Friendship (21 page)

Bev widened her eyes a little bit, unsure of whether to laugh.

“Well, not literally crack, but you know what I mean. Definitely not the most deluxe accommodation, my uterus,” Sally said. She munched her breakfast and looked up at Bev brightly, smiling with a glimmer of something sharp and not okay in her eyes.

Without premeditation, Bev put her hand on Sally’s, on the table. “Think of all the stuff that would never have been able to happen if things had gone differently back then, though, you know?”

“God, you’re so mature, you know that?”

Bev waited a decent interval before removing her hand. The back of Sally’s hand was dry and a little bit scaly. With her other hand, she brought a bite of croissant to her mouth.
Enjoy the croissant, hypothetical baby,
she thought.
This is the kind of thing Sally would be able to help me give you. You could go to Paris and eat croissants there, probably. You could be born a sort of rich person, and then you wouldn’t be worried all the time, which would make you fun to be around. You could grow up to be nothing like me.

32

They drove over a covered bridge and out onto the highway and away from Margaretville, getting a slightly later start than they’d wanted to, but Bev felt more relaxed about missing a day of temping, it seemed to Amy, than she would have before the weekend’s events had taken place. Sally had insisted on loading them down with a picnic lunch, hugging each of them several times and exacting momlike promises that they’d call when they got back to the city, to let her know they’d arrived safely. Jason had been MIA for their leave-taking; Sally explained that he’d left early for a meeting in the city.

It was beginning to seem as if they might spend the entire drive back to the Zipcar lot in silence when, finally, Bev spoke.

“Okay, out with it. Whatever it is that you don’t want to tell me but are also kind of dying to tell me, just do it now, even if it’s horrible, please.”

Amy half suppressed a shocked laugh. How pleasant it was to be so known. “Ugh, it’s bad. You’re going to be mad. I feel like I should preface this by saying that I had no intention of doing it and I have no intention of doing it again, but…”

“Jesus, Amy, you’re going to make me get into an accident! Just spit it out!”

“Jason came into my room last night and we did it.”

“You did
what
?”

“Um? It?”

Bev guffawed. “Jason isn’t gay?”

“I know. I was shocked too!”

As the information settled into the car’s interior, the initial shock of it dissipated, but the change in the atmosphere lingered, like a bad smell. “I have a million questions about this, but I’m just, like … I mean, do you get the sense that this is the kind of thing Jason does all the time?”

“Like he’d tell me, you know—‘Don’t worry, I’m serially unfaithful to my wife so it’s not like this is a big deal to me’?”

Bev shrugged. “Well, not in so many words, or not in those words exactly.”

“We didn’t talk about it—we didn’t talk at all. He walked into my room and sat down on the bed and it was, like, a foregone conclusion that we would—um, the whole thing just felt very inevitable.”

“That sounds hot.”

“It was. I mean, it was crazy. I have no idea why I went along with it—it was dreamlike, in a way. His confidence was so appealing.”

“You did it on purpose, so it would be harder for me to have a relationship with Sally and accept help from her, et cetera,” said Bev dully, not in an accusatory way at all.

“But I didn’t do anything!”

“You did.”

“I didn’t make an
effort
to do anything. And there’s no reason anything has to get fucked up.” She glanced over at Bev, who was gripping the steering wheel with the grim determination of a boat captain in a thunderstorm.

“Well, it won’t.”

“Good!”

The gears turning, the processes of rationalization happening in Bev’s mind—Amy imagined that she could hear Bev’s thoughts in her own mind. But the next time Bev did speak, several exits later, what she said was nothing like what Amy had imagined she was thinking.

“I’m really touched that you’d go that far to protect me, Amy. I know you want what’s best for me, and you feel like you have to do whatever you can to try and keep me from making a bad decision. I wish you didn’t think you knew best about what decision I should make, but I am grateful that you care.”

“Are you being sarcastic?”

“No! I wish you had a different way of showing it, but you do care about me. And that means a lot to me.”

