Uses for Boys (10 page)

“Do you want to go home?” he says, leaning against me, and I do. I lean against his
dusty smell and lace my fingers with him. I’m going to leave him, I know. My mom’s
story is not my story. I’m going to need a new story. I wrap my coat around me and
let him lead me back to the apartment.

the abortion

I’m ready. I have two days off work and then it’s the weekend. I tell my mom over
the phone.

“I knew this would happen,” she says.

“Will you come?” I ask and she’s quiet. And I think it’s because I don’t ask. I never
ask.

“Anna,” she says and there is everything there in my name.

It’s decided. Josh will pick me up and Toy and my mom will meet us at the apartment,
after. When I get to the clinic, Jane is sitting behind the counter.

“Can you go in there with me?” I ask her. There are other girls, other women, other
uncomfortable boyfriends in the waiting room. There are parents, everyone judging
everyone else.

“Sure, Anna,” she says and she hands me some paperwork. She doesn’t try to look past
me to where Josh’s already hunched down in a chair.

They call me in to give me some valium. They take my blood pressure. The nurse, who
leans over me with two pills and a paper cup, smells like cucumber. She smiles and
pats my arm and then holds my hand, reassuring me in a way that tells me I’m scared
even though I hadn’t known that I was. She reminds me of Jane and for a moment I think
they might be sisters, even though I’m sure they’re not.

The women here all have these warm smiles. The kind where someone looks right at you
and sees you. I lean back against the pale green wall and close my eyes, but she tells
me to go back to the waiting room, that it won’t be long. She wants the valium to
relax me and then, she says, when I come back, Jane will be there.

I go back out to the waiting room. I hold Josh’s hand. I think: I’m holding his hand
because he’s scared and he needs me, and I’m right about that. My hand is on top of
his. His skin is very pale and he looks at the ground between his feet.

They take me into a small room. The doctor comes in and introduces himself. He’s wearing
scrubs. He makes a joke. “I’m a good doctor,” he says, “but my taste in fashion is
questionable.” He laughs and then Jane comes in.

She touches my cheek and says, “Anna,” as though we’re old friends who’ve just picked
up a long-running conversation, “I’ve been thinking.” And she moves in closer to whisper.
“I want to name her Imogen.”

I taste the name in my mouth. People are moving around the room, setting up. A nurse
puts my feet in the stirrups and Jane takes my hand. There’s a single lamp with four
bulbs on the ceiling and the nurse leans in to tell me what to expect. She warns me
before they give me a shot to numb my lower half and then she tells the doctor that
I’m ready. I look around the room at the two nurses and the doctor in scrubs. I look
at Jane. She’s glowing in that way they say that pregnant women glow. She looks very
calm and I feel, looking at her, something new. Something calm.

Imogen.

“I like it,” I say.

after the abortion

Cramping. Tugging. Pulling. I sleep afterward in a room with other girls. How am I
feeling? Nurses float around me, bring paper cups of water, murmur, women sleeping
and waking. No Jane. She’ll be back later, someone says.

I sleep again. My mom is in my dreams. My stuffed animals lined up, the small ones
in the front, and we’re telling the story. Tell us again, they say. My mom wraps me
in her arms. I’m a five-pointed star. We tell our story, but it’s a different story.

Jane is there. “Can you sit up?” she asks and I can. I sit up and the room comes into
focus. Jane’s face is serious and she sits by the side of the bed and looks at me
as though judging if I’m alright.

“I’m alright,” I say.

“Are you ready to leave?” she asks, and I am.

*   *   *

Josh is quiet as he helps me to the car. He holds my arm tight and makes sure I buckle
my seat belt before he closes the passenger side door.

“I’m alright,” I say when he gets behind the steering wheel, but he doesn’t start
the car. “Josh,” I say and I take his chin in my hand until he meets my eyes. “I’m
alright.”

In front of the apartment building, Toy materializes. My sister. My other half. She
dismisses Josh. He stands there, no longer useful, until she repeats, “Go back to
work, Josh.” She’ll take care of me, she says. Josh transfers my arm to hers and steps
back.

