1936

Elsie’s sisters have never let her down before, it’s a strange feeling.  Maybe let her down isn’t quite fair.  It’s more like they’ve confounded her.  Yes, their inability to give her a solution to her predicament is confounding. 

    Being so close in age, Elsie’s always felt as though the three of them have experienced life as almost one person:  confirmation using the same white dress three years in a row (with minor alterations); hired at the handbag factory, first Marion, then Elsie, then Grace; marriage one, two, three—again, all using the same wedding dress; and the babies—there were so many, so soon.  They all shared the one laundry line in back of Marion’s house who lived on the 1st floor, Grace on the 2nd, and Elsie next door; the little shirts, trousers, tiny dresses and diapers were worn by all the children willy-nilly.

    Due to their closeness, they’d not needed outside friends, so when Elsie asks them where she should go to end her fifth pregnancy, her sisters look up at her blankly where they sit at Grace’s kitchen table peeling carrots and potatoes for a beef stew.  They haven’t the slightest clue.

    Up until a year ago, Elsie’s husband had been a bachelor, and now here he is a married man with four children.  He and Elsie had met at Coney Island, and when he came calling the first time, he asked who the three little boys in the backyard belonged to.  Elsie lied and said they were Marion’s, not wanting to scare him off with the news she’d been married before–the proof was right outside the window playing cowboys and Indians.  After the wedding, she’d set him straight and he’d taken it in stride (it helped being a drinking man).  A daughter had come along that very first year.  Not wanting to press her luck with another child so soon, Elsie’s come around to some belated family planning.

    In the end, it’s Marion who comes through, handing Elsie a folded piece of paper with a stranger’s handwriting of an address, along with a date and time.  “It’s five bucks,” Marion adds.

    Marion’s done this when Grace, the better Catholic of the three of them isn’t around, and Elsie feels a pang of sadness at causing a rift in the sisterly trinity. 

    On the appointed day, Elsie hotfoots it down the sidewalk on a street of modest two-family homes, checking house numbers.  In her apron pocket (she takes off her apron only to go to bed) is the address Marion’s given her, her housekey, and a $5 bill.  She finds the correct number, and raps the door knocker.  From inside she hears feet approaching, and when the door opens, she’s swiftly ushered into a parlor with a newish-looking sea-green rag rug, with brown speckles.  Fancy, thinks Elsie.  She’s seen this woman around the neighborhood–Armenian she’s said to be.  A nice woman with a respectable family, three kids total.  Boy, you never can tell who does what for a buck.  As the woman leads her to a small side room, Elsie goes past a hutch with two shelves of tea-cups, each cup and saucer unique, and displayed as decoration.  Imagine that:  tea-cups just for looking at!

    In the smaller room she’s been lead to, there is a divan and a single straight-back chair on which she’s told to place her drawers and her apron, and then to hike up her housedress and lie down.   

    The woman doesn’t waste time, fiddles around up there and confirms what Elsie already knows:  she’s perhaps waited a bit longer than she should have.  But the woman gets to work anyway while Elsie regards the strange sight of her apron hanging over the back of the chair, it’s one side sagging due to the weight of her house key.  When she’d bought it at Woolworth’s, it’d been yellow with perky pink ruffles.  Now, it’s a uniformly faded white, the ruffles reduced to limp lumps.  This is when they’re good, this is exactly how she likes them, when they’re at their most worn-in and comfy.  Her reverie is cut short by someone yelping loudly and it takes her a moment to realize it was own self.  She welcomes the pain as evidence that she’s gotten what she came for.  The woman finishes up and tells her to go home.  She assures Elsie it will expel.

    Later that evening, it does.

    In time, Elsie will give birth to two more daughters, completing her family.  Years later, she’ll remark to Marion, “I looked in the toilet and saw its little thing.  I felt bad–I never had no boys by him.”

