Range of Light (10 page)

We decided to be sensible
and not marry until after graduation. The first letter about our engagement was to Kath. Then I wrote my family. I mailed both letters the same day because Mother would be livid if someone outside the family heard before she did. How would she know with Kath living ninety miles north in Davis? You didn't take chances with Mother's radar. Kath would have to write now. I hadn't received a thank-you for the tartan hat, let alone a present for myself, and I had been excited about finding a plaid from the Shetlands, where there was so much Norse influence. I wrote Kath with trepidation and an enthusiastic invitation to be my maid of honor.

Mother wrote back immediately with enthused suggestions about flowers and dresses. Sari sent a funny congratulations card. With a short P.S. about how she had dropped out of school for the term. Father wrote an aerogram declaring the whole Ward clan had toasted Lou and me at dinner the night before. I was dubious about my parents getting along better, but truly, I couldn't imagine them divorced. Finally, in mid-February, there was a birthday card from Kath saying she was sorry she had been out of touch. No mention of Tom. She would explain everything in the summer. And she was happy I was happy.

That was it? Not “terrific … congratulations … are you scared? … wow! … are you sure? … I'd love to be your maid of honor.” She was happy I was happy. I felt a pang, imagining the last real scene of our friendship had been that day she leaned against the garage door, waiting for my family to pile into the loathsome Lincoln. No, I was exaggerating. We would sort things out this summer. Then next summer, after graduation, after the wedding, Lou and I would be settling into a small apartment near the Pacific School of Religion, where he would do graduate work. Divinity school would protect him from the draft, and he was now thinking of an academic career in religious studies. He also talked about Yale's program but knew I preferred California. Our small apartment wouldn't be too far from Kath, who would be finished with Davis by that time and living back in the Bay Area. Soon everything would fit back together.

I stared at the coffin,
wondering if Sari's fragile body were finally relaxed. Now that she had everyone's attention. Now that it was too late. Mother and Father looked expectant, as if they were waiting for our imp to pop open the box top. A very, very hot September afternoon in 1976. The day before Sari was to begin graduate work in music, Mother had remarked this morning, momentarily emerging from her fog. Sari had finally finished college and was on her way to a career. I was sweating in my black sheath, something I had originally bought for a college reception. Sari, of all people, would have appreciated my resourcefulness. The day was macabre: the heat, the birds, the cascades of nauseatingly sweet wreaths sent by friends of the family and my father's colleagues. Sari, in her own ironic way, would have laughed at the insistent cheerfulness of the afternoon, which provided her this perfect off-center exit.

Lou's solid fingers squeezed my hand, helping me surface from numb grief. What would I have done without him? No one else to talk to, really. Mother was washed away on tranks and Father was furiously obsessed with that terrible article “Doctor's Daughter Takes Life”—as if it had been his fault, as if his being a physician had had anything to do with it.

Paula and Nancy had heard about Sari's death from their families. Both wrote, apologizing that they couldn't get away from their jobs in Tucson and Los Angeles, sending love and concern. But nothing from Kath. Not a card, a note, a call. This was the end, I decided. It had been painful enough to have her ignore the wedding, but any decent friend would acknowledge the loss of my sister. I understood that part of my mourning today was for Kath. Why had I placed such naive faith in friendship? I should have spent more time with Sari than with her. After all, what bond did Kath and I share? There had been nothing between us for years now, except an occasional Christmas card when one of us got the motivation to reach out. So we had gone to school together for eight years. So we had spent three quarters of our adolescence on the telephone confiding about sex, Milton, deodorant, socialism. We had simply been friends. We didn't owe one another anything. The nature of friendship was that it passed.

Standing in the graveyard now, I thought how I should have put all those years into being a better friend to Sari. Was her body really in that coffin? Wasn't there
anything
I could do—now, then—to bring her back? Perhaps if I had been more available to her when we had been kids, she would have been happier. However, I had been too busy planning my own escape from the liquid pain in Mother's eyes and Father's brusque, dutiful parenting. What was wrong with me? Why was I so terrified? I hadn't been physically battered as a child, or sexually molested. I had been raised in middle-class, upper-middle-class comfort, with all privileges attached: music lessons, European travel, theater tickets, nice clothes. And yet as I grew up, home felt more and more dangerous and I came to see my parents' marriage as a zone of ice, the glacier moving slowly, millimeter by indiscernible millimeter, unstoppably toward my heart. I couldn't calculate the window of escape, but I realized that one day—if I did not get out, really out, far away for long periods of time—one day I would find myself fossilized in the ice as well. And so we never returned to California for graduate school. I had visited only three times in the seven years since our wedding. This year, I had been planning a Christmas trip.

