Choice Words Page 8

  The woman on the phone told me they could fit me in the following week, and it would be $400 after insurance. It was the beginning of the month, so I had just paid rent. I had about $100 left in my bank account. Payday was in two weeks.

  “Can you bill me?” I asked.

  “No, we require full payment the day of procedure,” she said, brusque from routine but not unkind.

  I felt like a stripped wire. My head buzzed and my eyes welled.

  “But … I don’t have that.”

  “We can push back the appointment if you need more time to get your funds together,” she offered.

  “But,” I said, finally breaking, “I can’t be pregnant any more. I need to not be pregnant. I’m not supposed to be pregnant.”

  I didn’t want to wait two more weeks. I didn’t want to think about this every day. I didn’t want to feel my body change. I didn’t want to carry and feed this artifact of my inherent unlovability—this physical proof that any permanent connection to me must be an accident. Men made wanted babies with beautiful women. Men made mistakes with fat chicks. I sobbed so hard I think she was terrified. I sobbed so hard she went to get her boss.

  The head of the clinic picked up the phone. She talked to me in a calm, competent voice—like an important businesswoman who is also your mom, which is probably fairly accurate. She talked to me until I started breathing again. She didn’t have to. She must have been so busy, and I was wasting her time with my tantrum. Babies having babies.

  “We never do this,” she sighed, “because typically, once the procedure is done, people don’t come back. But if you promise me you’ll pay your bill, if you really promise—you can come in next week and we can bill you after the procedure.”

  I promised, I promised, I promised so hard. Yes, oh my god, yes. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you! (And I did pay—as soon as my next paycheck came in. They were so surprised, they sent me a thank-you card.)

  I like to think the woman who ran the clinic would have done that for anyone—that there’s a quiet web of women like her (like us, I flatter myself) stretching from pole to pole ready to give other women a hand. She helped me even though she didn’t have to, and I am forever grateful. But I also wonder what made me sound, to her ears, like someone worth trusting, someone who was safe to take a chance on. I certainly wasn’t the neediest person calling her clinic. The fact is, I was getting that abortion no matter what. All I had to do was wait two weeks, or have an awkward conversation I did not want to have with my supportive, liberal, well-to-do mother. Privilege means that it’s easy for white women to do each other favors. Privilege means that those of us who need it the least often get the most help.

  I don’t remember much about the appointment itself. I went in, filled out some stuff on a clipboard, and waited to be called. I remember the waiting room was crowded. Everyone else had somebody with them; none of us made eye contact. I recognized the woman working the front desk—we went to high school together (which should be illegal)2—but she didn’t say anything. Maybe that’s protocol at the vagina clinic, I thought. Or maybe I just wasn’t that memorable as a teenager. Goddammit.

  Before we got down to business, I had to talk to a counselor. I guess to make sure I wasn’t just looking for one of those cavalier partybortions that the religious right is always getting its sackcloth in a bunch over. (Even though, by the way, those are legal too.) She was younger than me, and sweet. She asked me why I hadn’t told my “partner,” and I cried because he wasn’t a partner at all and I still didn’t know why I hadn’t told him. Everything after that is vague. I think there was a blood test and maybe an ultrasound. The doctor, a brisk, reassuring woman with gray hair in an almost military buzz cut, told me my embryo was about three weeks old, like a tadpole. Then she gave me two pills in a little cardboard billfold and told me to come back in two weeks. The accompanying pamphlet warned that, after I took the second pill, chunks “the size of lemons” might come out. LEMONS. Imagine if we, as a culture, actually talked frankly and openly about abortion. Imagine if people seeking abortions didn’t have to be blindsided by the possibility of blood lemons falling out of their vaginas via a pink photocopied flyer. Imagine.

  That night, after taking my first pill, as my tadpole detached from the uterine wall, I had to go give a filmmaking prize to my friend and colleague Charles Mudede—make a speech on stage in front of everyone I knew at the Genius Awards, the Stranger’s annual arts grant. It was surreal. Mike and I went together. We had fun—one of our best nights. There are pictures. I’m glassy-eyed, smiling too big, running on fumes and gallows humor. I remember pulling a friend into a dark corner and confessing that I had an abortion that day. “Did they tell you the thing about the lemons?” she asked. I nodded. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, hugging me tight. “There aren’t going to be lemons.”

  She paused.

  “Probably no lemons.”

  THE PILL VERSUS THE SPRINGFIELD MINE DISASTER

  Joanna C. Valente for Richard Brautigan

  Don’t blame me. I only killed

  what I could not take care

  of.

  YOU DON’T KNOW

  Judith Arcana

  You think I didn’t care about that baby,

  didn’t wonder if we’d like each other

  when she turned fourteen;

  didn’t think he’d follow anywhere

  his older brother went.

  You think we take them out, like gangsters;

  disappear them, like generals.

  You don’t know how

  it works then, do you?

  You don’t know what

  sits on both sides of the scale,

  what it means to decide:

  what I got and what I gave,

  gave that baby I didn’t have,

  baby who couldn’t make me laugh—

  applesauce upside down on her head;

  couldn’t make me cry—

  taking his first step right off the porch.

