Agorafabulous! (24 page)

“MMMMMUUUUUUUUURRRRRDDDDEEERRREEEEER!” Again! I was aghast.

If I’d been of sounder mind, I might have come up with something wittier. Instead, I went with knee-jerk honesty.

“Not YET!” I blurted out. “I don’t even know if I’m pregnant!”

Apparently, this was not the response he was looking for.

He opened his mouth to yell again. I craned my neck wildly to see if another cab was coming, so that I could run away to my bed and bury my head in the pillows and make myself very small beneath the blankets, so that God and Satan and Santa Claus couldn’t see me. I just really hated myself in that moment, maybe even more than he hated me, and it occurred to me that perhaps I deserved whatever was coming to me.

But before the old man could let out another hate-moan, somebody else piped up. Because where there are devils, angels are often present, too. And my divine guardians had arrived, albeit in a form I hadn’t expected.

“Oh. My God,” came a female voice out of nowhere. “I. Love. Those earrings!”

I turned my head to the left and saw two very pretty, stylish young women grinning at me. They had funky haircuts and perfect eye shadow, and they wore fun boots and skinny jeans. They looked a lot like the gorgeous people I’d seen on the street the night before in Andrew’s cool neighborhood, with one major difference: they were wearing bright orange vests that read
ESCORT
.

I’ve never been a morning person, and by that point, my mind had accommodated all the new experiences it could handle. My powers of logic collapsed. Therefore, I came to the natural conclusion that these women were call girls. After all, that’s what professional “escorts” are, right? Seven thirty
A.M
. on a Saturday, and I’d somehow stumbled into the center of the Venn diagram where sex workers and Bible thumpers overlapped. I had no idea what these high-class hipster hookers were doing wearing identifying vests, as that would seem to invite the attention of the vice squad. Were they that special feminist kind of prostitute, the ones who protested for legalization of the world’s oldest trade? This was the East Village; it wasn’t out of the question.

“MUUUUUURRRRRDEEEEEREEEEEER!” yelled Santa.

“They’re so fun and dangly and they totally work with your outfit,” Escort #1 said, smiling and walking up to me.

“But I feel like, also? They could work with something more formal,” Escort #2 said, cocking her head to the side. “Like they could easily go from day to night, like if you had them on at the office you could change and just go to a party at night and you’d be fine.”

“I caaaaan’t handle how cute they are. Where did you get them?” Escort #1 demanded.

Now, I may have been utterly exhausted. I may have been terribly scared. I may have been carrying three extremely small bastard children. But I was also a young woman who had spent most of her life in suburban New Jersey, where the chief recreational activity is shopping and the most sacred house of worship is the nearest mall. And these whores were speaking my native tongue.

“Target!” I said.

The girls gasped in unison.

“No way!”

“But they look vintage!”

“I
know,
right?” I said proudly. “Nine ninety-nine. I got them in El Paso!” Suddenly we were walking, as a little group, and I didn’t know how that had happened but I didn’t mind, because one of the harlots was telling me about the one-day sales at the new Target in Brooklyn, which apparently were epic and not to be missed.

“But you
have
to get there by ten
A.M
. because all the good stuff gets picked over after that,” she said. “This is Carlos; he’s going to check your bag and take you through the metal detector. We’ll see you later; have a good appointment!” Startled, I realized she and her associate had somehow pried my frozen feet from the curb and walked me ten yards to the entrance of the Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger Center. At the same moment Carlos the security guard greeted me, I remembered my friends who had volunteered as safety escorts for patients at the local Planned Parenthood health center back in Asheville. As Santa continued shouting in the background, the girls waved and shut the bulletproof-glass door behind me. They were like little feminist helper-elves, relying on their training and their knowledge of retail to get one frightened Jersey girl where she needed to go. And in that moment, I became a Planned Parenthood fan for life.

I entered my name in the log and waited my turn alongside a girl who looked to be about the same age as my ninth-graders back in Texas. Her boyfriend was with her. There were a lot of men there that day, waiting patiently or anxiously, listening to music or reading magazines. I learned that only patients were allowed beyond the second door, which was also bulletproof and rigged with an alarm.

