Windfalls: A Novel Read online

  Now she imagined Sam finding her copy of Rita’s painting, imagined him looking up from her drawing to eye her with a new admiration. But then his face as she had last seen it bullied its way inside her daydream, and she winced and turned away, left the puppies to frolic on their own.

  In Rita’s room, she shoved aside the stockings draped like perished ghosts across the rumpled bed and sprawled there herself, flipping through the Cosmo that lay beside her mother’s pillow and gazing at the skinny, suntanned models until a keen self-loathing filled her soul. Unlike the models’ breasts, and unlike the breasts of Rita’s dolls, when Cerise’s breasts arrived, they came with silver stretch marks and with nipples that tightened or softened as inexplicably as the moon that was sometimes round as a pizza, sometimes skinny as a torn-off toenail, and other times entirely absent in the sky above Rossi. Cerise’s feet had grown, too, stretching out flat and long in front of her, and though the hair on her head had remained dense and blond, new hair grew in the sticky V’s of her armpits and her crotch.

  It seemed as though she had never even had a body before her breasts began to grow. Back in grade school, her body had been unremarkable, reliable as a machine. But in junior high that machine betrayed her, growing so tall and thick and smelly it seemed as if Cerise had turned into some kind of animal instead of the sleek creature the pictures in Rita’s magazines promised she would be if she became a woman. Suddenly she was the largest kid in the whole school, and the tiny boys and compact girls who the year before had ignored her now gawked and whistled and whispered when she passed.

  Cerise Center, the boys called after her as she hurried down the halls, her schoolbooks clutched against her chest as if she could press her breasts back inside her. But she was too clumsy and self-conscious to play basketball, and later, when the sting had worn from Center, the boys changed it to Centerfold, and snapped her bra and inquired about her cup size.

  “Hey, Centerfold,” they yelled when she ignored them. “Whatsa matter? You on the rag?”

  “My name’s Cerise,” she said once, after Rita told her she had to stand up to them, that no one could do for Cerise what she was too spineless to do for herself. But she said it so halfheartedly, her voice rising at the end, that she turned her own name into a question, and her protest only added to their joke.

  “Cerise?” they jeered, “My name’s Cerise?” and when she finally submitted to tears, they asked her, “Is Cerise? sad? Is Cerise? on the rag?”

  She slapped the magazine shut in self-disgust and headed toward the kitchen. Standing in the draft of the open refrigerator, she swallowed a full-throated swig of milk, gnawed on a cold drumstick from the Kentucky Fried box, helped herself to a fingerful of Cool Whip. She glanced at the clock above the stove, saw that it was almost time for Star Trek, and closed the refrigerator.

  But a note on the kitchen table snagged her attention, CERISE—FOLD LAUNDRY& IRON. She stared at her name until her vision blurred, nearly washing those words from the page. She had always hated her name. It was awkward and unusual, and it seemed to have more to do with Rita’s pretensions and aspirations than with Cerise herself. Once she had looked it up in a book of names for babies and found herself dismissed in three words—“French for cherry.” Cherries were okay, she guessed, but French was foreign, foreign was strange, and she was already strange enough without a name that substitute teachers, to the pooled delight of the rest of the class, always mispronounced—Shir-ice? See-rise?

  Sighing, she crumpled the note, tossed it in the trash, and set off through the house, assembling the iron and ironing board, the basket of laundry and the spray starch. Back in the kitchen, she plugged in the iron and waited listlessly for it to heat. When the air above the sole plate wrinkled with heat, she licked her forefinger and flicked it across the surface of the iron, felt the sizzle of evaporating spit. It was satisfying, the tidy quickness of it, but it was oddly exciting, too, that small proximity to danger.

