Memoir of a Fiction by Claudine Mussoto

The abortion wasn’t the commencement or the culmination. The termination wasn’t the central event.

1.

It was a day when a more fanatical human placard did not carry a gun with which to shoot and kill the adult female receptionist. The procedure transpired in the summer of 1982 on Beacon Street in Brookline, an upscale suburban sister to Boston and, across the river, to academic Cambridge and its proletariat neighbor, Somerville, where I lived. Human billboards displayed the evolution of the species through its bloodied protozoan, bird, and fish forms at a proscribed distance from the clinic entrance. I and my volunteer escort were unmolested up the short flight of concrete stairs and into the locked steel and glass door of the health center brownstone.

The one-night stand wasn’t the inception or the finale. The encounter wasn’t the foremost incident.

2.

I drove a pea-green Vega always famished for oil or a yellow Pacer with a skewed front panel. The tryst occurred in June with Tim or Jim, a guy with an unremarkable name but plausibly Irish Catholic heritage who worked at a sports store adjacent to the waxing salon. On the cement sidewalk of the strip mall, he asked to see my shorn thighs; asked to see me. I didn’t understand that to mean my naked body and available orifices. Discernment would not be among my skill sets for two more decades. I was twenty-three. I found his apartment in a complex of lifeless red bricks in Tarrytown, a river settlement north of Manhattan.

The doctor was young and male. The procedure room was cold, white, and antiseptic.

3.

The quickening was perceptible the morning after. I heard my voice as seven years old, flirtatious and innocent through lost front teeth, while I spoke to the crown of the nice Jewish boy’s thick brown-black curls between the v of my spread legs in stirrups. This was that summer of 1982 six maybe eight weeks post assignation, because forty years ago it took thirty days for the urine test to read positive. I spoke of imminent graduate school, not the distant sultry fuck or fear or that I knew no one in this stiff city or that I’d left a note on the self-righteous lower working class kitchen table in Westchester to say that I’d gone to Massachusetts to earn a master’s degree. The doctor called me a good girl.

Tim Jim the breeder was sweaty and perverse. Humidity and crimson flushed the procedure room.

4.

I lost one fastener in my un- or re-clothing. He answered the door in the un-showered damp hair and uniform of a baseball referee. One rugged hand cupped the bowl of a goblet glistening ruby; two fingers pinched the narrow end of a joint. I’d dressed for a date in new clothes with buttons: an opaque peach blouse with a strand down its back; beige pants with ankle closures. I missed the chance to leave in a protracted moment of mental paralysis outside his bedroom door: the dilemma between undesired sex and unbearable ridicule. There was one long, languid, lush fuck with sounds and without a diaphragm, then a silent pointing to and nodding at on the playing field: prompts for mutual masturbation. I left as he feigned sleep in the hot wind of a floor fan.

The torment wasn’t new or unfamiliar. An older sibling wasn’t the principal tyrant.

5.

She’d joined the Air Force or Army, the military, and cackled in disbelief when she asked, and I replied I had a date. Anne, the eldest, my older sister by fourteen months, the one who’d called me fat and ugly and sneered that I used twenty-five-cent words for the fifteen years since I’d been eight, and who I’d believed, was visiting that 1982 June, maybe from New Mexico, maybe Texas, the southwest. Reverberations of that mockery caused the pregnant pause before the sportsman’s lair door and my intelligent mind’s inability to choose a movie alone over a lay with a rancid player. A date-length interval had to pass before I returned home that summer night.

The ordeal wasn’t uncommon. An uncle and grandfather weren’t the primary predators.

6.

It wasn’t sex but sexual and condoned because what can devout Roman Catholics do except pawn off and obscure unwelcome facts. The uncle, the first, from the time I was four and his wife had given birth to their first, a son, was my godfather and an alcoholic with a devastated, hemorrhaging heart. The grandfather, the second, paternal, from the time I was seven because I was disposable but strong, was mean; everyone’s bastard. It was sex and allowed because what can spineless Roman Catholics do except offer sacrifice to what they fear.

There is blonde with blue eyes. There is brunette with brown eyes.

7.

A decade post two master’s degrees with honors, with dark hair and eyes still at forty-two, I recognized my high intelligence, perceived and believed in it for the first time. I inquired mutely with no elder sibling in attendance: ugly because I’m not blonde and blue and don’t have full lips that say tooken for the past tense of take, have trim sensuous lips that speak abscond; fat in sizes 5, 7, 9 and finally 12, with un-witnessed emotionally distraught interludes of 14 and 16 and no need for fad water and grapefruit diets that cause belching and ulcerated stomach?

There is brunette with brown eyes. There is not brunette with brown eyes.

8.

Maybe I was chubby from the age of eight until I was twelve when I lost fifteen pounds for a health class self-improvement project and became a size five. I kept a journal. I recorded what I ate, how many calories I consumed, and the particulars of my exercise regime; maybe I did twenty-five sit-ups in the mix, leg lifts, and forward bends. The teacher wanted to know how I felt. I had no idea. Maybe I was chubby with baby fat. Maybe I was chubby to insulate myself from related adult male pedophiles. Maybe I lost weight for my tonton and grandpa paramours.

The birth wasn’t the beginning or the end. The delivery wasn’t the pivotal happening.

9.

A pious Roman Catholic does not abort, only Jesus, Mary, and Joseph permitted to bestow mercy. That my mother did not want to be pregnant again and afterward could not love me had no relation to my being. It was her fiction that in the interim long-term became my non-fiction. I was born into a family who are not my people for reasons of evolution, for purposes more elevated than those that consume most humans. The familial sacrifice was mundane: its hurt diminished to a soft ache; its loneliness and grief to a gently contoured edge. It began with the mother, the original perpetrator. It will end with the father, the superlative, and just force.

Claudine Mussoto

Image by Anne Karakash from Pixabay – An examination/treatment couch covered with a paper sheet.

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