Amy Bloom - Love Invents Us

I came back to the car, and Huddie watched as I ceremoniously swallowed the first of the yellow pills. He clapped and I laughed and stuck two fingers in his mouth, his sharp teeth against them, the slippery, warm insides of his lips around them.

I don’t know how it worked for other girls. I know the nurse told me to wait thirty days, to use “alternate modes of contraception” while the yellow pills fooled my body into thinking that it was pregnant, blooming with all that I would have sold my soul, my real emerald ring, and Huddie’s car to avoid.

I tried. We tried. We compromised, we had intercourse with every other body part, we made deals with God as each other’s juices ran down our chins, and we invited disaster every way we could, short of formally announcing that having acted like grown-ups, having done right, we were now entitled, goddammit, to have some big-time fun. On the twentieth day, Huddie and I cut study hall and went to his house. On his narrow bed, with the raw plywood headboard banging steadily into the faded yellow wallpaper, with me murmuring, “No, no, no” and clutching his hard wet back to me, pulling him right through me, until it amazed me to see any part of him still outside my skin, Huddie and I stopped trying to be grown up. After forty-five minutes, we melted down, panting and numb like long-distance runners.

There was no time to shower, which didn’t bother us. We had never taken a shower together. Kids have nowhere to fuck and nowhere to shower. Only adults, cheating and careful, clean up afterwards. We jumped wet and proud into our jeans, and we left his room thick with our scent of damp, salty fur, two puppies playing in a marsh, a smell that dripped from Huddie onto me and the sheet beneath us and seeped back into our skins. Liquid as hot and thick as my own blood ran down my legs for the rest of the day, and I smiled every time I sat down and felt the rough seam of my jeans cut into me. You would have had to shoot us to keep us apart.

By the weekend I knew I was pregnant. I remembered reading about girls my age who delivered and didn’t know they were pregnant until they went into labor. Did their parents really believe that? That these girls felt their breasts change into tender, painful eggs, hot as a fever, felt their bellies slope into firm, enveloping tents around tiny insistent strangers, threw up at the smell of spinach or bacon or coffee, and didn’t know? I knew.

I didn’t want to worry Huddie and I didn’t want to lose him.

I called Max.

“I’m pregnant,” I said. “I think I’m pregnant.”

Max said nothing. His breath was in my ear, thick and smoky; I heard him swallowing.

“Why don’t we get you a test first? Just to make sure.” I heard the flick of his lighter. “Don’t worry, baby girl.” He didn’t say, It’s not my baby, although I knew he knew it wasn’t.

“Okay. Rachel told me she had a test at Planned Parenthood.”

“Who was the boy?” Max had never liked Rachel, and after I told her just a little about what went on, not mentioning the vibrator or the way he put me in the chair naked and just stared at me, she hated him. When we saw him in town, she’d glare at him and mutter, and once she scraped his car with her keys. “Huddie’s so cute,” she said. “He’s disgusting, Elizabeth. It’s sick. We should kill him.”

“Zvi Carnofsky. Anyway, she wasn’t.”

“Fine. Anyway, I didn’t mean Carnofsky. If you don’t want to go to Planned Parenthood, go see a friend of mine. Hilda Ringer. She’s a very good doctor, a lovely woman.”

I didn’t say anything. I’d never made my own doctor’s appointment.

“Do you want me to call for you?”

“No, I can do it. What do I say? Do I say I’m pregnant?”

“No, you ask to see Dr. Ringer and you say you want a pregnancy test and that Mr. Stone suggested you call. I’ll take care of the bill.”

“Will you come with me?” He wouldn’t. People would wonder why he was there with me, and it would cause trouble.

“I don’t think so, baby girl. I think that would be pretty conspicuous. You go and I’ll pick you up afterwards. We can get a bite to eat and wait for the results.”

“Never mind. I’ll go with Rache. I’ll go with someone. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine. I won’t do anything conspicuous.” I slammed down the phone. I was furious until I remembered it wasn’t his baby.

I wasn’t happy that I had to wait three more weeks for the abortion, but the counselor at Planned Parenthood told me what I wanted to hear and held my hand when she promised me no pain, “just a little cramping.” She made it sound like going to the dentist, which was what I wanted. She smiled at Huddie and looked gravely at me and handed us a pile of educational booklets with cheerful stick-figure men and women making sensible and healthy decisions. I dropped them in the trash on the way to Huddie’s car. I said it was no big deal and Huddie said it was, and we fought about things that were too big for us until we got to the park, where we lay beneath hundred-year-old oak trees and said, We might as well.

Thanks to Mrs. Hill and her daughter, I knew as much about cholesterol levels and heart disease as any elderly cardiac patient. I made casseroles with a skim-milk white sauce from a recipe I found in an American Heart Association pamphlet, and skinless chicken breast with tomatoes and mushrooms sautéed in a half teaspoon of olive oil. Sometimes I substituted turkey for chicken and potatoes for tomatoes. The pork rinds were long gone, as were the palm readings. Now we were serious; Mrs. Hill was seriously ill and I seriously loved her.

Mrs. Hill was having a pretty good day. Her skin was its normal coffee color, not overcast with greyish yellow tones, and we had spent some up time before her nap, clowning around while the radio played a tribute to the Supremes. Mrs. Hill and I could do all the appropriate hand gestures for every song, and we agreed that Diana Ross was too skinny and bossy for her own good. We preferred Flo Ballard, who looked a little like Vivian, or even Cindy Birdsong, who was obviously dumb as a tree but good-natured.

I was skinning the chicken breast and then I was not.

Huddie made his deliveries and found me curled up on the floor, my cheek on the red and grey speckled linoleum, my hands pressed to my belly.

“Are you okay? Liz, sweet, I’ll take you to the clinic. Elizabeth?” I could hear him and I could smell him and the pain was not so bad but I couldn’t speak. A cold rising river closed in on me, running through me, carrying only me and my baby — all of a sudden my baby, wrapped in my arms. Naked, swept over sharp, half-hidden rocks, stones scraping my feet, icy grey sprays chilling our cheeks, stiffening her soft body, pulling her fine hair with rough fingers.

My baby is dying, I thought, and I pounded on the floor, terrifying Huddie. The blood had begun to seep through my jeans. I reached inside my underpants and looked at my red-streaked palms. I crawled to the bathroom, and he pulled off my jeans and my underpants and sat at my feet, crying for me.

Cry for her, I thought, and I told him to leave me alone. He looked at my smeared hands and legs, my bared teeth, the bits of blood drying in my black hair, and he sat down outside the bathroom door and waited.

I sat and sat, feeling clumps of blood and tissue sucked out of my bright veins, pulled out of my young body, into nothing, leaving nothing. I would be old when this was over, a shell scoured clean by the waves. Huddie would be young and I would be old, as tired as Mrs. Hill. Just lay me down next to my little baby, leave us be. I’m sorry, baby, I will never think of having an abortion ever again, no matter what, I’m sorry, God, don’t take my baby, don’t take my baby. The cramps were almost gone, just the smallest waves now.