The Abortionist's Daughter (5 page)

Megan didn’t catch on at first that he might be expounding on this last issue for her benefit. But over lunch one day, as Duane desperately juggled a soccer ball nearby, Bill told her that he admired her mother’s courage.

“Not that I’m advocating abortion as a means of birth control,” he said between cheesy bites of a thick calzone. “It’s just that mistakes happen. Condoms break. And you shouldn’t have to pay for it the rest of your life.”

Megan did not respond. Without knowing it, Bill was opening up a very big can of worms here; her personal feelings about abortion were far more complex than he could have known. She’d first seen the products of her mother’s work when she was in middle school. Every day she walked over to her mother’s clinic after school to do her homework; usually there were no signs of the business at hand around, and she found an empty examination room to work in. But one day she happened to walk through the lab and made the mistake of glancing into a white bucket on the counter. She stared in horror. There were tiny fingers with miniature pearls at the tips, noodly little legs and bean-shaped heads, all mixed together in a thick bloody soup. She continued to stare until one of the nurses happened to come in for something else; when she noticed the bucket, she whisked it away, swearing under her breath.

Megan hadn’t talked about the incident with her mother, but it haunted her. At home that night she’d watched her mother julienning red peppers before dinner, and she couldn’t help but envision those same hands tugging on baby parts. What an awful way to earn a living, she thought. She began to see her mother in a vaguely diabolical light, and worried that she might be carrying around her mother’s karma.

So Bill had no idea what he was stepping into, commenting on Diana’s courage. But sitting there in the school cafeteria, Megan made the very practical decision that it was not the time and place to try and explain her very conflicted feelings. Instead, she changed the subject—sort of. Boldly she asked Bill if he’d ever gotten someone pregnant.

“No,” Bill replied. “Have you?”

Megan laughed nervously.

“You know what I mean. Have you ever
been
pregnant?”

“No,” Megan said, feeling her neck flush—an unusual feeling, for rarely did she flush, or feel any kind of nervousness for that matter, in a boy’s company.

“We’re lucky, aren’t we,” said Bill, wadding up the calzone wrapper.

The implication of this short conversation was that the worry of an unwanted pregnancy was something Megan might already have experienced; and the implication from
that
was that she had already engaged in the sexual intercourse that would have given rise to the worry in the first place. Neither of which she corrected. She left their lunch with a strange thrill knotting up her stomach, a feeling that tightened on and off that afternoon, especially whenever she thought of Bill thinking of her having sex.

Duane took the Homecoming decision hard. She’d led him on! She’d jerked him around! When these accusations didn’t change her mind, he called her a cockteaser, which bothered Megan far more than she let on. It was an ugly word, and it made her feel conniving and dirty and mean, when in fact she’d simply been undecided.

Sometimes she wished she could talk to her mother about such things. But hah! Never in a million years would that happen! Megan hated talking to Diana about love, or sex, or the changes her body was going through. Back in the sixth grade Diana had made one offhand remark about Megan’s tiny puffed nipples beginning to poke through her T-shirts, and that was enough to shut Megan up for the rest of her life. When Diana asked if she was interested in shopping for bras, Megan leveled a stormy, silent gaze upon her mother, and her mother never mentioned it again. (Ditto with tampons, a word Diana seemed unable to mention without also mentioning the word
hymen.
Megan cut her off in mid-sentence and made it very clear that she would figure everything out for herself. And she did: after a few months of dealing with bunched-up napkins, she went out and bought a package of SlimFits on her own. Following the illustrated directions, she quickly figured out how to lift her knee and shoot up the little torpedo, and thereafter she didn’t so much mind being female. The only thing she needed from Diana was cash, plus a little brandy when the cramps got so bad she couldn’t get out of bed in the morning.)

The night she told Bill she would go to Homecoming with him, she could not get to sleep. She felt an unbearable pressure building inside, more energy than she knew what to do with. She’d read of people with autism who needed to be squeezed, who in fact built elaborate compression devices to meet their needs, and she lay there imagining how good it might feel to climb into one of those machines and get pressed from all sides.

