After This

In her blue polyester smock, her arms pressed against her stomach, she drank a Coke and smoked a cigarette with Jill O’Meara who had come into Woolworth’s just as Susan was going on her break. They sat together on the concrete rim of a planter in the middle of the mall. It was humid, but there was that orange color at the edge of the blue sky-the begi

Susan looked at her, smiling. “How far?” she said. They were not friends, but might be becoming. Jill admired Susan. She liked her wit, her self-possession, her feline languor in the classroom, the way she slumped and curled into chairs. The way she let her eyes close slowly, never bothering to put her head down, when a teacher grew boring.

Like most compulsive liars, Jill O’Meara was skeptical of the reports others gave of themselves-the incredible dates, the wild parties, the insane mothers and alcoholic fathers-but she had always trusted what Susan had to say. Susan’s brother had gone to Vietnam and had come back a basket case. (This offered in a history class discussion about the war.) She had spent a year convinced her parents were really brother and sister, they were so identically boring. (This during a retreat day at school when the girls had been broken into small groups to discuss ways to bring Christ into their daily lives.) She had written her initials in love bites around the navel of the boy she was taking to the junior prom. (This declared amid much laughter at a table in the lunchroom.)

Jill sipped her drink, nodding slowly. “God,” she said, as if at the recollection of some astonishing memory. “We went far. Really far.”

A laugh, sophisticated, wordly-wise, broke from Susan and she said, “Start saving your pe

“This ain’t pizza,” she said.

At the end of a boring summer (no boy at the lake or anywhere else, only a hopeless crush on the UPS guy who stopped by the card shop every day and called her Kid), the revelation, the sudden tears in Susan’s voice, were high drama.

Jill O’Meara had nearly two hundred and fifty dollars in her senior prom fund. (It had been her junior prom fund last year but she hadn’t found a date.) She told Susan-the summer suddenly become interesting-”I can lend you the rest. You want me to go with your

Susan spent the night before at A

Susan filled out the forms with A

The day before, Susan had gone to a bank near the mall and exchanged her collection of money for six crisp fifty-dollar bills, sensing somehow that the neatness of her payment would confirm the authenticity of her age. She handed these to the woman, still in their yellow bank-provided envelope. The woman merely attached the money to the same clipboard and then said again, “That’s fine.”

“We’ll call you in a minute,” she said.

It was ten thirty on a Tuesday in late August and there was no one else in the waiting room, which was very small and comfortable-a pale lavender sofa and two plaid chairs, shaded lamps that might have been in someone’s living room. A

Although they would have said they were prepared for it, they both were startled when a woman-a nurse in a white uniform-came through the door beside the receptionist and said, “A

“Good luck, A

The nurse-square-jawed and deeply ta

In that moment she saw, too, how Susan had fixed her eyes-brown not hazel-on some distant point, some point out of the room, out of this particular ten thirty on a Tuesday morning in late August, out of this strange office building in Manhattan, and onto a place after which this would be done, gotten through, gotten over.

A

Inside, Susan gave a urine sample and then undressed and was examined, and when the pregnancy was confirmed, the procedure was explained to her. The strange words: cervix and uterus, dilation and curettage, felt like a steel blade against the edge of her teeth. In religion class, Sister Lucy had said, more simply, that they break the baby’s arms and legs and drown it in salt water.

Pain like a pretty bad period, the doctor said, some heavy bleeding afterward.

There was another paper to sign and she was halfway through her own first name when she remembered and went over the S and the U.

“My hand is shaking,” she said, apologetically, and the ta

The woman who did the exam and all the explaining was small and wiry with wiry red hair and a humorless face. She had been introduced as the doctor but still Susan expected a man to come in for the abortion itself. Someone stooped and gray in a white coat and a tie who would call her “young lady” and look at her over the top of his glasses both to reprimand and to forgive. Who might say something old-fashioned and complimentary, something like, “Well, I can see why your young man might have been carried away. You’re a lovely girl.”

But only another nurse came in, a pretty Asian woman who might have been alone with the doctor in the small and crowded room for all the notice she paid. The doctor said, “Are we ready then?”