Choice Words Page 24

  Ann had introduced me to amphetamine samples on those long sleepy night shifts, and we crashed afterward at her bright kitchenette apartment on Cathedral Parkway, drinking black coffee and gossiping until dawn about the strange habits of head nurses, among other things.

  I called Ann at the hospital and met her after work one night. I told her I was pregnant.

  “I thought you were gay!”

  I heard the disappointed half-question in Ann’s voice, and remembered suddenly our little scene in the nurses’ pantry. But my experience with people who tried to label me was that they usually did it to either dismiss me or use me. I hadn’t even acknowledged my own sexuality yet, much less made any choices about it. I let the remark lay where Jesus flang it.

  I asked Ann to get me some Ergotrate from the pharmacy, a drug which I had heard from nurses’ talk could be used to encourage bleeding.

  “Are you crazy?” she said in horror. “You can’t mess around with that stuff, girl; it could kill you. It causes hemorrhaging. Let me see what I can find out for you.”

  “Everybody knows somebody,” Ann said. For her, it was the mother of another nurse in surgery. Very safe and clean, foolproof and cheap, she said. An induced miscarriage by Foley catheter. A homemade abortion. The narrow hard-rubber tube, used in postoperative cases to keep various body canals open, softened when sterilized. When passed through the cervix into the uterus while soft, it coiled, all fifteen inches, neatly into the womb. Once hardened, its angular turns ruptured the bloody lining and began the uterine contractions that eventually expelled the implanted fetus, along with the membrane. If it wasn’t expelled too soon. If it did not also puncture the uterus.

  The process took about fifteen hours and cost forty dollars, which was a week and a half’s pay.

  I walked over to Mrs. Muñoz’s apartment after I had finished work at Dr. Sutter’s office that afternoon. The January thaw was past, and even though it was only 1:00 p.m., the sun had no warmth. The winter grey of mid-February and the darker patches of dirty Upper East Side snow. Against my peacoat in the wind I carried a bag containing the fresh pair of rubber gloves and the new bright-red catheter Ann had taken from the hospital for me, and a sanitary pad. I had most of the contents of my last pay envelope, plus the five dollars Ann had lent me.

  “Darling, take off your skirt and panties now while I boil this.” Mrs. Muñoz took the catheter from the bag and poured boiling water from a kettle over it and into a shallow basin. I sat curled around myself on the edge of her broad bed, embarrassed by my half-nakedness before this stranger. She pulled on the thin rubber gloves, and setting the basin upon the table, looked over to where I was perched in the corner of the neat, shabby room.

  “Lie down, lie down. You scared, huh?” She eyed me from under the clean white kerchief that completely covered her small head. I could not see her hair, and could not tell from her sharp-featured, bright-eyed face how old she was, but she looked so young it surprised me that she could have a daughter old enough to be a nurse.

  “You scared? Don’t be scared, sweetheart,” she said, picking up the basin with the edge of a towel and moving it onto the other edge of the bed.

  “Now just lie back and put your legs up. Nothing to be scared of. Nothing to it—I would do it on my own daughter. Now if you was three, four months, say, it would be harder because it would take longer, see? But you not far gone. Don’t worry. Tonight, tomorrow, maybe, you hurt a little bit, like bad cramps. You get cramps?”

  I nodded, mute, my teeth clenched against the pain. But her hands were busy between my legs as she looked intently at what she was doing.

  “You take some aspirin, a little drink. Not too much though. When it’s ready, the tube comes back down and the bleeding comes with it. Then, no more baby. Next time you take better care of yourself, darling.”

  By the time Mrs. Muñoz was finished talking she had skillfully passed the long slender catheter through my cervix into my uterus. The pain had been acute but short. It lay coiled inside of me like a cruel benefactor, soon to rupture the delicate lining and wash away my worries in blood.

  Since to me all pain was beyond bearing, even this short bout seemed interminable.

