"A Suitable Abortion" by Julia Levy
This is a story from our Summer 2022 edition, guest edited by Jose Diego Medina. Click here to purchase the print edition and click here to purchase the digital version.
This is a story about a woman who has an abortion. A story where a woman gets pregnant, decides not to have a baby, and then doesn’t have a baby. That’s all.
The abortion part of this story happens on a Tuesday, or maybe a Thursday. A woman, let’s call her Liz, is sitting on a gardenia-print loveseat in a softly-lit waiting room in a very nice, private clinic. Her husband is next to her, a lanky man named Mike, or Sam. No, Bert.
The most important thing to know about Liz is that she has never, not once, questioned that she will be a mother. But there are other things you should know. Liz has been to 47 countries and plans to visit all 195 before she dies. Her favorite food is chocolate ice cream. She wakes up right before sunrise to draw, mostly sketches of birds. Her eyes look like mugs of hot coffee. She loves bouquets and mosaics, the art of selecting and arranging. Liz’s life extends before her, like a textured canvas, and she knows, implicitly, that she will always have a bounty at her disposal to paint exactly what she wants.
Liz loves being married to Bert. He is jocular and kind and likes to play Would You Rather? with Liz every night before falling asleep. Like, would you rather have wings or X-ray vision? She loves the way he plays with her little cousins during family reunions, bouncing them up and down on the trampoline in the yard like they are popcorn kernels. He bounces them long after the other grownups are inside, sipping wine, talking about grownup things. Bert will make an excellent father someday.
Before the story starts, a few weeks before the Liz character finishes her graduate degree, a year into their marriage, the Bert character tells her: I got the promotion. They want me to build a team in Boston. This is a good opportunity.
Okay, Liz says. I’m game. She pictures their life in Boston, a montage set to snappy, lighthearted music. Maybe Sweet Caroline. They are boarding the plane to Boston; they are unpacking a quaint, cozy brownstone in the South End. They kiss in the morning before work, laugh with friends at high-end prix fixe restaurants, do the wave at Sox games. There are candles on birthday cakes and vacations and promotions and fights and tears and sex, lots of sex, always sex, and maybe, in two years or five, a Christmas card with three pairs of shoes, two big and one tiny.
This is all very cliché, but you try telling a story about a middle class married woman getting an abortion.
Let’s say they move to Boston in January. Their first months in the city are not what they’d hoped. There is snow and sleet. The wind rolls over the ocean and through the streets and into the cavernous rooms of their brownstone and settles in their bones. Everything in Boston is icy, even the people. Their eyes are always covered by thick wool hats. Their mouths are always covered by thick wool scarves. It’s a whole city of cold, grumpy noses. The sky is gray; the days are short; the bottoms of Liz’s pants are perpetually wet and cold.
Bert is anxious all the time. The new role is harder than he expected. He leaves home early and comes home late. Long after Liz makes herself dinner and watches television alone and falls asleep in the big king bed with the organic cotton sheets, alone, Bert is adjusting spreadsheets, tweaking slides. There are no new restaurants, no new friends, no raucous sporting events, no rushed morning kisses. They are not having sex.
When they are together, Liz feels like she is a small, needy child. Like Bert is reprimanding her for tugging on his sleeve. Bert says, Don’t be ridiculous. I could never think of you that way. But he barely looks up from his computer; his mind is on the numbers.
Liz needs a haircut; a filling; a new gynecologist. Her birth control expires. But she dreads leaving the apartment. She doesn’t know anyone. No, let’s give her one friend, an acquaintance from college who is always on the road for work. She rearranges the living room furniture and buys expensive ceramic vases online. She draws exactly one bird and, before she even finishes, smears the charcoal across the page with her fist. She calls her mom twice a week and cries: I hate it here.
Get out of town, her mother says. Your father and I rented a house in Lisbon. Pick a week in March; stay with us.
There is nothing stopping her. Liz invites Bert to join, but she knows he won’t. She books a first-class ticket and packs two sweaters, a light jacket, and a tin of colored pencils. Maybe a nice dress. She checks the weather. In Lisbon, it is brisk. In Boston, it rains.
I’ll miss you, Bert says. But he looks relieved. Like he’s been worried about all the ceramic vases that keep appearing, moving around the apartment like chess pieces.
On the plane, she stares at the silver ocean, an expanse of cracked mirrors. The flight attendant brings her a bottle of Chablis so small it might as well be for a baby. Above the clouds, the sun shines through the window and her diamond wedding ring makes a thousand tiny rainbows flutter against the tray table.
In Lisbon, Liz drinks espresso every morning at a cafe with tables made from reclaimed wood. The air is cool and the sky is clear. She loves being outside. She walks for hours through labyrinthine alleys, sketches the azulejo tiles. She sends Bert postcards with generic messages: Love you! Wish you were here! In the evenings, her father orders wine for the table and they sample petiscos, boiled ovas, and cabidela rice, on a patio overlooking the Tagus. He talks about maritime history while Liz furrows her brow and thinks about Bert and the children on the trampoline, laughing, pop, pop, pop. Or she thinks about sleeping alone, the click clack of Bert’s keyboard coming down the hall like a frantic horse. Maybe she thinks about calling Bert. Asking him: Would you rather I come home now or stay here forever?
