Ways To Show Affection

The cold morning wind clings to my skin like a tangled bedsheet, following me in the door from Lafayette Street and through the metal detector. The heat isn’t working in the clinic waiting room. A bronze bust of Margaret Sanger, patron saint of birth control, scrutinizes me from a plaster podium, and a slide show, Ways to Show Affection without Intercourse, is projected half on a pull-down screen and half on the cottage-cheese ceiling. There are no empty seats, so I stand among the teenagers, who are still wearing their oversized coats and avoiding eye contact, while a security officer with a shaved head presides over us with a list of names: Tiphanie, Lindsay, Keisha. You young ladies can go on back now. No, you can’t take anyone with you. The third way to show affection without intercourse is cuddling, but the man I’m with isn’t holding my hand. I’m out of place because of my pale skin and my jewelry; he’s out of place because of his gray hair.

A little girl with pink plastic barrettes in her lamblike curls squirms impatiently in the lap of her dozing, tattooed guardian. The girl looks me right in the eye, as small children do, and her gaze jumps my heart like a defibrillator. I look away quickly, but her image stays with me, and I am not here in the clinic but leaping from a rubber swing, splashing in a backyard wading pool with a plastic slide, prancing in a daffodil sundress on a wraparound porch with long pine railings. When I was this girl’s age, I’d get up at dawn to make parades of tiny objects down the wooden rails: plastic circus animals, alphabet blocks, newly minted pennies, brittle cicada skins plucked off the bark of pecan trees, granite rocks with quartz jewels embedded in them. In my family the women all collect small things, and we like to put them in lines. At my grandmother’s house, high on a shelf that held hawk feathers and arrowheads and foreign coins, there stood a glass mother elephant and four baby elephants all in a row, each one’s trunk tucked through the curled tail of the next. Sunlight from my grandmother’s window reflected off their glass ears, and I took them home with me, one by one, tucked in my palm, careful not to squeeze too hard and break them. The elephants were my grandmother’s gifts to me at the end of my visits, my reward for being a good girl.

There are no presents for the little squirming girl, nor for me, here in the first waiting room of the clinic. The windows, small grated diamonds near the ceiling, look out onto a sidewalk pockmarked by blackened chewing-gum buttons ejected from the mouths of smirking adolescents. I try to imagine carefree, bubble-blowing girls in miniskirts, but the only encouraging item in this cold basement holding cell is a ruffle-edged New Yorker magazine from last May. Blue xeroxed pamphlets, carelessly folded, lie scattered on the stained industrial carpet and particleboard tables: My partner / family member / friend is here for an abortion today, they read. What should I expect?

I guess they’re allowed to write abortion in print. On the phone they say termination, and in person they say procedure. Paul, whose hand I’m not holding, eyes a pamphlet but doesn’t pick it up. Maybe he’ll wait until I’m called away. Then maybe he’ll read it over and over, until he’s memorized what not to say afterward and knows exactly how much bleeding is too much. I could have told him all that myself, in minute detail. I know exactly what to expect.

I don’t know whether to say, “I’m sorry,” or, “That’s wonderful” was Paul’s first, whispered, response when I told him I was pregnant. Then What do you want to do? Then a gentle I guess I should come up, huh? Later he’d say that the wonderful part was just because he’d felt sure I’d want it, no matter what.

I just never in a million years thought this would be happening to me, Paul said — as if it were happening to him. I sat quivering in Queens, with my plastic cellphone in one hand and the plastic pregnancy test — showing two lines — in the other. I imagined him fiddling with his phone cord, perched on the edge of the navy-sheeted mattress on the floor of his dim Washington, D.C., studio apartment, beside the flimsy folding table that held his alarm clock, a photograph of his mother, and his wedding ring at the bottom of a white paper cup. (I’d known he was divorced from the beginning, but it had taken me weeks to notice the ring. I’d slip it on and off my finger while he shaved.) As it became clear that I was uncertain and willing to consider all the factors, Paul revised his initial line: while he couldn’t say no if I wanted to go through with the pregnancy, he wouldn’t lobby for it either. He didn’t want me to do anything I didn’t want to do. I would hear no more mention of wonderful, not until I e-mailed a girlfriend who made assumptions, wanted to throw a shower, told me she had hand-me-down onesies and tiny socks and a million books for me to read. By the end of her sweet, excited letter, I couldn’t stop sobbing.

How the fuck did this happen, anyway? Paul asked, and I explained to this man nearly twice my age — to this graying, ankle-aching, shoe-tree-using man — all the reasons why withdrawal isn’t enough. But by this, he meant a lot more than conception.

He said he was still all tangled up in his failed marriage. And I told him, I don’t want to talk about Alice right now. And he said, I know, but — And I said, You don’t. And he said, It’s not about her. It’s about us. And I said, Please stop. And he did.

When he came up, he said, No matter what, I’m glad it’s you — glad I was the one carrying his child. I wouldn’t let him hold my hand. I wouldn’t let him touch me at all.

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