Friendship (11 page)

“I have an idea,” he said, and then he knelt—she was short enough, and he was tall enough, that kneeling had put his face right between her legs—and he pushed her clenched thighs apart with one gentle but peremptory gesture.

“Oh my god, no way,” Bev said, somewhat involuntarily.

“I want to.” His voice somewhat muffled.

“This is not going to make me more relaxed!” Bev could feel herself blushing with horror, humiliation, and shame. There was no possible way for her to enjoy what he was doing, and the idea that
he
might enjoy it was almost frightening. Was he enjoying it? And then somehow the shame became part of what was unignorably becoming fun. She was being so bad! Oh god, she was so dirty and disgusting and bad. Oh.

Later, as the back of her head knocked gently against the toolshed, and her heels—still shod in her Converse sneakers—left the ground slightly with each thrust, Bev had no thoughts, not even about her own badness. And even in the immediate aftermath, when she and Trevor found themselves unable to quite make eye contact—they had left reality together and were now back in it, apart—she had no thoughts save one that repeated over and over: she had to get out of the Midwest, she had to go somewhere where the kind of thing she’d just experienced was accepted, a regular occurrence, popular, possibly a public utility. She had been on the fence about remaining in Minnesota for college. Now she was determined to go as far away as possible, maybe to another country. She could not have cared less about Trevor in that moment. She wanted all of the Trevors, available whenever, forever.

Two weeks later, though, during which Trevor had reverted to his previous monosyllabic relationship with Bev and she had found herself pining stupidly for another kiss or even just a smiling acknowledgment of what they’d done, she’d found herself worrying, and needing to know for sure that at least her life hadn’t been ruined. The single-lane road wound around and took forever, but she kept driving until she found a convenience store where no one could possibly know her.

After she bought the test, she’d pulled over into a cornfield and pulled down her jean shorts and peed on it right there, waiting the length of a Dixie Chicks song coming from her car’s speakers before checking the results. No one was around for miles, so no one heard her whoop of relief.

The part of the whole experience that she remembered most vividly now, as she awaited the test result in her Brooklyn bathroom, was the packaging of that first test: a picture of a pastel-clad mother with a fluffy blond hairdo, cradling an infant, looking radiant: Madonna and child. The test she was taking now had come in stylish modern packaging. On the stick itself there was no blue or pink line; the test was more high-tech than that, though she still had to check the package insert to confirm that what the digital display meant by
☺
was that she was pregnant.

16

“It seems improbable that this hasn’t happened to us before.”

“Us? Are you going to start saying ‘we’re pregnant’?” Bev cringed. “We’re not a couple, Amy.”

“I meant ‘happened to either of us,’ but we are a couple, in a way. I mean, we’re life partners. All these people”—Amy gestured at the couples walking by them at the outdoor flea market, eating grilled corncobs and tacos, grinning at each other in Ray-Bans—“are obviously going to break up once their sexual chemistry peters out. But we’ll be together forever.”

“I know, but this isn’t happening to you. It’s not your problem; it’s mine.” Bev took a bite of her own grilled corncob, chewed it slowly, then spat it into her napkin. “Ughhh. I’m so ravenous, but then I put something in my mouth and I feel like I’m gonna puke again.”

“Are you sure you’re not just hungover?”

“I thought so at first, but my hangovers don’t usually last for a week. And I also typically get them from drinking, not from, like, existing. And I did take a test.”

A nearby baby crowed loudly, as if on cue, and they couldn’t stop themselves from turning to look at it. It was a rosy perfect baby from the rosy perfect baby dispensary in central Brooklyn, where rich, responsible thirty-three-year-old women went to be issued babies from some sort of giant bin. This baby was doing a clumsy bouncing-in-place dance while taking the radish slices from its mother’s taco and flicking them one by one onto the pavement, narrating its activities with a battery of earsplitting bird noises.

“What a little monster,” Amy said before she could stop herself. She and Bev continued to stare at the radish-flicking baby, transfixed, and then Bev calmly turned her head to the side and vomited a neat mouthful of corn chunks into an empty taco tray. No one even noticed. Amy felt a pang of disgust, or maybe sympathetic nausea. She waited till Bev was done wiping her mouth.

