The Original 1982 (2 page)
A
few days later, Gabriel leaves for Puerto Rico to play some concerts. He'll be gone three weeks. In the original 1982, I go with him. I wear a purple bikini. I'm flat-chested, skinny as a boy. He tells me all the women on the beach wish they had a body like mine and I feel proud. We've put the abortion in the back of our minds or maybe we're pretending the pregnancy never happened.
Every afternoon we walk from the beach through the hotel lobby to have lunch in the restaurant. A guy plays the piano there all day.
“Baby, how come he plays in the lobby of a hotel and you play in a stadium?” I ask.
Gabriel laughs, but I'm sincere. I'm trying to figure out what makes someone succeed or fail. I want to be successful like him. I write songs. I play the guitar a little. I think if he can do it, so can I.
In his band, there are two girl singers, Estelle and Mildred. Mildred is down-to-earth, a Puerto Rican American woman who writes the vocal arrangements and gets along with everybody. I ask her questions about how she got started. I sing one of my songs to her on the beach.
“One day, maybe I'll sing with your band,” she says encouragingly.
The other one, Estelle, is harder to read. A Jewish girl sort of passing for Latina, she's a six-footer with wide hips and big legs. I can tell Gabriel likes her. Two weeks into that trip I find out he's going to her hotel room after rehearsal.
But none of that matters. Because this time I don't go with him to Puerto Rico. I stay behind in New York to work extra shifts at the restaurant. I stop drinking alcohol and start saving my money.
A
t the Café Miriam my fellow waitresses are artists, dancers, and musicians. We're proud to be nonprofessionals. We're only waiting tables until our circumstances change.
The customers know it. They ask us what we
really
do. They smile and say, “Someday I'll say I knew you when.”
We believe it's true. It's just a matter of time.
Sofia is in an off-off-Broadway play. Janelle is a member of a modern dance company. Nina makes sculpture out of things she finds on the street.
Vicky, our manager, tries to bring us back down to earth. “Quit your daydreaming and clear table six,” she says lightly. She's pretty cool as far as managers go. She has long red hair and the whitest skin covered in freckles.
I'm not the only one at the restaurant who's pregnant. Another girl, Callie, is, too. She and her boyfriend are getting married in a couple of weeks. She's an actress but says she'll take a break from auditioning once her baby is born. She looks as tired as I feel. I catch her eye and we smile.
When I leave the restaurant at the end of my shift, it's still light out. Every day it gets dark a little later. Excitement rides high in my chest. It's almost spring in New York, and the scent of it is in the air, floating down from the tight buds of apple blossom trees.
I talk to you all the time, Little Fish. I tell you everything I see: Look at all the people walking with a lighter step, winter coats over their arms, ready for warmer days.
I
n 1982, the most popular names for girls are Jessica, Jennifer, and Ashley. But I'm not one to follow convention. My own name, Lisa, was so common growing up, it was usually paired with my last initial. I want yours to be yours alone. I consider the names of flowers and birds. I think of family names: Pearl, Rose, Lily, Sparrow. I change my mind every day. I like boys' names for girls, tooâJamie, Syd, Maxâand the names of colors, Blue or Green like the songs by Joni Mitchell.
I play you lullabies on my Martin. Before you, the songs I wrote were lonely songs, but now I write love songs to you and your father.
Gabriel gets back from Puerto Rico and calls from the airport.
“Hey, I miss you,” he says tenderly. “Meet me at the house.”
Although I'm dead tired, I shave my legs, get in a taxi, and ride across the park. I let myself into his apartment and get into bed to wait for him. When I hear his key in the lock, my heart starts to beat crazily. His footsteps on the hardwood floor, the sound of his voice as he says my name, his passionate kiss, his skin on my skin. Loving him is a drug I need to live.
In the original 1982, it's unbelievable what happens. I get pregnant again and have another abortion. Gabriel breaks up with me. He says he's come to the realization that I don't give him anything. I write him a poem about the irony of that statement. I've given him two little babies and he's helped me flush them down the drain. We're apart for two weeks, then he calls and we get back together.
But there can be no second pregnancy, not while I've got you in my belly. I've made my decision and there's no changing it. Gabriel tries every way he knows to get me to reconsider. He argues, he reasons. He's sugar one day and vinegar the next. He brings me ice cream and spreads Vic's VapoRub on my chest when I catch a cold. He calls me Pajarito, an endearment that means “little bird.”
Then he punishes me and doesn't call. He's seeing Estelle, I'm sure of it, and others, too. He's never been faithful, but he doesn't try so hard to hide it now.
