Spa Treatments

Molly Zapp

 

At 8:00 a.m., Lex Weeg would have a choice: Be among the first at the legendary Stowe Saint James Spring Rummage Sale, or be the first on the phone to schedule an abortion when Planned Parenthood opened.

New Englanders seemed just as thrifty as others stereotyped them to be, at least in Vermont. Show up to a sale 15 minutes after the flyer advertised, and the Sony receiver and turntable, a steal at $10, would be claimed by Mavis Dellacroix’s granddaughter. Forget about decently priced bookshelves after 8:10, unless vinyl veneers were passable. Accept that someone’s scratched Teflon skillets and grimy kids’ toys and assorted cross-stitched kitsch would be all that remained past the half-hour mark. Last year, as Lex biked to work, she had luckily stumbled on the sale just as it opened. Like any downwardly mobile North Dakotan trying to assimilate to New England thrift, she stopped and stocked up on brightly colored wool sweaters. Still, it pained her to remember the $15 pair of leather winter boots—resoleable and all—that she’d been too cheap to buy, a decision she lived to regret when her co-worker wore them the entire five months of winter. This year, since she saw the sale flyer and wrote down the date and time in her planner, she’d vowed to make better long-term decisions.

“Anything you want me to keep an eye out for?” she’d asked her spouse, Erik, the evening before.

“Maybe some floor lamps.”

“I always look for decent floor lamps. They’re hard to find.”

Later that night when she was stoned, she noticed that her breasts were still sore. The week before she kept thinking she was about to bleed because of the bloating, soreness, and cramps, but nothing came. Since her cycle was somewhat irregular anyway, it didn’t strike her as too unusual. Under the new lens of weed, though, she thought it might be best to make sure.

When the pregnancy test, three years expired, showed up with the plus sign and the control with a straight line, she heard a distant echo of how unlikely a false positive was.

Erik was awake and in bed. She wasn’t trying to be dramatic, but it took a minute for the words to come out.

“I just took a pregnancy test on an expired stick and it was positive. If I’m really pregnant, and I probably am, I want an abortion.”

They laughed a little in stoned disbelief, the slightest feeling of happiness that they were even capable of reproducing. With her irregular periods and polycystic ovary syndrome, doctors had long warned her that she might not be able to conceive at all.

Erik didn’t need much time to think or respond with his typical passivity. “If that’s what you want,” he said and seemed to mean it.

She slept terribly that night. In the morning, he dropped her off in front of the pharmacy so she could get another test.

“What is wrong with me?” she quietly groaned as another plus sign appeared in the bathroom of Snowflake Cafe. “How could I be so stupid?”

At 7:56 a.m., she walked toward Saint James and tried calling Planned Parenthood again, but it was still too early. The sign at the sale said No Early Birds, but people were poking around the pots and pans with impunity, so she joined.

It was already the biggest event of the weekend in the resort town, one that drew penny-pinching confirmed millionaires and working-class Lamoille County stock alike. Her boss walked by and touched her on the shoulder, wordlessly, as she beelined toward the furniture. Lex found a floor lamp with a green glass dome and immediately grabbed its stem possessively when she saw Max Gravel, son of the town assessor, eyeing it. The glass looked good and the cord was intact, so she schlepped it over to the table of kitsch to scout for objects she could incorporate into her artwork. On the table was a four-foot tall wooden nutcracker. A notable variation on the nutcracker-as-soldier theme, this one was dressed as a nineteenth-century fishmonger. Cradled in one of his arms was a large cod. From the other arm hung five wooden trout covered in teeth marks. His mouth was slack and chipped, like some idiot or child had actually tried to crack nuts in it after their dog chewed the fish.

Goldmine, she thought. Across the parking lot, she saw someone snag a wheelbarrow that would have been perfect for hauling the nutcracker and lamp back home, where, come spring, she could have used it for gardening. She grabbed a multioutlet surge protector for 50 cents on her way to check out and left feeling weighted down and overwhelmed, but not without success.

“I need to schedule a pill abortion,” Lex said to the woman on the phone. She sat at a wooden picnic table with a decent mountain view, the nutcracker standing next to her on the bench.

