Making Plans

If you saw me today, strolling across the campus here at LeMoyne, you’d say, “Amy, your eyes. They haven’t changed. Still that sea-glass green. Still amazing.” You wouldn’t comment on my other parts, but you’d notice that I’ve managed to stay in pretty good shape for—how many years? Twenty-five? Twenty-five years, oh my God. Think of it. Our baby would be all grown up. I think about that sometimes. Do you?

I don’t know what else you’d say. Everything I remember of you is tangled in a labyrinth of hopes, and dreams, and our teenage sense of predestination. Are you a lawyer? A writer? A professor in an ivory tower? You always loved the ambiance of academia, were always intent on proving how smart you were. But I can’t picture you grounded, practical, paying a mortgage, filing taxes, surviving the mind-numbing sameness of adult life. Your dreams had an all-or-nothing quality. How have you managed to compromise?

You paid me so many surprise visits during my undergrad years in Boston, I got used to turning corners and suddenly finding you there. For years I expected you to turn up at any time, convinced that you’d always be back. But in my senior year, the visits (“guilt trips” I called them to myself) suddenly stopped. Had you finally found a place that you didn’t need to escape from? A reality that you could live with interminably? Maybe you’ve become ensconced in a proper New England neighborhood, in an old Victorian house with black shutters and a porch. Did you have children? And do they look like the perfect images people show off on their Christmas cards? This one at Harvard, another sporting a 4.5 at the local high school? Or has our questionable karma come back to haunt you, as it has me, with children like Serena, who are as intractable as they are odd, out of step and challenging all paths?

Serena, who came to me during graduate school in Chicago, will graduate from high school in this little town outside of Syracuse in the spring. When she was born, her name occurred to me in a flash as I bore down so hard that I was sure my face would burst. My housemate Polly peered at me over the sheets repeating over and over, “You’re almost there, you’re almost there.” Serenity was what I wanted most at that moment—a place away from the struggle for both her and myself. And it’s what I still want, especially now that she fights me at every turn.

 Those months after she was born were such grey and heady days, sharing child care duties with Polly and Mason, who themselves managed to produce two babies in two years while at law school at the University of Chicago. We lived in a three-bedroom apartment in a house a couple blocks from the university, all ancient wood floors and high windows. You would have approved of our bohemian lifestyle, the debating of Bush Sr.’s war until 3 a.m. while diapers dried on the shower rod and radiators, and Polly and I pureed baby food in the blender. Serena, the first of the babies, was passed from lap to lap so often around the formica table in the kitchen, it’s no wonder she grew to regard me as the least inspiring of her influences—the one who had to say “no” the most and was the most pensive. Her life since seems to have been one long campaign to push me off and run as fast as she can in any direction, so long as it’s away from me.

Where was her father? Suffice it to say that he wasn’t available, although he must have suspected, as he saw me waddle past his office in those last weeks, whose baby was slowing my gait. But he never asked, and I kept as far away as I could in spite of having my sociology classes just down the hall. She’s got his brains, though, I can tell you that. I just couldn’t say good-bye to another baby after ours, but, once again, I couldn’t see the benefit of ruining his life, too. As for Serena, I told her that it happened at a party and that I wasn’t even sure who the father was, a lie I use shamelessly to warn her about mixing drugs and alcohol and being too trusting of acquaintances. She retorts that she couldn’t possibly be that stupid. I hold my tongue and let her believe that I was naïve in all the usual ways, not more complicated ways that would be harder to explain.

I remember the last time you showed up on the campus at Northeastern. I was walking back from breakfast in a cold April wind, and you were just there, walking backward on the path in front of me in an absurdly thick parka and furry earmuffs, so that I had to laugh. It was the day of the Boston Marathon, and you talked me into skipping classes and riding the subway to Kenmore Square to cheer the runners by. While we waited, we caught up between sips of coffee at the Mug N‘ Muffin, mine black and yours doused with more cream and sugar than most desserts. You were supposed to graduate from UMass that spring, but you were vague about your plans, and I didn’t press you, willing to trade the truth for your company. Around noon, the bulk of the runners coursed by, so close we could see the taut cords of muscles straining in their necks and the slick sweat glistening on their bodies. “I’m going to do that someday,” you said, and I didn’t doubt it. When we got back to my stop on Mass. Ave., you hugged me so hard, I thought I’d miss the stop. But the number you gave me didn’t work, and then you disappeared for good.

