Violation

by Sallie Tisdale

  Once in fury at her I sat on the concrete steps and tore apart her favorite philodendron, leaf by leaf, scattering the green shreds like dung, like ruin. The old straight-backed woman cried, still and trembling in the doorway. It was an enormous crime. I sat in the curious silence of shamed regret, curling inward, surrounded by pieces of something I couldn’t put back together again—and saw behind my grandmother my own mother’s stricken face. She had somehow permitted this crime, had failed, and become subject to her own mother again, through me.

  And so I always found it odd, watching from the doorway, that my dour grandmother and stoic mother spent hours talking over a single pot of coffee, relaxed, girlish. These scenes are elongated and mysterious, one of the forbidden places. I sprawled on the huge rag rug, following its oval track from the center outward, from the outside in, while they laughed and gossiped. At night my sister and I lay in the soft guest bed, fighting over territory, and heard more talk, muffled, more laughing, and now and then through the magpie voices my father’s deep, short bursts of speech.

  Now I have three children, and new appreciations. I call my mother, three hundred miles away, to talk about them, and she interrupts, anxious to return to her book, her television. She takes her cool pleasure in us from a comfortable distance, and our conversations are often short. She parries better than I can, and I forfeit. Hanging up in sudden discontent, I am all over them, passionate and physical, rubbing and wrestling and jouncing, whispering subliminal permissions, tiny pleas, in their downy ears.

  I give up my common inhibitions, rules of conduct, when I hold my babies. It is a pleasure instinctive and heavy, and breathlessly free. Bit by bit time wedges us apart, forging separation, and amnesia. I love my parents because, after all, they are my parents, and my babies love me for the same good reason. We are bound in a loom of pulling away and pushing back, letting go and holding on. My children’s task is to pull away and they do, they do, tugging furiously at the leash I strain to play out an inch at a time. We hold back, let go; I still tug. A friend, telling me of her mother’s death, begins, “I remember when we were dying.”

  My mother was orphaned a decade ago, and she still shivers with loss, denied the requisite delights of regression. Nostalgia is its own reward, its own burden; it illuminates our imagined history. My grandmother lived in that house a long time after her husband died of cancer, long after she found out that she, too, had cancer. The house was sold, furniture parceled out. The tough woman in the kitchen became a weak bundle of pain, and I lifted her under her arms and swung her from the bed to the commode, commode to chair. She admitted no complaint. I could feel in her dried and sagging arms a most peculiar substance. I could feel, blushing, a twisted skin in the faces that watched us; my mother and her daughter, my sister and my mother’s sister and my grandmother’s granddaughters, all of us at once and together and almost wholly unaware of it: the clinging web that held us back and wouldn’t let us go.

  My mother and my glacial aunt tentatively asked me to quit school and stay with her. I refused. I held back, and my grandmother let go. When the furniture was divided, my mother kept her bed; it’s where I sleep now when I visit them.

  All my cross-grained, melancholy generations have gently collided with each other, as generations do, like bottles of milk rattling along, sliding up the track to jostle other bottles along. We wait our turn. My mother’s father is dead, her mother is dead, my father’s father and three stepfathers are dead. And between us my brother and sister and I have seven children jockeying for position by the fireplace, playing our old games. This Christmas my mother watches her grandchildren and her television from a hospital bed, where the tree used to go. She is dying of cancer, the same cancer that killed her mother.

  Each year around my birthday the little ornamental cherry tree in front of her house bursts into bloom, luxuriant and top-heavy. I used to sit in its lap of low branches; now I pick blossoms off the top. The bubbling frog creek is a dry gully; the noisy park clean and quiet. I see strange faces in the streets, new shapes, house-peaks along empty hills. It is time to think things through, to follow the thread where it enters the knot until I find its exit. Time now to confess my tenuous hold on adulthood before I am orphaned in turn.

