After This (20 page)

 

She had saved seventy dollars so far this summer. Annie loaned
her fifty from her own savings and then two more ten-dollar bills,
filched (on two separate occasions) from her mother’s lingerie drawer.
Susan added thirtyfive of the fifty dollars her father had given her to
shop for fall clothes—indulgently, because her mother wanted her to
use her own money—saved by buying a single sweater and then going
into the dressing room to put a blouse and a kilt skirt into the same
bag. The trick—amazing what you could find out—was to go to the
better departments of the nicer stores where there was usually only
one saleslady working the floor (a plump grandmotherly type in this
case, whose daughter had gone to Mary Immaculate Academy as well),
and no one counting hangers as you moved in and out of the dressing
room, looking for another size.

 

She added the next thirty of the thirty-seven dollars from her
second-to-last paycheck.

 

In her blue polyester smock, her arms pressed against her
stomach, she drank a Coke and smoked a cigarette with Jill O’Meara
who had come into Woolworth’s just as Susan was going on her break.
They sat together on the concrete rim of a planter in the middle of the
mall. It was humid, but there was that orange color at the edge of the
blue sky—the beginning of a late-summer sunset. Because they had
not seen each other since June—they were not particular friends—
conversation demanded an accounting. Jill had had a perfectly boring
summer, working at a card shop in a strip mall near her home, the
backyard pool, Jones Beach, two weeks camping with her family—
where, she added, a spontaneous lie, she met this guy. They went
pretty far, she said, improvising, swimming together late at night, in
the lake, out of their suits. He was dark-haired and blue-eyed and
funny—but from Syracuse, she said, the first place she could think of
that sounded like the dark side of the moon.

 

Susan looked at her, smiling. “How far?” she said. They were not
friends, but might be becoming. Jill admired Susan. She liked her wit,
her self-possession, her feline languor in the classroom, the way she
slumped and curled into chairs. The way she let her eyes close slowly,
never bothering to put her head down, when a teacher grew boring.
Like most compulsive liars, Jill O’Meara was skeptical of the
reports others gave of themselves—the incredible dates, the wild
parties, the insane mothers and alcoholic fathers—but she had always
trusted what Susan had to say. Susan’s brother had gone to Vietnam
and had come back a basket case. (This offered in a history class
discussion about the war.) She had spent a year convinced her parents
were really brother and sister, they were so identically boring. (This
during a retreat day at school when the girls had been broken into
small groups to discuss ways to bring Christ into their daily lives.) She
had written her initials in love bites around the navel of the boy she
was taking to the junior prom. (This declared amid much laughter at a
table in the lunchroom.)

 

Jill sipped her drink, nodding slowly. “God,” she said, as if at the
recollection of some astonishing memory. “We went far. Really far.”
A laugh, sophisticated, wordly-wise, broke from Susan and she
said, “Start saving your pennies now,” and opened her smock and put
her hand on her stomach, although what she thought of as her paunch
was mostly invisible to Jill, and to everyone else.

 

“This ain’t pizza,” she said.

 

At the end of a boring summer (no boy at the lake or anywhere
else, only a hopeless crush on the UPS guy who stopped by the card
shop every day and called her Kid), the revelation, the sudden tears in
Susan’s voice, were high drama.

 

Jill O’Meara had nearly two hundred and fifty dollars in her senior
prom fund. (It had been her junior prom fund last year but she
hadn’t found a date.) She told Susan—the summer suddenly become
interesting—”I can lend you the rest. You want me to go with your
Susan spent the night before at Annie’s house so in the morning
they could walk to the bus stop. They both told their mothers they
were accompanying the other to the famous hair salon in the city to
give her moral support while she got a new cut. (The story would be
that in the end Susan/Annie had chickened out on getting something
totally new and just got a few inches cut off, you could hardly notice
the difference.) They took the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station
and then rode the hot subway uptown. Of course, they didn’t run into
any neighbors or relatives who worked in the city, or anyone else who
knew them, but that was no matter—the haircut story was already in
place; they were, until they got off at the eleventh floor and not the
third, precisely where they were supposed to be.