We were so naïve back in high school, thinking that everything would work itself out if we just hoped hard enough. But it wasn’t our fault that everything went bad. The timing was wrong. I had barely begun to suspect that I was pregnant when Dad walked into the house that night and announced that the Navy was sending him from the Norfolk shipyard to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. We had from November to January to be ready to move. He stared us down around the dinner table with that tempered-carbon gaze of his, daring us to complain. Of course, Danny didn’t care; he loved that nomadic lifestyle, being a latchkey kid and never having anyone looking over his shoulder. But, I tell you, even if it hadn’t been for us, the thought of packing everything up and moving again made me feel so old. You and I hadn’t begun to sort out the “what ifs” of my condition, and then we had the move thrown at us. Who could think straight under that pressure? I don’t know whether I ever told you what Dad said to me later that night while I was packing lunches and he was paying bills at the kitchen table, sorting the receipts into neat piles and licking and applying stamps with surgical precision. He came up behind me, put his hands on my shoulders, and rested his chin on the top of my head. It was so strange to feel his touch—I bet I can count on one hand the times he’d shown me any affection since Mom died. “I know it’ll be hard on you. You’re a real trooper,” he said.

That was the beginning of my big freeze and the end of us. I think I knew it already as I stood staring into the enamel sink, my eyes fixed on a few scraps of soggy lettuce caught in the strainer. I knew that I would have to make decisions, do things that might hurt Dad and us. I had to find the compromise with the lowest common denominator of pain, to box up and put away all of my own feelings, to make this come out right, even if that right wasn’t necessarily the way that we would want it. I didn’t know the risk I was taking, that boxing everything away could become a chronic condition. I was just trying to find a way to survive. That’s why I called Aunt Diane that night.

I still wonder what might have happened if she had gone along with my plan. I’ve never lost the image of us married, living with her in her Baltimore rowhouse, wheeling a stroller past the concrete stoops. But then reality breaks in, and I see us ten years later, divorced, handing our child back and forth, hating the ties we still had and maybe hating each other, too.  I just couldn’t bring myself to trap you in my life that way. And that’s how Diane, deep set in her feminist ways, saw it, too. We mustn’t ruin our futures, she said. We couldn’t let one mistake determine our lives. We had to go to college. We had to stick to our original life plans. All she would offer was confidentiality, a small sum of cash, and her signature on the papers. And finally, you agreed. Were we wrong?

I look at Serena and I can’t help comparing her to us at seventeen. How is it that she has been exposed to so much more and knows so much less than we did? She takes nothing seriously, barely does her homework, still needs to be reminded to brush her teeth. If I wasn’t there every morning, shoving it in her hand as she rushes out the door, she’d forget to take her pill. A scary thought. Her boyfriend of the month is a sophomore at SUNY-Syracuse who she refuses to bring to the house. “You hover too much,” she accuses. “You want to talk politics. You just don’t know what teenagers are like today.” But if I keep quiet, she can’t stand the awkward silences or even my insistence on serving vegetables, as though their mere presence on the table is so offensive that no boy would want to come back. I wonder what it is about him that she doesn’t want me to see. She warns me that she’ll be out the door as soon as she graduates and into a cheap rental with her friends. Or she may even head down to the city. I retaliate by taking the apartment ads from the Sunday papers and circling the rents. “Good luck” I wrote on the post-it note that I attached to the ads and left on her pillow last week. I worry—how far down would she let herself go before she’d admit her plan won’t work? Or would she ever?

We were so much more grounded at her age. And after the abortion, so careful. In those weeks before the move, it was as though a long kiss could bring disaster. We tiptoed around what we had done, our feelings, our plans. Life had become a delicate Ukrainian Easter egg, too fragile to handle. We sank under the pressure, so that it seemed inevitable that we would eventually let our relationship falter under the weight of 600 miles and 600 pounds of guilt. I could already feel the difference as we walked up the hill to the bus stop after the procedure. You held my hand and asked over and over, “Are you sure you’re okay?” 

