Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (27 page)

Then the doctor and the girl were involved in a brief very rapid conversation in Spanish.

This was followed by a noisy silence and then the
sound of the doctor carrying something heavy and unconscious out of the operating room. He put the thing down in the other room and came back a moment later.

The girl walked over to the door of the room I was in and finished opening it. My dark cool office was suddenly flooded with operating room light. The boy was cleaning up.

"Hello," the girl said, smiling. "Please come with me.

She casually beckoned me through the operating room as if it were a garden of roses. The doctor was sterilizing his surgical instruments with the blue flame.

He looked up at me from the burning instruments and said, "Everything went OK. I promised no pain, all clean. The usual." He smiled. "Perfect."

The girl took me into the other room where Vida was lying unconscious on the bed. She had warm covers over her. She looked as if she were dreaming in another century.

"It was an excellent operation," the girl said. "There were no complications and it went as smoothly as possible. She'll wake up in a little while. She's beautiful, isn't she?"

"Yes."

The girl got me a chair and put it down beside Vida. I sat down in the chair and looked at Vida. She was so alone there in the bed. I reached over and touched her cheek. It felt as if it had just come unconscious from an operating room.

The room had a small gas heater that was burning quietly away in its own time. The room had two beds in it and the other bed where the girl had lain a short while before was now empty and there was an empty chair beside the bed, as this bed would be empty soon and the chair I was now sitting in: to be empty.

The door to the operating room was open, but I couldn't see the operating table from where I was sitting.

T
HE
door to the operating room was open, but I couldn't see the operating table from where I was sitting. A moment later they brought in the teen-age girl from the waiting room.

"Everything's going to be all right, honey," the doctor said. "This won't hurt." He gave her the shot himself.

"Please take off your clothes," the girl said.

There was a stunned silence for a few seconds that bled into the awkward embarrassed sound of the teen-age girl taking her clothes off.

After she took off her clothes, the girl assistant who was no older than the girl herself said, "Put this on."

The girl put it on.

I looked down at the sleeping form of Vida. She was wearing one, too.

Vida's clothes were folded over a chair and her shoes
were on the floor beside the chair. They looked very sad because she had no power over them any more. She lay unconscious before them.

"Now put your legs up, honey," the doctor was saying. "A little higher, please. That's a good girl."

Then he said something in Spanish to the Mexican girl and she answered him in Spanish.

"I've had six months of Spanish I in high school," the teen-age girl said with her legs apart and strapped to the metal stirrups of this horse of no children.

The doctor said something in Spanish to the Mexican girl and she replied in Spanish to him.

"Oh," he said, a little absentmindedly to nobody in particular. I guess he had performed a lot of abortions that day and then he said to the teen-age girl, "That's nice. Learn some more."

The boy said something very rapidly in Spanish.

The Mexican girl said something very rapidly in Spanish.

The doctor said something very rapidly in Spanish and then he said to the teen-age girl, "How do you feel, honey?"

"Nothing," she said, smiling. "I don't feel anything. Should I feel something right now?"

The doctor said something very rapidly to the boy in Spanish. The boy did not reply.

"I want you to relax," the doctor said to the teen-age girl. "Please take it easy."

All three of them had a very rapid go at it in Spanish. There seemed to be some trouble and then the doctor said something very rapidly in Spanish to the Mexican girl. He finished it by saying, "¿Como se dice treinta?"

"Thirty," the Mexican girl said.

"Honey," the doctor said. He was leaning over the teen-age girl. "I want you to count to, to thirty for us, please, honey."

"All right," she said, smiling, but for the first time her voice sounded a little tired.

It was starting to work.

"1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6..." There was a pause here. "7, 8, 9..." There was another pause here, but it was a little longer than the first pause.

"Count to, to thirty, honey," the doctor said.

"10, 11, 12."

There was a total stop.

"Count to thirty, honey," the boy said. His voice sounded soft and gentle just like the doctor's. Their voices were the sides of the same coin.

"What comes after 12?" the teen-age girl giggled. "I know! 13." She was very happy that 13 came after 12. "14, 15, 15, 15."

"You said 15," the doctor said.

"15," the teen-age girl said.

"What's next, honey?" the boy said.

"15," the teen-age girl said very slowly and triumphantly.

"What's next, honey?" the doctor said.

"15," the girl said. "15."

"Come on, honey," the doctor said.

"What's next?" the boy said.

"What's next?" the doctor said.

The girl didn't say anything.

They didn't say anything either. It was very quiet in the room. I looked down at Vida. She was very quiet, too.

Suddenly the silence in the operating room was broken by the Mexican girl saying, "16."

"What?" the doctor said.

"Nothing," the Mexican girl said, and then the language and silences of the abortion began.

V
IDA
lay there gentle and still like marble dust on the bed. She had not shown the slightest sign of consciousness, but I wasn't worried because her breathing was normal.

So I just sat there listening to the abortion going on in the other room and looking at Vida and where I was at: this house in Mexico, so far away from my San Francisco library.

The small gas heater was doing its thing because it was cool within the adobe walls of the doctor's office.

Our room was in the center of a labyrinth.

There was a little hall on one side of the room, running back past the open door of the toilet and ending at a kitchen.

The kitchen was about twenty feet away from where Vida lay unconscious with her stomach vacant like a chalkboard. I could see the refrigerator and a sink in
the kitchen and a stove with some pans on it.

On the other side of our room was a door that led into a huge room, almost like a small gym, and I could see still another room off the gym.

The door was open and there was the dark abstraction of another bed in the room like a large flat sleeping animal.

I looked down at Vida still submerged in a vacuum of anesthesia and listened to the abortion ending in the operating room.

Suddenly there was a gentle symphonic crash of surgical instruments and then I could hear the sounds of cleaning up joined to another chalkboard.