As they lowered the coffin, I looked away. Once again: the comforting pressure of Lou's large hand. I was thankful for this, and yet gratitude was mixed with strange resentment—as if Lou stood between me and Sari's resurrection—and, frantically, I could not stop wondering what else I could have done for her. At least once a year I invited her to Massachusetts. I had sent pictures of the cottage in Maine, offering her the place as a retreat if she wanted solitude, also inviting her to join the family there. I clipped articles about travel, courses in different parts of the country. Sari was unfailingly congenial in her responses. She never said, “get off my back” or “leave me alone.” She would send a grotesque postcard once a year, maybe even a birthday card. Today I kept thinking about her dismissive comments the summer Mother and Father were divorcing. “Don't worry about me. Live and let live. I'll be fine.” After a while, my attention did waver. With the dissertation, the academic market, the first job, the tenure-track appointment, the accumulating tenure dossier. This year I had written her just three or four times. If only I had paid more attention. If only I had been there for Sari.

Back at the house, Mother wafted through the motions beautifully—filling people's glasses, cutting ham, making coffee. Could the guests tell her dosage had been increased? She had always had such a charming, distracted air. Who would distinguish among the outlines of grief and fey sensibility and chemical affect? Certainly no one would voice any public concern. People were already tiptoeing around Father's fury with the newspaper. No one dared acknowledge—let alone discuss—Mother's addiction. Psychotropic drugs were a topic for discretion. (Was this why Kath had backed away?) You kept a family confidence unless, of course, someone were imprudent enough to kill herself. “Sarita Ward's family could not be reached for comment.”

My father chewed on his pipe, half-listening to Dr. Gorman talk about last week's hole in one. I wondered whether Father could ever again be reached for comment.

Gripped by need for Kath's voice, I suddenly dropped Lou's hand (which I had forgotten I was holding) and walked to the French doors overlooking the back garden.

“Are you OK?” He had followed me and now placed his capable palms on my tense, aching shoulders.

Lou was a gift. Warm and loving where Father was frozen in loneliness. What fortune to have this kind, intelligent, successful, loyal husband. Yet I worried, perversely, that I didn't love the man, that our life together, which had been so lucky, would not be happy. Perhaps I was incapable of happiness.

“Fine, dear. Fine. I just need a break from the community support team.”

“All right.” He patted my neck, backing away slightly. “I'll leave you. But I'll be on the couch if you need me.”

Blessedly, the kitchen was empty. I poured myself a lemonade and sat at the familiar, round oak table. Our old red phone hung by the open window, within easy reach. Lifting the receiver, I automatically dialed Kath's number. She had to be around. Paula said she had run into her on Telegraph last winter. She couldn't have dropped off the face of the earth.

“Hello.” Kath's father. His clipped, Scandinavian accent made me feel twelve and bursting at the seams again.

I should have said, “Hello, Mr. Peterson. This is Adele, Katherine's old friend. Is she there, by any chance?” But I didn't want to be humiliated by need, didn't want her to know I was looking for her until I found her. Instead, I said, “May I speak to Katherine Peterson, please?”

“She's not here,” he answered abruptly.

“Do you know where she is? Do you have another number?”

“Who is this?” He was alarmed. “Who wants to know this?”

“I'm just trying to find her current phone number,” I said anxiously, unnerved out of all proportion by Mr. Peterson's irritation. He was a big man and could be violent. Another family secret betrayed.

“She is not here. She has done nothing wrong. Leave her alone. And stop calling this number.” He slammed down the phone.

I sat there stunned. Mother entered the kitchen, tears filling her eyes, yet smiling widely. “It's such a lovely party, don't you think, Sari?”

