LOVERS

“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.