“I can certainly help you with that today. I need to get some information from you, which should take about 15 minutes. Do you have time now?”

The woman on the phone had all the answers, like she had practiced the exact configuration of clarity, calm, and conciseness through hundreds of phone calls with women who had unlucky sex and its unappealing consequences.

Lex would go in on Wednesday and take a pill that shut off the pregnancy hormone. She would take another at home the next day and bleed and cramp and let it be over in her bathroom, alone. She could switch her day off at work, so maybe this could work out.

▱

A year or so of living in Stowe had given her a handful of friends, but mostly the type with whom she’d never had a conversation longer than 40 consecutive minutes. She found the Yankees to be kind and helpful people but also private and guarded in their northeastern way, on top of—like everyone else—being wrapped up in their own lives, problems, loves, and kids. Erik had told her that deep friendships took time, that it’s unreasonable to expect to replicate friendships from her twenties in a new environment. She and Erik had an open marriage in theory, but most of the local women seemed straight, and the men were bearded and listened to jam bands, so she had no real dating prospects outside of, maybe, Lindsay Ibitola.

Fortunately, Lex liked to yearn for people. She was loyal and consistent to the point of being dependent on her old friends, who were scattered across the country and globe—New York and Chicago, Bangkok and Portlands on both coasts. A few friends from high school had moved back for the Bakken boom. Lex wrote them all letters, and one or two replied. If there was a pursuer and a pursued, a star and a fan, she was always the fan, albeit a much-appreciated one after the occasional catch-up phone calls that lasted an hour or two. She wondered how people could appear so attached to their phones yet so inconsistent at answering them. Today though, she had a phone date with Alicen—a solid hour set aside before going to work at the spa, written in the planner before she even knew she was knocked up. It would be good to talk.

Fifteen minutes before their phone date, Alicen sent her a text: I told my friend I’d go to yoga at 4. Can we talk on Thursday?

Lex had to hold herself back from throwing the phone to the ground or from firing back a furious reply that she would later regret. Of course Alicen had no clue what was happening in her life, but she had no clue because she was a shitty, lazy friend who hadn’t called her in almost three months. She was too busy doing the corporate hustle, taking Molly on the weekends and carrying on an electronic romance with some woman she’d met in Costa Rica. Like a child, Lex wanted to scream, “I made you the best womyn in my wedding, and you don’t even keep our phone dates!” But no, Lex was the fool, the fan, for thinking that people continued to care with the same intensity that she cared for them. After a few minutes she replied: In fact I am busy on Thursday. I had set aside this time today for you, but whatever.

She shut off her phone and walked to the river to skip rocks, or at least throw something, before work.

▱

In the slightly hushed tone that signaled that Mountaintop Spa was a place to receive pampering, Lex gave her Tuesday maple-sugar-body-scrub-special spiel to a forty-something woman wearing a teal cashmere cardigan. The woman was a vacationer, not a local; therefore, she had more money and time and was more likely to take the upselling bait.

“I haven’t had a good scrubbing in a while, but I’m doing this Candida cleanse and I’m not supposed to have sugar. Do you think it counts if it’s just on your skin?” the woman asked with sell-it-to-me eyes.

“Our maple sugar body scrub is nontoxic and made with food-grade ingredients. Your body won’t soak up any glucose through the skin. Plus, it’s made from local organic maple. It’s actually from the sugar house where my spouse works.”

“Perfect! I just love Vermont,” the well-moisturized woman said as she leaned closer. “It’s so green and pure. I might have finally convinced my husband that we should get a place up here. It’s a buyer’s market, you know.”

