Agency

"Honey, was Rick Margolis the father of the baby you aborted on Wednesday, or did someone else have the honor?" my husband asked, in an even, up-key, almost conversational tone, as he served salad at the table, his eyes fixed on his efforts instead of on me.

My mother-in-law gasped in reply. My own mother dropped the plate she was holding. It smashed loudly on the floor. Then, there was total silence in the dining room as my parents and his parents just looked at me. His mother was holding her hand to her open mouth, staring at me in shock and sadness. My father and father-in-law just appeared stunned, looking first at me, then at each other, then at my husband, then at their plates.

My husband did not look up at me at all. He just kept serving the salad.

But he did say, "I assume it wasn't me because I can't think of a single reason why you wouldn't have told me about it, if I were the father."

I could feel my intestines turning their contents to liquid, and I dashed to the bathroom just in time for a bout of explosive diarrhea. When that stopped, my stomach rebelled, and I had to grab the trashcan so I could vomit, as I remained sitting on the toilet. After my stomach emptied itself, I could see that the sanitary pad in my panties between my ankles was still showing blood stains. The nurse at the clinic told me that the bleeding could continue for days, but should decrease over time.

My skin was cold and clammy. I was shivering and covered with goosebumps. No one was ever supposed to know.

I am a financially stable woman and the mother of a beautiful, albeit feral, toddler. Until just a few moments ago, I would also have said that I was happily married. Now, I am not so sure.

Our daughter is often wonderful, but she is a ball of relentless energy, is into everything, and is at the Terrible Twos stage. They are pretty terrible. After we had her, and before she became more difficult, as a matter of principle, I had come to a "one and done" position psychologically. Kids are just so much work. And such an expense. Forget about time for yourself. I just could not see myself having more. My husband never expressed a preference. We probably should have talked about it, but I never figured out how to bring it up. He would probably just have taken whatever nature gave us. But raising our daughter had us in a rut, so we were not having nearly as much sex as we used to. The whole business was almost hypothetical anyway.

Then, a few months ago, while drunk after a rare date night, I convinced myself that I did, in fact, want a sibling for my toddler, and let my husband make love to me. As he got close to coming, I told him not to worry about coming inside me, so he did. Buckets full. It had been a while, after all.

A few weeks later, I missed my period. Then, I started to reconsider. I was plagued with nausea, vomiting, and most of all regret.

My husband heard me vomiting one morning and asked if I was okay. I told him that I must have some intestinal bug. He seemed unsure but did not press me. After that, I took extra care to go to the downstairs bathroom when I felt the morning sickness coming on.

It was just at that time that my daughter had started her Terrible Twos phase and was driving me crazy. I work fulltime, and she is in daycare, so our actual interactions are limited, but they are intense when they occur, and they have been becoming universally negative.

Add to that the fact that work was becoming more stressful due to some rapidly approaching deadlines, and I was losing it. It was becoming more and more common for me to have to stay late and go in to do some work on the weekends. We had no choice though, given the childcare costs.

One night, my husband asked me if something was wrong. I mostly avoided his eyes and told him I was just stressed from work. He asked me if there was anything that I wanted or needed to talk about, and I just snapped at him.

"Nothing's wrong. I'm fine!"

I glanced briefly at his face to see that it was entirely dead. There was no anger. No worry. No concern. There was nothing. I shuddered a bit, but wanted to get away, so I just turned and went to the bedroom and slammed the door.

I realize now that he must have suspected. In retrospect, I also realize that this was the same emotional roller coaster I rode after becoming pregnant with our daughter, dragging my husband along for the ride then. He must have remembered. Back then, though, we had talked. Now, we were not. I was the one shutting it down. And I understand now that he knew then that I was lying to him and that he was deeply angry.

Soon after learning that I had become pregnant, it became clear to me that I did not want to have another child, and I was completely disappointed in myself for having such a lapse in judgment that I thought it would be okay to get pregnant again. I wanted to avoid all the stress and the arguments that I was sure would come from telling my husband about it, so I scheduled myself to get an abortion and resolved to keep secret the results of my drunken failure of will.

