Choice Words

by Annie Finch

  After a particularly bad fight, I decided to expedite matters. L was always telling me that we should elope—he thought eloping romantic, a marker of true love—so we did.

  “You are so lucky to be getting married,” my school friends said, despite the fact that L was finishing up high school and I had dropped out. My stepmother was pleased I’d be gone, but my father and biological mother called us rash. L’s parents declared wily me had ensnared their innocent son and ruined his life. L’s mother had had grand plans for L, which included his going to college abroad and then getting married to a girl of her choice, a girl who was not, like me, from a “broken home.”

  I decided to prove to my mother-in-law that I was her dream daughter-in-law. I began to cook, even though I’d never stepped foot inside a kitchen, and help in running the household. But the nicer I was, the worse my mother-in-law treated me. Although L would apologize on his mother’s behalf, he never defended me to her.

  Because our elopement coincided with L’s final high school exams, he underperformed and was unable to gain admission to a good college in Pakistan, let alone one abroad. Instead, he settled for a mediocre job at a bank. L never blamed me for his situation, but his mother constantly found occasion to let me know I was the root of his failure.

  My father-in-law was no better. “Yes,” he would say, concurring with my mother-in-law, “Sarai oversalts the food. Sarai makes terrible tea. Sarai is arrogant because she speaks English rather than Punjabi. L was the perfect son before Sarai got her claws into him.”

  I was a prisoner in that house, without dignity, without money, day in and day out losing any sense of self. I complained to my father and biological mother, but because I hadn’t bothered asking their advice before eloping, they said I had only myself to blame.

  Around this time, a classmate of mine, Hajra, had an arranged marriage. I recall thinking how lucky she was because her in-laws obviously approved of her. I also recalled feeling like a fraud at the wedding, with all my classmates envying my love marriage.

  I became pregnant seven months into my marriage. I was overjoyed and believed a baby would mend all relations. But my mother-in-law was livid. After demanding to know why L hadn’t used the prophylactics she’d given him, she threatened to poison me. I spent my entire pregnancy too frightened to eat. After nine terrifying months, I had a blessedly easy labor and delivery and gave birth to a beautiful baby.

  My in-laws helped with the baby only when L was around, and when the baby became colicky and demanding, even L lost interest. He increasingly envied his college-going friends their ability to do whatever they wanted without the interference of a wailing newborn, a warring mother and wife, and an underpaid bank job. Through exaggerated sighs, L complained that the baby made him feel “stuck and suffocated” and that he hadn’t wanted to be a father so soon. The baby made me feel stuck and suffocated too, but I battled these feelings and concentrated on being a good mother.

  I still thought L a decent man. When my best friend, Aminah, returned from college needing an abortion, L insisted on driving us to Aminah’s appointment. “Shit happens,” he said. I really loved him for his nonjudgmental attitude, and I encouraged him to re-sit for his high school exams. This time L received scores high enough to get into a college abroad.

  I was ecstatic at the thought of leaving Pakistan and getting far away from my abusive in-laws. When I finally realized that L was going abroad by himself, I was heartbroken and angry. L assured me he was doing this for our future, and that it would be much easier for him to navigate studies abroad without a wife and a child tagging along.

  After L’s departure, my in-laws withheld all affection for their grandchild and begrudged me every bite and every breath. How I survived those two years, God only knows. I spent each day fantasizing about leaving my in-laws behind to join L abroad.

  But when L kept stalling about procuring visas for me and our child, I realized that he would never send for us. I reached my breaking point the day my mother-in-law sat my toddler in her lap and told stories of children who fell out of windows, or came under a car, or died in their sleep. That night my child had nightmares.

  The following morning, I bundled my child into L’s car and, swallowing my pride, drove to my father’s house. L telephoned me and, as usual, refused to hear anything negative about his parents. When I hung up, I finally realized, here or abroad, I did not want to be with someone who valued his parents over his wife and child.

  After I began divorce proceedings, I heard that my soon-to-be ex-mother-in-law had already lined up girls from unbroken homes willing to marry her foreign-educated son.

  At my return, my stepmother became increasingly quarrelsome and I knew that my child and I needed a place of our own. Through my father’s connections, I landed a job with enough salary to rent an annex, hire a maid, and put my child in preschool. My child began to thrive, and with my newfound financial independence, I began to regain confidence and security.

  A year after my divorce, I met K. Though I was not looking for a relationship, K pursued me until I changed my mind. We’d kept bumping into one another on the party circuit. He was always attentive of my needs—refilling my wine glass, lighting my cigarettes—without my asking. He had a gentle touch and a soothing voice. He was always telling me I was a pure and strong woman and a remarkable mother.

  Five months after I began dating K, I ran into J, an ex-classmate of L’s. He’d heard about the divorce and he was sorry—he smiled—but not too sorry. I agreed to go for coffee with him and we ended up talking the whole night.

  J was working overseas but visited Pakistan every month. Soon, each time he visited we would go out for dinner, which would stretch into breakfast. He made me laugh. He also made me aware that L was poorer for having lost me, and it certainly didn’t hurt that J was very cute.

