Olive-Skinned Girl

              There was no one to come with me, no one I wanted to ask.  I didn’t show my vulnerabilities in those days.  I was a graduate student in a laboratory; what I shared with people was data.  I did have a boyfriend, someone with his own commitments.  Alden was a medical student in ob/gyn.  When he brought me my test results from the hospital, we didn’t discuss whether I should have an abortion, we discussed the logistics of how and when.  In a couple days I would be flying to California to interview for a fellowship. 

              The next morning he dropped me off in front of a clinic in the Bronx that took my medical insurance.  As I got out of my beat up Pinto station wagon, which he drove, he wished me luck.  He was off to take a final exam.  He would have come with me otherwise, but an exam was an exam.

              Don’t worry, I reassured him.  It’s no big deal. 

              Lying on giant white paper draped over a cushioned hospital bed, my feet secured in stirrups, wearing the cloth gown open in the back, I wanted to watch.  My view was limited though, to the porous foam ceiling panels and the white sheet draped over my knees that made them look like Halloween ghosts.  The nurse stared intently into my spread legs, as if she was checking to make sure the doctor performed the procedure correctly.  He said this will feel like a pinch while injecting my cervix with anesthetic.  I recognized a clear polyurethane tube, the kind I used in the laboratory for my own experiments, maybe half an inch in diameter and specially constructed with thick walls to avoid collapsing under pressure.

              As a scientist, anatomy and physiology were subjects I could latch onto.  I was comfortable making observations and drawing conclusions.  Once the procedure was underway and the vacuum whirred and swished, I watched the red and yellow streams crisscross through the tube like a double helix, winding to a destination below the bedside.  I focused on a single inch of tubing that I was sure my fetus would pass through as it made its way through the tube. Maybe it’s this stream of blood, or that little speck of yellow, or that little reflection of fluorescent light hitting the arcing tube just so. These details protected me. Without them, questions might have come up. What did this procedure mean to a living being? Did being alone at this moment mean I was in the wrong relationship? Did I have friends or family, or had science replaced all of that?

              When the vacuum stopped, the room was startlingly quiet. The doctor instructed that I should just lie there until I felt comfortable getting up, but not for at least thirty minutes. 

              Was I really pregnant?  I asked, as if to leave open the possibility that all of this had never really happened. 

              Oh yes, you were definitely pregnant, the doctor said, his voice too cheerful.

              But I didn’t see anything, I argued, as if I was somehow right, that what the doctor yanked from my uterus was something other than a fetus, perhaps just a late period, built up layers of sterile endometrial tissue that refused to come out on their own.

              Oh yes, don’t worry, you were pregnant, but you’ll be fine.

              The nurse converted the examining table to a bed, and then lifted my feet from the stirrups one by one, laying them flat. She picked up the clear glass vessel and as she headed for the door I searched for any details in the red liquid, but there were none.  The great wooden door shut tight into its metal frame.

              A yellow cab drove me back to downtown Manhattan where I lived in a fifth floor walk-up in Greenwich Village.  Zigzagging in traffic along the East River Drive we passed 68th Street, the laboratory where I worked, and I wondered if I would be well enough to go in today.  I pictured myself making up a story for Howard, my co-worker, who would ask why I was late.  Would he believe I’d slept in or had a 24-hour bug?  We were always at the lab, even on Saturdays and Sundays.  Instead I found myself climbing the stairs to my little apartment. I was too weak to go to the lab. 

              Alden had rented me the movie, “Lost in America,” and I lay in bed watching the main character, Linda, gamble her last pennies away at a casino.  Her actions affected her unknowing husband in the hotel room upstairs, but she was consumed by her obsession to win.  I allowed myself to drift numbly with the story and avoided drawing any parallels with my own obsession to succeed.