It certainly isn’t a renter’s market, Lex thought, but smiled at the woman anyway and marked her down for the scrubbing. At another point in her life, Lex would have found such people insufferable—their indulgence and entitlement, their absurd willingness to spend $407 on strangers beating them with moisturizers and essential oils while Enya played in the background, the way they breathlessly said “reiki” and “toxins.” But undergraduate was a while ago, and some mix of meditation, marijuana, New England slowness, and selling out had made her come to the conclusion that it’s good for people to relax in some form or another; rich people just needed to pay people to help them do it, and if that was a problem, it wasn’t hers to worry about. She saw many of the spa’s patrons transform, at least temporarily, from stressed, screen-addicted tense women, to ones who gratefully submitted to the serenity of the present after a couple hours of pampering, long hot soaks, and quietude. At no previous job had the people she served thanked her as warmly and genuinely, and all she did was smile, take their money, and show them the tea selection.

After the massage therapist came and scooted the woman to the treatment room, Lex sat back and tried to read “Go Tell It On the Mountain” while she waited for her shift to end and women’s soak night to begin. Unlike some of the less serene spas in town, Mountaintop Spa had a “no-screens” policy, but the owner allowed workers to knit or read books on the job when it was quiet because she thought having a staff that appeared crafty and literary further developed the Vermont experience for their customers. But the words blurred together, and she couldn’t focus on the teenage preacher’s struggles because she kept thinking, I am pregnant, and I don’t want to be. I’m pregnant, and I’m going to be one of those women who has an abortion. She could feel it in her bloated belly and sore breasts. All food had started tasting metallic, and she hated it.

Perhaps the only surprising thing the woman from Planned Parenthood had told her was that Medicaid would completely cover the cost of her abortion, which would otherwise be over $500. She wondered which Vermont politicians and lobbying groups had secured state funding for abortion because she knew there was no federal money for it. She should have been kicked off of Medicaid months before, since she got the job at the spa and started to make an almost-living wage, but Green Mountain Care was backlogged with Change of Circumstances requests, so now her fellow taxpayers would pay for her to end this pregnancy, which was a relief.

She perked up as Lindsay Ibitola walked through the door wearing ripped jeans that showed off her toned thighs and her stick-and-poke tattoo of a garlic bulb. Lindsay was a fiber artist; they had met nine months ago when they both had pieces up at Peterson-Welles Gallery. That was Lex’s last show, where she sold nothing. Since then, no galleries had given her more than a stiff, polite rejection smile when she had shown them her work. Lex set down her book with the cover visible so that she might look intelligent and not so painfully white.

“I need this soak like babies need their mothers’ breasts. How many of us are there today?” Lindsay asked, her eyes intent on Lex.

Over the past two months, Lindsay had come most Tuesday evenings for the semi-official women’s spa night, which was the owner’s concession to both her lesbian sister and her workers who wanted their friends to come in for cheap. It wasn’t advertised, but women who knew about it could come for a (trans-inclusive) women’s soak for two hours on Tuesdays, the slowest evenings, for the token price of $12, just under Lex’s hourly wage. In practice, this meant that two to five of the six confirmed lesbian or bisexual women of Stowe, plus a few employees and artsy ladies, got naked and communally soaked and sighed, all who had the remarkable talent for averting their eyes or closing them altogether. Most of the women were at least in their 50s; if anyone besides Lex and Lindsay had ever flirted at women’s night, Lex hadn’t seen it.

She was pretty sure men’s soaks had a different sort of vibe.

“My opening at Hollande Gallery is Thursday, if you feel like coming. Starts at seven,” Lindsay said, and then briefly submerged herself under the hot water, the tips of her locked hair floating around her head. One of the older women on the opposite side of the pool let out a less-than-hushed groan as she stepped into the bubbling water, and then sighed.

“It’s on Thursday? Damn, I’m not sure if I can go.”

“No worries, if you’re busy or whatever,” Lindsay said, acting cool enough that she must have been a little hurt.

Resigned that this pregnancy was also going to tank her ever having a chance to sleep with Lindsay, Lex decided to talk to her like an actual friend. “I’m getting an abortion, and I’m not sure if I’ll feel up to seeing people Thursday evening. If I do though—”

“Damn, no, do whatever you need, that night and for however long you need. I’m sorry that you have to go through that. It’s kind of no big deal, but it’s still going to be hard.”

“Is it? I mean, I don’t know what to expect, besides the flames of hell.”

Lindsay turned so she was facing Lex. “I had one a few years ago, and I’m glad I did, but it sure wasn’t fun. You having the pill or surgery?”

