Sarah E. Harris

Sarah E. Harris

Freeze

I keep a pregnancy test in the plastic bin underneath my bathroom sink. I’ve never missed a period, but sometimes I like the reassurance. Last week my boyfriend found it. He said, “What have you been hiding?” He said he was looking for the aspirin, but who keeps aspirin under the sink?

My first year of college I read a story about a thirteen year-old girl from my hometown who’d been rushed to the hospital with abdominal pain. When the doctor told her she was about to give birth, the girl’s mother screamed and punched the obstetrician in the mouth. My mother sent me the news clipping in a manila envelope. I thought it might be a card with a check or a gift certificate. Instead, I pulled out the long thin strip of newspaper with a stuck-on post-it note that said Don’t make me a felon.

It doesn’t help that the birth control makes me look a little pregnant. I grow a cup size, I gain a little weight around the middle. My boyfriend says, “What’s the matter with that?” He rubs my stomach until I push his hand away. I refuse to wear bigger shirts out of principle. The cupped wires in my bra make red horseshoes I can trace with a fingernail. When he’s not around I cup each breast right where the red wire mark cuts my skin and I try to feel around for “excessive tenderness.” My doctor always asks me if I breast-self-exam in the shower but I tell him no, we’re never looking for the same things.

Tonight my boyfriend has promised to take me to Lerua’s where they make my favorite green corn tamales. It’s a small place with lacquered wooden tables and paper placemats but I dress up like it isn’t. I put on heels. When he calls to say that he can’t make it, I pull my curled hair into a ponytail and drive over there anyway. I order twenty of their frozen tamales to take home, and while I wait I look at the crayon-colored placemats the owners have hung on the wall. There are thick-lined crayon drawings of families. My favorite is a bright blue mother and daughter wearing triangle-dresses; a row of birds at the top of the page looks just like six wide m’s. The tamales don’t come out quite as well at home, but I pretend they do anyway. Later when he asks, I rub my stomach, I hum into the phone: “mmmmmm.”

One of my friends has joined a performance art group, and last week she called me from Colorado. She was at a public mall about to participate in a “happening.” She said there were a hundred and fifty people, all walking around the shopping centers, and in about five minutes they were all going to freeze in place at exactly the same time. She wanted to be posed with her phone and asked if I’d mind. A minute later she stopped talking. I stayed on the line with her until it was over, just listening. I tried to freeze too but I kept touching my stomach. It’s a thing I do when I’m nervous, like compulsively opening and closing the refrigerator. Every minute those tamales get harder, sweatier.

Actually, the clipping my mother sent to me wasn’t about a girl from my hometown at all. I read about it later on the Internet when I was doing a search for “unknown pregnancy.” It is possible, I found out, for women to have their period throughout a pregnancy. It is possible not to show. It happens to about one in five thousand women, maybe. Most of them young, most of them not at all like me.

After my friend called from Colorado I looked up the happening on the Internet. There were grainy cell-phone videos of people frozen still, ice cream running down their arms. There were two long-haired women reaching for a hug, their hands just about to touch one another’s backs. I muted the audio so I couldn’t hear the people walking by or the jolt of camera noise. I saw my friend leaned against a pole. I hadn’t imagined her leaning that way. I tried to think there I am, but I wasn’t. I was moving.

The next time I go to Lerua’s I eat there at a table in the corner on my own. One glass of water, no lemon. All the test directions say “take three days after your missed period,” but what if you never miss? I take a pen out of my purse and write a poem on the placemat. The poem is a drawing of a prom dress. I color it in with a red ballpoint pen.

I never told my mother that story. She doesn’t like Metallica and she doesn’t say “so,” not without something else attached. She says things like “hey is for horses” when I answer my phone that way. The last time I was home she saw Planned Parenthood in my browsing history and said, “You’re pro-abortion now?” I said “no, but I’m pro-planning.” What’s attached is the important part. That was three years ago yesterday. We’re not Catholic, but sometimes I pray to the Virgin Mary. When I do I say, “Don’t let them choose me.” I make the sign of the cross, amen.

Right before I met my boyfriend I bought a yoga video combo, one for AM and one for PM. The AM video was the only one I ever used, and even then I pressed fast-forward to the very end. The part I liked was the relaxation meditation—the dead man’s pose. “Lie on the ground, one hand on your stomach, the other on your chest. Feel the movement of your breath,” the tape said, “feel it rise and fall.”