Legacy

You had spent the past three months trying to talk me into going ahead and getting married. You were on a campaign. Each day brought a new reason. A new persuasion.

We both knew our parents had discussed the possibility. We both knew that if we did go ahead and marry, they would have continued to support us until we both graduated. Nothing much would have changed.

Except everything. I mean, marriage does – after all – do that. Change everything. But that’s beside the point. We were young. We didn’t know that. We knew, oh god, so little. So incredibly little.

That day you sat in the bathroom talking to me while I bathed, shaved my legs, dunked my head under and washed my hair. We had been intimate long enough for this to have been casual. I don’t remember what we were discussing. I just remember suddenly you stopped and said, curiously, “Your breasts look larger.” For a moment you almost looked amused.

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.”

You froze.

“I think I’m pregnant.”

I’m not sure what I expected. Certainly not jubilation, but neither did I expect the anger that exploded from you. I wonder, did you come close to slapping me? Surely you must have. Oh, I know that much about you. Don’t be coy with me. Did you consider drowning me right there in the tub?

Of course, I know what you saw, Jeremy. You saw the possibilities of your life shrink in a single instant. You saw me forcing your hand. You imagined all sorts of sinister plots and scheming. Your barely controlled paranoia ran amok. You forgot entirely that this recent headlong rush to matrimony was part of your agenda. Not mine.

I don’t remember a lot of what was said. I remember volume, and facial expressions, and one single, solitary sentence. “So help me God, Lily, if you have this child I will never speak to you again.” Those words will never fade from my mind. They became the totality of my reality. If I wished to keep the man whom I intended to be my husband, I must give up this child.

I saw a doctor. The doctor not only confirmed the pregnancy, but expressed grave concern over medication I had been taking prior to being aware of being pregnant. “If there is anything even slightly iffy about this pregnancy, terminate it.” His words were final. Dismissive.

I talked to my parents. My parents assured me they would “take care of it.” Their words too, were final. Dismissive.

No one, including me, asked me what I wanted to do.

For all my affectations of rebellion in college, the real rebellion, the real fight in me, had been beaten out of me by the time I was 16. Squashed like a bug. I was a good girl, and I did what I was told. It never even occurred to me I had a choice.

The abortionist was a horror. I remember the office, all black leather and chrome with foil wallpaper. I expected a pimp to come out, not a nurse. I remember her sneer at me for not knowing your blood type ('You would sleep with a man without even knowing his blood type?'). I remember feeling like a whore, being treated like a whore, the condescension, the shame.

And the pain – oh mother of God! I remember hurting so badly that I was fighting to get from one breath to the next. I remember the look on your face when you saw me, white as a ghost, afterwards. When you knew, you really knew, how much they had hurt me.

It was years before I learned that an abortion didn’t have to hurt like that. Years before I understood that doctor was punishing me, waging his own vendetta against whores like me, bad girls who slept with their fiancés and committed the unpardonable sin of conceiving a child.

A year later in a drunken rage at a party, you balled your fist up and knocked me off a porch 15 feet back onto the sidewalk. I remember hitting the cement and the endless moments when I simply could not force air into my lungs.

You came to me the next morning. Sobbing. Pleading. But baby, everything I had ever felt for you died between the time your fist hit my face and my back hit that sidewalk. I got off of that sidewalk over you. Finito. The End.

What remains is only the memory of that single line.

“So help me God, Lily, if you have this child I will never speak to you again.”

And to think I cared! I cared!

My god, how many years have passed since we spoke? How many women have been on the wrong side of your fist in those years? Thank god we didn’t marry. Thank god I learned in time.

Four years later, I had my first miscarriage. Another two years later, I had my last. By then I knew that I would never be able to carry a pregnancy to term. I had been too badly damaged. It was too late.

You stole from me my one viable child. Stole that from me with your petty, petulant threat.

And that, my dear, remains in my heart. The only trace of you there at all.

Summer

It never would have happened had Adam not called me that morning.

He was panicking. I grabbed a cigarette, rubbed the sleep from eyes and listened. His parents had left town. He’d had a party. The house was in shambles. Would I help clean up?

Cleaning. That’s my gig. I can clean anything.

