2002, Connecticut

By Marleen Parish

When I step from my bath, I squirt lotion onto my legs, rubbing the excess into my hands and breathing in what the label insists is the “healing, restorative scent of lavender.” I hold my scented palms to my face, inhale, but, no luck. The knot in my chest doesn’t loosen; my clenched stomach doesn’t loosen its grip.

So I wrap up in my well-worn terry robe and make my way to the kitchen. Then, cup of chamomile in hand (“soothing” is what this label promises), I go to the living room, wedge myself into my satin stripe loveseat and, without success, try to nestle in.

I wage war with the throw pillows. And when I attempt, unsuccessfully once again, to secure a comfortable position, my grey and black tabby stalks across the sofa’s undulating camel back, then turns and glares when he reaches the opposite side. “You should have stroked my fur,” he taunts, “or tugged my ear when I passed.” But when I realize my error, and reach to make amends, he springs for the coffee table, just too far to touch. “Don’t trifle with me. You had your chance.”

Sufficiently chastised, and jealous of the way he draws lines and doesn’t cross over, I pull the curtain from the window to look outside. The sky is murky and dull from the thunderstorm just past. Even my shabbily tended lawn glistens from the rain. Cars parade past to the cadence of this wealthy, pretty, family town. Mercedes and Porsches testify to their drivers’ accomplishments, Volvos and Subarus to their desire to transport precious cargoes safely, protectively.

Though the cars drive by, my one thought stalls and won’t move on: I am 42 and childless.

Hal and I left Connecticut for Nantucket on Friday. We planned on a four-day escape from the drudgery of his work, my illness (I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which six months ago relieved me of corporate career possibilities), and August’s excessive, oppressive closeness. But we came back today, Sunday, and neither of us got the respite we sought. The yellow clapboard inn was charming enough, what with its window boxes spilling purple and pink petunias. Our room, papered in pink cabbage roses, was pleasant. And the quilt-covered canopy bed could have been inviting.

But I didn’t want to get in. And when I finally did, neither of us felt inclined to intimacy or sleep.

Because our room butted the street, we closed the window shutters to keep out noise and stray glances, preventing ocean breezes made it from relieving the heat. “The air’s too thick in here,” I said while we flailed around, each doing battle with the bedcovers, trying to find some acceptable posture to erase the tension between us.

The first night Hal got up about 11 to walk outside and to pretend not to smoke. When he came back, I couldn’t bear his cigarette breath, so I went to the sitting room, took a volume of Dickinson off the shelf. But I didn’t read. Why now? I asked myself. Ten years after the abortion, with Hal holding out a pearl of a life, why is it haunting me now?

Almost a year ago, on Thanksgiving, I squirmed when I scanned the dining room, the light reflecting in the chandelier, my gold-rimmed plate, Hal across the table. Three hours earlier, at a soup kitchen two Parkway exits away, I had shoveled grocery store pies onto paper plates for men and women with matted hair and missing teeth and shopping bags filled with their lives. But that night, no well-trimmed hair was out of place. No one slumped over her seat or slurped his soup. Pretty crimped-crust pies were served on gold-rimmed porcelain, while not an uncivil word, it appeared, was spoken.

The only appetite I had was for answers. I am as much an alcoholic and addict as any man or woman living on the streets of South Norwalk, I mused. I have rehab release papers to prove it. Why, I wondered, was I given another chance, and why were they not?

“You seem distracted.” Hal across the table toward me. I looked away at first. Hal had been an acquaintance for years, and it had been a respectable six months since his divorce. But only a month had passed since our health club banter stretched beyond Hello, good to see you, you look great.

“I’m just wondering how it is I came from where I came from,” I said. “And how I end up here, while the people at Good Shepherd are back on the street or in or crack houses.” Hal rotated his water glass, looking into it as if he could divine perspective in it. “That’s a big question to answer over one dinner.” He tilted his head to the right a little. “Is it enough to know you did something good today?”

“Maybe,” I said, releasing my guilt grip enough to enjoy the company of a man with intelligence and heart. “OK, enough of that,” I conceded. “How was your week?” After he talked about his recent conference in Bangkok, then his last trip to Tokyo, I told him I was finally ready to get that PhD I always coveted, the piece of paper that, once and for all, would pronounce me OK.

I tried to figure out how much older Hal was than I. Lean and strong, hair thick and streaked with a little gray. Late 50s? But there was the loose fold of skin under his neck. Early 60s? I didn’t need to know, I told myself. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had dinnertime conversation with a man about anything more substantive than third quarter shipping targets, or whether the 49ers would go all the way. I liked the way my mind came out of hibernation when Hal and I debated the validity of the Gnostic gospels, the implications of genocide in Rwanda.