“Um, do you wanna go home?”

“No. I like being around people right now. It makes me feel more normal. I’ve been holed up in my bedroom for the past few days, turning down temp assignments and watching bad TV on my computer. And reading stuff on the Internet about abortion and eating bland food and vomiting it up.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“I guess because having this conversation with you officially makes it into something that’s actually happening?”

“Fair enough.” Amy picked up her taco, but her eye caught on the little yellow puddle of frothy corn vomit in Bev’s tray and she put it down again. “So, okay, have you made the appointment yet, after all that online research?”

“Yeah. They said I have to wait another two weeks for there to be enough baby cells for them to vacuum out of my uterus. So, it’s two Thursdays from now. Are you, I mean…”

“No, duh, of course I can come.”

“Phew.”

“Obviously I’m coming, dude! I want to help, I mean, what you said is true, but you shouldn’t feel like you’re alone dealing with this. I’m right here!” Amy said, remembering with a twinge that she had a lunchtime waxing appointment that Thursday that would be annoying to reschedule. “So how are you feeling, aside from nauseated and freaked out?”

Bev turned and looked at the taco baby again; it was impossible not to. He had tired of his taco flicking and was now lying, sleepy and docile, in his mother’s arms, a look of beatific happiness on his dollish face. The mother was wearing tall Frye boots and at least five hundred dollars’ worth of smooth leather jacket, and was talking animatedly to a friend, absently stroking the baby’s little topknot of silky hair. Bev was wearing Vans that had once been black and white and were now brownish gray and white. Her own hair looked as if it had either just been washed in the last hour or had not been washed in days.

“Mostly I feel like a total failure. I mean, by the time my mom was my age, she’d had three babies. I look at my life, and it’s just completely insane—laughable—to imagine bringing a child into it. Think of a child in my apartment that I share with my disgusting roommates! It’s all one big exposed, chewable wire. My baby would grow up eating roaches straight off the floor.”

“Well, I’m sure plenty of babies do,” Amy said, then looked at Bev’s face and realized that this wasn’t quite the pep talk that was called for. “Hey, you know, this is so not a big deal. You will totally have a baby later if you want to. Your accidentally getting pregnant right now is not some kind of referendum on the state of your life. It could happen to anyone! And Thursday after next it’ll be like it never happened at all.”

“But I’m just saying, like, we’re not at an age anymore where abortion is the only rational thing. People we know have babies.”

“No one we’re close to. And obviously no one in our, like, tax bracket. I get your thought process here, but just because you’re pregnant doesn’t mean you have to feel bad about not being ready to have a baby.”

Bev laughed. “Um, of course it does. How could I possibly avoid thinking that? Wouldn’t you think that? I mean, what would you do if this was happening to you?”

Amy had thought about this and knew exactly what she would do. A baby was supposed to be the trophy you received for attaining a perfected, mature life, not another hurdle to surmount on the infinite sprint toward that infinitely receding, possibly nonexistent finish line. “What you’re doing, of course. It would be a no-brainer.”

“It isn’t a no-brainer for me.”

“Because of your … religion? Or like, not your religion, but how you were raised?”

“No, not even. Not at all. I mean, maybe very subconsciously there’s some vestigial hell stuff still in my brain, but it’s maybe more that, like … I don’t know, I think I have this idea about adulthood that kids are the only thing that can make you an adult. And I don’t imagine that there’s ever going to be any other way for me to have a kid than to be surprised and forced into it, as bizarre as that sounds. It’s just, like, clearly never going to happen for me any other way.”

“That
does
sound bizarre to me. And of course it could happen another way! You’re only thirty!”

Bev sighed. “I’m sorry. I don’t have the energy to keep thinking about this. Don’t worry, I’m just explaining my thought process, not saying I want to have a baby.”

“I mean, clearly it would be better to have neither baby nor abortion, but that ship has sailed.”

“It did sail. It go, it gone. Bye-bye.” They smiled at each other wearily. A barbecue-scented breeze washed over the concrete bleachers, and Bev audibly gagged. “Okay, fine, let’s get out of here. I left the house, many bonus points to me for doing that.”