1970

Elsie couldn’t come to help her daughter Carol out like usual.  Carol’s just had a new baby via C-section, and is laid up on the den couch with a bag of Ruffles potato chips.  It falls to Lynn, the eldest of Carol’s six children, to carry her new brother up the stairs.  He was born two days ago, and this is his first night in his new home.  He was a big one, over nine pounds, which was the excuse given for the C-section, although Carol had never needed one for the other five.  I just want it out!  Lynn had overheard her telling someone on the phone.  I’m so sick and tired of being nine months pregnant in August, the heat is killing me!  He hadn’t been due for another two whole weeks.  Lynn reads the horoscope section in the daily paper each day along with Ann Landers’ advice column.  She wonders if being forced out ahead of time will alter his destiny, now that he’s a Leo instead of a Virgo, never mind all those rising moons and sun signs.  Lynn wishes she wasn’t having to tend to this newborn, but no one else seemed to be doing anything about him, so here she is.  Lynn wishes he hadn’t been born.  And he wouldn’t have been, Lynn thinks, if her mother had stuck to her guns.

A year and a half ago, Lynn had awakened early one morning to her mother’s voice rising in distress from the breakfast counter downstairs as she sobbed to Lynn’s father, “I CAN’T HAVE SIX KIDS!”

    Carol had cried and cursed her fuckface OB/GYN whom she said laughed when she asked if there was ‘something he could do’.  She imitated his condescending tone of voice Oh, Mrs. Johnson… heh heh heh… noooo.  Her husband spoke in a low, reassuring tone which only enraged her, I’M THE ONE’S GONNA HAVE TO HAVE IT, GODDAMNIT!

    The histrionics continued, and the kids were afraid to come down the stairs.  Lynn had been worried they might miss the school bus.

In the end, Carol found a neighbor who’d had an abortion in New York City from a bona fide Park Avenue OB/GYN, and this woman had made the call for Carol, acting as the word-of-mouth referral.  All it took, then, was an early morning drive from New Jersey to arrive pre-office hours, and $1,000 cash.  Lynn overheard that getting there was a nightmare.  Even though Carol and her husband had always lived in New Jersey, never more than an hour’s drive to the city, neither of them had ever gone there before, so when they came out of the Lincoln Tunnel and took a southbound lane instead of a northbound, it almost made them miss the appointment.

    Afterwards, Lynn heard her mother on the phone with a florist ordering a bouquet of flowers to be sent to the neighbor.

What happened next is something Lynn can only chalk up to her mother’s lapsed Catholicism:  to atone for her sin, Carol became pregnant by the year’s end with her sixth child.  Lynn wondered if her mother was so simple-minded that she thought she was replacing the potential person she aborted.

Lynn and the replacement baby enter his room that until recently was the bedroom of her two younger brothers, who’ve been moved to a partially finished, overly-damp basement space that has no bathroom, and will need a dehumidifier running at all times.  This house is bursting with people, Lynn thinks.  Goddamn it.  Just when I thought it was over, she has to have another one.  She’d spooned jarred food into her two sisters’ mouths and wiped their behinds when they’d come along, and these days, she picks up the slack when Carol needs help around the house, and Carol needs a lot of it.  She’s regarded as a good little mother’s helper by friends of the family, and relatives.  “How lucky your first was a girl!” they chime. 

    If anyone were to ask Lynn about it, she would say that she is unpaid live-in help at best, slave labor at worst.  She starts high school in about a month, and she’s thought of joining a sports team at school so she can stay late for the practices and games just to get a break.  Lynn is unimpressed and perplexed by her mother.  Carol has never even seemed to like having babies, and is unmotherly with everything connected to raising them.  Except for that one afternoon long ago when the three eldest of them were five, four and three.  Lynn remembers Carol calling them to come hear her read something aloud, which she’d never done before, and they’d been treated to “The Owl and the Pussycat” who went to sea, in a beautiful pea-green boat.  After Carol had read the part about the Piggy-wig with a ring at the end of his nose, his nose, his nose, they’d returned to the swing set, feeling ennobled.  But Carol soon called them back:  she hadn’t turned the page, so hadn’t realized there was the last one third of the funny nonsense poem to go.  Oh, what a treat, a bit more!  “Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling your ring?”  Said the Piggy, “I will.”  There’s that Piggy-wig again!  PIGGY-WIG!  They couldn’t stop laughing. 

