Baskets

The woman having a miscarriage bumps into the woman getting an abortion. It is New Year’s Eve. They are both in line at the pharmacy, buying ibuprofen. One carries a basket holding a bottle of wine, the other four candy bars. There are many people ahead of them.

“Those look good,” says the first, glancing at the candy. “I love hazelnut.”

The second smiles faintly. Slides over an eye to peek at the other’s goods.

There is a theme to the items. A woman can see.

“That time of the month?” asks the first.

The second starts, faintly, to cry. “No.”

“Oh, sorry. I’m sorry. Not my business.”

“It’s OK,” says the second, wiping her eyes. She grabs a box of tissues from a nearby pyramid and adds it to her basket.

“Hey, would you hand me one of those too? You aren’t miscarrying as well, are you?”

“Miscarrying?” says the second, now blowing her nose.

“You are?”

“No.”

They stand quietly. They move forward.

“I’m aborting this afternoon,” says the second.

“Today?”

The second nods.

“From bad amnio results?” says the first, who has forgotten for a second how other people live.

“Bad what?”

“Oh, right. Of course. Sorry. You don’t want it?”

“It’s just impossible. It’s not a good time,” whispers the second, who is definitely the younger of the two. She’s probably around twenty-three, and the other woman is closing in on forty.

The first nods. “I get it,” she says, rubbing the back of her neck. “I do. It’s just too bad we can’t trade, right? I spent all yesterday crying because mine won’t stay in.”

“I have to take mine out.”

“So it goes,” says the first.

“It’s just not a good time,” repeats the second.

“I’m not judging, honey,” says the first, shuffling forward in line. She picks up and puts down a bottle of champagne from the sale holiday display. “I used to pray all the time not to get pregnant. Once, I was really late? I completely panicked.”

They’re close to the front now, and the checker greets the older woman, ringing up her wine, her pills, two chocolate bars, her tissues, a water, a heating pad.

“Thirty twenty-two,” says the checker.

“And?” asks the second woman. “What happened?”

“With what?” says the first, taking out her wallet.

“You were late?”

“Here’s forty,” says the first. “Oh. Right. Turned out to be nothing. I’m sorry. Bad example.”

The younger woman presses fingers against her eyelids. The checker tightens her ponytail and counts back the change. Thirty-three, thirty-four, forty. She, too, is a woman, but her uterine history will remain mysterious.

The first feels bad now just leaving, so she stands to the side while the second goes through her basket. She has a super-pack of red licorice, four chocolate bars, toothpaste, ibuprofen, tissue, a fashion magazine.

“I read them when I’m nervous,” she says, pointing.

Outside, they stand on the street corner holding their plastic bags. They’ve been released from their line intimacy into the wide and unobligated world. Wind and high blue sky. Restaurant waiters step outside to post specialty prix fixe menus. Customers double park to rush in and out of stores. The younger woman keeps dabbing a tissue at the corners of her eyes. Her face flushes. Her shoulders close in. “I love children,” she murmurs.

The older woman has just spent fourteen thousand dollars to try to get pregnant, including shots all over her torso, anesthesia, and consultations with embryologists. She was pregnant for twenty days, and then the doctor looked at her uterus on the ultrasound screen and found a black seed of a sac with nobody inside it. She can feel the ache beginning to sear a lung-shaped space on the side of her back. The doctor has advised a heating pad and painkillers and rest.

“Do you need company?” asks the older woman, against her instincts. She rips open a chocolate bar.

“No?”

“When is it?”

“Three,” says the younger woman. She points down the street. “Just there.”

“You going alone?” Chewing.

“It’s fine.”

“You should have someone with you. On New Year’s Eve?”

“I can’t tell my parents. My boyfriend’s in Italy.”

The older woman looks at her watch. It’s 1:50. Italy. Jesus. She has other stuff to do. It’s not really the best choice for her own recovery. She opens her water and swallows three ibuprofen. “Let’s go,” she says.

The younger woman is still crying. She murmurs something about her boyfriend’s grandfather’s heart attack in Napoli. The clinic is several doors down, and on the way, they pass a handmade sign in the window of a real estate office that reads, in colorful markers, “Don’t Forget to Make Your Resolutions!”

It just makes the older woman angry, although she is already angry. Even the parking meters up and down the curb are pissing her off. So gray and timed. So bulby and fallopian. Full of coins. At the clinic, the two women read magazines side by side in the lobby, and at 2:45 go in the back together. The younger woman changes shyly in a corner into the crinkly gown and by 3:15 the older woman is squeezing her hand, whispering reassurances against the loud whir of the suction machine and the raggedy breathing of the girl as she weeps. She, the older one, would’ve done it too, at the wrong time, had she been in the same situation. She waited for the right time. She waited, in fact, for such an exact right time that time shimmied forward without her.

The procedure is brief, and the older woman leaves the room as the younger rests and cleans up. Gravity’s starting to exert its tug on her own lining, and she sits on a scoopy orange chair and closes her eyes and thinks about how she will open the wine on her walk home, as she lives nearby, in a top floor condominium with a spare bedroom she’s been using for storage. She’ll drink straight from the brown paper bag like a wino. Then she’ll hunker down and call up her fellow who will come over to watch holiday TV. He is sad too. But he is less sad.

After a while, the younger woman exits and splashes water on her face from the hallway drinking fountain.

“I’m so sorry,” she seems to be saying to the air.

At the street corner, they part.

“Thank you.”

“Good luck.”

“Happy New Year.”

“You too. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

The younger grips tight to her box of tissues as she walks away. She moves through the sheets, thinking of the older woman. I hope I will be like that, she thinks. Later. I hope I would be able to do such a thing as she did. Me, so stupid and young and irresponsible and dumb. She, able to hold my hand.

The older woman watches the younger walk away as she uncorks the wine with her convenient red multitool switchblade. It’s a mild Wednesday in December, and the sunlight is starting to slant into softness.

She remembers, right then, trying to learn how to write an essay. It had been for a college class. She had had such trouble developing an argument. She met with the teacher at office hours, on the fifth floor of an imposing stone building just off the central quad. The teacher had a clear jar of watermelon candies on her desk, and walls touched with black-and-white photographs of rivers in European cities. The woman, then a girl, sat politely in her chair as the teacher leaned forward at her desk, forehead in hand. “Come on,” the teacher had said. “Just write extra. Write more. You can always cut. Don’t hold back so much.” The student had these crisp three-line paragraphs. There was never anything to cut. She is reminded of it now, beginning her slow walk home, knit up with bitter jealousy of the young woman, who is hunched and buckled over with tears and self-hatred as she drifts down the sidewalk in the other direction. The older woman thinks of her teacher pacing around the office, waving a red pen. “I can’t use the red pen with you,” she said. “I want to! It’s my job! Make me use the red pen!”

But what do I want to say, the woman remembers herself thinking, sitting in that oak chair in the rusty bookish office on the fifth floor. What more is there possibly to say?