What could I answer? The truth would have been too much—No, I’m sore and sick, and I can’t believe what we just did; I feel like all our dreams were just sucked down a black hole. I couldn’t tell you about the fat nurse with the red hair who prodded me every five minutes in the recovery room, trying to get her precious bed vacated for the next patient, or the black nurse who picked up the chart at the end of the bed and said, “Another D and C? Umm, umm! Lordy, lordy!” Every time I opened my eyes, I thought I was going to puke. And I couldn’t tell you any of it, you, the one who held all my secrets. So I just squeezed your hand and pushed back the tears. “It’s okay. I’m fine. I’m just tired,” I said. And when we slid into our seats, I closed my eyes and leaned on you until the No. 27 meandered across town to Highland Park.

I still remember the good times, though, the times before the pregnancy that I wouldn’t trade even if it would fix all the pain and wondering and loneliness that came later. Remember that fall, how we were saving every penny for Homecoming, so we’d spend Friday and Saturday nights just wandering around Virginia Beach? And the night I closed my eyes and let you lead me around as though I was blind? I never doubted you for a minute—I felt as safe as I could ever be. You led me through heavy traffic, down alleys, turning and turning until I couldn’t possibly guess where we were. Then my feet felt wooden planks, and I knew we were on the boardwalk. “Step down, now sit,” you directed, and I did. And when I opened my eyes, it was to a pristine autumn sky with crisp stars divided eerily into quadrants by the jet trails of the Navy planes from Norfolk. We held hands and talked about our dreams, mine to live in a cottage in the woods near the ocean with lots of dogs, yours to practice labor law in a big city. “Why so many dogs?” you asked. “So I won’t be scared to be alone,” I answered. “There are cities near the ocean. I can be there to keep you safe,” you said.

Remember Homecoming? It seemed truly magical, not because of the dance or the music, or my father letting us borrow his real pride and joy, the MG, but because of the way we looked. I could see it in my father’s eyes as he snapped the pictures, me in a red satin gown that barely caressed the floor and my hair pinned up except for a couple of trailing curls, you in that black tux with the red satin vest and a bow tie. We looked so sophisticated, so poised, so old! Dad suddenly seemed awkward, uncertain, and I know he was suddenly seeing me as grown and married, leaving him for good. At the restaurant, we ordered scampi and cut our pasta in little bites so we wouldn’t slurp it onto our clothes. The waiter bowed and said “Sir” and “Ma’am,” and suddenly we could see ourselves in ten years, a handsome and established couple, envied by our friends, the ones to emulate.

After that night, we felt so settled that it was as if nothing could touch our faith in each other. As the weather turned and it got too cold to walk around town, we’d sit in each other’s houses until eleven or so and then say a long good-bye. Whose idea was it that night when every last kiss just wasn’t enough and we couldn’t stand to pull apart? I can’t remember. All I can recall are the feelings I had later that night of daring and excitement and anticipation as I sat in bed listening to a soft rain needling the window and watched the clock until Dad and Danny were sound asleep. Finally, the numbers on the clock radio flipped to 2:00, and I slipped out of bed and down to the basement door. Through the window you looked the part of a burglar, dressed all in black with your hood over your head. I opened the door a scant foot, and you slipped in, throwing off your hood like a gallant knight from medieval days. You were shivering from the rain, so you pulled off your wet sweatshirt, and I laid it on the drying rack in the laundry room. 

We had a good contingency plan, I thought. If we heard Dad stirring, you would hide in the dark corner of the laundry room behind the water heater, and if Dad came down, I would say I couldn’t sleep so I came downstairs to do some laundry. I always kept a book open and face down on the end table and a load of wet laundry in the washer. But we didn’t have to use our plan, even though that first night you stayed chilled for so long I thought you’d shake the house trying to keep your teeth from chattering. I smuggled a large mug of hot chocolate down from the kitchen, and we wrapped ourselves in an afghan on the couch, delighting in the feel of our bodies pressed so close. The success of that first night led to others, and as the weeks went by, we gradually discarded more and more items of clothing, as though playing a slow-motion game of strip poker. What can compare to the rapture of those first nights before reality and consequences came crashing in, and we learned that good intentions don’t ward off unintended results? We felt holy, untouchable, chosen for bliss. 

