousands of dollars to buy them because they felt their own bodies had betrayed them. Any way you looked at it, where there should have been a child, there was a math problem.

“At Financial Aid they’d probably cover my tuition for the summer,” I said. “But I’d need the security for an apartment, and something to live on till I could get a job. Plus money for doctors and stuff. Once I graduate I can’t get school insurance anymore.”

Laura turned and looked at me, and it was not exactly friendship on her face. More like resignation.

“I just got paid,” she said softly. “Take it.”

I didn’t care right then why she was doing it: guilt, or anger, or privilege. I didn’t care if she needed it or not. I didn’t even have the pride to reject the first offer and make her insist. It wasn’t that I’d planned it that way, and I don’t know when I knew what I was doing but all of a sudden it was done and I wasn’t about to feel guilty.

“All right,” I said. “If you can afford that.”

She pulled out her checkbook, like it was nothing. I thought of telling her to stop, watched her loopy cursive fill the space of the check. I wondered what I’d say to Rafael, what I’d do when the money ran out, what Laura and I would say to each other for the last few months of what was suddenly my last semester of college. I thought of telling her to stop, but like I was afraid of undoing the knot of cells growing into something alive inside of me, I was afraid of undoing what was happening.

When she handed me the check, I folded it into my wallet and didn’t say a word. I didn’t think I deserved it, not really, nor did I think she owed me. I thought the universe was a whole series of unfulfilled transactions, checks waiting to be cashed, opportunities waiting to be cashed in, even if they were opportunities made of your own flesh. I thought it was a horrible world to bring a child into, but an even worse world in which to stay a child. I left my number lying on the seat and stood up and walked out to Broadway, Laura behind me. I watched my feet as though they belonged to someone else. I looked up at the sky, feeling grown and full of something sad and aching to be known.

G
eorgie knew before he left that Lanae would be fucking Kenny by the time he got back to Virginia. At least she’d been up front about it, not like all those other husbands and wives and girlfriends and boyfriends, shined up and cheesing for the five-o’clock news on the day their lovers shipped out and then jumping into bed with each other before the plane landed. When he’d told Lanae about his orders, she’d just lifted an eyebrow, shook her head, and said, “I told you not to join the goddamn army.” Before he left for basic training, she’d stopped seeing him, stopped taking his calls, even, said, “I’m not waiting for you to come home dead, and I’m damn sure not having Esther upset when you get killed.”

That was how he knew she loved him at least a little bit; she’d brought the kid into it. Lanae wasn’t like some single mothers, always throwing their kid up in people’s faces. She was fiercely protective of Esther, kept her apart from everything, even him, and they’d been in each other’s life so long that he didn’t believe for a second that she was really through with him this time. Still, he missed her when everyone else was getting loved visibly and he was standing there with no one to say good-bye to. Even her love was strategic, goddamn her, and he felt more violently toward the men he imagined touching her in his absence than toward the imaginary enemy they’d been war-gaming against. On the plane he had stared out of the window at more water than he’d ever seen at once, and thought of the look on her face when he said good-bye.

She had come to his going-away party like it was nothing, showed up in skintight jeans and that cheap but sweet-smelling baby powder perfume and spent a good twenty minutes exchanging pleasantries with his mother before she even said hello to him. She’d brought a cake that she’d picked up from the bakery at the second restaurant she worked at, told one of the church ladies she was thinking of starting her own cake business.
Really?
Georgie thought, before she winked at him and put a silver fingernail to her lips. Lanae could cook a little, but the only time he remembered her trying to bake she’d burnt a cake she’d made from boxed mix and then tried to cover it up with pink frosting. Esther wouldn’t touch the thing, and he’d run out and gotten a Minnie Mouse ice cream cake from the grocery store. He’d found himself silently listing these nonsecrets, the things about Lanae he was certain of: she couldn’t bake, there was a thin but awful scar running down the back of her right calf, her eyes were amber in the right light.

They’d grown up down the street from each other. He could not remember a time before they were friends, but she’d had enough time to get married and divorced and produce a little girl before he thought to kiss her for the first time, only a few months before he got his orders. In fairness, she was not exactly beautiful; it had taken some time for him to see past that. Her face was pleasant but plain, her features so simple that if she were a cartoon she’d seem deliberately underdrawn. She was not big, exactly, but pillowy, like if you pressed your hand into her it would keep sinking and sinking because there was nothing solid to her. It bothered him to think of Kenny putting his hand on her that way, Kenny who’d once assigned numbers to all the waitresses at Ruby Tuesday based on the quality of their asses, Kenny who’d probably never be gentle enough to notice what her body did while it was his.

 

 

It wasn’t Lanae
who met him at the airport when he landed back where he’d started. It was his mother, looking small in the crowd of people waiting for arrivals. Some of them were bored, leaning up against the wall like they were in line for a restaurant table; others peered around the gate like paparazzi waiting for the right shot to happen. His mother was up in front, squinting at him like she wasn’t sure he was real. She was in her nurse’s uniform, and it made her look a little ominous. When he came through security she ran up to hug him so he couldn’t breathe. “Baby,” she said, then asked how the connecting flight had been, and then talked about everything but what mattered. Perhaps after all of his letters home she was used to unanswered questions, because she didn’t ask any, not about the war, not about his health, not about the conditions of his honorable discharge or what he intended to do upon his return to civilian society.

She was all weather and light gossip through the parking lot. “The cherry blossoms are beautiful this year,” she was saying as they rode down the Dulles Toll Road, and if it had been Lanae saying something like that he would have said
Cherry blossoms? Are you fucking kidding me?
but because it was his mother things kept up like that all the way around 495 and back to Alexandria. It was still too early in the morning for real rush-hour traffic, and they made it in twenty minutes. The house was as he’d remembered it: old, the bright robin’s egg blue of the paint cheerful in a painfully false way, like a woman wearing red lipstick and layers of foundation caked over wrinkles. Inside, the surfaces were all coated with a thin layer of dust, and it made him feel guilty his mother had to do all of this housework herself, even though when he was home he’d almost never cleaned anything.

He’d barely put his bags down when she was off to work, still not able to take the whole day off. She left with promises of dinner later. In her absence it struck him that it had been a long time since he’d heard silence. In the desert there was always noise. When it was not the radio, or people talking, or shouting, or shouting at him, it was the dull purr of machinery providing a constant background soundtrack, or the rhythmic pulse of sniper fire. Now it was a weekday in the suburbs and the lack of human presence made him anxious. He turned the TV on and off four times, flipping through talk shows and soap operas and thinking this was something like what had happened to him: someone had changed the channel on his life. The abruptness of the transition overrode the need for social protocol, so without calling first he got into the old Buick and drove to Lanae’s, the feel of the leather steering wheel strange beneath his hands. The brakes screeched every time he stepped on them, and he realized he should have asked his mother how the car was running before taking it anywhere, but the problem seemed appropriate: he had started this motion, and the best thing to do was not to stop it.