The Original 1982
Lori Carson
Epigraph
What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.
—Gabriel García Márquez
Contents
Epigraph
Prologue
Part 1
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Part 2: Minnow
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
Forty-five
Forty-six
Forty-seven
Forty-eight
Forty-nine
Fifty
Fifty-one
Fifty-two
Fifty-three
Fifty-four
Fifty-five
Fifty-six
Fifty-seven
Fifty-eight
Fifty-nine
Sixty
Sixty-one
Sixty-two
Sixty-three
Sixty-four
Sixty-five
Sixty-six
Sixty-seven
Sixty-eight
Sixty-nine
Seventy
Seventy-one
Part 3: The Original 2010
Seventy-two
Seventy-three
Seventy-four
Seventy-five
Seventy-six
Seventy-seven
Seventy-eight
Seventy-nine
Eighty
Eighty-one
Eighty-two
Eighty-three
Eighty-four
Eighty-five
Eighty-six
Eighty-seven
Eighty-eight
Eighty-nine
Ninety
Ninety-one
Ninety-two
Ninety-three
Ninety-four
Ninety-five
Ninety-six
Ninety-seven
Ninety-eight
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
You were the first, Little Fish.
We were walking on Columbus Avenue from the Sheridan, the building where your father lived, to the Café Miriam, where I worked as a waitress. I had terrible morning sickness and had to sit on the curb to keep from throwing up. Your father told me to put my head between my knees.
The Café Miriam was a restaurant on the west side of Columbus. It was across the street from the Museum of Natural History and a big neighborhood hangout in those days. It was there your father and I first met. I was working brunches and lunches, mostly. I’d never waited tables before, but there wasn’t much to it, just hard work.
I remember exactly where he was seated, at a four-top by the window, across from the bar. He had three friends with him. One was the music journalist Roberto Rodriguez, and the other two were fans or yes-men. Your father was famous, they said, the Bob Dylan of his country. When he saw me he grabbed his heart and gasped, pretending I was too beautiful to bear. He was a master at seduction, charming and bright with intelligent dark eyes and a Cupid’s-bow mouth.
He could have any woman he wanted, and he had plenty. I was twenty-one, a former art school student and Long Island girl, slender with long dirty-blond hair and hazel eyes, pretty in a natural way. I still am, and it’s thirty years later. Your father rightly predicted I’d be a handsome woman as I aged. He was thirteen years my senior, but looked even older than that. His hairline was receding and he wore a Hawaiian shirt with a pair of baggy jeans belted up high. He seemed more mature for other reasons, too. He was street-smart and well educated, the scrappiest dog on the block. He liked to win and was used to winning.
If you had inherited the best traits of both of us, you’d have been smart and a beauty, a lover of music, a sensitive girl. I’m fairly certain your father would have broken your heart the way he broke mine. He didn’t want you to be born and never had any children after. He was his own child, the apple of his own eye: an artist, showman, and politician. I spared you that at least. But I spared you life itself and for that I’m filled with regret.
If I could go back to any day in my life, I’d go back to that morning on Columbus Avenue, morning sickness, head between my knees. I’d go back with courage. I’d say:
“Maestro, I’m not having an abortion. Get ready. You’re going to have a child.”
And since I’m the writer of this story, and can do whatever I want, that’s what I’ll do. Go back to that day in 1982.
Part 1
One
Gabriel Luna has a Daily News rolled up in his back pocket. He’s looking forward to his breakfast, eggs over easy with bacon and sausage both, maybe a side of ham. He doesn’t much like having to deal with anyone else’s problems. Not even mine, and he loves me. That’s what he says and what all his friends and former girlfriends tell me. But I’m pregnant and he doesn’t want me to be pregnant. He can’t forget about it either, although I try not to mention it. But I’m sick. I’m sick as hell all the time.
I love him with another kind of sickness. The kind that makes me forget I have an opinion of my own or any wishes that don’t fall in neatly with his. I’m young but this doesn’t quite explain it. There’s a wound in me that I know about but have not yet begun to examine and take apart. It makes me compliant, and more than that: it makes me believe I have no right to my own life.
Gabriel and I make love every night except for the ones we spend apart. We use no birth control other than his pulling out at the last second. Every once in a while, he doesn’t pull out. It’s a special gift he gives me.
“This is for you, Mami. Nobody else.”
He says it in a rush as he comes. Coming inside me is what distinguishes the sex he has with me from the sex he has with other women, all unprotected. He gives me a venereal disease that year, too, a gift that keeps on giving.
But this isn’t a story about Gabriel Luna or his selfishness. This is a story about a girl who gets to be born. One of those nights, when he doesn’t pull out, it happens. Your life begins.