  I wanted to tell K and J about each other, but I was scared one or the other would ask that I choose between them. I suppose I was greedy—I had been without affection and intimacy for so long that I wanted them both.

  When I became pregnant six months later, I didn’t know who the father was. I had to tell them both. J rushed back from abroad and K happened to follow me to the hotel where J was staying. That’s how my two-timing got caught. While K and J agreed that I was a horrible woman, they each offered to support me as long as I chose one of them. But I feared that, were I to marry either J or K, sooner or later, he might feel “stuck and suffocated” by the baby and I would be back to square one: financially and physically on my own and responsible for yet another child.

  I told J and K that I chose neither one of them and was getting an abortion. J left in a huff. K told me to do what I thought was best for me. I thought it best to abort.

  I refused to go to that butcher by the well-known bridge. I remember the butcher giving Aminah a paltry aspirin instead of proper anesthetic. Her brusque slaps and Aminah’s cries were the stuff of my nightmares. Since Aminah’s abortion, I’d grown older and wiser. Abortion might be illegal, but in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan everything is available for the right price.

  My OB-GYN looked at me for a long second before telling me to come to *** hospital the day after tomorrow during a time slot the operating theatre was idle. I was not to go to the reception. Instead her head nurse would be on the lookout for me. I was to pay the nurse fifteen thousand rupees. She would then guide me from there. And yes, the OB-GYN assured me, there would most definitely be anesthesia.

  I wished Aminah was here, but she’d married and chosen to leave Pakistan. K drove me to the hospital. He offered to pay for the abortion. But I could afford to pay myself. Even though we didn’t utter a single word on the way, he held my hand the entire time.

  I didn’t know it then, but in a few years K, like J, would be gone from my life.

  At the hospital, the head nurse was waiting for me. I handed her the fifteen thousand rupees thanks to my having a good job, even as I recalled Aminah’s struggles to collect t
wo thousand rupees. The nurse led me to an operating theatre where two junior nurses were put on guard outside the door so no one would intrude on this illegal procedure. Soon after the OB-GYN and anesthesiologist arrived, a drip was attached to my toe. Soon I was numb, and even sooner it was over.

  K drove me home. He wanted to stay with me but I sent him away. Once he left, I cried—with relief and with regret over depriving my child of a sibling. Finally, I forbade myself from crying. I could not allow myself the luxury of remorse or guilt, the luxury of self-pity, the luxury of falling apart—after all, I had a child to feed and clothe, and I had rent to pay. I promised myself to get on with the future and not dwell on the past, and that is what I did.

  Aminah, 2001

  In Pakistan, married women routinely have abortions. These abortions are often performed for financial reasons, or to space out children, or as birth control. My married cousin, Hawwa, was admitted into the hospital this morning for an abortion though officially it will be recorded as an appendectomy. She sits propped up against pillows from home on a comfortable hospital bed in her private room. She looks fresh, as if she’s just come back from a spa. I think what a difference anesthesia and painkillers can make. My mother and Hawwa’s are opening plastic food containers and the room is flooded with the comforting smell of soup.

  I thought my mother was against abortion for any reason. Perhaps she has softened her stance; perhaps now I can come clean, tell my mother about my ordeal.

  “Ami,” I say, “do you know about this doctor by *** Bridge who used to, maybe still does, perform abortions?”

  My mother makes an ugly face. “That woman performs illegal abortions. She is a disgrace. She should be put away.”

  I sputter that Hawwa’s abortion should also be a disgrace since her pregnancy did not endanger her life. Hawwa and her mother are used to my harboring hatke, or far-from-the-norm opinions, and ignore my statement.

  My mother asks how I know about that woman by the bridge. Because I went there, I want to scream. I went there in order to save our family from disgrace. I want to tell my mother everything. But I don’t. I don’t want to witness the censure in her eyes for that unwed me even as she spoons love into my married cousin’s mouth. Though now that I’m married, my mother, I am sure, will be more than pleased to hold my hand and feed me soup should I too have a pregnancy I want to abort.

  Postscript

  Aminah cried as she related her abortion. “If I could reverse time, I would go back and have my baby. Not a day goes by when I do not think of that ‘choice’ with rage and regret.”

  Hajra told me she lives in daily terror that her husband will yet find out that she wasn’t pure and a virgin at marriage and so divorce her. She added that in telling her tale and knowing that it would be written down, she’d found a sense of closure she hadn’t even realized she’d been seeking. “I rarely think of my abortion and I have zero regret.”

  Sarai related her story to me in an even tone. Afterward she said that since she was two-timing guys, she didn’t expect sympathy from this society, or anyone. “Past is past. I don’t have time to dwell, and, really, what’s the use of regret?”

  Author’s Note: Aminah, Hajra, and Sarai were three who shared their stories in that high school class of twenty-one. Premarital sex in Pakistan remains a crime punishable by a five-year prison term.