Amy felt like the shittiest imaginable shit. She was used to Bev always giving her the benefit of the doubt, but this was much more benefit than she was used to. She did care about Bev, of course she did, but she hadn’t had sex with Jason in order to complicate things with Sally and dissuade Bev from having the baby. Or had she? Who knows, maybe subconsciously she had. And there was no point in telling Bev she hadn’t, no point in actively
trying
to make Bev think less of her.

“You’re a way, way better friend than I deserve,” Amy said.

“I don’t know about that,” said Bev.

But Amy saw her face and knew she was thinking that Amy was right.

33

There was a magazine in the waiting room called
Conceive
, and Bev stared at its cover in disbelief for a few seconds. The woman on the cover wasn’t obviously pregnant, but she was beaming. Were readers meant to assume that she had
just then
conceived? Bev had brought a book, a collection of 1980s short stories that had been assigned reading for one of her workshop classes, but even the idea of opening her bag and unearthing it seemed too taxing. She just wanted to stay perfectly still for the moment. But she also needed to avoid making eye contact with anyone in the waiting room, so she was going to have to read something. The magazine she picked,
Disney Family Fun
, was innocuous enough. There was a two-page spread on how to throw a “Reading Is Fun!” theme party, complete with invitations that looked like library cards along with instructions for using fabric paint to print book shapes on canvas tote bags. Bev sensed herself filing the information away for future reference; the tote bags were cute, though she had a hard time believing that kids would think so. She was halfway through the following article, about healthy new ideas for sandwich fillings, when the receptionist called her name, held out a specimen cup to her, and gestured wordlessly with her head in the direction of the restroom.

Afterward a nurse took her to a little alcove near the restroom, where she took her blood pressure and gave her a form to sign. The nurse didn’t ask any question more personal than “How tall are you?” but Bev was still careful to answer her as brusquely as possible; she was in the kind of mood where a simple “How are you?” might elicit an unstoppable torrent of intimate information. There was no point in humiliating herself any more than was absolutely necessary. The nurse’s touch, when she removed the blood pressure cuff, was kind and soothing, and Bev realized that aside from Sally’s unwanted hugs, she hadn’t touched or been touched by anyone in days.

The nurse brought her back to an exam room, instructed her about what portion of her clothing to remove, then left her alone. There was a
New York
magazine near the little alcove where she left her clothes, as well as another issue of
Conceive
with a different beaming woman on its cover; this one had a slightly convex stomach, which she was accentuating with tight blue yoga pants. Bev busied herself removing her pants and underwear, folding them in a neat pile, and situated herself on the exam table with the paper wrap she’d been given loosely draped around her pelvis. How much longer would the doctor keep her waiting? Should she get up and grab the
New York
magazine? What if the doctor came in while she was walking across the room to get it?

The doctor made her wait for what seemed like much too long, and during this interval Bev thought of getting up and putting her underwear and pants back on and leaving at least four or five hundred times.

The doctor who came in was young, blithe, stylish, and visibly just slightly pregnant. “Hi, I’m Sandy,” she said, reaching out to shake Bev’s hand, then immediately turning to the sink to wash her hands and pull on latex gloves. “Everything going well?”

She didn’t even look at the chart,
Bev thought. Years of paying for all her medical care out of pocket had made Bev highly attuned to inconveniences and flaws; she felt like writing a bad Yelp review. “Uh, so. I’m pregnant, and I just need to know if I can change my mind about it without its being totally traumatic and horrible. I tried googling it, but that was just too … uh, there’s a lot of really bad Internet out there about abortion, and I got too horrified to continue.”

“Do you know how many weeks you are? Lie back and put your feet in the stirrups.” Sandy stared fixedly at the corner of the room as she palpated Bev’s abdomen, touching her brusquely, verging on roughly.

“Eight and a half.”

Sandy treated her to a forced smile. “Well, you’ve still got options. But if you do decide to terminate, you’ll have to schedule another appointment, as you know. It’s a routine procedure, but it’s still surgery. You have to abstain from eating beforehand and we have to confirm that there’s someone waiting to take you home, all that stuff.”

