Chapter 1 of a new book (novel) that I'm working on

Ange never had any doubt the blue line would be there. The flu like fullness in her head and chemical feeling in her stomach were too familiar. Part of her wanted to pretend otherwise. To believe a miracle was still possible. That she would get her period and just be more careful next time.

After undergoing her first abortion at thirteen, she was totally prepared to make her own arrangements. Even at sixteen, her family was irrelevant. Unlike the majority of her classmates at Garfield High School, she wouldn’t face parental displeasure, shame or even disappointment. What she couldn’t bear was handing herself over to adults she didn’t respect and who didn’t respect her. To be subjected to hours of inane questions and advice. Moreover they would feel entitled to be patronizing and condescending. From her past experience at Aurora Medical Center, she was resigned to their inability to see her for what she was. All they would see was a naïve teenager who had foolishly engaged in unprotected intercourse.

The clinic would insist on repeating her pregnancy test before they did anything. Ange, however, was savvy enough to know she had a right to demand a blood pregnancy. Not only was this more reliable, but it would produce a result within a few hours. They would also harangue her about being tested for HIV and being swabbed for gonorrhea and Chlamydia. She was determined not to tell them that her partner was a twenty three year nursing student and clean. She had learned to treat all her relationships with adults like a chess game. If she told them about Reuben, this would only lead to more questions. And they would think they had scored points by getting into her head at all.

All adults in the so-called helping profession were like that. You could almost see them adding up points in their head. Eventually they reached some magic number and decided they knew you better than you knew yourself.

The clinic would be the smaller hurdle. By this point, Ange had effectively dispatched dozens of social workers from welfare and Child Protective Services. The secret was to listen passively to the lectures, give non-committal shrugs to all their questions and to finish with: “Thank you. Can I go now?” She could read their fury in their body language – none of them were immune – but only the frankly incompetent ones ever vented it.

Handling Reuben would be much more difficult. She was determined he would pay for the abortion because it was his fault. There was no fucking way it would come out of the $1,500 she had saved for the first and last month on a studio, her one and only life goal. She was pretty confident of pulling it off by telling him she knew about Sophie. She had reconciled herself six weeks earlier to ending her relationship with him Reuben. At the same time she was too furious with him to do it without making a scene – and determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeing her lose control.

The clinic was a forty five minute bus ride from the three bedroom house on 45th and Wallingford that her mother inherited when her grandmother died. Too angst ridden to sleep, she was up at 5:30 and showered and dressed in a black turtleneck and her best black cords by 6:15. Her plan was to arrive a little before nine when they opened the doors and persuade the receptionist she was too upset to wait for an appointment. It took her five minutes to apply a thin thread of eye liner under each eye and to put her jewelry in. She put on her full regalia, as Reuben called it – four double loops around the outer lobe of her left ear, three on the right with a pewter ear cuff, a tiny silver loop through her right eyebrow and a tongue stud.

She loved the way her friend Katherine had cut her hair. Prior to her first abortion, she had shoulder length blonde hair and spent $25 a month on cosmetics. After her Aunt Beverley came to live with them she dyed it jet black and wore it in a shag or pixie cut. Katherine insisted it was still too long, but Ange was frightened that a shorter cut would make her look too masculine. Nevertheless her friend’s skillful tapering on the top and at the back gave it an extra fullness that softened her square jaw lined much better than a longer cut that lay flat against her skull.

As she studied her reflection she marveled at how pretty she looked since making herself over as a punk. What she liked best about the new look was that for the first time in her life her outward appearance perfectly matched the person inside. She no longer saw a naïve party girl looking back at her. She saw a woman – one that was assertive, confident and self-sufficient and in no mood to be pushed around.