  “Cerise!” she exclaimed suddenly. Ruthlessly and without warning she cocked her wrist and thrust it against the hot edge of the iron. The hurt was quick and wicked. She made a little sound like someone else’s moan. Tears flung themselves from her eyes, but she used her other hand to keep her wrist pressed against the iron. This is me, she thought, burning, and for a moment she felt a kind of triumph that overshadowed all her pain. When she could stand it no longer, she yanked her wrist away, first lifting it to her nose to sniff, and then holding it out so she could study the tidy white stripe of ash running like a broken bracelet along the inside of her wrist, across the tender skin where a razor might be pressed. That was strange, she thought, pleased by her courage, by her ability to punish herself for her awkward size and awful name. She imagined Sam seeing her wound and being impressed—and maybe even a little intimidated—by what she was capable of doing.

  Looking at the burn on the pale inside of her wrist, she couldn’t keep from remembering Sam’s finger in her palm. But somehow all the shame and confusion of that moment had vanished like a lick of spit against a hot iron. She felt clear and focused, as near happy as she’d been in a long while. This time, as she reached toward the iron, she had a swell of feeling that could only be known as hope.

  BY THE TIME THE BUS FINALLY REACHED ANNA ’ S STOP, HER MIND WAS scraped so raw from a week of working through the same sad set of facts and coming to the same inevitable conclusion that she’d almost ceased to think at all. Mechanically she lurched down the aisle, stepped blindly onto the street, and stood for a moment amid the diesel fumes and dust, blinking in the gritty light and trying to get her bearings. A large cluster of people was milling on the sidewalk in front of the building where she was headed. At first she thought there’d been an accident. But the crowd seemed too purposeful to be waiting for an ambulance. A second later it crossed her mind to wonder if she had made a mistake about the address or the time of her appointment, but even as she scrambled to recheck her memory, she knew she could not possibly have got those details wrong.

  She’d brought a book to read in case she had to wait, and now she clutched it to her chest and began to walk faster. As she drew nearer, the group resolved into individuals, though to Anna’s eyes they all looked much the same—the women in thick hose and knee-length skirts, the men in crew cuts and polyester jackets. There were also several children, scrub-faced kids in tidy hand-me-downs. With a jolt of alarm Anna realized that the whole group was watching her.

  Her thoughts clattered together, and her steps began to slow. For a split second she thought she should try to speak to them. But before she could think of what to say, she saw the suspicion on their faces, and her apprehension sharpened into fear. One of the men was holding a placard toward the passing traffic. When he turned his sign in Anna’s direction, she read its scarlet word and started as though she’d been slapped. A protest blurted up inside her, inadvertent as vomit. Part of her wanted to turn and run, and another part wanted to stop and rage at them. But instead she focused all her attention on walking.

  When she realized that she would somehow have to pass through those people to reach the building where her appointment was, a new confusion fluttered through her chest. But as she was hesitating, the crowd parted grudgingly in front of her, creating a rough corridor down which she might pass. Her shoulders cringed in anticipation of the blows it seemed would surely come if she tried to reach the doors at the far end, but she forced herself to start walking, passing so close to the bodies of the protesters that she could smell the spice of aftershave and the acrid musk of nerves, so close she could hear the censure in their breathing. She kept her eyes down, watching the fringe of weeds that was already beginning to grow in the cracks in the sidewalk, watching the toes of her boots as her feet propelled her on.

  “I’ll raise your baby,” a man said to her when she came abreast of him.

  His voice was low, insinuating. Glancing in his direction, she saw his shiny face and the way his belly distorted the plaid of his shirt beneat
h his jacket, and she looked away, repelled at the thought of giving anything of hers to him. The doors loomed ahead, double doors with metal handles like twin halves of a moon. She stretched out an arm as though she were an exhausted swimmer floundering to reach a dock. But suddenly a child darted between her and the doors, a girl of ten or twelve.

  “Miss?” the girl asked. “Would you read this?” She kept her face twisted away from Anna so that she seemed to be speaking back over her own shoulder as she thrust a pamphlet blindly in Anna’s direction. Anna reached out to take it from her only because the girl seemed so uncomfortable—more miserable, even, than Anna herself. Then, in an attempt to reassure the girl and to prove to the watching crowd that she was no monster, Anna tried to smile.

