Here’s the thing: I make nine dollars an hour copying keys at Ace Hardware. After taxes, that’s about a thousand a month. Subtract whatever for food and bills and there’s not much left over for extras, let alone emergencies. Say your transmission blows, or you need a root canal, or, in my case, you get into trouble and it costs 400 dollars to fix even at Planned Parenthood which is supposed to be all cost-effective but I’m not some CEO or one of those Hilton sisters who can just charge their way out of a mistake. I mean, I count coupons! I got to Supercuts! I shop off Craig’s List ! You know, the website where everybody sells their stuff all crazy cheap?
STUFF I GOT OFF CRAIG’S LIST
1. Dining room table $40
2. Five dollar CTA card $4.50
3. Unopened twenty-pack carton Colgate $14
4. Bluebird paperweight, ten cents. Not like I needed a paperweight, but TEN CENTS? You can’t pass that up! plus it’s glass and cold and sort of soothing. I carry it in my pocket and grip it when I think I’m losing my mind. Like when Gary left, I squeezed that bluebird so tight the beak cut into my palm.
5. Size-ten lady’s whole closet, FREE. I guess she died—leukemia—and her husband couldn’t handle it. Please take ASAP, said the post. I don’t want to remember anymore. She liked the fancy stuff, this lady. I got a cashmere trench coat that goes all the way to the floor. Sometimes, when it’s slow at work, I imagine millions of keys lining the inside of that coat. I imagine riding the el and suddenly it screeches to a stop and all the lights go off. Something terrible is about to happen, we’ll be exploded by a meteor or beheaded by terrorists or something, and everyone is screaming and banging on the doors but I remain calm. I reach into my trench coat. I pull out a key. It glows softly in the dark and people back away in awe—“Look, Mommy, we’re saved!” cries a small, freckled child—as I unlock the locked door and lead everyone to safety.
Sounds ridiculous, I know, but when you spend forty hours a week doing the same thing over and over—find the key code, line up the keys, grind—you’re also spending forty hours in your mind. Forty hours thinking, and in my case it’s better to imagine impossible stuff than replay reality, ‘cause, I’ll tell you what, the reality is sort of shitty. The reality is Gary, sitting across from me at our Craig’s List dining room table. He’s wearing his Pep Boys uniform and his fingers are stained with Penzoil. Underneath the table, his right leg bounces like it does when he’s nervous.
“How can you be pregnant?” he asks.
I think of that video from sixth grade biology, with the cartoon sperm narrating how babies are made, but now isn’t the right time. “I don’t know,” I say instead, reaching into my pocket and grabbing the bluebird. “I just am!”
By now Gary’s knee is banging into the underside of the table. “Was it when the condom broke?” he asks. “Or the night we got drunk?” and on and on with the possible blame. I tune him out and watch the table shake. I’d seen enough Lifetime Made-for-TV movies to know how this scene would end. Either: A. “We’ll make this work!” or B. “I don’t think I’m ready.”
Gary didn’t say A or B. He said, “get rid of it.”
*
“He told you WHAT?” said my sister Adel. She goes to community college and is right now taking a Women’s Studies Class, where they spell “women” with a Y.
“To get rid of it,” I said.
“And what did you say?”
“Nothing,” I said which got her all sorts of worked up. She talked like there was a whole press corps in her living room. “When are you going to stand up for yourself? When are you going to face these years of oppression and say to them, ‘Years, I will not be held back! This is the 21st Century and I can, nay I WILL do it all! I will work my job and feed my young and wear a skirt while doing so because never will I give up my femininity to play into your non-gender specific perceptions of my person!’”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told her, so she got off her fake pedestal and asked what I was going to do.
“I already did it,” I said. “I went to Planned Parenthood last week.” That’s when I started to cry. Saying it aloud made me remember—the waiting room. The paper robe. The You’ll feel some discomfort—so I tried to think about something else. Adel has this big fireplace and I imagined that inside it was a door. I go to it, and then, I reach inside my coat and pull out a key and unlock the door and stretching out before me would be a whole starry universe and all I have to do is walk through and I’d be somewhere else. Somewhere away.
Adel patted my shoulder. “You need to protect yourself,” she said. “In case this happens again.”
Starry universe, starry universe, I thought, rubbing the bluebird with my thumb.
“You should really go on the pill.”
*
The problem is, I don’t have health insurance. I don’t even have the fifty bucks the pill would cost without Blue Cross. But Adel was right—no way could I let what happened happen again. So I did like I did with the dining room table and went online to Craig’s List.