  She has filled the drawers of my old dresser with her wedding albums and old baby pictures and clippings of my brother’s high school football games, neatly scissored. She takes with her where she goes a voice I’ve heard from birth, a step, a chime, the smoky car. A door closes, irrevocably, on rooms cluttered in certain ways by her passage, on a dusty piano, sun-dried towels, and certain plays of light on certain trees. Chipped crystal stays, without her use, and the dark bedroom and high dark bed, without her smell. I begin a definition of love made fundamentally of the familiar. These things and these places, the way a shadow casts in August and seamstress hands and the cool wet smell of the grass in the early morning, are not things I’ve used much for years. I have been inattentive in my turn and made another family, holding hers in reserve, available. She is dying and sad and scared to die, and takes with her the remnants and desires of my life till now. She lets go and I hold back, watching her grow weak and frail, disconcertingly familiar as she disappears from sight.

  She was never the mother I wanted her to be. We have never chattered over coffee, grown girlish together while my daughter watched. For a long time I tried to change her, reproachful, and failed, not seeing how she had tried to change me long ago. She won’t change now; she is merely herself. So is my father, blustering and mad. He meticulously catalogs videotapes of old movies, John Wayne and Errol Flynn, their favorites, to watch alone half-asleep in the evenings after she dies. My silent brother and my shrill, half-panicked sister won’t change, not much, and neither will I. We are the gifts we were given. I sit by her bed in sadness, an unspoken summing-up held, like so much else, back. These are the people I am accompanied by, my escorts. We dance attendance on each other, as families do, and little else. There is little else to do.

  And I go home, wherever it is, and confront a son resentful of my tight rein. He demands a faster adulthood, receiving power in unexpected shifts and abrupt shufflings. I grab the leash and run the other way. He is hurt by my mother’s coming extinction, blustering like my father, his grandfather, her husband. I grow dizzy in the sticky threads, resistance against the spin. He is letting go of me and I am holding back, for I know he has no idea, no possible idea of all the many surprises still in store.

  Zyzzyva, Winter 1986–87

  For more than thirty years I’ve been writing about the way family wraps around our lives. There is no escaping it, even when we escape—one way or another, we are made of it. This was one in a series of essays I wrote about the sticky threads woven around us by both parents and children—a web we create, long for, celebrate, and hate.

  Fetus Dreams

  WE DO ABORTIONS HERE; THAT IS ALL WE DO. THERE ARE weary, grim moments when I think I cannot bear another basin of bloody remains, utter another kind phrase of reassurance. So I leave the procedure room in the back and reach for a new chart. Soon I am talking to an eighteen-year-old woman pregnant for the fourth time. I push up her sleeve to check her blood pressure and find row upon row of needle marks, neat and parallel and discolored. She has been so hungry for her drug for so long that she has taken to using the loose skin of her upper arms; her elbows are already a permanent ruin of bruises. She is surprised to find herself nearly four months pregnant. I suspect she is often surprised, in a mild way, by the blows she is dealt. I prepare myself for another basin, another brief and chafing loss.

  “How can you stand it?” Even the clients ask. They see the machine, the strange instruments, the blood, the final stroke that wipes away the promise of pregnancy. Sometimes I see that too: I watch a woman’s swollen abdomen sink to softness in a few stuttering moments and my own belly flip-flops with sorrow. But all it takes for me to catch my breath is another interview, one more story that sounds so much like the las
t one. There is a numbing sameness lurking in this job: the same questions, the same answers, even the same trembling tone in the voices. The worst is the sameness of human failure, of inadequacy in the face of each day’s dull demands.

  In describing this work, I find it difficult to explain how much I enjoy it most of the time. We laugh a lot here, as friends and as professional peers. It’s nice to be with women all day. I like the sudden, transient bonds I forge with some clients: moments when I am in my strength, remembering weakness, and a woman in weakness reaches out for my strength. What I offer is not power, but solidness, offered almost eagerly. Certain clients waken in me every tender urge I have—others make me wince and bite my tongue. Both challenge me to find a balance. It is a sweet brutality we practice here, a stark and loving dispassion.

