Girl, Calendar 1979

by Ellen Taylor

These days start with an X on the calendar,
meaning No Blood.  Five days late isn’t too bad,
but ten days late she wakes up to dread —
like a dead parent, or a plane crash,
and a hunger no food will fill.

The sour cashier doesn’t make eye contact
under the fluorescent lights of CVS,
the home pregnancy test package
slipped into a plastic sleeve
as transparent as she feels
walking home, pregnant.
She is sure of it.  Her small breasts
announcing themselves for the first time,
her fear growing like a tumor.

Just as she thought, the dark brown
ring of positivity appears like a planetary
halo, and she with no ring and not even a boyfriend
feels herself float out of her bloating body
over her studio apartment like a Chagall figure.
Outside, the sky is blue as a baby blanket,
children pedal their bicycles on the sidewalk
before mothers call them home for dinner.

She’s lucky, she tells herself, no coat hanger
needed, no unmarked door on a dark street.
She still has money saved from baby-sitting
for the neighbor who works nights at the track,
her husband left her and her three kids
who love hotdogs in a skillet and toasted buns.
She’s been waitressing the morning shift
at the diner, filling coffee cups and juice glasses,
scraping runny eggs off plates into the trash.

She’s lucky, she tells herself.  She’s 18.  Now,
there are clinics where women and their children
wait outside with posterboards of bloody fetuses,
larger than life, red splotched babies
bobbing up and down the street
above the protester’s shoulders,
“Jesus Loves You,” they call to her.
“Don’t kill your baby.”  A middle-aged woman
older than her mother, takes her arm
and leads her inside the clinic disguised as a house,
to the worn couches and tables strewn with pamphlets.
All the chairs but one are taken.  She sits on the nubby upholstery,
the women around her like fellow passengers on a train
greet her with weary smiles.

She’s lucky, she tells herself.  No coat hanger, no coat hanger
she tells herself in the room, where there is a dragonfly painted on the ceiling and a warm, smooth hand that squeezes hers when the pain starts.  They remind her to breathe.  And she does.
She breathes with her own sort of labor, until it’s over.
Home, she pulls off her boots and pulls a blanket over her,
a thick down quilt that swaddles her in warmth and safety
and for the first time in weeks, she sleeps, she dreams, she flies.