The Empathy Exams Read Free Page A

not knowing what to say. I remember wanting a drink. I remember wanting Dave to be inside the choice with me but also feeling possessive of what was happening. I needed him to understand he would never live this choice like I was going to live it. This was the double blade of how I felt about anything that hurt: I wanted someone else to feel it with me, and also I wanted it entirely for myself.
    We scheduled the abortion for a Friday, and I found myself facing a week of ordinary days until it happened. I realized I was supposed to keep doing ordinary things. One afternoon, I holed up in the library and read a pregnancy memoir. The author described a pulsing fist of fear and loneliness inside her—a fist she’d carried her whole life, had numbed with drinking and sex—and explained how her pregnancy had replaced this fist with the tiny bud of her fetus, a moving life.
    I sent Dave a text. I wanted to tell him about the fist of fear, the baby heart, how sad it felt to read about a woman changed by her pregnancy when I knew I wouldn’t be changed by mine—or at least, not like she’d been. I didn’t hear anything back for hours. This bothered me. I felt guilt that I didn’t feel more about the abortion; I felt pissed off at Dave for being elsewhere, for choosing not to do the tiniest thing when I was going to do the rest of it.
    I felt the weight of expectation on every moment—the sense that the end of this pregnancy was something I should feel sad about, the lurking fear that I never felt sad about what I was supposed to feel sad about, the knowledge that I’d gone through several funerals dry eyed, the hunch that I had a parched interior life activated only by the need for constant affirmation, nothing more. I wanted Dave to guess what I needed at precisely the same time I needed it. I wanted him to imagine how much small signals of his presence might mean.
    That night we roasted vegetables and ate them at my kitchen table. Weeks before, I’d covered that table with citrus fruits and fed our friends pills made from berries that made everything sweet: grapefruit tasted like candy, beer like chocolate, Shiraz like Manischewitz—everything, actually, tasted a little like Manischewitz. Which is to say: that kitchen held the ghosts of countless days that felt easier than the one we were living now. We drank wine, and I think—I know—I drank a lot. It sickened me to think I was doing something harmful to the fetus because that meant thinking of the fetus as harmable, which made it feel more alive, which made me feel more selfish, woozy with cheap Cabernet and spoiling for a fight.
    Feeling Dave’s distance that day had made me realize how much I needed to feel he was as close to this pregnancy as I was—an impossible asymptote. But I thought he could at least bridge the gap between our days and bodies with a text. I told him so. Actually I probably sulked, waited for him to ask, and then told him so. Guessing your feelings is like charming a cobra with a stethoscope , another boyfriend told me once. Meaning what? Meaning a few things, I think—that pain turned me venomous, that diagnosing me required a specialized kind of enchantment, that I flaunted feelings and withheld their origins at once.
    Sitting with Dave, in my attic living room, my cobra hood was spread. “I felt lonely today,” I told him. “I wanted to hear from you.”
    I’d be lying if I wrote that I remember exactly what he said. I don’t. Which is the sad half life of arguments—we usually remember our side better. I think he told me he’d been thinking of me all day, and couldn’t I trust that? Why did I need proof?
    Voiced concern for my situation/problem. Why did I need proof? I just did.
    He said to me, “I think you’re making this up.”
    This meaning what? My anger? My anger at him? Memory fumbles.
    I didn’t know what I felt, I told him. Couldn’t he just trust that I felt something, and that I’d wanted something from him? I