  I look at abortion as if I am standing on a cliff with a telescope, gazing at some great vista. I can sweep the horizon with both eyes, survey the scene in all its distance and size. Or I can put my eye to the lens and focus on the small details, suddenly so close. In abortion the absolute must always be tempered by the contextual, because both are real, both valid, both hard. How can we do this? How can we refuse? Each abortion is a measure of our failure to protect, to nourish our own. Each basin I empty is a promise—but a promise broken a long time ago.

  I grew up on the great promise of birth control. Like many women my age, I took the pill as soon as I was sexually active. To risk pregnancy when it was so easy to avoid seemed stupid, and my contraceptive success, as it were, was part of the promise of social enlightenment. But birth control fails, far more frequently than laboratory trials predict. Many of our clients take the pill; its failure to protect them is a shocking realization. We have clients who have been sterilized, whose husbands have had vasectomies; each one is a statistical misfit, fine print come to life. The anger and shame of these women I hold in one hand, and the basin in the other. The distance between the two, the length I pace and try to measure, is the size of an abortion.

  THE PROCEDURE IS disarmingly simple. Women are surprised, as though the mystery of conception, a dark and hidden genesis, requires an elaborate finale. In the first trimester of pregnancy, it’s a mere few minutes of vacuuming, a neat tidying up. I give a woman a small yellow Valium, and when it has begun to relax her, I lead her into the back, into bareness, the stirrups. The doctor reaches in her, opening the narrow tunnel to the uterus with a succession of slim, smooth bars of steel. He inserts a plastic tube and hooks it to a hose on the machine. The woman is framed against white paper that crackles as she moves, the light bright in her eyes. Then the machine rumbles low and loud in the small windowless room; the doctor moves the tube back and forth with an efficient rhythm, and the long rail of it fills with blood that spurts and stumbles along into a jar. He is usually finished in a few minutes. They are long minutes for the woman; her uterus frequently reacts to its abrupt emptying with a powerful, unceasing cramp, which cuts off the blood vessels and enfolds the irritated, bleeding tissue.

  I am learning to recognize the shadows that cross the faces of the women I hold. While the doctor works between her spread legs, the paper drape hiding his intent expression, I stand beside the table. I hold the woman’s hands in mine, resting them just below her ribs. I watch her eyes, finger her necklace, stroke her hair. I ask about her job, her family; in a haze she answers me; we chatter, faces close, eyes meeting and sliding apart.

  I watch the shadows that creep up unnoticed and suddenly darken her face as she screws up her features and pushes a tear out each side to slide down her cheeks. I have learned to anticipate the quiver of chin, the rapid intake of breath, and the surprising sobs that rise soon after the machine starts to drum. I know this is when the cramp deepens, and the tears are partly the tears that follow pain—the sharp, childish crying when one bumps one’s head on a cabinet door. But a well of woe seems to open beneath many women when they hear that thumping sound. The anticipation of the moment has finally come to fruit; the moment has arrived when the loss is no longer an imagined one. It has come true.

  I am struck by the sameness and I am struck every day by the variety here—how this commonplace dilemma can so display the differences of women. A twenty-one-year-old woman, unemployed, uneducated, without family, in the fifth month of her fifth pregnancy. A forty-two-year-old mother of teenagers, shocked by her condition, refusing to tell her husband. A twenty-three-year-old mother of two having her seventh abortion, and many women in their thirties having their first. Some are stoic, some hysterical, a few giggle uncontrollably, many cry.

  I talk to a sixteen-year-old uneducated girl who was raped. She has gonorrhea. She describes blinding headaches, attacks of breathlessness, nausea. “Sometimes I feel like two different people,” she tells me with a calm smile, “and I talk to myself.”

  I pull out my plastic models. She listens patiently for a time, and then holds her hands wide in front of her stomach.

  “When’s the baby going to go up into my stomach?” she asks.

  I blink. “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” she says, still smiling, “when women get so big, isn’t the baby in your stomach? Doesn’t it hatch out of an egg there?”