  “You see, now, that’s all there is to it. That wasn’t so bad, was it?’ She patted my shuddering thigh reassuringly. “All over. Now get dressed. And wear the pad,” she cautioned, as she pulled off the rubber gloves. “You start bleeding in a couple of hours, then you lie down. Here, you want the gloves back?”

  I shook my head, and handed her the money. She thanked me. “That’s a special price because you a friend of Anna’s,” she smiled, helping me on with my coat. “By this time tomorrow, it will be all over. If you have any trouble you call me. But no trouble, just a little cramps.”

  I stopped off on West 4th Street and bought a bottle of apricot brandy for eighty-nine cents. It was the day before my eighteenth birthday and I decided to celebrate my relief. Now all I had to do was hurt.

  On the slow Saturday local back to my furnished room in Brighton Beach the cramps began, steadily increasing. Everything’s going to be all right now, I kept saying to myself as I leaned over slightly on the subway seat, if I can just get through the next day. I can do it. She said it was safe. The worst is over, and if anything goes wrong I can always go to the hospital. I’ll tell them I don’t know her name, and I was blindfolded so I couldn’t know where I was.

  I wondered how bad the pain was going to get, and that terrified me more than anything else. I did not think about how I could die from hemorrhage, or a perforated uterus. The terror was only about the pain.

  The subway car was almost empty.

  Just last spring around that same time one Saturday morning, I woke up in my mother’s house to the smell of bacon frying in the kitchen, and the abrupt realization as I opened my eyes that the dream I had been having of giving birth to a baby girl was in fact only a dream. I sat bolt upright in my bed, facing the little window onto the air shaft, and cried and cried and cried from disappointment until my mother came into the room to see what was wrong.

  The train came up out of the tunnel over the bleak edge of south Brooklyn. The Coney Island parachute jump steeple and a huge grey gas storage tank were the only breaks in the leaden skyline.

  I dared myself to feel any regrets.

  That night about 8 p.m., I was lying curled tightly on my bed, trying to distract myself from the stabbing pain in my groin by deciding whether or not I wanted to dye my hair coal black.

  I couldn’t begin to think about the risks I was running. But another piece of me was being amazed at my own daring. I had done it. Even more than my leaving home, this action which was tearing my guts apart and from which I could die except I wasn’t going to—this action was a kind of shift from safety towards self-preservation. It was a choice of pains. That’s what living was all about. I clung to that and tried to feel only proud.

  I had not given in. I had not been merely the eye on the ceiling until it was too late. They hadn’t gotten me.

  There was a tap on the alley door, and I looked out the window. My friend Blossom from school had gotten one of our old high school teachers to drive her out to see if I was “okay,” and to bring me a bottle of peach brandy for my birthday. She was one of the people I had consulted, and she wanted to have nothing to do with an abortion, saying I should have the baby. I didn’t bother to tell her Black babies were not adopted. They were absorbed into families, abandoned, or “given up.” But not adopted. Nonetheless I knew she was worried to have come all the way from Queens to Manhattan and then to Brighton Beach.

  I was touched.

  We only talked inconsequential things. Never a word about what was going on inside of me. Now it was my secret; the only way I could handle it was alone. I sensed they were both grateful that I did.

  “You sure you’re going to be okay?” Bloss asked. I nodded.

  Miss Burman suggested we go for a walk along the boardwalk in the crisp Febru
ary darkness. There was no moon. The walk helped a little, and so did the brandy. But when we got back to my room, I couldn’t concentrate on their conversation anymore. I was too distracted by the rage gnawing at my belly.

  “Do you want us to go?” Bloss asked with her characteristic bluntness. Miss Burman, sympathetic but austere, stood quietly in the doorway looking at my posters. I nodded at Bloss gratefully. Miss Burman lent me five dollars before she left.

  The rest of the night was an agony of padding back and forth along the length of the hallway from my bedroom to the bathroom, doubled over in pain, watching clots of blood fall out of my body into the toilet and wondering if I was all right, after all. I had never seen such huge red blobs come from me before. They scared me. I was afraid I might be bleeding to death in that community bathroom in Brighton Beach in the middle of the night of my eighteenth birthday, with a crazy old lady down the hall muttering restlessly in her sleep. But I was going to be all right. Soon it was going to be over, and I would be safe.