Except, it did not work out that way. My husband obviously knew what had happened somehow. And he was very obviously upset.

I cleaned myself up and splashed water on my face. I finally opened the door and came out to find both sets of parents gone, the food put away, and the table cleared. The mothers must have done that while I was in the bathroom for God knows how long. Our daughter still napped in her bedroom. At least there would be no screaming. No one would want to wake her.

My husband was in the living room, drinking scotch. He looked at me without expression.

"You never answered my question," he said.

My mind was a blank. I honestly could not remember exactly what he had said.

"I forgot what you asked."

He grimaced, as if he were about to yell at me, but rallied and let the tension out of his face.

"I asked," he said slowly, "whether Rick Margolis is the father of the baby you aborted on Wednesday, or whether someone else had the honor of fathering it."

I remembered and was shocked again.

"How can you even ask that?"

He just looked at me.

"Easy. I opened my mouth and let the words come out."

He had never been this sarcastic with me before.

"And you still haven't answered my question, which I have now asked twice."

"I have never cheated on you," I told him. I was not lying.

He just continued to look at me. Then, he broke eye contact to empty his glass. He spoke again finally after he swallowed.

"I'll assume that is true for the sake of argument. Which means that you decided to go out and kill my child, which you did not even bother to tell me we had made. Correct?"

This is the whole argument that I had wanted to avoid in the first place. I just slumped down on the couch across the living room from where he sat in his favorite armchair.

"It wasn't a child. It was an embryo. I had the abortion before I had been pregnant for ten weeks."

He looked at me for a moment, then got up with a sweeping wave of his arms, eyes wide, and his mouth formed into an O.

"Oh, well thank goodness. Then there is nothing to worry about here," he said, as he walked into the dining room, rummaged through the liquor cabinet, and returned with the scotch bottle.

He plopped down into his chair loudly, poured a large portion of the liquor into his glass with exaggerated precision, like a parody of a scientist, put the bottle down, drank about a third of the glass, and finally looked back at me.

"Back to my earlier question, I infer that the answer is that, yes, you did decide to go out and kill my embryo"—he put emphasis on the "embryo" in "my embryo"—"that you did not even bother to tell me we had made."

There were a lot of ways that I could have tried to answer. I just went with complete honesty because it was the easiest to remember, and my mind was all over the place.

"I didn't want to have an argument about it. I made a mistake thinking that I wanted another child."

My husband simply looked at my face for a moment, then downed the rest of his drink. After a quiet moment, he pulled himself up in his chair and began to speak.

"I've been a liberal since before I registered to vote. I've been pro-choice since I was old enough to understand the issues. I don't believe that the law should require that a wife get her husband's permission before she gets an abortion. But that's a different story than what a wife who says she loves her husband ought to do when she finds out that he made her pregnant. The bottom line here is that you ended a life I made with you and did not bother to tell me. That bothers me more than I can possibly tell you, and that's assuming I believe it was mine to begin with."

I ignored that last part of what he said as I replied.

"This was something I had to do by myself. I'm the one who has to carry it for nine months, and then nurse it. It's not an issue that needed your opinion."

He just looked at me again, his face a mask. Finally, he sighed, then he spoke.

"I talked to you before we bought the big-screen television. I talked to you about planning our last vacation before I bought the plane tickets. I talked to you about whether I should get a new job. I ask you what you want to eat for dinner when we go out. I talk to you because we're supposed to be partners, sharing one life. And I can't even count the number of times you've asked my opinion about a pair of shoes or an outfit before you bought it, presumably for the same reason. But this, . . . This you did this all on your own and did not even think to talk to me. It makes me wonder what else you didn't bother to tell me. Like maybe who else you have been fucking. Like good old Rick Margolis when you tell me you are 'working late,'" he said, putting emphasis on "working late" and making elaborate air quotes with his fingers.

"I haven't been with anyone else, you bastard!" I spat at him.

He pursed his lips and nodded.

