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Mark had two kids, a four-year-old named Lizzie and a seven-year-old named Max, but he hardly ever spoke of them. He certainly

didn’t talk about his wife. All he wanted to talk about was poetry and writing and books. He would take me to Barnes this whole affair had seemed to be kind of his thing.

She’d been letting him drive. But the idea of hanging out with this middle-aged man without the sex—like, just having an older,

dorky friend ?

“Okay,” she said, “let me get this straight. So you still want to go out to dinner?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And emails?”

“Of course we can email, the emails are, like, the most important part, we can email for the rest of our lives.”

It seemed obvious to her that they would not.

“But wouldn’t your wife mind the love poetry more than the sex? Like, if I were someone’s wife, and they slept with someone,

I could get over it. It’s the love stuff that would get to me. Like, you shouldn’t be telling me you love me.”

“But I do love you.”

Margo didn’t know what to say. She had a blister on her thumb from grabbing a hot plate at work. Her fault for leaving it

there too long, but she’d been triple sat by the new hostess. She kept pressing on the blister and feeling the tightness of

the water beneath the skin. She was on the verge of failing French also. She should be studying.

“I’m not willing to lie about the fact that I love you. If I can’t be that honest with myself, then I’m finished.”

“I’m gonna go pee,” she said. “Do you want a glass of water?”

“Yes, please,” he said, the covers up to his chin. Then he said in a little old-woman voice, “I’m so thirsty, Margo.” He did

this a lot, pretend to be an old woman.

“All right, Granny,” she said, pulling on some fresh underwear and stumbling out into the hall.

She figured that most likely he did not mean it, the stopping having sex. That really he would play a game where he said he

wasn’t going to sleep with her, then he’d give in and sleep with her and vocalize his guilt and swear not to do it anymore,

and so on. That turned out not to be the case. Mark never slept with her again. And he continued to take her out to fancy

dinners and write her love poetry and not feel troubled at all. It was incredibly annoying. She was pretty sure she could

wear him down eventually, though.

That was the somewhat stable situation in which Margo discovered she was pregnant. She hadn’t even realized she was late. One night when she was working, she kept throwing up a little Taco Bell in her mouth and swallowing it, and Tracy, her favorite coworker, was like, “Maybe you’re pregnant!” But it seemed so much more probable that her body was rebelling against the Taco Bell.

Yet her body kept rebelling, against cheesecake after her shift, then against yogurt the next morning. She drank a blue Gatorade,

cold dark blood of the gods, and puked it right back up. This went on for a full forty-eight hours before she gave in and

bought a pregnancy test. They had not used condoms. He had always pulled out. He was married, and he said that was how he

and his wife did it, and they’d never had any mistakes! She felt incredibly stupid. For believing him, for having the affair

with him, for having a uterus.

The first thing she did was call her mom, and she wasn’t even able to get the words out, she was just sobbing.

“Are you pregnant?” her mom asked.

“Yeah,” she yell-cried.

“Damn it!”

“I’m sorry,” Margo said. “I’m so sorry.”

And then her mother took her out for donuts.

Margo ate them, and they stayed down.

When I first told Mark, we were at a restaurant, and I’d ordered a salad with fresh figs in it, prompting me to wonder why

everyone was pretending to like fresh figs, this vast conspiracy to fake that figs were any good.

Anyway, I told Mark I was pregnant, and he said, “Holy shit.”

And I said, “I know.”

“You’re positive?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“Have you been to the doctor?”

“Not yet.”

“So you could just be late.”

“Well, I took, like, four pregnancy tests, so I don’t think so, but yeah, I guess.”

He took a sip of his beer. “I’m involuntarily kind of thrilled. My seed is strong!” he cried in some kind of German or Viking

accent.

I laughed. My hands were sweating profusely. It felt like the whole restaurant was moving, like we were on a boat, the heavy-handled

silver faintly shifting on the white tablecloths.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s serious. I want to be there to support you in any way possible. Financially, of course,

but if you want me to take you to the appointment or any of that—this is my fuckup too, and I am fully responsible.”

“So how do I make an appointment?” I said.

“I mean, I would start by calling Planned Parenthood,” he said. “But, like, I don’t know if private doctors do it or if it’s

nicer—like, I don’t want you to have some cheap abortion.”

I had not realized he’d already decided I would have an abortion. But of course he had. He would decide the same way he decided

we would stop sleeping together (though evidently making out in his car was A-OK), the same way he decided we would have the

affair in the first place. I’d never said no to him, not once. We went where he wanted when he wanted, ate what he wanted,

touched or didn’t touch as much as he wanted. And honestly, I think I said it just to fuck with him: “Oh, I’m not having an

abortion.”