Standing over the bassinette, Lynn sees that although there’s a sheet, there’s no baby blanket.  It’d been a sweltering summer day, so he’d been brought home practically naked in just a diaper and a too-tiny tee-shirt that has ridden up his tummy, exposing the dried bloody stub of his umbilical cord.  Yuck.  As Lynn lugs him to the hall closet for a towel to cover him, she wonders if anyone will be reading The Owl and the Pussy Cat to this one.  They took some honey and plenty of money wrapped up in a five pound note.  What next?  Oh, yeah, the owl and the pussycat get married.  By a turkey, that’s right.  Obviously the owl and pussycat can’t mate, there must be some scientific term for interspecies sex–or rather, the inability.  Well, good for them! Lynn thinks.  No little owl-cats, or whatever they’d be called.  Not like these men and women so keen on making more of themselves. 

    Listening to the other sounds of the household downstairs, nothing seems any different than usual, like a new person didn’t just move in for the next 18 years.  Placing the newborn on its back in the bassinette that’s been brought down yet again from the attic, the baby lists its face towards her, although Lynn knows it probably can’t make out people yet.  Don’t look at me, don’t need me, she silently pleads to it.  It’s so looking for someone though, and it’s so, very, excruciatingly needy; his little legs and arms pump fists and feet into the air as he attempts to grow and become one of them.  The best thing Lynn can think of is to croon to him the last lines of the nonsense poem:

    And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

    They danced by the light of the moon,

           The moon,

           The moon,

    They danced by the light of the moon.

1981

What was the date of her last fucking period?!  Lynn’s been asked this numerous times since the pregnancy test.   Anyway, her period’s not come again, which is why she’s now sitting in a circle of women in this Mid-town abortion clinic prior to the procedures they will all have by lunchtime.  Dressed alike in blue examination gowns and plastic ID wrist bracelets, they sit on hard plastic chairs on this overcast day in mid-September; weak light makes its way through the slats of thin metal blinds, along with the noises of the city carrying on its business ten floors below.

    A kind-eyed woman leads them in the obligatory pre-op discussion about birth control, itemizing the various methods and giving a brief explanation of each.  One woman in the seated circle of patients is clearly not playing with a full deck and simply begins talking.  “Oh, my God, when the baby comes out, they lay it across your stomach, all wet and warm, and oh, my God, there not a better feeling in the whole world!  Yup!  You just feel such LOVE!  Such–”

    “Yes, Anita,” says the kind-eyed woman, “but right now we’re–“

    “Right across your belly!  You’re bonded INSTANTLY, and  it SMELLS SO AMAZING!”

    Anita continues on like this until she runs out of gas.  The others in the circle are all very silent, very still, and staring at the floor.  No one wants to be here, and this is the last thing they want to be hearing.

    Lynn tries to distract herself with recalling the date of her last period, and she still can’t remember.  Forms for them to sign are now being passed around on plastic clipboards, and she actually encounters something in the fine print that’s worse than Anita’s outburst:  by signing the agreement allowing the women’s center to provide her an abortion, she agrees that any fetal tissue may be used for medical research.  This clause bothers her a lot.  And worse, she feels protective.  Her brain feels like it’s starting to come apart, her resolve dissolving.  She maintains control of herself by signing her signature at the bottom of the form and slipping a check for $160 into the clip at the top.

    On the operating table before the anesthesia is administered, she’s again asked the date of her last period.  And again, for the life of her, she simply can’t remember.  It irks her that she wants her mother whom she’s never been close to, and can’t stand to be around.  Does she want Carol because it’d actually help to have her there, or do all women instinctively want their mothers at such times?  She doesn’t know.  It annoys her even more, though, to think of the married man with four children who’d impregnated her.  Whatever had she been thinking of, getting involved with him?   

