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"I'm not judging you," she adds quickly, "I'm just saying I think you judge yourself so harshly that your solution is to pretend it didn't happen."
"It was fifteen years ago," Jane tells her. "I felt like I didn't have a choice. I couldn't tell my parents. My boyfriend freaked out. I didn't want to marry him, anyway."
"I'm not judging you."
"What am I supposed to do? I can't go back and change it."
"You could forgive yourself."
"I don't know how. I don't even know if I did anything wrong."
"Then you can acknowledge that you were young and confused, and you used your best judgment to terminate the pregnancy."
Jane begins to cry. The tears come whenever anyone says "terminate the pregnancy." She has never told anyone but Laura about the abortion, not even the father of--what? She cannot say the word "fetus" because it sounds obscene to her. She thinks of a right-to-life zealot she saw on TV, holding a jar with a mangled fetus in it, thrusting it into the face of a girl who is entering an abortion clinic. She wonders if she will ever meet a man and have children, and when she thinks about becoming pregnant, her skin feels numb, and her chest gets tight.
The Long and Winding Road
Charlotte sits in an overstuffed chair, her feet up on an ottoman, and reads a women's magazine. She should get up and start dinner, but she is tired, and it is wonderful to be alone in the house and do something mindless. Laura will be coming home soon, with other people's fear and despair still stuck to her like the makeup that penetrates deep into your pores when you are too tired to wash your face. No longer potent enough to change your appearance, it nevertheless wreaks havoc on your cells.
Laura thinks she is detached, but years of serving as a human sponge have made her over-sensitive, brittle. Charlotte wonders if the saints felt that way--so saturated in sorrow that they died young out of self-defense. Something in Laura is dead, and that something is what makes her say "I'm just not ready" and "Give me some time" whenever Charlotte brings up the subject of having a baby.
Charlotte goes through the lists from the sperm bank and, inside her head, gives birth to various combinations of skill and health, intelligence and creativity. She is afraid of getting ovarian cancer, and knows she will not take the fertility drugs more than once. She also knows that Laura will not take them at all because Laura has no interest in being pregnant. This troubles Charlotte because it has always been her dream to become pregnant, and she cannot understand how Laura cannot have the same drive.
"Turkey baster dykes," Laura calls the women who do their own artificial insemination. Charlotte laughs, but she is strangely warmed by the image of two women who refuse to let technology interfere with their longing for a child. She thinks about the relative pain of adoption, knowing that she and Laura will never be at the top of the list, but does that matter? Laura obsesses about insurance, and about what will happen to her legal rights as a parent. Charlotte suggests they move to another, more liberal, state, but Laura says she cannot leave her practice.
Charlotte imagines herself drunk on hormones, with full breasts and belly, waiting for her child. She worries that Laura will no longer find her attractive and will leave her, or worse--ignore her. She remembers her bitter sadness ten years ago, when she thought she was pregnant, and her husband suddenly began treating her like a goddess. Then she had her period, and he went back to treating her like a servant.
The front door opens, and Laura walks in. She is smiling and carrying a bundle of brochures.
"Do you want to go to Europe? I have great fares."
"I want to have a baby."
Laura drops the brochures on the table and goes to her room.
Follow the Yellow Brick Road
Laura has a secret she has never told Charlotte. She has already had a baby.
At age seventeen, her senior year in high school, she had sex with Greg, who knew even less about putting on condoms than he knew about turning on girls. No one told him to leave some slack at the tip; Laura thought he knew what he was doing. Her parents wept and yelled with such Wagnerian force that she decided she would do anything to appease them, and so she traveled fifty miles to her aunt's house, and stayed there until she delivered her baby.
Her friends went to college, met new boys, took birth control pills, and had all the sex they wanted in crowded, dope-enhanced surroundings. While they were smoking, drinking and screwing, Laura was throwing up, crying and enduring her aunt's self-conscious sympathy. The child, a girl who looked exactly like Laura's mother, was quickly adopted, and Laura has no idea what became of her.
"Your mother is beautiful," Charlotte once told her. "Don't you think so?"
Laura, who had considered telling Charlotte her secret, remembered the tiny face that had looked directly at her twenty years before, and answered, "Her face is too perfect."
Laura does want a baby. Not like Charlotte wants one--with swelling breasts and glowing skin and can't-see-my-feet humor--but with quiet desire. A son. Only a son. She cannot bear to tell Charlotte why she cannot have a daughter, though she wants to tell her, wants to explain to her that she is not without maternal desire. But she doesn't know how to say it: I cannot have a little girl because I already had one and she looked just like my mother, who made me give her away.
Laura thinks about Jane. She wishes she'd had an abortion. She could forgive herself for that. "Don't you see?" she wants to tell Jane. "You have a clean slate. You don't have unaccounted-for offspring who are sitting in some other therapist's office trying to understand why their mothers gave them away."
Laura is wise now, Laura has heartfelt remorse. But she is short on courage.
When she is alone, Laura watches a private movie in the dark, cold theater of her restless mind:
She sees a young woman, beautiful in a classic sense, sitting in a university class, bantering with the professor. Then she sees this same young woman holding hands with a man, or holding hands with a woman, then weeping in a sympathetic therapist's office, or sitting alone on a park bench. After intermission, the young woman loses her polish and good looks, and is waiting at a bus station, waiting for food stamps, waiting for the dope man. The movie always ends the same way--the fragile protagonist runs back to her home and to her mother. But there's always a fade-out before Laura can see the mother's face.
The Road Not Taken
Charlotte's best friend, Elsa, lives with Brad. They have lived together for two years now, and Brad would like to get married, but Elsa is afraid that, despite his assurances, he will want children. Brad has never been married, and has no sons or daughters.
Elsa told Brad she didn't want to have children about six months after they met.
"Its okay," he told her, causing her to think he wasn't serious about their relationship. "Haven't you ever wanted a child?" she asked him.
"I've thought about it, sure, but I can't say it's something I have to have. I mean, I'm okay with having kids, and I'm okay with not having them."
This, of course, is the kind of statement that drives women insane, and it left Elsa with no one but herself to blame for any decision she made. It wasn't that she didn't like children, she told herself, and anyone else who would listen. She just didn't have an overwhelming desire to be a parent, and her life was settled, and she liked it the way it was. If Brad really didn't care whether he had children, she reasoned, there must be something wrong with him. How can you not know a thing like that?
"Elsa," Charlotte made her case, "do you have any idea how many thousands of people have children and do nothing but damage them? People who don't have a clue about how to be parents? People who probably secretly hate their children? It's much better to have no children than to have children and make them miserable."
Easy for you to say, Elsa thought, since Charlotte's major project for the last year had been making elaborate plans for motherhood. People didn't think Charlotte should have a baby, that it wasn't right, but she was born to be a mother. They expected Elsa to become pregnant, but they forgot to consult her about the decision.
One morning, watching Elsa take her birth control pill, Brad said to her, "I'm curious; why haven't you had a tubal ligation?"
Elsa said nothing. She couldn't say anything, for she had no idea what the answer was.
One For the Road
A woman, we'll call her Laura, walks into a sperm bank and says to the bartender, "I'll take a shot of your best sperm."
"Straight up?" the bartender winks.
"More like, with a twist," she deadpans.
"That all you want? It's Happy Hour, you know."
"Then make it a double."
She manages a smile, tips the bartender, and heads off into the night.
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