“Mother,” I whispered, conducting her to a seat and exchanging her wineglass for my own half-finished lemonade. “Sit right here, Mother, and have something cool to drink.”

“Yes, a lovely reception.” Mother sat straight in the chair, sipping lemonade. “Hmmmm. That tastes good. Really, it's rather hot for June, don't you think?”

Chapter Eleven

Kath

1968 / Los Angeles

I LAY ON THE
narrow
bed
between the crisp, white sheets inspecting the misspelled “Catherine” on my wristband and speculating about other mistakes the hospital would make. I should be studying. Otherwise, I would never catch up. Stupid to lie here and obsess. Yes, I told myself again and again, I was doing the right thing. Slowly, inevitably, the late afternoon dragged on, punctuated by buzzers and bells and beeps. Were all hospitals so noisy? This was no place for a rest cure. Yet there was something calming about Dr. Perry telling me my “job was to go to bed.” To sleep. Ultimately to mend, to be myself, just myself again. The textbooks were piled on the bedside table. An hour ago I had been determined not to waste time. However, now I allowed myself stillness. I felt safer here than I had for months, years.

I was twenty-one, and pregnant. The last part was highly unlikely because, as the gynecologist declared, the loop was almost foolproof. Ninety-five percent guaranteed. How often did you get a promise like that? As he said when he inserted it five months before, the IUD was as safe as the pill and healthier for someone like me, who was throwing up even on the lowest hormone combo. Highly unlikely to conceive on the IUD. After his first checkup, he said I couldn't possibly be pregnant. Since my period was never predictable, I opted to trust medical science. But the next month he shrugged, declaring me the exception. Well, what was he going to do? I asked, thinking of customers who came back to Dad when their cars continued to make little noises. How could he fix me? The doctor shook his head sadly. It was out of his hands. Abortion was illegal in California. Besides, he had philosophical objections. He wished me luck.

Now, from the next room, a baby began to cry. Down the hall a woman starting labor roared as if from inside a volcano. I didn't know which one of these sounds frightened me more. A fifty-dollar IUD—the cost of which meant skipping lunch all summer—a shake of his sad, graying head and that was that. Problem was, I understood his philosophy. Abortion was a sin, maybe not murder, but a sin. Still, I had to commit this sin. I couldn't produce a child. What chance was there for a kid whose mother was a student and whose father was trudging through swamps in Vietnam? Giving birth right now was not responsible behavior. No abortions at Student Health Services. No referrals. The antiseptic smells here unsettled me. Everything was artificial, like life on a spaceship: white, spare, painfully clean.

Sitting up on the bed, I reached for my history book. With pillows plumped against my back, this would be the perfect spot to study. When the nurse placed me in the room, she raised her eyebrows at the pads and books. “Thought we might bore you?” I shrugged. Clearly she didn't know the pressures of making decent grades while holding down a job. If I lost pace now, I could flunk. Already, I was far behind in history. I needed to remind myself what was real. My courses were real. My job at the library. My love for Tom. Our future together. This hospital jaunt was a temporary interruption.

Flipping through Richard Hofstadter, I thought how kids had transformed Martha's life. Martha loved Kirsten and Sam, of course, but so much for her ambition of opening a tailoring business. She complained she never sewed anymore unless it was to fix a hem or seam. No time to pore over patterns, to scheme about opening her own shop. Her life would never be the same again, although, she was quick to add, it was a very good life, a lucky life.

Somewhere I had read about pennyroyal and cohosh tea. One night after my roommate, Judy, had gone to bed, I went down to the laundry and drank and drank, three quarts of it. The only result was cramps, deep, painful, nagging cramps for five days. So bad that I stopped going to class and missed half my work shifts. The next week I tried hot baths, hogging the tub on my dorm floor for hours at a time, only to surface lobster red, with a couple of long-lasting, nasty burns on the insides of my thighs.

