Chapter 1:
I walked up slowly to the desk and put my name down. Scribbled it roughly in the patch of white space between black ink lines. The woman told me to take a seat, that somebody would be with me shortly, but I didn’t want to sit down. I didn’t want to ally myself with the women lined up in chairs. Forced to stare at white walls and obligatorily flip through aged pamphlets. I did not want to be one of those women; but I was one of those women and I felt that if I were to sit I’d be validating it- joining a club, showing my allegiance. The truth is I was disgusted by these women, disgusted by the hands that touched them, disgusted by their weakness and vulnerability. I was disgusted by myself.
“Ma’am.” My head was spinning. “Ma’am?” Who was she talking to? “Ma’am!” Me.
The woman at the counter was far too shiny for a job of this nature. She was washed in freckles with angry orange hair. She was attacking a piece of bubblegum with a wide-open mouth and slamming her fingers into a keyboard. She smiled up at me from behind pink-rimmed glasses. “I’m sorry Ma’am. You need to fill out this form.” I nodded, managed a half-hearted smirk, and took the clipboard from her acrylic fingers. I gave in and sat down. Attached to a string, dangling from the clipboard was a pen. The pen was green and yellow and spelled out in purple block letters:
JUDGEMENT FREE ZONE.
Yeah, right.
I surveyed my surroundings, letting the air-conditioned atmosphere rush into my lungs. The clinic was cold, overcompensating for the hard heat that lingered on the streets. Yet nobody shivered, nobody complained. We were complacently in purgatory, glancing at clocks, wondering when we would be done, when we could start forgetting. It’s only an Old Testament God that would make limbo look like a family planning clinic in the middle of Kentucky: only a cruel and unforgiving Divine would have that sadistic of a sense of humor.
I shifted in my seat.
I felt compelled to walk back in time, just to tell my Sunday school teacher, “You were wrong.” I wanted to tell her there was no fire in Purgatory, that nobody was screaming or strapped into strange torture devices. I wanted to tell her that Purgatory was quiet. That it smelled like band-aids and antiseptic. That the walls were eggshell white. I wanted to tell her that it came equipped with two vending machines and plenty of informative literature. I wanted to tell her that the warden was a smiley woman with a care bears tattoo.
But that wasn’t purgatory; it couldn’t be. Because the thing about purgatory is that when the torture and apathy cease to consume you, you are on to heaven, moving on up to eternal bliss. My prospects were hardly as bright. Maybe it wasn’t purgatory. Maybe it was limbo.
I forced myself to focus on the task at hand. “Fill out the form, Judas. Fill it out. One question at a time.” I had been trained from a very young age to give myself pep talks… And so the scribbling began.
Name: Judas Eleanor Mersten.
Age: 21.
Regular period? Obviously not.
Birth control? Not good enough.
Months pregnant?
Pregnant. I froze up around this word. Pregnant. It’s the type of word that swirls in your head while you’re playing house as a little girl. You play with baby dolls, kiss their cold, plastic heads, rock them to sleep in your pudgy-baby-fat-arms.
I used to stick a pillow under my chest and pretend to be in labor. Well, labor how I imagined it. But the word was different now. It had lost something in translation.
The translated “pregnant” sounded something like this: I’m 21. I’m single. I have no money and there’s a stranger sleeping in my stomach. A stranger who I have no desire to know. A stranger who needs to disappear.
“Focus on the form, Judas.”
Months Pregnant: Three.
Chapter 2:
The clock in the clinic was plain and simple. Mass-produced, mass-purchased. White with thin black hands. At that particular moment, it had been ten minutes since I arrived. Then eleven. Then twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. I hadn’t stared at a clock with such veracity in years, a decade even. Time is funny. It can move like snaps or stretch out like rubber bands and it always seems to do the opposite of what you want it to. I know this from much experience.
I was only eight when I started this love-hate relationship with time.
My grandfather was a jeweler, with a specialty in watches. Mersten’s Fine Jewelry had practically become a landmark in Kentucky (where the tiny story was originally conceived) but with the onslaught of places like Tiffany’s and Ben Bridge, my grandfather’s quiet pipe dream became more and more elusive. Customers wanted more for less and employees became flighty, my Grandfather would sit down to his Makers Mark after work and murmur about how “heart had left business for good.” His heart never really left it though. His dreams just got old with him and kept him company on Sunday mornings as he balanced his checkbook.
