Choice Words

by Annie Finch

FROM RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE

  Rita Mae Brown

  “Are you sure you’re pregnant?”

  “Yes, I am goddamn fucking sure. Enough to make you vomit, isn’t it?”

  “Where can we get an abortion?”

  “I know a guy in med school who will do it. But I have to give him $500. Can you believe $500 to scrape a tiny bit of gook from my insides?”

  “Do you think he’s safe?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Well, when are we doing it?”

  “Tomorrow night. You’re driving me there, Cookie.”

  “Okay. Did you tell Cathy you were going tomorrow?”

  “No. At least I had sense enough not to spill that. I don’t even know why I told her in the first place. It was on my mind and it popped out. Stupid.”

  The next evening we left the dorm at nine and drove out west of the town. We pulled in the driveway of the med student’s trailer and Faye climbed out.

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “No, you’re not. You stay here and wait.”

  It seemed hours and I was so nervous I threw up. The whole thing was creepy and the Spanish moss in the night looked like ragged fingers of death coming to get me. All I could think of was Faye in there on some kitchen table with him doing God knows what. I thought maybe I should go in there, but then suppose I barge in at the critical moment and he pushes a hole in her or something. Eventually Faye wobbled out. I ran out of the car to help her.

  “Faysie, are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m all right. A little weak.”

  As we neared the dorm I turned out the lights and pulled into the macadam parking lot. We walked slowly back to the basement window that was permanently unlocked at the price of ten dollars per week to the guard. I lifted Faye through because it was high up. As I dropped to the other side I noticed blood oozing down her leg. “Faye, you’re bleeding. Maybe we should go to a real doctor.”

  “No. He told me I might bleed a little. It’s okay. Shut up about it or you’ll make me think about it.” We started up the four flights of stairs to our room and Faye was going painfully slow. “I’m so goddamned weak this is gonna take a fucking hour.”

  “Put your arms around my neck and I’ll carry you up.”

  “Molly, you crack me up. I weigh one thirty-five and you must weigh about a hundred.”

  “I’m very strong. Come on, this is no time to pull a Weight Watchers. Put your arms around my neck.”

  She leaned on me and I picked her up. “My hero.” She laughed. I cut classes the next two days to hang around the room in case Faye needed me. She recovered in record time and by Saturday was ready for another liquor-sodden weekend.

  “I’m going over to Jacksonville to raise hell.”

  “Don’t be an asswipe, Faye. Take it easy this weekend.”

  “If you’re so worried you can come along and play nurse. We can stay at my house and come back Sunday night. Come on.”

  “Okay, but promise me you won’t pick up some stud and bust open your stitches or whatever you’ve got up there.”

  “You crack me up.”

  We started out at a bar near Jacksonville University, black walls, Day-Glo paint on them and a huge sea-turtle shell here and there. An enormous basketball player bought us drinks and insisted on asking me to dance. My nose hit his navel and I got cramps in my arches from dancing so long on my toes. We left there and headed toward the inner city. “I’m gonna take you to a wild bar, Molly, so gear yourself.”

  The bar was Rosetta’s, named after the owner, who walked around with a black lasagna hairdo teased up nearly a foot with chopsticks stuck in it at various angles. Rosetta smiled at us as we came in and demanded our IDs. They were fake, of course, but we passed Checkpoint Charlie and went over to a table in the corner. As we sat down, I glanced in the direction of the dance floor and noticed that the men were dancing with each other and the women were dancing with other women. I had a sudden urge to clap my hands in frenzied applause, but I suppressed it because I knew no one would understand.

  “Faye, how’d you find this place?”

  “I get around, Toots.”

  “Are you gay?”

  “No, but I like gay bars. They’re more fun than straight ones, plus there’s no jocks to paw at you. I thought I’d bring you here for a little treat.”

  “Thought you’d shock me, right?”

  “I don’t know. I just thought it would be fun.”

  “Let’s have fun then. Come on, smartass, how’d you like to dance?”

  “Bolt, you crack me up. Who the hell is going to lead?”

  “You are because you’re taller than I am.”

  “Wonderful, I can be butchess.”

  Once on the terrazzo dance floor, we had a hard time keeping our balance because Faye was laughing uproariously. Every two steps she mangled my sandaled foot. Then in a burst of concentration, she gave me a Fred Astaire twirl and made use of her cotillion training. As the final strains of Ruby and the Romantics died down, we started for our table to be intercepted by two young women on the other side of the dance floor.

  “Excuse me. Don’t you all go to Florida and live in Broward?”

  Faye volunteered the information. Then the short one asked us if we’d come to their table for a drink. We agreed to that and trotted back to our corner table to retrieve our drinks.

  “Molly, if that little one tries to pick me up, you tell her we’re going together. Okay?”

  “Instant marriage, is it? In that case, I’ll do anything for my wife.”

  “Thanks dearie. I’ll do the same for you. Remember we’re the hottest couple since Adam and Eve. Wrong metaphor—since Sappho and whoever. Come on.”