“It’s OK,” I say and I lean into Toy’s embrace. And then Toy, in charge, opens the
door of the apartment and moves me into the bed. My mom helps her, pulling back the
covers and it’s strange to see them together, my mom and Toy. How the abortion makes
us a family.

The room is warm, too warm. Toy’s lit candles and there’s music coming from my little
player. My mom then, suddenly, hugging me, enveloping me, loving me. Why now? I’m
trying to make sense of it.

Toy brings me a hot chocolate in my favorite blue mug. They tuck some pillows behind
me so I can sit up and drink. My mom looks out of place in the dim apartment, drinking
in small sips from the other mug, the chipped yellow one. She’s watching Toy. Toy
plays music, Billie Holiday and Édith Piaf, and runs around moving candles and laying
out chips like it’s a party. She’s talking, Toy is always talking. She’s talking about
“Gloomy Sunday.”

“Yes,” my mom says. “That’s a very sad song.” Her hand is in mine. She starts telling
our story in a faraway voice. She had no father, no mother. She was all alone until
I came along.

“And then you came along and everything changed,” she says and her hand is still in
mine and she’s looking down at me and seeing all the ways I look like her and I know
she believes it. She forgets about the other stories she tells herself. The one about
the next husband and then the next. I’m so tired, so heavy, but I struggle to protest.

“That’s not our story anymore,” I say. But I’m asleep and I’m not sure I say it out
loud.

sleep

When I wake my mom is gone. Toy is stretched out next to me, asleep. I can make out
Josh’s figure in the big chair. It’s black outside the window and the room is terribly
hot. I hurt all over and I take one of the pain pills with a bit of cold cocoa. Then
I sleep.

josh

After the abortion, Angel moves to Seattle.

“Portland is so over,” she says.

I’m standing in her apartment with the red walls. Her clothes are boxed up and her
furniture is gone. It looks like any room now. We sit on the floor with the pipe and
a lighter and a bottle of wine between us. I’m talking about Josh, but I’m thinking
about abortion and it mixes together, my stories. The empty house, the curtainless
windows in Josh’s apartment, the girl I want to be.

Angel knows how it is. “This isn’t about Josh,” she says.

And I think about this: Toy and my mom together by the side of my bed listening to
Billie Holiday and drinking cocoa.

I can’t stand how everything stays the same. Toy disappears again. The apartment is
empty. Josh goes to work and afterward he meets me at the bar. He tells the same stories
to the same people and he touches my hand the same way when it’s time to leave. Even
the trees on the sidewalk are bare and the buzzing’s back. Faint like a shadow, but
there. Like all the people on earth are racing to a single point.

At the cafe I stare in people’s faces and they catch me, watching. I’m looking for
something. Someone. Some sign that I’ve changed. It’s Thursday and I leave the cafe
and walk up the park blocks and over to the university. Down to the river and past
the fountain and over to the train station. I stare at the buildings looking for the
one where I lived with my mom. And then I find it. Not the same one, but one that’s
squat and brick like ours was. It’s short and solid with painted window frames and
a
FOR RENT
sign in the window.

I know what I’m going to do.

I call Toy. I stand at the pay phone across the street from the apartment and memorize
the manager’s number, four-oh-one-eight-six-seven-nine. I wait for Toy to answer and
I repeat it to myself, four-oh-one-eight-six-seven-nine.

Hello, I say, to the little building. I’m going to live here.

But Toy doesn’t answer, so I call the manager and set up an appointment for the next
day. Then I call Toy again.

“I’m moving out,” I say and the words come out in a rush, but Toy isn’t listening.
She sounds distracted and distant and suddenly I have to picture myself without a
best friend. I keep talking about the building and the street and the manager’s creaky
voice and I keep talking because I don’t know what else to do.

Then I hear it. She lightens and I can hear her listening. I can picture her, ear
pressed to the phone, sucking on her lip like she does, breathing softly, and I imagine
that she’s remembering me in the way I need to be remembered.

