After my divorce, I took a job teaching poetry to inmates in the Massachusetts prison system. By then, my daughter and I had moved into a large, creaky house in Cambridge with two other single moms and their children. Looking back, I can honestly say that life in that big house could seem as dark and dangerous as the rigors and uncertainties of life in prison.

THIS IS PART 6 of an EIGHT-PART STORY

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8

Did I think I was having a miscarriage? 

Those words ricocheted through my mind as reality sank in. Two months before, I’d had unprotected sex with Davis; I hadn’t had sex with anyone else so this current situation had to be attributable to him. 

Someone gave me a recommendation for a gynecologist, a Dr. Mendelsohn in Brookline who months later would molest me on his examination table. I was driven to his office where it was confirmed that I was experiencing a miscarriage and sent home with a prescription for meds that would stop the bleeding and calm my system down. I was never given a D&C. I think the assumption was my body would take care of itself on its own. 

The next few days were awful. I lay in bed, crampy and miserable, the pregnancy slowly seeping away as I tried to understand what had just happened. Davis would come and visit me. To my surprise, he blamed the loss of the baby on me even though I hadn’t known I was pregnant. “You’ve been running around, not taking care of yourself,” he admonished. Then he made it clear that had I not miscarried, he would have insisted I carry the child to term, no abortion (!), and he would have taken over and brought up his infant son or daughter on his own.

Well …

Interestingly, he told Eloise all about it, how he had fathered a child and how I, through carelessness, not sleeping or eating properly, drinking too much, had caused the pregnancy to go down the drain.

So now, for the first time, Eloise had the facts and understood that Davis and I had been lovers. Obviously there was nothing she could do about that, but our relationship grew even more strained and I became persona non grata in her house.

Not that she ever said anything. She just knew how to make me feel unwelcome with a narrow look or a critical remark that was clothed in concern, such as: “You don’t look so well, no wine for you.” Words that stung because Eloise Fein, with her high intelligence and carefully thought out observations, was a bit of a role model. As teenagers in high school, we had constantly hung out together, wandering around the city following random strangers who looked interesting, or forming crushes on improbable people (movie stars whose information we somehow managed to get hold of), or simply lazing about at her parents’ country house on Long Island. It would never have occurred to me back then that we would become serious enemies.

Cover Image: Kristina Tripkovic

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