Sex Object (2 page)

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The first time I had an abortion I was in this same room, on the same table. When I walked into the office, the receptionist offered me tea in the same way she had seven years earlier. I was the only patient there, an upside to paying over a thousand dollars for an early abortion in a private clinic that doesn't accept insurance: you get to be alone and hold on to a shameful sense of superiority that you aren't like other women who get later abortions.

As I lay down on the brown cushioned table, the rolled-out paper crunching beneath me, I noticed that the Jolly Ranchers on a nearby counter were in the same glass candy dish that had been there the first time I was here. Then, the candy was Starbursts.

That time I was in my late twenties. I had a job, money, and enough family support to have a baby. But I also had a shitty boyfriend, a lingering love for an even shittier ex-boyfriend, and was in the process of finishing my first book. I had al
ways thought that should I find myself pregnant at that age, twenty-seven, I would just go through with it. But the minute I saw the word “pregnant” come up on that stick, I knew that I couldn't be.

I was only a few weeks along, but most abortions can't happen until eight or ten weeks and I couldn't wait that long. A Google search on “early abortions” that same day led me to a clinic claiming to be midwifelike that used a method for ending the pregnancy that didn't require machines, anesthesia, or a horrible sucking sound. Just a syringe and a nurse holding your hand. I made the appointment for the following week, even though the woman on the phone cautioned me not to come in too early—there would be nothing to take out if I didn't wait.

My mother had an abortion when I was nine and my sister was seven but she didn't tell me this until after I had mine. She hoped, I think, that it would be a bonding moment between us but the clear regret she had over ending her pregnancy—
Your dad was so busy with his music, I felt I had to; it's normal to feel depressed after
—made my own ambivalence feel somehow criminal.

We were sitting in a restaurant in Astoria, Queens, when she told me—a new place on 34th Avenue that had opened near the Museum of the Moving Image. The café was cavernous on the inside—literally—with high ceilings and walls made to look like bumpy stone. I know she wanted me to tell her this was the hardest thing, and to find some commonality in our suffering, but it wasn't hard and I wasn't hurting.

My parents got married when my mother was only seventeen years old, and she tells me that on their wedding night she called her mother crying afterward. She was a virgin, brought up in Catholic school, and terrified of men—even my father, whom she had dated since she was twelve years old. Her tears that night set the stage for a relationship-long narrative between them: my father desperate for her love and she too scared of it.

They were married for thirteen years before having children, my mother enduring miscarriage after miscarriage before her pregnancy with me finally took. So when she got pregnant with my sister when I was little over a year old, it was a surprise. By the time the third pregnancy came, years later, my parents were working nonstop and my father had started a blues band that was doing relatively well—several gigs a week at bars and clubs downtown, like Manny's Car Wash and the Bitter End.

When I was twelve or thirteen years old I started going to watch him play, thrilled that the bartenders would ask me for my drink order, ignoring their eye rolls when I told them my age. One night when I walked into the back room where the band was getting ready one of the men backstage made a comment about my low-slung jeans and how he could see my underwear. I became very aware, suddenly, that I was the only girl in that room and that my father wasn't there.

It never occurred to me that those late nights he was gone playing music meant my mother was alone caring for us. Or that his rehearsals several nights a week meant the same thing. It's
difficult, when you are young, to imagine the time your parent spends with you as hard work.

My parents are retailers—a profession a college professor I had once called the
most evil there is
because they jack up the price of items for profit, and I thought it was pretty easy for her to say. When I was a child, they ran two stores—one in the Bronx, one in Queens—that sold women's clothing, the kind meant for older customers: bedazzled jumpsuits; nightshirts with Betty Boop cartoons on them; huge bras and underwear that only came in white, beige, and black, all stacked in yellow boxes behind the counter. Their customers yelled at them, tried to return clothing that had been worn for years, and sometimes pissed and shit themselves in the dressing room.