Bev felt relieved and disappointed. She had kind of known that she couldn’t just walk into the doctor’s office and walk out un-pregnant. It was another of those vague myths about New York that still lingered in the collective imagination, that it was a city where you could get anything you wanted at any time, as long as you were willing to pay for it. But you could no more impulse-buy an abortion than you could get good take-out Chinese food at any hour.

“If you decide not to terminate, though, we should set up a schedule of appointments and consult about your nutrition, and we should really do that soon. So—I mean, I hate to state the obvious, but it would be good to decide as soon as possible, either way.”

“But how much longer do I have before I won’t be able to…”

“I’d have to do an ultrasound to give you an ironclad number, and you’re out-of-pocket, right? So let’s not do unnecessary stuff. Is ASAP going to be good enough, or do you need a deadline?”

Bev forced a short laugh to defuse the awkwardness, then felt even more awkward about how laughing like that had made her muscles contract around Sandy’s gloved finger, which was now in her vagina, pressing upward to feel the shapes of Bev’s organs from the inside. As if responding to the pressure, the finger withdrew. Sandy made eye contact with Bev for the first time as she stripped off her gloves.

“Do you want to talk about it more?” Her voice sounded sincere, as if she was ready to deviate for the first time from an established script.

“Not really,” Bev said.

“Okay, then you can get dressed. Make another appointment with the receptionist on your way out, or you can call and make one in the next couple of weeks. But Beverly? The next
couple
of weeks, okay? Don’t let the decision be made for you.”

Bev shed her gown and stepped back into her clothes, feeling the gross gooey warmth left by Sandy’s lubricated finger between her legs as she slipped her underwear back on. Her breasts hurt as she put on her bra; she looked in the mirror in profile to see if she could discern any change in her silhouette, but of course there was none. She ran her hands down her body, feeling strangely distant from it, as if it were a robot she could control. She felt detached from her body’s fate.

She finished dressing and took her body back out onto the street. As she started walking downtown, she noticed the warmth of the sun on her skin, alternating with the cool shade generated by the tall trees of Gramercy Park. She was back in her skin again, and she felt reassured and happy for no reason she could name. Happy and ravenous.

There was a raw juice and vegan salad place nearby that was, improbably, really good, but it constituted a big splurge for Bev: the salads and juices were all in the eleven- to fifteen-dollar range. But for the first time in a while Bev felt like spending money, not because she had any more of it than usual—in fact, if she didn’t pick up a temp assignment this week, she was going to bounce her rent check—but because the future seemed promising in some inchoate way. She felt genuinely uncertain about her pregnancy, but also newly confident that whatever she decided would turn out to be right.

As she stood in line at the juice bar, she checked her phone: no emails, no texts, no missed calls from Amy. They hadn’t hung out since they got back from Margaretville over a week ago. Sally had texted her a few times, not about anything in particular, just older-person-style sentiments like “Hope your Monday’s not too much of a Monday” and stuff like that. Bev had appreciated it. She wondered if maybe she could just ask Sally for a check. Not for a lot, for like five hundred dollars, just to give herself some breathing room. She felt as if she probably could.

After she placed her order and settled into a seat to wait for it, she became aware that a beautiful woman with a huge amount of curly black hair was watching her from the next table over, and with a shock she realized why the woman was familiar: it was her favorite professor from her one year of grad school, Elise. “Beverly Tunney! Oh my god! I’m so delighted to see you here! How are you?” Without waiting for an answer, Elise swooped Bev into a bosomy hug.

“I’m good! It’s really good to see you!”

“Isn’t this place amazing? I love what they do with nuts.”

“Totally.” They beamed at each other. Elise had written several well-received books and was married to a banker, but despite being successful, beautiful, and rich, she’d been Bev’s nicest teacher by far. Or maybe that was why she’d been nice: teaching was a lark for her, whereas for everyone else, you could tell, it was a burdensome and ill-compensated necessity. The sense that her teachers were marking time and that they thought checks were the most important thing she and her fellow students were writing had been a big part of why Bev had left school. But Elise had been so encouraging that Bev felt slightly guilty about not living up to her expectations.