Rarely Ever Isn't Never

by Denisa Dobrovodová

This is an extract from 'Rarely Ever Isn't Never', a novel which explores the highs and lows of young womanhood, ruled by the chaos of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

        She had to go through the whole process. Name. Age. Address. GP.  It was going relatively well. This time, the pharmacist was a woman, a woman way past menopause. Lisa hoped she wasn’t about to get a religious lecture. Some Gods don’t like contraception. Some Gods prefer you to go raw.

         “Good, all this information seems correct.”

         Lisa smiled, relieved.

         “One last thing, have you ever taken the emergency contraceptive pill?”

         Boy, has she ever.

         “Ehm, a couple times.”

         “You’re familiar with the process then?”

         Lisa nodded. Very familiar. Too familiar.

         “And when did you take the last one?”

Lie. Do it. Lie.

         “About two weeks ago?”

Nice going. Increase your chances of being pregnant.

         “So…within this cycle?”

         Lisa swallowed, and the pharmacist could hear it, she must have, it was so forced, so dry.

         “Maybe?”

         “It’s not wise to take more than one per month. I’d strongly advise against it.”

         Not wise. It wasn’t wise to smoke. It wasn’t wise to take ellaOne. She must not be very wise, then.

         But the pharmacist looked almost kind. Actually concerned.

Tell her you’re already pregnant, so it doesn’t matter anyway.

         “Can I still buy it though?”

         She frowned. Lisa noticed her name tag. Her name was Alice. Alice frowned. Alice didn’t look happy. Alice was about to judge.

         “Legally, yes. But emergency contraception shouldn’t be taken lightly, and it certainly shouldn’t replace regular birth control. The dose of hormones is very high, and the more often you take it, the more severe the side effects-”

         She let her speak. Alice had to say her piece. She would probably have trouble sleeping if she didn’t.     

         “When did the unprotected intercourse occur?”       

         “Last night.”

         Alice nodded.

         “And, ehm, this morning.”

         She lifted her gaze, stared at Lisa from above her glasses. She looked like a fairy godmother. She could have been Polish, minus the accent. She judged like a Pole, too.

         “The effectiveness goes down every hour that passes-”

That’s right. You’re probably already pregnant. From last night. From the night before. From last week, last two weeks, last month…

         “Do you take Apple Pay?”

         She swallowed the pill on a bench nearby, got it down with her last sip of water, chilled from the long walk. It was large. Daunting. Almost wouldn’t go down.

Difficulty swallowing is a primary sign of throat cancer.

         She stayed on the bench for the next two hours. She had to. Alice said that if she were to throw up, the pill wouldn’t work- which was unfortunate, because she wanted to get out of that shithole as soon as possible. But there were no 24-hour pharmacies in her uni town, and the buses stopped running around midnight. 

The union party was in full swing. Everyone was posting about it. Gemma. Alessandro. Martin. Jack. Alcohol was pouring down throats, cigarettes were being waved around in the smoking section outside, the party music was surprisingly good for once. But Lisa wasn’t there, Lisa was losing all the feeling in her toes and probably getting a UTI from the freezing cold bench. Or maybe that was an old wives’ tale, a Polish wives’, maybe it was one of those “facts” that Magdalena perpetuated without any scientific evidence. Can you even get a cold from being cold? Someone said you couldn’t.

You can definitely get cancer from smoking, though. That’s proven.

         Lisa’s stomach was painfully empty, apart from the pill, and she could feel the acid building. She was getting the hunger nausea that couldn’t be helped with anything but a cheeseburger. Or a glass of wine. That would work too.

         In one of those Instagram stories, she spotted the silhouette of Timothy, his profile, or his back, but it might not have been Timothy, it might have been an entirely different tall, slim, dark-haired, intellectual-looking, attractive in the New-York-despite-being-from-LA-kind-of-way American. Timothy rarely went to the student union.

That doesn’t guarantee a thing.

         It was gonna happen. She could feel it. She was gonna throw up right then and there, on her suede high-heeled boots, under the bench. And the pill will have stayed intact. She knew it. It was intuition. 

        But Lisa wasn't much of a vomiter, her stomach was strong and sturdy and required an ungodly amount of alcohol, or bacteria, to get rid of its contents. Bulimia wasn’t an option. She tried it once, although she would never admit it to anyone but Mary, who was in the adjacent room when Lisa put the back of a toothbrush down her throat. She wanted to see if she could lose weight before one of her trips to visit Magdalena, and she didn’t want the comments and criticisms- not the British types, the veiled, the concealed, but the Polish ones; the ones spoken out loud and out of the gate, the ones that cut deeper because they couldn’t be rationalised against. Of course, she meant it. She said it. There was no doubt.

