Part 9 (1/2)

So I sucked in my breath and asked the young partner in the television production company. He didn't ask what it was for. I had been obvious, sniffling and red-eyed around the office. ”I'll talk to the accountant,” he said. The accountant gave me a check the next day.

It wasn't such a rare occurrence, I learned later.

I had money to fly to Puerto Rico, stay a couple of nights in a motel, and have the procedure taken care of by a doctor in a hospital. I bought a ticket on Pan Am for a Sunday evening flight there and a Tuesday night flight back. The airfare was $100. I picked a place to stay a short distance from the hospital, the White Castle Hotel. There was a White Castle on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Eleventh Street, a block from my apartment, which served a quarter-inch-thin gray burger, pellucid squares of chopped onion on top, on a saccharine sweet bun that dissolved in your mouth without a chew.

I climbed down the stairs from the Pam Am flight at San Juan airport, and as I stepped onto the tarmac, my white patent-leather kitten-heeled shoes sank in, ruined. I had a change of clothes, a nightgown, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a copy of Henderson the Rain King, $350 in American Express traveler's checks, and $150 in cash.

I checked into the White Castle Hotel after dark and gave the clerk $100 in traveler's checks. The rest were for the procedure. The cash was for taxis and food. The room smelled of disinfectant and stale cigarettes, but it was air-conditioned. Lucky. I hadn't thought to ask. It was one hundred and three degrees that dark night in San Juan.

In the morning, the clerk gave me directions. I didn't want him to know my destination, but I couldn't risk spending money on a taxi. The hospital, I gleaned from the map, was a long walk away.

It looked like a friendly suburban inst.i.tution, built of clean white brick with a sweeping U-shaped driveway. As I walked up the steps under the white-columned portico to the entrance, I allowed myself to believe for the first time that this would work.

The lobby was quiet. Behind a desk stood an official-looking young man in a white coat. I approached tentatively, standing in front of him, praying that he spoke English. He looked up and asked, ”Jes?” I had practiced this speech a million times. On the plane. As I tried to sleep. When I woke that morning. On the walk over. Out loud, I said that I had been told on the telephone from New York that I could get a D & C. I want to make an appointment. For today. Please. He nodded and slid me a form to fill out. This was going to work.

He asked me my age.

Nineteen.

He shook his head.

”Oh, no no no. Too young. Only after twenty-one.”

I begged, pleaded, told him I had borrowed money to get there, that I didn't have any more, that I was desperate. He told me to leave.

As I walked toward the door, the rain began to fall, splas.h.i.+ng back up a foot or two, a few people on the road outside caught in the downpour, running to escape but instantly drenched. I stepped outside, but it was useless. Already dripping, I ducked back in and asked meekly if I might wait until the storm pa.s.sed. I sat on a brown couch, the backs of my thighs sticking to the plastic surface.

I would be returning pregnant. I wept silently, hoping that anyone who saw me would mistake the tears sliding down my face for rain from the deluge outside. My paperback copy of Henderson the Rain King was sodden. Outside, it rained on. I would go back to the White Castle, call Michael, tell him the news, get a plane back to New York that day. I would be able to save a few dollars. But I would have to keep this baby.

I sat and waited. And waited. As I started to pull myself together to leave, a tiny brown man in the green uniform of an orderly approached me, skittish, surrept.i.tious. He held a crumpled piece of lined paper in his hand torn from a notebook. ”Go dere,” he said in a stage whisper. He offered me the sc.r.a.p, then disappeared.

Written in pencil was a name and an address. My dress was wet, my tarmacked shoes stuck to the ground as I walked. I had proud long hair then that I ironed straight. It frizzed in the humidity. I handed a cabdriver the paper. He spoke no English, but I could tell that he thought I was mistaken, that I didn't want to go there. That it was far. Yes, yes. I nodded emphatically at the paper, taking it back from him and pointing with my finger at the address. Finally I understood his words: twenty dollars. I handed him money and off we went, out of San Juan, on dirt roads for what seemed like hours, to a small village built around a gra.s.sy square. The square was still, empty save for a few mangy-looking dogs, a couple of chickens, and two old men sitting on a bench playing a board game. He dropped me in front of an open building, which appeared to be someone's house.

