Mercy Street(6)

“Everything you tell me today will be kept confidential here at the clinic,” Claudia began, “unless you tell me someone is hurting you or not taking care of you, or if you are going to hurt yourself or someone else. If you tell me any of those things, I have to tell someone outside the clinic so we can make sure you’re safe.” With minors, this was standard protocol. Every staffer at the clinic was a mandated reporter. Once or twice a year, sometimes more, Claudia placed a call to DCF to initiate a 51A report.

Vanessa answered her questions in monosyllables. Yes, she was aware of all her options. No, no one had pressured her to have an abortion. When asked about her plans for the future, she was more expansive. In September she would begin classes at UMass Boston, to study communications and later, speech pathology. Her sister was raising a deaf son. Someday, Vanessa would teach the boy to talk.

Vanessa M. The name abbreviated, AA-style, to protect the patient’s privacy. This too was standard protocol.

“I definitely want kids someday,” she said softly. “Most definitely. Just—you know—not now.”

Claudia explained that with a medication AB, she could expect six to eight hours of heavy bleeding and strong cramping. “Like a bad period,” she added. “Ibuprofen will help with the cramps.”

Mary returned with Vanessa’s legal guardian—a stout, pugnacious aunt who reminded Claudia of her own mother. The aunt had agreed to sign the consent form, but was palpably displeased.

She signed the form without speaking. Before leaving, she paused at the door. “It’s Vanessa’s decision, but I don’t mind telling you, I’m not comfortable with this.” She looked Claudia up and down. “You have kids?”

Of course, she’d been asked this before. The askers—often Black or Latina, and mothers themselves—were unsurprised by her answer. They eyed her with suspicion, a White woman who didn’t love children. Claudia felt the sting of their judgment, but she couldn’t argue with the verdict. She was White and she didn’t love children—at least, not in the global, unconditional way women were supposed to. She loved them strictly on a case-by-case basis, having learned early on that some were intolerable. In the Maine foster care system, many were: unruly, needy, hemorrhaging rage and fear. That they had good reasons for being so didn’t make them any easier to deal with.

“No,” said Claudia.

“I didn’t think so,” the aunt said.

In truth, she had never decided not to have children. She had simply decided, not now—at twenty, at thirty, at forty. At every point in her life, there had been something else she’d rather do.

The aunt said, “I don’t know how you can work here.”

Claudia said nothing. People were always telling her this: old friends, distant cousins, strangers on airplanes. Her dentist. Her chiropractor. The woman who cut her hair. Her therapist had pointed out that a reply was unnecessary; it was a statement, not a question. The most obvious response was simple agreement. No, you don’t.

“Vanessa will be fine.” Claudia handed the aunt a card. “That’s my direct number. If she needs anything, please call.”

I DON’T KNOW HOW YOU CAN WORK HERE.

Here’s what Claudia didn’t say, had never said: I didn’t always. Long ago, in another life, she’d lived in New York and worked at a magazine called Damsel. She got the job because she was young and cute and her boyfriend’s mother knew someone. Claudia was hired as an assistant editor, the youngest on the masthead. It was her first lesson in how the world worked.

Damsel dispensed an unending stream of advice. They taught women how to be women. Service journalism, they called it.

Once a year, Claudia wrote without irony, book a session with a professional bra fitter.

It was a glamour job. The paycheck was small, but there were other compensations. Damsel paid for her gym membership, a monthly clothing allowance to cover dry cleaning. Enterprising salon owners offered free haircuts and massages and waxing and pedicures, hoping for a positive mention in the magazine.

When did bra fitting become a profession? Was there a licensing exam, an International Sisterhood of Bra Fitters, an annual convention to keep yes, abreast, of new developments in bra technology?

Color-treated hair demands TLC, Claudia wrote. A violet shampoo will tone down brassiness.

She wrote about breakthroughs in anti-aging skincare, fashion mistakes over forty. She was twenty-three years old.

A glamour job, highly coveted. The assistant editors skipped lunch to save money, and spent the hour smoking on the rooftop. In the evenings they went to events. An event was a cocktail party, a salon opening, a product launch: the spring line, a celebrity diet book. The assistant editors arrived en masse, crammed into taxis to protect their borrowed shoes. They sipped wine from plastic goblets. They made a meal of the free hors d’oeuvres.

Investment shoes, smuggled out of the photo department: stiletto heels worn only once, by a model for a cover shoot.

The fashion mistake, it seemed, was turning forty.

It was a time in her life when no one ever said, I don’t know how you can work here.

The great unspoken irony of that job, which strikes her even today, was that a person raised in a trailer could be hired to do it. Not that she trumpeted this fact about herself, then or ever. At twenty-three, she was like a gangster in the Program. Discretion was the central imperative of her life.