Choice Words Page 20

  “It’s just that you always seem so in control. Like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel. Tempering her passion with ideals.”

  “Hmmm,” I said, more puzzled than flattered.

  “I don’t mind too much talking about it,” she said. “I feel like I’m a relic from the past, living history. You know, some of the kids—listen to me, kids—I taught at Binghamton don’t really believe that abortion used to be illegal. They know it, but they say things like, ‘You couldn’t even get a private doctor to do it for you?’ I told them it even used to be impossible for girls to get birth control, and they looked at me, gaga, and said, ‘You don’t remember that.’ I feel called upon to tell my tale.” Amber laid a melodramatic hand on her breast.

  “God, I was so dumb,” she said. “The thought of me, at fifteen, pregnant, seemed so ridiculous, so impossible. I thought it just wouldn’t happen. Couldn’t. So I never did anything. But I knew I was pregnant, even before I missed my first period.”

  “I remember that,” I said. “It wasn’t just that I was so tired. I just knew.”

  “I was scared to tell Hank,” she said. “When I finally did, he was a real sweetheart. We sat in his bedroom—his mother was at work—and he cried and I cried…. I walked around the Pembroke campus, stopping each woman walking alone. ‘I’m pregnant. Do you know anyone who can help me?’ Finally, one woman gave me a phone number, she knew it by heart, a doctor in West Virginia.

  “I called him from a phone booth, I was afraid to have the long-distance call show up on my parents’ bill. The woman had told me, don’t say pregnant, don’t say abortion. He sounded so gentle. I told him I was fifteen years old, that I understood he might be able to help me. He kept saying ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh,’ and then I blurted it out, I said the word, pregnant, and the phone clicked dead. I called right back, and it rang and rang and rang.”

  SONG OF THE EMMENAGOGUES

  Lesley Wheeler

  Vincent drank a potion Mother had concocted and walked and walked and walked.

  —Norma Millay, quoted in Savage Beauty

  I tell everybody how my mother feeds me on nettles and thistles, the heartless old thing.

  —from Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay

  She was caught, fallen, over her time,

  a blossomy month on the road.

  Think and think twelve miles a day,

  up and down hills near Shillingstone.

  Mugwort, nasturtium, rue,

  primrose, angelica, parsley.

  The sun’s clock ticked into summer

  and down. Bigger than her sorrow.

  Unmothering flower crouched in grass.

  Scour the paths tomorrow.

  Henbane, gentian, all-heal,

  hyssop, thyme, bitter apple.

  Some herbs provoke a woman’s courses. Says the book: decoct in wine. The blue-petaled one, darling of Venus, draws forth the undreamed-of child.

  Tea of the raspberry leaf. Ginger,

  cohosh, tansy, pennyroyal.

  Refusal grew of her weeks in Dorset,

  blooming from red-rooted alkanet.

  Rhymes with secret, the pretty weeds whisper.

  Thatch hushes the cottages yet.

  FROM THE HUNDRED SECRET SENSES

  Amy Tan

  “Simon, you don’t have to explain.” I stood up on shaky legs. “Let’s just forget it, okay?”

  “Olivia, sit down. Please. I have to tell you. I want you to understand. This is important.”

  “Let go of me. Forget it, okay? Oh, shit! Just pretend it never happened!”

  “Wait. Come back. Sit down, please sit down. Olivia, I have to tell you this.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “Because I think I love you too.”

  I caught my breath. Of course, I would have preferred if he hadn’t qualified his declaration with “I think” and “too,” as if I could be part of an emotional harem. But infatuated as I was, “love” was enough to act as both balm and bait. I sat down.

  “If you hear what happened,” he said, “maybe you’ll understand why it’s taken me so long to tell you how I feel about you.”

  My heart was still pounding wildly with a strange mixture of anger and hope. We sat in nervous silence for a few minutes. When I was ready, I said in a cool voice, “Go ahead.”

  Simon cleared his throat. “This fight Elza and I had, it was in December, during the quarter break. I was back in Utah. We had planned to go cross-country skiing in Little Cottonwood Canyon. The week before, we’d been praying for new snow, and then it finally came in truckloads, three feet of fresh powder.”

  “She didn’t want to go,” I guessed, trying to hurry up the story.

  “No, we went. So we were driving up the canyon, and I remember we were talking about the SLA and whether giving food to the poor made extortion and bank robbery less reprehensible. Out of the blue, Elza asked me, ‘What do you feel about abortion?’ And I thought I heard wrong. ‘Extortion?’ I said. And she said, ‘No, abortion.’ So I said, ‘You know, like what we said before, about Roe v. Wade, that the decision didn’t go far enough.’ She cut me off and said, ‘But what do you really feel about abortion?’”

  “What did she mean, really feel?”

  “That’s what I asked. And she said slowly, enunciating every syllable: ‘I mean emotionally, what do you feel?’ And I said, ‘Emotionally, I think it’s fine.’ Then she blew up: ‘You didn’t even think about the question! I’m not asking you about the weather. I’m asking you about the lives of human beings! I’m talking about the real life of a woman versus the potential life in her womb!’”

