Thirty - Jill Emerson [52]
This isn’t supposed to happen to girls on the pill. Everybody said the pill would put abortionists out of business. What is it, some sort of mad suicidal or self-destructive streak in me? How can you run around the city fucking absolutely everybody and forget to take your pill first thing in the morning? And it isn’t as if I have such a full schedule that I can’t find time to take a birth control pill. It isn’t as though I have so many other vital things to remember that little trivial things like not getting pregnant are too much to remember.
As a matter of fact, there have been days when taking my pill was just about the only thing I did do. There were also days when it was one of many things I didn’t do. Which is why I am presently knocked up.
When Howie and I were trying to have a baby, nothing happened. The river flowed red like a clock. Red like a clock? What is the matter with me today? And what’s with cutesy little euphemisms for menstruating?
What do I do now?
Who do I know who would know where to go for an abortion? The funny thing is probably just about anybody. Of the old gang in Eastchester I’m sure there were a lot who went under the knife. If this had happened before I left Howard, I would just have asked Marcie. Nothing simpler. If she hadn’t had an abortion herself she would certainly know somebody who had, and it would all be very intelligently arranged, and it would cost whatever it is that they cost, which I guess is a thousand dollars (which means I could have afforded it if I hadn’t had the robbery, and of course people become paranoid, why shouldn’t people become paranoid, because it’s pretty obvious that the world is conspiring against me. I mean, how else would everything happen this way, as if on schedule? It can’t all be luck. Somebody up there hates me.)
The same question, over and over and over. What do I do now? I wish I knew the answer.
There’s not even any point in looking for an abortionist now because I don’t have any money to pay him with. The way things stand now I’ll have the rent when it’s due and probably a couple of hundred dollars beyond that, but I don’t know how long I can go before it’s too late to have the abortion.
Maybe I should have the baby.
Oh, that’s just what I need. And if worst comes to worst I can take it back to Howie. Here’s somebody’s baby to bring us back together again.
Solid.
July 24
Liz says she knows someone who will do it for three hundred dollars. She insists he’s reliable and that he operates under sanitary conditions. I hope so. I really don’t want to die. I’d rather have the baby than die.
I wasn’t so sure about this the other night. I sat in the bathroom making lists of the different ways to kill yourself. Myself, to be specific. One was worse than the next. There was a Dorothy Parker poem about that, wasn’t there? All the different ways to check out and what’s wrong with each of them, and it winds up You might as well live. That was the conclusion I came to, and for about that reason.
Maybe I should write something about Liz. I just got to know her the past couple days, although I’ve seen her around ever since I started to work the bars off Lexington.
(How professional that phrase sounds!)
She is a Lady Clairol blond, and her hairdresser is only one of many who know this. I think you could say (at least I can) that she looks like a whore. I say this not to put her down but realistically. The bleached blond hair, the hardness around the eyes and mouth, the way she struts when she walks, the slight and excusable tendency to overdress. Maybe, for all I know, it pays to look as much like a whore as possible, so that men will know what you are. Why confuse potential customers? Where’s the percentage?
We had taken to nodding to each other, and then one afternoon I was watching a daiquiri evaporate when she came over and asked if the other seat at my table was taken. It wasn’t, and she sat in it and studied me intently.
“We’ve seen each other around,” she said.
“Sure.”
“What I’m going to say, I don’t want you to be offended.”