After the abortion and the move, it all changed, so fast and slow it was like the first time I ever fell skiing, my feet slipping sideways on crusty snow, my body tipping bit by bit, knowing I was going down, yet seeming to have all the time in the world to watch the ground come up to meet me. We held onto the idea that we could keep things going with long letters and carefully timed weekly phone calls—no unlimited long distance back in those days! But I could feel you being swept up with graduation and college acceptance letters and then plans to work with your uncle all summer for tuition money. All of these plans that didn’t, couldn’t include me, stuck in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with another year of high school to finish and a weekly allowance of $15. 

When summer came, Dad let me get a job at Dunkin’ Donuts since there wasn’t any studying to do, and that was when you did your first appearing act, standing in line at the donut counter in the middle of my morning shift that July day. You beamed, and I was so flustered by your presence, my fingers trembled on the keys of the cash register, and I had to void two charges in a row. You already looked different. Your polo shirt and jeans were immaculate, and you had a new jauntiness about you, an offhand kind of confidence, not your usual measured calm. But your eyes told a different story, unable to hold my gaze for long, shifting around the store. 

We agreed to meet after I got off. I remember changing into my street clothes in the restroom, splashing water on my face and arms, trying to rid them of their coating of sugar and fat. You teased me anyway, calling me “Honey-dip” as I slid into the passenger seat of one of your uncle’s pick-up trucks. We drove out to Odiorne Pointe and sat at a picnic table overlooking the rocky shore, watching kids and dogs playing in the tide pools under vigilant adult eyes. But before we sat down, you grabbed me by the shoulders and kissed me, pressing me back against the end of the picnic table. Your lips were the same, soft on the surface and firm underneath, the same kiss, the same feeling of longing that I’d been mentally reliving for six months. The day was hot but breezy, full of the dank smell of seaweed drying in the sun. A sticky sweat rushed to the surface of my skin, but was immediately dried by the wind, and I remember feeling alternately hot and chilled. “God, I’ve missed you,” you said into my hairline as we stood and gently rocked each other.

Then we sat down, leaning against each other and looking out over the water. We tried to talk about our lives, exchanging questions and brief answers, but we’d kept up with the basic facts through our letters, and we carefully skirted the topics that mattered, like who we were now and how we could go on. Finally, you told me that you’d gotten your acceptance to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

“That’s wonderful!” I said, and I hugged you, truly delighted that you’d been accepted at your first-choice school and one that was a scant two hours from Portsmouth. “But you must have known for a while. Why didn’t you tell me before?”

You shrugged, fixed your gaze out over the water, and didn’t answer until I pressed you.

“Well?”

“I don’t know whether this is working,” you said. “These months… they’ve been so hard. Everyone else was so happy, making plans… Graduation and prom—they’re supposed to be good times. I felt so apart from everyone. Like my life was on hold. No, like I’ve been holding myself back, afraid to join in, like it wouldn’t be right to enjoy myself without you. It’s just been so hard. I don’t think I can keep doing it. Do you know what I mean?”

You looked at me then, and I read the expression in your eyes, that you’d already made your decision, and it made me mad—mad that I’d somehow gone from prize to liability in six short months. I saw that you were ready to launch off into an exciting new life, while I would be stuck in a place where I still hadn’t made a friend and had nothing to look forward to because the future I’d been planning had just been pulled out from under me.

Then I started to cry, and you looked away, so that when I answered I could only address your profile, not your eyes that couldn’t face what you were doing to me. “No. I don’t know what you mean. Do you think it’s been any easier for me? I have no friends, nothing. Just you. What am I supposed to do now?”

As I raised the back of my hand to wipe my cheeks, you finally turned and wrapped your arms around me, but it was the hug of a parent with a child who’s fallen down and scraped a knee. Not like your kiss, not like before.

“Amy, Amy, Amy,” you said and held me to your chest. “I’ll still be in your life. I promise. We just need more space. Who knows what might happen when we’re both in college and we can make more of our own decisions. This just isn’t right for us now. I’m trying to be honest and fair to both of us.”

“Right,” I said, and I couldn’t keep the sarcasm from my voice, or avoid the realization that I had already given up so much more than you that the balance could never be fair. Later that night, after we’d spent the rest of the day together and you were well on your way back to Virginia Beach, I counted back the months, as I had counted them at least once a week since November. Assuming I’d gotten pregnant somewhere around the third week of October, the third week of July would make nine months. But instead of you or a baby or a plan, I had nothing.

