The day after my abortion, I boarded a bus to Tucson, where my dad had moved a few years before. I’d tried to reach him at the university to let him know I was coming—he lived out in the desert and didn’t have a phone—but a secretary had told me he only came in to the department a couple of times a week. I arrived early on a Sunday morning and wound up at a police station, asking where the street address I had was located. Instead, one of the cops drove me out into the desert in a patrol car.

Twenty miles beyond the city limits, at the end of a meandering dirt road, we came to a modern ranch-style house surrounded by sand and saguaro cactus. I rapped on the door several times, more loudly with each repetition, but no one answered. So I started circling the house, peering in windows, trying to determine if this really was my dad’s place. When I pressed my nose against a sliding glass door, I saw a study strewn with books and papers—and, to my astonishment, a coyote looking warily back at me. “This is it,” I told the officer. And resumed pounding on the door until I finally raised my father.

He had moved to Tucson for his health, he’d written, thinking the climate would help his arthritis—but he wasn’t much better than before, he now admitted. He still had, I was able to make out, the few pieces of handsome modern furniture and the colorful throw rugs my aunt Nat had helped him pick out after the divorce (the new furnishings my mother had so resented), as well as the artifacts he’d brought back from Mexico—onyx bookends of Aztec gods, tin masks, and ceramic animals—though both furniture and objets d’art were all but buried in the general disorder.

An architect had designed the house to his specifications, he said, so its floor-to-ceiling windows faced two mountain ranges. The rocks of the massive fireplace he’d also brought back from Mexico. With his power tools, he’d built a stand for two huge aquariums. In one was a beautiful orange-striped seaworm like a candy ribbon, as well as several baby octopi the size of your thumb. He’d caught their mother, he explained, but she’d died after they hatched. He had an expensive stereo system and a huge record collection, and he played me his favorite pieces, among them a Mozart violin concerto that he said always made him weep. I thought it was the most beautiful piece of music I’d ever heard.

When I arrived he’d been preparing to take another trip to the Gulf of Mexico, where he hired boys to catch marine specimens for him—and he invited me along. But suddenly I came down with a fever. The doctor Dad took me to told me I’d developed an infection, apparently due to unsterile conditions during my abortion. He said I could either check myself into a hospital or monitor my urine output myself; if it dropped below a certain level, I should head for the nearest emergency room. My father was angry at me, then, because I’d spoiled his vacation.

Nevertheless, since he was still mostly bedridden, he let me take his car to go exploring on my own when I’d recovered. I found my way to the desert museum where he’d taken Doug and me when we were kids—and saw, among other creatures, hideous sun spiders like the ones we’d caught during our trip through the Southwest when I was twelve. They brought back a flood of memories: Capturing a couple of them and thoughtlessly putting them together in a glass jar; when we checked them next, they’d completely dismembered each other. Crossing the border into Mexico amid clouds of yellow and gold Mammoth Sulfurs—tropical butterflies we’d never seen before. Driving through a tiny town where the women hung their embroidery out the windows of their poor adobe huts to display them to tourists—I bought a shawl with lavender flowers. Trying to catch tiny crabs on the beach at Mazatlan—when one no bigger than a quarter grabbed my dad’s finger, he let out a howl of pain. Happening upon a white witch, a giant moth with a 12” (!) wing span, on a shaded rock on a trail to a waterfall in Monterrey; my father trapped it in a butterfly net, but when he reached in to grab it, it managed to fight its way free, it was so strong.

Speeding through the desert in my dad’s car, I saw magnificent sunsets, the entire sky a vault of flaming clouds; the moon rising blood-red, doubled in size; storms coming off the mountains, traveling across the desert until they enveloped me, a light show of lightning barbs piercing the sky. And for the space of a few days, I felt a sense of expansiveness—of relief—because I’d finally come to know that, despite my father’s incapacity, he had a full life. He had his books, his music, his love of wildflowers, and he wasn’t so disabled he couldn’t do woodworking, go on excursions in his boat, and more… He’d even had lovers, he assured me.