  I watched one greyish mucous shape disappear in the bowl, wondering if that was the embryo.

  By dawn, when I went to take some more aspirin, the catheter had worked its way out of my body. I was bleeding heavily, very heavily. But my experience in the OB wards told me that I was not hemorrhaging.

  I washed the long stiff catheter and laid it away in a drawer, after examining it carefully. This implement of my salvation was a wicked red but otherwise innocuous-looking.

  I took an amphetamine in the thin morning sun and wondered if I should spend a quarter on some coffee and a danish. I remembered I was supposed to usher at a Hunter College concert that same afternoon, for which I was to be paid ten dollars, a large sum for an afternoon’s work, and one that would enable me to repay my debts to Ann and Miss Burman.

  I made myself some sweet milky coffee and took a hot bath, even though I was bleeding. After that, the pain dimmed gradually to a dull knocking gripe.

  On a sudden whim, I got up and threw on some clothes and went out into the morning. I took the bus into Coney Island to an early-morning food shop near Nathan’s, and had myself a huge birthday breakfast, complete with french fries and an english muffin. I hadn’t had a regular meal in a restaurant for a long time. It cost almost half of Miss Burman’s five dollars, because it was kosher and expensive. And delicious. Afterward, I returned home. I lay resting upon my bed, filled with a sense of well-being and relief from pain and terror that was almost euphoric. I really was all right.

  As the morning slipped into the afternoon, I realized that I was exhausted. But the thought of making ten dollars for one afternoon’s work got me wearily up and back onto the weekend local train for the long trip to Hunter College.

  By mid-afternoon my legs were quivering. I walked up and down the aisles dully, hardly hearing the string quartet. In the last part of the concert, I went to the ladies’ room to change my Tampax and the pads I was wearing. In the stall, I was seized with a sudden wave of nausea that bent me double, and I promptly and with great force lost my $2.50-with-tip Coney Island breakfast, which I had never digested. Weakened and shivering, I sat on the stool, my head against the wall. A fit of renewed cramps swept through me so sharply that I moaned softly.

  Miz Lewis, the Black ladies’-room attendant who had known me from the bathrooms of Hunter High School, was in the back of the room in her cubby, and she had seen me come into the otherwise empty washroom.

  “Is that you, Autray, moaning like that? You all right?” I saw her low-shoed feet stop outside my stall.

  “Yes ma’am,” I gasped through the door, cursing my luck to have walked into that particular bathroom. “It’s just my period.”

  I steadied myself, and arranged my clothes. When I finally stepped out, bravely and with my head high, Miz Lewis was still standing outside, her arms folded.

  She had always maintained a steady but impersonal interest in the lives of the few Black girls at the high school, and she was a familiar face which I was glad to see when I met her in the washroom of the college in the autumn. I told her I was going to the college now, and that I had left home. Miz Lewis had raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips, shaking her grey head. “You girls sure somethin’!” she said.

  In the uncompromising harshness of the fluorescent lights, Miz Lewis gazed at me intently through her proper gold spectacles, which perched upon her broad brown nose like round antennae.

  “Girl, you sure you all right? Don’t sound all right to me.” She peered up into my face. “Sit down here a minute. You just started? You white like some other people’s child.”

  I took her seat, gratefully. “I’m all right, Miz Lewis,” I protested. “I just have bad cramps, that’s all.”

  “Jus’ cramps? That bad? Then why you come here like that today for? You ought to be home in bed, the way your eyes looking. You want some coffee, honey?” She offered me her cup.

  “Cause I need the money, Miz Lewis. I’ll be all right; I really will.” I shook my head to the coffee, and stood up. Another cramp slid up from my clenched thighs and rammed into the small of my back, but I only rested my head against the edge of the stalls. Then, taking a paper towel from the stack on the glass shelf in front of me, I wet it and wiped the cold sweat from my forehead. I wiped the rest of my face, and blotted my faded lipstick carefully. I grinned at my reflection in the mirror and at Miz Lewis standing to the side behind me, her arms still folded against her broad, short-waisted bosom. She sucked her teeth with a sharp intake of breath and sighed a long sigh.