“Pill.”

“Yeah, I was early too. I bled for a good five days, but it was only painful for a day two. You have someone going with you?”

“Well, no. I just … I just want to do this alone. My partner could probably get off work for the next day if it gets too intense and I need him, but the sap’s running hard in Belvediere, and his boss wants him there for at least 10 hours a day. And I’m just going to the clinic to take the first pill. He’ll be home when I get back.” Lex noticed she was digging her feet in the pumice pebbles on the bottom of the pool a little too hard, and stopped.

“You need to have someone go with you. Be independent another time. Men should see what we have to go through. Bring a friend at least—hell, I’d go with you, but I’ll be hanging up my show all day Wednesday and Thursday.”

“That’s really nice of you, but I’ll be okay.”

Lindsay gave Lex a sad frown and then looked away in disapproval.

“I’ll come check out your show,” Lex said. “And maybe we could go thrifting together next week. I’m looking for a bunch of old plastic dolls to make some creepy fetal art piece.”

“That’ll go over really well with the Stowe gentry and their delicate sensibilities. Did you see that they covered up ‘agina’ on the sign for the ‘Vagina Monologues’?”

“If they only knew they were footing the bill for my Medicaid abortion!”

“Abortion’s a steal compared to labor, delivery, and eighteen years of raising a child.”

“I’m saving the taxpayers thousands of dollars. Maybe the Chamber of Commerce will send me a thank-you card.”

“No way. They want cute white women to have babies. It’s me they don’t want to reproduce.”

“But they like having you in their galleries,” Lex said. She’d seen Hollande Gallery’s Facebook page for Lindsay’s opening: NIGERIAN-AMERICAN FIBER ARTIST’S SHOW UNEVEN PARRELLELS THIS THURSDAY! Lindsay’s picture was huge, and her name was small. Lindsay had been born in Philadelphia and had been to Nigeria twice. “It makes them feel more cultured.”

“They display my art because it’s good,” Lindsay said sharply.

“Of course it’s good! I like your work! I want to see it up everywhere! It just seems like every time they put up work from an artist of color, the people at Hollande fall over themselves congratulating each other for being so cutting-edge, and I think it’s a little disingenuous and tokenizing.”

“Thanks, this really means a lot to me two days before my opening,” Lindsay said as she got out of the water.

“Lindsay, fuck, I’m so sorry. That piece you did with the felted baby goat thing and the olive wood last year was amazing. You’re a really talented artist, and I’m sorry if I said something stupid.”

“It was a ewe, not a goat,” she said and shut the door to the changing room.

Lex looked up to see the two older women staring at her. They too left, quickly, which made it possible for her to dunk her head underwater and scream before she pressed her face on top of the marble tiles and sobbed.

▱

On Wednesday morning, she downshifted roughly but didn’t kill the aging Subaru. A year of being Polly Prissy Pants Passenger and half-assed learning how to properly drive the one manual car she and Erik shared had ended once she realized she’d need to drive herself to Burlington if she wanted to get this abortion. The night before, she’d taken herself on a determined and focused drive through the mountains without killing or wrecking it and felt she was ready enough for I-89.

“Third gear is where all your power is,” Erik had said to her. “You can do a lot in third gear.” As she slowed down on the curves and then accelerated on the on-ramp without needing to shift, Lex could tell that Erik was right. He never said as much as she wanted him to, but Erik accepted her as she was and let her live her own life. For that she was grateful. She thought that he could be a good dad someday, and she felt relief that he didn’t pressure her to be anything she wasn’t ready to be.

As the hamlets and mountains whirled by, she considered her friends who did have a kid when they weren’t planning on it: Anna, who eventually married her partner, a professor fourteen years older than she who expected her to stay at their Georgia bungalow and raise their son while he strove for tenure. Rita, who moved to Williston to make $150 a week as a lactation consultant while her partner brewed beer for $11 an hour. Her cousin Gretchen who shoplifted organic vodka from Whole Foods to supplement what food stamps didn’t cover, who refused to involve the state in collecting any child support from her ex. Vera, who had two abortions before giving birth to a kid she refused to vaccinate or put in public school.

