An Unplanned Plan

Content Warning: This story contains sexual content, abortion, mental health struggles, strong language.

When I was seventeen, I fell in love with Daniel. He was funny and he made me laugh which was hard to do because I was not usually in a mood to laugh. Anyway, he and I connected during the summer of 1974 when my parents left me alone. They went to the Finger Lakes where my father was a horse race judge at an upstate New York thoroughbred racetrack.

Daniel and I met at Jones Beach where we were both New York State summer employees. He was the foreman of the West End beach crew, and I was on the crew. He wore a snow-white uniform with brass buttons and a white captain’s cap over his long, dark, soft, curly hair. The rest of us on the crew wore khaki dark green slacks and an army green button-down shirt. Daniel assigned the jobs. We, on the crew, cleaned the beach, swept the sand from the walkways, picked up litter on the beach using dark green canvas bags that we slung over our shoulders, and a litter picker with a trigger at one end and a grabber at the other end.

I knew Daniel liked me because he was paying a lot of attention to me. He just kept asking me questions. What was my favorite food? What was my favorite book? What did I want to major in when I got to college? Daniel had already graduated from the University of Toledo, and he was in law school at NYU. But he told me he wanted to be a screenwriter; I think he thought of himself as a writer in the same vein as Woody Allen. He said he wanted to change his name from Daniel Kennedy to Danny Kenny as he thought his first name should be a nickname and his last name should have only two syllables. He believed that such a name would be a better commercial screenwriter’s name, like Woody Allen.

That summer, Daniel and I had sex in my childhood bedroom. It was my first time, and intercourse hurt. After he left when I was alone at night in the upstairs of the rusty red split level house, I got up and went into the pink-tiled bathroom with the pink porcelain tub, the pink sink and the pink-themed wallpaper. I sat on the toilet. A gush of red blood came out of me and turned the toilet water crimson red. Although I was terrified, I kept myself calm and waited to see if anything bad happened. I went to bed and got up in the morning no longer a virgin. Daniel’s sperm was travelling through my uterus into my fallopian tube.

A skill I had was that I could handle a crisis. Like when I came home from work at the beach one day and saw some kind of insect stuck to my arm. It was a tick. I went to the World Book encyclopedia and looked up ticks and read that you can suffocate a tick by rubbing kerosene over it. You had to keep gently rubbing until the tick died, stopped its parasitic life and fell off. I did that by myself. And another time when an older guy who fucked me, then told me he had crabs. I looked it up in the encyclopedia, and I read that kerosene kills crabs, so I again got the kerosene out of the garage and went into the pink bathroom and doused my vagina with kerosene. Jesus, it stung! I guess I got rid of the crabs, or maybe I never had them, but I never had to do anything else about that.

I broke up with Daniel shortly after we had sex, and then went out to Montauk Point for a weekend vacation with my parents who had come back from upstate New York. We stayed in a hotel on the beach where my parents took the queen size bed, and I slept on the pull-out. I was swimming in the Atlantic jumping waves crying, thinking about Daniel. I missed him.

A few weeks later, I was beginning my freshman year at an all-girls’ Catholic college in the Bronx. It was early September, and I began to suspect that I was pregnant. I was not getting my period, my breasts were sore, there were drops of milk coming out of my nipples and I was nauseous every time I went into the cafeteria to eat. In the phone booth outside the cafeteria, I found the thick yellow pages directory book, and looked up resources, phone numbers and addresses, under the category for Pregnancy Counseling Services. I forget the name of the clinic I found, but it was a private free-standing clinic on the upper East side of Manhattan where I went for a pregnancy test. I took the express bus into Manhattan, checked in at the clinic, waited my turn, got into an exam room where my blood was drawn. I waited. The nurse came in, looked at me and, with a voice full of patience, clarity, and kindness, said it’s positive. After I got the news, I sat on the curb of a New York city street as my pregnant body’s hormones were beginning to rage with the unknown life that would lead to unknown pain. Then I got the express bus back to Riverdale.

I had to tell Daniel about the pregnancy. I called him from the pay phone at my college dorm. He said he would help me, and he asked me if I wanted to get married. After the call, I sat in that phone booth a while. I pulled out the yellow pages book again and looked up the name and phone numbers of homes for unwed mothers. I called one of them but was told I would have to tell my parents. Knowing I would not do that, I made an appointment for an abortion for the next Saturday and called Claire Sullivan, my high-school religion teacher, to see if she could take me to the clinic that day.

On the day of the abortion, September 27, 1974, Claire picked me up at my college, and took me to the abortion clinic in Manhattan. She was an ex-nun. She left the convent at around forty years old and came to teach religion at my high school where the girls wore uniforms, marched against abortion, and went by bus to Nassau Coliseum to a Nixon rally where we shouted repeatedly, four more years.