I was as devoted to science as some are to religion. I was, I would say, a fanatic. If you were going to be making the discoveries, you had to be connected to them in every sense, as driven by the experiments as they were by you. I understood there were people who did not live this way. These people had “jobs.” Howard and I would laugh about TGIF – Thank God It’s Friday.  How strange, we said, that such a slogan existed, let alone the desire to live life according to TGIF. Weekends, we reasoned, were artificially imposed structures that got in the way of true data collection, which was ongoing, around-the-clock and superior to societal delineations of time. More recently I’ve heard of Wednesday being called “hump-day,” another artificial line in the sand marking halfway towards Friday, the week’s finish.  Research was never finished.

When I moved from New York to California to begin my fellowship, Alden came with me.  We rented a little house near the freeway and Alden bought a motorcycle.  As a medical resident he worked twelve hour shifts in different hospitals, often overnight. I sometimes slept on the couch in the coffee room next to the lab. 

              I was the only scientist in my family. My dad’s sister, Pam, had moved to California years earlier and lived nearby. Pam was the type of person who had a “job.” The job did not run Pam’s life. She was always trying new things that she claimed changed her life, or her focus, and her job simply provided sustenance.  Most recently Pam had been to see a Mr. Saxon, who she believed could predict the future. An office visit had cost seventy-five dollars, but Mr. Saxon was worth the expense to Pam.  Worse yet, she insisted I make an appointment, and the visit would be her birthday present to me.

              Mr. Saxon was bearded, burly and wore a plaid flannel shirt.  His office, in a single-story decrepit building was decorated in blues.  The carpet and café curtains, the flowery sofa and matching armchair, were combinations of turquoise, royal blue and slate blue.  Given this cheap décor, I didn’t believe for a second that Mr. Saxon could predict the future.  When he began questioning me, I provided vague answers to prove, in my scientific way, there was no such thing as telepathy.   On top of it, that morning I had chosen to wear a checkered, naïve-looking halter dress, and what occurred to me when Mr. Saxon started speaking was that he would never know the real me in that dress.

              Despite my reservations, Mr. Saxon’s voice was warm and it drew me in.  He had a charming way about him, not forceful, and he asked some simple questions that there seemed no harm in answering.  Then his eyes grew slit-like and he said he had a feeling that people who had once known me were gathering in the room.  Their faces bore looks of recognition and warmth.  One was a gray-haired man with thick eyebrows wearing a business jacket. This description would possibly fit my grandfather, I thought, who had come to this country from Greece as a child.   A woman’s description fit my grandmother.  Of course, this could have been coincidental, but briefly I allowed my mind to drift along with the charade.

              Who else is here?  I wanted to know. 

              Mr. Saxon mentioned the features of a dark-haired woman carrying a bag of coins, and my mind turned to Aunt Mimi, my grandmother’s sister, who would save her pennies for when I came to visit.  I had loved those childhood visits to Aunt Mimi’s, but then after my parents were divorced we had lost touch.  By the time I was thirteen, when I heard she died of a heart attack I had no emotion.  As Mr. Saxon described these people, I remembered parts of my past I’d left behind, people I’d loved and lost.  I grew into the feeling, at least temporarily, that my life had meaning beyond my current fixation with the lab.

              Then he said abruptly, a little girl is here.  Are there any small children in your life?  Did you have a daughter? 

              No.   I shook my head. I had worked during the summers as an au pair for a family near Boston fifteen years earlier.  These children would now be in their twenties.  I didn’t think they had died.  Then I realized there might have been a child in my life.  I might have had a daughter, if abortions counted.   

              Mr. Saxon had leaned forward in his armchair, and his kind eyes bulged out behind wire-rimmed glasses.  I’m getting a picture of a little girl with a message that you should be more certain of what you want out of life, he continued, studying me quizzically.  I have a sense that within a few years you will change your life’s focus and do something more creative.  Do you know what that might be?

              I didn’t know what it meant to do something more creative, but I found myself holding back tears.  I also felt my daughter’s omniscience peering into my denial. Tearfully, I told Mr. Saxon about the abortion.

