I want my father to be impressed with my potential career, and I say, “Who knows? Maybe I’ll nail a fantastic job. Some of them pay two thousand a week.”
He cuts his tamale into neat little sections and inserts a piece into his mouth. “So you’re looking for a job. That’s nice.” He chews slowly and swallows. “I was talking about your long-term goals.”
To get Russ to dump his girlfriend? “What long-term goals?”
“Marriage. Family.”
No pressure or anything. “I’m sure I can worry about that after I find a job.”
“I think you’re missing my point.” He inserts another piece. “I can’t pay your tuition this semester.”
I nearly choke on my refried beans. “What?”
“Too many leases went sour in the past few months and I need to invest my own capital into the business. I’m sorry.”
“But, but Dad…” Oh. My. God. What am I going to do?
“I’m sorry, Kimmy, but money’s tight, and I don’t believe that sending you to business school is my best investment.”
“How can you say that?” I ask, my hands shaking. “What could be a better investment than arming me with an MBA?”
“You won’t be in the workforce long enough to make back that kind of money. If you go back to LWBS-”
“I’m going back,” I say, suddenly determined. “I’ll take out a loan.” Russ takes out loans. Lauren takes out loans.
“You want to go forty-five thousand dollars into debt?”
“I’ll pay it back after I graduate. I’ll get a job that pays well. I told you, I have two interviews lined up-one with O’Donnel and one with BCG.” I got rejected by everyone else, but whatever.
“Honey, you’re twenty-six now, right?”
I nod, blinking back tears.
“Even if you do get an incredible job after graduation, you’ll only keep it for a few years. You’ll be approaching thirty and you’ll want to settle down.”
Settle down? “You can’t be serious. In case you haven’t heard, two-income families are the norm.”
He scowls, and it’s not from the jalapeños. “What about the kids?”
I’m not even dating the guy I’m screwing, and my father is talking kids? My back is beginning to spasm from the hard wood chair. “That’s what day care is for.”
“So you’ll ship your kids off to day care? You want your children to be raised by strangers?”
I was shipped off to day care when my mother had to get a job after my father left her. One woman was responsible for about twenty-five of us. I spent the first two weeks crying in the corner, and the rest of the time watching the small Polish woman picking up children by their ears. But anyway, why are we talking about my nonexistent children? “I don’t know. Maybe I can get a part-time job.”
He points his finger in the air, dotting an i in the sky. “Exactly my point. Why spend all that on your education if you can’t commit yourself totally to your career? There is no reason for you to have an MBA. You don’t want to be a career woman. You want to be a wife and mother. And I don’t want to burst your bubble, but in today’s economy, managers aren’t rushing to hire childbearing women. Remember Melissa? When I hired her, she didn’t utter one peep about wanting kids, and now she’s six months along and I have to find someone to replace her while she’s on maternity leave. Sure, she says she’s coming back, but she doesn’t have to let me know until the end of her leave. It’s horrible for the company, I tell you.”
“I-” I think you’re an asshole, I think but don’t say. “I’ll be right back.”
I lay my napkin on the table and scamper to the bathroom, as quick as my unpregnant body can take me. Although, since I haven’t gotten my period in weeks, I could be pregnant, who knows? Not a big deal. I could just have it “taken care of.” Again.
I lock the stall and sit on the closed toilet, the tears freely flowing down my cheeks, ruining my mascara.
Taken care of. Can you take out the trash, please? I imagine a vacuum being placed up against my vagina, sucking out the debris. When I missed my first period, I’d been surprised. But excited. Wayne hated condoms so he’d been pulling out. I knew I was supposed to be nervous, devastated even, but I ran to the store to buy the pregnancy test, ran up to my bathroom and did it right away. Pink. Pink, pink, pink. Wayne and I had been dating a year; he would be happy, wouldn’t he? Scared of course, that was normal, but secretly happy. He must have known there was a chance this would happen (they don’t call pulling out sexual roulette for no reason). Maybe this was what he’d been planning. I called him at work, told him to come over as soon as possible. We sat in his car in the driveway, engine off. I didn’t want my mother listening. I felt like Molly Ringwald in that movie where she and her high-school sweetheart are scared, but they drop out of school and make it work.
After I told him, he stared at the windshield. He turned the wipers on and then watched them go back and forth, back and forth. “Do you need money to take care of it?” he asked.
Take care of it.
I felt the baby die right then. Shrivel up like a popped balloon. “Is that what you want?” I asked, my throat contracting.
“What choice do we have?”
Instead of explaining the choices, I nodded.
In the middle of the night, I crawled into my mother’s bed, crying. I hadn’t done that since my father left. I told her everything, and that I wanted to keep the baby. Then she started crying, too, and told me that I couldn’t keep it, that it would ruin my life, that I had to take care of it, take care of it, take care of it, and two weeks later I did. We sat together in the waiting room, my mother and I. She read the Redbook that was on a table and I stared at the safe-sex posters on the wall. Another girl, a tall blonde who looked about sixteen, was also there with her mother. We didn’t make eye contact.
I called in sick for the next week. It’s easy to get out of work when your dad’s your boss. Told him I had bronchitis. Smoked a cigarette before I spoke to him so my voice sounded scratchy. Decided that since I was no longer pregnant, I might as well take up smoking. Went on the pill the next week. Wayne thought it was the best present ever-now he could come inside me.
I doubt I’m pregnant again, since I’m a few weeks into my continuous birth control taking. My trick worked-I didn’t get my period during exams. The only problem is, I realized that if I take the entire month, I’ll start my next period on January 9, which sucks, because I go back to LWBS on the eleventh. Since I want my period to end on the ninth so there’s none of that “aftermath” left by the eleventh, I have to get it on the fifth, which means I have to take my last pill on the second. Maybe I’ll keep taking the pills straight until I go through menopause, and then I’ll never have children. Then will my father encourage me to work?
What if I never get married? What if I decide to spend the rest of my life as a mistress instead? Under the circumstances, that seems likely. No worries, Dad, I think I’ll just spend my life sleeping with men. Especially attached men. Have any friends you can introduce me to?
I sit on the toilet and pee out the margarita. What am I going to do? Drop out? Take out loans? Maybe my father is right. Maybe I don’t care about my career. I never used to. I applied to LWBS only because of Wayne. Maybe I am wasting my money. Maybe I should throw in the schoolbag and head up to Alaska. I’ve heard the male-to-female ratio up there is comparable to LWBS’s, but knowing me, I’d probably head straight for the guy with the serious girlfriend. The guy who stops calling as soon as he’s out of the country. I pull a sheet of rough toilet paper out of the dispenser and use a square to dry my eyes. Why did I fall in love with a guy who loves someone else?