In high school, I was infatuated with Claire and spent as much time as I could with her. Once I hitchhiked from Wantagh to Mineola in faded patched bellbottom jeans and huaraches just to be with her. We spent time in her bedroom where she told me I was the one person in the world that she felt closest to. And she told me about her boyfriends. We visited one of them, I can’t remember his name. He took his shirt off and was parading around his apartment with no shirt, his belly hanging over his shorts, drinking a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. Claire told me that when they made love, he would slap her hard inside the thigh. I think she was not sure if something was wrong with that. I knew that there was something wrong with that. She drove a reddish-brown Plymouth Duster and the day we visited her boyfriend she gave me a ride back to Wantagh in the Duster.

There really was never a question whether I would go through with the abortion or not. Claire said she thought it was the most loving thing to do. Was it? I wasn’t sure. The one thing I was sure of was that I was not going to tell my parents. They had an illusion of me, and I would not shatter it. It was not the real me they were parenting. It was the image of me they created. The Catholic school girl who did her homework, succeeded in school, and said she wanted to be a lawyer. That is who they were parenting. Not the one who dropped windowpane acid alone at night in the same bedroom where she had sex with Daniel, not the one who was caught shoplifting Orleans’ albums from Korvettes, and not the one who got drunk on blackberry brandy at Jones Beach in broad daylight and who drove home drunk on the Wantagh Parkway to that same rusty red split level and threw up in the backyard.

Daniel met Claire and me at the abortion clinic and after he paid the medical bill, and Claire got seated in the waiting area, I went into the back area alone. Everything about that clinic seemed white, white walls, white cotton gown, white paper slippers, a doctor in a white coat, nurses dressed in white. There were other girls around my age, also alone like me. I was numb to what was really going on. It was like a surreal white on white dream, and the starkest reality I had ever known, all at the same time. I felt older on the outside of my body than I did on the inside. I was afraid.

Once again, I stayed calm as a nurse I did not know held my hand during the suction curettage, and, against all that white, I saw the red blood and tissue flowing through the clear plastic tube into somewhere, I do not know where and I did not ask. I do remember wondering how I would get through that day without telling my mother. You were supposed to be able to tell your mother these things, to go to her, lean on her, cry and get help. She would say, I love you anyway, I love you for who you are, I am sorry you are going through this really hard time, but I am here for you, and we will get through it together, we will figure out what to do. And if you and I think you should have this baby, you will have the baby and we will raise the baby together, I will be so happy to be a grandmother to your baby. It will not be easy. It is not what we had planned for you, or what you had planned for yourself, but this is life, the surprise of an unplanned pregnancy. And she would fold her arms around me, draw me in close to her, hold me, and I would feel her strength seeping into my bones, my mind would become quiet, and the fear would melt away like frozen butter softening into the deep and profound love of a mother and daughter.

When it was over and I was discharged, Claire was waiting for me, and we walked outside where Daniel was sitting on the stone steps of the clinic entrance.

“I’m hungry, let’s go get something to eat.” I said to them.

“I’m not very hungry.” Daniel said and he looked down. Maybe Daniel did care about me, about the pregnancy, the fetus that could have turned into a child, that could have been his and mine. Maybe I should have married Daniel and had a bunch of his kids. But did he just want to fuck me, take my virginity? I could not marry Daniel; I could not get off the road that was planned for me. I could not even tell my mother I was pregnant much less that I was quitting college to get married. This unplanned plan, it was all too much, too much of a loss, losing Daniel, losing a baby, and Claire telling me it was the most loving thing to do, to have an abortion. Was it? Loving for who? For my parents who I never told until ten years later when I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital? You should have tried telling us, they said.

But on that sunny late September afternoon, after going through a medical procedure to aspirate a tiny growing fetus from my womb, after that experience that would eventually turn into a personal haunting, I was hungry. Claire and I ate at a diner in Manhattan around the corner from the clinic. Daniel sat with us but did not eat. After I said goodbye to Daniel, Claire drove me in her Plymouth Duster back to my college in the Bronx.

In biology class just a few weeks later the professor passed around a little jar with a dead six-week-old fetus floating in formaldehyde. I guess that was how big my fetus was when it was aspirated from my body. I thought about that as I held the jar and looked at the forming head, feet and hands of the fetus. I thought about the recovery room at the abortion clinic. I was in a bed next to another girl about my age. We were both wearing white hospital gowns and white paper slippers. We smiled at each other as we heard Paul Anka on the radio singing “Having My Baby.”