Summer of Love, a Time Travel (21 page)

“That’s
the law, ma’am.”

“What
will they do if I get an illegal abortion?” Susan asks. “Throw me in jail?”

The
law clerk ignores her. “Now, even if the D.A. finds probable cause, it’s been
our experience—and I admit, we don’t have much experience—that the committee
may still require parental consent before an abortion is approved for a minor.”

“The
committee,” Susan says. “What is the committee?”

The
law clerk takes off his spectacles and rubs his eyes. “The committee consists
of three licensed physicians on the medical staff of an accredited hospital.
They must agree unanimously. The committee must find either a substantial risk
that continuance of the pregnancy would gravely impair the physical or um
mental health of the mother or that the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest.
We’ve um been through the rape angle. I don’t suppose,” the law clerk says
gloomily, “there’s an incest angle?”

“No
incest angle,” Susan whispers.

She
shakes her head. She doesn’t want to claim rape. She doesn’t want to face Stan
the Man—whom she hasn’t seen since the afternoon after the Festival of Growing
Things—and accuse him of rape. She just doesn’t want to have his baby. She just
wants this nightmare to be over.

Ruby
pulls herself up all her nearly six feet. “What does
that
mean: ‘grave
impairment of mental health’?”

The
law clerk fumbles with the clipboard. He doesn’t like Susan or Ruby. Susan
isn’t intimidating like Ruby, just pathetic. He doesn’t want to think about any
of this. He would much rather try to beat a drug bust. “Impairment of mental
health means the infliction of mental illness to the extent that the woman is
dangerous to herself or the person or property of others or is in need of
supervision or restraint. As a result of the pregnancy. The um would-be pregnancy.
You know what I mean.”

“Dangerous
to property?” Ruby says.

“That’s
what the statute says.”

The
Gypsy Jokers clatter out of the hip lawyer’s office into the waiting room.

“We’ll
shove this up their ass, no sweat,” the hip lawyer says.

“How
come you don’t know more about this law and how we can get the kid a safe and legal
abortion?” Ruby says.

“The
statute just passed,” the law clerk says. “California has one of the most
progressive therapeutic abortion laws in the United States, ma’am.”

“No,
I’ll tell you why,” Ruby says. “You don’t want to go up against the committee,
either.”

“You
want my advice, you should get parental consent,” the law clerk says to Susan.
“Can’t you get parental consent?”

“I
couldn’t get parental consent to talk to my best friend on the phone,” Susan
says.

“We’ll
plead illegal search and seizure,” the hip lawyer tells the Gypsy Jokers.

“We
was
holdin’ five thousand hits,” a Joker admits.

“Piece
of cake,” the hip lawyer says.

The
Gypsy Jokers slap hands with the lawyer. Two of them stick out and lick each
other’s tongues. “I’m having a seizure!” says the third, rolling his pupils
back in his eye sockets and making claws of his hands. He seizes Susan,
plunging his mouth on her mouth.

Susan
goes limp. Don’t struggle with a biker’s kiss, flower child. She’s learned
that
on the street. You struggle, he may haul off and break your nose. The Gypsy
Joker tastes of beer and bile and pot smoke.

Ruby
waits until he’s through. Then she seizes Susan’s elbow. “Let’s get out of
here, kid.”

*  
*   *

“Are
you sure?” Ruby asks her for the hundredth time as they walk back to Clayton
Street.

“I’m
sure,” Susan says for the hundredth time. The chilly morning air refreshes her
after the horrid hip lawyer’s office.

“You
don’t want to tell Stan?”

“No
way.”

“Tell
me true, Starbright,” Ruby says, furrowing her brow. “You can’t be more than
sixteen. Right, am I right?”

Susan
nods. How did Chi put it? She’s not lying, she’s implying.

Sometimes
Susan imagines having the baby. A little girl with big brown eyes like hers.
She’d name her Jessica. Jessica would be beautiful and brilliant, of course.
Susan understands—she will never forget—what it’s like to be a child. She knows
so many things she could teach Jessica. Important things, like love and sex and
death, happiness and sadness. Finding your true self in life. Finding meaning.
She’d be a good mom. She’d be fifteen when Jessica is born.

