Choice Words Read online

  1“Thank you” in Cherokee

  2Cicuta maculata was reputed among the Cherokee to be an oral contraceptive, though it was discouraged with a social stigma of immorality attached to the woman taking it, and prescribed with a warning that the woman’s resulting infertility would be permanent.

  HEART

  THE MOTHER

  Gwendolyn Brooks

  Abortions will not let you forget.

  You remember the children you got that you did not get,

  The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,

  The singers and workers that never handled the air.

  You will never neglect or beat

  Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.

  You will never wind up the sucking-thumb

  Or scuttle off ghosts that come.

  You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,

  Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

  I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed

  children.

  I have contracted. I have eased

  My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.

  I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized

  Your luck

  And your lives from your unfinished reach,

  If I stole your births and your names,

  Your straight baby tears and your games,

  Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and

  your deaths,

  If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,

  Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

  Though why should I whine,

  Whine that the crime was other than mine?—

  Since anyhow you are dead.

  Or rather, or instead,

  You were never made.

  But that too, I am afraid,

  Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?

  You were born, you had body, you died.

  It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

  Believe me, I loved you all.

  Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you

  All.

  PLACES

  Mariana Enriquez

  This is what it’s like to grow up in a country where abortion is illegal. Teenage girls in a provincial town, scared because the pill is expensive and they can’t pay, because they don’t know how to use a condom—this isn’t taught in schools and their parents don’t know they’re already having sex—and pregnancy tests are bought, together with antacids and aspirin in the drugstore. Silent crying in the bathroom when the test shows positive and then trying to find help. Drink rue tea. Throw yourself downstairs. Put some parsley in your vagina. Nothing works, the blood doesn’t appear, and it’s time to visit the “places,” because that’s what we call them. “A place” where a “señora” sees to you.

  Places don’t have names or, rather, they can’t be named. They are ghost houses, anonymous houses, with facades that are so inoffensive they look suspicious. One of the “places” is an apartment. The stairs are very steep, narrow, and in almost total darkness. The door of the apartment is white. The woman who answers the doorbell keeps her face in the shadows, wants to know who told you about the “place,” and asks “how far gone” (referring to months of pregnancy). “Tell the truth because after three I don’t do it.” She then says the price and gives a date for the procedure.

  That’s it. No advice, no medical history, no preparation, no who will do it, no what to do afterwards. The amount is high. Then the money’s stolen, usually from parents. Or the computer is sold. Or marijuana is sold. If your boyfriend agrees about the abortion, he might contribute. But usually boyfriends don’t know what’s happening because boys tend to like the idea of being fathers and then they become one more obstacle.

  In one of the “places” on the outskirts of town, the clinic where the abortions were done coexisted with a small puppy mill. Rumor had it that the doctor was no such thing, but a vet who knew how to deal with human patients.

  A girl from my school, Bernie, had her first abortion there. She told us about it as she smoked a cigarette in the schoolyard. She said it wasn’t a dirty place, despite the animals. And if she got pregnant again, she’d go back to see them because they were cheap.

  Bernie was strangely pretty: she had a squinty eye and she had attitude. I was fascinated by it. At school, they said she was a tart, but insult tends to come with admiration and, with Bernie, the admiration was evident. The gray skirt of her uniform, which she wore very short, pulled up and folded over her belt, was the envy of everyone. Her long legs and laddered tights. The multicolored barrettes she wore in her hair and the adolescent rage in her blue eyes. The way she leaned against the wall, her white shirt, the cutest boy in the school kissing her in front of a female guard.

  They expelled her. I don’t know why, maybe for smoking or for all sorts of misbehavior or some stupid thing. After she stopped coming to school, we still saw her in the street, in bars, at concerts. She was a famous girl, which is what bold, pretty girls tend to be.

  We didn’t see her for some weeks and soon the word got around. Bernie had died in the street. She’d bled to death. Well, not exactly. She died in hospital, but she was close to death when she was found on the sidewalk. Someone who lived nearby called an ambulance when he saw her lying on the curb in a pool of blood, with a perforated uterus. I imagine her long white legs, covered in blood. Her hands full of blood as she tried to staunch the hemorrhage.

  She was near the famous clinic with the dogs but not too near. About five hundred meters away. Did she walk there alone, mad with pain? Did the people who did the abortion dump her in this place? After how long? Had they put her in a car so they could leave her far away? Had someone been capable of holding her hand, lying to her, telling her not to be afraid, that she was going to be fine? I can’t stop wondering why they didn’t take her to a hospital. Why they punished her like that.

  WOMEN’S LIBERATION

  Judith Arcana

  Every week we went to a meeting,

  but not like now. No one stood up

  and said, My name is Jane and I’m

  an abortionist. No. Because we didn’t

  want to stop, we weren’t trying not to do it.

  We sat in apartments, passing the cards.

