Chapter Thirty #2
The drive was long and brown. And boring.
This was a good thing. I did not think I had forgotten how to drive.
I did not think Moth had forgotten how to drive.
Of all the changes my life had undergone these last nine months since moving to Vista View, not driving was the least of them.
But our cargo was awfully precious, and I was relieved to confirm we both remembered how.
Moth and I alternated at the wheel, more him than me.
When he drove, I lay down on my side across the water buffalo’s back seat, a pillow between my knees, and Lola sat up front.
When I drove, she sat up in the back like a normal person, and Moth moved to the passenger seat and rubbed my right knee since he couldn’t hold my hand since I stuck as unfailingly to ten and two as a watch in an advertisement.
If it had been a movie, there would have been a montage: Stops to pump gas and gaze thoughtfully over the billowy dust of the horizon, Lola’s hair snaggling out the open window, empty farms meant to contrast the barrenness of the land with the fertility on display in the car.
Surreptitious walks around empty parking lots, the blue hoodie doing nothing to mask my enormous body but hiding, at least, my untimely wrinkles and gray hair.
A perfectly teetered soundtrack, sweet then sad then sweet again, over the three of us staring separately out at unfurling highway.
Maybe that’s what Lola’s playlist would have been, but she fell asleep almost as soon as we got on the road.
If there was a plug to connect her phone to the water buffalo, neither Moth nor I could find it.
We did, however, know how to work a radio. For some miles, there was music, and if it wasn’t ideally suited to the mood, it still passed the time. Then the music ran out, and it was nothing but talk radio.
Talk-about-me radio, to my enormous surprise.
“I mean, what is she going to give birth to?” some caller was saying. “I feel like no one’s asking that.”
“That’s a good question,” the host said. “Conceived in sin. More sin than usual.”
Moth reached into the back seat and found my hand. “I thought it was lovely actually.”
“And who knows what deformities it’ll have?” the caller continued. “It’s gotta be a retard, right? No arms or legs. Or face. Or brain. Who knows?”
“Birth defects increase with maternal age,” the host crowed. “And this maternal age is significantly increased.”
“I agree with the last guy,” the next caller said.
Moth snorted. “Do you really, you absolute prat.”
“What’s a prat?” I asked.
“An arse, I suppose. Like pratfall.”
“Absolument derrière,” I offered.
“Entirely heinie.”
“Such a tuchus,” my mother’s Yiddish-accented voice said out of my very own mouth.
“Colossal caboose,” he supplied.
But we’d apparently woken Lola, who objected sleepily, “No body shaming.”
“Apologies.” His eyes flicked toward her then back to the road. “What would you suggest?”
“Bluetooth.”
Which was apparently how you connected the phone to the car, but she couldn’t make it work either. She blamed the car though.
“And anyway, who’s gonna take care of it?
” another caller demanded while Lola fiddled with the knobs.
“You know she’s gonna die in childbirth.
The dad’s probably gonna keel over from shock when he sees what comes out.
No one’s gonna adopt a baby with no face, arms, or brain. So who’s gonna raise this thing?”
Moth took one hand off the wheel to give the radio the V-sign. Repeatedly.
“The taxpayer, that’s who.” The host sounded happy to be on familiar ground.
“We’re already paying to keep this woman and her boy toy alive.
Social security. Medicare. Pensions, for God’s sake.
Now we’re also going to have to pay for their …
I’m going to use the term ‘spawn’ here. Disability.
Medicaid. Special education. Where does it end? ”
“It’s not the state’s responsibility,” the next caller opined.
“She chose to have unprotected sex. She chose to have a baby. She chose, she chose, she chose. Now she wants to make someone else pay for those choices. Why should I? This baby or whatever it turns out to be isn’t my responsibility.
Live and let live, right? But if they can’t do that on their own, I say good riddance, die and let die. ”
“Right.” Moth snapped off the radio. “I could do with a stroll. Anyone else?”
He pulled in at a gas station, but we didn’t need gas, so Lola hopped out to get snacks (not that we needed those either).
Moth parked away from the pumps, and I dutifully unkinked myself from the car and walked in slow circles around the parking lot.
The sun was up now, and though it was early still, it was also Texas still and already too hot for the hoodie.