 

Susan filled out the forms with Annie’s name and placed Annie’s
fake license and birth certificate under the clip on the clipboard before
handing it back to the woman at the reception desk. The woman,
handsome and serene, with a small face and an old-fashioned French
twist, merely slipped them out from under the clipboard and handed
them back to her—no question of hazel or brown. “That’s fine,” she
said, sweetly. “And how will you be paying?”

 

The day before, Susan had gone to a bank near the mall and
exchanged her collection of money for six crisp fifty-dollar bills,
sensing somehow that the neatness of her payment would confirm the
authenticity of her age. She handed these to the woman, still in their
yellow bank-provided envelope. The woman merely attached the
money to the same clipboard and then said again, “That’s fine.”
“We’ll call you in a minute,” she said.

 

It was ten thirty on a Tuesday in late August and there was no
one else in the waiting room, which was very small and comfortable—
a pale lavender sofa and two plaid chairs, shaded lamps that might
have been in someone’s living room. Annie had brought the last of her
summer reading books—
A Farewell to Arms
—which she was only
halfway through and Susan herself had not yet finished. “Boring,”
Susan said, glancing at it. “A lot of war stuff.”

 

Although they would have said they were prepared for it, they
both were startled when a woman—a nurse in a white uniform—came
through the door beside the receptionist and said, “Anne Keane.” After
only a moment’s hesitation, Susan stood.

 

“Good luck, Annie,” Annie whispered and Susan laughed a little.
“Thanks, Susie.” Like the spunky, place-trading twins from a sitcom.
The nurse—square-jawed and deeply tanned but with warm
brown eyes—advised Susan to leave her purse with her friend, and in
that moment of turning back to hand over the strap of her bag, Annie
saw that Susan was trembling, trembling slightly, almost
imperceptibly, but also thoroughly, from her fingertips to her
shoulders to the smooth flesh of her pretty face, lips, scalp, even the
ends of her pale hair.

 

In that moment she saw, too, how Susan had fixed her eyes—
brown not hazel—on some distant point, some point out of the room,
out of this particular ten thirty on a Tuesday morning in late August,
out of this strange office building in Manhattan, and onto a place after
which this would be done, gotten through, gotten over.

 

Annie took her friend’s bag but did not aim, again, to smile at her
or to offer any encouragement. Later, wading through the war stuff,
she wondered if what Susan had shown her in that moment—
trembling, looking ahead—could be called courage. And wondered
why it was assumed that courage was always put to some noble end.
Inside, Susan gave a urine sample and then undressed and was
examined, and when the pregnancy was confirmed, the procedure
was explained to her. The strange words: cervix and uterus, dilation
and curettage, felt like a steel blade against the edge of her teeth. In
religion class, Sister Lucy had said, more simply, that they break the
baby’s arms and legs and drown it in salt water.

 

Pain like a pretty bad period, the doctor said, some heavy bleeding
afterward.

 

There was another paper to sign and she was halfway through her
own first name when she remembered and went over the S and theU.
“My hand is shaking,” she said, apologetically, and the tanned
nurse whispered, “No worry,” and gently took the botched form away.
The woman who did the exam and all the explaining was small
and wiry with wiry red hair and a humorless face. She had been
introduced as the doctor but still Susan expected a man to come in for
the abortion itself. Someone stooped and gray in a white coat and a tie
who would call her “young lady” and look at her over the top of his
glasses both to reprimand and to forgive. Who might say something
old-fashioned and complimentary, something like, “Well, I can see why
your young man might have been carried away. You’re a lovely girl.”
But only another nurse came in, a pretty Asian woman who might
have been alone with the doctor in the small and crowded room for all
the notice she paid. The doctor said, “Are we ready then?”
The tanned nurse stood right beside her. She complimented the
sun streaks in Susan’s hair and then held her hand when she drew a
sharp, unsteady breath at the cold touch of the instruments. She told
her, “Go ahead and say ‘Ouch’ if it hurts,” but Susan only turned her
head, her eyes now fixed on the woman’s white uniform, which was
the same woven polyester of her Woolworth’s smock. She could smell
the sweet clean odor of the detergent it had been