Later, in the exam room, a nurse told me, “I don’t think we’ve ever had someone come in just four hours after a broken condom. That’s some impressive speed.”

“I’m kind of neurotic,” I said.

“Welcome to New York,” she replied.

I went home with two pills and instructions to take them twelve hours apart. I took one combined with a Xanax, because by that point I was so tired I couldn’t sleep. Lulled into a chemical slumber, I dozed peacefully for several hours, then took the second pill as directed. I prayed for support and forgiveness, but to the Virgin Mary, not God. I figured she’d be more sympathetic to the whole unplanned pregnancy thing, especially since she and I both knew I wasn’t carrying any messiah. And I’d always had a sneaking suspicion it was Joseph who knocked her up, anyway, and the Archangel Gabriel thing was a less secular version of the stork story. The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe had been omnipresent back in Texas, so I prayed to that Mary as well as the more familiar Italian Catholic one.

When I didn’t get sick from the pills, I felt relieved. But I also had this nagging feeling that the whole thing was too easy. Something was wrong. Something was missing.

A few weeks later, it became apparent that at least the latter prognostication was accurate. My period was MIA. Concerned, I called Planned Parenthood.

“You’re a week late? Oh, don’t worry,” the woman said. “Plan B can knock your cycle off for a month or two. You said you took Plan B a few hours after the incident? Well, statistically, chances are very, very slim that you’re pregnant. If you get really worried, come in for a pregnancy test. It’s free.” I thanked her and hung up. As much as I’d enjoyed my interaction with the angelic escorts, I didn’t greet the idea of a return trip with any enthusiasm.

I busied myself with school and student teaching. I ate a lot of chocolate, because I’d read or imagined that it could jump-start a period. Optimistically, I wore a panty-liner each day—just in case my period arrived. One month passed, then two. Nothing. Not even any cramps.

One night I was sitting in a graduate seminar listening to a girl named Rhoda Wasserstein explain how listening to Hot 97.1 (Motto: “Blazin’ hip-hop and R&B!”) for an hour each day really helped her relate to her class of thirty-five black teenage boys, when something inside me snapped like a wishbone and I began to bleed.

It was very sudden, and there was no warning, and then just a tsunami of pain. It was electric, coursing through me as if it were a power unto itself and I merely its conduit. I felt it in my uterus, in my stomach, in my pelvis, in my quadriceps muscles. I’d had my period since I was eleven years old, and it had never just shown up unannounced like this. There were always a few days of cramps and spotting before the main event. I remembered, dimly, that my period had arrived right on time after I’d used emergency contraception for the first time, back in North Carolina.

A classmate asked if I needed help—she said I looked like I “didn’t feel so hot.” I thanked her distantly, from some faraway place where my normal, polite self had gone on vacation. Abruptly, I excused myself from class. I forgot my winter coat, but no one noticed until later.

Out in the hall, I was shocked to feel my hands begin to tingle in the telltale way that augured a panic attack. My last one had come soon after I moved to Texas, when I grew overwhelmed by the seemingly endless sky. The embarrassment of having a sky-induced panic attack was mitigated somewhat by the fact that the attack was relatively light and manageable. I popped a Xanax and took some deep breaths, and it passed. Based on the warning tremors, though, this New York City panic attack was going to be bigger. And tougher.

“No, no, no,” I whispered as I took halting, painful steps toward the bathroom. “No, no, no. It’s been over a year. You’re going on a year and a half without any. You can’t have one now. Focus on getting to the bathroom. One foot in front of the other.” I felt as if I were hip-deep in mud, so acute was the sensation of slogging through a thick, stubborn substance.

The bathroom door felt unnaturally heavy, and I leaned on it before it glided open. I was raised to avoid the handicapped stall at all costs—
What if a nice girl in a wheelchair needs to use it, and you and your perfectly healthy legs are hogging it?
—but tonight I needed it. I needed it because it was big, and because I was going to pass out unless I lay down. First, though, the toilet.

I don’t remember how much blood there was. In my memory, there is none, not even a drop or a spot. But this seems unlikely. Still, I can’t honestly say what I saw when I looked down between my legs. What I do remember is sitting on the toilet and rifling furiously through my purse, looking for the bottle of Xanax I always carried with me, like a talisman. I used it so rarely that the bottle always expired months before I emptied it, but I liked knowing it was always there.