  You don’t even know that this is not about regret.

  You don’t know one blessèd, I say blessèd, thing about it.

  GHAZAL

  Jenna Le

  Our grandmas, bless their hearts, their sweet skip-to-my-lou’s,

  were lying when they said virginity hurts to lose.

  Lil’ sis, here’s what you do so that there’ll be no pain:

  one finger Sunday, two on Monday, three on Tuesday.

  There’s stretching regimens that’ll help as well. The web

  is glad to teach you these when Ma and Moms refuse.

  This notion sex must hurt, must come all tangled up

  with pregnancy and punishment—that’s just their ruse.

  Who isn’t scared of pain? Pain here, though, is a symbol.

  They paid, so now they want you, too, to pay your dues.

  I feared the hurt, the pop, the snap, the break. They warn

  a girl her hymen rips like paper when she screws.

  So, when it was my turn, I sank into my fear.

  I let the boy, my fear, and chance do all the choosing.

  I could’ve planned ahead: got on the pill, all that.

  But I don’t blame myself. What’s there to blame? Old news.

  We did it in his dorm, but I’m remembering now

  that clinic bed, that clink of tools between my shoes.

  FROM WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR ME LATELY?

  Myrna Lamb

  First performed at New Feminist Repertory Theatre, New York City, March 1969.

  Time: whenever.

  Place: a space, silent, encapsulated. A man lies with his head angled up and center stage, feet obliquely toward audience. His couching, by all means psychiatric in flavor, should also be astronautic and should incline him acutely so that he almost looks as though he is about to be launched. An almost perpendicular slant board comes to mind or a simple sliding pond or seesaw.

  There is a simple desk or table, angled away from t
he man, and a chair placed toward the desk that will keep the occupants’ back toward man in authodox (approximate) psychiatric practice, but will give profile or three-quarter view to audience.

  At rise a man in a business suit is situated as delineated. Woman in a simple smock (suggestive of surgical smock) comes on upstage and crosses without looking at man. He does not see her. He sits silently. Some time elapses. A soldier, in a Green Beret outfit, complete with M-1 rifle, comes to stage center. He faces audience.

  MAN: Where am I? What have you done to me? Where am I? What have

  you done to me? Where am I? What have you done to me?

  (SOLDIER stands at attention)

  WOMAN: Are you in pain?

  MAN: Yes. I think I am in pain.

  WOMAN: Don’t you know?

  MAN: I haven’t been able to consider it fully. The whole procedure … strange room—anesthetic—nurses? Sisters in some order?

  WOMAN: Nurses. Sisters. In some order. Yes, that would cover it. Yes, anesthetic.

  MAN: I don’t believe it. I can’t believe this nightmare.

  WOMAN: Well, that is how many people feel upon learning these things. Of course, most of those people have been considered female. That made a difference, supposedly. We’ve managed to attach a bit of ovary to the uterus. I don’t think it will do any real good, but I will give you a course of hormonal and glandular products to maintain the pregnancy.

  MAN: Maintain the pregnancy, indeed! How dare you make that statement to me!

  (Using outreaching arm of GIRL and foot leverage, SOLDIER flips her over and throws her to floor.)

  WOMAN: I dare. There is a human life involved, after all.

  MAN: There is a human life involved? You insane creatures, I’m fully aware that there is a human life involved. My human life. My human life that you have decided to play with for your own despicable purposes, whatever they are.

  WOMAN: Do you think you are in the proper frame of mind to judge? My purposes?

  (SOLDIER does pushups with sexual-soldier connotations over outstretched body of GIRL.)

  Your ultimate acceptance of what you now so vociferously reject? The relative importance of your mature and realized life and the incipient potential of the life you carry within you? Your life is certainty involved. But perhaps your life is subsidiary to the life of this barely begun creature which you would seek to deny representation.

  MAN: Why should I give this … this thing representation?

  (SOLDIER rises and kicks GIRL aside. Walks to rifle. Walks around GIRL, pacing, right shoulder arms.)

  It is nothing to me. I am not responsible for it or where it is, nor do I wish to be. I have a life, an important life. I have work, important work, work, I might add, that has more than incidental benefit to the entire population of this world—and this—this mushroom which you have visited upon me—in your madness—has no rights, no life, no importance to anyone, certainly not to the world. It has nothing. It has no existence. A little group of cells. A tumor. A parasite. This has been foisted upon me and then I am told that I owe it primary rights to life, that my rights are subsidiary! That is insanity! I do not want this thing in my body. It does not belong there. I want it removed. Immediately. Safely.

  WOMAN: Yes, I understand how you feel. But how would it be if every pregnancy brought about in error or ignorance or through some evil or malicious or even well-meaning design were terminated because of the reluctance or the repugnance of the host? Surely the population of the world would be so effectively decimated as to render wholly redundant the mechanisms of lebensraum, of national politics, of hunger as a method, of greed as a motive, of war itself as a method.

