As Good as Dead (29 page)

With my Workshop meeting and my seminar in British Autobiographies and Biographies of the Nineteenth Century, along with the two classes that I taught, it was hard to schedule the maximum five hours that the clinic said might be needed (observation time after the procedure varied from client to client), but the place did stay open in the evening, and I managed to set up an appointment for four o’clock. It was a blessing that Esmé no longer came back to the apartment to sleep. There would be no need to lie to anyone about where I’d been if I did not get back to the apartment until nine.

Unlike the day of my first appointment, on the afternoon of the procedure, three scowling picketers walked back and forth in front of the clinic. The man with the fur ruff and the sonogram was there again, and, at a break in the traffic, I darted out into the street to skirt him. All three picketers shouted at me. One was a woman in a pink acrylic version of Esmé’s
papakha
, but even she put me in mind of those carloads of boys who shouted obscenities from their rolled-down windows as they sped past female pedestrians.

The clinic clearly meant for the reception area to look homey (floral cushions, a tweedy carpet, table lamps with low-wattage bulbs). Two couples, probably close to my age, were seated on the twin rattan love seats. The male halves of both couples wore heavy metal T-shirts and chains around their necks. One of them was very tall, taller even than Will, and he sat slouched forward, headphones on, listening to a Walkman. He laughed every now and then. “Listen to this!” he said and removed his headset and tried to put it on the woman who I assumed was his girlfriend or wife. She batted the headset away. “You know I hate him!” she said. “You know I think he’s sick!” The man laughed.

The other couple sat quietly holding hands, heads leaned one against the other. They looked incredibly sad.

I had come directly from the university and wore “teaching clothes” and, while I filled out forms on the clipboard that the receptionist had given me, it occurred to me that the two couples might imagine that I hoped to pass myself off as a social worker or something, not just another knocked-up young woman. This absolutely was not true. I would have been glad if one of those women had started to talk to me. I was apprehensive. I wouldn’t be able to ask for the “twilight sedation.” (The clinic required that all clients be driven home after the procedure; for me, that would mean using a taxicab, and, given that I couldn’t risk being seen getting out of a cab in front of the apartment building, I would need to be alert enough to walk the last block or two on my own steam.

It’s odd what you remember. During the procedure—just five minutes, as several people on the staff told me—over the clinic’s antiseptic odors, there rose the good smells of cumin and garlic and onions. A worker heating up leftover Indian food in a microwave, I supposed. I almost commented on it to the very nice African-American woman who was holding my hand and smiling down at me, but then I thought better of it in case she or someone else might imagine I was being a smart aleck. The woman squeezed my hand and said something to me, but I couldn’t make it out (she stood on my deaf side and the aspirator was whirring away). It might have been simply
Almost through
.

After the observation period, I dressed. I used the clinic’s telephone to call a local taxi service and a cab came and it ferried me—and a bag holding stapled instruction sheets, three pain pills, and a bunch of very fat sanitary pads—to a spot about a block from the apartment.

As expected, Esmé was not at home when I arrived. That made it easier to do everything that the instruction sheets said to do, including, when I started to have severe cramps despite the pain pill, sitting on the toilet every hour or two, massaging my lower abdomen. The abortion took place on Monday. On Tuesday, with the help of the second of my three pain pills, I was able to teach. I even attended my workshop class late Wednesday afternoon, but very early on Thursday morning, the last pain pill gone, I felt so bad that I lay down on the bathroom floor and I stayed there.

You could hear the chimes from some church at the apartment. That morning, while I waited for the chimes to signal eight o’clock—the instruction sheets said that the clinic would open at nine—I rehearsed things. Over and over. Exactly what words I would use when I telephoned. How, once I finished talking to the clinic, I would call for a cab—though not from the company that I had used Monday. Next, I would get dressed. Start down to the first floor immediately so that I could be waiting when the cab arrived. It was imperative that I leave the apartment before Esmé came by to get dressed and do her Jane Fonda. She rarely arrived before nine—

But there had been exceptions. I thought of some of the exceptions.
I should leave now
, I thought.
Call a cab now
. I could take the cab to a diner that I remembered sat not far from the clinic. Then, shortly before nine, I’d start walking to the clinic.

In the living room, a key rattled in the lock. I tried to get up. Knocked over the metal trash can that I used for support.

“Charlotte? Is that you?”

I hesitated. I didn’t want Esmé to see me on the bathroom floor; but, then, neither did I want her to imagine there was a robber in the place. The thought of
her
scared made
me
even more scared, and I worked my way onto my hands and knees and called, “In here.”

From the doorway, she asked, “What happened? Did you drop something?”

I looked up at her. “What’s wrong with you?” she said and crouched down beside me and set her hand on my forehead. “We’re going to Student Health!”

I pointed toward the stapled sheets of paper that I’d carried from my room and left lying on the floor. She frowned as she read the top page.

“Thanksgiving,” I said. “When we were sick—I guess I threw up my pills.”

She sat back on her heels. “But—it’s almost March!”

“So I’m stupid. Will you take me there, please? At nine o’clock?”

A portion of the tissue had not been expelled. It was septic.

During that visit, I accepted the twilight sedation. Whether or not someone held my hand while I was reaspirated, I do not know. I have no memory of Esmé driving me back to the apartment or getting me to the third floor, but I do remember waking up in my bed that night. When I rolled over, there was Esmé, sitting in my desk chair, reading. She got right up and brought me pills and water. She took my temperature.

“Almost normal,” she said. “That means the antibiotics are working.” She showed me a chart she had made up for the pills that I was to take for the next ten days, along with the rule sheet that I needed to follow until I went back to the clinic in two weeks.