  But the muscles in her face trembled so violently it seemed she had forgotten how a smile was made. A sound came from the back of her throat, involuntary as a glob of coughed-up phlegm, and the child shot a startled look at Anna’s face. Their glances met and held. The girl’s eyes were blue and somehow strangely familiar. For a crazy second Anna had the sensation she was looking into a mirror, although Anna’s eyes were brown and she was twice the girl’s age.

  From somewhere in the crowd a man’s voice rang out, “Remember Jesus.” The girl’s eyes filled with fear, and Anna glanced down at the pamphlet in her hands as a way of protecting them both. But the photograph on the cover of the pamphlet was so appalling that even before Anna could react to its lack of contrast, bad focus, and cluttered composition, she was staring aghast at the image itself.

  It was a photograph of a newborn baby, an infant even younger than Dylan had been at Christmastime. Only instead of lying in its mother’s arms, this baby was sprawled lifeless on top of a trash-filled can of garbage. It was as sickening and fascinating as pornography, and for a second, as she stared at it, Anna forgot about the crowd. A moment later she felt the horror of it slap her, and she flung the pamphlet to the ground.

  “That’s your baby,” she heard the male voice boom as she reached the clinic door. “Don’t throw your baby away.”

  She was shaking when she entered the waiting room. Her legs felt porous, too frail to bear her weight. She sank into the scoop seat of the plastic chairs that ringed the room, and for a hysterical second she wondered if she had wet her pants. The thought came to her that she should leave. She could catch the bus back to the university and deal with everything tomorrow, but her fear of the crowd outside kept her rooted where she was.

  There were other people in the waiting room, six or eight women and several men. Anna snuck a quick check of their faces to assure herself that they had not witnessed the encounter outside, that they were not watching her now. Most of the other women sat as Anna had instinctively sat, with an empty chair between her and the person next to her. They all appeared both shaken and resigned, as though they had just heard bad news and were now waiting for a bus. Of the two men in the room, one was little more than a boy, a scrawny-haired teenager who held the hand of the girl sitting next to him with a furtive defiance. The other man was middle-aged and sat stolidly reading the newspaper, ignoring the woman who waited beside him.

  At the front of the room was a counter. A sign below it read, “Please Confirm Your Appointment Before Taking a Seat.” Anna crossed the room to stand before the receptionist.

  “I’m Anna Walters,” she made herself say, although her voice rasped like sand against her throat.

  “Walters?” the receptionist echoed, without looking up.

  Anna cleared her throat. “Yes.”

  The woman reached for a stack of files, and Anna saw that her fingernails were so long that she had to handle them with a splay-fingered dexterity. It made her movements seem squeamish, as though everything she picked up was something she would rather not have to touch.

  Anna said, “My appointment’s at eleven.”

  The receptionist nodded and began to shuffle files. When she found the one she wanted, she opened it, studied it, and asked, “You have the money?”

  Anna had known she had to bring money, but even so the question seemed so crude and the receptionist’s voice so loud that her throat clogged again. She coughed and answered, “Yes.”

  “Cash? Or cashier’s check?”

  “Cash,” Anna croaked, opening her backpack to get the money she’d withdrawn from the bank, almost half of what she had to live on for the rest of the semester. Even though she could have used his help with the money, Anna had not told the sculptor. Getting him involved seemed as silly as seeking out the person who had been sneezing the day before she caught the flu and insisting that he pay for her aspirin. Besides, she’d been reluctant to reveal such an intimate failure to a stranger. But now, standing alone in front of the receptionist with her rent money in her hand, she wished for a fleet moment that she’d told the sculptor, after all.

  “Here’s your receipt,” the receptionist said, handing a slip of paper across the counter to Anna. “You have the consent form?”

  Anna nodded. Pulling a folded piece of paper from the pages of On Photography, she laid it open on the counter. Words snagged her eyes—perforation, hemorrhage, infection, death. A woman had died in Texas only last October.

