Heart of Glass (8 page)

Jenny's apartment was prewar, with high ceilings and wood floors—but the walls were coated in layers of paint and grime, and continuous wear had scuffed the floor. The furniture had been salvaged from the street mostly or left behind by the prior tenants. The tatty, white-gray foldout sofa, where I was currently sleeping, we dubbed “the golf course” for its lumpiness and bulging springs. A few sad armchairs and a wooden-crate coffee table accompanied it, and a big desk sat in the corner where Pete did his studying and cramming for exams. One wall held bookshelves sagging under the weight of all the books former tenants, mostly Columbia and Barnard students, had read while they lived there. Three or four copies of
The Powers That Be
,
The Prince
,
The Awakening
,
Jane Eyre
, and the condensed version of the
OED
they used to give away with a subscription to the
New York Review of Books
formed a veritable in-house syllabus. The stereo rested on the bottom shelf, and records lined the wall below along the floor. Even though it was a trifle dilapidated, with its scruffy furniture and a major cockroach problem, I loved that apartment on Ninety-seventh Street because Jenny and Pete lived there. It was a place I was always welcome, where I felt safe and accepted for just being myself.

There was one bathroom, a kitchen, a dining room, and two small bedrooms besides Jenny and Pete's, where their roommates lived. A Korean American kid named Hee-Jon lived in the back bedroom—I had never seen him actually—and a guy named Anthony lived in the room behind the kitchen when he wasn't at Juilliard studying to be an actor.

I came home from class one evening to find Jenny putting groceries away in the kitchen. “Ugh—Michael just called, sounding all hangdog. You're gonna have to talk to him sometime, Vend.”

“What's for dinner, honey?” I asked, ignoring her advice.

“I'm making fish for supper, with green beans and rice. I hope that's okay?”

“Great, thanks—I'll clean up.”

Jenny pulled a gallon bottle of cheapie white wine from the fridge and poured us each a glass. Daintily unwrapping a piece of Saint André, she put it on a wooden cutting board, with a little dish of shiny olives. She sliced a baguette and placed the pieces elegantly around the cheese. Jenny was a foodie before there were any. Per her instructions, Pete would take the butter out in the morning before he left so it would be room temperature and easier to spread on her croissant when she got up and had her breakfast.

I heard the front door slam—Pete was home. He came barreling into the kitchen, dropping his heavy book bag on the floor with a loud thump, and took Jenny in his arms. They had a mad make-out session right there by the stove.

“Must you suck face with such zeal?” I rolled my eyes.
It was kind of embarrassing—as if they were going to drop and do it on the scuffed-up linoleum floor. They had been together for two years but still couldn't keep their hands off each other. Theirs was the kind of deep, true love I dreamed of having, but I didn't really need the floor show.

“Sorry.” Pete leaned over and gave me a peck on the cheek. He was over six feet, with brown hair and little, brown, nubby teeth that Jenny called his “Indian corn.” He laughed a lot and was the kind of person who could do a lot of different things really well: speak French or Spanish, draw, tell jokes, pick up any instrument and play “Turkey in the Straw” on it immediately. Five years older than me, Pete was incredibly sweet, book smart, and kind. I was very much in awe of and had a sort of little-sister crush on him.

After we ate the fish and everything else, I helped out with the dishes while Pete went to study in the living room. He was trying to get through Columbia's premed program in two years instead of three, so he was constantly hitting the books.

Just as Jenny and I finished the dishes, the kitchen wall phone rang.

Jenny lit up a cigarette, blowing expert smoke rings at the dingy overhead light fixture. “Oh, boy.” She looked at me. “Why don't you answer it?”

I reached over and picked up the receiver. It was Michael.

“Look, Wendy, I know you hate me right now.”

“I don't hate you. There's a room opening up here, so I think I'll come get my stuff, if that's okay.”

Hee-Jon's parents were swooping in to take him home—they'd discovered he was seeing a white girl—so his room would soon be conveniently empty.

After a long pause Michael replied, “All right, if that's what you want. Sometime tomorrow?”