Judy grew more and more worried. But how could I talk to someone who attended mass every Sunday and didn't even approve of birth control pills? She knew something was dreadfully wrong. Not confiding in her made me feel angry—at once censored and guilty. There had to be an escape. This wasn't the right time to have a baby. Other animals had natural contraceptive reflexes to keep them from reproducing during times of drought and flood. It didn't make sense to bear a child now. I would find a way out. Women had been whispering directions to one another for centuries. My rational mind searched ahead. But lower in my body, I carried a grievous panic. Weeks passed as I tried one remedy after another. A library book suggested parsley. So I boiled up a foul brew and drank the stuff until nauseated. Next day I skipped two classes, then slept through my job. For a week I was seasick, eventually breaking out in a rash all over my breasts and shoulders. It was getting harder and harder to concentrate in class, and I was missing work hours.

This couldn't continue. Soon I would lose my job or fail my classes. I had managed to scrape up the current registration and residence hall fees, but there wasn't enough for next term. It would be embarrassing to quit school, and my parents would be mortified if I flunked.

Then one night after our shifts at the circulation desk, I let my story slip to Linda Chen. Linda phoned a friend who gave me the number of a doctor who performed abortions. “Performed”—they made it sound like a magic act. Fine, if I could be the escape artist. Dr. Harder could admit me to the hospital on a technicality—my mental health!—and it would all work out. Even though I was two and a half months pregnant, it would work out.

This was the twentieth century. I was a free woman. Tom and I would have our family—six children—when he returned from the war, when we could provide for them together.

Escape was foiled by Dr. Harder's pneumonia. My procedure was postponed. And by the time he recovered, it was too late for a D & C. For three days I camped at Linda's apartment, making expensive phone calls all over Northern California, filling a yellow legal pad with names, addresses, phone numbers. Even to save the life of the mother, Catholic hospitals wouldn't do salines. Other places were booked up.

Finally, on the fourth morning at Linda's apartment, Dr. Harder phoned with a referral to a colleague in Los Angeles. Overwhelmed with gratitude, I made the appointment before calculating expenses. Gradually, over the next day, costs came into focus: bus to L.A., hotel room for the first night—maybe the Y—hospital fees, operation, another hotel night afterward, bus back to Davis. Easily this could eat up $600. Five months' salary. Where was I going to find that?

Wide awake on the L.A. bus, I recalled a short story from one of Judy's
Mademoiselle's
last year in which a girl my age got pregnant and her mother flew her off to an English hospital. Imagine. Imagine being able to tell my Catholic mother I wanted an abortion. Imagine having family money for such travel, even if Dad weren't on workmen's comp right now. Somehow I would pay the bills. Petersons were resourceful, immigrant people. Responsibility and will were coded into my genes. In the genes of this thing, this being, growing inside me, from me, through me. No, I wouldn't think about that. Someday I'd have half a dozen children and then it would be all right.

As afternoon dimmed into evening, the hospital room filled with strange lights. The saline injection happened tomorrow morning. Tomorrow night everything would start being better. Next to my bed, red buttons winked. Blue neon glowed from the offices across the street, and yellow fluorescence seeped under the door from the hallway. Noises grew louder, too, as they do at dusk in the woods. Here the sounds were infants crying and women screaming and nurses paging doctors paging nurses over the intercom. I was lucky to be in a safe, clean hospital. I was lucky to be in a double room. Would someone else come? Would they put a delivering mother in the other bed? How would I explain my condition to her? How would I get any sleep? The voices continued to nag: About sin. About natural women. About biological destiny. I kept trying to change the station on my conscience, but the tuner wouldn't move, and I listened again and again to worry, fear, guilt. By dinnertime, there were so many babies squalling I thought my head would split.

Dr. Perry appeared at the door. Immediately firing words: “Sorry about this. Most of the D & C's are quick affairs. In and out in an afternoon. But the salines take longer. No place else to put you. Don't worry, you'll be up in a couple of days, back to ordinary life.”

I nodded, comforted that I had an ordinary life. Grateful to him. After all, I was fourteen weeks pregnant—that sounded better than three and a half months—and it was hard to find a doctor at all, let alone someone who'd accept installment payments. He'd given me sixteen months. What were a few shrieks in the night? I'd heard a lot of crying babies in my life. Planned to hear a lot more.

“You'll be fine after I perform the procedure,” he said as he walked out the door, reading the next patient's chart. “You'll be just fine, Patsy.”

I stared after Dr. Perry, tears rolling down my cheeks. It didn't matter that he got the name wrong. Who cared? It was only a procedure, a sterile, impersonal, installment plan procedure. And he was a performer.

