It was a warm September morning and I was sitting on a bench at the bus stop when Teresa sauntered over and sat down next to me. I knew it was her, even though I was looking down. I could see her big, white work shoes out of the corner of my eye. She had to step over a McDonald’s bag with something smashed inside it, probably a hamburger. I could see the ketchup soaking through the bag. In this neighborhood, I was surprised some hobo crack head hadn’t picked it up for breakfast. Teresa sat down, but didn’t lean back. “Don’t worry it’s dry,” I said as I waved my hand toward the newly spray-painted “Sur 13” on the back of the bench. “Spider and Rico did it yesterday. Nice job, huh?” I asked. Teresa nodded her agreement.
I swear I used to feel like my whole life was spent at the bus stop. I was seventeen then and I took the bus everywhere. I was always going somewhere because I never wanted to be where I was. At the time, I was living with Rico, my boyfriend. My mom threatened to kick me out if I didn’t stop seeing him. She didn’t like his gangster hype or the drugs he sold. Instead of breaking up with him, I moved in with him and then I had to take the bus to high school every morning. I really wanted to get my diploma. Everyone said I wasn’t going to graduate because of the baby on the way, but I figured I could make it until the end of the school year. I was only two months pregnant. I had a few friends that had babies and quit school. After that, they couldn’t even get a job at the mall. That wasn’t going to be me. I wasn’t going to let this thing, this mistake, ruin my life.
Teresa was twenty years old and she was a waitress at an old diner called the Red Barn. I was telling Teresa about how I got the bruise on my cheek. “I know that sometimes there is no right or wrong, just different ways of looking at the same situation,” I explained to her. “Rico says that I make him too angry and he’s right. There have been a lot of times when I knew he was getting mad, but instead of backing off, I just kept at him. Is it more wrong of me to push him or is it more wrong of him to hit me? ‘Cause I always hit him back, every time he hits me, so maybe there is no right or wrong.”
“I don’t think anyone should be hitting anyone,” said Teresa, “but a man shouldn’t be hitting a woman at all, especially not a pregnant one. They’re too strong. He could really hurt you or the baby.” She crossed her arms over her red and white checkered apron. I wouldn’t be caught dead in that loser uniform. If she had washed off two layers of makeup and put her big, sprayed hair in two pig tails, she’d have looked just like a milk maid straight off the farm.
Teresa wasn’t really my friend. I talked to her at the bus stop every morning, but I didn’t ever take her advice on anything. Teresa didn’t date, so she didn’t know much about men. She was kind of ugly. She had a really big head and a big nose and bad, nasty teeth, probably from her druggie days. I still liked Teresa though, she was real smart. She was always reading something at the bus stop, but she didn’t know anything about love or relationships. She said she had sex with a lot of guys when she was using, but never had any real boyfriends, so I didn’t take her advice about my problems with Rico. Teresa wasn’t a very understanding person anyway. She was always acting better than everyone else and always preaching about God. She said she found Jesus when she got clean and then He helped her get that waitress job with the great tips that she always bragged about. I thought that maybe Jesus could have got her something a little better than that. Anyway, she was always criticizing me and Rico. She told me I was stupid for having sex with him because he was a player. Then she would tell me that he was abusive because of the hitting. I didn’t think Rico was a player, but looking back on things now, well, she might have been right about the hitting. At the time, I thought that maybe the hitting was a sign that Rico just wasn’t my soul mate. That’s why we made each other so mad all the time.
I didn’t think that Rico was a player, but he did have one other girl, Stephanie, that he was seeing. Players screw everybody and lie about it. Rico didn’t do that stuff. He was a nice guy. He was just in love with both of us and he hadn’t made his decision about who he wanted to be with yet. I told Teresa, “Everyone who is dating has to make the decision to be with only one person sometime. You don’t meet someone and just dump all your other choices overnight. Rico is just taking his time making up his mind to be sure he makes the right choice between me and Stephanie, and if I nag him about it too much, he won’t choose me.” Now, when I look back on things, I think that maybe he shouldn’t have taken so long to decide.