He turned green almost instantaneously; it was extremely gratifying.

“What are you, Catholic?” he asked in a much nastier voice than he usually spoke to me in.

“No, but it’s my choice,” I said.

“Don’t you think I should get an opinion?” he asked.

“No,” I said. I stood and covered my gross fig salad with my napkin and left. When I got outside the restaurant, I could smell

the ocean, and there was this weird moment when I felt like my mom, walking haughtily on the sidewalk, like my legs were in

those sheer black pantyhose, like I could slip into being someone else entirely. Then I tripped on a curb, and the feeling

was gone, and I was merely the idiot who had parked too far away.

And I really, really wish the next part hadn’t happened, but it is true that he ran after me and we wound up making out in his car, and I admitted I would probably have an abortion, I just didn’t want to be forced, and he said, “I couldn’t force you to do a damn thing, Margo. You are wilder than anyone I’ve ever known.”

And I liked that he called me that, even though the things Mark said about me never felt like they really had anything to

do with me. They were more his fantasy of me. But I liked making out in his car, and we left on good terms. Then Mark didn’t

contact me for three days, an unheard-of silence. I kept checking my phone, checking my email. I texted, Hey, you okay? (I always typed out you with him in deference to his Gen-X hang-ups and also because he was my English professor for goodness’ sakes.) He didn’t

write back.

And I knew something bad had happened, that his feelings had shifted. Normally, there was a cord of attachment between us

that I could tug and feel him there on the other end. I suddenly had the horrifying sensation that it had been snipped off,

and now I had a cord that led nowhere, that was just dangling in space.

Then the email came, long and convoluted, explaining how he felt it was best for us to have no further contact, which was

easy enough since the semester was over and I was no longer in his class. He was sorry for anything he put me through, but

he felt I was throwing my life away and he couldn’t abide it. You could go anywhere, you could do anything, he wrote. Don’t throw it all away to have a baby. This one time, Margo, believe me. I am older than you. I have had babies. They are

hard. You do not want babies.

It was confusing that he kept trying to frame the decision in terms of what I wanted. To me, want and should were two very separate things. In fact, wanting something was usually a sign that you did not deserve it and would not be

getting it, for example: moving to New York City and going to a fancy college like NYU. Conversely, the less you wanted to

do something, the more likely it was that you should, like going to the dentist or doing your taxes. More than anything, what

I wanted was to make the right decision, and yet no one was willing to engage with me on those terms.

Margo’s best friend from high school had gotten into NYU and moved to New York, and the pain of this, that Becca was living the life they both had wanted and Margo was a waitress attending junior college—the unspoken understanding that this was because Becca’s parents had money and Margo’s mom did not—was too intense, and the girls had stopped talking. Except now Margo called her, and Becca picked up on the first ring.

Margo gave her a rough summary of what had happened. “So what do you think?”

“Fucking have an abortion!” Becca said.

“But like...” Margo could hear sirens and city noise in the background.

“There is no ‘but like.’ This isn’t a ‘but like’ situation! This is an emergency!”

It did not feel like an emergency. “Do you believe things happen for a reason?” Margo asked. “Like, do you believe everything

is fated, or do you believe in free will?”

“Margo, this is not a philosophical question. This is a financial decision.”

“It just feels fucked up to make an important decision based on something as stupid and made up as money.”

“I assure you, money is very real,” Becca said.

Margo was sitting in her bedroom, looking at the pile of laundry spilling out of her closet like her clothes were trying to

crawl away.

“I just think,” Becca said, “maybe being a single mom might not be as glamorous as you think.”

Now Margo was pissed. “Becca, I’m the one who was raised by a single mom, and it’s not fucking glamorous. I’m not saying I

would keep the baby because it would be fun or easy. I’m saying I think keeping the baby might be, like, what a good person

would do.”

“So having an abortion makes you a bad person?”

“Well, no,” Margo said. Although on some level, wasn’t that kind of what everyone implied? You weren’t supposed to get an

abortion just because it was more convenient. You were supposed to be all cut up about it.

“So tell me how keeping the baby would make you a good person again?”

“I don’t know! I’m not saying it would!” Margo raked her scalp with her nails.

“You literally said you were thinking about keeping the baby because you thought it’s what a good person would do.”

“Then maybe I didn’t mean that.”

“And since when do you care about being a good person? I mean, you were fucking somebody’s husband.”