Jack didn’t bother to use a condom properly, which I was too inexperienced to realize. Not only would he wait until he’d completely lost his erection to remove it, he’d wash it out and use it again, which made what happened next practically a foregone conclusion.

When I discovered I was pregnant, I sank into an even deeper depression. With no way I could see to support a child, I would have to give it up for adoption, but without a support system, carrying it to term felt like more than I could do.

Despite my despondency, I do remember standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom one afternoon and stroking my belly, thinking, “There’s a new life growing inside me,” and feeling, however fleetingly, what a miracle that was. Actually, I regarded myself as such a failure at the time it seemed all the more miraculous that I, of all people, could be carrying a child.

Nevertheless, I scheduled an abortion at the local clinic. Later I would comfort myself with the thought that many pregnancies end in miscarriage and maybe mine would have too, or by telling myself that there was no guarantee that adoptive parents would be good parents and that my child might have wound up suffering as much as I had.

In later years, though, I felt if I were to get pregnant again, I wouldn’t choose to have another abortion, and I’d grieve whenever I thought about the child I might have had.

And here I would like to add that I believe abortion is such a deep, personal issue for a woman that the state has no right to interfere. Besides, the human race has already overrun the planet, driving a mass extinction of all else that lives, despoiling and destroying the natural world on which our own future existence depends. To me, those who call themselves pro-choice, are pro-lifers in the broadest sense.

“Jack—kooky, comical face, all chin and jaw and nose, hair like an unpruned bush—said last night that he was crazy about me and could hardly sit apart from me in the same room for frustration, that I was incredibly beautiful, and that it appeared to be hopeless, although he didn’t understand why, that when I left, he would need to smoke himself into the oblivion of earphone rock.”

At the high school where I worked as a noon supervisor, I became friends with my male counterpart, a New Yorker and former Spanish teacher named Jack, a seemingly happy-go-lucky guy who couldn’t understand why I took life so seriously. He sent me funny postcards and called me “Punchy” because I got antic whenever I so much as tasted anything alcoholic. When my roommates and I were evicted, I moved to Seal Beach, the small town just to the north. My apartment was dark and gloomy because all the windows faced the neighboring apartment building—which blocked out the light—and it had, horror of horrors, a green shag carpet. (I don’t know who ever came up with the notion that green was a good color for a carpet. It doesn’t go with anything except house plants.) When there was a vacancy in the building next door, Jack moved in.

Reflecting back on this time, I know I must have found Jack’s passionate declaration enormously flattering. Though I didn’t feel the same way about him, I thought about how, in other cultures, parents arranged marriages for their children and couples came to love each other, an outcome that seemed logical to me at the time. I was so dejected about my recent experiences—about not being able to sing or sell my dress designs or create in painting class or perform at my guitar lessons or find a way to make a decent living—that I was desperate to make something in my life work. Feeling so bad about myself, I was grateful to know there was something I could give that somebody wanted, even if it was only myself. So Jack and I became lovers.

GUTTED

“They had told her it wouldn’t hurt much; they told her to breathe normally. But when they started vacuuming out the fetus, she was so crazed with pain she gasped like a creature being gutted alive. Then they honed their voices with exasperation, wounding her. And they clamped their fingers tight with impatience, shackling her. And when they wheeled her out on the gurney, as her head fell sideways on the pillow, she felt a tear slip out the side of her eye. In the recovery room they asked her questions, but they got no answers; all she had left of words were petrified on her tongue.”

This is all I ever wrote about my abortion. I didn’t know until later that it was so painful because the doctor failed to give me a successful anesthetic block.

“I’m having a hard time with my memoir,” I tell Toni. “And it’s not just grief that’s hanging me up; it’s shame too. Every time I start a new vignette, I think, no, I’d better leave this out. But then I feel the same way about the next experience I try to write about…and the next.”

“What are you ashamed of?” she asks.

“That I just kept walking into one situation after another in which I got victimized,” I say. “I can’t imagine why anyone reading my memoir would have any sympathy for me, I was so hapless.”