  One card is Sandy from West Lafayette,

  eighteen years old, coming in on the bus.

  She’s got about sixty-three dollars, she thinks

  she’s nine weeks pregnant. The next card is

  Terrelle, who’s thirty-two and angry. Her

  doctor gave her an IUD that didn’t work;

  he says there’s nothing he can do.

  Here’s Mona, fifty-four years old, has one

  hundred dollars, wants to keep this secret

  from her family. And Carlie, a long term—

  twenty weeks pregnant, may have ten dollars,

  twelve years old like Mona’s youngest—she

  got herpes from her brother when he did it.

  Every week some of the cards were passed

  around for hours; none of us wanted

  to counsel those women, take one

  into her life. The longest of long terms,

  they lived far away, had no one but us,

  no one to tell, no one to help, no money.

  They needed everything. Cards went around

  the room while we talked: dilation, syringes,

  xylocaine, the Saturday list. At the end

  of the meeting, all the cards were taken.

  CARDBOARD POPE

  Galina Yudovich

  Stranger on the sidewalk says,

  don’t kill your baby. he’s holding a sign and running after women

  and careful not to step in the parking lot where

  guardians in orange watch for violations.

  Across the str
eet is a shop selling

  PARROTS PARROTS PARROTS

  of glorious yellows and greens and blues unbothered by abortions.

  Nun on the sidewalk says,

  they kill babies in there. she stands with a line of

  churchgoers, church pray-ers, hallowed be thy name,

  and all the rest of it, again and again, but more

  around Easter, when the sin is worse.

  Angry Old White Man on the sidewalk says,

  you’re no better than Muslims

  who go around killing people. he spends his days

  with his sidewalk family. Sanctimony is thicker than blood.

  Cardboard Pope on the sidewalk says,

  give me your baby. there’s a man named Frank who

  tells brown people in Spanish that his name is Francis, like the Papa.

  he wants your baby too. i want to ask who does he offer his prayers to.

  are his vigils for dead women—

  dead from bleach, dead from poison, dead from knitting needles in

  their vaginas?

  where is his burning candle for sepsis, for bleeding tissue, for suicide?

  But i have signed a pledge of non-engagement.

  silence is political.

  inside, the women reach home base, safe, Ollie ollie oxen free.

  they battle cardboard popes to be here. They want to explain to me

  why not now:

  money, school, work, no man, bad man, too many kids to love.

  they cry or they don’t. they say sorrysorrysorry for:

  crying, not crying, asking questions, needing to check when someone

  can drive them.

  they say sorrysorrysorry for using my tissues, for

  being pregnant, for not understanding why before, for needing

  another one, for their kids running around the office.

  i think, do they apologize to the Cardboard Pope, ask for:

  absolution, forgiveness, mercy, understanding, unconditional godly love.

  inside there is propofol and cookies for when you wake up and

  doulas to hold your hand or ignore. Inside there is sisterhood telling you:

  don’t cry, oh my kids are teenagers too, i can give you a ride.

  outside there is Papa Frank, and there is no baby to give him.

  he wants nothing from you now.

  FROM GRANICA (BOUNDARY)

  Zofia Nałkowska

  That night had been a bad one for Justyna, full of dreams and sudden awakenings, damp and sticky from sweat. “What’s the matter with me?” she thought and sank back into sleep. She had to get inside somewhere, reach some sort of people, some kind of dwelling place. She was walking down an unpleasant black corridor, with her head bowed, and a feeling of suffocation in her throat. It was a passageway leading to Jasia’s basement, the very same yet worse and more terrifying than it actually was. She was walking along this corridor, on and on, until she stumbled upon a wooden door made only of bare planks. She groped with her fingers over the surface for a lock with an iron latch, and a key jutting out of a lock. She turned the key, because it had been locked from the outside, and opened the door. No one was inside, no one responded. She entered the dark interior and felt with her hand for the bed. There were no covers, only boards. On the bare boards, directly on the wood itself, lay Karolina Bogutowa just as she had after she had died, fully clothed in her black dress, swollen, holding a little crucifix in her hands. It was as if she had been lying there for a long time, as if they had forgotten to bury her. And that, too, was worse than the truth that her mother had died.

  She woke up and again imagined something was the matter with her. The next dream was beautiful. She was sailing across the sea. But what a strange craft it was—no people, no deck or chimney. There was no sky above it. Only through what seemed like huge gates was the sea visible and its boom and swell tangible. But the gates were made entirely of rock and the whole ship was of stone. And thus, it rumbled over the sea without a single human on board, only her.

  Only at daybreak did she dream about the child. Tiny, completely naked, healthy, and robust. It was alive, but as though hewn out of white stone, not flesh. Pretty and sunny. Then it became soft, flopped in her arms. Its little head hung on its neck and rolled onto her shoulder. It grew sad like little Jadwisia. And then, when it died, it actually was Jadwisia.

