Your comedy career filled him with immense pride. He went into medicine but always secretly wanted to do what you did and was able to live vicariously through you. Whenever he saw you in person or spoke to you on the phone, he’d always run down his laundry list of show ideas, joke ideas, script ideas, and book ideas. He had so many ideas.
He’s no longer full of ideas. No longer funny. No longer alive. I hate you for doing this to him.
The night after our Yom Kippur cemetery family outing, Dad comes over to babysit Iris for a couple of hours. After putting her down for bed, I trap him into having a conversation—just the two of us. Sippy cup in hand, I head downstairs to find him slumped down, feet on the coffee table, remote control glued to his hand. He’s still in his work clothes that hang off him now because he’s lost so much weight. For his birthday in July, I bought him new jeans that are two sizes smaller, but even those are too big now.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen him this way—ransacked and vacant. This Yom Kippur, it’s because of you. Twenty years ago, it was because of me.
• • •
When I was fifteen, I fell hard for a boy. Let’s call him Ben. He was so cool. I only had my learner’s permit, but he knew how to drive. He drove a hand-me-down Chevy Monte Carlo with velvety seats. He played in a band and smoked tons of weed. I don’t recall him being particularly nice. I don’t recall him being anything definitive at all really. No matter. I loved him ferociously, and it consumed me.
Dad hated him, of course, which only made me love him more.
One afternoon while Mom and Dad atoned for their sins at Yom Kippur services, I had sex with Ben in my childhood bedroom, under a ceiling of glow-in-the-dark stars.
I’m not sure where you were that day.
I remember being too scared to walk into the pharmacy and buy the pregnancy test, so Ben drove us to our favorite diner to kill time. I ordered my usual chicken tenders basket with fries but couldn’t eat a bite because my stomach ached with the knowledge that I was in very serious—very adult—trouble. More trouble than I knew how to handle. I didn’t need a test to tell me that. My sore and swollen boobs were evidence enough.
Ben’s parents happened to be out of town that weekend, so we took the pregnancy test to his house, where I locked myself in the hall bathroom. My chest was clenched; my pulse, explosive. When I read the results, I fell to the ground, hitting my head on the counter on the way down.
I felt numb, empty, panicked, terrified, ashamed, sad, mad, and bad. Very, very bad. That night, we drank a 40-ounce of malt liquor in Ben’s backyard.
The next few days were profoundly heavy. It was the first time in my life I’d felt that kind of weight. While all my friends worried about an upcoming geometry test, I worried about how I would tell Mom and Dad I was pregnant.
Aside from the teen sex, drug experimentation, and cigarette smoking, I wasn’t a bad kid. I got good grades, had passions and interests, went to a competitive, specialized high school for performing arts. Teachers always gave me the highest marks in conduct. I wasn’t a bad kid. I was a good kid who did a stupid thing. But getting pregnant at fifteen and having to deal with the emotional trauma, stigma, and shame of having an abortion taught me very early on that my actions do, in fact, have consequences. A leads to B, which leads to C, and C can sometimes really suck:
I have unsafe sex, I get pregnant, Mom weeps an ocean of tears and threatens to send me to boarding school.
I have unsafe sex, I get pregnant, I’m taken to a doctor the day after telling my parents and forced to look at the doctor’s kids’ baby pictures that sit on top of his desk while he makes sure I understand my options.
I have unsafe sex, I get pregnant, a nurse puts a mask over my face, a tear spills down the side of my face and onto the operating table as I drift off to sleep staring at a computerized sonogram image of a baby inside of me who I’ll never know. When I wake up, full of lead, a Depo-Provera shot is being administered in my ass and an HIV blood test is being shot into my arm.
I have unsafe sex, I get pregnant, Dad doesn’t speak to me for a solid month. No good morning, how was school today, pass the salt—nothing. I’m an invisible ghost who floats around the house haunting my loved ones. An invisible ghost who hates herself and will continue to hate herself for years to come.
Like most traumatic events, this ordeal had a tremendous impact on my future. Pretty much immediately after it happened, I developed this obsessive need to prove that I was “good.” I didn’t want to upset Mom and Dad any more than I already had, so I chose to be the very best version of myself. I spent hours every night doing my homework, stopped taking acid every weekend, auditioned for every school play and got leading roles, pulled back from the shitty boyfriend. From there:
I went on to graduate seventeenth in my high school