The store was named after my mother and the walls were slatted so that the latest shirts and elastic-waist paints could be hung there, covering the store in sets of polyester “suits” with jewelry dangling off the hanger to give a sense of a completed outfit. I liked to try on the wigs from the mannequins that were in the front windows, their outfits and surroundings changed monthly by a man who carried pins in a cushion that looked like a tomato and who once—to annoy my mother after a fight—fashioned a tuft of fake pubic hair to come out of the underwear on one of the mannequins modeling lingerie in the window.

I spent most days after school at the store in Queens—the one in the Bronx would close before I turned ten—and I would lose myself in one of two activities: (1) going to McDonald's to buy french fries so I could feed the mice that lived in the back
corner of the store (my mother hated this game); (2) playing in the long satin nightgown rack.

I figured these gowns must be the most special because unlike other clothes in the store they were covered in clear plastic bags to protect them. I would pretend to dance with them: that I was a prince at a ball and these nightgowns—disembodied and smooth, covered in plastic—were princesses, and I would reach underneath the bags to feel the satin beneath. Sometimes I would stick my whole body underneath the plastic and the gown, even though my head just reached the empire waist, and my mother would yell at me to get out—that I would suffocate in there.

I learned to ask customers,
Can I help you?
as a toddler and later how to ring up a sale on an old-fashioned register where the numbers were printed on huge circular buttons that clicked in when you pressed on them, like typewriter keys. I collected hangers to put in boxes in the basement and sorted clothes by size, hanging them on the round racks in between the white S, M, L, XL, XXL, and XXXL signs that hung there too.

We didn't live far from the store, just a few avenues over in Long Island City. Our house was on the corner of a block lined with other houses but just two blocks away from rows of factories—sweatshops, my father said—and street corners that would become populated with sex workers once the sky got dark. One night when I was ten we heard a woman screaming outside for help. My father looked out the window, saw her battered face, and ran outside to her. But he, a large bushy-bearded man
in his underwear, did not inspire confidence and she ran away. Hers was not the last scream we heard outside of our window.

I don't know if it was the city noise, the car alarms, or simple childhood insomnia, but I rarely slept through the night growing up. My earliest memories are of walking around our house in the darkness, trying to think of something to do to pass the time. Sometimes I would just sit at the edge of my parents' bed, hoping my presence would magically wake them up. Sometimes I pretended I was a ghost haunting my own house.

But I am older now, so when my mother tells me about her abortion, I understand logically that it must have been impossible to imagine having a baby alongside her two preteen children. Among that work, in that house, in that neighborhood they were working so hard to make sure we didn't spend too much time in.

Still, my first thought when she tells me about her abortion is one of shock because
she is such a good mother
. Always sacrificing, always putting us first. Despite my feminism and knowledge that sometimes women get abortions to be good mothers, my first thought is one of judgment.

But admitting that somewhere inside me is the belief that good mothers don't get abortions is too antithetical to the work I do and who I am, and so with loneliness masked as self-sufficiency, I made the appointment to end my pregnancy and went with my sister instead of the man who got me pregnant.

Midwifelike handholding aside, the pain was terrible, much worse than I expected. I didn't cry, but my sister told me I went
pale, my lips white for the minutes afterward while I ate a pink Starburst to get my blood sugar going enough to get me off the table without vomiting.

The elevator ride down from the office was strange, being in an enclosed space with people leaving work to go out to lunch and you—in pain but trying not to show it and nauseous but trying not to throw up—just having made a decision to keep your life on track but feeling like a feminist cliché.

At least it's over, I thought. I celebrated my birthday but went for a required blood test to make sure the procedure had taken.

It had not.

As I had been warned, I tried to end the pregnancy too early. When the nurse told me on the phone my knees literally went weak at the thought of enduring that pain again. So when I went to see the doctor for the second time, I started to sob.
Please can you give me something.
She told me I was right and brave to ask for what I needed and a nurse put an IV in my arm and gave me a sedative that made the procedure so easy I cried with relief and gratitude—thanking the doctor through tears as she left the room when all was done. I left the office with my sister and went outside, where my mother was waiting with her car to drive me home, me lying down in the backseat. I knew, though, that I could never go through this again.