The bus came just in time to save me from Teresa’s preaching about Rico cheating on me. I didn’t know why she always called it cheating. She just didn’t get it. I understood Rico, so it didn’t matter to me what the bus stop waitress thought. Grateful for the chance to move away from her, I picked up my backpack and slung it over my right shoulder. My long, black hair got caught under the strap. Teresa pulled my hair out for me and said, “I swear, Maria, you should cut your hair. It goes all the way down to your butt. It must give you headaches. By the way, how are you feeling lately with the baby and all? Are you still sick all the time?”
“Nope,” I said. “The sick feeling has gone away, but I still feel bloated all the time.” Then whispering to her, I said, “Monday, I had a little blood in my panties.”
“How come you didn’t go to the clinic right away?” she asked, looking at me kind of funny. “Aren’t you worried?”
“No,” I said. “I’m sure everything is fine. I feel okay and I don’t want to cost Rico any more money for extra visits.” Teresa just rolled her eyes and gently pushed me ahead of her onto the bus.
The bus arrived at Teresa’s stop first, and I was glad because I didn’t want to talk to her about the baby anymore. I just wanted to ignore it and forget for a minute that it even existed. I felt like nobody ever wanted to talk about me anymore. They only asked about the baby. Even Rico paid more attention to the baby than to me. Sometimes he acted really excited about the baby and he patted by belly. One time he brought home a Little Golden Book about a train that said over and over again, “I think I can, I think I can." He made me sit down on the couch. It was really nice because he put my feet up on the coffee table and he put a pillow behind my head and one under my feet. He rubbed my belly and kissed it and then read the train story to my belly. That little train thought he could do anything and I remember thinking that Rico could probably do anything. Every time he said he would do something, he did it. He always came through for me and for his homies. Rico was a guy you could count on. Not like my old man, my father. He was never around much, and when he was, he just drank and yelled at us. If we got in his way or talked too loud when he was home, my mom would smack us good. I know she did it to protect us. It was much better to get a quick smack from her than to get punched by him.
I liked that Rico read to my belly. It was so sweet that it made me cry and I stopped crying when I was seven. Nobody ever felt sorry for me anyway, so why bother crying. I felt like a big baby crying that day about a stupid train story. Rico said it was just that pregnant women get really emotional about their babies, but I wasn’t thinking about the baby. I was thinking that Rico wouldn’t be doing all that nice stuff for me if I wasn’t pregnant. It was all for the baby. None of it was for me. Rubbing my belly was pretty much the only time he touched me anymore. I wondered if he was having more sex with Stephanie.
As I sat on the bus, I glared down at my stomach. I had a pooch there where it had been flat before. My belly ring seemed to stick out at an awkward angle and my favorite jeans were starting to get too tight. I didn’t want to get fat and I didn’t want to give up these really cute jeans. They showed off my butt and I loved them because they were Mudd jeans. I was so lucky to find them at the thrift store. The bus lurched a few times and the fumes were pretty bad. Usually, I would get nauseous on the bus ride, but that week I had felt pretty good. It was great, like I wasn’t even pregnant, and on the bus that day, I remember pretending in my head that I wasn’t going to have a baby at all. I imagined myself selling all kinds of Mary Kay make-up and winning a cruise and a pink car. Sometimes, I even pretended that I was going to college and when I graduated my parents and all the ‘cholos’ from the neighborhood that talk shit about me, came and saw me. After the ceremony, they all hugged me and told me how wrong they were about me and apologized for being mean. Then they all asked to borrow money from me and I looked them straight in the eye and said, “No.”
The bus came to Teresa’s stop and she said goodbye and wished me luck at the clinic. I watched her exit the bus and walk down the sidewalk. I began to think about what Teresa had said about Rico and the hitting. I spent a lot of time defending Rico, but the truth was, I think a lot of the time Rico started the fights on purpose, just so he could get mad and stomp out of the house. While he was out, he would go down to the club and hang out with Spider to “cool down.” That way, he got out of the house without me nagging him about him spending more time with Spider than with me. If I complained about it later, he would say he was planning on spending time with me until I started a fight and drove him away. I used to believe him when he said that stuff and I wondered why I was always nagging him. After being with Rico for about a year, I started to realize that he was getting me all worked up on purpose. So after that realization, I ignored him. He didn’t like being ignored. I think that’s when the hitting started. He couldn’t get me to nag him or fight with him because I was ignoring his comments and he got really mad. The first time I ignored him, he swung his fist at me hard, landing his knuckles on my jaw. After hitting me that day, he went to Stephanie’s apartment and stayed the whole night. Eventually, I learned to fight with him, but just a little bit, so he would just go hang with Spider. If I fought too much or ignored him completely, he'd hit me then run to Stephanie, saying it was my fault.