All of them seemed to deeply love their pull-out-method kids, but didn’t seem to like their lives very much. If they didn’t want careers or stability and personal fulfillment through something that brings in money, they weren’t at risk for having them.

Lex killed the car as she pulled into the parking garage and then restarted it, her hands shaking, Lindsay’s wounded face on her mind. She made eye contact with one of the protesters outside the clinic and said nothing.

The lights in the waiting room were much harsher than the low, warm ones at the spa, and there were no sliced cucumbers in the complimentary filtered water. She stared at the pink and teal couches, a sort of sub-IKEA aesthetic, and wondered how many Americans would find her choices reprehensible. Sure, she was at least ending the pregnancy early, like most women who have abortions, but she was married. Hell, she was mostly happily married. And she was 30, the age when women are supposed to worry if they don’’t have kids. And she wanted a kid, maybe, eventually. But right now she was depressed and just wanted to get drunk on wine and dance in her living room, sleep with other people, pay off her student loans, work on her art, not tank her career, maintain and grow her friendships and have her breasts stop hurting—and all of her observations indicated that those wants and needs were mutually exclusive with pregnancy. Maybe this was a bodily fluke, her only chance to get pregnant, but oh well if it was. What to do if later on she wanted a kid and couldn’t get pregnant wasn’t a bridge she had to cross right now. She kept wondering if this would feel like a hard choice or if she would waiver, but she hadn’t.

Absolutely, her Baptist parents would disown her if they knew and would condemn her at her funeral if everything went terribly wrong. They were made-your-bed-now-sleep-in-it people with four kids and an unhappy but stable marriage, and they expected from their children some semblance of the same. There was no point in turning to them for support or to prove any point. She hoped they didn’t call for a while, and she thought about how good one, two, three glasses of cheap Merlot would feel once this was all over.

On the opposite couch was a person with green hair of whom Lex wondered the preferred gender pronoun. She—well, it was abortion day, so “she” in at least some regards—was clad in a cheap baggy sweatshirt and blue monkey pajama pants and spread out on the couch with two pillows, a stuffed lamb, a grungy green fleece blanket with knotted ends, and a squishy cooler suited for fat kids at junior high track meets. On her backside, clipped to the bottom of her sweatshirt, was a synthetic gray tail, hanging down like she was a grubby mini-city coyote. The woman curled into an extended ball on the couch like she’d been in this position before and knew it was best to wait it out in comfort. She gave Lex a quick nod of acknowledgement before she shut her eyes.

I love the weird fox girl, thought Lex, as she held back the impulse to pet her greasy green hair.

Lex read every word of the eight or so papers the clinic workers gave her as if her life depended on her understanding every detail and its possible complications. She learned that she should plan for the entire process to take four hours, that it’s okay to change her mind, and that the woman at the counter could give her the Wi-Fi password and could answer any additional questions she might have. Women sucked into their smartphones were there in twos, with a friend or a partner, except for Lex and the fox girl. She looked at her flip phone; still no reply from Lindsay after sending her a barrage of calls, voicemails, and texts. Her guilt, thick in her stomach, coated her with the shame of being a jealous artist, a failed friend, and a racist. There were no foot soaks or spa slippers for her to relax into nor any calming lavender essential oil being diffused, but at least the music was pretty good.

She took out her notebook and made a list of things she wanted to understand before ever having a child:
      1. Conversational French (pref. Quebecois)
      2. The major constellations
      3. The definition of “sardonic,” and the right context in which to use it
      4. NAFTA

After another 40, 80 minutes, the receptionist called her name, and then she was wearing a thin cotton gown that tied in the front, sitting on the edge of an examination table, listening to a nurse explain what was going to happen. Lex heard the second Joni Mitchell song at the clinic, her later, jazzy stuff, the same sort of music they played in the lobby of the spa.

“Are we listening to ‘Figs and Chardonnay’?” she asked.

“I’m sorry?” the nurse said as she rotated the ultrasound probe in Lex’s vagina.

