Outside, snow is falling, killing off the first of the cherry blossoms. My hiking boots are soaked through. On the walk from the subway to the free clinic, through the blooming snowdrifts, I almost lost my nerve. But I’m here now, waiting for my pink ticket number to be called, as if I’m at a Baskin-Robbins.
The nurse calls us in five at a time. I hand her the signed letter I’ve forged on my mother’s stationery, giving me permission to get birth control, since I am only fifteen. She barely glances at it before tossing it on top of a pile of what are probably similar letters. I am taken to a curtained-off area with the Puerto Rican girls and a pregnant woman. A counselor talks to us about the risks of birth control, the option of adoption, and then gives each of us a pregnancy test to take. The pregnant woman protests that this is a waste of a test, but the nurse explains that it’s part of the protocol. The three girls eye-fuck me the entire time. “What’s the matter, blondie? Daddy won’t pay for a real doctor?” I take my test into the bathroom and pee on the strip.
My mother thinks I am spending the day with Becky, going to see Victor/Victoria. She even gave me money for popcorn and a soda. I want to tell her the truth, beg her to save me, but I can’t do that to her. It would break her heart, destroy her marriage. She’s so happy with Leo, and I am stronger than she is—strong enough to carry this. It is my responsibility. I was nice to Conrad, I let him in the door. “It’s your funeral,” Anna had said that poison ivy night. And she was right. Now everywhere I go, I’m trapped by the weight of his body, his moist breath, his smelly hands, his hideous fleshy parts.
* * *
—
We are ushered from the information session to a changing room and given paper dresses. “Take everything off, leave on your shoes,” the nurse tells us. There is a line of women in thin paper dresses and heavy snow boots sitting on a long bench waiting their turn. It is two hours before my name is called, and the nurse brings me into an exam room.
The doctor has a mask over his mouth. I never see his face, just his distracted eyes.
“Please ask the patient to get on the table and put her feet in the stirrups,” he says to the nurse.
“I just need a prescription for birth control pills,” I say.
He turns to the nurse. “Did you explain that she cannot get medicine prescribed until we examine her?”
The nurse nods and gives me an impatient glare. “Of course, Doctor. She signed the forms.”
When I climb up onto the table, I feel my dress tear. How will I get back to the changing room without exposing myself? I lie back and let the nurse place my wet boots into the metal stirrups. It is hot in the room, but I can’t stop shivering.
There’s a knock on the door.
“Come,” the doctor calls out.
A young Asian man in a white coat enters the room.
“We have a medical student here from Kyoto studying our birth control methods. You don’t mind if he observes?” the doctor says. He beckons the man over to the end of the table, ignoring the look of horror in my eyes. Hands him a mask.
The man gives me a formal bow, arms tight by his side, before putting his head between my legs and looking at my vagina.
“Interesting,” he says. “The hymen is still intact.”
“Yes,” the doctor says. “This will feel cold.”
15
1982. November, New York.
Water sluices the windows. My room is tomb-like, sealed. I yawn, sit up in bed, stare down into the interior courtyard. The heavy rain has puddled to the middle, forming a square-shaped lake. A waxy Dixie cup skitters across the surface, dragging a piece of Saran wrap behind it like a jellyfish tail. I reach for my clock. I have a history test first period and I’ve set the alarm for six a.m. so I can finish memorizing. 7:45. A flash of panic sweeps me as I realize I’ve slept through my alarm. I rush around my room, throwing things into my backpack, drilling myself out loud: Stamp Act Congress, Taxation Without Representation, “the shot heard round the world.” I pull on whatever clothes I’ve left lying on the floor and am almost out the front door when I remember my birth control pills. I race back to my room, reach into the way-back of my closet, grab the nude oval container from inside the old ice skate where I keep it hidden, and swallow Tuesday.
* * *
—
The week I started taking the pill, Conrad stopped coming to my room at night. At first I thought it was the timing. Six days after my visit to the clinic, Conrad had left to spend spring break in Memphis with his mother and weird Rosemary, whom I hadn’t seen in three years and, for all I knew, was probably a bride of Christ by now. The first few weeks after Conrad got back, I lay in bed at night, forcing myself to stay awake, waiting for a floorboard to creak, the whisper of his clothes, the unzipping. But nothing happened. It was as if I had taken a magic pill.