 

washed in. “Not much longer now,” the nurse said. And, “You’re
doing great.” She was supposed to be in what they’d called, so prettily,
a twilight sleep, but the pain was on a steady rise and in the midst of
it, Susan gripped the woman’s hand and raised it to her own mouth to
stifle a sob. There was the smell of hospital soap on the nurse’s skin,
sharp, medicinal, and, because of the pain, somehow cruel. It was a
scent that would return her to this moment for the rest of her life.
They brought her to another room to recuperate. She had not
worn a sanitary napkin and a belt since she was thirteen and the thing
felt like a diaper between her legs. There was a kind of chaise longue
for her to sit on, a small table beside it with grape juice and a few
cookies: a kindergarten snack, a clean sheet, and a light blanket. The
tanned nurse lowered the light a little further and said she would go
tell her friend she was okay. She could go home in an hour or so,
depending on how she felt.

 

“Rest a bit, honey,” she said, like a mother, before she left the
room.

 

Susan could hear the traffic rising up from the street, the bang
and rattle of trucks, taxi horns, a warning shout and a whistle and
then a man’s laugh. She could picture the men in the street below,
men pushing carts and backing vans into narrow parking spaces, men
in suits, men with briefcases, going to lunch, ducking into cabs,
running their hands down their ties as they walked across a subway
grate. She closed her eyes but knew she wouldn’t sleep. She had never
gone to sleep in New York City.

 

An Act of Contrition started up in her head. “Oh my God, I am
heartily sorry for having offended Thee,” more a habit of mind than a
plea for absolution. Because she could not balance any remorse against
the dawning sense of relief. However terrible it might be, what she
had done, it was over: gotten through, finished. However terrible it
was, its immediate effect was that she could go

 

back to school next week, her senior year. She could take the SATs, go
to the prom, go to graduation. She could apply to colleges and choose
one and move into a dorm in September. She could go out with her
friends this weekend, maybe meet another guy. She could sleep late
tomorrow (she had already asked for a late shift at the store, three to
nine) and go downstairs in her work clothes and her smock—
”Going”—her car keys in her hand, her father singing from another
room, “It was a lucky April shower, it was the most convenient door,”
sweet and affectionate and naive as he always was because he had no
fear of trouble for this beautiful child, no quicksand, no terrible
diversions, no nightmares to drive her from the room he and his son
had plumbed and paneled with their own hands. “I found a million
dollar baby in a five and ten cent store.”

 

The tanned nurse came in again to take her temperature and
check her pad. She came back a little while later to say the doctor
would be in to talk to her once more and then she could get dressed
and go. “Although,” she said, blithely, “I’m not sure where your friend
has gone off to.”

 

Susan almost said, “Annie?”—but instead pursed her lips to show
she had no answer.

 

The nurse glanced at her watch. “I thought maybe she’d gone out
for a bit of lunch, but she’s been gone a while now.” She gave Susan
the full, professional warmth of her brown eyes. “Pam at the desk said
she just kind of flew out.”

 

Susan nodded. She and Annie had agreed to have lunch together,
if she was up for it, at a diner on Third Avenue. Vanilla egg creams and
greasy cheeseburgers, they’d said.

 

“We can’t let you go home alone, you know,” the nurse told her
kindly, deliberately. “Is there someone else you can call? If she doesn’t
come back?”

 

Jill O’Meara came to mind, but Susan suspected she was probably
at work now. Susan didn’t even know the name of the card
store. Jill would be two hours coming in from Long Island anyway. The
Jackass had a car—a GTO, the whole problem—and lived in Queens,
and it would serve him right to get the full weight of the whole
summer delivered to him in one phone call (You screwed me, you
dumped me, I just had an abortion, and you need to drive me home),
but she wasn’t that crazy. She knew he caddied on Tuesday and
Thursday anyway; she’d made enough plans this summer to casually
drop by the golf course.

 

Slowly, she shook her head. “She’ll be back,” she told the nurse.
“She said she might run over to Bloomingdale’s.” And then, when the
nurse had gone out again, wondered how messed up she was to find
herself praying, praying earnestly this time, that her half-assed lie was
true.