  FROM LA BTARDE

  Violette Leduc

  My period did not come. I did not want to keep the child. Sometimes I told Gabriel about my visits to the so-called midwives, sometimes not. A curious man: he still continued to keep himself in check, yet he still wanted the child. As for my mother, she treated her married daughter as though she were an innocent maiden who’d been seduced. But despite this confusion I must admit her appraisal of my situation was astute enough. I was torn in two directions at once. When I fell on a staircase I imagined I was saved. I was mistaken. The months passed and the five months’ ripened fruit in my belly gave me the strength of a lion. If it moved, what would I decide? It didn’t move, I wasn’t forced to say to myself that there was a heart beating in my insides. It was while we were eating in a restaurant that specialized in the dishes of the Auvergne that Gabriel told me how he was going to rent a sunny apartment in a modern block, how we were going to bring up the child together. The rosé wine was sending me to sleep, Gabriel’s voice was like a cradle rocking me. Since his mother’s death and his sister’s marriage, he’d been living on the top floor of a new building just around the corner from our musty room. I came to my senses, I went to live with my mother. I was full of mistrust. My mother has no idea of the love I showed her or the sacrifice I made for her then.

  A Sunday afternoon in winter without a fire. Michel was taking a course in sheep farming at a school in the country. He had to leave again that evening. I knew how passionate they both were about the cinema and persuaded them to go to one. My mother was unaware of what a serious condition I was in after my final attempts at an abortion the day before. The door banged behind them, the lift came up. I was warm as I lay in my mother’s bed writing a story for the magazine. Writing: it meant entering the struggle; it meant earning my livelihood as religious people earn their right to enter heaven. I blew on my fingers, I massaged my hip, the infection was beginning, I went on writing, and every now and then I glanced through the glass front of the dresser in their dining room. Inside, I could see the drawer in which I had put away ten thousand francs, a fortune acquired in one fell swoop, thanks to an advertising story I had written for the firm of Lissac: in it I had demonstrated how a shortsighted girl who wore glasses was more attractive than her
twin sister who had arrogantly refused to adopt a long view of things. They came back from the cinema at six that evening and I told them I was in no pain. I was in pain. Unforgettable afternoon with my paper to be filled and my single woman’s determination to stand by herself and not to fall.

  I have described the sequel to that afternoon in Ravages: the following evening I was dying in a clinic. I didn’t want my mother to spend the night in an armchair by my bed. I begged her to go home and rest in her own bed. But the one spark of life left in me kept flickering the same message over and over: she will stay, you’ll see, she’ll stay. She left. She told me later that she went to the cinema, otherwise she couldn’t have got through the evening. I understand her and I don’t understand her. The next morning, she didn’t dare telephone the clinic. She thought they would tell her I was dead. I suffer from her sufferings as well as my own.

  A terrible winter without coal. I had been discharged from the clinic and spent several months in bed at my mother’s. She got up at six in the morning, she broke the ice in the kitchen, then she put the pieces of ice in the rubber bag I had to keep in my belly all day long. I listened: the pieces of ice fell on to the tiled floor, and because her hands were cold, when she had finished picking them up she’d let them all slip on to the floor again. I accused myself of being sick, of lying in a warm bed, of making her wait on me. I upbraided my immobile legs.

  A yellowing light coming through the window. The sky had snow in store for us. I panicked. Night was coming, I couldn’t switch on the light. My mother had gone out to bring medical supplies from a chemist’s near Gare Saint-Lazare and she should have been back by now. I called to her with all the strength of my lungs. Someone rang the doorbell. I sensed that it was Gabriel. Nailed to the bed, I loved him without desire and without regret. I heard him going away, I called to my mother again in the darkness. What had happened to her, what would happen to me, alone in her big bed? The door was double locked. Gently, in the silence, I began to weep. Crying rhythmically like that kept me going in the darkness behind my closed eyelids.

  My mother came back and flew into a temper. She’d been held up by the queue in the chemist’s, the crowd in the Métro, the crowds everywhere she went. I asked her the time. She’d been away six hours, I said piteously between sobs. I would have liked her to take me in her arms. She was getting ready the permanganate, the boiled water, the douche…. She began giving me my treatment. The doorbell rang. She thrust the douche into my hands and went to the door. She came back into the room and went on attending to me. Wearing his long cape and his beret, leaden faced, he had followed her into the room. He looked at me and he looked at the pink rubber tube, the crimson blood. He left without a word.

  Translated from the French by Derek Coltman

  I AM USED TO KEEPING SECRETS ABOUT MY BODY

  Josette Akresh-Gonzales

  A bottom drawer of just-in-case ovules—

  treasure of Candida—

  ointment if you do not feel some relief.

  * * *

  Bathroom door locked, rashes I’ve treated in the mirror.

  The doctor I had for ten years—never not awkward

  and when I revealed the pink pustules exploding,

  oystershell yellow and white, my breast,

  the underside of the breast,

  he only glanced, said he suspected poison ivy—

  shy (or maybe horny) doctor referred me to derm.

