Choice Words Read online

  chickenshit, whose knees aren’t buckling as she kneels, who isn’t

  letting the room go black, who isn’t skipping ahead, to a rust-stained

  recliner, a handful of saltines, sour OJ in a Dixie cup, & a wastepaper

  basket. you lean over now, if you feel sick, the nurse says. her voice is

  centuries away, filed away behind a metal desk.

  you better come back later, she says, you can’t speak because you’re

  leaning over the wastebasket, because the room smells like talcum

  powder & citrus fruit, because your womb feels like an argument,

  because you are,

  you’re chickenshit. you wipe your mouth, exhale.

  I gotta do this, you say. we drove three hours for this. I already paid. I

  gotta do this now. I can’t send you in like this.

  you gotta pull yourself together. the words are like a steel-trap,

  snapping. you gotta explicate yourself. the room bulges, contracts. you

  bowl over, you

  hold your stomach & you forget. she’s standing over you now. her

  fingertips cool on your forehead, cheek. this your first time, honey? her

  words syrup, slush.

  you gotta close your eyes to make sense.

  you gotta lean over the wastepaper basket, you gotta wipe your mouth,

  you gotta swallow.

  you haven’t got to answer. you gotta do it, that’s all.

  THIS DOCTOR SPEAKS: ABORTION IS HEALTH CARE

  Sylvia Ramos Cruz

  Abortion.

  Nobody likes the word.

  Why not? asks the doctor.

  “Abortion is health care,” she says, looking down to check the overnight

  tweets of trolls who call her killer, promise death.

  Later, at the hospital, she navigates the maze of laws conceived by scores of part-time legislators who know little about the science, ritual, real-life consequences of practicing medicine—legislators who wage a stealth campaign against women, waving clubs of medically unsound mandates

  for—

  intrusive ultrasounds

  three-day waits

  scripted counseling

  parental consent,

  twelve-week bans

  painkillers for twenty-week-old fetuses

  and more …

  And when that’s done, the doctor turns to what she enjoys—

  talks birth control with teens

  counsels women about mammograms

  examines patients with high-risk pregnancies

  delivers babies

  screens for cancer

  cuts out tumors

  makes treatment plans for patients

  who can’t afford even basic

  generic drugs …

  And once a month she joins a handful of providers, travels to the only two

  clinics left in this vast

  wind-sculpted state, brings abortion services to almost a million women

  and girls sixteen and over.

  She does this because she knows

  abortion is health care.

  IN WHICH I AM A VOLCANO, FROM TERMINATIONS: ONE

  Lynne DeSilva-Johnson

  In volcanic eruptions, I read, magma rises through cracks or weaknesses in the Earth’s crust. When the pressure is released, e.g., as a result of plate movement, magma explodes to the surface, causing a volcanic eruption. The lava from the eruption cools to form new crust. The rock builds up, and a volcano forms.

  It’s hard to locate the origin of shame in my body. No, that’s not exactly true—it’s more that it’s hard to locate the entry point in the story. I have vague, dreamlike memories of not feeling ashamed, embarrassed, or uncomfortable in my body, but it is so early that I can’t identify the precise shift, but I know that by eight years old, it was going strong.

  When do we start telling the human children we call “girls” that they can’t sit with their legs spread, that their shirts can’t hang down below their nipples when they turn upside down on the monkey bars? When do those children learn that their value is inextricably linked to their ability to be attractive to the opposite sex—to their body’s ability to do so?

  For those of us with nothing in our pockets, fighting against abuse, or eking out survival, this lesson has an additional set of teeth—the ability to attract and manipulate sexual attention becomes a capital negotiation, a cost-benefit analysis.

  I grew up in a household that looked from the outside like a “liberal” one, but where conservative, sex-negative body-shaming was the norm. As a preteen I was dragged out of sex-ed classes (“human education,” they called it) where my school was using Our Bodies, Ourselves, and told by my mother that my school was being irresponsible, as she went on a vocal campaign to recommend the adoption of an abstinence-only text, that no other parents (bravo!) went along with. So, only I was removed from these classes.