I think of you growing inside me and it gives me the will to stand up to him. I think of your tiny heart forming, your webbed hands and feet. I go to the library and take out books called
Your Baby
and
What to Expect When You're Expecting
. I find out it's normal to run up the stairs and feel out of breath, or gag on the subway at the smell of someone's dirty hair.
I worry a lot. Every time I feel a little ache or pinch, I'm afraid something will go wrong. I worry about what it will be like once you're born. How will I know how to take care of you? But then I see all the babies and children in strollers and playgrounds, on every street in New York City, and think about how they all got here the same way. Some of those children were born to mothers who were as scared and baffled as me. I think maybe it will be okay. Maybe it's even good that I'm young. I'll be able to chase after you and keep up with you. There's nothing I won't do to make sure you have a happy life. Isn't that a law of physics, when you change one thing, all the others change, too? Maybe even Gabriel Luna will be transformed.
G
abriel plays at the Vantage on Tuesday nights. These are special Latin-meets-jazz concerts. He's always nervous no one will show up, but every week there's a line around the block. It's thrilling to go with him. I get dressed up and hold his hand as we run alongside all the people waiting to get in. Sitting in the audience among the crowd of salsa fans, I marvel at his talent, his ability to capture the crowd. When he morphs one of his own songs into Marvin Gaye's “Sexual Healing,” the women in the audience start to howl, and jealousy comes over me like a creeping rash.
Backstage Eddie nods hello. He's the bandleader, a trumpet player and well-respected
patrón
in Latin music circles. Carole-Ann, his beautiful blond wife, leans up against the wall beside him. She's all right, but because she's a wife and I'm a girlfriend, she's never as friendly to me as she is to the wives of the other musicians. Or maybe it's because things are tense between Eddie and Gabriel lately. Eddie thinks Gabriel should be satisfied with things as they are instead of always trying to overshadow him. He wants Gabriel to keep singing in his band, keep making hit records. He doesn't understand why Gabriel wants to woo a white audience who will never truly appreciate lyrics written in Spanish and rhythms they can't feel in their bones.
But Gabriel is a star. Anyone can see he's going places and won't be taking any of us with him. Not even me.
Carole-Ann waves me over. She's wearing a sparkly dress, snug against her curves. She offers me a cigarette from her silver case, but I turn it down. Sometimes I smoke with her even though I don't smoke. “You sure?” she asks, and I come close to telling her that I'm pregnant. But who knows what she'd do with the information? She lights one for herself and blows the smoke to the side, away from me. “You coming to Europe?” she asks. I've heard that there are some dates coming upâBrussels and Amsterdam and Paris, but I haven't been invited.
“I don't think so,” I say. “I probably have to work.”
“Gabriel has your plane tickets,” she says.
But Gabriel hasn't said anything to me about that.
I watch him from across the room. He's talking, moving his hands, his fans listening in rapt attention. Always there are women, beautiful and young, or older and accomplished. I'm on the lookout for the ones who are his type. Gabriel says I always pick the wrong ones, that he's not even attracted to the women I fear. But of course it's the cheating itself that makes me afraid. When I see a pretty girl approach him, my heart sinks. Maybe she'll be the one he takes to Europe.
A
t the women's clinic in the Flatiron District, I wait with a half dozen other girls in the reception area. We read magazines or watch the small TV monitor. We look up whenever the receptionist opens her window to call out a name. “The doctor will see you now,” she says.
Dr. Nancy isn't really a doctor. She's a nurse practitioner. A lot of girls I know go to see her for exams and birth control. She's very tall and confident, a little intimidating. Holistic before holistic becomes fashionable.
When it's my turn, I go through the door and down the hallway, into the examining room.
“Hello there,” Dr. Nancy says breezily as she comes in a few minutes later with my folder in her hands. “What can I do for you today?” She doesn't seem shocked when I tell her my news. “Congratulations,” she says, not unkindly.
Dr. Nancy examines me and takes some blood. She says everything looks good. She tells me what vitamins I should be taking and how important it is to eat the right foods. She says she won't actually be delivering my baby. Her partner at the clinic, Dr. Diamond, has an affiliation with a hospital, and he'll be the one.
“I assume you have health insurance?” Dr. Nancy asks. I tell her that I don't and show her the pocketful of cash I've brought, tips from weeks of waitressing. “Come with me,” she says, and walks me across the hall to sit down with her office manager for guidance.
Turns out I need health insurance, of course, but there's no way I can afford it. I figure I have two options. I can go to Gabriel and ask him to pay for it or I can ask my parents. I'm not confident either will help me. I'm estranged from my mother and father and haven't spoken to them in months. If they do help, I know it will come with all kinds of strings attached.
Yet I can't bring myself to ask Gabriel. I can already see the furious look in his eye, the stern set of his jaw.