Lying back, I closed my eyes. Alone. In and out in three days. No one except Linda, Dr. Perry and his accomplices would know. When I had recorded Linda as next of kin, the registration clerk hadn't blinked. Parental concern was the last thing I needed now. Mom and Dad thought I was on an anthropology field trip. I considered calling Paula, who had moved from the UCLA dorm to Westwood, but some part of me believed that if I didn't talk about this ordeal, I would recover faster. I'd weighed, then discarded, the idea of writing about this to Tom. He had enough to worry about. I'd tell him when he returned, sometime after the birth of our first baby. If there was anyone I wanted to talk to, it was Adele. But Adele was probably huddled in a quaint Edinburgh pub over pints of lager with new friends, telling them about her Christmas break, skiing through Switzerland with Lou. I really should have answered the last letter. Marriage. But how could I respond, with what degree of honesty? Adele was receding further and further; Radcliffe, Edinburgh, the Alps, checking every now and then to see if her anchor were still here. I had no intention of being anybody's fucking anchor.

A nurse flashed on
the
overhead light, filling the room with throbbing glare. She accompanied a woman with astonishingly long, curly, dark hair to the other bed.

“Katherine, this will be your roommate, Dacia.”

Dacia gave me a terrified nod. I wondered if I should say, “Welcome.” I recalled Judy's sign on our dorm room, my wilted parents, the excited conversation over chocolate chip cookies. How far I had come in only two years: virgin ingénue to shipwrecked whore. I knew I should at least say hello to Dacia. Instead, overcome with self-consciousness, I nodded mutely.

The nurse introduced Dacia to the toilet, the meal chart, the call button. Holding herself rigidly, Dacia listened.

Then we were alone under the whining white light.

She lay still as a corpse in the tightly sheeted bed. Her stomach didn't look large enough to contain a baby. Again, I wondered if my roommate would be a woman about to give birth. Was I a woman about to give death? I had heard there was a form of execution—death by lethal injection. I closed my eyes and listened to a baby crying in the neighboring room. Maybe they did mix birth patients with abortion patients. Why not? We had made different choices. Each of us was a certified gynecological procedure. Sensible to do all the womb jobs in one place. A gross joke, but one Adele would appreciate. Dear Adele. Damn Adele. How did I get myself into a position where the only person I could talk to was in Europe? Of course there was Tom. Six thousand miles away in the other direction.

Alone in Los Angeles these last couple of days, I'd had plenty of time to think about Tom. I wish I missed him more. For the hundredth time, I cursed myself for sleeping with him. But once he received the draft notice, I lost all resolve. I listened to the casualty statistics on Walter Cronkite. I watched the men arriving home in body bags, on stretchers, in wheelchairs. I wanted to give him a memory to take to Vietnam, and I wanted a memory to carry me through the lonely months of his absence. And my body was drawn to his with a desire that burned deeper than reason or logic or sentiment. Now I remembered those great long legs on top of me. I remembered him entering me passionately, gently. I hungered for that coming together.

“Water, Signora?” The voice startled me. “Is there water?”

“Wait a sec.” I fetched a paper cup of water from the bathroom. “There you go.”

“You are here for the baby?” Dacia looked up at me.

“To have an abortion.” I tried to sound unapologetic.

“Ah.” Dacia sat up. She studied my face, then started sobbing.

“Me also. The abortion. If ever my parents they should find out, I don't know what to do. But how can I have the baby? Me, with no husband.” She wept and wept, unable for a moment to catch her breath.

Gingerly, I perched on the bed, taking her hand. “It's all right,” I said, “plenty of women have abortions.”

“Not so many Italian women. Not in my family. Ohhhh, I am so ashamed. What choice I have?”

Sitting on the edge of her bed, my feet dangling above the shiny linoleum floor, I felt like a five-year-old psychiatrist.

“What choice I have? A baby. Imagine. Sewing ten hours a day. And a baby.”

“Right,” I said encouragingly.

“But I plan lotsa babies someday. Lotsa. With my husband. In a family. And you?”

“Maybe.” I was surprised by my reserve. Six kids. I should tell Dacia about the six kids.

“You have what kind of job?”