Finishing in the bathroom, Ange headed for the kitchen, which was at the back of the house, and put two pieces of twelve grain bread into the toaster while she boiled water in the electric kettle and set up her mother’s single cup drip cone on her mug with a new filter and two scoops of her mother’s French roast coffee. Ange’s taste for coffee, which up until four months ago had seemed nasty and bitter, was newly acquired. While she waited for the water to filter through, she buttered the toast with a thin sliver of margarine and placed them on a saucer on the tray Patricia kept in the center of the kitchen table. Then she took the tray and knocked softly on the door to her mother’s bedroom, which was between Ange’s room and the bathroom.

Without waiting for an answer, she opened the door and set the tray on the antique wooden hospital tray stand just inside the door, which she wheeled to the head of her mother’s bed. Then she crossed the room to open both sets of the floor length reddish brown thermal drapes that she hated. Angie’s mother had a large electric bed with a remote control that allowed her to adjust its height and to elevate the head of the bed herself. Diane had suffered her stroke, which left her paralyzed on the left side and virtually unable to speak, a week after Ange’s thirteenth birthday. After spending three months in a rehabilitation center in Mountlake Terrace, she came home and went through nine different caregivers in twelve weeks. Every time an agency nurse failed to show up on time or quit without giving notice, it became Ange’s responsibility to feed, toilet, transfer and bathe her mother, as well as tracking down Diane’s elusive case manager to get a new caregiver assigned.

Whether the stress of this immense responsibility was directly or indirectly related, suddenly Ange found herself pregnant. Ange was too naïve at the time to recognize what happened as date rape. The boy was never prosecuted. Fortunately Diane’s sister Beverley still lived in Seattle then. After scheduling and paying for Ange’s first abortion, she moved in with them.

***

That had lasted exactly three months. Ange, who knew it was down to her that Bev had left, would give anything to take that summer back to live over again. It was only after her aunt moved halfway around the world that Ange recognized that Bev was the only adult other than her grandmother to genuine care for her. But by then it was too late.

It had all started with a comment her aunt made about Ange trying to become her mother. There was no need for her to explain what she meant by this. Prior to her stroke Diane was almost a caricature of the ideal of American beauty promoted by TV advertisers. Her whole life was focused on perfecting her appearance to maximize male attention.

Before Bev came to live with them, Ange had no adult women to compare her mother to. However after her aunt moved in, Ange became acutely aware how shallow and superficial Diane was compared to Bev and her grandmother – who were both self-sufficient, free thinking feminists. Infuriated at being compared to someone Ange never felt close to and was convinced didn’t love her, Ange lashed out at Bev, rebelling at the firm limits her aunt tried to set for her. Diane, who was always exclusively focused on her own needs, had always allowed Ange to do as she pleased. After two months of dealing with Ange’s angry tirades and verbal abuse, Bev quit her job and K-Mart and returned to Africa to start a rural development project in the Congo.

***

After opening the drapes Ange approached her mother, who was curled up on her right side. Even without make-up, which Irene applied first thing every morning, Diane was much closer to Angie’s ideal of beauty than she herself was. In fact for years she believed this – her basic ugliness - was why her mother couldn’t love her. As far back as Ange could remember, her mother was always complaining that Ange’s, nose was too thick, her jaw too square and her eyes too small and close together.

Although she was pushing 45, Diane still had a heart shaped baby doll face and fine, perfectly proportioned features. Ange always felt she looked prettiest when she was asleep because the scowl lines disappeared when her forehead relaxed. Ange had never seen Diane’s natural hair color but assumed it would be mostly gray now, as her grandmother had been totally gray at 40. Angie remembered her mother’s hair as auburn before her stroke. Prior to her stroke, Diane dyed it auburn. However for the last six months, since Irene had been borrowing a DSHS van to take her to the beauty college, it had been copper blond with whitish blond streaks and styled in a trendy razor cut that covered her ears and jaw line like a veil.

Ange grasped her mother firmly by the shoulder and felt a slight shudder. Diane hated being woken early, but it was too risky to let her wake up in an empty house. There was a 911 autodial set on her speaker phone. The last time Ange left before Irene arrived, her mom had called the police and Ange nearly ended up in a foster home.