On her last day, Liz’s mother suggests they try an art exhibit she read about in the Travel section of the newspaper. A series of Paula Rego pastels on loan from a museum in London. The gallery is in a former brothel on a street the color of bubblegum, in a part of town that used to be seedy. Now it’s all boutiques and foamy lattes. Liz cringes at the paintings, young women splayed on cots in agony. Their knees are bent and their legs are open. Their jaws are clenched. Liz lingers at the last painting. The subject’s skirt is raised; her feet are propped on makeshift stirrups; her eyes are iron ball bearings. She looks ahead, ready. Liz prefers the tiles, geometric bursts of cerulean, marigold, moss.
Her mother says, your great aunt had one, you know. Before it was legal.
Liz tries to picture her great aunt but can’t remember either of her grandparents having a sister.
She asks many questions. Like, was the aunt young; was she poor; was she married; was the father very old or very mean; was she in love or raped, or in love and raped; was she religious; did she choose to do it or was she forced; did a doctor or a friend help her; was she all alone; did she have other children; did she take poison or use wire; was she punished; was she sad; did she survive?
I don’t know anything else, says her mother. I’m sure there were good reasons.
Liz considers this. There are always reasons. She isn’t sure, exactly, what makes one good or not.
The great aunt is, of course, a device. A dangling plotline that, like all true stories, will never be fully resolved.
At the airport, Liz’s flight is delayed, so she wanders through the duty-free store and buys a Toblerone and a concealer made from precious minerals. When her plane finally lands, it is after midnight. 2, maybe 3 a.m. Liz calls a car and the wind slaps at her face like a scolding hand. She fumbles for her keys outside the apartment, but Bert opens the door while her nose is still buried in her purse. He folds her into a hug. Against the cold, his warm body feels like a fleece blanket.
I know this has been hard for you, Bert says.
What’s a few lousy months, she says. She has always believed there will be good days. They fall asleep on the king bed, their limbs braided together like a freshly-baked loaf of bread.
In April, there is sun. Bert finds his legs at work, then his feet. He comes home before dinner, goes to bed before midnight. They take long walks through the Commons on the weekends and find a favorite bar that makes a fancy drink Liz likes, garnished with a sugar-crusted lemon peel.
Liz gets an interview, then a job offer. It’s for a marketing position at a gallery in the Seaport. The Seaport is new and full of promise, nothing like their drafty brownstone in the South End. She feels like she is at the beginning of her favorite book. The one with the relatable heroine.
To celebrate, Bert takes Liz to a high-end restaurant with a prix fixe menu and they splurge for the wine pairing. They look like the shiny-faced young professionals on luxury condo advertisements: you could live here! This could be your life! They make out in the Uber on the way home and their lives spread in front of them like an endless blue sky.
So they made a mistake. Liz is never, ever late. She buys a test and takes it in a bathroom stall on her lunch break. While she waits, she draws boxes with her breath. Inhale, up; exhale, left. Inhale, right; exhale, down. A pink line appears, then a second. Like a tidy, efficient strikethrough.
Liz tells Bert in the entryway of the apartment before he can even take off his coat. He has the decency to let Liz go first.
I’m not ready, she says.
Me either, he says. He exhales like the wind rolling over the ocean. I want kids, I really do.
But not right now, she says. We’re just starting.
That evening, they make a list with two columns. There are some pros. There are some cons. They could make it work; they have all the tiles at their disposal to arrange and rearrange. But in the end, it’s a matter of timing.
They do cry. It is trite, but they cry. They hadn’t wanted it to happen this way, but what can you do? It could be worse for them. They understand that they could be different people, in a different time, living different lives.
Liz makes some phone calls, schedules an appointment. It’s a Tuesday or a Thursday. May or June. In her imagination, the clinic is a rundown building surrounded by vitriolic protestors. She sneaks through a backdoor to a room with unforgiving fluorescent lights and trays of sharp medical tools, where a brusque doctor makes her writhe in pain. Like one of the pastels from the old brothel.
But it’s not like that at all. This place has excellent Yelp reviews. It is a spa. The receptionist offers her tea or cucumber water. There is a stone fountain and a Zen garden, the kind where you rake the sand into patterns. The whole thing is covered by Bert’s insurance; she uses her credit card with the best airline rewards for the copay. This is inexplicably funny to Liz, using abortion points toward a vacation. She wants to feel contrite for being the sort of person who sips cucumber water and laughs while waiting for her own abortion. But she does not. This fact is like a little, annoying bird in Liz.
They will go somewhere with onyx sand and crystalline water. The forty-ninth country.
Liz and Bert take a seat on a plush loveseat. Soft music plays from in-ceiling speakers, so clearly that Liz briefly thinks: a harpist. They have hired a real harpist. It feels like she is waiting for a facial except maybe she’s in another person’s body, waiting for another person’s facial.