“I know,” Margo said. But she didn’t. She’d always known Mark was a terrible person, but she had not quite registered that

she was terrible too until this very moment. “Just... what am I even doing with my life? Going to junior college? Pretending

I’m gonna transfer? Do you even understand how impossible it is to get into a UC anymore? And even if I did, I would major

in what? English? You can’t get a job with an English degree, and I can’t even think of anything else I could study! So, then,

what do I do, like, waitress? Get a job at Bloomingdale’s like my mom? None of it makes any sense. At least this would be

something.”

“There’s lots of cool things you could do, Margo. You could get into viticulture and go into wine or something.”

Margo instantly thought of the wine rep her restaurant dealt with who was so corny and pretentious and had a huge tattoo of

grapes on her chest, like right on her décolletage, massive ugly purple cartoon grapes. And Margo knew that if they were talking

about what Becca should do with her life, viticulture wouldn’t even be on the table.

“I’m saying it’s a big deal!” Margo said. “Like, don’t you think I should at least think about it? Why are you trying to make

it not a big deal?”

“I’m sorry,” Becca said, “I don’t know why I’m being such a bitch. It is a big deal, it’s a super big deal.”

This was not satisfying, and Margo didn’t know exactly why. “How’s school?” she asked. And they talked about that for a little

while. When they hung up, Margo cried for twenty minutes and then went to work.

Meanwhile time was still happening, and somehow it was Tuesday, and she was going to her first doctor’s appointment. She’d originally called Planned Parenthood. They wouldn’t do an ultrasound to confirm pregnancy until you were eight weeks along, though. Pregnancy math was cruel. The moment you found out you were pregnant, you were already at four weeks. Waiting four more weeks to see if she was pregnant or not seemed absurd, so she called around until she found an ob-gyn who was willing to see her at six weeks.

It was exactly like every other time she’d been to the doctor. She wasn’t sure why that was surprising. Maybe she thought

they’d be nicer to her. The doctor was a chubby, middle-aged white guy with a shaved bald head.

“So, you don’t know the date of your last period?”

“No, I didn’t keep... records?”

“Okey dokey, don’t worry, we’ll get all this squared away.” He seemed like the kind of man who was a great husband but whose

wife would cheat on him anyway. “I’m gonna leave the room. The nurse will bring you a gown. Change into that, no underwear.”

Margo nodded.

“This is a transvaginal doppler,” he said. “Ever had one of those before?”

“Nope.”

“Well, when the fetus is this size, you can’t see well enough through the belly, so you have to take a peek internally.”

Margo looked over at the futuristic dildo attached to the sonogram machine. She got the idea. She had not pictured it being

like this at all.

After the doctor stepped out of the room, while she was changing into the gown the nurse had brought her, she silently thanked

God that Mark hadn’t come to spectate such a thing. It would be weird enough if her mom came, but Shyanne was working.

And then it was time for her to get fucked by a robot to meet her unborn child.

“Okay,” the doctor said, “now the gel is heated, so this shouldn’t be too bad.”

He began to insert the giant dildo. It didn’t hurt. It was just weird as hell.

He was really digging around in there, trying to see something perhaps in her spinal column. “Okay!” he said, turning a knob on the machine, and suddenly there was sound, a quiet, fast whoosh, whoosh, whoosh . “That’s the heartbeat.”

“It is?” It sounded like a mechanical toy. She didn’t know why she was crying; it was completely underwhelming as a sound.

He kept digging the wand around, taking pictures, clicking the mouse of the computer with his other hand. It was really quite

impressive, his ambidextrousness. “I’m taking measurements so we can get some idea of the age of the... uh... fetus.”

She noticed he had avoided using the word baby . She thought that was kind of him, and it made her start crying again.

“Okay,” he said, “so I would say, based on measurements, and these are pretty accurate especially this early, that you’re

about eight weeks.”

It wasn’t that this wasn’t possible, only that Margo wasn’t prepared. Eight weeks pregnant sounded awfully pregnant.

He removed the wand and peeled off the plastic condom thing, then he pressed a button on the machine and a printer started.

“Oh, I should have asked—do you want copies of the pictures?”

“Yes,” she said, though saying it made her cough because she was crying so hard while trying to be relatively silent.

“Do you... know what you want to do about the pregnancy?”

“No,” she said, and closed her eyes.

“I’m gonna let you get cleaned up, and then we can talk more about your options,” he said.

When he was out of the room, she looked at the pictures, which were still dangling out of the machine on their shiny, thin

strip of paper. And there he was. Her baby, looking for all the world like a tiny, deformed dove.