What We Lose(12)

“Ouma,” he says, calling me my nickname from childhood, “everything’s all right. I’m not going anywhere.”





It happens again, this tightening feeling and then the nausea, when I am sitting at my desk and then again when I am vacuuming the hallway in my apartment. I realize that the paunch in my belly that normally goes away after a big meal doesn’t this time. Instead it is turgid and my pelvis is sore, as if slowly being stretched apart, and I walk with my hips slightly parted, my tail angled toward the sky.





I buy a pregnancy test and it says yes.





PART TWO





Aminah and Frank had been broken up for a month when she called to tell me that she was pregnant and needed an abortion. At the time, things were okay between them, and Frank had visited her in New York. They returned to her house from a party where Frank was talking to another girl. When they came home, Aminah fucked him with all her might, desperate for his attention, and afterward she collapsed in a ball next to him, crying, drunk, in the dark. She picked a fight with him and threw him out, and he rode the bus back to D.C. in the middle of the night.

They hadn’t spoken in two weeks. I caught the train up to New York that weekend. We walked to the clinic, past picketers in front, and I helped her separate her belongings at the metal detector. We were led into a cold linoleum waiting room. I took notes for her during the consultation with the nurse practitioner. As we approached the doors to the operating area, she asked the nurse’s aide, “Can she come with me?” The aide refused, gently as she could, so I held Aminah’s hand until I couldn’t anymore. I waved to her through the swinging door.

Afterward, she told me three other women were in the recovery room with her, two black and one white. The procedures had been completed in separate operating rooms, and at the end, they all ended up in one waiting room. The women who received anesthesia were worse than the others. They were confused, getting up and falling to the ground. Aminah was awake the whole time. The procedure didn’t hurt, she said, and the people were as nice and thorough as could be. But there was no getting around the discomfort. When it was over, they sat clutching their stomachs, and Aminah kept thinking about what color hair the baby would have had. Would it have looked more like Frank or like her? She didn’t cry, though another woman did. The other, dazed from the drugs, inquired repeatedly about a bus schedule. None of the other women had anyone waiting for them.

Aminah said that she wasn’t sad. We never raised the morality of the action, because our politics took care of that. Neither of us believed that a fetus legally constituted a human life. But Aminah still cried as if she had lost something, and I had to tell her that she was wrong, that it was nothing to begin with.

Yet part of me doubted that statement, because I was smart enough to believe that nothing on this earth could be completely knowable. That little tadpole could have feelings, and there could be a God, and we could have angered God with what we did that day.

What I knew for sure was that if I had been in Aminah’s shoes, I would have chosen the same thing, and I would have mourned the same way she did. And I would have wished, against the futility of such thoughts and acceptance of my decision, that it hadn’t happened, in the same way that I knew she did.

When I finally got her back into bed and fed her painkillers along with canned tomato soup, Aminah started crying, harder than I had ever seen her cry, even harder than the time she broke her ankle at camp field day in third grade and you could see the bone poking through her skin. “I love Frank,” she wailed over and over, “and he’s going to hate me for this.”

I told her she didn’t know that he would, but she decided to keep it a secret anyway. She never told him, and three months later they were back together for good.



My mother was completely exhausted in the first few weeks after treatment. She needed someone to bring her lunch during the day, to remind her to take her medicine, and to sit and watch television with her. I was home from college for the summer and played her caretaker. For most of the day, she sat alone in my parents’ bed, in the same position: hugging a body pillow, her head angled toward the television. She wore a stocking cap and her old cotton pajamas.

Her treatment center was in the middle of one of Philadelphia’s most expensive neighborhoods. The building was a classic stone-fronted townhouse that overlooked a small park. It looked like a mansion, offering an opulence I imagined to be comforting to my mother. But that was one thing we never talked about: the apparent moneyed-ness of her treatment. It was something she knew her friends could never afford, and for that I think she felt guilty.

She told me that, surprisingly to her, most of the people in her chemo center were black. I was surprised as well, but I never revealed as much. I thought of a friend’s mom whom I knew from elementary school, and the people in the ads and brochures for cancer foundations. They had a look: older, round, rose-cheeked, what little hair they had graying, and mostly white. No, my mother said, in her center they were mostly black men and women, quite a few of them young—in their thirties and forties—working-to middle-class. Many brought their children to treatment because the kids didn’t have anywhere else to go.

She told me about one black woman in her support group who had no family, no friends willing to take her in or help her. It was just her and her daughter, the woman said, and she cried and cried.