Page 17 - WTP Vol. IX #10

public school had comprehensively educated her about reproduction, but she’d always sensed that her body was different. That it would not be hospitable to human life.
“You mean, like, Mars?” her friend would say. “You’re talking about your uterus like it’s Mars.”
“I’m not saying it makes sense.”
The first time she got her period, she cried. She was thirteen, the last of her friends, and she didn’t tell her mother for three days. The booklet they’d handed out in health class said it meant you were becoming
a woman, that it was normal to feel sadness or pain for a while, and your body was only shedding what it didn’t need now but someday would need.
At first she thought about an abortion. She’d signed petitions for abortion, donated money, protested for it in the streets. She’d even interviewed for a job at a clinic once. A friend had forwarded the job posting to her. “If I were getting an abortion in southern Illinois, I’d want you to be the one to talk to me about it first,” is all the friend wrote in the email.
But an abortion was for teenagers, for desperate, impoverished girls or aging women with five kids in tow and hips so stretched out and tired that another just wouldn’t do. She was thirty-two, married, with enough money in her bank account that it didn’t keep her up at night. Women like her didn’t get an abor- tion. They made it work.
What decided it in the end, though, was the thought of the thing coming out of her. She played out every scenario in her head, and the conclusion was always the same. It didn’t matter if it was a vacuum-looking thing in some sterile exam room, or a slow sliding out on the toilet at home. She couldn’t stand the thought of it.
She knew exactly what her friend would say: “Surely you knew that an actual baby coming out of your vag would be way worse, right?”
“I’m not saying it makes sense.” “Oh you.”
After a while, she’d even felt excited. “The thing is,” her husband told her one night, kneeling on the floor opening the packages that now showed up daily on the porch, “is that nothing really has to change. We can still do what we want, for the most part, be who we are. We’ll just have a little mini-us that we get to
bring along when we go places, you know? Now, what the hell is in this box?”
He was now inflating whatever it was, breathing into it with his mouth like it was a beach ball. A cu- riosity grew inside her when she watched him like this from her cocoon on the couch. Unpacking the boxes. Assembling and arranging things, things with buttons and knobs and parts that warmed up or made noise, things that talked to other things. She imagined him in pictures, holding his child, smiling into its face instead of the camera. It looked right, seeing him like that.
He hadn’t wanted to pressure her, had played at indif- ference when she first told him, but she knew he’d always felt like a father. He’d told her that years ago, when they were first getting to know each other over long restaurant dinners and mornings in bed. “I’ve always felt like a father.” That’s what he said.
Later, when they moved in together and started sneaking glances at life beyond next weekend’s plans, they’d always ended up fighting when they got to this part.
“I don’t need one to be happy. I just want you.”
“You say that now. But one day you’re going to realize it’s not true, and by then it’ll be too late.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Well neither do you. That’s what I’m saying.”
And she’d meant to bring it up a hundred or a thou- sand times since then, but there were always other things, things that needed doing right now and never hurt, veterinary appointments to schedule, oil to change, furniture to paint and repaint, and eventually
(continued on next page)
10