I lay in my twin bed and stared at the ceiling.  I twisted myself around in the sheets and worried myself to sleep. In the morning I drove to my classes at Queens College in my Honda Civic, shifting the gears down Jewel Avenue and biting my nails.  I couldn’t concentrate on what my professors said. 

After school I rode my bike to a frozen yogurt shop on Queens Blvd.  I worked the machine and made swirling cups of yogurt while stealing glances at myself in the mirror on the wall.  My body was changing; my skirt was tight.

I had missed my period, maybe two.  My boyfriend, with the green eyes and black hair, would meet me, and we would worry together, not knowing what to do, afraid to tell anyone. We had been dating for a year.  At night, back in my room, I tried to think of anything else while I listened to Annie Lennox sing Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) on my turntable. 

Desperate and unmoored, I went to my sister, Debi, ten years older than I and married.  I told her I was probably pregnant.  She said that everything would be okay, that she would help me, but that first I had to tell my mother.  “Never,” I said, but she convinced me, saying our mother was modern and would understand. This is what she told me years later.  I don’t have any memory of it.

I didn’t have to tell my mother, because one morning, as I was getting dressed, she stopped at my bedroom door. I was about to turn 19, and this was my childhood room, still pink and girlish. She pushed the door open, and we both froze.  I covered my bare breasts, which were fuller than usual, swollen really.  My mom entered the room and pulled my hands away and looked at me. I felt my lip trembling.  When she finally spoke, her voice was a little shrill. “Are you pregnant?” she asked.  The trembling increased, and my chin crumpled.

My mother asked me again.  “I don’t know,” I sobbed.  She went to my parents’ room, and I trailed behind her, clutching my shirt to my chest. She sat on her side of the bed, near the sliding balcony doors.  I stood before her, dressing and crying, not knowing what her next move would be.  I worried she would call my father at work.  My sobbing increased. “Don’t tell Dad,” I blurted out, my words garbled by tears and mucus. She took her phonebook from her night table and opened it.  She dialed Dr. Brokunier, her gynecologist, and also mine.  Dottie, the nurse, answered. We got an appointment right away. 

My mom and I talked about a lot of intimate things; I shared everything with her. Except for sex.  One time, shortly after I had become sexually active, I wanted to ask her things.  She shot back, “Are you still a virgin?” In an instant, the conversation became a confrontation, and without thinking I screamed, “No, I’m not.” Soon after that she took me to Dr. Brokunier.  It was the first time I had ever gone to a gynecologist, and I had no idea what to expect.

I was 17 then, a high school student.  My mother was in the waiting room while I was being examined. Dottie wore a white nurse’s uniform with a hat. She was chatty and kind. She told me to undress and gave me a papery gown. Dr. Brokunier entered wearing a sort of flashlight strapped to his forehead, like a coal miner.  He was all business. No one had told me that a strange man with a light on his head would look at a place on my body where I myself never looked. 

After the exam was over, he left the room, and Dottie showed me a diagram of my reproductive organs set on an easel.  The diaphragm was already inserted, she explained, and I was to learn how to remove it.  “Put your finger inside like this and pop it,” she said and demonstrated by putting one of her own stockinged feet up on a stool and flicking her wrist. 

I didn’t feel well but said nothing.  I was scared, ashamed. I couldn’t make sense of what Dottie was saying.  A wave of nausea came over me, and the room tilted. Dottie stopped her demonstration and held out a cup of water, saying something like, “Oh, dear.”  I could see the cup if I concentrated, but then there were two of them, and I reached for the wrong one, my hand clutching air.  Dottie brought the water to my lips.  I knew she was talking, but I could no longer hear her. And then I blacked out.  She woke me with a smelling salt that made me wince and cry.  She sat me up, holding me by the shoulders. The paper gown had shifted, revealing my nakedness.  My body heaved, and I threw up all over myself.  I remained limp in her arms as I cried and asked for my mother.  The diaphragm had to be removed by the doctor.

I was given the diaphragm in a hard plastic case on my way out. I never used it.  The sight of it brought on nausea.

Now, on this second visit to Dr. Brokunier, he was warmer. After he examined me, I joined him in his office, where my mother and Debi were waiting.  They sat in straight-backed chairs that made me feel like I was entering a tribunal.  Dr. Brokunier looked at me protectively and leaned against his desk. Addressing us all, he said that I was pregnant. 

We scheduled the procedure to terminate the pregnancy for the next day.

That afternoon I sat cross-legged on the cream-colored carpet of my mom’s bedroom and gazed at myself in the mirror.  For the first time in almost two months I wasn’t frightened or anxious.  I was able to look at my reflection with wonder: There was life inside me. It was happening, and there was something magical about it. I felt beautiful.

That night I asked my mom how bad it would be if I kept the baby.  “Mom,” I said, “we love each other.” My mother, no longer angry, said that I was too young, that I would regret it, that soon I wouldn’t love my boyfriend in the same way.  Then she said, “Don’t tell anyone that you had an abortion.”  I wasn’t planning to, but I still asked why.  She said that it could be very dangerous information.

The next day Debi and I picked up my boyfriend, and she drove us to Park Avenue South, to a clinic in an office building. In the waiting room I could hardly look at him. I only wanted Debi.  She filled out the forms for me and let me put my head on her shoulder while I waited my turn. 

I later learned that my mother was too scared to come with me, that she sent Debi in her place, and that she was sick with worry.

When I woke up after the procedure I was crying, and a nurse, or maybe an aide, was stroking my hair and telling me I was okay.  I couldn’t get out of the fog of sleep, and she helped me stand.  Blood came trickling down my legs.  She walked me to the toilet, cleaned me, and dressed me with such tenderness that the crying that was fading surged up again.  When I got to the waiting room, still feeling drugged, Debi was at the reception desk, begging to know what had happened to her sister: I had taken much longer than expected to come out.  She was half crying herself. She took me home.  My mother was waiting. She closed her eyes in relief when I entered the house, and then she bit her lip.

Afterwards, in my own bed, cramping and bleeding, my hair in tangled knots, I was grateful that my mother had walked in on me when I was undressed and knew what to do, that she had advised me this way, that I could resume my classes and just be a college student again. 

I was different though. Changed.  I was in the grip of sadness, or maybe grief, and I wanted to stay there for a while.

When I saw my boyfriend a few days later, I thought it would be okay never to see him again.

About the Author

Leslie Lisbona recently had several pieces published in Synchronized Chaos, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, The Bluebird Word, The Jewish Literary Journal, miniskirt magazine, Yalobusha Review, and Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine She is the child of immigrants from Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Queens, NY.

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