So for obvious reasons there were clocks and watches lingering in every nook and cranny of my grandparents’ house: on the walls, stuffed in dressers, forgotten in junk drawers, in pant pockets, everywhere.
The house became characterized by its incessant ticking: a ticking that my grandparents and I had long ago stopped noticing.
But, I digress.
Clock hearing is much different than clock-watching. My clock watching days began when I was a little girl—on Sundays.
I was forced to practice the piano after Church. I think my grandmother appreciated the aesthetic above anything else. It painted the right picture or at least a picture she was comfortable with.
I hated Church. I hated the piano. The truth is I wasn’t any good… Maybe I could have been but the classical compositions meant nothing to me; I couldn’t hear anything in them. The sound came across fragmented, like a word that refused to translate. Besides all of this, my fingers were too pudgy and my mind too easily distracted.
My mother had never gone to church. I think that may have been the reason I was forced to attend. My grandmother looked at me as a second shot, round two if you will. After me it was game over. So, through no fault of my own, I was condemned to the most banal and cliché of youth activities: Sunday School.
The Sunday school teacher thought of me as a demon child, not because of any particular offense I had committed, but rather because of the offenses of my namesake. “Who in their right mind would name their child Judas?” She would whisper to the other mothers.
“My mother!” I wanted to say. “My mother!” But I knew better than that, I had been trained better than that.
It was a simple enough story, the way I was given my name.
My mother wanted to give me a biblical name. I suppose she figured that if she couldn’t save me, this might incite God to take her place. So with the largest amount of conviction she’d ever muster, she went into a bookstore and opened a Bible to a random page, she let her finger fall to a random line.
Her finger lie on the name Judas.
Unfortunately for me and my mother, she had become a soul-searching hippy just thirteen days before this whole expedition. She thought of herself as “misunderstood” and believed in love and peace and second-chances. And she liked “Judas.” She would later call it a “strong name, a noble name.” So from that awkward used book excursion on, my life was forever doomed to be a series of incidental disappointments. The first disappointment would come for my mother, on the day of my birth. I was born a girl. She named me Judas anyway.
“I don’t like that tune.”
“That’s because your ears are out of tune, Jude.”
“That doesn’t even make sense, Grandma.”
“Do you know that girls who play an instrument are more likely to go do well in primary school? More likely to do well in high school? More likely to do well in college? More likely to do well in life? Isn’t that interesting?”
“Sure.”
“Sarcasm isn’t attractive, Judas.”
“Neither is my piano playing.”
My grandmother’s tight face crumpled. “I only ask you to play for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes without whining or complaining. Play for the good lord, Judas. The heavenly father loves music.”
I felt compelled to ask her how she knew this: that God liked music. I would follow it up with, “what kind of music does he like?”
I wondered if he liked the big high-note music from strange countries in strange languages. I wondered if he liked the “soul” music that came out of the neighboring black Church. I wondered if he liked folky-guitar-for-Jesus music. I wondered if he liked Christian Electronica.
There was only one thing I was certain of: He was not a fan of my music and for that alone he deserved infinite respect.
My grandmother was glaring at me.
I took a deep breath and began plopping my fat fingers along the keys, all the while staring at the grandfather clock that graced our tiny living room. The pendulum swayed as time dug its heels in the dirt. Fifteen minutes. Then sixteen. Then seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen.
Chapter 3
I had only been there for twenty minutes. I had counted the amount of times that I told myself I needed to stop counting time. I was making myself dizzy, making myself sick. I could feel my breathing get quicker but I didn’t have any control over it. I gripped my hands to the side of the chair. I felt carsick but I wasn’t moving.
The shiny-bubble-gum-chewing-baby-killer was on her tiptoes, pressing the power button on a TV I hadn’t even noticed.
I added that to my limbo description.
Television: Check.
The twisted irony was that the Pope had recently declared the end of purgatory. I had found the whole thing to be utterly hysterical. I imagined souls walking up to the sliding doors only to see an “Out of Business” sign. I imagined the New-New Revised Standard Version of the Bible with a note at the end. “PS Forget all that stuff about limbo. No big thing. XOXO, God.”
The television was too loud. The news is always loud. It always seems to tell me things I don’t want to hear:
An amber-alert was out for a girl thought to have been kidnapped by her grandfather. A roadside bomb had killed three in Iraq. The US wasn’t accepting some kind of Asian product because of some kind of defect. A renowned war photographer had killed himself. The President was smiling.