“And why do you think you kept getting victimized?”

“It’s complicated,” I muse. “I suppose one problem was I didn’t have the ability to discriminate between safe and unsafe people.”

“Well, when you’ve had such narcissistic parents, you’re not going to be able to recognize narcissism in other people,” she says quietly.

“And to the extent that I was able to discriminate, I didn’t trust my own judgment and perceptions.”

“How could you?” she asks. “Who in your life ever validated them?”

“I know I was afraid of hurting other people. I think feeling responsible for my brother’s burn made me hyper-conscientious about that. I’d feel guilty if I thought I hurt someone, no matter what the circumstances or what they might have done to me; I often didn’t protect or defend myself out of fear of doing harm; my childhood experience was that hurting someone else had the potential to be hugely consequential, while my being hurt didn’t—or so I imagined.”

Later in the day I write down more reasons that occur to me. At my next session with Toni I read them out loud:

“Another difficulty was that my feelings were so intense a lot of the time I didn’t think it would be appropriate to express them because I knew they were an over-reaction. And then there was the fact that it was easy for me to empathize with other people and to understand why they did what they did, which, even if it didn’t assuage my hurt feelings, made me feel less justified in having them.

“At the same time, I was reluctant to risk alienating anyone. I already felt so desolated that I couldn’t tolerate any more loss. Besides, my experience was that one loss was likely to precipitate another—and another—like toppling dominos, until I wound up with nothing left, including a sense of self. This happened after my parents’ divorce, after I left Spain, and again years later when I lost my job at Tiburon College. I’m still liable to panic after any significant loss, terrified that it’s going to snowball.

“Which reminds me of something Pia Mellody wrote,” I say, “that some people’s abandonment issues are so crippling it actually may be better for them to stay in a bad relationship than leave it. I appreciated her acknowledging this because, though it goes against the conventional wisdom, in my own experience it’s been true.”

“So,” says Toni, “your writing about the many times you wound up getting victimized just demonstrates what happens to people when they’ve suffered a lot of emotional abuse—they can’t recognize when they’re putting themselves in harm’s way.”

“And it’s not just that you don’t know that you deserve better,” I say. “You don’t know there is better.”

“Exactly,” Toni nods.

I feel tears start in my eyes. “That reminds me of when I was in therapy with Dr. A., the psychiatrist I went to when I got back from L.A.,” I say. “One day after I’d been seeing him for almost a year, I told him about a heart-to-heart I’d had with Ella when she was visiting—and how good I felt about it. He said he didn’t believe it had happened the way I’d described it. When I asked him why not, he said it didn’t fit in his picture of me—he didn’t think I was capable of intimacy. I’ve always wondered if he reached this conclusion partly because I never asked him any questions about himself. I felt so fragile back then, I was afraid if he were to tell me that he was divorced, for example, it would be the final proof to me that love was just a four-letter word, that it didn’t really exist. I was hanging onto the hope that it did by the most tenuous thread, and I felt if it were to break, I would too.”

“Charlie has long, undulating fingers, supple and strong; thin, taut cheeks; and a flash of softness for a mouth. His eyes are clear, intelligent, and drooping, and they look past you when he talks to a thought just behind the door. I’d kept him out of my mind because I couldn’t tell who he was, but as I listened to him last time, I was fascinated by the way he drew his mouth in, thoughtfully, in a funny gesture of concentration, then released it with a sudden pop. How many times have I sought him out as a friend, agitated, full to bursting—for confession or shared thoughts or only to listen—because he was odd, and quiet, because his lyrical music moved me, and then a part of him stayed with me after I left, keeping me company?”

PERFECT TIMING?

“Charlie, in a blue woolen cap, roars up behind me as I stroll across the street towards the movie theater, hands clasped behind my back. Five minutes before, I’d stolen down the narrow corridor between the houses to the alley, just in time to see him reach his motorcycle, guitar in hand. That’s what I’d been hoping for, but I hadn’t expected my timing to be so perfect and, suddenly embarrassed—I hadn’t figured out what to say—I turned and hurried back the other way. I’ll arrange for him to run into me, I thought, and I began to race down the block toward the theater, where I expected his motorcycle to emerge. Minutes passed—I thought he must have gone another way. Feeling a sudden ache of disappointment, I watched the lights of passing cars and began to wander aimlessly. Then, to my surprise, he was there beside me.