A small man glanced at me from inside, and pointed to the whitewashed stairs that rose along the wall. At the top stood a second man, dressed in white pants and an unders.h.i.+rt. His ma.s.sive shoulders and arms were those of a wrestler. He must be a bodyguard, I thought. But he immediately started talking about the money in fluent, barely accented English. He could take care of me, but traveler's checks were no good to him. I didn't have enough money for the cab fare to the hotel and back again on top of the $250 that he was demanding. Are you alone, he asked? Yes, I said. We agreed on $200. He would wait. I returned in the twilight with the cash.

A wooden table, no anesthesia, a sc.r.a.ping sound, and a newspaper-lined metal bucket. I moaned. Be quiet, he demanded. Or did I want him to stop? No, no. Go on. Please. Go on.

When it was over he warned me not to fly for two days, gave me two sanitary pads, and called a taxi. By now it was night. The roads seemed ruttier in the dark, every b.u.mp jarring my sore body. It was still Monday. I had to change my flight to Wednesday. At the hotel I slept on and off, not knowing day from night. Tuesday, in the dark, I went out to the little bodega across the street and bought some cheese and peanut b.u.t.ter snacks in little rectangular cellophane packages. Peanut b.u.t.ter sticks to the roof of my mouth, so I grabbed a bottle of Coca-Cola. That didn't seem healthy, so I added an orange. I had nothing to cut it with in the hotel room, and the peel didn't want to come off, so I bit off the top, sucked the juice out of it, and threw it empty but whole into the garbage.

Michael met me on Wednesday night at Idlewild. We rode the bus in to the Port Authority. I was tired and craving red meat. We took the IRT downtown to our favorite place for a cheap-enough steak dinner. It was owned by Mickey Ruskin, who became famous later as the proprietor of Max's Kansas City. I had a filet steak, a baked potato, a salad with blue cheese dressing, all for $9.99. The vodka was extra. So was the carafe of house red. Michael paid for dinner, and I felt full and satisfied and safe. The name of the place was the Ninth Circle, the lowest region of Dante's h.e.l.l, below which lies only Lethe, the river of forgetfulness.

In the morning I called Emily's gynecologist. He saw me the same day. He examined me and wrote a prescription for penicillin just to be sure. He told me to call if the bleeding got worse. It didn't. I was one of the lucky ones. According to the Guttmacher Inst.i.tute, in 1962-the year I made my trip to Puerto Rico-nearly sixteen hundred women were admitted to just one New York City hospital for incomplete abortions.

In the New York Times in June 2008, Waldo Fielding, a retired gynecologist, described his experience with incomplete abortion complications.

”The familiar symbol of illegal abortion is the infamous 'coat hanger'-which may be the symbol, but is in no way a myth. In my years in New York, several women arrived with a hanger still in place. Whoever put it in-perhaps the patient herself-found it trapped in the cervix and could not remove it ... Almost any implement you can imagine had been and was used to start an abortion-darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-gla.s.s salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off.”

Three years after my trip to San Juan, illegal abortion officially accounted for 17 percent of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth in the U.S. It is speculated that the actual number was likely much higher.

There Are Things Awry Here.

Lia Purpura.

FROM Orion.

I FOUND A PERIMETER, THANK G.o.d, and I'm walking. I'm making an hour of it, finding a way to get my breathing going hard. These four big lots with big-box stores must compa.s.s a mile. Measuring helps. I am here (quick check: yes, panting and sweaty) but it feels like nowhere, is so without character that the character I am hardly registers at all. So I'll get to work, in the way I know how: Here is a farmer entering the black field. He's a proper farmer, bowlegged and leathery, with a serviceable rope looped over his arm. But the farmer comes out of a logoed truck and the rope links up to a ChemLawn can and off he goes to tend the weeds a.s.serting through the asphalt. He p.i.s.ses I don't know where during his long day in the sun. His hat's a tattered red GO BAMA cap. His tin lunch pail is a bag from Popeyes, just down the road (I mean highway).