When I first got pregnant, I was excited because I thought he would dump Stephanie for sure and we would start a family together, maybe even get married. But now I was just praying that he didn’t take off and leave me with this thing all by myself. If he did, my mom wouldn’t help me. The day I told her I was pregnant, she called me a whore. “You don’t deserve to have a child!” she screamed in my face.
As the bus continued to roll along, my thoughts drifted toward my older half-sister, Rosa. She was my mom’s first kid from Julio. Sometimes my dad would be gone for weeks and Julio would come around. My mom always had a lot of men, and she called me a whore. I wondered if Rosa would let me stay with her if I left Rico. I didn’t think she could afford to keep me and a baby. If I went to work, who would watch it for us? At least Rico made enough money on the street to pay for the stuff we needed, and he didn’t ask me to work or quit school. The way I saw it, I was stuck with him, bound together by the baby. This thought sometimes made me giddy with happiness and sometimes it scared me to death.
I sat in my bus seat and watched faceless people walk by on the sidewalks and colorless cars pass on the street, until finally the bus stopped and I got off. The clinic was right in front of the bus stop. It was in a really bad neighborhood. I think it was Crips territory. I pulled the sleeve of my jacket down and held the material between my thumb and forefinger, trying to hide the “13” tattooed on my wrist. It wouldn’t be a welcome sight around here. The outside of the clinic was clean, but the paint was so chipped that it was hard to tell what color it had once been. There wasn’t a sign on the top of the building; instead there was a large piece of wood leaning against the wall. It had the word “clinic” spray painted on it with an arrow pointed toward the door.
Before I walked in, I checked my purse to make sure I had the ten dollars they charged me for each visit. The room was small and it smelled like pine sol. There was a counter near the door where the receptionist sat, and a bunch of hard, plastic chairs against the opposite wall. Between the chairs and the counter was an old, wooden coffee table covered with outdated magazines.
“Name?” said the woman behind the counter. Her name tag said Stephanie. My skin crawled and I glared at her. The woman was old, at least thirty. I knew it wasn’t Rico’s Stephanie, but I still didn’t like her.
“Just what the world needs,” I thought to myself, “another Stephanie.”
“Name?” she said again, impatiently.
“Maria,” I replied as I rubbed my shoe against the baseboard of the counter.
“Uh, your full name. I need your full name,” said Stephanie with a fake smile.
“Maria Consuela Calderon,” I said, looking her in the eye with my own fake smile. “Is Dr. Hubbard in today?” I asked. “I saw her the first time I was here and I’d like to see her again.”
“Yes. She’s here, but you’ll have to take a seat and wait your turn,” said Stephanie pointing to the crowded waiting room.
I remember waiting for what seemed like hours. Finally, Stephanie poked her ugly, sour face into the room and said my name. She led me to a room in the back. It was a small room, painted white with gray trim. There was a sink and counter, an examination bed, a stool and a tray. In the corner was a machine with a little tv screen. I undressed, put on the paper gown Stephanie had given me, and sat there for awhile waiting for the doctor. As I waited, I daydreamed that I was a grown woman in a church dress with a handsome husband and a minivan. In my fantasy, the husband was standing next to me, holding my hand and suggesting baby names. I was so lost in my imagination that I didn’t hear Dr. Hubbard and her assistant enter the room.
“Hi Maria,” said the doctor. “This is Sheila. She’s a student who will be working with me for awhile. Do mind if she observes your check up?” she asked.
“No,” I lied. Dr. Hubbard asked me to lie down and put my feet into the stirrups at the end of the exam table. She and the student moved down to the end of the table, looking up my paper dress. The student asked me to scoot down to the end of the table, so I moved my butt down toward her a few inches. Then she asked me to scoot some more and then more. My butt felt the edge of the table before the puta finally said to stop. Any farther and I would’ve fallen off. Lying flat on my back with my knees in the air, I felt like I was on display at some kind of freak show, or maybe at some alien autopsy where I was the alien or maybe the baby was the alien. I remembered some sci-fi movie where the alien baby rips its way out of the mother, or host, as they called her. That’s how I felt--like a host to this alien invader.
