A. Homes - In A Country Of Mothers

The nurse took Polly away, and Claire was glad to be alone. Her thoughts had agitated her to the point where if she hadn’t been with a patient, she would’ve tried to get a little Valium of her own somewhere. She took a couple of deep breaths and closed her eyes. She’d been there before. She could feel it in her shoulders, in the back of her neck. Déjà vu, sort of. It was much different then. In 1966 there were no pregnancy tests on sale at the drugstore. There were no abortion clinics listed in the yellow pages.

• • •

Eighteen and a half years old, finishing her first year at George Washington University, she was involved with Mark Ein, an English professor just out of Yale with a novel already published. Intense, with curly brown hair, sexy pursed lips, and blue eyes. He was like no one Claire had ever known. He said he avoided eye contact because he was afraid of burning holes into people, and described himself as a nonteacher. “We’re in this together,” he told the class. “This is an exploration, the beginning of what should become an unending process.”

As part of the exploration, he took Claire out. He took her for meals she’d never eaten, to movies she’d never heard of, to hot spots where they danced to strange new music. And then she was pregnant. In 1966 that’s how an eighteen-year-old knew; she figured it out. It didn’t take a genius. No red tag sale, the curse that didn’t come.

“I’m pregnant,” Claire finally told him as they walked into an ice cream store.

Standing in line, Mark leaned over and whispered in her ear. “I should tell you something. I’m married. My wife’s in graduate school at Berkeley.” He ordered a mint chocolate chip cone for himself and turned to Claire, who was about to throw up. “Want anything?”

She shook her head and bit down hard, grinding her teeth together.

“You don’t have to have it,” he said. “I can find a place.”

Claire wasn’t sure what he was talking about. What kind of a place? A place where she and the baby could hide? Where he’d keep her as his extra wife?

On the warmest day of spring, Mark picked Claire up in his green MG and drove her into a part of Washington she’d never seen before: street after street of row houses, not brick townhouses like they had in Georgetown, elegant and expensive, but rundown wood and brick. Some had little front porches; some had faded striped awnings and half-rusted aluminum porch furniture. There were a few children, a few older men shuffling around, the occasional dog loping toward home. Claire felt exposed, in danger. She wondered if Mark was taking her to the nanny who’d raised him and was going to leave her there. She would live in the nanny’s house, and sometimes Mark would sneak away and come visit her. By the time the nanny got old and died, the neighbors would be so used to Claire that she’d just go on living there for the rest of her life.

“Come in,” a tall black woman said, holding open the screen door. They stepped up onto her porch. “I’m Luanne,” she said, leading them through the house, into the kitchen in the back. “Lie down.” She pointed to the kitchen table covered with a neatly pressed white sheet. Claire lay back on the table — the same table, she supposed, they ate their dinner on every night. She didn’t know what she was doing there. Mark hadn’t said a word. Would he make her do something she might not want to do? Would this woman operate on her, just like that, without warning?

“Relax,” Luanne said, smiling. Her smile was filled with dark tooth gaps and bright pink gums. Claire looked at her uneven grin and decided they’d come for some sort of special treatment that would make the baby dissolve and disappear. Luanne closed her kitchen door and came to Claire. She lifted Claire’s shirt and put her hands on Claire’s belly.

“How long?” she asked.

“Two months, maybe a little more,” Claire said.

With dry, bony fingers Luanne kneaded Claire’s stomach.

Mark stood in the corner gnawing his cuticles. Claire could see him out of the corner of her eye. He no longer seemed so wonderful, larger than life. He looked small, nervous, unpleasant.

“I can do it,” the woman said. “You come back and I’ll do it. You stay overnight. Think about it. I make no guarantee. There could always be a problem, and there’d be nothing I could do except try and get you to the hospital. I don’t have a car, and it’s hard to get a taxi. I’m telling you that.”

Claire nodded. She finally understood what they’d been talking about all along, although she had no idea of how it would be done. Would the woman cut her belly open? Punch a hole with a knitting needle and stir things around?

“I’ll think about it,” Claire said, trying to be polite. There was no way she was coming back. The whole time she’d been lying on the table, all she could think about was the family eating dinner. She could see this woman taking her child, making stew out of it, and serving it up to a table full of people. Fresh, deep red, and tender.

“We’ll be back,” Mark said easily to the woman.

The woman nodded and smiled at him. Claire wondered if he’d been there before. She didn’t ask. She didn’t really want to know. For the next month she avoided Mark. The semester ended. For the first time in her life, Claire had straight A’s.

“Guess you’re having it,” Mark said to her. They were in his office after the last class.

Until he said it, Claire had never really believed that if she did nothing, in six months she would be forced — if only by gravity and the infant’s self-determination — to have a baby. She wondered how much it would hurt. Just having sex, having a man inside her, was enough. She couldn’t imagine a baby coming out without killing her. She pictured herself trying to hold it in, for months, years, the rest of her life.

“Maybe you’ll have a miscarriage or something,” Mark said hopefully.

Claire shrugged and pretended not to be offended. She could already feel it rooted inside her, not about to give up.

“Sorry,” he said simply, as if he’d accidentally stepped on her toe. “I’ll walk you to the bus.” They walked out into the clear May afternoon. Claire saw the bus coming down Pennsylvania Avenue and, without a word, took off running toward it and never saw Mark Ein again.

She waited until it was no longer possible not to tell her parents. She pulled her mother into her room and sat her down on the bed; but when Claire started to speak, no words came out.

“Is something wrong?” her mother asked, starting to get up. “Maybe you should suck on a lozenge.” Claire pushed her back down on the bed, lifted her blouse, pushed down the elastic waistband of her skirt, and turned to the side, so her mother would see the bulge. In profile, it looked like what it was.

“Oh my lord,” her mother said, covering her mouth with her hand, as if to push back a longer stream of words, the stream that turned into an overflowing river when her father found out.

Her mother ran out of the room and into the kitchen, where she made hushed phone call after hushed phone call. Then she ordered Claire into the car. She drove her to the doctor — not the family physician but a different one in downtown Washington — to make sure the protrusion wasn’t something else. Claire imagined her mother wishing it was some complicated disease, something there would be no shame in dying from. Cancer would have been good.

“It’s true,” the doctor said, as though he too had first believed Claire was concealing a tumor under her skirt.

Her mother leaned far over the doctor’s desk and whispered, so softly that later it would seem as though she’d never said it, “Is there anything that can be done about it?”