              Minutes later, I emerged onto a sunny sidewalk and found Pam waiting in her Camry.  I had no interest in lunch. I was angry at Pam for taking me to someone who would open my eyes. I felt as though I’d been tricked.  As cars passed us on the freeway, my mind created pictures of a little girl with black-hair and olive-skin that took after Alden. At four years old, she wears a cotton sleeveless plaid dress, knee length with a ruffle. She runs barefoot on a beach near our house. Her smooth tiny limbs dangle from the dress like toothpicks.  

              The next day I returned to the lab as usual, analyzed the data from a recent experiment and set up a new one. But it would be some time before I could get the little girl out of my head.  Especially when I was thick into part of an experiment that required immense concentration, (like counting drops from a spigot or weighing picogram quantities of fly embryos that I had painstakingly collected), the image of the little girl would return. I found myself questioning why I had aborted her.  I was ashamed to admit the act had been too easy, the procedure too available. We had been students at a medical school, so there wasn’t even a cost. The night Alden had come home with my results, I’d sensed his disappointment and I knew that the next morning I would go in, and that’s what I had done. I hadn’t thought it through because the event had been too enormous to face. 

By this time, Alden and I had been together five years. I started to hint about getting married. Then one day he surprised me with a big gold and diamond ring. We planned the wedding in one day, as we hadn’t wanted to take too much time off. Alden found out you could get married on a boat on Lake Tahoe, and even though it was February, a worker chipped ice with a pick so the boat could move away from the dock. With a Universal Life minister and a video photographer we recited our vows. I still remember when the cameraman asked Alden to say a few additional words. I look forward to raising kids and having a family, he said. So we began to try.

              But timing was a problem. Due to our schedules, we weren’t always in bed at the same time. I started taking my temperature to find out when I was ovulating, but this procedure was next to impossible. I would leave the glass thermometer by the bedside and as soon as my eyes opened in the morning I popped it into my mouth. Three minutes later I would read the mercury. Sometimes I noticed my temperature was 98.7 instead of 98.6. On those nights if Alden came in at 2 a.m. from the hospital, even though he was exhausted I would force myself on him. After several months there was still no pregnancy. Desperate, I tried Clomid to stimulate my ovaries to produce eggs. It didn’t seem fair that Alden would perform hundreds of deliveries and abortions in his spare time to earn extra cash, but we were unable to get pregnant. 

              One night we had a trivial argument, and Alden said he just couldn’t take the stress. He packed his backpack and left. I tried to call him to work it out, saying maybe I had put too much pressure on him to have children, but he didn’t want to talk about anything. After a couple months of living at the hospital or with other medical residents Alden brought me divorce papers to divide up our only valuables: a sofa and a stereo system. Part of my soul crumbled when I signed those divorce papers and handed them back to Alden.  After he hurried out the door I went to the window.  He was just a helmeted man in a leather jacket disappearing down the street on a motorcycle, but he took with him all the possibilities and opportunities not grasped.

              During the weeks and months that followed I was unable to carry out experiments. I would go to the laboratory, set out ten tubes in a rack, as if beginning an experiment. Then I would sit in my desk chair and consider what to do. Hours would pass with nothing accomplished, and at an appropriate time I would leave the lab to look in shop windows, watch women push strollers, go jogging.

I remarried within two years. Mike and I were in love and we both wanted children. It seemed the timing was right to leave science and explore something more creative. It didn’t occur to me I was fulfilling Mr. Saxon’s prediction. I have a sense that within a few years you will change your life’s focus, he had said.

              Our first pregnancy resulted in miscarriage. Through ultrasound I learned that the heart of my fetus had stopped beating.  My doctor told me to just wait for the miscarriage to happen naturally. He said spontaneously aborted fetuses had been found to have broken or malformed chromosomes. Development refused to continue in a fetus that did not have the proper programming.  In that conversation I kept waiting for the doctor to tell me that women who had had abortions might have trouble getting pregnant in the future, but he didn’t. 