From that first dinner Hal treated me like a choreographer to life to an updated Gershwin tune. Someone who would watch over me, and make the cruel worlds of the corporation and the homeless go away. For Christmas he bought me Donna Karan. For wintertime reading, he gave me Teilhard de Chardin’s writings. And over dinners, he admired me. “You’re so lovely,” he said, and I resisted the temptation to look over my shoulder to check out the leggy blonde I was certain he was talking to.

Hal asked me to marry him over lunch on Good Friday. Surely a sign of redemption at the end of what I had come to consider my personal journey to Golgotha. By then I had already stopped working. When able to sleep, I woke with what I thought might be the same terror and ritual a Vietnam vet once described to me of his time in the Mekong Delta: eyes open, shift left and right; limbs still; heart races. He was on the lookout for AK-47 wielding Vietcong. I, however, was testing the threat of an inner, invisible enemy.

Would today be more or less treacherous than yesterday? Did I dare hope that maybe, please, I’d be able to walk, talk and think like a relatively normal woman, for an hour or so at least. Or would I curl in pain, immobile, thoughts too muddied to remember how to get to the grocery a block and a half a way, in the town I’ve lived in a dozen years? Then, too, there were those bills — for copays, experimental drugs, naturopaths, homeopaths, anyone who held out hope — piling up on my kitchen counter. But with a stroke of Hal’s Mont Blanc: Poof!

So when Hal asked me to marry him, I smiled, turned my head from the restaurant table, just to the right, afraid to say no.

Two weeks later, I perched on a spindly green velvet chair in Cartier, where a well-chiseled salesman, looking like he’d just skied in from Aspen, and skilled in the art of flourish, set trays full of diamonds in front of Hal and me. Glittering hope, indestructible promise and protection, reflections bright enough to cast out any fear, shame, remembrances of things past.

But none of the rings looked quite at home on my hand, I didn’t think. So on my good days we continued shopping — in Greenwich, Westchester, back to Fifth Avenue — till he made the ultimate offer. “If you really want a child,” Hal said over dinner one night when he my eyes lingered too long at the family of four at the next table, “we can have a child.”

When I sailed away from the conversation, savoring motherhood, Hal’s voice reeled me back. “How about Bermuda?” When I looked puzzled, he took my hand. “For the ceremony. Just the two of us. I know a beautiful hotel on the beach.” Before I answered, the waiter set dinner in front of us. I took my hand from Hal’s, smoothed my napkin on my lap. “Bermuda?” I asked, lifting my fork. “I’ve never been there.”

It is 10 years since my abortion. I know now I made the decision that, at the time, felt like it offered a free pass out of fear. It didn’t. And I know that, over that Nantucket weekend with Hal, I was still afraid. Scared I might be punished with another pregnancy and that this time I would make a different choice. Or that I wouldn’t be rewarded with another chance and would be offered no other opportunity to choose differently. I’m not sure which I feared more.

Things were different 10 years ago. I was early on in recovery from the high speed chase of alcoholism, still careening around life’s curves at dangerous speeds. I was sober enough to get a good job, to jog and weight-lift myself into good shape, to buy a new car, earning enough to indulge myself with nice clothes. But I was still too far from the truth about myself, so distant from the capacity to protect myself that I couldn’t hear internal alarms that clanged when I was in danger with men.

Dan and I, for example, went to church together, spent weekends at his parents’ Rhode Island beach house. This seemed good. Normal. After all, he felt so bad about the times he had hit Carol. And those little lies, about where he was over the weekend, and with whom, I must have misunderstood. That’s what he says. I’ll listen more closely (to him, not to that sniveling little voice in my stomach), trust more, try harder.

The afternoon Dan returned from court to his fractionally furnished apartment, waving what I though were final divorce papers, I already had enough evidence to know I shouldn’t trust him. I already knew, when I gave up responsibility for myself on his scratchy Scotchguarded couch, a cast-off from the four bedroom colonial where Carol and his three daughters still lived, that I was in dangerous territory. But long after that raging need for drink subsided, a more muscular demon — self-doubt — remained.

Three weeks later, when I asked Dan to stop by after work, he found out I was pregnant and I found out he was still married. “I don’t love you,” he said. “I never did. I never will.”

