How to Care for a Human Girl by Ashley Wurzbacher

Author:Ashley Wurzbacher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2023-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

She did tell him, and he did laugh, when they met in Schenley Plaza after she left the lab. The sound and sight of his laughter so closely matched her mental preview that she was startled, grew nervous and fidgety, folding and unfolding her hands on the table where they sat together.

It was important, she said, that he know everything about how she’d come to be here. She told him about the abortion. It did not take long, and he did not interrupt her. He had hung a yellow plastic Dollar General bag over the corner of his chair, its contents sagging, and she wondered what was inside.

“I’m trying to tell you that this wasn’t a random decision,” she said, “my moving out. It followed from a specific thing that happened.”

“A thing that happened because you aren’t happy with him,” Drew said. “He’s not right for you. If he were, you wouldn’t be here.”

He said it with such sureness, despite his lack of data. She’d said similar things to herself, it was true, but they had been more like hypotheses than conclusions; saying them had been like testing ice that might turn out to be too thin to hold her. Suddenly the scientific method seemed to her remarkably feminine in its cautiousness—questioning endlessly, making no assumptions. Men were just like, This is this because I say it is. You are this because I say you are.

“I guess that’s part of what I’m trying to figure out,” she said. “How much of my choice was because of my feelings about him, and how much was because of my feelings about motherhood.” She could see Drew’s big-ass truck parked down the street, obscuring her view of Dippy the dinosaur in his spot outside the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. “I’m not sure I want children,” she said. “With anyone.”

“I get that,” he said.

“You do?”

“Sure. A life can be about other things.”

Jada nodded. “I said that to my mom once. She told me I’d change my mind.”

“Maybe you will.”

Her mother’s eagerness that Jada should marry had been a late-in-life development. When she was in high school and college, and even for a while after, her mother had seemed discouraging of her love life, looking sidelong at Drew and the other men she’d dated as if each had some devious plan to derail her career. Near the end of her life, though, she’d been all marriage, marriage, marriage, a regular Mrs. Bennett, as if the shine had worn off whatever romantic vision she’d held of Jada as a go-getter going and getting it alone, an independent woman who could take care of herself. Sometimes it seemed to Jada that her own wants were indistinguishable from her mother’s. It both heartened and alarmed her that this might be so, that her mother might have not only carried her body in her own but also determined all she’d do with it later. If this were so, what now—now that she was gone?

“There are times when having a child feels really, really important,” she said.

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