Mostly,
though, Susan has the nightmare, and her fantasies about Jessica vanish. In the
nightmare, the baby grows and grows, pushing past Susan’s bowels, sliding
around her stomach. The baby reaches up through her throat. Its tiny wrist
wiggles out of her mouth like a serpent. Its hand slaps against her tongue,
making her gag. The baby’s hand seizes her teeth. Its fingers are surprisingly
strong.

Then
she wakes, heaving for breath. Her teeth are always sore, and she is always
sick to her stomach. Sick to her heart. What
would
Mom and Daddy do?
They’d banish her from her lavender bedroom in Shaker Heights, that’s what. They’d
send her away to live in shame in one of those shabby boarding houses for unwed
mothers. She’d have to drop out of high school, never have a chance to go to
college.

Susan
cannot have this baby. She doesn’t have a husband or even a man who loves her.
She’s desperate to finish high school. She was hoping to finish college before
she had a baby. She needs to figure out what she wants to do with her life. She
was hoping to have some time to enjoy the world, too. Travel, see new places,
meet new people. She has only begun to taste the excitement of life.

She
wishes it hadn’t happened like this. She wishes Stan the Man loved her, that he
was someone else and she was someone else, in another space and time. In
another lifetime. Everyone talks about it in the Haight-Ashbury: other
lifetimes, other worlds. In another world, she is ten years older, in love with
the father of her child, and pregnant on purpose.

But
she is not in that world now.

She’s
sorry she had sex with Stan. Ah, forget it. She’s
not
sorry she had sex
with him. She’s sorry she’s pregnant.

“You
really
really
sure?” Ruby asks her for the thousandth time.

“I’m
really
really
sure,” she tells Ruby for the thousandth time.

“Absolutely
positively?”

“Absolutely
positively.”

“Because
you don’t have to do this. It’s a human life we’re talking about. Your dentist
daddy won’t turn his back on you.”

“You
don’t know Daddy.”

Ruby
sighs. “Don’t you come crying to me later.”

“I
won’t come crying.”

“Don’t
you tell me you regret it, and why didn’t I warn you. You remember I’m telling
you this.”

“I’ll
remember, Ruby,” Susan says.

Ruby
quietly backs out the Mercedes, and Susan closes the garage doors. She glances
up at the apartment. Chi is probably still conked out on the couch. He often sleeps
until noon. He says he’s got a touch of tachyonic lag, something like jet lag.
Chi says all kinds of strange things.

Ruby
whisks the Mercedes across the Golden Gate Bridge. Fog cascades over the scarlet
towers, thick and eerie. Ruby flicks on the dims. She’s a superb driver, but
Susan is edgy. Ruby’s face is as grim as granite.

Ruby
is not an easy person to live with. Not that she’s mean. Susan just hasn’t
figured out exactly what Ruby believes in, though she’s constantly proclaiming
about all kinds of things. She flies into a rage if you wonder whether a
tincture of hemlock could actually cure cancer, but she laughs at spaghetti sauce
spilled on a carpet--an offense that would have Susan’s mother shitting bricks.
Ruby calls television the devil box. She never watches it, even though she owns
one. But when Susan asked if she could draw a mural of the goddess Isis on a
wall of the Mystic Eye, Ruby just said, “Put the ankh in her
left
hand
and the sistrum in her
right,
you hear me?” With a squirmy memory of her
baby hands slapped beet-red after she’d doodled on Mom’s dining room wall with
a crayon, Susan drew a six-foot-tall goddess in pastels right on Ruby’s
whitewashed plaster. And Ruby pronounced it good.