              Mike was at work when I went into labor.  The contractions felt like a vice clamping down on my uterus, the pain unrelieved by over-the-counter medications.  As I twisted and turned on our king-sized bed I remembered my doctor telling me that twenty percent of pregnancies ended in miscarriage. Twenty percent seemed like a high number. As one contraction followed the next, I was astounded that women around the world were going through this pain without talking about it. All I’d heard about was the pain of childbirth, but what about miscarriage, alone, no one caring because it was just a fetus already dead. More importantly, why did I care now, when I hadn’t at a younger age?  

              As the blood started pouring out, I sat on the toilet and collected the dripping material in a Tupperware container. When the pain subsided, once again I became the scientist making observations.  In that mode I could cope, standing outside looking in.  I brought the container to my desk, and poured the gooey mass onto a piece of aluminum foil under a Tensor lamp.  Multiple hues of red, liver-like clumps drifted slowly across the reflective surface like miniature glaciers.  Meticulously I poked and prodded with a toothpick and magnifying glass, searching for a miniature form similar to those from textbooks or from containers of formaldehyde in anatomy classrooms, but I found nothing.

              Eventually, Mike and I conceived our first child, and we had our second right away because we still were not convinced we could.  I was adamant about staying home with the children.  Within ten years, however, Mike and I divorced and I needed a job. I started teaching high school science since I could be out when my children were.  The job also provided health benefits for the children and was close to home so that my commute would not take time away from them.

The high school where I worked was overcrowded, and each morning caravans of buses rolled in from 110 Los Angeles zip codes.  Students descended on campus like a stampede.  I taught six Physiology classes, each with forty kids. It was a fact of life that teachers rarely had individual time with students.  

              One girl, Brooke, was unusually quiet.  She was small and frail, had orange-dyed curly hair and a cherubic face.  I had watched her scores slip in my computerized grade book, but repeatedly neglected to tell her to come and talk to me.  Then one day after class she stood by my podium in line behind other students.  When it was her turn she smiled and said she’d wait till all the others had left.  One by one they headed out of the room to eat their snacks before the next class.  The door remained open, but Brooke deliberately went outside to pull it tight.  In that brief period of time that elapsed, I knew what she was going to tell me.

              When she returned to my podium, she said, I’m pregnant.

              I asked the usual questions, how old she was, did her parents know.  She was eighteen, and I was grateful for that.  It meant we could talk, and she would be an adult making her own choice.  She had not told anyone else, and she had made the decision to have an abortion. 

              As we talked, the story written here was laid out before me in my head, the abortions, the marriages, the children, work. Ultimately, I loved my children, but here at the high school I had half a life, devoting so much of my self to others.  Even though I grieved for my olive-skinned girl, if there ever had been one, choosing to be in the laboratory had been my way of creating meaning out of my existence, of filling a void that relationships and family would never fill.  Somehow at a young age I had known that implicitly, and I’d been right to act without thinking further.  Yes, I had been ashamed based on Mr. Saxon’s vision, but as a scientist I knew there were other interpretations.  Of course, I shared none of this with Brooke, though her eyes looked to mine for answers.

              Do you think it’s the right thing?  She wanted to know.  Lamely, I said it was her decision, and that I would support whatever she wanted to do.  I think my eyes were saying to get that abortion.

              During the next two weeks Brooke’s classroom seat was empty. Then she reappeared, turned in homework and ignored me.  I wondered what had happened, but didn’t ask. Obviously I knew. On the last day of school she passed by my podium and made eye contact.  I nodded. She leaned over and whispered, I did it.

              Good, I said.

              She smiled, and that was the last time I saw her.

Karen K. Perkins is a writer and science teacher in Los Angeles.  She holds a doctorate in biochemistry, spent many years in laboratories studying gene regulation in fruit flies and human cancer cells, and is a former recipient of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Award.  She is now part of the ongoing creative nonfiction workshop at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, California.  Her work has been published in Mount Voices, The New York Times Book Review, The Hispanic Outlook On Higher Education and in many scientific journals.