I shook my head. “Thank you. For everything.”

She settled her hand on her belly, clearly thinking about her own baby. “You’re welcome, of course, though I
am
pissed that you didn’t trust me enough to tell me! I don’t know if Will agreed with you—”

“Will
doesn’t
know anything!” I sat up in the bed. Yelped. A large, heavy brick was lodged inside me, its edges in flame. “No one ever can know! You’re the only person in the world besides the clinic that knows!”

“All right, sh, sh.” She stroked my forehead. She grinned. “You realize, of course, I’d feel a lot more honored, being your special confidante, if you’d
wanted
me to know?”

As it happened, I hardly saw Esmé again after that night. Maybe three or four times. Her parents had asked that she and Jeremy Fletcher get married by a justice of the peace in Evanston—something to do with allowing Esmé’s grandmothers to be present. Very happy, tipsy. A lot of racket in the background—she called me from a pay phone at the noisy restaurant where the family had gone to celebrate after the ceremony. “I had to tell you! We’ve decided not to come back!”

The two of them were moving to Mobile, Alabama.

A few weeks later, Esmé’s little brother and one of his friends drove to Iowa City, and I helped them pack Esmé’s things and carry them down from the third floor to a U-Haul exactly like the one that I’d help Esmé unpack a few months before.

I lived in the apartment alone until May. In May, I flew to Milan to meet Will. In July, when we returned to Iowa City, we moved into an apartment that we had picked out together.

PART THREE

Chapter 21

I left the mess from the
WRITERS
’ WORKSHOP/DRAFTS
box where it lay, scattered across the dusty floor of the shed, and I returned to the empty house.

It was Jacqueline C.’s husband, Billy, a retired contractor—also a member of AA—who picked up my call.

“Charlotte Price!” he said, as if my name were a cause for celebration. Then he called, “Jackie! Charlotte Price is on the line!”

After she had listened to me for a couple of minutes, Jacqueline said, “But all this is old news, honey.”

“Not somebody’s asking me to rig an award or else they’ll tell Will about it.
That’s
not old news.”

The sound of her long inhale let me know that she had gone back to smoking cigarettes since the last time I had seen her, a month or so ago. “Have you been drinking?” she asked.

“No.”

“Well, that’s good, but you need to get regular with meetings. If you’d kept going to a couple of meetings a week, you’d be a whole lot better equipped to deal with a problem like this. Hold on, hold on.” She held a brief muffled conversation with Billy. I undoubtedly was upsetting their plans for the day. “Okay, Charlotte. Look, it’s eight. I’ll come get you and we’ll talk. Then we’ll try to go to a nine o’clock.”

While I hurried to dress, I thought about the day ahead. I was scheduled to be at my office at noon in case any of my graduate students wanted to talk with me before our workshop started at one thirty. I could not imagine going into school at all, but while canceling office hours wouldn’t be too difficult, canceling a workshop class would be. Even if I could find someone who was free from one thirty to four to lead the workshop, I’d first have to deliver the stories to the person, and, then, he or she would have to read them—

I ran to the front hall to see if Jacqueline had arrived. No car in sight, so I ran to my desk. The three fat, green envelopes holding Poulos Prize finalists sat in a stack on one corner. I stuck them in my briefcase. Added the manila folder containing the Melody Murphy material (her CV, one of her articles, and my notes on her demo class, which I’d somehow have to organize before the search committee met on Monday).

Jacqueline was driving a car I didn’t know, a sporty thing, tiny for her rather large self. As I came down the walk, she leaned forward and, through the rolled down passenger-side window—smiling and upbeat and sociable—she called to me, “Everything’s grown so much since I last was here, Charlotte! It looks lovely!” Once I got into the tiny car, though, she hugged me in a consoling way.

“You’re an angel,” I said.

“Not hardly.”

“I always feel, like, because you lost your son, my problems—”

“Oh, stop.” She eased back into her seat and set her hands on the steering wheel. “This is your
life
. You need to take it serious, so . . . none of that.” She let out the clutch and we started up the road.

“So, talk to me. I got a meeting list in my purse. We can always find a ten o’clock, if we have to miss the nine.”

While I talked and—as my dad would have said—“blubbered away,” Jacqueline drove us slowly through the quiet, moneyed neighborhood called El Encanto, where the only other vehicles on the silky, curving streets were the battered pickup trucks that belonged to mostly dark-skinned men at work with blowers and rakes in the expansive yards.

After a while, Jacqueline broke in to suggest that I “let go and let God,” which was all well and good except, as I reminded her, “I don’t even know if I believe in God.”

She stopped her tiny car right in the middle of the street, and, as if to say,
Lord, help me
,
looked up at the ceiling, which was located not far from the tip of her cute nose. “That’s because you’re not willing to be transformed, Charlotte! Man, you’re stubborn! Stop being so stubborn!”

I didn’t argue with Jacqueline, although, actually, I would have liked very much to be transformed. Against my better judgment, there had been a number of times when I’d gotten down on my knees and prayed for transformation.

Maybe if I’d felt some stirring, I would have been willing to believe what otherwise couldn’t be believed—but I hadn’t.

Jacqueline drove us into pretty Reid Park—several times, in fact, because its streets were short and meant only to deliver you to the playground or the rose garden or the band shell. On one of those trips, she parked, and we got out of the car and sat on a shaded bench so that Jacqueline could smoke a cigarette. She was wearing a heavy gold charm bracelet that Billy and her kids had been contributing to for years, and she looked up from picking at one of the charms—a little dog with rhinestone eyes—and she said, “I’m always embarrassed for you to see me smoke. I know you used to smoke.”