“The music … the streaming station. It’s no album experience, but it’s pretty solid. Is this station called ‘Figs and Chardonnay’?”

“It might be,” she said slowly as she peered intently at the ultrasound screen and frowned.

“Can I look at the screen?”

“In just a minute. I’m having some trouble …” More frowning. “When was your last period?”

“I don’t know the exact date. I think I should have started bleeding about ten days ago.”

“I’m going to get the nurse practitioner,” the other type of nurse said, and she swiftly left the room. Lex had been at the clinic for three hours already, which seemed incredibly long for just getting a couple of pills.

Nurse Celine introduced herself quickly. The two nurses frowned together; one pointed to something on the screen, and the other nodded.

“Can you tell me what’s happening?” Lex said. Maybe they would tell her she wasn’t pregnant after all, that this had all been a mistake.

The nurse practitioner looked her in the eyes. “We are not finding the pregnancy in your uterus where it should be. It’s possible that it’s implanted on your cervix or that you’re already in the process of a miscarriage. It’s also possible, though highly unlikely, that the pregnancy’s implanted on your fallopian tube, which is more complicated than we can handle in the clinic.”

“Jesus. Did you just tell me that I might have an ectopic pregnancy?”

“Only 1 percent of pregnancies are ectopic, so it’s highly unlikely, but yes, it’s possible. Have you ever had pelvic inflammatory disease or abnormal Pap smears?”

“No.”

“Okay. That’s good. Here’s the deal. The pill abortion is no longer on the table. If the pregnancy’s not implanted in your uterus, the pill won’t work. So, you can either go to the hospital, where they have an ultrasound machine that costs eight times as much as ours and can give you a better picture of what’s going on. If you have an ectopic pregnancy, you’ll need to be admitted for surgery immediately because it’s fatal if left untreated. Or you could have a surgical abortion here, and the doctor can see if she gets anything, and then you can go from there.”

“Holy shit. I … I don’t know what to say.”

“This is a lot to take in. Do you have someone who can meet you here?”

“My partner’s at work, 40 miles away. He doesn’t even have cell phone reception up on the mountain. Wait. Am I just going to miscarry anyway?”

“That’s a good question,” Celine said, like Lex was a student adept at considering the variety of outcomes that could happen to Patient Doe. “It’s impossible to tell. I wish I could.”

Lex imagined herself driving that stupid stick shift up the hill to the hospital, alone, half-panicked, stalling at the intersection because she just couldn’t get it into gear.

“I feel like I’m hedging my bets on my body. Have the surgery today, alone, and hope that things turn out fine. Or take myself to the hospital, know for sure, and then somehow take another day off of work to have the surgery anyway.”

“This is a difficult decision,” Celine said. “I can give you some time to think about it.”

Celine looked tough and beautiful, like a clear-skinned volleyball captain who could rally the team and score the winning point, a fearless leader high school boys must have fantasized about but were too intimidated by to date. Lex regretted not bringing Erik along. She wanted to tell both him and Lindsay that she had made mistakes, that she had overestimated her strength and intellect and now she had to pay for it.

“If I have the surgery now and it’s normal, could it be over today?”

“We’d need to see you back for a little bit of blood work in five days, but you could do that at the clinic closer to where you live. Otherwise, if things are normal, yes, it could be over today.”

The adrenalin kicked in. “Well, I know I’m not ready to die from an ectopic pregnancy. Let’s just do the surgery now.”

“All right, since you’re driving yourself, I can’t legally give you any sedatives, but I can get you some Advil. I’ll let the doctor know.”

An hour passed, and then a nurse pricked Lex’s finger to test for negative or positive blood.

“Some women tell me this finger prick is the worst part of the entire day,” the bubbly nurse with red hair said as she squeezed a few drops of Lex’s blood onto a paper strip.

“I’m pretty sure hearing the words ‘ectopic pregnancy’ was worse.”

“Fair enough,” the nurse responded with a smile.

A few pills, a consent form electronically signed. Everyone was very nice and apologized for the wait. She waited longer and read the same four pages of her book over and over, retaining nothing.

