Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,55

at least five weeks along before a pregnancy may be terminated. December thirtieth, Maddie concluded, if she did not want to do it a day later than necessary. December thirtieth in 1994 fell on Isra and Mi’raj, by which time I was back at home in Bay Ridge, getting dressed to go to the mosque. Maddie called from her mother’s house outside Albany and confessed that she had not been able to have it done after all. She was eager that I understand this was not owing to any late-breaking moral qualms. Undetected by her mother, she’d driven herself to the Planned Parenthood downtown, registered, paid for the procedure up front and in cash, changed into a paper gown, submitted the requisite blood and urine samples and lain down for a sonogram, then sat in a room with approximately half a dozen other women to wait. There had been a television on, and whatever they were watching was interrupted by a news report about what had just happened in Massachusetts. A man had taken a rifle to the Planned Parenthood in Brookline and shot and killed the receptionist there. Then he went up the street to a preterm clinic and shot and killed the receptionist there. Where’s Brookline? the girl next to Maddie asked. Far away, Maddie had reassured her; there was no need to worry. But then the clinic’s telephone began to ring and two policemen arrived to tell the women in the waiting room that they should all put their clothes back on and go home.

And now I don’t know if I can go back.

Maddie, do you want a baby?

No.

Do you want to have a baby and give it up for adoption?

No.

I waited.

I know I need to do it, she said. I just don’t want to go alone.

That night, I kneeled beside my father in the mosque and thought about what it would be like to accompany a girl I had not got pregnant to her abortion. There were children present, many more than usual, and as they listened with wide darting eyes to the story of Muhammad and Gabriel ascending into the heavens, I felt at once flattered and perverse. Afterward, in the parking lot, I was introduced by my parents to the daughter of some Lebanese friends, a pretty girl with long glossy hair and black eyeliner drawn expertly around each intelligent eye. She was home from Princeton, where she was a junior majoring in evolutionary biology, and I suggested that we meet for coffee one afternoon before we each went back to school. But I never did call her.

Maddie knocked on my door the following week wearing a skirt.

Was I supposed to dress up? I asked.

Oh, Maddie said quietly. No. I just thought it would make me feel better to look nice.

We did not say much after that. The cold felt so reproachful of our mission that when we came to a cheerful-looking coffee shop I suggested we stop in for some hot drinks. Maddie declined, on the basis that her stomach was supposed to be empty, so I went in to buy something for myself and we walked on. The clinic was not at all what I’d expected. Vaguely, I’d imagined something more, well, clinical, maybe a modern cinder-block affair, but instead Maddie was going to have her abortion in a three-story brick manor whose gabled roof, multiple chimneys, and lawn running the length of the block looked altogether more like a Victorian asylum. I was not allowed inside with my hot chocolate so to register she went in alone. Standing by the door I watched her walk to the receptionist’s desk, where, with her hood up and her hands in her pockets, she looked like an Eskimo asking directions. Next to the receptionist’s computer stood a miniature foil Christmas tree, strung with colored lights that blinked quickly, then slowly, then quadruple-time, like a disco strobe, then went dark for a long, suspenseful moment before the cycle started over again.

Why was I there? I was eighteen. I had had intercourse with only two girls, each of them once, both times with a condom employed so successfully that we might have been shooting a video for educational purposes. Maybe for this reason I felt faintly censorious of Maddie’s condition—but then of course even the most conscientiously donned condom does not always stay on and/or intact. At any rate, this was not about me. You could draw a circle around me and my morals and another