  My friends were jealous, they said it was a drag, and I got to work on homework in a study hall, which was generally considered the better deal. But I was mortified—both because my experience in school was already that of imposter, other, different, and all I wanted was to seamlessly fit into normal experience.

  I wanted desperately to be liked and accepted, and from first or second grade, conversations with other little “girls” (I use quotes because there was no option to be other than your cisgendered origin) were already concerned with which boys we liked, and with stories of teenage romance, boyfriends, and the role of the body and clothes in this.

  I also wanted to understand and feel legitimized in my instincts that body exploration was not evil and degenerate and that my quickly growing body was not something to hide. In fifth grade, I was the tallest person in my class, and the first bra I ever bought was a C cup. As my breasts grew, my mother shifted all my clothes into tent-like sizes and insisted my bras be matronly, taupe, and white devices with the intent of taming and obscuring my breasts. Any desire for color or pattern or pretty was a place for shame: Why was I thinking about who was going to see my bra? SLUT! Touching myself was verboten. Wanting contact or sex was verboten. Early experimentation, written down in a secret diary read without my permission, resulted in repeat visits to a priest for repentance and retraining in classic Catholic shame, fire, and brimstone. Not only was I dirty, low, broken, I was a sinner, and I would be punished not only in this world but beyond.

  There is no boundary where shame “about body” or about self ends and shame “about abortion” begins. For me, it is inextricably entwined. Its roots come in a deep-seated fear of my own true self—my desires—being something to be repressed and hidden, and the learned belief, repeated to me so many times by my mother, that left to my own devices, I would be a disaster.

  My inescapable abortion, like a toxic waste spill on the timeline of my life, was a beacon of this inner programming for nearly twenty years. It was true, the inner voice said. Left to your own devices, you fuck everything up. You become a statistic.

  The thoughts woven tightly with these aligned with my mother’s perspective; the gaslighting that was so constant came to live in my head, a voice I misunderstood as my own inner voice, rather than a programmed recording I hadn’t been able to dub over. Any time I couldn’t get a job, struggled with a class, was unsure of my next steps, the abortion appeared like a warning flare—reminding me of my weakness, my lack.

  For nearly twenty years, the abortion loomed, as illness and broken relationships and labor precarity and a string of traumas each as damaging as the next made childbearing a seem a diminishing possibility. With each misstep, I thought to myself, you killed the only child you will ever conceive. When my reproductive system remained riddled with pain and cysts and in need of surgery and then medication, for many years the words in my head weren’t was there a medical problem with the abortion or could there be a metaphysical, psychological root of this illness, but only, ever, you fuckup, you ruined your chances at chi
ldren. My shame remained rooted in my feelings of weakness and inadequacy, and of self-blame. I was told again and again, in doctor’s offices where the “termination” was discussed, that I was a ticking clock. My womb was broken, and my promiscuity was often inferred as the probable cause. Endometriosis being rarely identified, the going theory was, usually, unchecked STIs. Judging your-fault faces, judging your-fault official diagnosis.

  And: no one talked about it. I didn’t know a single woman who’d come forward about an abortion until I was much older. No doctors understood—few doctors do—the manifestation of trauma in the body as chronic illness. It took until the magma collecting under my surface erupted and I ended up in countless hospitals and emergency rooms, nearly twenty years later, for me to understand.

  It was only as I worked my way out of trauma that I realized the source of my programming and started to reclaim my story, and to see that my shame was learned—it was not mine. There is no shame in these stories. If we can find a safe, supportive container for their release (and if we create these soft landings for each other) we can begin to truly heal. And when we begin to release the chokehold of other people’s shame, the shift begins. I barely recognize myself stripped of this burden I too long called by my name.

  I am building my body anew, and these stories are the foundation. The lava hardens, and becomes the landscape. Even on that burnt landscape, new growth appears.