T
HE
doctor came through the room carrying the teen-age girl in his arms. Though the doctor was a small man, he was very strong and carried the girl without difficulty.

She looked very silent and unconscious. Her hair hung strangely over his arm in a blond confusion. He took the girl through the small gym and into the adjoining room where he lay her upon the dark animal-like bed.

Then he came over and closed the door to our room and went into the forward reaches of the labyrinth and came back with the girl's parents.

"It went perfect," he said. "No pain, all clean."

They didn't say anything to him and he came back to our room. As he passed through the door, the people were watching him and they saw Vida lying there and me sitting beside her.

I looked at them and they looked at me before the door was closed. Their faces were a stark and frozen landscape.

The boy came into the room carrying the bucket and he went into the toilet and flushed the fetus and the abortion leftovers down the toilet.

Just after the toilet flushed, I heard the flash of the instruments being sterilized by fire.

It was the ancient ritual of fire and water all over again to be all over again and again in Mexico today.

Vida still lay there unconscious. The Mexican girl came in and looked at Vida. "She's sleeping," the girl said. "It went fine."

She went back into the operating room and then the next woman came into the operating room. She was the "one" coming the Mexican girl had mentioned earlier. I didn't know what she looked like because she had come since we'd been there.

"Has she eaten today?" the doctor said.

"No," a man said sternly, as if he were talking about dropping a hydrogen bomb on somebody he didn't like.

The man was her husband. He had come into the operating room. He had decided that he wanted to watch the abortion. They were awfully tense people and the woman said only three words all the time she was there. After she had her shot, he helped her off with her clothes.

He sat down while her legs were strapped apart on
the operating table. She was unconscious just about the time they finished putting her in position for the abortion because they started almost immediately.

This abortion was done automatically like a machine. There was very little conversation between the doctor and his helpers.

I could feel the presence of the man in the operating room. He was like some kind of statue sitting there looking on, waiting for a museum to snatch him and his wife up. I never saw the woman.

After the abortion the doctor was tired and Vida was still lying there unconscious. The doctor came into the room. He looked down at Vida.

"Not yet," he said, answering his own question.

I said no because I didn't have anything else to do with my mouth.

"It's OK," he said. "Sometimes it's like this."

The doctor looked like an awfully tired man. God only knows how many abortions he had performed that day.

He came over and sat down on the bed. He took Vida's hand and he felt her pulse. He reached down and opened one of her eyes. Her eye looked back at him from a thousand miles away.

"It's all right," he said. "She'll be back in a few moments."

He went into the toilet and washed his hands. After he finished washing his hands, the boy came in with the bucket and took care of that.

The girl was cleaning up in the operating room. The doctor had put the woman on the examination bed in the operating room.

He had quite a thing going just taking care of the bodies.

"OHHHHHHHHHH!" I heard a voice come from behind the gym door where the doctor had taken the teen-age girl. "OHHHHHHHHHH!" It was a sentimental drunken voice. It was the girl. "OHH-HHHHHHHH!

"16!" she said. "I-OHHHHHHHHHH!"

Her parents were talking to her in serious, hushed tones. They were awfully respectable.

"OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

They were acting as if she had gotten drunk at a family reunion and they were trying to cover up her drunkenness.

"OHHHHHHHHHH! I feel funny!"

There was total silence from the couple in the operating room. The only sound was the Mexican girl. The boy had come back through our room and had gone somewhere else in the building. He never came back.

After the girl finished cleaning up the operating room, she went into the kitchen and started cooking a big steak for the doctor.

She got a bottle of Miller's beer out of the refrigerator and poured the doctor a big glass of it. He sat down in the kitchen. I could barely see him drinking the beer.

Then Vida started stirring in her sleep. She opened
her eyes. They didn't see anything for a moment or so and then they saw me.

"Hi," she said in a distant voice.

"Hi," I said, smiling.

"I feel dizzy," she said, coming in closer.

"Don't worry about it," I said. "Everything is fine."

"Oh, that's good," she said. There.

"Just lie quietly and take it easy," I said.

The doctor got up from the table in the kitchen and came in. He was holding the glass of beer in his hand.

"She's coming back," he said.

"Yes," I said.

"Good," he said. "Good."

He took his glass of beer and went back into the kitchen and sat down again. He was very tired.

Then I heard the people in the outside gym room dressing their daughter. They were in a hurry to leave. They sounded as if they were dressing a drunk.

"I can't get my hands up," the girl said.

Her parents said something stern to her and she got her hands up in the air, but they had so much trouble putting her little brassiere on that they finally abandoned trying and the mother put the brassiere in her purse.

"OHHHHHHHHHH! I'm so dizzy," the girl said as her parents half-carried her, half-dragged her out of the place.

I heard a couple of doors close and then everything was silent, except for the doctor's lunch cooking in the
kitchen. The steak was being fried in a very hot pan and it made a lot of noise.

"What's that?" Vida said. I didn't know if she was talking about the noise of the girl leaving or the sound of the steak cooking.

"It's the doctor having lunch," I said.

"Is it that late?" she said.

"Yes," I said.

"I've been out a long time," she said.

"Yes," I said. "We're going to have to leave soon but we won't leave until you feel like it."

"I'll see what I can do," Vida said.

The doctor came back into the room. He was nervous because he was hungry and tired and wanted to close the place up for a while, so he could take it easy, rest some.

Vida looked up at him and he smiled and said, "See, no pain, honey. Everything wonderful. Good girl."

Vida smiled very weakly and the doctor returned to the kitchen and his steak that was ready now.

While the doctor had his lunch, Vida slowly sat up and I helped her get dressed. She tried standing up but it was too hard, so I had her sit back down for a few moments.