Valley of Ashes Read Free

the pediatrician’s office with her at the wheel of Dean’s beat-up Mitsubishi Galant.
    “It’s hard sometimes,” I said. “But then it always feels like we have new stuff to talk about when he gets home. We’re happy to see each other, you know?”
    She nodded. “I think the hardest thing for me when you kids were little was never feeling like I could
finish
anything… everything was always interrupted. And then your father would come home from the stock exchange and I was so hungry for what was going on in the
world
, and I wanted to be told I was doing things right after singing ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’ all day. Just, ‘Goodness, you’ve painted the dining room table—how wonderful!’ But he wouldn’t say anything at all, he’d just read the paper and have a cocktail and grumble through dinner.”
    “You guys were so young,” I said. “I mean,
babies
. No wonder your entire generation got divorced. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to marry the first guy I slept with, just presuming it would all work out.”
    “It never occurred to me that it wouldn’t. Mummie and Daddy always seemed fine. I thought all you had to do was get married and then that was it.”
    “And cloth diapers,” I said. “I remember you rinsing them out in the toilet, when Trace was a baby.”
    “Well, on Long Island we had a diaper man, at least. He took the dirty dipes away and delivered a pile of clean ones every week.”
    “I don’t care,” I said. “No Pampers, no Prozac? No fucking way.”
    She nodded. “
And
no birth control. You and Pagan were both products of the rhythm method.”
    “Jesus, Mom. I’d’ve had myself committed, just to catch up on sleep.”
    She laughed and turned left, into the doctor’s office parking lot. As she looked for a spot, I thought about the end of her marriage to my father.
    In 1967, Mom discovered that she was pregnant a third time, and wept, and told Dad she didn’t know how they could handle having another child. There wasn’t enough money, and they were both so exhausted already.
    He asked around on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, where he was an ill-paid fledgling broker at the time. Someone knew someone who knew where a woman could get an abortion—from a doctor in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for four hundred dollars cash.
    So Mom drove herself to Kennedy airport in the dark one morning, racked with such bad morning sickness it took her the entire drive
and
four-hour flight to finish one jelly doughnut. She ate it in little tiny pieces, trying to keep something in her stomach, some sugar in her system, so she wouldn’t throw up.
    When she arrived at the doctor’s office, the nurse told her the price had gone up to five hundred.
    Mom put her four bills on the doctor’s desk. “This is all I have. Please help me.”
    She drove herself from the airport back to our tiny rented house in Jericho, New York, arriving home around midnight—bleeding profusely, doubled over with cramps.
    She got into bed carefully, not wanting to wake up my father.
    He turned toward her in the darkness as she drew the covers up to her chin.
    “I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “If you don’t want to have my child, I don’t want to stay married to you. I’ve packed my bags and I’ll be leaving in the morning.”
    I was four years old, my sister two and a half.
    In my pediatrician’s parking lot, a gigantic Range Rover finally pulled out of a space.
    “No, Mom, really,” I said. “I couldn’t have handled the shit you dealt with when we were little. You’re fucking amazing.”
    We sat in the waiting room for twenty-five minutes, then the examining room for another ten before the doctor came in. Mom took the chair and settled Parrish in her lap. I sat up on the crinkly-papered exam table with India.
    “Do the girls need shots this time?” she asked.
    “Probably. It seems like they have to get a few more every time we come in. Hep B, DTaP, meningitis… endless.”
    Mom