The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets (18 page)

I begged and manipulated James for his brother’s address. He refused and spoke in thick condescension.

“I really have to say here, Ida, I still agree with Jackson that it’s better if you two don’t talk. I am sorry, but no. No can do. Nope.”

On my second try, he was just as short but slightly more kind, had forgotten how much he was supposed to hate me as per his brother’s instructions, and I played it for everything it was worth.

“How you doing tonight, kid?” he asked, and I let him call me kid; being the needy versus the needed was essential.

“Oh, you know,” I said and composed a self-aware titter, “it goes up and down. But I’m trying to think of other things? And let myself feel but not
sit
in it?”

“That’s good. That’s real good.”

“Yeah! And I even started a little garden on the fire escape today.”

I was lying through my teeth. There was absolutely no happy-go-lucky gardening going on, no brightening at the thought of readily available fresh rosemary.

“All good things,” he said.

I hedged my bets and let him talk about himself for a while, resolved to let it wait.

On the third try, I embarrassed even myself with insipid, upbeat blather that filled the telephone lines until they could barely stand it, and without taking a breath posed the question again. I used my very best manipulative lilt, stressed that he really could probably use the money, considering he was starting his life over, that this wasn’t at all about making contact with him.

“You know,” I posed, tried to imbue my voice with all the begrudged wisdom I could, “despite everything, I still care about him. He did what he felt he had to do.”

It was an evil game I was playing, outsmarting James, taking advantage of someone who couldn’t help but bow to our history. Despite years, despite so many divergences, I was still the older girl from down the street who held his head while he vomited after too many popsicles and so couldn’t tell his mother he was ill, still the girl who slept in her underwear on the floor five feet from him for years
after society deemed it permissible because I was, after all, essentially his sister. Still the owner of the first pair of breasts he ever saw in person, when Jackson and I broke into the high school pool and swam naked and kissed naked and did other things naked while James sat on the bleachers silent and sullen and clothed.

We were family, and though the person who mattered most was far away in another city and had forgotten, I had won. James agreed to give me his brother’s address as long as I promised to send the check and only the check.

J
ackson returned the check and I sent it back and he returned it and I sent it back and it went on for nearly a month. It felt nearly like flirting, the interval between its return becoming shorter and shorter until the fourth week, when I waited to spring with my supply of stamps and envelopes and it never came. It was supposed to feel like winning, but didn’t, and though I’d searched each envelope he’d returned for any sign of him and never found anything, when they stopped appearing through the brass slot and falling onto the crooked floors that had been ours, I wished I had searched harder, was sure I had missed something. When my father called and I told him with a pathetic giggle of our exchange, he danced deftly around the topic.

T
he plus or minus sign is supposed to appear within two minutes, but on all three the former appeared immediately.

There was absolutely no question of “keeping it”—as if it were something found—but still, I mentally drew Punnett squares like in high school biology class, remembered that blue eyes like mine are a recessive trait, as is my widow’s peak. The nausea not just in the mornings. The constant glances into mirrors and the windows of trains, begging they forgive my vanity, silently explaining it’s not just me I’m looking at or for, that I should have paid for three tickets.

I wanted to tell everyone, wanted to tell no one. I saw pregnant women and wanted to say
I’m seven weeks
, wanted to glow with them and not disclose that seven would not turn to eight. The dreaminess, the pernicious hunger. My hand wandering onto my abdomen without my permission, every gesture an apology.

The day before the clinic I woke early, took half of Jackson to a museum and showed him—I was sure it was a him—my favorite Rauschenberg and stood there twenty minutes so that he would remember. I splurged on fine coffee, sparkling water from France, fresh-squeezed orange juice thick with pulp. The sun was out for the first time in weeks so we headed to a roof garden with a view of the water and I read poems and stories that I hoped would help him to understand what it is I was saving him from. At seven weeks, his lungs and liver and ears and mouth were being formed, and his heart, beating with one chamber, would soon have formed a dividing wall. Since his couldn’t, I swore to form divisions in my own.