"And I'm supposed to believe that why?"

That left me stunned.

"I'm not cheating. Why would you even think that?"

He surprised me by being ready to answer.

"So, I should trust you when you say that you were just lying about a limited number of topics instead of generally? Is that it?"

When he saw that I had no answer, he continued.

"As for good old Rick, I've seen the way he looks at you. Frankly, I've seen the way you look at him. I heard about him all the time for a while, then suddenly I didn't. You suddenly have to work late. You snap at me without any reason. You seem distant. And for the past eight months, we haven't had sex more than a handful of times. The odds of me having made you pregnant seem kind of low."

I was shocked. I could not imagine where my husband got any of that. Rick was certainly handsome, but he was married, and we worked together because that was just the way it turned out. He was kind of a work husband so we were close in a way, but we had never done anything even remotely inappropriate. We just happened to click because we worked well together, which was the only silver lining in an otherwise unhappy job. The late nights were only because of a series of short-fuse projects. As for my moods, that was probably hormones and stress.

"I've never done anything with Rick," I said. I added, "Or any other man besides you since we started dating."

My husband again simply looked at me without reaction. I snapped.

"I'm simply taking ownership of my own body, dammit!" I yelled. "This is about my power to choose! This is about my agency!"

I stopped for a moment to gather my thoughts, and my husband did not interrupt me.

"My pregnancy is not a decision to be made by an executive committee where other people can purchase shares in my reproductive choices because they've married me, or because they hope to become grandparents again, or for any other reason," I said.

My husband just looked at me without moving.

After a moment, he finally said, "Your 'agency?' 'Executive committee?' What are you even talking about?"

"I need to prioritize my own well-being. And I thought you would get mad, so I had to look after my own safety."

At that statement, my husband stuck his jaw out and sucked in his lips. His entire body tensed. The fury was in his eyes. He then stopped and took deep breaths.

"You thought I would hurt you, and that's why you didn't tell me?" he said, almost in a whisper. "Am I getting that right?"

The fire was out of his eyes now, replaced now by cold, black anger.

I knew then that our marriage was in serious trouble. I tried to calm him, but understood deep down that the damage was done.

"I don't know what I was thinking. I wasn't really thinking, I guess. I just wanted it to end."

He drummed his fingers on the table.

"Oh, it's ending all right. Don't worry."

He got up, walked into the bedroom, and returned with two suitcases and a briefcase. I had not realized he had packed. He must have done that before our parents had arrived. I had never even guessed that this scenario was possible, so I had not bothered to look for clues that this was coming.

"I'm moving out for a while until I figure out what I'm going to do," he announced without looking at me.

Slowly, he turned to me.

"I am so angry right now that, if I see you before I am ready to do so, it is very likely that I am going to punch your lights out, so keep your distance."

He said that without any emotion at all. Then, he paused and smiled but without any warmth.

"Guess you were right to worry about me hurting you after all."

He walked out.

That was eight weeks ago. He refused to talk with me for almost the entire time after he moved out. We dealt mostly through our mothers. He took our daughter on the weekends during the daytime and dropped her off with one of the mothers in the evening so I could pick her up.

We also dealt through our lawyers. One week after he left, his attorney sent me papers for a mutually agreed divorce, with a letter stating that, if I refused to agree, then my husband was just going to wait for a full year and file for divorce on the basis of having lived separate and apart for over a year.

I could not believe we had gotten to this point. Five years together suddenly over. I had my lawyer tell his that I would consider signing, but only if he agreed to come to the house to talk to me. If he refused, he could damned well wait the whole year.

He must have been eager to get rid of me because he agreed to a meeting, but I was still hopeful about a reconciliation. His mother took our daughter that day. Even though the house still belonged to both of us, he rang the bell. I answered. He did not move to embrace me. His face had a hard, formal look to it.

He came in when I moved aside and sat in the one chair that meant that, no matter where I sat, I could not get close to him. We looked at each other. Eventually, he spoke.

"You wanted to talk so talk."

"I don't want a divorce. I want to get past this."