So I put on my ridiculously-short-shorts, an old ragged t-shirt, and went to his house. We gathered trash (lots of trash), drank wine, washed dishes, drank wine, mopped, drank wine, vacuumed, drank wine, and then I was in the bathroom, bent over scrubbing out the tub, and you walked in. I screamed at Adam, suddenly acutely aware of my appearance, of my state of undress. “You hadn’t warned me any men would be here! You hadn’t warned me any heterosexual men would be here!”

I remember vaguely writing a letter to Adam’s father that I owed him a bottle of wine. I remember vaguely all of us ending up at my apartment.

I remember quite well that you kissed me. Slow and sweet. I remember how you looked after that first kiss. There is a photo in my mind. You with your head thrown back against the oak paneling.

And I remember feeling the wine kill my guts sometime in the middle of the night. How romantic. How suave. I was throwing up my toe nails. A certain way to capture a man’s heart! And you! You were so sweet. Got a cold washcloth for my forehead. Dragged your fingernails across my back until goose flesh rose and my body cooled. The very thing, perhaps the only thing, that would make me feel better.

And in the morning, there we were.

You showed up the next evening with a bottle of Crown Royal and a cribbage board. “You’ve done your research?!?” I said. I was flattered. Amused. A little depressed to be so predictable and easily pegged. More than anything, I was thrilled to see you. Did you know? Did you see right through me?

We got drunk. We played cards. You played well. I hadn’t expected that. You also drank well. I hadn’t expected that either. You came over other nights. A lot. Sometimes at 2 or 3 a.m.  You came over in the day. Sometimes at 9 a.m. and settled in for the duration.

It was days before you tried to make love to me again. Days in which I wondered about this dance we were doing. But we worked it out. Stepped over the obstacles. Ignored a few rules. You were young and brash. I was young and drunk and what the hell? You were younger, not by much, not enough to send me to jail, but enough. I was a robber. Of cradles. Of conventions. Of my own broken heart. A pirate set loose upon the sea.

Do you know how happy you made me? How much fun I had with you? How when you held my broken heart in your hands it became whole again for a moment, it’s beat strong and true?

Soon, the world fell out from beneath my feet, and I moved in with Adam and his dad.  Luckily, I had kept my word and purchased his father that bottle of wine.

We had only that spring and that summer. August was an end for both of us. You going one way. Me going another. So we seized the moment, dashed headfirst like children into sprinklers, threw caution and sense to the wind. It was magic. Time out. No reality. No tomorrow. Only an endless now in which we devoured each other. I’ve never hungered for a lover like I did you that summer. I was insatiable. I was ravenous. I breathed only for you.

Each morning, I would get up and preen myself for you and wait. Would you come? You came! Whole days passed tangled in sheets. We danced and played cards and walked and dined and oh! the summer night against my skin! The endless warm embrace of june bugs and cicadas. Days without calendars or clocks.

At the bar one night Wanda came and was flirting with us both. I thought you wanted to. You thought I wanted to. Finally, I discretely left, leaving you to her. Oh! You were so angry! My trick! No! No! Your trick! Oh bloody hell! More good intentions with which the road to hell was paved. What began as an argument dissolved into laughter.

And one night, that lovely boy – the one Adam was so hot for – broke his guitar string and tied it, ever so tenderly, around my neck, while you growled and glared. Silly, silly man. No boy, no matter how lovely could have stolen me from you then! I was the butterfly on your shoulder, wings beating softly against your cheek.

And then, inevitably, August came. I packed the first truckload and made the first trip out, truck fairly bursting at the load. I returned the next morning for the few final things. Remnants. Not even enough for the trunk of my car. And we met in that vacant house. From 11 a.m. until 1 a.m. we made love in the empty living room, stopping only to go out and gorge ourselves with food.

I never loved you more than I did that day. No sorrow. No regrets. Just joy. Joy and love like a fountain. Gushing, flying, sunlit to the sky.

And when it was time to say goodbye, we smiled our love into each other eyes, and then you! You did the most amazing thing! Took the cross from around your neck, the cross you’d worn for years. The cross you showered in, made love in, never-ever-ever took off. You took that cross and slipped it around my neck. I was almost speechless.

A week later, a letter: “For god’s sake Lily, take off the necklace. I know you don’t wear jewelry.”

But there were drops of your blood after your signature. And I understood. I understood.

My darling lover! My laughter! My joy! My delight!

My heart still bleeds for you, precious drops on bits of paper. Paper carefully folded into love like an origami crane.