I was conscious those next few, short weeks of how my friends and my faith carried me like a limp bundle in strong arms. To visit a priest who explained the Church’s teachings on abortion and told me of another single parishioner who had her baby, married a wonderful man who adopted the child, and, I was certain, clicked her ruby slippers three times before returning to Kansas and Auntie Em and Toto. “Whatever you decide,” he said, “Come back.”

I had the abortion because I was afraid. Because I leaned on my faith to take me to the door of fear but not through it. Because I believed I could not afford, emotionally or financially, to be a mother, and because I believed the shame of being unmarried and pregnant would snap the final strand that kept me hanging from the possibility that I would one day be acceptable, to my family, and to myself.

The only instant I seriously considered the viewpoint I had learned as a young Catholic (that abortion was morally wrong) was when I heard the obstetrician’s receptionist’s voice on the phone the afternoon I called for my pregnancy test results: “Your test is positive,” she tootled. “I hope that’s good news.” I looked at my secretary, my friend, who stood by me and my phone. Who looked back at me when I said, “I can’t have an abortion. I’m Catholic.” Whose eyes said, “But look at this mess, Honey. You’ve got no choice.”

So I arranged for a 10-hour hospital stay. And two days later, I left to visit my sister in Miami to begin, I thought, to forget. Ten days later I was back on my job, having exchanged the beginnings of a child for a bronzy Florida glow.

These past 10 years I’ve cried and raged now and again over my decision, mostly when I ended relationships that started with high parenting potential. But until now, I never doubted my decision. I believed I had made the best choice from a menu of unsavory options. I believed that time would heal on a steady incline.

But 10 years later, I chase butterflies of questions I couldn’t imagine a decade ago. How did that kindly doctor, the one with pictures of his grandchildren and his sailboat on his office desk, just how did he take my baby from me? With what cold, sterile instrument? Where did he put her? Would she have had blue eyes or brown? Auburn hair or blonde? Would she have played the flute or the piano? Would I have been able to love her enough?

And, most intrusive: Did I do the right thing? My editorial judge, of course, interjects, and I respond. Yes, this line of questioning is out of order, your Honor. Strike it from the record. But too late. The jury has already heard.

For 10 years now, when I’ve felt the wringing in my stomach or the piercing in my forehead that might have forced these questions sooner, I have suited up for tennis lessons, painted lawn furniture, eviscerated closets, colored my hair, charged into the office before sunup. Until now busy-ness distracted me.

But now, my spirit, rubbed raw, finds hope for repair only in what I feared most. Asking the questions. Allowing them free rein. Answering them as best I can. And facing the tragedies. That the siren song of self destruction doesn’t end when the drink is put down, that, without vigilance it shape-shifts, equally seductive as amber elixir in crystal glass. That in the company of a man who was not good for me I was in a dangerous neighborhood with no protection. That shame and fear and isolation allowed me to convince myself the only way out was down. Three flights, on a stretcher, covered by a white sheet, a nurse holding the door open to wheel me into a room with bright lights and shiny metal instruments.

After returning from Nantucket to Connecticut, I watch other women in their 40s with other men in their 60s. I see them in the grocery. In restaurants. At the movies. The polish on their squarish, manicured nails never loses its luster. (Don’t they ever wash a dish?) They dress in exercise outfits that flatter personally trained thighs, or in evening wear the costs of which could feed families of four for months.

I envy them from a distance. But when seated at a table next to them in a restaurant, or standing behind them in line, they look distracted. A little lifeless under expertly applied makeup, as if, instead of making these older men happy they’ve made themselves older too soon. Or they’re brittle, too likely to break. The pedestals on which their older admirers have placed them makes them more prone than other women, it seems, to snap at waitresses in restaurants because the food is cold or late. I begin to see myself swinging between these two poles of low-grade sadness and shrill arrogance when I am with Hal.

It takes a few more weeks for me to become honest enough to leave Hal, even after I know I don’t want him. After all, other women love the way he attends to them, the way he listens. Maybe they imagine, as I did, what it would be like to be provided for. Besides, I have this fear of falling down some long dark tunnel that ends up back where I came from, desperate and alone.

But now I know, if I had a daughter, what I hope I would tell her if she found herself in the situation I was in 10 years ago, or the one I am in now. That there’s a price for self-abdication. That it’s possible to say no to a quick and unalterable fix. And that, whatever path she chose, traveling it alone is safer than in the company of the wrong companion, no matter how seductively wrapped the offer.

Marleen Parish is an award-winning novelist and the author of numerous articles, essays, and books on health and healing. She is using a pseudonym.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, May 7th, 2007 | Email This Post

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