Here is a rancher coming over a rise, backlit and stiff, sure hands on the reins, eye for the dips that would wreck a fetlock. He's nearly cantering over the brown gra.s.s, cropped short to begin with, but hey, he's on contract, it's the fifteenth of the month, so he comes to harrow the gra.s.s at the edge of the lot. The rancher rides masterfully and the mower goes fast; he turns sharply, leans into the bit, and the beast resists not at all.

Here are the animals branded and waiting, they're tired, they stopped where the gra.s.s was fresh and a pond provided. It's dusk coming on, a slight chill picking up that turns them toward home, but they don't raise their heads, catch a scent of dog, of roundup coming. The herd's mixed. ”MsBob” is all in with ”Luvbun” and ”GoTide.” ”Bubbaboy,” ”Nully,” and ”Sphinx” are there too. The stock are purebred Camaros, Explorers, Elantras, Legends. Docile and ragged; worn, overfed.

More is wrong.

The flags are frozen. They're fifty feet high but don't move in wind and they carry no sentiment, like ”these we hoist high over our small town/farm/ranch to keep alive spirit, memory, fervor...” The flags have names: Ryan's, Outback, Hooters (best saloon in town, I'd say, judging by all the horses tied up out front). IHOP. Waffle House. Walmart on a far-I'd like to say hill but that's out of the question, the hill's been dozed, subdued into rise.

Here is a field between parking lots-real gra.s.s and dirt with bottles tossed in, amber longnecks, flat clears of hard stuff. The word artifact comes, but it's b.u.mped out by garbage, the depths are all wrong, and in a matter of weeks it will all be turned over. Not a field's breaking. Not loamy and clod-filled. More Tyvek and tar. By which things are wrapped, laid in, erected. How easily the new names for ”seasons” come forth: undeveloped, developing, development, developed. Skirting the site, I lose options like fallow, that yearlong rest wherein land regains strength. I'm losing the language for thoughts about gleaning. Crop goes to cropping as in Photoshop fixing. (And Photoshopping-wow, that gets confusing.) Here is a farm woman, her shawl held against wind. It's late February in Tuscaloosa and the tornadoes that hit farther south last week are still lending their kick. She leans into the gust as she crosses, with bags, the black earth (that black below tar), the damp earth (I say earth out of habit, I see), but it's very well marked, white lines intersect, and the acre or so she's covered (I'm holding on here, with acre as measure) is field distance, but it's not a field anymore. She's juggling bags and pinning her nametag, she works at the Cobb, the town's multiplex, and she's late for her s.h.i.+ft. On my next turn around the series of lots (where, remember, I'm walking, trying to get my own body into the scene), she'll be behind gla.s.s, with money and tickets. Smoothing her hair. Gulping her Big Gulp. Settling. (Settler. Settlement. Sigh.) A bit farther on, here is a mailbox with its red flag flipped up, in front of the Marriott, my closest neighbor (I'm a Hilton Tuscaloosa guest for a week). It's a wooden mailbox on a wooden post, which means ”rustic”-and truly, it is weatherworn. Around each fire hydrant-the hotels here in parking-lot land are each fitted with two stumpy blue ones-grows a thicket of bushes. To hide the hydrant. Though in any small town, hydrants are red and freestanding on actual street corners. This greenery means to convey ”tended garden.” Which makes the hydrant a reverse sort of flower, one that emits water. Which I guess fits the whole upended scene.

Here are four tall trees in a tangly grove-former trees because now they're dead, though a grove, I know, accommodates all forms of growth and decomposition, all cycles and stages. Long, bare branches and rough, broken ones alternate all the way down. It's the kind of ex-tree that might draw an owl (that's what I'm conjuring, a native barred owl), it's got to be full of grubs just beginning to stir, and it offers a safe, clear view of the land. In the air is the scent of burning something. Highway and rubber. Diesel and speed. In fact, it's all over-a smell, if I'd known it as a kid, I'd hardly notice, or only on days when the wind kicked up. Poor farm wife in her booth, her hair tangled and blown. Gusts helping my rancher into his stable, right up the ramp and the tailgate slams shut. And my farmer-he's holding his rope low and firm while it leaks a bright poison as yellow and brief as a corn snake, sunning, then startled, then disappearing back into the ground.

