In her blue polyester smock, her arms pressed against her stomach, she drank a Coke and smoked a cigarette with Jill O’Meara who had come into Woolworth’s just as Susan was going on her break. They sat together on the concrete rim of a planter in the middle of the mall. It was humid, but there was that orange color at the edge of the blue sky-the beginning of a late-summer sunset. Because they had not seen each other since June-they were not particular friends-conversation demanded an accounting. Jill had had a perfectly boring summer, working at a card shop in a strip mall near her home, the backyard pool, Jones Beach, two weeks camping with her family-where, she added, a spontaneous lie, she met this guy. They went pretty far, she said, improvising, swimming together late at night, in the lake, out of their suits. He was dark-haired and blue-eyed and funny-but from Syracuse, she said, the first place she could think of that sounded like the dark side of the moon.
Susan looked at her, smiling. “How far?” she said. They were not friends, but might be becoming. Jill admired Susan. She liked her wit, her self-possession, her feline languor in the classroom, the way she slumped and curled into chairs. The way she let her eyes close slowly, never bothering to put her head down, when a teacher grew boring.
Like most compulsive liars, Jill O’Meara was skeptical of the reports others gave of themselves-the incredible dates, the wild parties, the insane mothers and alcoholic fathers-but she had always trusted what Susan had to say. Susan’s brother had gone to Vietnam and had come back a basket case. (This offered in a history class discussion about the war.) She had spent a year convinced her parents were really brother and sister, they were so identically boring. (This during a retreat day at school when the girls had been broken into small groups to discuss ways to bring Christ into their daily lives.) She had written her initials in love bites around the navel of the boy she was taking to the junior prom. (This declared amid much laughter at a table in the lunchroom.)
Jill sipped her drink, nodding slowly. “God,” she said, as if at the recollection of some astonishing memory. “We went far. Really far.”
A laugh, sophisticated, wordly-wise, broke from Susan and she said, “Start saving your pennies now,” and opened her smock and put her hand on her stomach, although what she thought of as her paunch was mostly invisible to Jill, and to everyone else.
“This ain’t pizza,” she said.
At the end of a boring summer (no boy at the lake or anywhere else, only a hopeless crush on the UPS guy who stopped by the card shop every day and called her Kid), the revelation, the sudden tears in Susan’s voice, were high drama.
Jill O’Meara had nearly two hundred and fifty dollars in her senior prom fund. (It had been her junior prom fund last year but she hadn’t found a date.) She told Susan-the summer suddenly become interesting-”I can lend you the rest. You want me to go with your
Susan spent the night before at Annie’s house so in the morning they could walk to the bus stop. They both told their mothers they were accompanying the other to the famous hair salon in the city to give her moral support while she got a new cut. (The story would be that in the end Susan/Annie had chickened out on getting something totally new and just got a few inches cut off, you could hardly notice the difference.) They took the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station and then rode the hot subway uptown. Of course, they didn’t run into any neighbors or relatives who worked in the city, or anyone else who knew them, but that was no matter-the haircut story was already in place; they were, until they got off at the eleventh floor and not the third, precisely where they were supposed to be.
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?”