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.