  “She was hysterical.” I was eager to emphasize Elza’s volatile and unreasonable nature.

  He nodded. “At the trailhead, she jumped out of the car, really pissed, threw on her skis. Just before she took off, she screamed, ‘I’m pregnant, you idiot. And there’s no way I’m having this baby and ruining my life. But it tears me up to abort it and you’re just sitting there, smiling, saying it’s fine.’”

  “Omigod. Simon. How were you supposed to know?” So that was it, I thought: Elza had wanted to get married, and confronted with the prospect, Simon had refused. Good for him.

  “I was stunned,” Simon continued. “I had no idea. We were always careful about birth control.”

  “You think she slipped up on purpose?”

  He frowned. “She’s not that kind of person.” He seemed defensive.

  “What did you do?”

  “I put on my skis, followed her tracks. I kept shouting for her to wait, but she went over a crest and I couldn’t see her anymore. God, I remember how beautiful it was that day, sunny, peaceful. You know, you never think terrible things can happen when the weather’s nice.” He laughed bitterly.

  I thought he was through—since that day, he and Elza hadn’t seen each other, end of story, time for the sequel, me. “Well,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic, “the least she could have done was given you a chance to discuss the situation before jumping all over you.”

  Simon leaned forward and buried his face in his hands. “Oh, God!” he said in an anguished voice.

  “Simon, I understand, but it wasn’t your fault, and now it’s over.”

  “No, wait,” he said hoarsely. “Let me finish.” He stared at his knees, took a few deep breaths. “I got to this steep fire road, and there was an out-of-bounds sign. Just beyond that, she was sitting at the top of a ledge, hugging herself, crying. I called to her and she looked up, really pissed. She pushed off and headed down this steep wide-open bowl. I can still see it: The snow, it was incredible, pristine and bottomless. And she was gliding down, taking the fall line. But about halfway down, she hit some heavier snow, her skis sank, and she sagged to a stop.”

  I looked at Simon’s eyes. They were fixed on something faraway and lost, and I became scared.

  “I yelled her name as loud as I could. She was mashing her poles against the snow, trying to kick up the tips of h
er skis. I yelled again—‘Goddamnit, Elza!’—and I heard the sound, like a muffled gunshot, and then it was perfectly quiet again. She turned around. She was squinting—she must have been blinded by the sun. I don’t think she saw it—the slope, two hundred yards above her. It was slowly tearing, no sound, like a giant zipper opening up. The seam became a crack, an icy blue shadow. And then it was snaking fast, straight across. The crack slipped down a little, and it was huge, glassy as an ice rink. Then everything began to rumble, the ground, my feet, my chest, my head. And Elza—I could tell she knew. She was struggling to get out of her skis.”

  Like Elza, I knew what was coming. “Simon, I don’t think I want to hear any more of this—”

  “She threw off her skis and her backpack. She was jumping through the snow, sinking to her hips. I started yelling, ‘Go to the side!’ And then the mountain collapsed and all I could hear was this train roar, trees snapping, whole stands of them, popping like toothpicks.”

  NOTHING BUT THE WIND

  Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi

  for my first child from my first marriage

  The only flower in this world

  who has no choice

  but to turn into a track of a dead love

  is a child of an unsuccessful marriage.

  I who was your sepal

  had no choice but to kill you

  who was my petal.

  Since your death

  in the eyes of all flowers

  I am nothing but the wind

  with the bloody hands.

  HAINT

  Teri Cross Davis

  no amount of dilation and suction

  hemorrhaging and fever

  could’ve erased you or

  the pulp of your carved initials

  made with the solid grasp

  of a still forming hand

  science tells me

  you are still whispering

  inside my bones

  that years from now

  cut me to the marrow

  and microscopes will read

  the rings of your insistent story

  no matter the inconvenient

  coupling of timing and desire

  even now when the bloody show

  disappoints our sharpening hunger

  do you still cling? Or are you willing

  to let another call my womb

  home?

  THE MEMORY OF ABORTION UNEXPECTEDLY RETURNS

  Leslie Monsour

  The sun has trailed its negligee across

  The pinkened threshold of the globe and left

  Behind a blue-gray edge around the window.

  Selecting silken undies from a drawer,

  She thinks of loneliness and hummingbirds.

  A violet-crowned one sometimes comes to perch

  In solitude against the evening sky;

  It’s sitting there right now, in plainest view,

  Digesting nectar, waiting for the night

  To settle. Suddenly it breaks away,

  A tiny, falling glow, she can’t retrieve—

  Unlike the camisole forever sliding

  Off of the lacquered bedpost to the floor—

  As light as ashes, light as sighs; a small,

  Bright, sleeping bird that dies and dies and dies.

  GRETEL: UNMOTHERING

  Lauren K. Alleyne

  I’m sitting in a clinic

  waiting to kill my baby.

  This is what the women screamed

  as I clutched my coat close.

  No walk ever seemed so long,

  as this march through the forest of protest;

  no doorway as dangerous

  as this place of endings.

  There is a live thing inside me,

  I know—I carry its heart.

  Forgive me, little bun,

  but I am no oven.