  My first question in an interview is always the same. As I walk down the hall with the woman, as we get settled in chairs and I glance through her files, I am trying to gauge her, to get a sense of the words, and the tone, I should use. With some I joke, with others I chat, sometimes I fall into a brisk, businesslike patter. But I ask every woman, “Are you sure you want to have an abortion?” Most nod with grim knowing smiles. “Oh, yes,” they sigh. Some seek forgiveness, offer excuses. Occasionally a woman will flinch and say, “Please don’t use that word.”

  Later I describe the procedure to come, using care with my language. I don’t say “pain” any more than I would say “baby.” So many are afraid to ask how much it will hurt. “My sister told me—” I hear. “A friend of mine said—” and the dire expectations unravel. I prick the index finger of a woman for a drop of blood to test, and as the tiny lancet approaches the skin she averts her eyes, holding her trembling hand out to me and jumping at my touch.

  It is when I am holding a plastic uterus in one hand, a suction tube in the other, moving them together in imitation of the scrubbing to come, that women ask the most secret question. I am speaking in a matter-of-fact voice about “the tissue” and “the contents” when the woman suddenly catches my eye and asks, “How big is the baby now?” These words suggest a quiet need for a definition of the boundaries being drawn. It isn’t so odd, after all, that she feels relief when I describe the growing bud’s bulbous shape, its miniature nature. Again I gauge, and sometimes lie a little, weaseling around its infantile features until its clinging power slackens.

  But when I look in the basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see an elfin thorax, attenuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards. A translucent arm and hand swim beside.

  A sleepy-eyed girl, just fourteen, watched me with a slight and goofy smile all through her abortion. “Does it have little feet and little fingers and all?” she’d asked earlier. When the suction was over she sat up woozily at the end of the table and murmured, “Can I see it?” I shook my head firmly. “It’s not allowed,” I told her sternly, because I knew she didn’t really want to see what was left. She accepted this statement of authority, and a shadow of confused relief crossed her plain, pale face.

  PRIVATELY, EVEN GRUDGINGLY, my colleagues might admit the power of abortion to provoke emotion. But they seem to prefer the broad view and disdain the telescope. Abortion is a matter of choice, privacy, control. Its uncertainty lies in specific cases: retarded women and girls too young to give consent for surgery, women who are ill or hostile or psychotic. Such common dilemmas are met with both compassion and impatience: they slow things down. We are too busy to chew over ethics. One person might discuss certain concerns, behind closed doors, or describe a
particularly disturbing dream. But generally there is to be no ambivalence.

  Every day I take calls from women who are annoyed that we cannot see them, cannot do their abortion today, this morning, now. They argue the price, demand that we stay after hours to accommodate their job or class schedule. Abortion is so routine that one expects it to be like a manicure: quick, cheap, and painless.

  Still, I’ve cultivated a certain disregard. It isn’t negligence, but I don’t always pay attention. I couldn’t be here if I tried to judge each case on its merits; after all, we do over a hundred abortions a week. At some point each individual in this line of work draws a boundary and adheres to it. For one physician the boundary is a particular week of gestation; for another, it is a certain number of repeated abortions. But these boundaries can be fluid too: one physician overruled his own limit to abort a mature but severely malformed fetus. For me, the limit is allowing my clients to carry their own burden, shoulder the responsibility themselves. I shoulder the burden of trying not to judge them.

  This city has several “crisis pregnancy centers” advertised in the Yellow Pages. They are small offices staffed by volunteers, and they offer free pregnancy testing, glossy photos of dead fetuses, and movies. I had a client recently whose mother is active in the anti-abortion movement. The young woman went to the local crisis center and was told that the doctor would make her touch her dismembered baby, that the pain would be the most horrible she could imagine, and that she might, after an abortion, never be able to have children. All lies. They called her at home and at work, over and over and over, but she had been wise enough to give a false name. She came to us a fugitive. We who do abortions are marked by some as impure. It’s dirty work.