The children mumble sleepily; snoozily. She’s just put them down, in the middle of the afternoon, but the heavy curtains make the rooms dark and heavy. Both doorways face each other across the hallway, each close with the smells of small children. She, Karen, can see into the boys’ room from here. It’s thick and warm, set to the rhythm of air escaping and filling soft pink lips.
Her cigarette curls into the gloom, where she leans beside Anne Marie’s window and watches the sunlight that appears and disappears in odd patches on the floor. The curtains still swing, tempting her to draw them back and see what is outside. The sunlight glows like broken bits of paradise, while the heavy paisley fabric may as well be the iron curtain now hanging over Europe.
She takes another slow drag and leans her head against the wall. ‘All this time,’ she thinks morosely, the words becoming bitter in her mind. ‘And all that learning wasted.’ Utterly, inescapably wasted. On this. On children and a husband and a house- just like her mother. A college education spoiled on babies who spit and screamed and never though to say thank you, thank you, Mommy, for giving up your life for me. Instead they tug on her earrings, her last attempt to stay fashionable, and put marbles in their mouths and even up their noses. Hunter Jr., he did that just yesterday, showing off for his little brother, who thought it was hilarious and tried to do it too. And Anne Marie kissed the neighbor’s cat.
They’re even smelly when they’re sleeping, and she can’t stand it, except for the tobacco, but that’s just covering one ugly smell with another. Her own mother would throw a fit if she knew her only girl, her Karen, The Smart One, was smoking in the baby’s nursery.
‘The nursery,’ Karen thinks shrilly, able to hear her mother’s voice within her skull, snorting at the old woman’s predictability. Who has nurseries these days? Who can afford them? The rich. The ostentatious. The extravagant. The lucky? But then again, there just don’t seem to be babies in the world anymore. Everybody either has ‘kids’ or is a kid. Kids older than Hunter and Annie and Mike. Kids who hate everything their parents were or did and want to change the world. They reject everything that worked for the last 30 years and create this new counter-culture of old jeans and unwashed hair and sex and drugs and who knows what else. Karen doesn’t. She’s inside with the ‘babies’. ‘Little’ Michael is already three. Babies don’t know how to play hopscotch.
If only she had been born just a few short years later. . . just a few. She married Hunt Lucas the year before the Beatles arrived. Maybe she wouldn’t have if she’d known that they would show up soon with their bowl cuts and their accents and their yeah, yeah, yeahs. She could have been swept up with the rest of the ‘kids’ in the new wave of defiance. She would be perfect for this era of rock music and freedom. She would sing “Let’s Live For Today” and dance naked in the rain, the wet drops beading on her breasts, reminding her that she was no one’s dependant. That she was free, free to go it alone, free to need and be needed by only herself.
She doesn’t need to see the photograph perched ominously on their mantle to know what it looks like. The one that has come to symbolize all that she hates. Hunt’s face is smiling at the camera, and she is smiling with him- below him. It’s a photograph from 1960, when they had first met, at college. She’s still dressed like it’s 1955, because it might as well have been. Her long skirt matches his sweater, tied nicely around his shoulders. Matching was big back then, before girls dressed like men and men wore their hair like women. A part of her misses that, and the rest of her reviles it. With Hunt’s arms around her in that photo, he already has her prisoner. She used to think she wanted that entrapment.
But Karen knows, too, what was sitting beside them on the grass- no, they were beside Hunt, out of her reach: her textbooks.
How could he not have known that she would want to go on studying? He had looked so surprised the first time she brought it up. It was over burgers at White Castle, while they were studying for finals. She wanted to be a copywriter, working her way up through the ranks, so that she was a part of magazine ads and TV commercials and radio spots. More than a job, she wanted a career. She wanted to follow in the steps of brave, enterprising women, and break new ground, make a better world for all women to work in. It was so, so close then in their junior year. She almost had it within her grasp.
“Three kids,” Hunt mused, wiping ketchup off his hand onto his napkin, not really trying to get clean, just doing it out of habit. “Four is too many. My mom has four, never got a moment’s rest.”
The words struck her as odd, so she paused in sipping her milkshake. “Why three?” Still seemed like a lot to her…
“Well, I don’t want that to happen to you, baby doll,” he smiled, with a patronizing affection that now makes her stomach roil.
Delighted, she smiled back, and reached over to take his hand. He cared about her and he wanted her to have time for her dreams! He did! He understood! “I love you, Hunt.”
‘I love you, Hunt,’ she mocks now, just under her breath before taking another drag on her fading cigarette. She never used to smoke before they got married. Not much before Hunter Jr., either.