"You just don't want my child though, right?"

When I did not answer—and what could I say?—he continued.

"So, what now? Are you Kay Corleone in that 'Godfather' movie when she tells Michael that his turn to the Mafia has made him so evil that she does not want to bring another one of his children into the world, and that's why she got an abortion? I'm somehow morally repulsive? Is that it?"

I did not know where he was getting this.

"This isn't about you or anything wrong with you. This is about me," I told him. "It's about what I want and need. This is about my agency."

He listened, then he sighed. For a moment, his eyes teared up, but he recovered. Then, he spoke.

"It used to be that when I looked into your eyes every day, I saw the woman I fell in love with. Now, I don't see her anymore. I don't know where the woman inside there now came from. Maybe she was hidden there the whole time. Frankly, I don't really like that selfish bitch. But it doesn't matter."

I took all that abuse without argument, hoping that he would get it out of his system so that we could really talk.

After pausing for a few moments, he continued, "Even if everything you have told me about never having cheated is true—and I have no real reason to believe you—then accepting your story means also accepting the simple fact that you lied to me. You actively told me something untrue to hide something important from me, and you lied by omission when you failed to share important information with me. You took yourself out of the marriage and made a decision for yourself alone. So, all I really know is that, at a moment of great stress, dealing with something of profound importance to us as a married couple—the birth of a child—you could not be bothered to talk to me because you did not trust me to be part of the decision. Everything else is a mere detail."

That made me lose it.

"Damn it!" I yelled.

He looked at me without reaction, the same dead face. I may not have become Kay Corleone, but he had assumed Michael Corleone's immobile, pitiless expression.

"'I don't want to be a parent again' should be enough of an answer for you," I said. "That should be the end of the discussion!"

It felt like my eyes were flaming. He looked at me, and his façade broke slightly so that I could see a hint of sadness. Finally, he spoke.

"And 'I don't want to be married to you anymore' should be enough of an answer for you. End of discussion. And right now, I am talking about what I want and need. See? I have agency, too. But from now on that agency is going to be free agency."

He got up and walked out of the house without another word. He didn't even bother closing the door.

I refused to sign the divorce papers. My husband refused to take my calls about trying to work things out. We were at an impasse but, of course, the clock was still ticking relentlessly to a one-year-separation divorce.

When I texted him about counseling, he replied, "'I don't want to go to counseling; I want a divorce' should be enough of an answer for you. This is about what I want and need, remember? How do you like my agency?"

I started going to counseling myself and came to understand that I had been suffering from extended post-partum depression. I called my husband to tell him. He actually took the call, probably by accident. He did not react the way I had hoped.

"OK, so because you've gone crazy, you get a get-out-of-jail free card for everything that's happened between us. Is that what you're saying?"

"I'm not crazy. It's depression. And it's common. I just want you to understand."

"I'm trying to, but it doesn't sound to me like you were delusional when you got an abortion or that you were unable to tell what you were doing. In fact, you got yourself together sufficiently to go behind my back, make all the arrangements, and lie to me about what you were doing. I'm glad you figured out what your problem is before you tied our remaining child into her car seat and drove her into a lake so that you don't have to be a mommy anymore."

"You're being a total dick," I said.

"A dick," he repeated slowly and paused.

Then his voice brightened.

"No, that's wrong," he said. "I'll tell you what's going on. I just realized. I just had an epiphany. And I didn't even have to pay a therapist for it. Remember that movie, 'Look Who's Talking?' The one with Kirstie Alley and John Travolta? It's back before she got fat. It's the one where Kirstie Alley is having an affair with a married man and gets pregnant, and the baby narrates everything. An apt reference in these circumstances, don't you think? There's a scene where Kirstie catches her married boyfriend making out with his new girlfriend in the changing room at a dress shop. She confronts him, and he says, 'I'm going through a selfish phase right now.' It's the same with me. I myself am going through a selfish phase right now. Your selfishness has liberated me from giving a shit about your problems. I admit the timing is bad. For you anyway."