Richard Brautigan - The Abortion - An Historical Romance 1966

‘Please,’ he said, gesturing us in.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I just called you on the telephone. I’m Foster’s friend.’

‘I know,’ he said, quietly. ‘Follow, please.’

The doctor was small, middle-aged and dressed perfectly like a doctor. His office was large and cool and had many rooms that led like a labyrinth far into the back and places that we knew nothing about.

He took us to a small reception room. It was clean with modern linoleum on the floor and modern doctor furniture: an uncomfortable couch and three chairs that you could never really fit into.

The furniture was the same as the furniture you see in the offices of American doctors. There was a tall plant in the corner with large flat cold green leaves. The leaves didn’t do anything.

There were some other people already in the room: a father, a mother and a young teenage daughter. She obviously belonged to the brand-new car parked in front.

‘Please,’ the doctor said, gesturing us towards the two empty chairs in the room. ‘Soon,’ he said, smiling gently. ‘Wait, please. Soon.’

He went away across the corridor and into another room that we could not see, leaving us with the three people. They were not talking and it was strangely quiet all through the building.

Everybody looked at everybody else in a nervous kind of way that comes when time and circumstance reduce us to seeking illegal operations in Mexico.

The father looked like a small town banker in the San Joaquin Valley and the mother looked like a woman who participated in a lot of social activities.

The daughter was pretty and obviously intelligent and didn’t know what to do with her face as she waited for her abortion, so she kept smiling in a rapid knife-like way at nothing.

The father looked very stern as if he were going to refuse a loan and the mother looked vaguely shocked as if somebody had said something a little risqué at a social tea for the Friends of the DeMolay.

The daughter, though she possessed a narrow budding female body, looked as if she were too young to have an abortion. She should have been doing something else.

I looked over at Vida. She also looked as if she were too young to have an abortion. What were we all doing there? Her face was growing pale.

Alas, the innocence of love was merely an escalating physical condition and not a thing shaped like our kisses.

About forever or ten minutes passed and then the doctor came back and motioned towards Vida and me to come with him, though the other people had been waiting when we came in. Perhaps it had something to do with Foster.

‘Please,’ Dr Garcia said, quietly.

We followed after him across the hall and into a small office. There was a desk in the office and a typewriter. The office was dark and cool, the shades were down, with a leather chair and photographs of the doctor and his family upon the walls and the desk.

There were various certificates showing the medical degrees the doctor had obtained and what schools he had graduated from. There was a door that opened directly into an operating room. A teenage girl was in the room cleaning up and a young boy, another teenager, was helping her.

A big blue flash of fire jumped across a tray full of surgical instruments. The boy was sterilizing the instruments with fire. It startled Vida and me. There was a table in the operating room that had metal things to hold your legs and there were leather straps that went with them.

‘No pain,’ the doctor said to Vida and then to me. ‘No pain and clean, all clean, no pain. Don’t worry. No pain and clean. Nothing left. I’m a doctor,’ he said.

I didn’t know what to say. I was so nervous that I was almost in shock. All the colour had drained from Vida’s face and her eyes looked as if they could not see any more.

‘Two hundred and fifty dollars,’ the doctor said. ‘Please.’

‘Foster said it would be two hundred dollars. That’s all we have,’ I heard my own voice saying. ‘Two hundred. That’s what you told Foster.’

‘Two hundred. That’s all you have?’ the doctor said.

Vida stood there listening to us arbitrate the price of her stomach. Vida’s face was like a pale summer cloud.

‘Yes.’ I said. ‘That’s all we have.’

I took the money out of my pocket and gave it to the doctor. I held the money out and he took it from my hand. He put it in his pocket, without counting it, and then he became a doctor again, and that’s the way he stayed all the rest of the time we were there. He had only stopped being a doctor for a moment. It was a little strange. I don’t know what I expected. It was very good that he stayed a doctor for the rest of the time.

Foster was of course right.

He became a doctor by turning to Vida and smiling and saying, ‘I won’t hurt you and it will be clean. Nothing left after and no pain, honey. Believe me. I’m a doctor.’

Vida smiled 1/2: ly.

‘How long has she been?’ the doctor said to me and starting to point at her stomach but not following through with it, so his hand was a gesture that didn’t do anything.

‘About five or six weeks,’ I said.

Vida was now smiling 1/4: ly.

The doctor paused and looked at a calendar in his mind and then he nodded affectionately at the calendar. It was probably a very familiar calendar to him. They were old friends.

‘No breakfast?’ he said, starting to point again at Vida’s stomach but again he failed to do so.

‘No breakfast,’ I said.

‘Good girl,’ the doctor said.

Vida was now smiling 1/37: ly.

After the boy finished sterilizing the surgical instruments, he took a small bucket back through another large room that was fastened to the operating room.

The other room looked as if it had beds in it. I moved my head a different way and I could see a bed in it and there was a girl lying on the bed asleep and there was a man sitting in a chair beside the bed. It looked very quiet in the room.

A moment after the boy left the operating room, I heard a toilet flush and water running from a tap and then the sound of water being poured in the toilet and the toilet was flushed again and the boy came back with the bucket.

The bucket was empty.

The boy had a large gold wristwatch on his hand.

‘Everything’s all right,’ the doctor said.

The teenage girl, who was dark and pretty and also had a nice wristwatch, came into the doctor’s office and smiled at Vida. It was that kind of smile that said: It’s time now; please come with me.

‘No pain, no pain, no pain,’ the doctor repeated like a nervous nursery rhyme.

No pain, I thought, how strange.

‘Do you want to watch?’ the doctor asked me, gesturing towards an examination bed in the operating room where I could sit if I wanted to watch the abortion.

I looked over at Vida. She didn’t want me to watch and I didn’t want to watch either.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay in here.’

‘Please come, honey,’ the doctor said.

The girl touched Vida’s arm and Vida went into the operating room with her and the doctor closed the door, but it didn’t really close. It was still open an inch or so.

‘This won’t hurt,’ the girl said to Vida. She was giving Vida a shot.

Then the doctor said something in Spanish to the boy who said OK and did something.

‘Take off your clothes,’ the girl said. ‘And put this on.’

Then the doctor said something in Spanish and the boy answered him in Spanish and the girl said, ‘Please. Now put your legs up. That’s it. Good. Thank you.’

‘That’s right, honey,’ the doctor said. ‘That didn’t hurt, did it? Everything’s going to be all right. You’re a good girl.’