Passing out from heatstroke would also not be inconspicuous.
But without the cloaking, however slight, afforded by the hood and tinted windows, my body in its entirety announced me as exactly who I was.
I watched the sight then recognition of me catch and spread like fire.
A young man at the pumps clapped a hand over his mouth then grabbed his girlfriend’s arm and pointed at me wildly.
She jumped up and down and squealed and hugged him.
They both got out their phones and started filming.
Other gas-pumpers started squealing and jumping and pointing their phones at me as well.
I know it makes me sound old, but I am old: Young people these days have terrible manners.
“Care to give your admirers a little wave?” Moth said. He was trying, I knew, to salve my irritation, lessen my worry, make me laugh. “Shall I show you how the royal family does it?”
“No.” I did not want to laugh.
“Should you throw kisses at the cameras?”
“I should throw something at the cameras.”
Lola hurried out, panting. “I think we better get out of here.”
“Hey, you’re that lady! You’re Pepper Mills!” A man started jogging over. He wasn’t much younger than Moth and me and should have known better (about being rude but also about running in this heat at his age). “Hey, wait, I own this place. I can’t believe you’re here! Can I get a photo?”
“Good news,” Lola said. “We get to leave now. Also I got gummy bears.”
She climbed into the back with me, and Moth peeled out like we were gangsters.
I told myself there were so many pictures, a few more didn’t matter. I told myself it was almost over—we’d have Lola at the clinic first thing in the morning, we’d be back at Vista View by dinner the next night, I would have this baby in a month and a half, and this whole mishegoss would be over.
Though another, of course, would be just beginning.
“Can I ask you a question, Grandma?” Lola said.
“Anytime, baby.” But then she didn’t, so eventually I pressed, “What is it, Lols?”
She looked at me, then back out the window. “How come you didn’t do this?”
“Didn’t do what?” I said, though I knew what she meant.
“Reschedule New York. Leave Texas. Get an abortion.”
And I nodded because it was the right question.
The right hard question. “One of my doctors expressed some concern that the procedure would not have been as … straightforward for me as it will be for you,” I said carefully.
“Or maybe it would have, but there was no way to know for sure.” Moth found my eyes in the mirror.
“You’re young. I’m not. You’re strong.” I didn’t want to scare her.
Not about what she was about to do. And not about me.
“The fact of this pregnancy is already so strange. There were just too many unknowns.”
She said nothing, waiting, because that wasn’t the whole answer. I levered myself upright.
“After this procedure, you will be fine. Entirely healthy and whole and perfectly fine. But in my case, there was too much chance I wouldn’t, and then what would you do?”
“Me?”
“You and Sari. Oliver and Pierre. Your mom and Aunt Alice and Uncle Max.” I paused.
“Moth. Maisie. I’m not saying you won’t have to live without me someday, but I don’t want that day to come any sooner than necessary.
I want to stay well while I’m still here.
And when I do go, I want it to be my choice, but not my fault. ”
Lola turned from the window then to look at me. “Those are the same thing.”
And I laughed because she was right. Choice and fault are so close together when you’re young. But when you get older—not old, just older—they diverge. How to explain that to a teenager who would obviously live forever?
“I couldn’t leave the state by myself and go do it on my own.
What if something happened to me, alone and far away and all because I was too cavalier with life?
Not the pupacorn’s life. My life. Your life.
‘Life-threatening’ doesn’t just mean this thing might kill me.
It also means it might threaten our lives, our ability to live them the way we want to.
I don’t want to miss what comes next, all you’re going to grow up and do in the world, not any more than I have to.
But even more than that, I don’t want you to miss it.
I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I think that’s what it means to choose life. I choose your life.”
“So, no pressure then.”
I laughed again. “Sorry, kid. That’s the way it is, I’m afraid.”
“And anyway, why would you have had to go alone?”
“Because helping me this way is illegal. As soon as it stopped being a secret, I couldn’t let your mom or your aunt and uncle or Moth or my doctor help me. As soon as it stopped being a secret, I was right back where I started.”
“Where?”
“Miraculous. Blessed. A wonder of the world. And therefore the property of the world. No longer entitled to either my own body or my own mind. No longer entitled to my life.”