The next day, I packed up my few possessions and clothes while Michael pleaded with me to give him another chance. He was sorry about slapping me, and I believed him. But the fight had just been a bad end to a bad idea.

“What if we get married?”

“I just think that it's over.” I put my small collection of books in a milk crate I'd picked up on my way down Broadway.

“I'll go to my safety-deposit box tomorrow. There's a diamond ring that belonged to my mother. I want you to have it. Actually, all her jewelry is in there. I'll give it to you.”

My first marriage proposal felt like a desperate bribe. It reminded me of when my mom had offered to buy me a car if I lived at home while attending BU. It hadn't worked then, either.

“No, Michael. It just isn't going to work out. C'mon, we're really unhappy together.”

“But I love you. Don't you love me? I mean, it was a stupid fight, and I wish more than anything I could take it back, what I did.” His eyes looked shiny, and he tried to smile but couldn't.

“I'm sorry, but I don't love you. Maybe I did, but I don't anymore.”

His face fell. He looked down and nodded. “I see.”

He walked me downstairs and helped me get my stuff into a cab. I turned to say good-bye before getting in and giving the driver my new address.

“I guess I can't make you love me,” Michael said plaintively.

But he could have made me love him. If he had been kinder, less concerned with turning me into someone he thought I should be. Now there was nothing left to say. I wanted what Jenny and Pete had, and I wasn't going to find it here.

“Good-bye. Take care.”

I slid into the backseat—with the Ciao! bag, the milk crate, and the futon—and closed the door. I didn't turn around to see if he was watching the taxi head up Broadway.

A week later, I realized that my period was late. I had felt sort of queasy the last few days, and my boobs were sore. Terrified, I made an appointment with a doctor I found in the phone book.

Dr. Anna Manska was an elderly Russian doctor who wore support stockings and what appeared to be Soviet-issued beige orthopedic shoes. She walked hunched over, had a mustache, and looked as if she lived on a diet of cigarettes and strong coffee. Perhaps because her examination room had the bleak astringency of an outpost in the gulag, Dr. Manska only charged $35 per visit. I peed into a cup and crawled onto the examining table, my heart pounding in my ears. I couldn't breathe as I watched her stick a little piece of paper into my urine and flick it, holding it up to the
institutional-looking overhead lights. Then she shuffled over to the table and gave me a pelvic exam, moving her hands around inside me.

“You are pregnant—maybe four weeks or so.” Her hands left my body, and she snapped off her rubber gloves.

I started to cry. She looked at me as if I were a moron.

“Do not cry,” she said disdainfully. “You are a young woman. You have your whole life ahead of you.” She walked to the little sink in the corner of the room and started washing her hands. “You can get it taken care of.”

Drying my eyes, I wrote her a check and squeaked a thank-you. I walked out onto the icy streets, knowing that it was Oedi's baby, and also knowing that he probably wouldn't care and that I didn't want to have it.

I went home and told Jenny.

“Holy shit!” She lit a Marlboro Red. “What are you going to do? Have you told Michael?”

“It's not his. It's this guy in Boston, he's . . . kind of an asshole.”

“Well, be that as it may—you should call him and ask him to pay half.” Jenny was a feminist and a women's studies major. Of course she was right. Besides, I needed the money.

When I finally got up the nerve to call Oedi and tell him I was pregnant, there was a long silence on the other end of the line. I stood in my bedroom, eyes screwed shut, gripping the receiver and feeling ill with despair and utterly vulnerable. Asking a man for money was something my mother did all the time—but this was a first for me.

It sounded like there was no one on the other end of the line. “Hello?”

Only then did he speak. “Yes? And? What does that have to do with me?” His tone was glacial.

“Well, it's yours.” My hands started to shake, and I tried to keep my voice from trembling.

“So what do you want?”

I plowed on, trying not to notice the deadness in his voice. “I'm planning to have an abortion. I was hoping you could, you know, contribute to the cost. Just, like, half. That's all.”

“Wendy, I assumed that when you came to my apartment, you were on the Pill. I'm certainly not responsible for you making a stupid mistake. That's your fault, not mine.”