“Many bonus points for telling me.”

“Don’t mention it. See you Thursday?”

“It’s a date.”

17

The eleven days between Bev’s telling Amy she was pregnant and her appointment at Murray Hill Gynecology Partners dragged endlessly. On Monday Bev called in for another temp assignment because otherwise she would be scraping dangerously close to the bottom of her checking account, and she got assigned to the French bank again—which was good, in a way, because they expected so little of her that no one even seemed to notice that she was spending time away from her desk, hunched over a toilet in a stall in the freezing-cold hall bathroom, where luckily no one was ever peeing; they seemed to have no female employees besides the one she was filling in for.

After work on Monday she came straight home, sprinting up the four flights so quickly she almost tripped over the loose tile on the third-floor landing that she’d been nagging the super about for the duration of her tenancy. The landing smelled like moist old newspapers and canned soup, as usual. As she opened the door, she almost walked straight into one of her two roommates, Sheila, who was on her way out the door; she worked night shifts as an orderly at a psychiatric hospital.

“Are you feeling okay, Bev? You’ve been sick a lot lately. The bathroom, um, is getting a bit out of hand, sorry to mention it.”

“Oh, yes, sorry! I’m getting over a little stomach flu. I’ll do a deep clean tonight. I’m really sorry.”

“I’m glad to hear you’re feeling better. I see enough vomit at work, you know? Ha.”

“Ha. Okay. See ya later.”

It was actually rare for her to cross paths with Sheila; Bev usually did errands or saw Amy or Mary after work, but tonight she just wanted to crawl straight into bed. She had to force herself to do a few life-maintenance chores first, though, including cleaning the bathroom. There was also something else she was going to have to get over with eventually that she might as well do right now, so she could stop dreading it. She could even do both things at once, for maximum efficiency and masochism. She put her headphones in and attached them to her phone, dialed, then put on rubber gloves and started filling a mop bucket with hot water and disinfectant.

Steve picked up on the first ring. “Hey, Beverly! I’m pumped to hear from you. The other night was so fun! You wanna make a plan to hang out again?”

“Uh. Well, I was calling about the other night, actually.” She couldn’t keep dread and a little bit of what probably sounded like anger out of her voice. Already she was regretting calling him. But it was the right thing to do, and besides, he could potentially be helpful, financially—it was completely reasonable to expect him to, at least, go halfsies on the abortion. She hoped he’d offer to pay for all of it. He hadn’t stinted on drinks or dinner, after all.

“Uh-oh. You sound upset,” Steve hazarded, in a less chill tone of voice.

“Oh, well … yeah, I guess I kind of am?”

There was a long pause, and when Steve finally spoke again, his voice was cold. “You definitely said yes. You clearly wanted it. If you had regrets afterward, that’s not my problem. But I definitely didn’t do anything wrong, and I hope you’re not planning to say otherwise.”

Bev almost dropped the sponge she was using to scrub the toilet. There was no vent or fan in the windowless bathroom, and the smell of the disinfectant, which had been pleasantly bracing at first, was starting to make her head spin now.

“That’s not where I was going with that, but, wow. Okay.”

He tried to play it off. “Oh, you know what I mean. But I’m sorry, you’re right, that was a harsh way of putting it. Is everything cool?”

“Well, actually, no. I’m … look, I need to have an abortion. The appointment’s next week. I was hoping you’d help pay for it.”

“Uh, sorry if this is rude, but isn’t there someone you could ask for a loan who you know a little better? We’ve gone on one date.”

“I’m asking because it’s partially your … your fault!” Was he really this dense, or was he pretending to be? She tried to remember what he did at the real estate company. Was he a lawyer? She didn’t think so.

“How do you know? Where’s the evidence?”

There was no way she was going to achieve her goal, she realized with sudden clarity, and in the same moment, she realized she was going to be sick again. Later, she would keep herself up at night thinking of many, many choice insults she should have hurled at this point in the conversation. Instead, though, she simply said, “Fuck you, bye,” hung up, and then undid all the work she’d done in the bathroom by vomiting a torrent of iced coffee and yellow bile that splattered onto the wall beside the toilet seat.