Another nurse told her the doctor was ready and handed her a thick pad.

“It’s easier if you put it in your underwear before the surgery,” he said. Because that didn’t make any sense, she ignored his instructions. She looked at the off-white, nondescript room with no music in which she would have an abortion.

The doctor and a worker named Cassie shook her hand and introduced themselves. She had wild curly hair, smelled faintly of patchouli, and had funky green tortoiseshell glasses that made Lex think that maybe under different circumstances, they could be best friends. Lex’s feet put themselves in the stirrups. Cassie softly took Lex’s hand, which felt weird until Lex realized that Cassie was in the room holding her hand because she was a fuck-up who was getting an abortion without a friend or partner there, and fuck-ups without friends or partners get an extra worker included in the abortion package.

“What do you do, Alexis?” Cassie asked as the doctor rolled the abortion machine to the edge of the table.

“I work at this bougie spa in Stowe and attempt to make art.”

“Cool, what type of art do you make?”

“Heavy-handed mixed-media pieces that are basically unsellable. Lots of found objects and such.”

“I remember this exhibit I really liked last spring in Stowe. There was this old roller skate that one of the artists had painted and fashioned into this rollercoaster that got stuck on purpose and couldn’t climb back up the track. I think it was trying to say something about the status of women, but maybe that’s just my interpretation.”

“You saw that? I made that. ‘Roller Out of Steam.’”

“You did? That’s awesome! It was a totally enchanting piece, really smartly done.”

“Thank you. Wow, that’s really kind of you.” This was happening, like summer camp turned dream turned nightmare in a doctor’s clinic on a reality TV show with a main character who looked like her.

The clicking noise began, and the screams of someone started to bounce across the room. The excruciating pain of failure ripped her as she felt her body being sliced and sucked away into a steel canister. Leviticus burned through her heart and numbed her hands until her fingers locked up like lobster’s claws, but the woman with the tortoiseshell glasses did not let go. The pain and whirring noise did not end, and someone was sobbing and wailing; somewhere there was a focused doctor, and another woman who had heard many screams, next to a crazed fuck-up on a table who had failed, who had failed alone.

▱

In the recovery room, Cassie helped her dial Erik because her hands were too numb to push the keys. She hoped he was home from work.

“I’m okay, but I need you to come pick me up,” she said when he answered.

“What happened? You sound awful,” Erik said, terrified.

“I had to have the surgery. I’m okay. I need you. I love you.”

“I love you too. I’ll borrow Matt’s car and get there as soon as I can.”

The doctor came over with a sealed plastic cup, akin to the type people piss in for urine samples. There was a squiggly off-white material suspended in the liquid.

“I think we got it,” the doctor said enthusiastically and held it toward Lex’s face. “See the part that’s a bit darker right there?” she asked as she pointed to the small blob at the bottom. It looked like a loogie with a speck of blood.

“Um, not really?”

“Well, that appears to be the pregnancy. The rest of the stuff is the lining of your uterus. We’ll do some blood tests to make sure, but it looks like you were so early that it wouldn’t have shown up on the sonogram.”

“What will you do with the, uh, zygote?”

“We’ll incinerate it with medical waste. Or you can take it home.”

“Really? Wow. Well, I guess I sort of made it myself.”

“With a little help?” the doctor said with a smile.

“Yeah, I guess so. Can I think about what I want to do with it?”

“No problem,” she said and walked away to another task, another patient in her long day.

Lex held with both hands the green tea that Cassie brought her, and she sipped slowly. It was the aftermath of the worst pain she’d ever felt, fading slightly with the heating pad. She could not imagine that a single woman had ever found an abortion to be less bad than a finger prick, and she thought about how someone should really talk to that clueless, bubbly nurse who had definitely never had an abortion herself.

“Do all women scream like that?” Lex, who sat in a mauve recliner, asked Cassie.

“Some do,” she said. “Especially without the sedatives.” An incredible amount of empathy oozed from the eyes of this intimate stranger.

