The Original 1982
The Original 1982
Lori Carson
What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.
âGabriel GarcÃa Márquez
Contents
Y
ou were the first, Little Fish.
We were walking on Columbus Avenue from the Sheridan, the building where your father lived, to the Café Miriam, where I worked as a waitress. I had terrible morning sickness and had to sit on the curb to keep from throwing up. Your father told me to put my head between my knees.
The Café Miriam was a restaurant on the west side of Columbus. It was across the street from the Museum of Natural History and a big neighborhood hangout in those days. It was there your father and I first met. I was working brunches and lunches, mostly. I'd never waited tables before, but there wasn't much to it, just hard work.
I remember exactly where he was seated, at a four-top by the window, across from the bar. He had three friends with him. One was the music journalist Roberto Rodriguez, and the other two were fans or yes-men. Your father was famous, they said, the Bob Dylan of his country. When he saw me he grabbed his heart and gasped, pretending I was too beautiful to bear. He was a master at seduction, charming and bright with intelligent dark eyes and a Cupid's-bow mouth.
He could have any woman he wanted, and he had plenty. I was twenty-one, a former art school student and Long Island girl, slender with long dirty-blond hair and hazel eyes, pretty in a natural way. I still am, and it's thirty years later. Your father rightly predicted I'd be a handsome woman as I aged. He was thirteen years my senior, but looked even older than that. His hairline was receding and he wore a Hawaiian shirt with a pair of baggy jeans belted up high. He seemed more mature for other reasons, too. He was street-smart and well educated, the scrappiest dog on the block. He liked to win and was used to winning.
If you had inherited the best traits of both of us, you'd have been smart and a beauty, a lover of music, a sensitive girl. I'm fairly certain your father would have broken your heart the way he broke mine. He didn't want you to be born and never had any children after. He was his own child, the apple of his own eye: an artist, showman, and politician. I spared you that at least. But I spared you life itself and for that I'm filled with regret.
If I could go back to any day in my life, I'd go back to that morning on Columbus Avenue, morning sickness, head between my knees. I'd go back with courage. I'd say:
“Maestro, I'm not having an abortion. Get ready. You're going to have a child.”
And since I'm the writer of this story, and can do whatever I want, that's what I'll do. Go back to that day in 1982.
G
abriel Luna has a
Daily News
rolled up in his back pocket. He's looking forward to his breakfast, eggs over easy with bacon and sausage both, maybe a side of ham. He doesn't much like having to deal with anyone else's problems. Not even mine, and he loves me. That's what he says and what all his friends and former girlfriends tell me. But I'm pregnant and he doesn't want me to be pregnant. He can't forget about it either, although I try not to mention it. But I'm sick. I'm sick as hell all the time.
I love him with another kind of sickness. The kind that makes me forget I have an opinion of my own or any wishes that don't fall in neatly with his. I'm young but this doesn't quite explain it. There's a wound in me that I know about but have not yet begun to examine and take apart. It makes me compliant, and more than that: it makes me believe I have no right to my own life.
Gabriel and I make love every night except for the ones we spend apart. We use no birth control other than his pulling out at the last second. Every once in a while, he doesn't pull out. It's a special gift he gives me.
“This is for you, Mami. Nobody else.”
He says it in a rush as he comes. Coming inside me is what distinguishes the sex he has with me from the sex he has with other women, all unprotected. He gives me a venereal disease that year, too, a gift that keeps on giving.
But this isn't a story about Gabriel Luna or his selfishness. This is a story about a girl who gets to be born. One of those nights, when he doesn't pull out, it happens. Your life begins.
In 1982, there aren't any protesters yet, no right-to-lifers. People are still reeling from illegal abortion, still euphoric about the fact that there is choice. Even the word
abortion
has no stigma. It means freedom, liberation, the right to choose.
Not that I'm aware of all that.
I believe you are a speck of protoplasm and that I'll have other chances.
I think there's no way he will allow it.
I watch Gabriel eat his breakfast at the Café Miriam. It makes me sick to smell the cooked meat. I want to rest my head on the table as he reads aloud to me from the paper. He explains what is really going on in the world. I love listening to him. I love his accent, the way when he speaks English he stresses the wrong syllables and confuses his prepositions. He reads between the lines to see America's complicity in all the world's problems. He calls the U.S. North America out of respect for his own country and all the countries of Latin America. He feels superior to the North Americans, who are soft and ignorant, but feels better than his own people, too, because they don't live at the center of things, in New York City, as he does. His intention is to show these
norteamericanos
what he can do. Then go home a hero.
We sip our coffee at the Café Miriam. We don't even mention you at that breakfast. I'm thinking about the abortion, though. I'm worried it will hurt. I remember a girl I knew at school. Her name was Melanie Parker. What comes to mind is that she never spoke to her boyfriend again after her abortion. She told me she couldn't even stand to look at his face.
T
he next day we go to the clinic. It's in a hospital on the Upper East Side. Gabriel is afraid he'll be recognized but he comes anyway. He's wearing aviator sunglasses with dark lenses and a Mets baseball cap, pulled down low. If anyone sees him he'll say he's here with a friend. He's a Catholic, too. It's not okay with him. But it's more okay than the alternatives.
I leave him sitting in the waiting room and go with the nurse to change into a blue hospital gown, open in the back. I lie down on a cold metal table, legs spread apart, my icy feet resting on the metal stirrups. I'm given something to relax me and start to give in to it.
Just as I'm about to go under, it hits me. I can't go through with it.
I open my eyes and try to sit up.
“Wait.”
“It's okay,” the nurse says. She's holding my hand. She's only a few years older than I am.
“Lie back now,” says the doctor.
But it's not okay and I won't lie back, though my limbs are heavy from the sedation. I feel as if I'm levitating off the table, climbing legless to the floor. The room is tilting left and right but I make it to the wall and move toward the door. I'm aware of a commotion behind me as I close my eyes and fall to my knees.
“I want to keep the baby,” I tell them.
Another nurse, or maybe she's an aide, makes her way to me through the confusion. She takes hold of my arm and helps me up, leads me back to the rows of beds where the women who have had abortions are recovering. I get into a bed to sleep off the drugs, pull a thin blanket over my back. When I wake up a little while later, I remember. I haven't gone through with it. I'm still pregnant! I'm flooded with relief.
Gabriel is so mad, he won't talk to me. He takes me back to my small apartment on East Seventy-eighth Street and leaves me at the door. I climb up the ladder into my loft bed and sleep for twenty-four hours. When I wake up, I'm hungry for mint chip ice cream. The cats wind around my ankles. They're hungry, too. I fill their bowl from a bag of store-brand cat food. I open the half refrigerator stuck in the hallway near the bathroom. It's empty except for some wilted celery and a couple of packets of soy sauce. A rotten smell emanates from it and turns my stomach. For a moment I'm terrified. How will I take care of a baby when I can barely look after these two cats and myself?