         She got it from Magdalena- the sturdy stomach. Her dad had one of the weakest stomachs around. He would throw up on buses and sometimes even on trains, Lisa could hear the turns of his insides whenever they ate something with a little bit of spice, and she would hide under pillows and blankets to muffle the sounds. Magdalena, though, Magdalena had a strong, sturdy, Slavic stomach. She could handle spicy food and greasy food and copious amounts of alcohol and all modes of transportation.

One time, when Lisa was little, she overheard a conversation between Magdalena and one of her Dad’s colleagues. It was absurd and inappropriate, and as expected, finished by her mother. The colleague, Anna or Abigail or whatever she was called, was sharing the heart wrenching details of her latest miscarriage-

Some people pray for children. And you might have just killed one of yours.

         The conversation was sombre, serious, very un-British. Anna or Abigail must have been buzzed, for she asked Magdalena straight and outright, had she ever had a miscarriage? Anna or Abigail had heard it was common. 

Lisa was sitting at the top of the stairs; she couldn’t sleep because she was worried about never waking up again and needed a distraction from all the thoughts of death and destruction. She hoped to find it by listening in on the semi-intellectual party happening on the ground floor.

All the guests were professors. All the guests were English. 

Her dad was a professor. Her dad was English. 

Magdalena wasn’t a professor, and she wasn’t English, and she also apparently never had a miscarriage, as she announced proudly in her loud voice that carried upstairs and most likely outside, too. “Nope. Never had one,” she said in that tone that lacked any and all empathy. “Whatever comes inside of me wants to stick around. Lisa was three weeks late. They practically had to pull her out of there.” When Anna or Abigail, silenced by the shock, didn’t respond, Magdalena added with a chuckle: “That’s why I have such a hard time losing weight. All the extra kilos are determined to stay.”

Only, she didn’t have any extra kilos, not now, and certainly not then, they were exaggerated, imaginary, non-existent, she was the only one who could spot them, up close and from afar. They were the apparitions of Magdalena’s insecurities, of the complexes she carried from her youth. Like gods, she both worshipped and feared them, her figure was her biggest pride and her biggest curse. “My thighs seem to have got bigger. Come look, Eliza, what do you think?” And Lisa would look and touch and study, her legs, or her arms, or her stomach, poke the ever-so-slight cellulite, play with the scar she had from her appendix surgery, examine the changes, check if there were some imperfections her mother might have overlooked. 

She was a great beauty- that’s how Tolstoy would’ve described her. She was the Anna Karenina of the modern age; she had an unusually symmetrical face, large eyes, plump lips, a child’s nose that seemed to have forgotten to grow. Her beauty was exceptional, and she knew it, and she didn’t know it, and it was her biggest fear, the gravest of threats, losing the beauty she might or might not have had.

If she were a smoker, she wouldn’t have held up half as well.

         People said Lisa looked a lot like her; her appearance was a tamer version of her mother’s, her beauty like a second cup of tea made from the same teabag. But her cheekbones were equally prominent, her lips equally plump, her eyes nearly as large, albeit a slightly different shape. She might have resembled her mother, but she couldn’t compare to her, despite their age difference, despite Lisa’s advantage of youth.

         Lisa's stomach turned again. She prepared to throw up, pulled her long dark hair away from her face, but she had no hair tie, no clip, nothing to keep it from getting all gross. She certainly didn’t anticipate throwing up when she was packing for her group therapy trip. She was meant to go in and out. She was meant to be home hours ago. She was meant to be in the student union.

         Alas, nothing could be done. She had to wait, contemplate, and she could almost feel the child growing in her stomach, the cells fusing, or perhaps they were already fused. 

How long does it take for the cells to fuse? The egg waits there, sure, but then what? Is there like a cool-off period, a trial run? Or does it just happen when the circumstances are right, when ovulation works its wonders and increases her libido and attracts a partner and all that?

Yeah, like your libido needs the help.

         The force of her libido, she must have also inherited from her mother. It was obvious. The number of men Magdalena went through was a clear indicator, her drunken remarks about one’s endowment or another’s, it all pointed to the same thing. But that must have been the purpose of her beauty, for what other point would it have, why be created so close to perfection but given no desire to procreate? It made genetic sense. Beautiful people are meant to mate. Destined to create more beautiful people, or uglier people, because Magdalena was always quick to point out the cosmic accident of the gorgeous parents and their less-than-attractive offspring. “Tragedy,” she would whisper in Lisa’s ear when they saw such an unlucky creature, “you would think they would end up with a mini supermodel.”

         But maybe, it was all up to chance; the beauty, the brains, the health, maybe there was no order in this or anything at all, maybe her mother had been created beautiful in a mere accident. Perhaps she would have been considered ugly, had she been born in a different time, a different society, had large women with little eyes and thin lips and massive noses been the ideals of beauty, perhaps they were both lucky to be alive today.

Only, Lisa didn’t feel very lucky, for she might be pregnant, and she might have cancer, and she might throw up all over her hair.