In 1982, there aren’t any protesters yet, no right-to-lifers. People are still reeling from illegal abortion, still euphoric about the fact that there is choice. Even the word abortion has no stigma. It means freedom, liberation, the right to choose.
Not that I’m aware of all that.
I believe you are a speck of protoplasm and that I’ll have other ch
ances.
I think there’s no way he will allow it.
I watch Gabriel eat his breakfast at the Café Miriam. It makes me sick to smell the cooked meat. I want to rest my head on the table as he reads aloud to me from the paper. He explains what is really going on in the world. I love listening to him. I love his accent, the way when he speaks English he stresses the wrong syllables and confuses his prepositions. He reads between the lines to see America’s complicity in all the world’s problems. He calls the U.S. North America out of respect for his own country and all the countries of Latin America. He feels superior to the North Americans, who are soft and ignorant, but feels better than his own people, too, because they don’t live at the center of things, in New York City, as he does. His intention is to show these norteamericanos what he can do. Then go home a hero.
Two
The next day we go to the clinic. It’s in a hospital on the Upper East Side. Gabriel is afraid he’ll be recognized but he comes anyway. He’s wearing aviator sunglasses with dark lenses and a Mets baseball cap, pulled down low. If anyone sees him he’ll say he’s here with a friend. He’s a Catholic, too. It’s not okay with him. But it’s more okay than the alternatives.
I leave him sitting in the waiting room and go with the nurse to change into a blue hospital gown, open in the back. I lie down on a cold metal table, legs spread apart, my icy feet resting on the metal stirrups. I’m given something to relax me and start to give in to it.
Just as I’m about to go under, it hits me. I can’t go through with it.
I open my eyes and try to sit up.
“Wait.”
“It’s okay,” the nurse says. She’s holding my hand. She’s only a few years older than I am.
“Lie back now,” says the doctor.
But it’s not okay and I won’t lie back, though my limbs are heavy from the sedation. I feel as if I’m levitating off the table, climbing legless to the floor. The room is tilting left and right but I make it to the wall and move toward the door. I’m aware of a commotion behind me as I close my eyes and fall to my knees.
“I want to keep the baby,” I tell them.
Another nurse, or maybe she’s an aide, makes her way to me through the confusion. She takes hold of my arm and helps me up, leads me back to the rows of beds where the women who have had abortions are recovering. I get into a bed to sleep off the drugs, pull a thin blanket over my back. When I wake up a little while later, I remember. I haven’t gone through with it. I’m still pregnant! I’m flooded with relief.
Gabriel is so mad, he won’t talk to me. He takes me back to my small apartment on East Seventy-eighth Street and leaves me at the door. I climb up the ladder into my loft bed and sleep for twenty-four hours. When I wake up, I’m hungry for mint chip ice cream. The cats wind around my ankles. They’re hungry, too. I fill their bowl from a bag of store-brand cat food. I open the half refrigerator stuck in the hallway near the bathroom. It’s empty except for some wilted celery and a couple of packets of soy sauce. A rotten smell emanates from it and turns my stomach. For a moment I’m terrified. How will I take care of a baby when I can barely look after these two cats and myself?
Three
A few days later, Gabriel leaves for Puerto Rico to play some concerts. He’ll be gone three weeks. In the original 1982, I go with him. I wear a purple bikini. I’m flat-chested, skinny as a boy. He tells me all the women on the beach wish they had a body like mine and I feel proud. We’ve put the abortion in the back of our minds or maybe we’re pretending the pregnancy never happened.
Every afternoon we walk from the beach through the hotel lobby to have lunch in the restaurant. A guy plays the piano there all day.
“Baby, how come he plays in the lobby of a hotel and you play in a stadium?” I ask.
Gabriel laughs, but I’m sincere. I’m trying to figure out what makes someone succeed or fail. I want to be successful like him. I write songs. I play the guitar a little. I think if he can do it, so can I.
In his band, there are two girl singers, Estelle and Mildred. Mildred is down-to-earth, a Puerto Rican American woman who writes the vocal arrangements and gets along with everybody. I ask her questions about how she got started. I sing one of my songs to her on the beach.
“One day, maybe I’ll sing with your band,” she says encouragingly.
The other one, Estelle, is harder to read. A Jewish girl sort of passing for Latina, she’s a six-footer with wide hips and big legs. I can tell Gabriel likes her. Two weeks into that trip I find out he’s going to her hotel room after rehearsal.
But none of that matters. Because this time I don’t go with him to Puerto Rico. I stay behind in New York to work extra shifts at the restaurant. I stop drinking alcohol and start saving my money.