“Oh, all right.” I was so flustered by his superior tone, all I could think about was getting off the phone. There was another icy pause, and then he spoke.

“So give me your address.”

I managed to jabber it out. “Well, uh . . . good-bye.”
I quickly pressed down on the button with a click.

A few days later, I received a check in the mail from him for $25. In his scrawled note he said it was for me to take a cab home from the abortion clinic. It was so nasty and seemed calculated to make me feel small, like giving me a tip. I couldn't believe I'd had blah sex with this creep and now I had to literally pay for my mistake.

I called to borrow the $300 for the procedure from my friend Julie, the art student, who had rich parents and there
fore was the only person I knew who had that much money in her checking account. It was awkward for me to ask; I could tell she was nervous about loaning me the money. Julie was the kind of person who would bring a bottle of wine to a party, then take it back home with her later even if it had been opened. No matter her instinct or inclination, she came through for me.

Jenny went with me. We sat in the waiting room of the Manhattan Women's Medical Clinic on Park Avenue South in the thirties. Other couples in the room were holding hands; some of the men had their arms around their wives or girlfriends, who were crying softly into Kleenex, their makeup running. A girl who couldn't have been more than fourteen sat with her mom. I just felt numb. Jenny was leafing through a magazine when I heard my name called.

“It'll be okay, Vend. I'll be here when you're done.” She gave my hand a tight squeeze, and I stood to walk through the buzz-in door into the back of the clinic. I sat in a small room and talked to a nurse at a desk about the choice I'd made.

“And have you decided that the abortion is what you want to do?” she asked, her face open, no judgment in her tone. It was as if she were asking me if I wanted to drop a class.

I nodded and said that I was sure. She had me sign some forms, and I was sent to another room, where I sat with a group of about ten women. We watched a film strip in which another nurse explained what was going to happen once we were in with the doctor; a series of increas
ingly thick steel rods would be used to open the cervix, then a handheld vacuum device would empty the uterus. This was called an aspiration abortion, which I thought was weird—it seemed like somebody's idea of a sick joke.
Aspiration
meant “hope” or “desire”; it didn't seem to go along with what we were all about to do. After the movie, we all shuffled to another counter in the hall, where we were supposed to pay.

In the procedure room, I lay on the table in a cotton hospital gown. Two nurses moved around the room, getting it ready for the doctor. When he came in, he looked at my chart. He was probably ten years older than me and reminded me of the boys I'd gone to high school with who would grow up to be lawyers or doctors. He looked at my chart, then to me and smiled.

“Miss Lawless?”

I nodded.

“I'm Dr. Cohen, and this is Nancy and Greta—they'll be your nurses today.”

The nurses also smiled at me. We were all smiling and I was about to kill a baby.

“It says here that you don't want to be put to sleep.”

“No, I don't.” It seemed fair that I should be awake, to pay for what I was about to do. I deserved it.

“Let me just tell you that if you were my girlfriend, I wouldn't want you to feel this.”

I turned to Greta and Nancy for backup.

“It's quite painful, even when we numb the cervix. If I
were you, I'd go for the drugs,” Nancy said, and Greta nodded in agreement.

“Oh. Okay.” Suddenly I was afraid.

Nancy put the tube in my arm and asked me to start counting backward from ten. Greta held my hand and said, smiling, “It'll all be over in five minutes, sweetie.”

Ten, nine, eight, six
. . . I laughed as I saw myself flying over an antique map of Spain, and then I went to sleep.

I came to in a brightly lit, narrow room that was lined with beds. Women, covered with thin cotton blankets, lay in mounds in various stages of waking. It made me think of
Madeline
, the children's book set in a French convent—twelve little girls in two straight lines, except we weren't getting up to have breakfast and brush our teeth; we were emerging from the ether after having our fetuses erased.

Afterward, Jenny and I went to a café, one of the ones that dot Columbus Avenue across the street from the Natural History Museum, with an outdoor, glassed-in patio that looked out onto the sidewalk. She ordered a glass of wine. I picked at my salad.