  “Chile, why don’t you go on back home to your mama, where you belong?”

  I almost burst into tears. I felt like screaming, drowning out her plaintive, kindly, old-woman’s voice that kept pretending everything was so simple.

  “Don’t you think she’s worrying about you? Do she know you in all this trouble?”

  “I’m not in trouble, Miz Lewis. I just don’t feel well because of my period.” Turning away, I crumpled up the used towel and dropped it into the basket, and then sat down again, heavily. My legs were shockingly weak.

  “Yeah. Well.” Miz Lewis sucked her teeth again, and put her hand into her apron pocket.

  “Here,” she said pulling four dollars out of her purse. You take these and get yourself a taxi home.” She knew I lived in Brooklyn. “And you go right home, now. I’ll cross your name off the list downstairs for you. And you can pay me back when you get it.”

  I took the crumpled bills from her dark, work-wise hands. “Thanks a lot, Miz Lewis,” I said gratefully. I stood up again, this time a little more steadily. “But don’t you worry about me, this won’t last very long.” I walked shakily to the door.

  “And you put your feet up, and a cold compress on your tummy, and you stay in bed for a few days, too,” she called after me, as I made my way to the elevators to the main floor.

  I asked the cab to take me around to the alley entrance, instead of getting out on Brighton Beach Avenue. I was afraid my legs might not take me where I wanted to go. I wondered if I had almost fainted.

  Once indoors, I took three aspirin and slept for twenty-four hours.

  When I awoke Monday afternoon, the bed-sheets were stained, but my bleeding had slowed to normal and the cramps were gone.

  I wondered if I had gotten some bad food at the foodshop Sunday morning that had made me sick. Usually I never get upset stomachs, and prided myself on my cast-iron digestion. The following day, I went back to school.

  On Friday, after classes, before I went to work, I picked up my money for ushering. I sought out Miz Lewis in that auditorium washroom and paid her back her four dollars.

  “Oh, thank you, Autray,” she said, looking a little surprised.

  She folded the bills up neatly and tuck them back into the green snappurse she kept in her uniform apron pocket. “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine, Miz Lewis,” I said jauntily. “I told you I was going to be all right.”

  “You did not! You said y
ou was all right and I knew you wasn’t, so don’t tell me none of that stuff, I don’t want to hear.” Miz Lewis eyed me balefully.

  “You gon’ back home to your mama, yet?”

  THE SPRING OF LIFE

  Ann Townsend

  The newts swam agitated in the jar

  he cradled in his hands and held

  toward three girls on the bank,

  while I crouched on the hotel bathroom’s

  cold tile, bile on my tongue.

  What a terrible painting, I thought,

  then threw up in the sink.

  The newts jostled against the glass

  until water dampened and feathered

  the lace of his cuff.

  From my vantage point on the floor,

  the painting felt filled with PRESSURE.

  The title, seen from an angle:

  “The Spring of Life.”

  His shoes were wet with mud,

  spring water quickening at his feet.

  These girls, their dresses

  pin-tucked across the bodice—

  One looked unhappy.

  One looked enraptured.

  One looked stupid but perhaps

  the bathroom light failed to flatter her.

  That day the newt on the ultrasound

  was no larger than a peppercorn.

  Five weeks along, the sonographer said,

  scrolling the wand across my belly

  as she scanned what swam inside.

  It’s so small, I said.

  My voice had love in it.

  Still at 1:50 I swallowed the pills.

  I could throw them up—I could—

  was the thought minutes past.

  You’ll expel the uterine contents

  eventually, the doctor said

  from far behind her desk.

  It took four days,

  then into my hand you swam,

  faceless face curled in a puddle,

  sliding against the placental blood,

  the cord a length of thread quivering.

  Grapeskin, mucosal smear I cradled

  in my palm. Look, he said,