    Expecting the procedure to finally begin, she’s surprised that she’s first subjected to an internal exam.  It’s uncomfortable:  the doctor’s one hand deep inside her, the other probing the sturdy mass from the outside.  Lynn wants to scream with rage.  The doctor withdraws his gloved hand, seemingly satisfied with what he’s found.  The anesthesiologist then places a mask over her nose and mouth and instructs her to count backwards from 100.  Just before she hits 95, the final number she mumbles before she’s unconscious, the date of her last period comes to her with the clarity and brevity of a gunshot:  July 27th.

2021

Alicia can’t believe the timing:  she’s gotten knocked up—a term her mother Lynn uses—after abortion is no longer legal in Texas.  She’s gay, for Christ’s sake.  She wonders if she’d unconsciously supposed that being a lesbian was a form of birth control.  Well, yes, if she hadn’t strayed from her preferred gender, but she had.  She’s nauseated just thinking of that night—the bonfire, the booze—but thankful that the lanky dude with the twang and large hands had been from out-of-state; at least she won’t have to deal with that.

    Her first visit to the university health center was to confirm what she already knew and to see what her options were, but the place was chaotic as staff tried to cope with the recent anti-abortion legislation, and she ended up leaving.  Returning the next day found things no better:  the best she could hope for was a ride in a van maybe at the end of the week to New Mexico with “a couple of other gals in the same fix” to begin the process all over again.  When she calms down and comes to her senses, she calls her Aunt Gloria in Manhattan.  By that evening she’s sitting in a bistro on Amsterdam Avenue, and at 8:30 the following morning she’s at Gloria’s gynecologist’s office getting the lowdown on the abortion pills she’s been prescribed.  Alicia is weepy at the ease of it all.  Gloria’s gynecologist is also in Gloria’s book club, and the two of them are eager to help.  In the office, staff reassure her they’re committed to caring for any more abortion refugees that might head their way.

    Her mother, Lynn, in upstate New York, wants to come visit, but they both demur at the last minute.  They’ll see each other at Thanksgiving.  Alicia hadn’t called her mother first; as supportive as Lynn would’ve been, Alicia would have felt infantilized at having to return home for something she should’ve been able to handle on her own, BUT THAT’S NOT ALLOWED ANYMORE.  At least not in Texas.  When Alicia had told Lynn why she was at Gloria’s, there’d been a pause; Alicia’s been out to her family since she was 16.  She’s in good hands with her aunt, though.  She and Alicia have superb Thai takeout, watch cable tv shows, and go for a long walk in Riverside Park.  They don’t dwell on the politics of her adopted state of Texas, and Alicia hears her aunt forestalling friends on the phone who want to know what they can do to help.

    The misoprostol efficiently finishes what the mifepristone’s begun, and as Alicia’s anxious to get home, she books herself a flight back to Austin the next day.  Her relief is gargantuan, and she sleeps deeply on the plane which she’s never able to do.  She’s refreshed and buoyant as she walks through the terminal:  mission accomplished.  But the feeling is short-lived.  She finds herself wondering what she’s doing there.  She’d had a number of other grad school acceptances in other states, but she’d self-imposed a corrective on her Manhattan-centric upbringing by choosing Texas.  She knows now she’s paid a price for that, so she reminds herself I’m not from here, I don’t have to stay.  It isn’t seeing the cowboy boots and hats, or hearing the confident twang of the airport’s inhabitants; nor is it the chagrin of finding herself in this predicament in the first place; it’s not even the fury of having others decide what she can, and can’t do with her body.   It’s something else:  the facts of her family’s abortion history have dribbled down to her, anecdotally.  She’d never gotten to meet Elsie, but she recalls a photo of her at a kitchen table:  plump, with an open, broad face, wearing a faded apron.  She thinks of her grandmother Carol, and her mother Lynn.  It’s messy, it’s complicated, and has been for a long time, she thinks.  But they all raised families nonetheless; families that took the shapes they did because they chose when they wanted to have children.  Would she, Alicia, even be here now if Lynn hadn’t terminated her first pregnancy?  The thought’s never occurred to her before, and the abruptness of it causes her to step out of the stream of passengers she was barreling along with, and pause near a wall.  She adjusts her backpack, her breath coming swiftly, her heart softly pounding in her chest; her heartbeat, which owed its very existence to the family tradition.