  (SOLDIER lunges and stabs at the invisible enemy, accompanying movements with the appropriate battle grunts and cries. There is hatred and despair in the sounds.)

  Surely, if all the unwilling human beings who found motherhood forced upon them through poverty or chance or misstep were to be given the right to choose their lives above all else, the outpouring of acceptance and joy upon the wanted progeny of desired and deliberate pregnancies would eliminate forever those qualities of aggression and deprivation that are so necessary to the progress of society. After all you must realize there are so many women who find themselves pregnant and unmarried, pregnant and unprepared, with work that cannot bear interruption, with no desire to memorialize a casual sexual episode with issue. So many human beings whose incidental fertility victimizes them superfluously in incidents of rape and incestuous attack.

  (Following the lunges, stabs, and grunts, SOLDIER slams the rifle against the stage in vertical butt strokes.)

  So many creatures confounded by sexual desire or a compelling need for warmth and attention who find themselves penniless, ill, pitifully young, and pregnant too.

  (Finally SOLDIER simply stands, lifts rifle to shoulder.)

  And so many women who with the approval of society, church, and medicine have already produced more children than they can afford economically, psychically, physically. Surely you can see the overwhelming nature of the problem posed by the individual’s desire to prevail as articulated by you at this moment. If one plea is valid, then they might all be. So you must learn to accept society’s interest in the preservation of the fetus, within you—within all in your condition.

  MAN: Do you know that I want to kill you? That is all I feel: the desire to kill you.

  (SOLDIER points rifle at GIRL’s head.)

  WOMAN: A common reaction. The impregnated often feel the desire to visit violence upon the impregnator or the maintainers of the pregnancy.

  POST-ABORTION QUESTIONNAIRE—POWERED BY SURVEYMONKEY

  Susan Rich

  1. Do you feel reluctant to talk about the subject of abortion?

  In the center of the ceiling a marigold weeps,

  or perhaps it’s an old chandelier.

  Inside, there’s an interior glow,

  shards illuminated in violet-pink

  and layers of peeling gold leaf.

  Such minds at night unfold.

  2. Do you feel guilt or sorrow when discussing your own abortion?

  The cabbage is a blue rose,

  an alchemical strip show. They scream

  when dragged from the earth

  only to be submerged in boiling water.

  The narrative unscrolls from cells

  of what-ifs and hourglass hopes.

  3. Have you found yourself either avoiding relationships or becoming overly dependent on them since the abortion?

  If I could unhinge myself from myself,

  attach to bookshelves, sever

  my tongue, I would watch

  as it grew back, rejuvenated

  and ready to speak.

  4. Do you have lingering feelings of resentment toward people involved in your abortion (perhaps the baby’s father or your parents)?

  One must be careful what one takes

  when one turns away forever:

  a Tuareg scarf, two photographs,

  untamed thoughts that curse, then lift—

  occasionally yes, though mostly not.

  5. Do you tend to think of your life in terms of “before” and “after” the abortion?

  Too scared to speak my name—

  not etherized upon the table—

  I wore silver stirrups, a blue wrap-around gown.

  The young nurse and I held hands—

  you’re doing great, she cooed.

  I remained awake, awakened.

  6. Have you felt a vague sort of emptiness, a deep sense of loss, or had prolonged periods of depression?

  The sky no longer speaks to me directly—

  and the beautiful man?

  He has dropped through the floorboards

  though sometimes he answers emails:

  Thank you, our family has survived the Paris bombings.

  Sincere condolences on your new president.

  7. Do you sometimes have nightmares, flashbacks, or hallucinat
ions relating to the abortion?

  Never mind, I told myself, it’s only a nightmare.

  But then I remembered I’d barely gone to bed at all.

  Then thirty years had passed, now thirty-one.

  8. Have you begun or increased use of drugs or alcohol since the abortion, or do you have an eating disorder?

  First the fog tastes sweet, then sour—

  what is identity but forged glamour?

  Strong doses of celibacy taken regularly.

  9. Did your relationship to or concept of God, or Karma, or Fate change after your abortion?

  If my own voice falters, tell them

  I tried not to live inside the clock

  or under the skin of pomegranates.

  Does anyone escape her own story—

  head-on collision, nor’easter, earthquake,

  or the racist seeding of our country?

  10. Has your self-concept or self-esteem changed since your abortion?

  Once I abandoned my car in a forest of red cedar,

  let it tumble down the mountain

  precipice by itself. In my next diorama there’s a friend

  at the wheel, and she urges, let’s go on;

  build yourself, like a paint color, an infant’s song.

  11. Are you bothered by certain sounds like machinery that makes loud noises?

  Coffee grinders, vacuum cleaners,

  electronic sewing machines—

  Also: truck backfires, sparklers,

  the sharp scrape of chair legs—

  gunfire overhead, handsaws—the evening

  news—aren’t you?

  12. Is there anything you would like to ask?

  Why does Google Maps allow blind spots;

  for example, the city of Zinder, Niger?

  Is it possible for one person to photograph each galaxy—