So I take the train out to Long Island to the house where I grew up. My parents live in a modest house in a middle-class neighborhood on the south shore of Long Island. It's a split-level surrounded by neighbors and big trees. I've turned down my mother's offer for a ride from the station, told her I wanted to walk instead. I'm putting off the moment when I'll have to see them. I haven't been back in more than a year.
As I approach the house, I'm nervous. I can see my mother waiting to greet me at the front door. She's shorter than I am and a little more sturdy. She teaches reading to grammar school kids. Blond and blue-eyed, girl-next-door pretty, she has deep dimples when she smiles, which she's doing now.
My mother holds the screen door open, hugs and kisses me until I pull away. It's been a long time. Our last argument is nearly forgotten.
The house is frozen in the early 1970s: dark paneling, orange-gold carpet. There's a wallpaper mural in the dining room of a street scene in Paris. It's looked like this for as long as I can remember. My father is nowhere to be seen.
My mother asks me if I'm hungry, and we settle in the kitchen. Me at the Formica table in the chair that was mine, she at the stove. She makes cheese and eggs for me, the way she always has. I'm not sure if my stomach will stand for it today, but it's comforting anyway. Through the window screen behind her, I see the familiar treetops and telephone lines.
“Where's Dad?” I ask.
“Oh, he's around here somewhere,” she says distractedly.
My father is a tall, handsome man with olive skin and hazel eyes. He's one of the smartest people I know, an engineer and inventor. He's got a strong moral code, too; never has more than a single cocktail, wouldn't in a million years cheat on my mother.
Still, he's a hard man to have as a father. He seems to think my artistic inclinations are a rebellion that can be cured with silence and a hard line. He looks at me as if I'm pretending not to be smart just to spite him.
I hear his footsteps overhead. He's probably in his room, or in the attic working on some gadget.
“Mom, I need to tell you something, and I don't want you to tell Daddy.” She looks alarmed even before I say it. “I'm pregnant.”
Her blue eyes are unblinking; still my excitement makes me hopeful.
“Are you sure?” she asks. “You've been to the doctor? What does Gabriel say?”
I shrug my shoulders. The gesture tells her that Gabriel is not on board, that I'm alone in this.
“What are you going to do?” she asks, and I feel a familiar disappointment.
“I'm going to have it,” I say, excitement dashed. Her reaction is not what I want. I want her to reassure me, help me to feel everything will be okay. I want her to say that no matter what happens she and my father will be there for me. But she doesn't say any of that. We're quiet as she serves me breakfast.
“The thing is I need a little help,” I say finally.
“What kind of help?” she asks, and I feel angry. What difference does it make what kind? What kind of question is that? But I swallow my anger because I need her to pay for the insurance. When I explain, she looks relieved.
“I'll call Blue Cross today and see if we can put you on our policy,” she says. “If not, we'll figure something else out.”
“Thank you,” I say,
thanks a lot.
We hear my father coming down the stairs and stop talking.
“Hi, Dad,” I say. My father is forty-six years old, a little more gray than he was last year. He takes his place at the head of the table. I think his charisma comes from his confidence and the way he keeps himself aloof.
“Do you want coffee?” my mother asks him.
He ignores her. “Everything okay?” he asks me instead.
“Yes,” I say. “Everything's fine.” I know he'll find out about the pregnancy eventually, but it won't be from me.
“What's the latest?” he asks.
My mother pours his coffee and I tell him about the celebrities I've met at the restaurant. Dustin Hoffman. Bob Fosse. “Do you know who that is, Dad?” He does. They've been to see
A Chorus Line
. When I run out of things to say, I ask him about the Yankees, his favorite team. I can hear the clock ticking and the hum of the refrigerator in his silences. After a while he says it's good to see me and heads back up to his room.
My mother and I take our coffee outside to the deck overlooking the backyard with its tall trees, sloping green-brown lawn, and rusted swing set. I think about how I used to race my sister to be first down the slide after it snowed. The whole neighborhood was new then. There was a drive-in movie theater right over the fence. It got torn down when they built the expressway.
My mother asks me how I'm feeling and I tell her the morning sickness is pretty bad.
“I was sick my whole pregnancy with you,” she says.
“I think it's supposed to pass in the second trimester,” I tell her hopefully.
“It didn't with you,” she says.
It figures, I think. Even in utero, we couldn't get along. But I don't say that.
Later, she gives me a ride back to the train. We embrace awkwardly across the front seat of the car.
“I'll call you tomorrow,” she says, worry in her eyes. I get out quickly and run up the stairs to the platform. Waiting for the train, I see her Toyota make a slow crawl around the corner, as if she's too shaken to even step on the gas.