  She awoke from her dream weeping. In the room it was still dark and cold. She remained in bed and, as she lay there, continued to weep silently, for a long time. It may have seemed that she dreamed of Jadwisia, but it was not for her that she wept. Jadwisia had lived in the world and seen the sky and earth before she went blind, played with the cat, exchanged hugs with her mother. But that child of hers, which was to be and was no more, was poorer by far. She had gone to the midwife of her own accord, allowed the thing to be done to her that women do, and so she was the one who had squandered its life. Most of all she remembered—and it kept coming back to her—how when she was lying on the bed at night after those pains, keeping quiet so as not to wake anyone, she was suddenly in motion. And then it had slipped out of her, like a little mouse. The whole world hadn’t wanted it, its own natural father hadn’t wanted it—only inside her had it had a safe hiding place. She alone in the whole wide world could have helped it wrest itself into life. Only in her did it have refuge and shelter. And she too, its own mother, had risen against it. So where was that tiny infant to turn for rescue when she herself, she too, had done this to it?

  She lay in bed until midday and thought round and round in circles about the same thing. On the far side of the yard, the sun was shining on the pales of the fence. Outside the window a single small tree was writhing in the wind and scraping its branches against the pales. The snow was melting. The March sky was a clear blue from the wind, and dotted with dark azure cloudlets. Yet Justyna had no desire to get up, or eat, or go out. She felt happy only when lying down like that, weeping and thinking of the one thing. She had no idea whether it would have been a boy or a girl, could not imagine how it might have grown up. She thought only of the small, blind, almost nonexistent little nobody, still ignorant of the created world around it, which had hidden inside her and only inside her found protection.

  In the afternoon someone knocked at the door. She rose from her bed, wrapped herself in a shawl, and turned the key in the protruding iron lock, just like the one she had dreamed about.

  “Again, you’re lying in bed all day,” said Niestrzepowa as she entered. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Who’s going to light the stove for you? Who are you waiting for? You want to cook something? Tidy up.”

  Justyna got up in silence, washed in the water in the wash basin, rummaged around with a piece of wood in the ashes in the grate. While Niestrzepowa stood over her, she lit a fire in the stove, picked up first one and then another object in her hand, poured water from a bottle into a pan, looked into a drawer and then into various bags to see if she still had some kasha.

  “You can’t go on like this. You’ll die of starvation!”

  Niestrzepowa went out, brought Justyna a little of her homemade soup, and urged her to take her coat, go to the shops, and buy at least a piece of sausage from the butcher.

  Justyna made her bed and swept the floor, then she sat and watched the flames as they burned and flickered, running along each log until it eventually caught fire. She would get up, add fresh logs, close the stove door, and then sit down on the edge of the bed.

  Again, she recalled how she went to that midwife on Mostowa Street, a few doors from the end of Swietojanska Street, near the train station. She lived in a red brick house. There was a kitchenette and one reception room. First was the kitchen, where the woman slept with her husband and three boys, while the main room was for patients. But when Justyna was lying there, there were no other patients. The woman’s mother cooked for them and swept the room. She told Justyna that the last patient before her had been a wealthy young lady, unmarried,
not even sixteen years old. In the greatest of secrecy her uncle, who had a wife and children, had driven her there from the country, where she had been living with them.

  As soon as Justyna arrived, the midwife ordered her to get onto the large table and lie down at the very edge while she brought in from the kitchen some sort of wires and tongs on a shallow dish and waited a moment for them to cool down. They were very poor people but took great care that everything was clean. In the evening the woman’s husband came home, a railwayman who drank heavily, and then there was a row in the kitchen. The kitchen door opened in the dark, and the old woman crept in silently on tiptoe. Evidently, she was hiding from her son-in-law; perhaps she stood in his way and it was on her account that he bullied his wife. These were the worst days of Justyna’s life since her mother’s death.

  After what the woman had done to her on the table, Justyna lay during the night unaware of what was happening to her, until she was seized by sharp pains. She screamed, but the woman immediately came in and told her to stop or she would be the ruin of them both. She stopped screaming and lay quietly for a few hours until everything ceased. And then, toward dawn, when she was all in motion, she felt—without any pain, without anything like that—the tiny thing come out of her. She lay there for another two weeks but what was wrong with her, she could scarcely remember. A doctor came. She had a high fever. They did various things to her. When she left there, she was still not entirely cured, but she gradually recovered and by the autumn was able to work at Torucinski’s. But the thought of that child was to remain with her forever.

  Translated from the Polish by Ursula Phillips

  INTERRED

  Pratibha Kelapure

  For Purvi Patel and countless other women in India and anywhere else in the world

  How do you speak of an event that didn’t happen?

  Time goes by and you don’t trust your memory,