Except that tonight it wasn’t.

I dumped my purse upside down on the tile floor. Some loose change rolled into the next stall; a pen from my local bank branch skittered toward the sink. My wallet flopped open. But there was no familiar orange bottle with the white top.

There’s really no convenient time for agoraphobia to flare up, but flare up it did, borne on the back of a rip-roaring panic attack, four floors up in an old stone building at the corner of West 120th Street and Broadway.

Fuck fuck fuck.

You know you’re in a bad way when the thought of lying on a dirty public bathroom floor seems perfectly acceptable. You’re in an even worse way when you curl up beside the public toilet and start to cry.

What do you do? Do you yell for help? Do you stay on the tile floor with the tampon wrappers and the stray pubes and the dirt from two hundred New York City shoes and mewl like a kitten? Can you survive there? How long until someone discovers you and tries to make you leave, without understanding that you really and truly can’t go?

And what if you get the courage to get out of there? Do you get up, take the creaking elevator down to the ground floor, and ask the security guard to call for an ambulance, even though St. Luke’s is only a few blocks away? Do you go home and wait it out? What if you don’t even know what
It
is?

I had to leave. It was never going to get better unless I left. But what if
It
didn’t get better? What if leaving made
It
worse? I wanted to stay there for a while, like forever, and maybe die on the floor, or pass out. Maybe I could pass out from the pain and someone would find me and I would wake up hours later in a lovely private hospital room or in my bedroom at home or in some beautiful safe rehab facility somewhere, a home for well-intentioned but slatternly young public school teachers.

Giving up seemed like such a nice idea.

Then came another stab ripping through my body. It was so jolting and so raw that I cried out. And that is when from the depths of my soul, like an irradiated plant-human hybrid emerging from a toxic swamp, came a voice I had locked away in a cage built out of literature courses and wry detachment and books recommended on NPR. It said, “
Madonna mia,
you did not move to Manhattan to sit and cry on a dirty friggin’ ladies’ room floor. Get the fuck up. Splash some water on that hair and scrunch it, it looks like bullshit. It’s like you got
agita,
just . . . in the front.” And somehow, for just a moment, I caught the faint scent of cannoli. (Look, we can’t all have madeleines.)

I let the pain propel me from lying on the floor to sitting up and then, gingerly, to standing.

I focused on each step. I talked myself through the motion, the way I’d done walking meditation back at my parents’ house in Jersey. Heel rolling to toe, heel rolling to toe, step, step, breathe. Every few steps, I had to stop and lean on something for support—first, the bathroom door, then the elevator wall, then a marble pillar in the hall, then a garbage can near the main entrance, then a utility pole outside in the icy rain. It was cold and I wore a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans. I got soaked. But I kept going, from one buoy to another, until I reached the corner of West 120th and Amsterdam, where I hailed a cab.

“Columbus and . . . and . . .” I groaned a little as another wave of pain churned through my innards.

We just sat there, and the car didn’t move.

“Are you . . . okay?” the driver asked, craning his neck around to look at me worriedly.

“No sir,” I said, with effort. “Sick.”

“You make . . . a vomit?” He mimed puking.

“No, no, not that kind of sick.”

“I pull over, you make vomit, we keep go.”

“I
promise
I don’t have to vomit.”

“Vomit so hard to get out of seats. Gets stuck in seat belts. I clean with toothbrush, last time.”

“I have cramps!” I said loudly. “I have really bad cramps! And I need to go home now!”

“Stomach?” he said. “No vomit in my cab.”

“Woman’s problems!” I said with a sob. “I am having woman’s problems. Female troubles.” I pointed, for emphasis.

“Ohhhh, baby,” he said, nodding sympathetically.

Now New York is full of folks from all around the world, many of whom do not speak or understand English. But a language barrier was not our problem. I was stuck in a car with a man who was perfectly capable of understanding me. He simply wasn’t
listening.
And because I had been in similar situations with past boyfriends, I knew it was time to take the very direct approach.