  “You can sign it now,” the receptionist said, handing Anna a pen.

  But this is different, Anna told herself as she wrote her name. She was paying cash for this, in a clinic. This was legal and safe. It wasn’t even an operation. A surgical procedure, it had said in the literature the nurse had given her, eleven times safer than birth.

  “Okay,” the receptionist said, tucking the form with Anna’s signature into her file. “Sit down, and the nurse will call you as soon as they’re ready.” The woman looked up, and the warmth in her black eyes was so startling that Anna turned away in confusion.

  She returned to her chair, opened her book, and stared at the page until the words doubled and smeared. There was a bathroom off the waiting room, and after a while one of the women got up and went inside. Through the closed door Anna heard the heave and splat of vomiting. There was the sound of water running, the roar of an institutional toilet flushing, and a moment later the woman reentered the room, her face empty of color.

  Another door opened, and a nurse stood in the threshold, calling a list of names. At the sound of her own name Anna felt a jolt of fear. Each of the women in the room stood and glanced uncertainly at the others. They made an awkward cluster around the nurse, who shepherded them through the door.

  “They’re going to do us all at once?” someone asked nervously as they shuffled down a narrow hall.

  “You have the procedure one at a time,” the nurse answered over her shoulder. “But you get prepped and you recuperate together.”

  She led them into a room filled with cots, like the sleeping cabin at a summer camp.

  “Find a cot and get your gown on. The opening goes in back,” the nurse said.

  “Will it hurt?” the girl who had been sitting beside the boy asked timidly.

  “That’s what the medication is for,” the nurse answered crisply. “And you’ll be given gas during the procedure itself.”

  As Anna turned her back to the roomful of strangers to get undressed, several of the other women began talking. Their voices were flat and loud, and they followed everything they said with a laughter that made Anna think of fiberglass insulation, pink and fluffy and sharp.

  She was tucking her socks into her boots when a voice from a nearby cot said, “I wanted to keep it, but my boyfriend’s not ready.” At first Anna thought the woman was talking about a plant or a pet, and when she realized what the woman meant, she was startled to discover that she had never thought of it that way herself, had never thought of keeping anything or not. For her it had been a question of being or not being.

  A mother.

  She was not a mother, so how could she have a baby? It would be an accident if she were to have a baby, a failure, a great mistake. If she were to have a baby, she would lose all s
he was and all she wanted to become, would lose all she hoped to do and to create. And where would that leave the baby, with a mother who was not the person she was meant to be?

  She folded her clothes with icy hands, tucked her underwear beneath her skirt and blouse, and then she sat on the edge of her cot with her eyes closed, willing herself to be still, to wait patiently, to be ready for whatever came next. Names were being called. Anna could hear women leaving their cots, could hear them returning. It occurred to her to meditate, but when she tried to say her mantra inside her head, it was like running through sand.

  “Anna Walters,” the nurse announced. Anna’s eyes burst open. She stood, clearing her throat, clutching her gown behind her like a child. As she followed the nurse out of the room, she saw that a few of the women who had already returned were lying with their faces turned to the walls, while others were sitting up, eating Oreos and drinking purple juice from tiny paper cups. The feeling in the room was subdued, the chatter and sharp laughter all leached away.

  Barefooted, still holding her gown closed with one hand, Anna followed the nurse down the hall into a room dominated by a stainless steel operating table. A squat machine sat in a corner. A tray stood next to the table, covered with a set of tools like curved screwdrivers and another gadget that looked like a plastic crochet hook.

  “Hop up,” the nurse said, her voice matter-of-fact, “and fit your feet in the stirrups.” Anna climbed on the table and lay back. When she placed a heel in each of the steel cups, she could detect the faint residual warmth of the feet of the stranger who had lain there before her. For a moment she felt oddly comforted.

  Then the nurse began to strap down her arms.

  “Is this necess—” Anna said, attempting to sit back up.

  “It just reminds you not to move,” the nurse answered, pressing her back onto the table.