But she had no such device, and so on that night, with the sound of Bill’s voice in her ears and a warm iron ball swelling between her legs, she lay in bed as the moon crept across the sky, and drew up her knees, and tugged relentlessly at herself. Mystified, she rocked back and forth in agony: for as much as she knew about the U.S. government and tangents and tampons and how to flirt with a boy, she knew very little about her body, or the things it could do when touched in the right spot.

And she certainly wasn’t going to talk to her mother about
that.

—————

As a sophomore, Megan wasn’t eligible to be Homecoming Queen; that plum position was reserved for juniors and seniors. But she might as well have been Bill’s queen on that chilly October night. She wore a low-cut green taffeta gown that cinched her waist and lifted her breasts. When her father saw her, he gave a long, low whistle—embarrassing enough in its own right, but pale when compared to her mother loudly reminding her that she hadn’t yet gotten fitted for a diaphragm and shouldn’t rely upon condoms given their ten percent failure rate.

“Diana! They’re going to Homecoming, not—” He turned his glare upon Megan. “You’re not sleeping with him, are you?”

“Oh my god,” said Megan.

“Look, you’ve embarrassed her,” Frank said to Diana. “Why do you have to be so explicit about everything?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Diana. “They teach this stuff in school. Teachers talk about it. Kids talk about it. Why can’t
I
talk about it?”

Megan looked upward and asked God to shoot her parents.

When Bill arrived, he presented Megan with a pink corsage. She had a white boutonniere for him. They pinned them on each other while Frank took pictures. After numerous poses—Megan alone! Bill alone! Now Megan and Bill! Now Megan and Frank! Now Megan and Frank and Diana!—Frank asked Bill what time he intended to bring Megan home.

“One o’clock, sir,” Bill said.

“That sounds reasonable,” said Frank.

Diana eyed Bill up and down. She had delivered him into this world, actually, back before she opened the clinic. She’d also circumcised him, she recalled now. Involuntarily she glanced at his crotch.

“I actually don’t like to stay out too late,” Bill was saying.

Diana rolled her eyes. “Bill, one thing you’ve got to understand. Don’t Eddie Haskell me, ever. Look, I’m well aware that kids stay out all night, and if you guys have a cell phone, you might as well—”

“One o’clock seems very appropriate,” Frank said, guiding them to the door. “No drinking. No drugs. Am I clear?”

“And no sex,” Diana added. “Not until I fit you with a diaphragm.”

“Oh my god,” said Megan, slamming the door behind her.

Megan and Bill didn’t spend much time at the Homecoming soirée. After a few perfunctory dances, they retired to Bill’s car, where as soon as they closed the doors they fell upon each other, kissing long and deeply, their hands gliding up and down each other’s bodies. It was a far cry from magnetic kissing dolls, and again Megan felt that warm iron ball inside, which tonight made her so dizzy that when she pulled away for a breath, she found herself gasping for air. Bill, for his part, wore an expression of anger, or so she thought; but then he pulled her close with an urgency that convinced her that it was not anger he was feeling but raw lust, a word she’d read about and heard about but never really known about until now.

They sped up into the foothills. Bill drove with one hand on the steering wheel and the other hand up her dress. At the first turnoff—just before the Overlook Restaurant, where her parents were dining that night—she ordered him to stop the car, and before he’d even had a chance to pull up the emergency brake, she unzipped his pants. His penis popped out, and she took it in her hand; it felt like a little zucchini, smooth and slightly curved. He groaned, then yanked the bodice of her dress down around her waist. After an eternity, he slipped his finger up inside. Megan gasped. She wondered if people passed out during sex. Fleetingly she thought of condoms.

But then, when he lowered the seat and parted her legs and she felt the first awful, wonderful thrust, when she felt him pressing into her, the last thing on her mind was condoms, or passing out. She had crossed over the line tonight. She was no longer a virgin, and that, under her logic, meant she was no longer her parents’ child.

It was the coolest thing that had ever happened to her.