After
Susan’s time at the Double Barrel house, what’s
really
weird is that
Ruby permits no grass or acid in her house. No dope, period. As far as Susan
can tell, Chi abides by the house rules. Susan tries to abide, too, but it’s
hard after the neverending party. She doesn’t miss grass or acid, but dexies
are hard to give up. That wide-awake clarity, plus she lost weight without even
trying. One night, when Professor Zoom was really wasted, he laid a whole bottle
of Dexedrine on Susan. Now she’s gone through half of it. Sometimes she’s
tempted to score more, but she doesn’t want Ruby to kick her out, and she has
to be careful with her dwindling cash. How is she ever going to get her hundred
dollars back from Stan?

“I’ll
tell you this, kid,” Ruby said one night, pouring herself a glass of wine.
“Drugs is drugs, and that’s that. I had a cousin. He was beautiful, and I loved
him dearly. But Roi became a junkie. He was a handsome young man in the prime
of his life.”

“Everyone
in the Haight-Ashbury is against junk, Ruby.”

“Are
they? I’m not so sure. I see a lot folks taking that speed crap, and speed is
just as bad as junk. Maybe worse.”

Susan
cringed. But Ruby meant crystal meth, stuff freaks shot up. Not her little
green-and-white dexies.

“I
know about drugs, kid,” Ruby said. “I’ve known about drugs since you were
knee-high to a grasshopper. I drank peyote-button tea when you were still
peeing your pants. Made me sick as a dog.”

“I
never
peed my pants.”

God!
Ruby loves to mess with Susan’s head. Susan is often left with more questions
than answers.

When
things get bad, though—like at the hip lawyer’s office—Ruby is a rock. She is.
. . . Susan struggles for what to call it. Well, she’s like Nance, only she’s
practically as old as Susan’s mother. Ruby is. . . .a
friend.
She stands
up for Susan against the whole world. Susan can’t remember the last time Mom
and Daddy stood up for her against the whole world. No, her mother and father
always seem to stand against her. Two against one. Her parents, Susan realizes,
do not act like friends.

*  
*   *

“This
is it, kid.” Ruby pulls into the landscaped parking lot of a medical building in
San Rafael. “You ready?”

“I’m
ready.”

But
as Susan walks into the general practitioner’s sunny office, she shivers with
fear, though she’s boiling hot in the sweater she wore to ward off San
Francisco’s chill.

Church
bells toll. Midmorning worship services are commencing in the suburban hills of
Marin County. Neighborhoods a lot like hers in Shaker Heights, only with palm
trees amid the oaks and the maples.

The
general practitioner gazes at a framed photograph on his desk. The photograph
shows three children seated in an opulent rose garden. The children hold pets
in their laps, kittens and puppies. The youngest, a brown-haired toddler,
cuddles a white rabbit nearly as big as she is.

“Yes,
I’m still a rose gardener,” he says to Ruby. “I’ve been pruning roses since 1953.”

Susan
senses tension between them, some kind of double meaning to his words. After
living with Mom and Daddy, she’s got antennae for covert emotions, like a
termite seeking wood rot. She looks at Ruby for help, but Ruby is remote.

“A
public service, that’s how you think of your work, Doc Clyde,” Ruby says. “Right,
am I right? For which you get very well paid.”

“My
technique has improved. But you must know that, or you wouldn’t have brought
this girl.”

“Uh-huh.
Haven’t killed anyone lately?”

“I
never killed anyone, Ruby. You know that. Well. Except for the rosebuds.”

“Glad
to hear it because Starbright is depending on you this morning.”

Doc
Clyde glances at Susan. “You’ve had the HCG test?” He checks her out in two
seconds, then looks away. She’s got the clear impression she’s keeping him from
something. He’s a lot like Daddy—she’s always keeping him from something more
important. Doc Clyde looks a little older than her father, a bland squashy man
with salt-and-pepper hair combed straight back, probably covering up a bald
spot beneath the Brylcreem. A prosperous potbelly swells out of his modest
frame.

Susan’s
shiver of fear deepens. She looks at Ruby. HCG?

Ruby
snaps, “The Planned Parenthood test. Of course she got it.”

“You
still keeping cats?” he says to Ruby.

Huh?
Susan thinks. She glances, puzzled, at Ruby.

“Yeah,
I’ve got five,” Ruby says warily.