“Have you had any problems since your first visit,” asked Dr. Hubbard.
“No,” I lied again. For some reason I felt like the bloating and the bleeding should be kept secret. I didn’t want her to ask me why I didn’t come in sooner like Teresa had asked. “I haven’t even been getting sick lately either,” I added honestly.
“Well, I’d like to do an ultrasound today,” said the doctor.
“Okay,” I said. “Will it hurt?”
“Not at all,” she explained, as she brought the machine with the little TV screen over to me. Sheila helped her get it set up and then she poured a cold, clear gel onto my stomach. She had a small thing in her hand that kind of looked like a remote control or a computer mouse and she rubbed it over my stomach. As she rubbed, she studied the TV screen carefully. Her face crinkled up and her eyes squinted at the screen.
“Turn up the volume please,” Dr. Hubbard told Sheila. I heard a crackling sound as Sheila turned a knob on the front of the TV, but I heard only a faint static. Sheila gave Dr. Hubbard a funny look and then the doctor took over, rubbing the little thing over my stomach again, this time pressing harder. I could see fuzzy, black and white blobs on the screen, but none of it made any sense to me. Sheila looked confused and worried.
“Maria, I can’t find the baby’s heartbeat,” said Dr. Hubbard. “I don’t want you to worry though. Sometimes they are just hard to pick up on the ultrasound. I’m going to try to get closer to the baby and see if we can find something that way. Okay?”
“Get closer?” I asked. My heart began pumping hard in my chest. “Is there something wrong with the baby?” I asked. All the hair on my body stood on end and my skin suddenly felt cold and prickly. I was scared, terrified, but then, suddenly, another thought flashed through my mind, “I’m free. If the baby’s gone, then I’m free.” The thought sent a shock through me and made my stomach turn. I grimaced and gritted my teeth to keep the bile down. I wanted to throw up. How could I think such an awful thing? What kind of monster am I? Dr. Hubbard saw my reaction and put her arm on my shoulder.
“It’s okay, Maria. Don’t worry about the baby. We don’t know anything yet. Just let me take a look,” she said. “We have a different kind of ultrasound wand that we can insert inside of you to press on the cervix. This will give us a better idea of what’s going on in there. It won’t hurt, but you will feel a lot of pressure. Just lie still.”
I remember laying there on the exam table, wondering if God would strike me with lightening at that very moment. My mother was right about me. I didn’t deserve a baby and I didn’t deserve Dr. Hubbard’s kindness. The doctor pressed and pushed the wand inside of me, but there was still no sound and only blobs on the screen. She finished her exam and helped me sit up so we could talk. She explained to me that the baby had died. As she spoke, my eyes filled with tears and then I started to shake. The sobs slowly took over. My body began to convulse and then lurch violently with each huge sob. I heard the gut-wrenching sounds, but they sounded far away and it took a few seconds for me to realize that the sounds were coming from me. My ears felt like they were stuffed with cotton balls, so it was hard to hear my own voice. Instead of hearing my own cries, I felt the sound waves ripple from within me, like an ocean tide beginning in my stomach and crashing out through my mouth. I collapsed into the doctor’s arms. Even now, when I remember that moment, I’m not sure why I was crying. I just know that I felt so much emotion that it was indescribable. There was no name for it. It wasn’t pain, sadness, relief, fear, shame or remorse. It was all feelings and no feelings all at the same time, an overwhelming emptiness.
Dr. Hubbard and Sheila stayed with me in the room for awhile, until I calmed down. Then the doctor told me that she wanted to schedule me for a D&C the next morning. She told me to clean up and put my clothes back on so I could talk with her in her office.
Dr. Hubbard was sitting behind her desk when I walked into her office. It was a small room with the same bare, white walls of the exam room and the same cheap furniture that was in the waiting room. Dr. Hubbard motioned for me to sit down at the desk across from her. As I sat down, my eyes focused on her certificates and degrees. They hung on the wall behind her and between them was a picture of her leaning against a minivan. In the picture, a handsome, smiling man stood behind her, making bunny ears over her head. They were both laughing.