If you saw me today, you might think it sad that I never married, another reason to pity me, the poor, loyal girl that you had to leave behind. But it’s not like that at all. I taught sociology at two other colleges before settling here at Le Moyne, and I’ve had many good friends and long, intimate relationships. I’ve travelled a lot for pleasure, run study abroad programs, and relocated for whole semesters on sabbatical for research projects. It’s been a satisfying life, even with the challenges of bringing up Serena. In the end, I suppose I’ve always trusted statistics more than the vagaries of the human heart. I don’t have enough fingers to count the number of women I know who’ve been dumped in mid-life by men they trusted unconditionally. Then there are the ones who start marriages keeping their spouse at an arm’s length with prenups and jaded attitudes that create marriages that are anything but. And, perhaps, I’ve come to realize that you really were right that day, more right than I was willing to admit because all I could see then was your thinly disguised self-interest. I like having choices and the space for big changes in my life. In less than a year, Serena will be off on her own, one way or the other. I’m due for another sabbatical, and I’ve already outlined a paper that could easily grow into another book. I feel settled, but not anchored, and I like it.

So why are you suddenly back on my mind? And why has the urge to look for you over my shoulder returned after so many years? It was that NPR feature I was listening to in my office last week that took me back. A minister, a psychologist, and some writer were talking about the long-term effects of abortion, and the host was encouraging listeners who had had one to “call and join in the conversation.” But the wrong people were calling in, or at least the balance seemed off. Some women called to express regret for the abortions they’d had. Of these, it seemed like most had been pushed into their decisions against their will. But the majority of the calls were from mothers who had decided against aborting, voicing the usual holier-than-thou attitudes. “I just know that I wouldn’t have gotten pregnant if God didn’t want me to have that baby,” one woman declared. Yeah, like he wants thousands of babies to be born to mothers with AIDS and into poverty, I thought, as I watched herds of undergrads course along the sidewalk outside my 3rd floor window. 

“Where are the women who are content with their decision to have an abortion?” the host asked, in his reasonable, everyday voice, as though they were discussing ice cream flavors. I could tell him—they’re hiding from the stigma that society still puts on their decision and the necessity of keeping a secret that they still haven’t been able to tell their parents or their aunts and uncles, or their own children. I could tell him that we had the right to choose an abortion, but not the right to be proud of a decision that has saved thousands of children from deprived and erratic childhoods. (I did tell Serena about our abortion when she was around fifteen, just the scantest details, but open to answering all questions. I never even mentioned your name. For a while, it seemed to bridge the gap between us, but in the end, it was just another way for her to feel smarter than me because, as she put it, she’d NEVER get herself into THAT situation.) 

I thought of lots of things I could tell that host, and I scrawled the call-in number on my desk ledger, but then I got distracted by the photo of Serena that I keep on my desk. She’s about three, and I’d taken her to visit Polly and Mason for Christmas about a year after they’d taken jobs at the same Chicago law firm. On Christmas Eve, we took turns helping the kids make a snowman and dress him up as Santa, and we posed them in front of the final product, with its too-small Santa hat, stuck on with nails, and its lumpy snow beard. In the picture, Serena stands between Sarah and Max and they are all so bundled up in snowsuits and scarves and knit hats, it’s hard to tell who’s who, except that I could never not recognize Serena’s serious, dark eyes, squinting against the glare. 

I don’t know why that picture stopped me, but my mind started to wander back over the years and the shock I felt when I called Polly back in the summer and she had to give the phone to Mason to tell me that Max had run away, and they hadn’t heard from him in weeks. And they were good parents, more patient than I ever was. I looked at the picture and Serena’s squinting eyes and thought about her lifetime of flinching away from my rules, my advice, even my hugs. What is a right decision, a good plan? After all these years, I still don’t know. Do you judge it by the intentions or the results? I never called in to the show. Instead, I turned off the radio, opened my window, and sat in my armchair with my head back and my eyes closed. Outside the window, I could hear the banter of the students as they strolled by, calling greetings, shouting into cell phones, making plans.