In the neighborhoods, parking wars intensified. Spaces were saved with lawn chairs, with recycling bins. Sofas and armchairs were dragged into the street. Workers called in sick to avoid driving. It was worth burning up a vacation day to hang on to a parking space.
The text messages arrived like digital precipitation, what the Weather Channel called wintry mix. The homeowner is responsible for clearing sidewalks.
Ice dams were a serious problem. This was a thing people talked about.
Five nor’easters in five weeks. It’s fair to say that Boston took it personally. Boston blamed El Ni?o or La Ni?a, global warming and fossil fuels, corruption in the State House, the city’s cursed geography. Boston blamed the New York Yankees, just because.
Long underwear, wool sweater, down parka, balaclava. Boston packed into train cars, awash in sweat and indignation. Boston—not the jolliest city on its best day—was feeling cantankerous. Resentment hung in the air like a toxic gas. Clear your dryer vents! Blocked vents lead to carbon monoxide poisoning. The resentment was visceral, a physiologic response to known phenomena—dew point, bulb point, barometric pressure—and to others not yet identified.
MEANWHILE THE REST OF LIFE WAS STILL HAPPENING. CLAUDIA worked too much and slept too little. She made appointments （haircut, dentist, mammogram）; she showered and laundered. She shoveled the sidewalk and dusted it with rock salt, read the newspaper and ate toast. On alternating weekends she drove to Stuart’s house in Andover, to eat steaks and fuck. （Occasionally they watched a movie.） Once or twice a week, her car was buried by the snowplow. Once or twice a week, she dug it out. All this took time.
At work, the hotline kept ringing. Condoms broke, eggs were fertilized, periods came or didn’t. Symptoms flared, worsened, required attention. The body, indifferent to weather, made its demands.
Each morning on Mercy Street, protestors gathered. Puffy fingered his rosary beads—a kind man, well-meaning. He wore a wedding ring. Claudia imagined him long married—widowed, maybe—and lonely in retirement, eager to do good in the world. He spoke gently to the young women he met at the clinic, not understanding that most of them were not actually pregnant.
A female body is a lot of work. Puffy, not having one himself, was possibly unaware of this fact. Women go to the doctor all the time, just to keep things running smoothly. On any given day the clinic was full of them, women of all ages and colors sitting in stirrups for the annual tribulation—an experience they’d all happily forgo, if they had any say in the matter.
Bring in your pelvis for its twelve-month checkup. Failure to perform scheduled maintenance may void the warranty.
These drab medical realities didn’t interest the protestors gathered on the sidewalk. Only abortion mattered, a stranger’s crisis. The rest was too mundane, too visceral: the messy business of secretions and hormones and cyclical seepages, the routine （expensive, embarrassing, occasionally lifesaving） interventions a female body required.
There was no way to explain this to the crowd on the sidewalk. Claudia didn’t even try.
HANNAH R. WAS SEVENTEEN, A TALL, SLENDER GIRL WITH SILKY hair and a flawless complexion, a senior at Pilgrims Country Day School. According to her file, she was six weeks pregnant.
Hannah. The name had become inexplicably popular. To bookish girls of Claudia’s generation, Hannah had been the family housekeeper in the Nancy Drew mysteries. Now, suddenly, Hannahs were everywhere.
“Have a seat,” said Claudia. “First we’re going to talk privately. When we’re finished, Mary will bring in your parent or legal guardian to sign the consent form.
“Everything you tell me today will be kept confidential here at the clinic, unless you tell me someone is hurting you or not taking care of you, or if you are going to hurt yourself or someone else. If you tell me any of those things, I have to tell someone outside the clinic so we can make sure you’re safe.”
She verified that the abortion was Hannah’s own choice, that no one had pressured her to have it. She explained the procedure step by step. Hannah might have some bleeding afterward. Her periods were likely to be irregular for the next couple of months.