Anne Marie rolls over, with a sleepy murmur, and Karen freezes. Shit. The last thing she needs is a sleepy four year old. Across the hallway, Michael’s dreaming like a baby and Hunter’s napping with a toy truck somebody gave him for his last birthday. And somewhere deep inside Karen’s belly, is the big number four. Four kids. Just like his mother. Hunt doesn’t know.
Karen’s shoulders slump, her eyes blurring so the patches of sunlight become a rippling lake. A fourth child, when she herself had never truly wanted even one. It was Hunt’s eagerness and fate that lead to Hunter Junior… and then Anne Marie… and then Michael… and then she swore she’d put her foot down, swore she wouldn’t have another. She could barely handle these three, could barely keep them under control. Hunt’s paycheck just covered them all, kept them fed and clothed, but Michael still was destined for Hunter’s hand-me-downs and Anne Marie’s, too, to a certain extent. When Michael was born, she nearly went mad with the chaos. A four year old constantly demanding her attention and two tiny babies… but then Hunter started school, and like magic, she began to see the light there at the end of the tunnel.
Children grow up. Soon they’ll all be in school and she can have a whole day to herself. A day to actually wash her hair and shave her legs and mend her husband’s fraying socks. A week to do grocery shopping and clean the house and cook them all dinner. A school year… to relax… or- or maybe- maybe she can even get a job…
But not if she’s got a fourth baby to look after. Her hand finds its way to her belly, the neat little place where it just begins to curve out, thanks to three pregnancies before. In a few months her stomach will start to swell like that again and she’ll feel cranky and humongous and angrier than she ever was before. How could Hunt do this to her? How could he be so careless with those goddamned condoms? She’d told him she wanted to go on the pill, but he just didn’t trust ‘those things’. Rubber worked good enough before, for his parents an’ everyone else’s parents, and it’ll work just fine for them right now, too.
‘Well it isn’t working now you fat clod!’ Maliciously, she strides from the room and jams her cigarette out on the coffee table ashtray. The rest of the house is quiet, but hell if it isn’t worse than three noisy kids running around. She stands there indecisively, without purpose now that she has nothing to smoke. She almost goes for another, but then she sees the light streaming through the living room window, and she’s reminded of last Thursday’s conversation.
It’s a word that no one’s supposed to say. A word no good person says. Like sex, or rebellion, or atheist. The teenagers down the block get to say those things all the time, but Louise at George Washington Park couldn’t say it last week, and so she and Karen carefully stepped around it.
“Mary got one,” said Louise, as their kids bumbled around the playground, shouting ideas to each other and kicking up woodchips and sand. Her eyes stay on her six year old, but her voice is low and tacit. They could be discussing the weather, or someone’s new tablecloth. “Went out one day and, snip, it was gone.”
“Did Frank know?” Karen breathes, amazed and reviled at once.
“No. Not ’til after. Sarah said that Mary had a limp at the bake sale the next Saturday. But it must’ve worked, because there’s only the two kids still.”
Both women look across the playground to the bench where Mary sits, chatting peacefully to another woman while her oldest son tries to get her attention and she ignores him. So normal. Can it really be that Mary is a felon?
“Where did she go?” Karen asks, wondering aloud. Her fingers are tight on the worn handle of her handbag, her legs crossed tightly at the ankle, everything reined in.
“Sarah says she must’ve gone into Cincinnati,” Louise purposefully smoothes the way her blouse lies over her stomach. Her wedding ring catches the light, sending off sparkles that dance into oblivion. “No one’d be stupid enough to do that sort of thing around here.”
A fleeting memory touches a forgotten part of Karen’s brain: “What about that doctor- there was a big headline a few years ago. Didn’t he lose his license for it?”
“Probably. Janie, put your shoes back on! You’re going to track sand home!”
The conversation fades, and Karen is left standing in the room again, alone. It’s 3pm and Hunt won’t be home for several hours. The kids will sleep for maybe another twenty minutes. She really ought to get around to starting dinner soon.
“Mary got one,” reiterates Louise deep in her mind. Mary, of all people. Mary is a classroom mother. She helps the Sunday School teacher every week, and is always volunteering for bake sales and fundraisers. She’s the last person anyone would suspect of an abortion.
Thinking the word surprises her, but at the same time, Karen feels liberated. Slowly, she thinks the word again, lingering over every syllable. An abortion. To abort a pregnancy. To halt the existence and development of a newly initiated life-
It’s a vulgar word! How- how could she even think of terminating a pregnancy? A child? Her own child, her flesh, her blood, half of herself and half of Hunt? The baby sibling to her three children- Her three children who already live on hand-me-downs and leftovers and whose futures are dimly lit at best.