“I have to leave early, mom. We have debate practice. I can’t wait for Irene to get here.” It was a lie, but a guilt-free one. Ange knew Bev had made Diane cry when she told her about the first pregnancy. Ange had enough problems coping with her own extremes of emotion without being lumbered with her mom’s. “Do you want to use the commode before I leave?”

There was a large black leather armchair to the left of the bed, where Diane spent most of her day. To the right of the armchair was a commode with a stainless steel frame and a seat cover that was originally yellow but had degraded over time to dingy white with pink streaks. To the left, immediately next to the bed, was a large oak bedside table fitted with three shelves for books, magazines, DVDs and videotapes. On top of the table was a small cut glass Tiffany lamp, along with a speaker phone, the remote for the bed and the remote for the TV and DVD/video player which was at the foot of the bed on a lightweight TV stand on wheels that Reuben had rigged up with a pulley and loop of clothesline. By pulling on the rope with her left hand, Diane could wheel the stand close enough to either the head of the bed or the armchair to insert her own DVDs and videos.

Her mother lifted her head, which waggled ever so slightly. The movement, which would have been imperceptible to a stranger, meant “no.” Angie cocked her head towards the armchair. “Do you want me to help you transfer?” Diane bobbled her head again. She wanted Ange to transfer her.

Ange pulled the covers back that Diane had clutched around her shoulder and bent over to enable her mother to reach her good left arm around her neck. Then Angie lifted her by the shoulders while her mother slowly rotated her left hip. The physical intimacy was the hardest part for Ange. Prior to her stroke, Diane had been prone to melodramatic displays of affection to demonstrate some hypothetical mother-daughter bond which Ange didn’t feel and didn’t believe her mother felt, either.

Once Ange had positioned her, she handed her both remotes and the rope Reuben had attached to the TV stand and wheeled the tray stand with Diane’s breakfast into position across the armchair. Then she checked the catheter bag, which was only half full, kissed her mother on the forehead and left.

***

She caught the 44 to Aurora and hurried up a long flight of concrete stairs to the 45th Street overpass, where she waited for the six to Aurora Village. With no trees or homes to block the stiff wind off Puget Sound, it seemed at least five degrees colder on top of the overpass. She huddled behind the bus shelter to protect herself from the wind and mentally kicked herself for making such a mess of her life. Although she was still very grateful to Reuben for opening up a totally new world for her, she no longer had any doubt the relationship was over. Not only had he cheated on her, but Ange believed he had done so due to the impasse in their own relationship. Ange was ready to branch out and excel in new areas, and Reuben could only full love her as his political protégée.

Furious with herself for being in this predicament at all, she tortured herself with questions about where she had gone wrong. Was she wrong to sleep with Reuben at all? Should she have seen this coming? She had sworn off boys after Bev left, who ironically had far more influence over her in Africa than in Seattle. Determined to prove her wrong – that Ange was nothing like her mum - she cut off her blond curls, dyed the inch long spikes that remained jet black, got extra piercings for her ears, eyebrow and tongue, and took to wearing black lipstick and nail polish and staying up all night crying to Pearl Jam and other EMO music. A deeply superstitious part of her 13 year old personality believed the punishment for wild behavior and if she stayed home after night and did all her homework she could keep it from happening again. However this only worked because she allowed the rebellious part of herself to compensate by transforming her physical being into a spiky haired, multiply pierced Goth. For the sake of all her teachers and counselors who decided they could tell all they needed to know about teenagers from their appearance.

***

She had first met Reuben at Leavenworth Summer, a special social studies camp her world history teacher nominated her for summer before her sophomore year. Reuben, a freshman at UW, was one of the counselors. Ange was surprised to hear an older girl in her Spanish class, who also attended, refer to it as “Commie” Camp. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the conversion of China to capitalism, Ange thought it unlikely there were any communists left anywhere in the world, much less in the US.