  SORRY I’M LATE

  Kristen R. Ghodsee

  She strode into the restaurant about forty minutes late. Bulgarians don’t always share the same concept of time with Americans, so I had ordered a Shopska salad and decided to wait. Svetozara worked for a local nongovernmental organization dealing with domestic violence, and I needed to interview her about a piece of legislation working its way through parliament.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said to me in the perfect English of a young professional who had earned a master’s degree in the UK. “I had an abortion this morning and had to run some errands, and then my tram didn’t show up and I had to take a taxi. The traffic was awful.”

  I looked up, stunned. In America we have this acronym TMI, which means “too much information.” But I wasn’t so much thinking TMI as I was thinking, “Wow, how can she be so nonchalant about something like that?”

  Svetozara studied my half-eaten pile of cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions covered with shredded white sheep’s-milk cheese and said, “Have you ordered anything else?”

  I shook my head. “No, just some wine.”

  “Oh great,” she said, picking up the menu. “I know you must be busy, so you can go ahead and ask me your questions. I’ll try my best to answer you.”

  I opened up my notebook and glanced down at my queries, but I was still reeling from the abortion comment. In the abstract, I knew that Bulgarian women, and indeed, most women in the former communist countries, relied on abortion as their primary form of birth control. Most of my Bulgarian friends and colleagues had already had at least two, if not three or four, abortions. Like menstruation and menopause, abortion was just part of a woman’s life cycle in this part of the world.

  Still, it was hard for me to wrap my head around. I’d spent almost all of my adult life on hormonal birth control to avoid getting pregnant because I was terrified of both having an unwanted child and of having an abortion. In my mind abortion meant trauma, regret, and emotional sturm und drang. In the US, abortion was a big deal. People killed over it. Could it really be that in Bulgaria it was just something you did on the way to the post office?

  “So, I understand that the legislation is being drafted in committee right now,” I said. “How much influence do lobbyists have over the proposed text?”

  Svetozara leaned back in her chair and began to explain the draft language that her organization had submitted for consideration. If she felt any remorse at all for her lost baby-that-might-have-been, it didn’t show. With the exception of Albania and Romania, most Eastern Bloc women not only enjoyed full reproductive rights but lived in societies where abortion carried little stigma. Everyone’s mother (and sometimes grandmother) had had at least one.

  The waiter came and brought us a carafe of Bulgarian rosé. We each ordered grilled kebabs made of mixed ground pork and beef infused with Balkan spices and roasted spicy peppers. These were called “nervous meatballs.”

  It was the Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai who had legalized abortion in the Soviet Union back in 1920, making the young workers’ state the first country in the world to guarantee women’s reproductive rights. Although Stalin reversed the decree from 1936 to 1955, abortion had been accessible to all women in the USSR since 1956. Abortion had been legal in Bulgaria to varying degrees also since 1956, which meant that Svetozara was born into a country where women had enjoyed their reproductive freedoms for more than fifty years.

  “If you want to interview one of our allies in parliament,” Svetozara said, “I can give you the contact information of Minister Peeva. She could give you the inside perspective.”

  “That would be wonderful,” I said, pouring Svetozara wine. I wanted to ask her how she was feeling and if she might like to go home and rest, because I worried that she was silently suffering and doing her best to carry on with her day after a difficult morning. But I didn’t say anything. I poured myself some wine and thought about my own morning: What’s the first thing I do every day? Take the pill. I’d been doing that almost every day for over sixteen years. Because I was sensitive to medication, I’d been on various different versions. Some made me gain weight. Some gave me mood swings. Some induced headaches. When I thought about the hassle, and expense, and side effects, I actually hated the pill.

  As Svetozara explained that not all of the women in parliament supported the domestic violence legislation because they feared it would make women seem like victims, I wondered what my reproductive life would have been like if I’d been raised in a country where a women’s right to control her own body hadn’t been seriously challenged in decades. Where going to an aborti
on clinic didn’t mean risking your life to get inside. Maybe having multiple abortions is actually better than pumping yourself full of hormones for decades. I didn’t know, but that day I realized that for women born in most Eastern European countries, the medical removal of a fertilized egg was no more traumatic or shameful than the pharmaceutical prevention of the egg’s fertilization in the first place.

  “Nazdrave,” Svetozara said, holding up her glass, and smiling. “To women’s rights.”

  I clinked my glass against hers. “Yes, Nazdrave. To women’s rights.”

  PELICAN

  Mahogany L. Browne

  She quit every job she owned on a Friday

  Left the shabby chairs and floor to squeal farewell

  She’s never been the kind to exit in a sentimental way

  A poet, an exposed bone, a girl too fragile, a shaken empty well

  To be a forgotten song in the throat of a corpse

  To be a washed-up basin on the edge of an ocean’s mouth

  She crawls towards the sea, towards the sun for a morsel

  She lives off the sandcastles blown away, a flimsy house

  She wants riches of mangoes and dumplings pinched by brown hands

  She wants what her hands can’t carry, she wants what she should not

  know exists

  Sweet bread from her mother’s kitchen and green crops from good land

  The pelican, intersection death, beak w i d e with its flushed pink

  stomach persists

  Don’t ask her what she does not know, don’t ask her about marriage or

  honor

  Ask her of the children buried, after a sweet medicine wrecked her