  * * *

  In camp, I remember, a girl whose boobs had come

  overnight like she had hidden a bicycle pump under her bed—

  I stared at her and me, me and her—funny mirrors.

  Behind the hook-and-eye latched door,

  one of those girls taught me how to shove a tampon in.

  When I failed over and over, my knee high over the toilet,

  my bare toes balanced brown with mud on the sole, my face

  reddening more with each attempt,

  there was relief in flopping down on the bed with a pile of Seventeen—

  tips on how to break up with a boy: It’s not you, it’s me.

  * * *

  I try to hike up in the Green Mountains,

  focus on not peeing as I step a foot-high boulder

  down, way behind my husband and boys,

  our friends and their dog so far ahead, their voices damp

  at the summit. I watch the horizon, a done deal:

  I quit I quit I quit.

  * * *

  About ten years ago, a woman I worked with

  took me for a walk by the river, opened up like a storm:

  that guy she’d hooked up with—who she thought she might marry,

  who’d profiled on IndianCupid as square-jawed but smart and steady

  almost too good to be true—

  and saw again at a friend’s party—

  Well, now I’m pregnant. Pale, nauseated

  morning, noon, and night—

  she wondered if I had a doctor I liked who could do an abortion.

  Her eyes had never strayed up from the pebbled map

  of river path under our boots.

  So how far along are you, I asked—

  splash—a false contraction overcoming me.

  I was pregnant too, and the body quickening,

  a kick in the guts.

  I don’t know, she said, it could be two months.

  I don’t know.

  I gave her the number of my doctor

  and promised that he would be for her a thing with feathers—

  this was Massachusetts in 2008—

  and a few weeks later, upstairs, quiet,

  she told me that it was done—

  of course, it was never purely one thing—

  no, she had bled too much,

  she had to return to the surgeon,

  had to keep her secret from even her closest sister.

  She told me, Look, I can never tell my mom,

  my father would disown me, I could never get married.

  Working in her cubicle next to mine, she took pills for the pain—

  she would not be an exile.

  In time her sisters would paint her in henna

  and she would wear a pink sari and many gold bracelets.

  She would enjoy the sweet smile of her child, like mine—

  the border of before motherhood/after motherhood

  like a wall which is a grassy hill on one side,

  stones stacked up on the other.

  WEATHER

  Lisa Coffman

  When I sit teaching among my red-lipped girls sugaring to ripeness

  among the flushed necks prideful as mine has been

  and feel in myself only the new wish

  to lie down in the earliest dark and turn my face

  or when I go among pleasured women filling with first child, oh

  when I want to go over what is gone and done

  then I come to my high room that faces the river

  and the wide light the river moves ceaselessly under.

  OF THE MISSING FIFTY MILLION

  Shikha Malaviya

  According to statistics from the United Nations, there are fifty million more boys than girls under the age of twenty in India. Sex-selective abortions, despite being illegal in India, are often performed, as boys are considered more desirable.

  In the celestial realm

  of abandoned girls

  you will find all parts

  tiny fingers and toes

  thumbnail-sized hearts

  silver anklets barely an inch wide

  kohl to ward off the evil eye

  and tiny ovaries dotting the skies

  Rupees five thousand for a simple operation

  saves you a dowry of fifty thousand

  for daughters are a father’s burden

  legs closed, mouths open

  decked in red

  when they are wed

  we welcome the bride

  a
s Lakshmi, goddess of wealth

  uttering blessings, of them one

  putravati bhava

  be the mother of a son

  MY SISTER GROWS BIG AND SMALL

  Linda Ashok

  Okay, listen, you need

  to calm down. It was just a dream,

  you know that. If you promise me

  and calm down, I will get you

  the joker-box in which his laughter

  spills into candies.

  But Ma, could that be his tongue?

  Could those candies be his tongue?

  No! Now you are annoying me.

  Listen there is no bad dream

  like an empty stomach

  and now I must go,

  gather firewood

  and cook

  a warm and loving meal for you.

  But Ma, you know that dream is not unreal.

  I see a girl by the pond every day;

  she wears my school dress

  and tells me that she misses you.

  She has your mole and her lips, Ma,

  are as red as yours. Hers,

  not snaggletooth but as perfect as yours.

  No, that is not real! Come with me

  to the woods. We’ll burn the spell

  of this bad dream.

  Ma, she is real. She follows me home

  till I wake up and she grows big and small

  and I cannot catch her. She says

  she will take me away with her.

  She knows you and grandpa

  and brother all by their names.

  She gets me toffees. But I cannot take them;

  there is something between us;

  she tells me it is you.

  See, when you gather the wood,

  check them if they are soggy, as the wet ones

  take longer to burn, might be a waste of all your time.

  Ma, could I be a soggy branch?

  You are too little to know how she fell off

  me. You are not responsible. She dropped

  off me.

  Next time, if you meet her, tell her

  that Ma wanted her as much.

  She’ll understand.

  TWEETS IN EXILE FROM NORTHERN IRELAND