  MOO AND THRALL

  Dana Levin

  Some people like to be

  spectacularly swayed.

  By a red field

  and a glint of metal.

  A surgeon’s knife. A gun. A pole

  that holds up a banner …

  I want to tell you about what I saw,

  on the quad.

  Just-dead flesh-babies twelve feet high.

  Monkey-head strapped in a test contraption,

  the enormous caption:

  IF THIS IS ANIMAL CRUELTY THEN

  —WHAT IS THIS—

  Late term.

  They looked like smashed melons. One still latched

  to the cord—

  You ask what I thought. I thought,

  Who am I to judge

  what another person needs?

  Who am I to have to pay

  attention?—

  I’d wanted coffee and walked into

  a carnival of death.

  But death was always

  ho-humming it, in various forms,

  all over the doomèd land—

  Still, students clustered.

  Young men offered to play the ballast

  for the scaffolding

  from which the lurid pictures flared. I thought,

  Look at that: something labeled

  “free speech board”—

  At either end of the kill-display, where you could

  dig a marker

  into white butcher paper—Get Your Fucking Hands

  Off My Body—in girlish

  curlicue.

  Across the quad the clinicians waited.

  Across the quad sat the rational young, offering info

  on colored paper, it

  couldn’t compete

  with lunchtime Grand Guignol—

  I wanted some coffee.

  I wanted some coffee and a sweet croissant.

  I wanted and walked

  through the moo and thrall, how hadn’t I

  seen it—chalked

  underfoot, every few paces the same

  smeared message:

  YOU

  ARE

  LOVED

  FROM LA NOVE DE LOS LOCOS (THE SHIP OF FOOLS)

  Cristina Peri Rossi

  The girl came late when all the seats had been sold. Jose had completed the list and handed it to Ecks, who automatically checked it from top to bottom to make sure that no name appeared twice or had been omitted. The fat man was breathing noisily because of the heat, puffing away at his eternal smelly cigar. The girl had short blond hair which hardly reached her cheekbones; her complexion was white as a baby’s, and her blue eyes were deep and penetrating. The color of her dress almost matched their intensity.

  “Please,” she told Jose. “It’s imperative that I go this week. I’m already in the third month …”

  Jose grabbed the medical certificate from her hand.

  Ecks was leaning against the wall, smoking: the heat was unbearable and he was longing to turn off the neon bulbs whose milky light reminded him of the clinic in London, of ugly hospitals where old people died alone without money or memories, of barred cells in a zoo.

  The fat man returned the certificate to the girl without ceremony. “Three months and twenty-five days,” he said severely. “Nothing doing. Besides, there are no seats left in tomorrow’s coach, nor in the next one; we are full for the next two weeks. Why didn’t you do something about it before?”

  He turned his head in the direction of Ecks, seeking both his complicity and an audience for the usual theatrical pronouncements: “Plenty of speed when it comes to jumping into bed, but afterwards … I can’t take you. We give no priorities. And as you may imagine, in this kind of journey no passenger wants to give up her place. What have you been doing the last four months? You weren’t thinking of having the kid, were you?”

  Ecks felt oppressed by the light: did he need glasses?

  “I was looking for the money,” explained the girl softly. “It hasn’t been easy; I’m unemployed.”

  “I’ve heard this story before, young lady,”
answered Jose bluntly. “This is the way business is run. Did you expect to pay in installments?”

  “Please,” entreated the girl.

  Jose was becoming cross.

  “Utterly impossible,” he said. “Off you go. Come back next time with longer notice. Next year with the next pregnancy.”

  (A German pharmaceutical company on several occasions requested the Nazi authorities dispatch three hundred pregnant Jewesses for experimental purposes. It was a good way of reducing numbers in the camps.

  “We gratefully acknowledge receipt of your latest cargo,” wrote the company director in 1938. “We have carried out tests with a new chemical substance. No survivors. However, around the end of October we are planning a new series of experiments, for which we shall require another three hundred subjects. Could they be provided on the same conditions as previously?”)

  The blue eyes had clouded over.

  Ecks threw down his cigarette butt and crushed it underfoot.

  It was too hot. Outside and inside.

  Ecks overtook her before she reached the corner. She looked startled as she turned towards him.

  “Excuse me,” he said nervously. “There may be a way. I may be able to take you, if you’ll occupy my seat by the driver. I can stand up or sit in the alleyway on top of my suitcase. Once in London, we’ll be able to find another clinic. The service will be the same and so will the cost. I don’t think the driver will mind. It has never happened before; he can just pocket the price of your ticket.”

  There was no answer: she looked down, her dress only a little paler than her eyes.

  “The coach leaves tomorrow,” continued Ecks softly.

  “I have nowhere to stay,” she confessed without emotion. “If they find out at the agency, will you lose your job?”

  “I don’t think so,” Ecks lied. “I will pick you up somewhere on the way. No one else checks the list once we have left. I have a room near here. If you want to, you can stay there. It’s not very big, but there’s an old sofa.”

  “Thanks,” she said simply.

  (A month after receiving his shipment, the pharmaceutical director had written again to the German authorities: