Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [80]
Maggie was confused. “For what?”
Monica pointed awkwardly at her stomach, then gestured around to the rest of the bus. “You’re Catholic, right?”
Non-Catholics Maggie had met at Kenyon seemed to think that all Catholics spent 90 percent of their time decrying abortion, when in fact no one in her family had ever so much as mentioned the word. She assumed her grandparents and Aunt Ann Marie and Uncle Pat were staunchly pro-life. She wondered then what her mother thought of it—Kathleen was progressive for a Kelleher, but even she had retained some of her childhood beliefs, and it sometimes surprised Maggie to find out which ones lingered on.
“I think you’re doing the best thing,” Maggie said.
“Maybe I should wait and think it over some more,” Monica said. Then, “Well, no. It’s not going to be that bad, right?”
“Right,” Maggie said. “I’ll be with you. Don’t worry.”
“It’s not like we’re going to put a crib in our dorm room,” Monica said.
“Only maybe as a place to store beer bottles,” Maggie said, trying to sound light.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” Monica said. “You’re really good at taking care of people; I’ve noticed that about you.”
“Thanks,” Maggie said.
They lived together for another six months, but they never discussed Monica’s abortion except once, during a weeklong pro-choice demonstration, when people hung hundreds of coat hangers from the trees in the freshman quad, with personal stories attached.
“I can’t bear to look at them,” Monica said. “I know what they’re trying to say, but it’s just too raw.”
The following year she moved off campus. They never really talked again.
A few minutes earlier, Maggie had feared that she’d be up all night. Now she sat on the couch while John Travolta sang “Grease Lighting” in the background, and felt as though she hadn’t slept in days. She got back into bed. Was this a pregnancy thing or a depression thing? Possibly both.
Before she drifted off to sleep, she thought of how, if life had turned out differently, Monica would have a thirteen-year-old child today, instead of living with her boyfriend and four cocker spaniels in San Francisco, performing in a bluegrass band, as Maggie had read about her in the alumni magazine.
She wondered if she had given the girl the right advice, but back then at Kenyon, an abortion had seemed like a reasonable step for dealing with an unfortunate situation.
Now that she herself was in the same position, it seemed less obvious. She was older, that was part of it. She wasn’t some college kid who couldn’t afford a child, couldn’t somehow figure it out. But she also wasn’t ready, the way she thought a mother ought to be: married, stable, living in more than two rooms.
You’re Catholic, right? Monica had asked all those years ago, and Maggie had shrugged the comment off. But maybe that was part of it too. She wasn’t religious in any formal way, but she still felt Catholicism coming through her pores so many years later. She still wanted terribly to be good, even if no one was watching. Out of habit, she prayed to Saint Anthony when she lost something, or said a Hail Mary whenever she heard an ambulance siren outside her apartment window. She didn’t go to church on Ash Wednesday anymore, but when she saw ashes on the foreheads of strangers in the street, she would realize with a start that Lent was coming and decide to give something up, just for the heck of it. No sugar, gossip, or snooping for forty days.
Maggie had been baptized as an infant, and she had made her First Communion. There were presents, mostly of a religious nature, and a few checks and twenty-dollar bills as well. There was a chocolate cake with rich buttercream frosting and pink sugar flowers in the shape of a cross. It was one of those nights when all the adults—her parents, Aunt Clare (not yet married then), Uncle Patrick and Aunt Ann Marie, and all the neighbors—got drunk and sang Irish songs, almost forgetting that the children existed, so that she and her cousin Patty got to stay up until midnight eating cake and honeyed ham with their fingers,