Lex sipped and looked out the window into the sunlit alley while Cassie just sat there. The tea was the cheap, bagged type, not the loose-leaf jasmine kind she scooped into heart-shaped steel infusers at the spa. Still, it felt good on her throat. It was nice, sort of, to be able to be slow with someone else, to be the one cared for this time, even if this appointment wouldn’t end in a maple sugar body scrub. “How’s working here?” she asked.

“It’s great. I work with an amazing group of people,” Cassie said. “I used to work at a clinic in Oregon, and it was firebombed twice. I mean, you really have to be passionate to work here.”

“Damn, that’s crazy. I’m really grateful for you, for everyone here.”

Cassie smiled and left her to her own thoughts. The cramps came in waves, hard, but not unbearable. Erik would arrive soon enough. If this was the most painful thing she had experienced, maybe that meant that her life was pretty good.

“I think I want to take it with me,” she said when Cassie returned.

“Crap, I think someone just threw it out.”

“Oh. Well, okay.”

“I’ll go Dumpster-dive it for you,” Cassie said as she got up.

“Oh, no, it’s totally fine.”

“No, it’s no big deal. I’ll see if I can dig it out.”

“I mean, only do what you’re comfortable with?” Lex replied as Cassie darted off. Across the room was the fox girl with her own heating pad and tea. Lex raised a hand slowly, and the fox girl did the same. It was over, almost.

“Found it. It was just on top of everything,” Cassie said slightly out of breath as she handed Lex her abortion, suspended in some liquid, encased in an orange biohazard bag. “No big deal.”

Lex took it out and held it up to the window. The early spring evening light seeped through the glass, through the plastic, through the tissue that was once her body. It looked like something she might hack up during a cold, something she would flush or forget or throw away. Nothing that looked like a baby. She tucked it in her backpack along with condoms, a bumper sticker, and an IUD information sheet. She stared at the wall of thank-you cards by the exit and wondered if she’d have the courage to send one. Maybe she could just sign her first name. Lex considered asking Cassie if she wanted to hang out sometime, but she just gave her a hug and walked into downtown Burlington, where people were buying and consuming like everything was normal. She looked at her bare arms, finally exposed to the sun after a woolen winter, and she realized that of all the irresponsible things she’d done, at least she’d never gotten any arm tattoos. That must count for something in terms of good adult decisions. Further, she never drank and drove. She had learned to drive a stick, after all; maybe learning French was also possible. How good the ground felt, the grass and bricks beneath her feet, their promise to remain steady and keep her from sinking or floating away.

In front of the pizza place, the one with the local maple bacon cheddar flatbread, Erik ran to her.

“I was so worried about you,” he said as he embraced her.

“I was totally unprepared for the pain. And I pushed you away. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too. I should have come with you. I love you so much.” He kissed her on her cheeks, forehead, eyebrows.

“Can we get some pizza? And a drink?” she asked as she pulled away.

“Of course.” He handed her a bag that smelled like onions, with a note taped to it. “Someone dropped this off on the front step. I was going to get you flowers but decided I should just get here as fast as I could.”

Lex ripped open the envelope with her name on it.

      Dear crazy cracker,

      Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner—I was pissed off, then busy putting up my show.
      Hope everything went as well as possible today at the doctor. I’ve decided to forgive you.
      Heard you snagged a gigantic nutcracker—you lucky duck. I bet you could make it into
      something cool. Wanna go thrifting this weekend? Give me a ring.
      Hugs,
      Lindsay
      P.S. Enjoy the first harvest of the year! Found these while hiking around the Notch.

Lex wiped the hot liquid from the side of her face and received the grace she felt she didn’t deserve. In the bag were two pounds of ramps, those wild leeks green and pungent, proof that April had followed March, May would follow April, the ground would thaw, the sap would run, the world would turn and grow, and she had no say in any of it. She wiped the dirt from the leafy green tops and bit in. The raw taste was bitter and hot, sharply intense, but not more than she could handle.

 

Molly Zapp is a writer, journalist, and critic. Her writing has appeared in Cult Montreal, Art New England, Montreal Review of Books, and Seven Days, among others. Originally from the rural Midwest, she lives in Montreal and tweets from @MollyZappWrites.