—————

After that first night Megan was willing to have sex whenever they could find the time: during lunch period, after school, in the evening at Bill’s house when they were supposed to be studying. She didn’t worry about pregnancy, because along with her adolescent belief that she would not live past the age of thirty lay a deep conviction that her so-called periods were in fact the beginning stages of some kind of cancer, and that she was, in short, infertile. Since she could never have babies and was going to die in the next decade, she might as well enjoy herself.

Mostly they had sex at Bill’s house. It gave her a thrill to think of his parents upstairs watching TV as she and Bill coupled on the nubby, soiled sofa in his basement. She went to the mall and stole a lacy black bra to lift her cleavage, along with a black thong, which, granted, felt like the old sanitary napkins she’d tossed aside but which, again, made her feel happily alienated from her parents.

Bill, for his part, thought this was all a pretty good deal. He wasn’t sure if he loved Megan, but she wasn’t asking for love, it seemed to him. So who was he to turn down her advances? Sometimes he worried that he should be using something, but since Megan didn’t seem concerned, he just assumed that her mother had put her on the Pill. There were a lot of advantages, he figured, to dating the daughter of the local abortionist—one being a certain freedom from narrow-minded notions of teenage abstinence.

Within five weeks Megan skipped a period.

The nightmares began soon afterward. She dreamed she was in a Chinese restaurant, but rather than hot and sour soup, she was served a thick red broth with tiny feet floating about. She awoke drenched in a cold sweat. Together she and Bill agonized over what to do. Bill pressed her to steal a pregnancy-testing kit from her mother’s office, but Megan felt the risk of getting caught was simply too high. She waited and waited. Every hour she went to the bathroom and scrubbed herself raw with toilet paper, searching for the tiniest faint twinge of red.

But it never came, and after seven weeks, convinced she was not only pregnant but evil as well for putting herself in this position, she went to the drugstore and bought a home pregnancy kit. If it was negative, great. If it was positive—

She thought of the white bucket.

Following the directions the next morning, she peed onto a little stick. There was only one red line in the window. She waited a little longer. Still just one red line. She held it under the light. When she realized it was negative, she wanted to leap, she wanted to turn cartwheels, but instead she ran downstairs and gave her mother the first hug she’d initiated in three years. Then she rushed off to school, where in that one morning she aced a math test, read three chapters ahead for U.S. Government, and volunteered to help out at the upcoming College Night. She bought a box of condoms and a giant tube of spermicide. As for Bill, he felt that the experience had unified them as a couple. He felt bonded. And he wanted to tell Megan that he loved her, because for the first time in his life he found himself waking up in the night with that torn-apart, ragged feeling that comes partly from feeling loved but also from the fear that this newly discovered sense of himself as someone worth loving could vanish in the morning, that it was all maybe a big joke, a silly dream, a bucket of air.

—————

From Megan’s hug that morning, Diana intuited a couple of things about her daughter. One: the girl was in love. This she knew because it was an established medical fact that love could turn sulky adolescent girls into sentimental and affectionate daughters. Two: not only was her daughter in love but she was sexually active as well—for the pheromones in their house were so thick you could wipe them from the walls. Every room smelled of mushrooms and musk; Diana couldn’t even
look
at Megan without being transported back to her sixteenth year when she, too, carried around a constant steely ache between her legs.

One night she stood in the kitchen chopping vegetables. Frank was sitting at the island, reading through a pleading file, his glasses perched crookedly on his nose. The news was on, and outside a neighborhood dog was barking. But the smell! Megan had just walked out of the room, and her aroma had even managed to overpower the sweet Vidalia onions Diana was slicing. Diana was certain that Frank would notice. How could he not? They could go upstairs, make love, and eat dinner late. She kept waiting for him to put down the pleading file, but when he did, he took off his glasses and picked up the remote control and changed news stations.

Diana went back to chopping onions, and wondered how it was she had gotten so old, so quickly.

—————

That spring, when Bill turned seventeen, his parents gave him a digital camera. The first thing he wanted to do was use it with Megan.

“Forget it!” she exclaimed when she realized just what he meant. They were upstairs in Bill’s room, a dark messy alcove with an unmade trundle bed and shuttered windows. Bill had gotten a new sound system for his birthday, and the boxy components lay scattered on the carpet like oversize blocks.