She can feel her experience closing in on her, the voices of Society and Religion beating the drums of propriety right in her ears. Vulgar, disgusting, horrific, scandalous murderer. Already you have sinned. Everyone will know, all will ostracize you for your thoughts. You, murderess of your own blood-!
With a physical force she rejects the condemning voices, hurling them across the room as she flings Hunt’s old couch pillow across the room, slugging it into the far wall. The poof and thump are amazingly satisfying. With that air leaving the pillow, the haunting voices are gone.
Slowly, she straightens, breath coming and going. She is released… and now she finds fresh purpose.
3:15 and a note is scribbled, pinned to Hunt’s pillow on his spot on the couch, the one that she threw. The kids are awake, if quite drowsy, and staying at Mary’s- Louise was busy- and confused.
“Mommy needs to go visit Grandma,” she tells them, giving each uncaring child a tender kiss. For a single moment, her eyes meet Mary’s and something is understood. A painstakingly clear note is pressed into Karen’s hand. She tries not to think of what it means to abort a child, the decision she has made between these three and the one now nestled in her womb.
She turns away again and returns to her car. When she pulls out of the driveway, excitement grips her and she heads off fast. She’s going to do it. She’s going to break all the rules like no one ever dreamed of, and it’s going to make her free. So, so free.
It’s nearly an hour to Cincinnati, but she doesn’t feel it. The Mommas and the Poppas are singing to her over the radio, telling her about their California Dreamin’, and she’s got the air conditioning turned way, way up. Hunt never lets them turn it up this far. “It wastes gas,” he tells them, even when the kids are sweating and faint from dehydration in the back.
“It’s not going to kill you to turn it on once in a while,” Karen snapped once, and that weekend when Hunter Junior’s Little League practice went badly, she turned it up just for him. That grubby smile she got was the greatest smile she has ever received in her life.
Hunt’s always saying things like that. “Why do you buy the name brand? Store brand’s just as good.” The store brand table polish ruined her grandmother’s antique table.
“You spend too much money on clothes,” he said when she finally bought herself a new winter coat. The old one was full of holes in the lining and it couldn’t keep her warm in the snow. She’d spent all of September aching over the new designs and watching the prices rise and fall, still beyond her reach. Agonizingly, she was about to admit defeat when she came across a coat at a discount outlet exactly like the ones in her catalogues and for only half the price. The coat came home that day in a box and when she went to model her great deal for her husband, all he said was, “Too much.”
Rush hour hasn’t hit the city yet, and she carefully navigates her way to the address Mary gave her, half a dozen previous visits in for a treat or needed purchases her guide. At last she finds the steps sunken into the pavement of a dirty, shady street, and descends them to her destiny.
The sign on the door reads “Workshop” but the row of waiting women in the front room confirms the rumor. Another woman approaches her and asks her for ID, and proof that she’s here for what she says she is. In semi-hushed tones, Karen gives the woman a summary of her story. Satisfied, this- receptionist? Nurse?- gives her a form to fill out. How long has she known she was pregnant? Does a doctor know? Does the father know? Would she like anesthesia? Her name is not required.
While Karen writes, the door opens again, and this time a couple walk in, hand in hand. Their faces are pale and with a shock Karen realizes how young they are. They can’t be out of high school, this boy and this girl, but they’re here for… Karen returns to the sheet, just as the other women have returned to their magazines. It is no business of theirs. No one asks, and so no one tells, because you can’t tell what it is you don’t know.
She hands the paper in and takes her place amongst the waiting women, most not showing at all, although one looks periodically green. They’re young, mostly. Girls in The Movement, girls who go to college. Envy races through Karen’s heart: if only she had had that same daring! Beside her sits a woman boldly wearing men’s pants and an audacious, gentlemanly watch, reading a feminist publication. She is clearly not wearing a bra. She eyes Karen as she sits down as though daring her in her housewifery to assume things about her or judge her as a heinous, evil radical.
Karen gives her a half-apologetic look that says, ‘I’m here, too, aren’t I?’ The other woman’s face softens, almost to a smile, and she goes back to her book.
Now comes the cruel part: the waiting. With three- no, two women before her (the feminist was just admitted), Karen has quite a while to go. Fear and doubt war within her, so she casts her mind out to further unsettling things.
For some reason, last night’s dinner comes to mind. It was normal enough. Mashed potatoes and meatloaf. Michael trying to make a mashed peas volcano. Hunter telling them eagerly about how some kid at school got in trouble. Hunt Senior enjoying the story. Anne Marie watching her mommy.