A few months later, I met the man who would become my husband and father of my daughter. Andrew was five years younger than I was, just out of college, and didn't wear socks—
something I chalked up as a residual idiosyncrasy from his Northern California upbringing. He had reached out to me over email, asking if I would write for the liberal website he was working with. Years later, I framed the email as a last-minute Valentine's Day gift.

We waited a few weeks before having sex, the longest I had ever waited before sleeping with a man. Most of my long-term boyfriends had morphed out of what should have been one-night stands. I told him beforehand that he should know if I ever became pregnant I wouldn't have an abortion under any circumstances. I told him what had happened months earlier and he understood.

A few months into our relationship my first book was released and his grandmother passed away. I sent flowers because it seemed like the adult thing to do and I imagined that his parents couldn't have been thrilled with their just-out-of-college son dating a woman nearing thirty. I thought that if I could prove I was a responsible kind of grown-up woman—a thoughtful person rather than the emotionally messy, desperately-searching-for-solid-ground woman-child I knew myself to be—they would like me.

Andrew went to Harvard, and before that Harvard summer schools while in high school. He was bored in his public school and had taken all the math classes they had, so they sent him to the nearby community college to study. One day at my apartment he left his computer open to a chat he was having with his last girlfriend, who was still in college. He told her what was
happening between us was mostly physical, that I wasn't a real intellectual. Nine years later I never bring it up because it pains him too much to think about the young snob he was and how I must have felt, but it matched the pace for the rest of our relationship: he in love with an older woman he found exciting, me feeling distinctly unworthy.

When Andrew's parents first came to visit him in New York, he was sharing an apartment—a five-story walk-up towering over the row of Greek restaurants on 31st Avenue in Ditmars, Queens—with a guy he met on Craigslist. He was only spending one night a week there, preferring to be with me most days and to avoid a roommate who kept a three-foot cardboard cutout of himself hanging in the living room.

I lived by myself in Astoria, with new furniture I'd bought with money I got as a payoff to leave an illegal loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was the first furniture I owned that wasn't hand-me-downs from my aunts and uncles. The last couch set I'd had—a leather sectional sofa—had been given to me by a cousin who worked as a doorman at a building on the Upper East Side. The people who had owned it before were moving and didn't like it so they just left it behind and told him to take it if he wanted. He did, along with a heavy white coffee table with curved edges that alongside the black leather couch made my apartment look like a 1980s banker's place. (But ironically, because Brooklyn.)

The plan was that we would go to dinner with his parents at a nearby restaurant that had outdoor seating, but that they
would come over to my apartment first for appetizers. I had preordered antipasti at the local Italian deli: a block of provolone, spicy soppressata, mixed olives, pepperoncini, artichoke hearts, and salami. Andrew, irked that he would have to make a stop on the way back from work to pick up the food, didn't understand why what I had in the fridge—Ritz crackers and a block of cheddar—wouldn't do. Food is one of the few things that makes me feel comfortable and in control—I can put together a nice meal without its feeling like posturing. It's the only time I don't feel like a fraud, ironic for a professional feminist.

Before Andrew I didn't cook much for boyfriends. I had tried to make a fancy dinner for a boyfriend once, another WASP-y Harvard graduate who played piano and once fucked me in the bathroom of a New Year's Eve party even though I had just broken my finger by slamming it in the door on the way in. I made steak and fettuccine Alfredo that we ate at my parents' house, who were gone for the weekend, to avoid my then-roommate. All was going so well until while we were having sex my parents' dog farted so badly that we had to stop. When he later broke up with me, his insistence that I was the “hottest” girl he had ever dated only intensified my despair. My attempts to be the cool girl who eats giant hamburgers but loves film adaptations of Shakespeare, who interns at an international NGO but will let you fuck her through the pain of a broken finger in a dirty bathroom, failed. He knew like I knew that I belonged in only half of those situations.