Reply to: loopydloo@aol
My insurance thinks I have an abnormal uterine bleeding problem so I only pay ten dollars a month for Ortho Tri-Cyclen, you can have it for twenty. My husband and I don’t need it because he got a vasectomy. We need money we are saving for a new deck. The Beachwood, Sunday night, 10 pm I have red hair.
Okay, I know. It’s shady as all hell. But you’ve got to understand: I couldn’t let it happen again.
*
The Beachwood is a bar over by the Jewel. It’s a dive for sure, all dark, peeling plaster and neon signs. Gary and I went there ‘cause the beers were cheap, but I never saw any other customers. The bartender was over sixty, with red lipstick colored outside the lines. She never said a word, just held up fingers for however many dollars we owed her. Sometimes, as Gary stared at the television, I’d imagine pulling a key out of my coat and leaning across the bar. I insert it between the bartender’s red red lips and suddenly she starts talking, same as those dolls that need their strings pulled.
“Can I ask you something?” she says, her voice two-packs a day.
“Sure,” I say.
“What’cha doing with this guy?” she nods her head at Gary, who’s lost in whatever’s on. We haven’t spoken in hours. We haven’t spoken in months and I am alone in an empty bar.
But THAT night, it’s not empty. THAT night, 10 pm on Sunday, I went to the Beachwood and could barely squeeze in it was so packed. I wondered if it was a bachelorette party or something, ‘cause everybody in there was a woman.
“What’s going on?” I asked the lady pressed into my right. She had green hair and a tattoo on her neck.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m here for the pill.”
“Me, too,” said the girl to my left. “You see any redheads?”
“Hang on,” I said. “Is everybody here for the pill?”
Lots of people heard that question, even over Smooth Criminal on the jute box. A chorus of “Yeah’s” and “I am’s!” came from all around me—the soccer-moms in the Capri pants. The college students, sweatshirts embroidered in Greek. The teenagers, wide-eyed, watching their backs—and from there the voices erupted.
“Who’s gonna get it?”
“Me, I need it!”
“Everybody needs it!”
“Where’s that fucking redhead?”
They got louder and louder, girls all up in each others faces, heads whipping from shoulder to shoulder like that’s MY Ortho-tri-fucking-cyclin and I thought of movie scenes where the crowd panics and tramples itself to death. In the midst of it all, a girl stood on the bar and yelled, “Everybody, listen up!” She wore a business suit, the skirt high on her thighs from climbing. Women like her came into Ace Hardware for Do It Yourself catalogues. “Is the person who posted on Craig’s List here?” The group went quiet. Everyone looked around. “Okay,” said the woman after a few seconds. “We got screwed. We should all go home and—“
“Fuck that!” yelled somebody in the crowd. “We came for the pill and we’re leaving with the pill!”
Everybody cheered, and somebody yelled, “How?”
“There’s a clinic right up the street!” yelled somebody else. “They’ve got tons of samples!”
It was well past midnight by that point, so maybe a couple hours of drinking had done its job. Maybe it was that freak mob-mentality you see on the news. Or maybe all the women in that bar had a story like mine, one we were trying our damnedest to forget. Whatever the reason, we moved as one through the street that night. Old and young, ugly and beautiful and scarred. I was near the front of the crowd, close enough to hear the girl who first reached the clinic door yell out what we all must have known anyway: “It’s LOCKED!”
I know. What I should’ve done was walk away, but what I did do was walk forward towards that door. In my head, I’d pictured this moment a thousand times: I open my trench coat and the inside is lined with keys, all identical-looking, and I grab one of them—to the untrained eye it would seem random but me? I know. I am the Keymaster, the Asian guy in the second Matrix, I can unlock a goddamn DIMENSION if I have to! and I take the key and put it in the lock and lead us into that clinic. I have another key to open the cabinets and hundreds and hundreds of free samples rain onto the floor and we pack them into backpacks and rush off through the night, thrusting the little plastic cases into the hands of women on the way. I got so excited in that fantasy that I forgot the truth of it all: the math and the broken condom and the fifty dollars a month, all these girls showing up in some bar and me with my imagination.
I didn’t have any keys. But I did have that bluebird, heavy and pulsing in my pocket, and I slammed it against the clinic’s front window. Slow-motion slow the glass cracked into a giant spider-web and as I watched it go I thought, “I will not be held back!”
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Paul M Davis