To her surprise it was the high point of her adolescence. Angie, who had never been east of Carnation, was instantly enchanted by the high Cascades site chosen for the camp, which reminded her of the alpine shots in Heidi and the Sound of Music. She had expected to be surrounded by a bunch of geeks and nerds, but for the most part the other campers looked exactly like the jocks and preppie types at Garfield. Unlike the camps Ange attended as a child, the campers were mainly left to their own devices. While there were a number of early morning hikes and campfire sing alongs, there was little organized daytime activity except for a morning and afternoon film series and discussion groups the campers mainly organized an ran themselves. They all seemed to spend most of their time in the canteen, which had an espresso machine and sold lattes, cappuccinos and hot chocolate at a $2 discount.

Ange, who felt extremely intimidated by the other campers, was more an observer than a participant. She was used to being around adolescents who talked about music they downloaded on their ipods. She had no idea how to relate to teenagers who were more interested in discussing the war in Iraq and the government bailout of two mortgage companies with names that sounded like grunge groups.

Concerned that Ange was having a hard time, the third day of camp Reuben invited her to drive to Leavenworth with him for a latte. "I just want you to know," he said as they got in the car together, "that I'm not hitting on you. This isn't about that."
It was the last thing she expected to hear from a member of the opposite sex. However the next thing he said was even more mind blowing. "You seem very different from the other campers, Ange," he said. "I can't quite put my finger on it. But I get the sense your parents never talk about politics at home. That all this is quite new for you."

Ange heard the implied question in his statement. Fortunately Reuben didn't expect her to answer and changed the subject. There was no way she was going to discuss her relationship with Diane with a total stranger, no matter how nice he was.

He went on to tell her about a film they were showing that afternoon called Who’s Counting by a NZ woman named Marilyn Warring. “We’re having a special type of discussion group afterwards called a fishbowl. The women who never say very much will sit in the center and talk about feminism, while the men and talkative women sit in a circle around them and listen. I’m sure you know what feminism is, don’t you?”

Ange nodded. “My grandmother was a strong feminist, but my mother always felt she was too extreme. She hated the way she was always at meetings instead of taking care of her kids.”

***

Ange thorough enjoyed the Marilyn Waring film, which focused mainly on the vast amount of work women performed in different societies that was unpaid and thus wasn’t counted as economically productive. She made the immediate connection with the hundreds of hours she had spent looking after her mom. One of the school counselors had called her a “young carer” and tried to send her to a “young carer” support group.

Reuben put Ange and four other girls who rarely spoke in the center of the fishbowl. As with Ange, it was their first time at Leavenworth Summer, as well as the very first time anyone asked them to discuss their own feelings and values – as opposed to those of their parents and the kids they hung out with. In fact that was the first thing they agreed on – they weren’t really sure how they felt about feminism or the other political topics the other campers discussed because no one had ever asked them before.

Instead of talking about feminism, the assigned topic, Ange and her fellow introverts started talking about housework and chores, focusing on the awful drudgery of doing dishes and cleaning toilets and shower stalls.

“I’m never getting married or having children,” Ange volunteered. “I was leaning that way before, but now I’m absolutely sure. I know a scam when I see one, and women are no longer compelled to take on that kind of unpaid work if they don’t want to.”

Three of the other girls were quick to agree. The fourth, who was two years older, wasn’t so sure. She thought that maybe Marilyn Waring was right – that society could change so that women could be valued or even paid for unpaid work. “Good childrearing is important for the whole society, even for people who choose not to have them.”

It had never occurred to Ange before that society might be as responsible as parents for the way children turned out. This, in turn, led to the though that possibly Ange wasn’t solely and individually responsible for the unhappiness in her life.

***

Reuben continued to call and text her after she returned to Seattle. He took her to other political films and lectures, as well as to meetings of a group called Socialist Action that previously she had no idea existed. In September of her junior year he invited Ange to her first protest march. Then in February, a few weeks after she turned 16, they became lovers.