“OK,” she says meaning she’s going to come. I lean against the phone booth and breathe
out, rubbing the toe of one damp boot against the other.

my own apartment

The next day I make fifty-seven cappuccinos, thirty-nine lattes, twenty-two espressos
and nineteen caffe americanos. Toy walks into the cafe and it’s as though I don’t
know even her. It’s as though she has some life that I’m not even a part of. And she
does, I know. Boys who look at her with soft round eyes, who give her things, who
want her. She looks new, like she doesn’t need me. Like she never needed me. Wearing
skinny jeans on her long legs and bunched-up olive-colored leg warmers over pointy
boots. She has a narrow navy wool coat and a striped scarf and she looks like someone
I only wish I knew.

I’m wearing a dress, but it’s cotton and covered in a sweater and it doesn’t fit quite
right and I think that maybe she won’t see me. I have to look away and I go back to
cleaning the counter and I think, for a second I think: She’s not even going to see
me. She’s going to walk right back out again. But she doesn’t. She walks over when
I’m taking off my apron and she doesn’t hesitate. She hugs me like she always does.
Like nothing’s changed.

And then, in that way she has, she takes my arm and it’s like, of course, everyone
wants to be us.

We leave the cafe arm in arm. We go to Avalon to look at dresses. We go to Django’s
to look at music. We’re killing time until it’s time to look at the apartment. Finally
I take her to Eleventh and Alder and stand her in front.

“This is it,” I say. I want her to say something that means she knows how important
it is.

She does, she takes my hand in hers. “Oh,” she says and she breathes out through her
mouth. “Your own apartment.”

She understands! “My own apartment,” I say and now I think things really will be different.
“My own apartment,” I say again. It will be filled with pictures of beautiful girls
and dresses and jewelry and music and—

Then she looks around. I want her to want what I have. I want her to say, “I wish
I could leave home too,” but she doesn’t.

“But why don’t you just move back home?” she says.

Spring is already showing and I’m sweating inside my coat. I could, I know. I could
just go home. Right now. And forget the cafe and the women who tap their nails against
the counter while they wait for their cappuccinos. I could go home. Leave right now
and never come back. I could just pack my bag and move back into my mom’s house.

That empty, gaping house.

I look up at the little brick building. It’s flat and it’s ugly and the paint on the
window frames is peeling and I think about this thing, this thing that makes me hurtle
forward because I can’t go back. The big house and the aborted cul-de-sac and the
empty rooms and I know there has to be something better and I don’t even care if this
is it.

“No,” I say and we ring the bell for the manager.

Then I’m standing in my own apartment. I can feel the weight of it on my skin. The
manager’s face is suspicious, sunken. Toy is talking in a funny grown-up voice about
the strange view and the manager is looking at her and at me and saying that the apartment
is too small for two people.

I walk from one end of the apartment to the other, my hand trailing along the bare
walls. The apartment is small and I can see the front door from the tiny kitchen.
The odd little bathroom has high ceilings and a claw-foot tub. My own apartment.

“It’ll just be me,” I say. In a drawer in Josh’s apartment I have an envelope with
$1,146 that I’ve saved. The manager’s caved features drop into a smile.

toy

We’re back in the park blocks, under the steady stare of Teddy Roosevelt on horseback.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT ROUGH RIDER,
the plaque says.

Toy reads it out loud. “Rough Rider,” she says. We think it’s hilarious. We sit shoulder
to shoulder and the immobile president watches Toy load the soapstone pipe. I stare
through the trees at the pale gray sky thinking about the apartment.

But Toy’s met someone. Finn, a boy from another high school. A boy with green eyes.
A boy who’s punk and funny and wants to be a filmmaker. He wants Toy to star in his
films.

She pauses, and I know what she’s saying. No one has ever asked me to be in a film.

“What about the other one,” I say. “The one…” I trail off. “Remember?” I’m thinking
about the one—am I mistaken? The one who wanted to take her to Europe. And I realize
that it is, actually, easier to talk about Toy than to talk about myself.

“Oh,” she says. “He still loves me, but I don’t know.” She makes a pile of leaves
with the toe of her boot. “I still call him sometimes.”

“I’ve missed you,” I say before I realize I’ve said it and I mean since the abortion.
I don’t ask her why she hasn’t visited because I know. Finn and Seth and the camp
counselor and the other one. All the other ones.