“Dammit, Hunt, do you have to encourage him?” she couldn’t keep her eyes on her plate anymore.
“What? It’s was just a couple of spitballs! Kid stuff!”
“Its- Just forget it, ok? It doesn’t matter.”
“What the hell is wrong with you, Karen?” his hazel eyes follow her as she dumps her plate in the sink, no longer hungry, if she ever was to begin with.
“Just forget it!”
Anne Marie’s eyes still haunt her. It feels like a lot of conversations end that way these days.
“They say the pill has an effectiveness rating in the 90s… maybe even 100%…”
“It’s too expensive.”
“But it works.”
“Condoms work, too.”
“Not well enough.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means condoms don’t work as well, Hunt. They break. Pills don’t tear.”
“They work fine!”
“Every one of our kids is a broken condom!”
“You want ‘em to become a missed pill? Then whose fault will it be?”
“It’s not about whose fault it is! Why does it always have to be about fault with you?”
“Because it’s always my fault, isn’t it, Karen? Just forget it- you can have your stupid pills. Be a swinger and shoot up, too, why don’t you?”
The emotions wash back over her and Karen blinks slowly, returning partially to the room. Another woman has gone in and the nurse is ready to prep her, her hand on Karen’s shoulder. With a meek nod, Karen submits. It’s almost her turn.
Indifferently, she zones back out. She’s doing something so taboo already… why not just break all the rules?
That word that starts with a D… Divorce. She savors the word, lets it roll around her tongue. She’s becoming a freedom junkie. Now divorce, that’s freedom. That’s a second chance and a new slice of liberty- without Hunt around to hold her up or hold her down.
A sickening thought occurs. If Hunt’s job, which he’s being working in virtually since they graduated, isn’t enough to run the air conditioning or buy a cheap coat, how would she, at an entry-level job, be able to keep them all fed and clothed?
The dream dies and it’s her turn. She’s all prepped and she goes into the room.
It isn’t what she expected, but she’s not sure what she expected in the first place. A tiny, dimly lit little room, perhaps, with a fearsome old man with a lazy eye performing the procedure.
Dr. Rowling is in his 40s, has a full head of hair and thick glasses. He talks to her as he gets ready to do the surgery, explaining what he’ll do and how she’ll feel. He doesn’t want to know her name. Before he starts, he looks her straight in the eye- his eyes are gray- and without judgment asks her one last time if she’s sure she wants to do this. Yes, she’s sure. She wasn’t certain that she would be at this moment, but now that’s she’s here, she’s sure.
It’s over sooner than she thought it would be, and she spends an hour letting her sensibilities return in their recovery room. It’s dark by the time she leaves. She’s still feeling woozy, so nothing really seems real as she checks out in the waiting room, watching the nurse there shred her notes on Karen’s condition. Money, really quite a lot of money, enough to deny her a dozen small luxuries long before next spring, changes hands. Karen has to steady herself before she can move away from it, giving her a long, slow look at the room. The girl and her boyfriend have long since gone in, and a new set is in line. Another feminist, a half-high hippie, and another housewife, looking scared and out of her element. Wearily, Karen gives her a smile, and lurches toward the door.
She doesn’t quite feel well enough to drive all that way home, so instead she goes on to her mother’s, in a town outside the city. Her mother is delighted to see her- of course she can stay for the night! Business in the city? Without Hunt or the kids?
No, replies Karen, hands circling a warm ceramic coffee mug. No Hunt and no kids… and no baby. It’s like her period only worse. She has to wonder, really morbidly, what would have happened if her mother had been in her position. If she, Karen, had been aborted. Again, envy. If only she had been spared this horrible life with this horrible dream gone wrong that makes her choose between options that aren’t choices.
It’s already eight pm, but she isn’t feeling hungry, and so she just goes straight to bed. Her mother clucks over her as she always has, and nausea fills Karen’s sorely empty belly. She will never have the joy of a baby in her arms again, never kiss impossibly tiny fingers, or soothe a wailing infant, rubbing its back until it falls asleep, exhausted. She knows what young children are like. She has three at home. Too many at once, really. It isn’t fair. It really, truly just isn’t fair.
As an afterthought, she picks up her mother’s kitchen phone, the one she used a forever ago to call her girlfriends and talk sickly sweetly to Hunt as she arranged times to see him. Her mind blanks before she remembers her own phone number. No wonder; she almost never needs to call it. Her mind doesn’t let her realize what she’s doing while the phone rings, and she is startled when a man’s voice- Hunt’s voice- picks up.