“Maria, we scheduled you at 9 o’clock tomorrow morning for the D&C procedure,” said the doctor.
“What is a D&C?” I asked.
“It is a dilation and curettage that is performed after miscarriages,” she explained. “It's a simple procedure in which the cervix is dilated and the fetal and placental tissue is suctioned out. It's much easier than waiting for your body to expel the fetus naturally and if we do it soon we can avoid severe cramping and hemorrhaging for you. Do you have any questions about the procedure?” she asked.
“No,” I lied again. Dilation and curettage sounded so violent to me. I just stared at the picture of Dr. Hubbard and the man. Then I asked, “Why did it die?”
She came around from the back of her desk and sat in the empty chair beside me. She took my hand and explained that these things sometimes happened with first pregnancies, especially in younger women. She said that sometimes the body just doesn’t produce enough hormones to support a new pregnancy and that it was not a sign of problems with future pregnancies. Then she asked me if I had any more questions, but I only had one.
“Could the baby feel my feelings?” I asked. I really wanted to ask her if the baby could read my mind, feel my fear, my resentment. Instead, I just stared at that picture of her and her man.
Dr. Hubbard tilted her head slightly giving me a curious look. Slowly she began to shake her head. “No,” she said in a small, quizzical tone. “The fetus couldn’t feel your feelings. It was too underdeveloped to feel anything.” There was a long pause and then she asked with concern, “Maria, are you going to be okay? Is there someone we can call to come get you?”
“No,” I replied. “I’ll just take the bus.” I sat outside on the bench, waiting for the bus. I thought about taking the next bus to Reseda to stay with Rosa. Now, it would just be me. I knew she would drive me back tomorrow for the procedure and then, maybe, I could stay with her. My mom might even let me come home, but only if I left Rico for good. Besides, I didn't want to deal with her men always hitting on me. Then I tried to imagine my life without Rico. I had been with him since I was fourteen. I can’t even remember what things were like before him. Sometimes, it seemed like he was always a part of my life.
The first year we were together, for my birthday he gave me a little jewelry box with an angel on it. He said it was because I was like a beautiful angel to him, a gift from heaven. It was the first birthday present anyone had ever given me. If I could have had a baby girl, I thought to myself, I could’ve given that jewelry box to her on her first birthday and Rico could’ve read her the little train book. As I sat daydreaming of a baby and a peaceful life with Rico, the bus to Reseda arrived and the doors opened. I thought about getting up, but I felt so heavy, like I was glued to the bench. My body felt drained and my head felt kind of cloudy. Unable to decide, I just sat there. The driver stared at me for a minute and then, as if in a dream, he slowly closed the doors and the bus floated away.
The next bus would be my bus back home to Rico, the last bus of the evening. If I didn't get on it, I would have been out there in the dark for the rest of the night and that neighborhood was the worst I’d ever been in. The bus to Rosa’s house was gone and I couldn’t sit at the bus stop forever. I would have to get on the next bus. I thought about getting off at a different stop, but I wouldn’t know anyone in those neighborhoods and that was dangerous.
So, in this way my decision was made. Making no decision at all became the most pivotal decision of my life. Instead of getting on that bus, I just sat there. Why hadn't I gotten on that bus? I think I wanted to. Looking back at things now, so many years later, I know that I should have, but I didn't. I sat at that bus stop for what felt like forever, waiting for the next bus home. As I waited, I imagined another bus pulling up to the stop, a bus painted bright, sunny colors, like the Partridge Family's bus. On this bus people were singing cheerfully, “I think I can, I think I can,” and it made me feel happy inside, in spite of the tears running down my cheek.
Contributor’s Note: I am the mother of two awesome little girls and I work for Corrections Corporation of America. In my free time I enjoy writing short stories. My dream is to someday publish my own anthology.
Though one can presuppose that Coleridge was at least moderately inspired by his addiction to laudanum, this literary scholar would prefer to concentrate exclusively on the poem—isolated from all outside influence. So, please--read this poem and post your thoughts here. Do you think the old Mariner ever attains peace? What do you think is the message here?