  COLD CUTS AND CONCEPTIONS

  Julia Conrad

  Few daughters know how many abortions their mothers have had. Few daughters even know their mothers have had an abortion. When my friend Ella found out, at sixteen, about her mother’s, she was so shocked she didn’t speak to her for a week—and her mother had only had one.

  “You’re the sole survivor!” my mom said jokingly after she told me she had had five. “It’s because I’m hyper-fertile,” she added. “You might be, too. When I was getting my fifth, the doctor said he was really impressed by how fertile I am.”

  She told me that after the first abortion, my grandparents took her out for lunch at the Carnegie Deli in New York. She got a corned beef sandwich. My grandfather got two hot dogs. After all, it was the seventies, a time when, if you lived in Greenwich Village, as my mother and her family did, such events were framed by more urgent concerns: The Weathermen detonating their townhouse headquarters by accident, Diane Arbus committing suicide upstairs, the Stonewall riots three blocks away.

  Her first one was by far the worst—only a year after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion. The whole process was nothing like it is today. She waited for hours in her Wrangler jeans at that first clinic in Greenwich Village, listening to women scream from inside the operation rooms. The procedure was less refined, and the doctors seemed to be trying to teach a moral lesson with their curettes. None of the others hurt, she said. She never heard cries again like that, and her last one was as painless as a pelvic exam. She jokes about how she owes the world a seminal memoir (pun intended) entitled Abortion Throughout the Ages, showing how as politics changed, technology improved, and ubiquity increased, an abortion became less of an ordeal.

  Certainly, an abortion can be an emotionally or morally difficult procedure. But it’s strangely rare to hear about the instances when it isn’t. Even though almost everyone I know is staunchly pro-choice, people look at me with horror for divulging the great secret of my mother’s five abortions. They do not understand that, although she’s definitely not proud of the number, she talks about it openly, whether at a party, in a crowded subway car, or to me for many years.

  “I’m the only one who didn’t get one!” cried my mom’s childhood friend Emily at a gathering at our home one afternoon. “But that was because I wasn’t getting laid.” Everyone in the room laughed.

  “I had three,” her friend Sheila added. “Two with pennyroyal. It was too expensive otherwise. That was horrible though. I wouldn’t do it on my own again, but the clinic one was fine.”

  “If there’s one thing that never changes,” they all told me sagely the week before I got my IUD, “it’s that you can’t always trust men to use condoms.”

  My IUD insertion appointment was at 9 a.m. later that week. I tried to convince my mom that she didn’t need to come, but she didn’t listen. She said she needed to bring the insurance card. She sat in the waiting room for the fifteen minutes it took, and when I emerged, upon seeing that I wasn’t keeled over in abject pain, she asked me if I was hungry. It was barely 10:30 a.m., but we went to Katz’s Deli, and both got pastrami sandwiches.

  MY EXCUSE: I HAD AN ABORTION. WHAT’S YOURS?

  Laura Wetherington

  after Paul Verlaine

  One can’t begin to assume how much room there is in a room.

  The joy which overtook you,

  my friend, had roots in my abdomen.

  The desire, I thought,

  the desire-brimming dream broke down

  when I tried to draw it out.

  None of my best enemies

  had even the appetite

  for vocal violence—their horror

  at the living lacerations

  and the local nightmare!

  Little limbs overrode the afterbath.

  My robes felt able-bodied.

  I matured.

  I could grow back the legs I never knew I’d lost.

  My palms felt softer and the training

  overcame all ways to water.

  But disquiet is a problem of dialect,

  and sex is an unusual number.

  In my torso: the open mouths of all kinds of

  dead informants. I’ll pardon your

  please, roll back your torment, torch

  all the long confessional letters, only,

  stop leaving me messages.