“Hunt?”
“Dammit, Karen, where the hell are you?”
“I’m at my mother’s. I told you…”
“All afternoon? Why?”
“I- I needed to see her. To talk to her.”
“That’s what we have a phone for, Karen.” The way he says it makes her feel so stupid, and ashamed.
“I’m sorry, Hunt,” before she knows it, she’s crying. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so- so, so sorry…”
He doesn’t know how to handle her like this. Even less so because it’s over the phone, and he can’t pretend he knows what’s going on by putting a comforting hand on her shoulder. Maybe it’s better this way. She stopped feeling comforted by him a long time ago.
“Just- just come home. Anne Marie misses you,” he finishes gruffly, and then he puts down the phone.
In a huddled mass, Karen slides to the floor, the phone still cradled in her hands. That’s how her mother finds her fifteen minutes later, her mascara streaked down her cheek and her fingers running compulsively through her hair. Without question, her mother hauls her off to bed, washing her face, smoothing her hair and pulling her out of her old clothes and into soft green pajamas, the ones Karen remembers from winters in this house. She’s tucked into her old bed, the room still decorated just as she left it, with old perfume ads pinned up all over her walls. The French ones are her favorite, with their bold, mismatched colors, and their romantic French scrawled across the top. Her father brought those home for her, before he died.
Worn out, she quickly drops off to sleep, and she dreams of when all of her children were babies. She dreams that all three of them are little at one time, and that they all three need her for everything. She can’t keep up, though, and all she wants to do is go to France to be a can-can dancer. The babies start crying, all of them at once, and Hunt is yelling at her, telling her to do better and not to spend so much money. Then there are five babies and ten babies and ten thousand babies, and they all want her, they all need her to be their mommy. But all she wants to do, all that she really can do, is cry for her own mother.
When she wakes up, the sun is shining, and she is warm. For a moment she is confused as to the time and the year. The dull ache in her belly reminds her what has happened, and with some effort she goes and cleans herself up. When she goes downstairs, dressed, her mother is making lunch.
“Hunter called,” her mother says, calmly making sandwiches. She’s always called Hunt Senior Hunter, and usually without inflection. Their son is Little Hunter, and she loves to pretend that they are out hunting together, for wild gooseberries or a toy frog. “He asked where you were.”
Karen falls into her chair, too weak to support herself. Her head is spinning, and she knows she is doomed. He’ll be angry… so, so angry… They’ll fight, and Annie will cry, and Michael will suck his thumb, and Little Hunter will try to get them to make up.
“I told him to go and get bent.”
Her head whips up, and her mouth falls open in an O. Her MOTHER-?
A serene smile graces her mother’s lips, while mischief twinkles in her eyes. “I told him that you weren’t feeling well, and that if he wanted pancakes he could damn well make them himself. I don’t know what happened to you, baby, but if he hit you, I’ll kill him.”
No… no, he didn’t hit her… Not yet, anyway… But, oh, the love Karen feels for her mother at this moment is enough to fill the room and burst out into the street. She finds herself choking on sobs, and her mother’s arms encircle her, rocking her gently back and forth as she purges all the sorrow.
“Sh… sh, my baby…I know, I know… He doesn’t deserve you, my angel…”
Deliriously, now feeling lightheaded after her emotional rapids, Karen realizes that her mother thinks that Hunter is the problem, that they are having problems, maybe that Karen is leaving him. But, no, wouldn’t she have brought the kids?
“Everyone has these troubles, Karen,” her mother tips back her chin and wipes at her face with a spit-dampened napkin, taking away the tears. “Everyone is afraid, at some point, that they’ve made some mistake, but most of us haven’t, and we make our way through it. We’re unhappy for a while but then we realize that we’ve done the right thing. We stay together… what choice do we have?”
What choice do we have? No choice. No choice to abandon three children and a husband she used to adore. It wasn’t a choice to be rid of a baby: they simply just couldn’t afford it.
The afternoon wears on, and eventually Karen heads home. Her insides still hurt, but at least she knows she did right.
Anne Marie will cling to her as soon as she gets home. She probably will not let her mommy go. Her big brown eyes will still follow everything, just as they always have, and maybe someday when Annie is tortured and tormented, Karen will tell her the story of what happened that day, why she drove out to Cincinnati to visit her mother who didn’t really need visiting.
The highway stretches out before her, and the watch her husband gave her a sweet dream ago reads that it is 2:55, but the radio DJ says 3. Perhaps on her way she will stop at the pharmacy and see if her prescription has been processed yet… this isn’t a day that she wants to repeat.