Here in the lot is some corrugated cardboard I thought was an animal's vertebrae (sign of hope, life in burrows!). Here the Brink's truck is outside the Cobb, and the driver is armed, as he's been since transfers of loot began. Here, with a thought to my love up north, I pluck a dandelion (it escaped the farmer), the gesture complete as it's always been, small, flowery symbol of tender missing. I pa.s.sed a shard of-it looked like pottery (domestic life/human scale!)-but close up was a shorn chunk of thick plastic.

And before the Committee on Irrevocable Mistakes chose this to do to the land-plant tar, seed commerce- here was what?

What was here, that a body moved through it?

Back in my room I can't shake the sensation (despite my dandelion in a plastic cup, curtains wide open, basket of apples to naturalize things). A strangeness, an insistence is hovering. The strangeness makes me say aloud to myself, Something had to be here, something had been.

Something made me make stand-ins, cutouts, cartoons. It made me possessive, led me to say ”my rancher, my farmer, my good farmer's wife”- mine, because I had to make them. From scratch. Out of something. Had to make them look like. A past. ”The past.” I conjured cliches (they come fas.h.i.+oned with roots). I had to make something, because the land couldn't do it. The land gave nothing. Gave nothing up. There was no plan, no narrative here, or tether-back-to. Just boxes to eat in. Big boxes for shopping. One boxy theater with nine movies plexed in. The parking lots gaped. Snipped, sprayed, and divided. Unpeopled. Tidied for no one.

Real land is never sad in its vastness, lost in its solitude. Left alone, cycles dress and undress it, chill-and-warm so it peaks, hardens, slides, swells. Real land hosts-voles, foxes, cicadas. Fires, moss, thunder. Rolls or gets steep. Sinks, sops, and sprouts. But this land didn't read. It babbled the way useless things babble-fuzzy bees with felt smiles, bejeweled and baubley occasional plaques, ConGRADulation mugs/frames/figurines. Capped, crusted, contained, so laden with stuff-how can it breathe?

Here, surely, went people with thoughts, in the past-and not as I conjured them, fleet, makes.h.i.+fty odes, dumb stock-a.s.sumptions, citified cartoons, with force of wind and vast stretch of blacktop shaping my story of them very poorly. (Points, maybe, for hale traits I a.s.signed: reticence, dignity, industriousness, skill!) My folks were as flat as those cowboy silhouettes slouched up against mailboxes, but the drive to olden them, tie them back to the earth, give them good pastoral work was real.

Let me start over, since this is America, land of beginnings. I'll try again, since after one night's stay, here doesn't clarify at all. Let me start very simply with my simple problem: Here, it's February 2008, and I can't figure out how to get my body to land in a land where the present's not speaking. Where stories won't take, and walking is sliding. I found a cadence to quiet the chatter, a word useful for focus and pacing out steps- refuse, which I used as both re-FUSE and REF-use, resistance-meets-garbage, iambic/trochaic, singsongy, buoyant-but alas, it ordered not much. So today I go searching in earnest. To the library first (always, always), then around the corner to Special Collections where I blurt my question to the expert on duty: At the site of the Cobb-that whole south side of town (”mess of emptiness,” I'm conveying with pauses)- by the Big K and Hooters (”that awful nowhere” suggested by sighs), before all that, what was there? Ah, she says, disappearing in the back, then returning with a stack of yellowing magazines. Here, try these.

I find a clear table, spread the magazines out, and turn the dry pages.

Once it was February 1942 here. It was British Cadet Cla.s.s 42E at the Alabama Inst.i.tute of Aeronautics, a wartime flying school operating in cooperation with the U.S. Army Air Corps. Here First Captain Wheeler wrote in Fins and Flippers, the cadets' magazine, a note of grat.i.tude to the American trainers ”for interpreting their training system in a manner intelligible to we British Cadets.”