Bert whispers, would you rather eat ice cream every meal for the rest of your life, or never eat ice cream again?
Every meal, she says. No question.
Across from Liz, a young woman is furiously highlighting a claret-colored law book. Liz names her Jenny. Jenny has hair like tangled ivy and six different sizes of sticky notes. Liz imagines the myriad reasons Jenny is there, and settles on Rohypnol, slipped in her beer by a classmate, Travis. No, Chad. Probably Chad has a popped collar and a summer internship lined up at his father’s white shoe firm. Probably Chad’s father is paying for this with an envelope full of cash. Liz pictures running into Jenny at a barbeque in five years, maybe seven. Jenny’s belly hard and round like an avocado. Liz’s chubby toddler hanging at her ankle. She will give Jenny practical tips on how to manage it all like they are old friends.
Don’t we know her from somewhere, Bert will ask later, scratching his chin like he is stuck on a crossword.
No, Liz will say, honestly. I’ve never met her before in my life.
This is another cliche, of course. Still, it’s an educated guess with these upwardly mobile abortions.
In the examination room, Liz sits on a cantilever chair the color of ripe tangerines. She waits for the part where they scold her, like she is a naughty child. But the reviews are accurate: everyone is pleasant and respectful. Consummate professionals. A kind nurse with earrings shaped like stethoscopes types notes and arranges some items on a table: two individually-wrapped capsules and a dixie cup filled with water and an information packet with three brochures. Bert holds Liz’s hand.
The nurse explains: there are two pills, one to take now and one to take at home. Bert writes everything down even though it’s all in the information packet. The nurse talks, Bert scribbles, Liz folds her hands together like they are the church and the steeple.
The nurse stops talking. It occurs to Liz that everyone is waiting for her; she is driving this plot forward. She picks up the first pill and holds it in her palm. Open the doors and here are the people. It is a marvel. She thinks about her great aunt, who risked her life because a baby would destroy it. It is that ghost, now, who admonishes Liz: what do you mean, a matter of timing?
This symbolism is heavy-handed, but aren’t all abortion stories written with a heavy-hand? Liz must confront the foil of her aunt so that she can become a fully-formed character in her own story.
You don’t have to do this, Bert says. We can make it work.
She thinks of the long, suffocating winter and the endless spring sky. The aunt, that was a different life, a very long time ago. She swallows the pill and then she and Bert go for a sandwich. In the cafe, he asks how she’s feeling.
Fine, she says. Powerful. Like a baby-killing sorceress.
Don’t be morbid, he says. His eyes are blotchy.
She says, would you rather have spaghetti hair or tortilla chip fingernails?
The next morning, Liz slips a matronly pad into her underwear and takes the second pill. She makes a cocoon on the king bed. Her abdomen cramps. It is a very bad period, that’s all. She takes some Midol. Bert brings her a pint of chocolate ice cream and kisses her forehead. She bleeds earthy clots, like overripe persimmons. She watches three episodes of that show she used to like, about the mother and daughter who talk fast in the small town. She vomits. She takes a nap. When she wakes, she feels a dull ache in her pelvis. But she knows the worst is over. She sketches a robin, full-breasted and alert.
On Sunday, she calls her mom. What was her name, she asks. The great aunt?
Mary, says her mother. Or Maggie? Marjorie.
Like you, says Liz.
But her mother doesn’t respond. The mothers in abortion stories are only ever called Mom.
Days go by. Weeks, then months. Sweet Caroline is playing again; there is another montage. Liz rises the ranks at her marketing firm. They meet other couples, they host game nights, they go to Sox games. They visit six more of the 195 countries. In two years, or four, they mail the Christmas card with the three pairs of shoes. There is a baby shower, and Bert is driving Liz to the hospital in the middle of the night in the snow; she is in the hospital room pushing, pushing, and there is a baby with lungs like a hurricane rolling over the ocean. The baby is crawling; she is a pigtailed toddler taking her first steps; she is kissing her baby brother on the forehead.
Bert has a very good year and, with some help from Liz’s parents, they buy a big house in the suburbs with a gopher problem. They take family tennis lessons and host birthday parties and watch the fireworks every year on the Esplanade. Sometimes they fight. There is sex, lots and lots of sex, and then hardly any at all, and that’s okay. The abortion is a blip in the arc of their life. It is no more or less significant than the year of obscene gas prices or the time everyone was arguing about whether the dress was blue or gold.
Would you rather be in this story, Bert asks, or the other one?
No question, she says.
Now, she is a rich, happily married lady. A mother. And once, a lifetime ago, she had an abortion.
Julia Levy is a recovering lawyer and a forever reader. She was born in Maryland, raised in Idaho, and currently lives in San Francisco with her husband, two silly preschoolers, and a very sad houseplant. Her previous work includes “Defendant’s Motion for Summary Judgment” and “End User Licensing Agreement,” but she hopes you never have to read them. This is her first literary publication. You can read more about her upcoming projects at www.juliawritesgood.com.
