Christopher Hacker - The Morels

“Or a life sentence,” Doc said with a chuckle.

“You could take your pick. Either way it was permanent. I mean, to be sexually liberated at the age of fifteen is one thing, to be thought of as easy, a slut? Fine — I’ll wear that, and proudly even. Some girls in school, myself included — not that we were a group or anything — we weren’t too bothered by what we were called behind our backs or to our faces. We got our power from it somehow. But to be pregnant? That was a whole different matter. That was disgrace , plain and simple. And there was no other option, no Planned Parenthood. Abortion was a horror story you heard about, somebody’s uncle taking manslaughter for trying to help some poor girl in her second trimester. Or the girl in our class who survived a malpractice butcher — the look in her eyes when she told you what he did, what she went through. Legal abortions were something new, in only a couple of states. I sat there on the toilet, box of tampons in my hand, racking my head for which ones. It had been on the news, one of the C states: California? Colorado? How would I get there? How would I pay for it? How much safer would it be? And how could I keep this from my parents — though I made much noise about not caring what they thought about me, I very much did not want them to know about this. I didn’t want to know about this. So I did the only thing I could think to do: I made an appointment with my dentist.

“I said it was an emergency. His receptionist put me on hold and came back on the line to tell me they could squeeze me in. Ha! I don’t know what you thought you were getting.”

“I thought we were going to fuck.”

“Boy, were you disappointed.”

“I sent my assistant out on an errand. I brushed the hell out of my teeth. Floss, rinse, repeat. Moved the tray of tools out of the way this time, and that stupid light! And then you came in.” It was, to put it mildly, not welcome news to the beast in Doc’s pants.

She was not wearing her wig or her boots. She was in jeans and an old Rutgers sweatshirt that smelled like men’s aftershave. She walked into his examining room and punched him in the jaw, then sat down, vomited neatly into the porcelain sink attached to the chair, and wept.

If he had felt the wrongness of what he had done and what he had continued to feel, it was never more acutely felt than right there with this young girl crying in his chair, wearing her father’s sweatshirt, face damp with sweat. It was his daughter, sitting there. He held her hand and smoothed her hair, her real hair, and murmured fatherly words of comfort.

“I would be lying if I said I wasn’t turned on,” Doc said.

“I was your daughter, and you were turned on.”

“I had the hardest erection.”

“Fine. You felt what you felt. Moving on.”

He took a urine sample (“What are you going to do — make a painting?” “A what?” “Never mind.”) and sent it off to a colleague of his. He wasn’t entirely sure he could trust the man, who was more of an acquaintance, but it would be senseless to go through with all of this on a false premise. It would take a couple of days to get the results, enough time to prepare, to plan. Doc agreed that doing nothing was out of the question. He also agreed that she needed to be rid of the thing growing inside her. But how? California, Colorado, Oregon, North Carolina. These were the states they might go to for the procedure. They could make Charleston in six hours, have the procedure the same day. Post-op recovery would have to be done there, at the hospital or in a motel room nearby. There would be no hiding what she had been through for at least seventy-two hours following the surgery. It would cost thousands. It would involve elaborate lies — he would have to pose as her father. He could make up a conference to attend; she could “run away” from home, leave a note about going to the big city — only to return the following week. She would look bedraggled; her parents would be angry, worried sick, but happy to have their daughter back, lesson learned, none the wiser about her real whereabouts. She would head to the bus station on the morning he left for his “conference,” and he would pick her up at the station. At the hospital, he would pay cash, in full. He would bring equipment with him to monitor her condition at the motel and if necessary drive her to a nearby emergency room.

But a hospital stay was to be avoided — for the expense and the added scrutiny they’d be under. It would be dangerous, but they just might, with a little luck, get out of this intact. He goes home to his wife and kids, dark cloud of worry following him through the front door.

Dolores has cooked a Mexican fiesta. Happy Cinco de Mayo! she says. She has made a pitcher of margaritas, decked out the dining room with streamers. She is wearing a sombrero. Grilled steak, tortilla shells, beans and rice, and guacamole. The table is stacked with platters. They sit down to it as a family, the first time in a while they’ve eaten together. Dolores is beaming and a little tipsy.

Dinner, he is sure, is good, delicious even — it smells fine — but he has no appetite. He may as well be eating wet cardboard and library paste, for this is what the food feels like in his mouth. He leaves a large portion on his plate. Dolores asks him if he’s feeling okay, and he says he just doesn’t have the stomach for spicy food, which is certainly the wrong thing to say.

Benji, ever the pleaser, helps himself to what’s on his father’s plate and exclaims how he himself enjoys spicy food. He heaps second and third servings of refried beans and rice onto his licked-clean plate and eats as though he is having a wonderful time, pretending to be drunk on the pitcher of virgin margaritas his mother has prepared for his sister and him — performing slapstick pratfalls off his chair. Sarah is openly helping herself to the other pitcher, which her mother is pretending not to notice. When Doc starts to say something about it, Sarah fixes her father with a withering look.

“She knew,” Cynthia said.

“You didn’t tell her.”

“I didn’t have to tell her — she knew what you were up to. She was a smart girl.”

The phone rings, and Sarah storms out of her seat to get it. She comes back in and says to him, It’s for you. It was Cynthia.

“She was getting cold feet.”

“I did not have cold feet.”

“You didn’t want to go through with it.”

“It wasn’t like I changed my mind. I still didn’t want to keep the thing; it wasn’t that. It was just — there was so much lying involved. I didn’t know that I wanted to be a part of it. I had been doing some reading.” She tells him this on the phone. She says that it’s true that in New Jersey, as in most other states, abortion is illegal. Except in cases of rape or incest .

There is a long pause on the line while he waits for her to go on, but that is all she says.

He says, So?

So, you turn yourself in.

For what?

For rape. You say you raped me.

But I did no such thing.

You don’t have to put it that way. Put it however you want to. I seduced you, you seduced me, it was entirely consensual. In the eyes of the law, it doesn’t matter — it all amounts to the same thing. You see, it’ll be so much easier, and we can be honest about it — and I can have an abortion here without all that lurking around.

If Doc was lying before about why he wasn’t hungry, his stomach is now making it true — he belches and feels a sour sting in his throat, the spicy steak and beans lodged, burning, in his chest.

But your life would be over, he says. You told me that you wouldn’t want people to know about this.

I’d rather live with them knowing than live with this lie buried inside me. Look, I’m on my way into the heart of total liberation, man. I don’t want to meet Andy Warhol with this thing on my—