Authors: Claire Bidwell Smith

The Rules of Inheritance (27 page)

BOOK: The Rules of Inheritance

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We'd talked for a while before I mentioned it offhandedly.

I bought a pregnancy test today.

What?

A pregnancy test.

I heard you. Why?

My period is late.

Do you really think you're pregnant?

No.

Did you take the test yet?

Not yet.

Well, maybe you should take it now.

While we're on the phone?

Sure.

Fine. Hold on.

And that's when I went in the bathroom to take the test.

Don't worry, I tell him, when I get back on the phone. I'm sure it's fine. I took a few of these in high school and they always turned out negative.

During my senior year of high school it seemed like every week one of us was taking a pregnancy test. We usually went to Lucy's house to do it. Her parents were divorced and her mom worked late. We had the house to ourselves for several hours after school let out.

Me, Lucy, Laura, Holly, and Sabrina.

I don't remember which of us was the first to lose her virginity, maybe Sabrina, but by senior year we were all sexually active. Some of our parents knew; others didn't. It's not even that we were particularly promiscuous. In fact we all had some form of serious boyfriend.

We were young though, and by proxy stupid.

Whenever one of us thought we might be pregnant, we would convene at Lucy's house after school. The rest of us would wait, whispering in hushed, respectful tones on Lucy's bed as the panic-stricken girl entered the bathroom alone.

Lucy had painted her room a deep, dark purple and posters of Robert Smith covered the walls. She dyed her long hair raven black on a regular basis and carefully maintained a ghostly pale complexion. Years later, when she is a bright and cheerful yoga instructor, I'll sometimes have trouble reconciling the Lucy I knew in high school with the radiant woman she has become.

None of us ever emerged from Lucy's bathroom with a positive test.

I tell Colin all of this and then I set down the phone and walk into the bathroom alone. The little plastic stick is exactly where I left it five minutes ago, and I peer into the plastic display window at the plus sign that's waiting there for me.

I am pregnant.

MY EXPERIENCE BEING back at Marlboro is completely different from my first go-round. Even though it has only been a year since I was that freshman girl angrily stomping the recycling cans with my boots, pining after Michel and Christopher, and mourning the pending loss of my mother, it feels as though decades have passed.

I feel worldly and abused, fragile and desperate.

I've been avoiding the dining hall, the parties in Howland, even my old roommate Christine. I hurry to my classes and then back home again, where I curl into a corner of the bed, pulling the quilt tight around me.

Michel graduated last year. Christopher is in San Francisco.

I have insomnia and I've begun having regular panic attacks.

I stay up each night until three or four in the morning, smoking cigarettes and frantically feeling for my pulse, my heart pounding down from another palpitation.

Skip, skip, beat.

A fleeting burst of sharp pain in my forehead leaves me breathless and frozen with fear. I sit, rigid like a hunting dog, for over an hour, certain that any movement might bring on an aneurysm.

My breath comes in shallow gasps. I think my throat is closing.

Each new symptom signifies my inevitable demise. It is exhausting.

Just months before, I ended up in an emergency room, certain that I was having a heart attack. Hooked up to monitors and an EKG for hours, the doctors found nothing wrong with me.

But it's not that there isn't anything wrong with me. It's that what is wrong is invisible.

Being pregnant suddenly gives me something real to focus on.

I determine that I'm not more than six weeks along. I go to the Laundromat the day after I take the test, and I pull a chair into a warm patch of sunlight and watch my clothes tumble dry behind the little circular glass window of the dryer.

I am pregnant.

I try to make sense of this fact but nothing comes. I have no context for this event. I think about my mother, and the time in high school when I thought I was pregnant. I think about how kind she was then. I wrap my arms tight around my abdomen and watch the clothes in the dryer tumble around and around and around.

I already know that I am going to have an abortion.

In fact I will never once consider keeping it. Not one time.

I CAN'T REMEMBER if it was during my high school pregnancy scare or at another, later, time that my mother told me she had had an abortion.

She was thirty and living in New York. She'd just ended a brief relationship with some slick Wall Street guy, when she realized that he had left her pregnant. Calls to his home went unanswered and messages left at his office were not returned.

Finally, with a fury and impatience typical of my mother, she left a message for his secretary, requesting a check for the abortion she was about to have.

He shelled out immediately, and she went through with it. I don't remember any other details though. If she'd felt conflicted over the decision or if the experience was a traumatic one, I'll never know. Either she didn't tell me or the details left no impression.

I think about all of this as I watch the laundry tumble around and around.

Is it wrong that the idea of having an abortion makes me feel closer to my mother?

I write her a letter on the one-year anniversary of her death.

Dear Mom,

I don't know how to be without you. Please come back.

Colin doesn't protest when I tell him my plan. In fact I'll later wonder if he would have been so passive had it been the other way around. He tells me he'll fly up and be there for it.

The next call I place is to my father.

The same week that I moved back to Vermont my father moved to California. He sighs into the phone, three thousand miles away, when I tell him.

Just as the only time he will ever walk me down an aisle in a church was at my mother's funeral, the only time I'll ever tell my father that I am pregnant is this one.

Well, kiddo.

He sighs again.

I'm standing in the kitchen of the apartment in Vermont, twirling the phone cord around my wrist, as though I am in high school and talking to a boy I have a crush on instead of telling my elderly father about the abortion I am about to have.

Two days later I drive in my old red Saab to the Planned Parenthood clinic. It is deep, deep cold outside. The sky is a hard blue and slick; black ice coats the road. I smoke cigarettes as I drive, listen to Portishead.

How can it feel this wrong? From this moment? How can it feel so wrong?

The clinic is housed in a quaint, wooden A-frame house. The waiting room is really an old living room, with a comfortable couch covered in a knit blanket. A plain-faced receptionist insists that I make myself comfortable. I sit on the edge of the couch, my arms folded tightly across my flat abdomen.

After a while I am led upstairs, where a kindhearted and very butch old nurse examines me, confirming what I and the nurse-practitioner at school have already determined to be true.

I am pregnant.

Afterward we sit in the nurse's office. Instead of there being a desk between us, we sit in chairs pulled close so we can face each other. Although I've never been, this is what I imagine therapy would be like.

So, what do you want to do?

I want to have an abortion.

Have you considered any other options?

No. I want to have an abortion.

An alternative might be adoption. Also, there are more resources than you might think if you decide to keep it.

I want to have an abortion.

Okay, she says. Her eyes crinkle into a look of sympathy, and I suddenly envy her. I wish I
was
her. Wise, buoyant, practical. Sitting opposite some girl like me. Not me.

You're sure, she says, with one more look into my eyes.

Yes.

I don't know why I'm so firm about the abortion. In some ways it seems like the next logical step in the narrative of my life.

Mother dies at eighteen.

Abortion at nineteen.

It's as though I don't have a choice.

But we always have choices.

It won't be until over a decade later, when I am well into the actual world of parenthood, frazzled and overwhelmed with love and impatience for the tiny creature I have created, that I will realize that if I had actually had a baby at age nineteen it might have been the very thing that would have kept me from the years and years of misery and destruction ahead of me.

It won't be until I am finally a mother myself, and not until my cheek rests against my child's soft downy head, that I will realize the bleakness of what I did all those years before.