The terms they use at the clinic versus the ones they must use with happy couples at the regular doctor’s:
I see the pregnancy
, said a nurse named Viv, not
I see the baby
. I asked to see and collapsed into sobs but still not letting her turn the screen away. Using the scratchy paper draped over my naked bottom half to wipe my face. I remembered hearing how abortion clinics in the Midwest are required to show the sonogram, that a significant number of children are born because of this.

Viv asked after my support system, which really meant: and what about the father?

“Oh, he’s been great,” I lied, shocked at myself. “We’re both just real sad we can’t keep it, but our financial situation—you know.”

Viv didn’t believe me, but she nodded, smiled wide and long.

I chose the at-home option, because three to five minutes under anesthesia just didn’t seem like enough suffering. The literature warned that some blood clots could be as big as lemons or oranges, and I couldn’t help but think that fruit seemed a malicious analogy.

The painkillers did not help so much as abbreviate the wincing into smaller, simpler blocks. Despite precautions, the sheets were left stained; I disposed of them the next day and slept on the bare pilled mattress for nearly a month. I didn’t tell anyone and simply stopped going to work, because the thought of nannying someone else’s child seemed as impossible as time travel. The family left increasingly angry, then panicked voice mails. Sometimes I didn’t hear the phone and sometimes I did, in which case I would watch it light up and vibrate with wonder. That the family I had worked for before—all things now categorized as before and after—still existed, still managed to force Brie and apple and candied walnut salads into their children’s mouths before rushing out of their multimillion-dollar home, was hard to believe.

P
aul forced his way in some six days or two weeks later and found me on the stained mattress watching television about the bottom of the ocean. I offered him something to drink and realized that all I had was long-expired soy milk (Jackson’s) and a bottle of apple juice that had begun to ferment. I held it to the light and tilted it wistfully, watched it unsettle; it made me happy, in a small way, to see something change by my own hand, to observe another form rotting quietly.

When I returned, Paul was sitting on the bed—it felt wrong to see him sitting so casually on the physical space where I’d lost the last of Jackson and me—sorting through the pile of pamphlets and pill bottles I hadn’t bothered to move.

“Jesus, Ida,” he said. “Jesus Jesus Jesus.” He looked down at where he sat, at the deep brown-and-red stain, and adjusted himself so that no part of his body touched it. He saw my face and froze.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just—”

•  •  •

I don’t know how he managed to reach him, but he must have told Jackson, because shortly after the checks started coming; they bore no personal note, and absurd amounts of money. I called James, who confirmed that their grandfather, an oil-guy Texan they’d met twice who taught his dog to bark at the word “Democrat” and had never gotten along with his son and their father, had finally bit the old bullet and they’d both received enough money to last quite some time.

I
t’s too bad what I did to Paul. It’s also too bad this is the best way I have of expressing it, and funny because I imagine that this is the way Jackson describes the way he treated me, artfully deflecting any blame: “It’s too bad what happened with Ida.” Too bad refers to that which was unavoidable in the wake of something greater or more important. It’s too bad what I did to Paul, though in those months it grew to be a kind of playful diversion, testing the limits of manipulation possible through the arch of my back, the jut of my hipbones, a few words in the right places.

Paul clung even more heavily after the abortion and suggested in small ways how that particular expression of my vulnerability had begun to turn his feelings of friendship slowly into lust. He encouraged my every pathetic triumph and rewarded me with small tokens; whether I actively accepted them didn’t matter. He was pleased when I showered, tousled my wet hair and complimented my scent;
he laughed loud and long when I made even the smallest, darkest joke; he praised the small herb garden on the fire escape (that I grew out of guilt for lying to James) and brought expensive fertilizers. It should also be said that he made his presence dependable when there were no small triumphs, when I began to revert to silence and starvation, and I began to rely on it. He was the only one who gave me permission. Instead of suffering alone, I let Paul come over and took pleasure in sending cruel words out of my mouth knowing there would be no consequences. Though I had, in a sense, grown to love them, these things I made, I forced him to watch while I hurled the potted plants off of the balcony and enjoyed his small moans.

He very nearly almost won. Somewhere in between the moments of the small triumphs and the fits, he nudged his way in. He made me smile. He showed up with Thai food and comforts and curiosities: an old cowboy belt buckle that concealed a fine silver lighter, sheets of luxuriously high thread counts, a bathrobe with deep pockets, etchings of various types of octopi.