  THE JEWEL OF TEHRAN

  Sholeh Wolpé

  She was still bleeding, three days later, still in pain. We returned to the clinic on the other side of town. Her feet were put back into the stirrups, her legs pulled apart. There were pieces still clinging to her womb like strands of red algae. The procedure had to be repeated.

  No, no, she sobbed. I can’t do it again.

  * * *

  He sits in the clinic’s spotless waiting room. She lies on a cold, hard bed, legs sprawled. She scrunches her face, bites her lower lip, lifts her shoulders and neck, arms tensing with pain, and squeezes my hand so hard I want to scream. I reach over with my other hand and brush away strands of brown hair from her eyes, this girl who was once the jewel of Tehran.

  Between her thighs, the doctor is playing a war game with her body’s desire to hold on to what has been imposed … by nature, God, angels, chance. Does it matter now?

  They were once in love. Or lust. He has two kids and a conservative wife. She is divorced and has a child. He is ambitious. She is from a religious family. Perspectives make any story into play dough. You can shape and tell it a hundred ways.

  Silence. Then a plop followed by a clink of metal against metal. The doctor walks over to the counter, puts the bowl in the sink, then leaves; his leather shoes suction the linoleum floor. I get up (shouldn’t have) and casually wander towards the sink. What’s inside that metal bowl melts my marrow—not because it’s gruesome, violent, or vile, but because it’s nothing but slimy pink spit; because this is how we all begin and live lives of various lengths, between happiness and misery, love and lust, belief and unbelief; between many, few, or no sunrises and sunsets. In the end, bones are buried, burned or crushed, and time bends and bounces, always true to its own form and direction.

  She moans, it hurts, and I don’t know if she means her heart or her womb. I look away from the sink, and something catches fire between my eyebrows, a scalding ache like the sting of a scorpion. I pull a blanket over my friend. She closes her eyes. Her face is swollen. Lines around her eyes and mouth spread like runaway roads to nowhere.

  Making true love must be skin to skin, he had insisted, refusing to wear a condom. Pills nauseated her. S
he imagined she was too old to sprout his seed. He bought her dresses, a diamond necklace; delivered promises fragrant as tuberoses he brought her every week wrapped in golden cellophane.

  In the bathroom, I throw up my breakfast. Yogurt and peaches that look like a whirling universe of pink starfish. The doctor comes back, asks my friend how she is feeling. She cries. I go to the waiting room, watch her Persian lover, doused with Paco Rabanne aftershave, pay the bill in cash. The nurse says I look pale and offers me a glass of water. His wallet is black. He counts the bills one by one.

  How is she? he asks. I shrug. He drops his head, shakes it east to west, west to east. I do love her, he says. I rub the pain between my eyebrows. He looks at me. His eyes are the color of burnt toast. I tell him he should go home. She doesn’t want to see you, I say. He nods, turns to leave but then stops, says, Please, tell her I’m sorry. For this. For everything.

  I want to say, tell her yourself, jellyfish. But my tongue is suddenly stone. I go back to the room. My friend has dressed and is ready to go. Walking is difficult. Living is difficult. Especially today. Shame is indelible. If you let it, it will stain your forehead like a tattoo.

  The doctor puts his hand on her shoulder, pats it gently. I think to myself, he is like that steel bowl; he holds within himself what he yanks out. This is his sacrifice.

  He looks at me, straight at me, and I know he’s read my thoughts, or maybe every friend who comes to hold hands has the same thought, this same grateful look; maybe he registers us all in his eyes and stows us away in the vaults of his consciousness for the days that he battles fear, doubt, or fatigue. Come see me again in two weeks, he says, jotting down notes. The nurse will give you instructions.

  At my friend’s apartment, I tuck her in, make her chicken soup. She wants a cigarette. I give her two. She smokes five. Drinks tea. Refuses soup. I pick up her daughter from school, buy her glitter lip gloss. The girl is happy. Life is that simple when you are nine. At Johnny Rockets, she mixes ketchup and mayonnaise, spreads it on her burger. Pink, I think. Pink.