Four
At the Café Miriam my fellow waitresses are artists, dancers, and musicians. We’re proud to be nonprofessionals. We’re only waiting tables until our circumstances change.
The customers know it. They ask us what we really do. They smile and say, “Someday I’ll say I knew you when.”
We believe it’s true. It’s just a matter of time.
Sofia is in an off-off-Broadway play. Janelle is a member of a modern dance company. Nina makes sculpture out of things she finds on the street.
Vicky, our manager, tries to bring us back down to earth. “Quit your daydreaming and clear table six,” she says lightly. She’s pretty cool as far as managers go. She has long red hair and the whitest skin covered in freckles.
I’m not the only one at the restaurant who’s pregnant. Another girl, Callie, is, too. She and her boyfriend are getting married in a couple of weeks. She’s an actress but says she’ll take a break from auditioning once her baby is born. She looks as tired as I feel. I catch her eye and we smile.
When I leave the restaurant at the end of my shift, it’s still light out. Every day it gets dark a little later. Excitement rides high in my chest. It’s almost spring in New York, and the scent of it is in the air, floating down from the tight buds of apple blossom trees.
I talk to you all the time, Little Fish. I tell you everything I see: Look at all the people walking with a lighter step, winter coats over their arms, ready for warmer days.
Five
In 1982, the most popular names for girls are Jessica, Jennifer, and Ashley. But I’m not one to follow convention. My own name, Lisa, was so common growing up, it was usually paired with my last initial. I want yours to be yours alone. I consider the names of flowers and birds. I think of family names: Pearl, Rose, Lily, Sparrow. I change my mind every day. I like boys’ names for girls, too—Jamie, Syd, Max—and the names of colors, Blue or Green like the songs by Joni Mitchell.
I play you lullabies on my Martin. Before you, the songs I wrote were lonely songs, but now I write love songs to you and your father.
Gabriel gets back from Puerto Rico and calls from the airport.
“Hey, I miss you,” he says tenderly. “Meet me at the house.”
Although I’m dead tired, I shave my legs, get in a taxi, and ride across the park. I let myself into his apartment and get into bed to wait for him. When I hear his key in the lock, my heart starts to beat crazily. His footsteps on the hardwood floor, the sound of his voice as he says my name, his passionate kiss, his skin on my skin. Loving him is a drug I need to live.
In the original 1982, it’s unbelievable what happens. I get pregnant again and have another abortion. Gabriel breaks up with me. He says he’s come to the realization that I don’t give him anything. I write him a poem about the irony of that statement. I’ve given him two little babies and he’s helped me flush them d
own the drain. We’re apart for two weeks, then he calls and we get back together.
But there can be no second pregnancy, not while I’ve got you in my belly. I’ve made my decision and there’s no changing it. Gabriel tries every way he knows to get me to reconsider. He argues, he reasons. He’s sugar one day and vinegar the next. He brings me ice cream and spreads Vic’s VapoRub on my chest when I catch a cold. He calls me Pajarito, an endearment that means “little bird.”
Then he punishes me and doesn’t call. He’s seeing Estelle, I’m sure of it, and others, too. He’s never been faithful, but he doesn’t try so hard to hide it now.
I think of you growing inside me and it gives me the will to stand up to him. I think of your tiny heart forming, your webbed hands and feet. I go to the library and take out books called Your Baby and What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I find out it’s normal to run up the stairs and feel out of breath, or gag on the subway at the smell of someone’s dirty hair.
I worry a lot. Every time I feel a little ache or pinch, I’m afraid something will go wrong. I worry about what it will be like once you’re born. How will I know how to take care of you? But then I see all the babies and children in strollers and playgrounds, on every street in New York City, and think about how they all got here the same way. Some of those children were born to mothers who were as scared and baffled as me. I think maybe it will be okay. Maybe it’s even good that I’m young. I’ll be able to chase after you and keep up with you. There’s nothing I won’t do to make sure you have a happy life. Isn’t that a law of physics, when you change one thing, all the others change, too? Maybe even Gabriel Luna will be transformed.
Six
Gabriel plays at the Vantage on Tuesday nights. These are special Latin-meets-jazz concerts. He’s always nervous no one will show up, but every week there’s a line around the block. It’s thrilling to go with him. I get dressed up and hold his hand as we run alongside all the people waiting to get in. Sitting in the audience among the crowd of salsa fans, I marvel at his talent, his ability to capture the crowd. When he morphs one of his own songs into Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” the women in the audience start to howl, and jealousy comes over me like a creeping rash.