Alice McDermott - After This

Susan filled out the forms with Annie’s name and placed Annie’s fake license and birth certificate under the clip on the clipboard before handing it back to the woman at the reception desk. The woman, handsome and serene, with a small face and an old-fashioned French twist, merely slipped them out from under the clipboard and handed them back to her-no question of hazel or brown. “That’s fine,” she said, sweetly. “And how will you be paying?”

The day before, Susan had gone to a bank near the mall and exchanged her collection of money for six crisp fifty-dollar bills, sensing somehow that the neatness of her payment would confirm the authenticity of her age. She handed these to the woman, still in their yellow bank-provided envelope. The woman merely attached the money to the same clipboard and then said again, “That’s fine.”

“We’ll call you in a minute,” she said.

It was ten thirty on a Tuesday in late August and there was no one else in the waiting room, which was very small and comfortable-a pale lavender sofa and two plaid chairs, shaded lamps that might have been in someone’s living room. Annie had brought the last of her summer reading books- A Farewell to Arms -which she was only halfway through and Susan herself had not yet finished. “Boring,” Susan said, glancing at it. “A lot of war stuff.”

Although they would have said they were prepared for it, they both were startled when a woman-a nurse in a white uniform-came through the door beside the receptionist and said, “Anne Keane.” After only a moment’s hesitation, Susan stood.

“Good luck, Annie,” Annie whispered and Susan laughed a little. “Thanks, Susie.” Like the spunky, place-trading twins from a sitcom.

The nurse-square-jawed and deeply tanned but with warm brown eyes-advised Susan to leave her purse with her friend, and in that moment of turning back to hand over the strap of her bag, Annie saw that Susan was trembling, trembling slightly, almost imperceptibly, but also thoroughly, from her fingertips to her shoulders to the smooth flesh of her pretty face, lips, scalp, even the ends of her pale hair.

In that moment she saw, too, how Susan had fixed her eyes-brown not hazel-on some distant point, some point out of the room, out of this particular ten thirty on a Tuesday morning in late August, out of this strange office building in Manhattan, and onto a place after which this would be done, gotten through, gotten over.

Annie took her friend’s bag but did not aim, again, to smile at her or to offer any encouragement. Later, wading through the war stuff, she wondered if what Susan had shown her in that moment-trembling, looking ahead-could be called courage. And wondered why it was assumed that courage was always put to some noble end.

Inside, Susan gave a urine sample and then undressed and was examined, and when the pregnancy was confirmed, the procedure was explained to her. The strange words: cervix and uterus, dilation and curettage, felt like a steel blade against the edge of her teeth. In religion class, Sister Lucy had said, more simply, that they break the baby’s arms and legs and drown it in salt water.

Pain like a pretty bad period, the doctor said, some heavy bleeding afterward.

There was another paper to sign and she was halfway through her own first name when she remembered and went over the S and the U.

“My hand is shaking,” she said, apologetically, and the tanned nurse whispered, “No worry,” and gently took the botched form away.

The woman who did the exam and all the explaining was small and wiry with wiry red hair and a humorless face. She had been introduced as the doctor but still Susan expected a man to come in for the abortion itself. Someone stooped and gray in a white coat and a tie who would call her “young lady” and look at her over the top of his glasses both to reprimand and to forgive. Who might say something old-fashioned and complimentary, something like, “Well, I can see why your young man might have been carried away. You’re a lovely girl.”

But only another nurse came in, a pretty Asian woman who might have been alone with the doctor in the small and crowded room for all the notice she paid. The doctor said, “Are we ready then?”

The tanned nurse stood right beside her. She complimented the sun streaks in Susan’s hair and then held her hand when she drew a sharp, unsteady breath at the cold touch of the instruments. She told her, “Go ahead and say ‘Ouch’ if it hurts,” but Susan only turned her head, her eyes now fixed on the woman’s white uniform, which was the same woven polyester of her Woolworth’s smock. She could smell the sweet clean odor of the detergent it had been washed in. “Not much longer now,” the nurse said. And, “You’re doing great.” She was supposed to be in what they’d called, so prettily, a twilight sleep, but the pain was on a steady rise and in the midst of it, Susan gripped the woman’s hand and raised it to her own mouth to stifle a sob. There was the smell of hospital soap on the nurse’s skin, sharp, medicinal, and, because of the pain, somehow cruel. It was a scent that would return her to this moment for the rest of her life.

They brought her to another room to recuperate. She had not worn a sanitary napkin and a belt since she was thirteen and the thing felt like a diaper between her legs. There was a kind of chaise longue for her to sit on, a small table beside it with grape juice and a few cookies: a kindergarten snack, a clean sheet, and a light blanket. The tanned nurse lowered the light a little further and said she would go tell her friend she was okay. She could go home in an hour or so, depending on how she felt.

“Rest a bit, honey,” she said, like a mother, before she left the room.

Susan could hear the traffic rising up from the street, the bang and rattle of trucks, taxi horns, a warning shout and a whistle and then a man’s laugh. She could picture the men in the street below, men pushing carts and backing vans into narrow parking spaces, men in suits, men with briefcases, going to lunch, ducking into cabs, running their hands down their ties as they walked across a subway grate. She closed her eyes but knew she wouldn’t sleep. She had never gone to sleep in New York City.

An Act of Contrition started up in her head. “Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee,” more a habit of mind than a plea for absolution. Because she could not balance any remorse against the dawning sense of relief. However terrible it might be, what she had done, it was over: gotten through, finished. However terrible it was, its immediate effect was that she could go back to school next week, her senior year. She could take the SATs, go to the prom, go to graduation. She could apply to colleges and choose one and move into a dorm in September. She could go out with her friends this weekend, maybe meet another guy. She could sleep late tomorrow (she had already asked for a late shift at the store, three to nine) and go downstairs in her work clothes and her smock-”Going”-her car keys in her hand, her father singing from another room, “It was a lucky April shower, it was the most convenient door,” sweet and affectionate and naive as he always was because he had no fear of trouble for this beautiful child, no quicksand, no terrible diversions, no nightmares to drive her from the room he and his son had plumbed and paneled with their own hands. “I found a million dollar baby in a five and ten cent store.”

The tanned nurse came in again to take her temperature and check her pad. She came back a little while later to say the doctor would be in to talk to her once more and then she could get dressed and go. “Although,” she said, blithely, “I’m not sure where your friend has gone off to.”