“’Hi! What are you doing?’ he asked.

“’Taking a walk.’

“’I’m off to an all-night poker jam.’

“’Well, don’t lose your shirt!’

“Laughing, ‘I probably will.’

“And with that he was gone.”

Intuiting that my fear in painting class wasn’t just a temporary problem I was going to get over any time soon, and knowing it wasn’t healthy to live with so much anxiety, I set out to learn to paint on my own. I soon discovered, however, that even though I might experience a measure of confidence about a project while I was in the flush of creation, when I finished it—if I finished it—I invariably became so doubtful about its merit, I wound up either convinced it was worthless or so unsure I didn’t dare show it to anyone. Without positive feedback or guidance, I seemed doomed to repudiate everything I created. Looking back on it now, I know that my insecurity was a function of a larger self-doubt. If you’ve been made to feel you don’t have any value, how can you believe that anything that derives from you does? It was many years before I was able to sustain a sense of satisfaction in anything I created, and I still have trouble believing it could be of interest or value to anybody else.

“The next assignment, an abstract, was even more baffling to me than the previous ones because I didn’t have a clue about what a good abstraction was. Some of my classmates liked what I came up with halfway through the assignment, but my teacher thought it was trite. Frustrated, I broke up the picture into formlessness, and when he came around again, he said, ‘Better.’ I took the painting home over the weekend—by now I was working and worrying over my paintings at home as well as in class—and though I stared at it all weekend, I was so utterly at a loss about what more I could do that I never even picked up my brush.

“I carried my abstract back to class just as it was, only now it was heralded by my teacher as a finished piece (?). At the next critique, however, he called it an accident, a fluke—and laughed about it. The painting that he really raved about was done by one of his protégés. This student had poured greenish-brown paint over a canvas and driven his car tire over it, leaving a muddy track. I’d once written, ‘My aspiration has always been to make beautiful things—simple and spare, like a Japanese flower arrangement or a Shaker chair. I think of creative work as an act of spiritual devotion—that what you make you should invest with all your ability, with care and reverence.’ Now I began to feel like some weird throwback who was hopelessly trapped in an outmoded aesthetic.

“For our fifth assignment we were allowed to choose our subject. I hadn’t been able to come up with anything in class, so I set a blank canvas against the wall of my bedroom, waiting for inspiration. When it didn’t come and I found myself on a Sunday night with nothing to show for my Monday class, I cut out a newspaper picture of Cat Stevens, and, in a towering fury at my own impotence, I painted for an hour or more like someone crazed, never pausing or standing back even once to evaluate what I was doing. When my anger was finally spent and I did step back, I was dumbfounded by what I saw, the portrait looked so alive to me. It was then that I had one of the strangest experiences of my life. It seemed to me that until that moment I’d only imagined I knew my own dimensions, but now a trap door had opened beneath my feet and I was falling through depths I hadn’t known existed before. I started to shake uncontrollably while the painted face I was looking at metamorphosed back and forth from Cat Stevens’ bearded face into my own.

“The next few classes I missed because I was sick, but I took my painting to the next critique, even though it wasn’t quite finished—I couldn’t get the hand that was resting on the guitar quite right. Also, as I was well aware, the whole composition was skewed to one side.

“When I arrived, I saw the paintings everybody else had done in my absence stacked against the walls—abstracts created by pouring paint on the canvas, the assignment I’d missed. They were all so bold and vibrant, my own painting seemed to me murky and flawed alongside them, and suddenly I felt a terrible vulnerability about showing this particular picture. In the end we never got to the critique—I don’t remember why—so I never received any feedback on my portrait, and I took it home relieved, knowing I’d never go back to class again.”