WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

Rufi Thorpe on the shock of finding she was pregnant and the surprise of realising what choice she was going to make

Rufi Thorpe on the shock of finding she was pregnant and the surprise of realising what choice she was going to make

The importance of all this was so terrifying that at first I folded inward like a telescope. I didn’t even phrase the abortion as a question when I first told Sam.

By the time I was in my late 20s, taking a pregnancy test when my period was late had become reflexive. I can remember standing by the toilet, my hands trembling as I held the little stick, mouth breathing, as though my undivided attention were necessary in order for the correct chemical processes to take place and allow the results to show up. But I was never pregnant. I had actually started to wonder if perhaps I wasn’t able to get pregnant, so reliably was I not pregnant. Still, anytime I was a few days late, I would buy a test, thinking: you’re just being paranoid. But also: better safe than sorry. Paranoia was, by the time I reached my late 20s, my buddy, my long-time pal.

So when I took a pregnancy test that day in late November, I didn’t even bother letting my heart race. I left it on the bathroom sink for an overly long time while I checked my emails. I had been seeing a man for only three months. His name was Sam. I hadn’t even dared to begin calling him my boyfriend yet, though I knew we were exclusive. I wanted him to be my boyfriend so badly that I was simply afraid to presume. It seemed like we should have a conversation about it or something. I would have liked to get a certificate made: Sam Is Officially Your Boyfriend.

A few weeks earlier, we’d had a condom break. Still, we had taken Plan B right away, and everything was going to be fine. Except that when I finally went in to check the test, I dropped it immediately on the tiled floor and it skittered away from me, and I couldn’t pick it up for some time because both my hands were clapped over my mouth. I was pregnant.

I laughed out loud. Then I said, “Holy f***ing shit.” Then I laughed out loud again. Then I picked up the test, confirmed that I was pregnant, threw it at the wall and howled. I felt simultaneously that everything was ruined and also that a miracle had occurred. “This is so, so bad!” I said, but I couldn’t stop smiling.

In a way, it is misleading to begin this story with a pregnancy test. There are so many other things you need to know, so many other places to start. I could start by explaining that I never actually knew my own father, that I was the result of a one night stand. That my mother, who’d had abortions before me, had suddenly been unable to schedule one, unable to just “take care of it”, and had instead decided to keep me. I could start with how much I loved her, with making French toast on the weekends, with the weird dance she used to do while pushing a cart at the supermarket, with the way she would pretend to have died in the aisles of Barnes and Noble until I could find a way to resuscitate her. I could start there.

Or I could start with explaining about Sam. I could tell you about the moment I saw him, his face a little sore-looking from being shaved too close, his black dress shirt obviously new and still starchy with fabric sizing, his jaw jutting with a massive chin and terrific under-bite.

The very moment I saw him, I wanted to marry him. I didn’t just want to marry him, I was positive that I would. I thought: Oh! There he is. It’s your husband. Like recognising someone.

I could tell you about our first date. How he took me out for dinner, and then afterward suggested a walk on the beach. “But first,” he said, “I have to get something out of my truck.” And in his truck was a picnic basket stuffed with two bottles of wine (he didn’t know if I would want red or white), a full cheese course, a bar of fine dark chocolate, a blanket. He had also brought a cord of firewood for a bonfire and a bouquet of lilies, which he explained he had wanted to give to me right away but had worried would be too forward. “And then when I saw you,” he said, “I thought, well, you’re just so beautiful. I was like, okay, we don’t have to go on this date. This is obviously a travesty. You can just send me home with a handshake, I get it.”

Perhaps, for context, it would be better to start with the growing up fat, the dumpling, pudgy teenage years at my boarding high school. The way I was a little bit unreliable about washing my hair. How I had a Pink Floyd T-shirt I really liked, and I was certain it looked good, even under sundresses. How I wrote poetry. How my first kiss was a disaster and I worried it meant I was a lesbian and how I told the boy I thought maybe I should become a nun or else work on a wolf preserve and that I was afraid there was no God but that no matter what I definitely could not keep kissing him any more.

Dating in high school was, for me, like a nightmare where you discover you have been cast in a musical and it is opening night. As you walk out on stage, you realise you don’t know the choreography or any of your lines. You search the faces of your fellow cast members, but they are all wearing masks. It is possible their eyes are just black marbles and, if you lifted their masks, there would be nothing underneath. The panic was liquid and pure, pungent enough to keep most guys from getting interested in me to begin with.

The only other boy who asked me out in high school was addicted to NyQuil cold and flu medication because he was so anxious about his grades that it was the only way he could get to sleep. He ran cross-country, and he was very skinny and tall. One night I walked with him to the pharmacy so he could buy more NyQuil, and we walked back home through the woods. He had bought me a bouquet of red carnations and he kissed me in the woods, and I thought I had never been happier. Later that night he called me, and I had butterflies in my stomach. But he was calling to tell me he couldn’t be my boyfriend after all. “Eventually, you’re going to realise you’re smarter than me,” he said.

“I already know that!” I said, exasperated. The silence that followed was filled with my treason and our mutual embarrassment. After he hung up, I shoved the bouquet of flowers out the window and then peered down at it for some time where it landed in the grass in the dark.

I could start there. Or I could detail the existential flailing of my early 20s, wherein I pursued wildly inappropriate men out of a

misplaced sense of adventure. I began an affair with one of my professors, not because I truly wanted to, but because it seemed like it might be an interesting thing to do. What kind of girl would I be if I dated a married man? A heroin addict? A man who had been to prison? What sorts of things would happen to that sort of girl? I was bored. Men were interesting. It didn’t seem like any of it mattered very much.

By the time I met Sam, I didn’t believe in soul mates. I didn’t believe in love at first sight. I wasn’t even positive I believed in the institution of marriage, though I was willing to give it a whirl. But I was pretty sure that any marriage I entered would end in divorce. Certainly I did not expect to meet my soulmate online! Sam and I did meet online, and not at a respectable dating site, either. No match.com or eharmony for us. I met him on OKCupid. Because I wasn’t willing to pay the fee to join a better dating site.

BUT I am starting with the pregnancy test because that is where this story really does start: where the actions and the choices that I made begin to matter in a sharper, stranger way. It is rare that daily life matters. So much of it is phone calls and driving, emails and worrying over the calories in a scone.

But for almost a week after I found out I was pregnant, I found myself in a kind of vibratory silence, unsure if I had merely misplaced the script or if perhaps there had stopped being any script at all, waiting to see what I would say. Whatever I did would matter. Whatever I chose would make me who I would become, would alter irrevocably the relationship with Sam, would forge the shape of the future. And of course, hardest to fathom: it would determine whether a new person would be born.

The importance of all this was so terrifying that at first I folded inward like a telescope. I didn’t even phrase the abortion as a question when I first told Sam. I wrote him an email asking him to come by, told him I was pregnant, showed him the test. He said, “Holy shit.” And then he hugged me and said “Holy shit” again, and I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear in his voice that he was smiling. And then I told him I would schedule an abortion.

To do anything other than schedule the abortion seemed insane. I was teaching as an adjunct and living in a studio apartment attached to my mother’s house. My income was $18,000 a year. Sam was just finishing a PhD in neuro-