Later, I would sit in empty churches and keep the Eucharist company. This was pleasant; it was communing with an idea. It was much like a girl spending a long afternoon brushing her hair and polishing her nails and looking at herself in the mirror—marveling at herself, except I was marveling at my mind, at my ability to swoon or be astonished, at my capacity to understand metaphor better than I understood anything else. I was combing my brain down to my feet. Of course I could have sat in that place and kept company with any object that shone as the end point of so much human thought. I could have sat there and kept company with a copy of King Lear, and later, that is what I would do.
Still, there was such a perfect privacy to those hours, such an enthrallment, such a feeling that the outside world was black-and-white and bloodless compared to the rainbow in the church, that I can understand a little why these men are here. I understand, too, that some people flee to that perfect privacy because of what they must hide.
“Wow,” says the baby behind me, a sweet and sober redhead whose parents have stayed with us at the rectory once or twice. “Oh, WOW,” he says over and over, the word climbing higher into music, until his mother carries him out.
• • •
THE PROCESSION PASSES AGAIN, with a sound like snakes’ lingerie, and then it is over. As we turn to leave, one of the Knights of the Crucified Elks approaches me. “I saw you writing in that notebook there,” he says in a booming, unionized voice. “What were you writing down?”
His interest verges on propriety. He takes a friendly step closer, begins to reach. He might have the largest feather of all.
“Oh, she’s always journaling,” my mother trills, fast on her feet, whirling me past him protectively. “Ever since she was a child.”
Don’t mess with me, knight, or my mom will snatch your hat. As soon as we pass him, I turn to her in disbelief. “Was that guy about to take my notebook? What was he going to do, throw it up into the air and slice it in half with his sword?”
“Maybe he knew who you were,” she says, steering me by my elbow toward the door. “Maybe he knew you were a debauched writer.”
“Oh, that’s rich,” I say, starting to laugh. “Scratch the most debauched writer on the planet, scratch a Parisian who wrote about whips and chains and dungeon masters named Gaston, and find a person who was raised in the Catholic Church.”
• • •
THE WHOLE CONGREGATION WALKS in a body through the drizzle. My mother and I share an umbrella; a car on the slick road honks at us. The celebration is not yet over—we have to go congratulate the new priests and be blessed by them.
Do you know that when a new priest blesses you for the very first time, you have to kneel down in front of him and kiss the palms of his hands? “Oh, disgusting, DISGUSTING,” I wail as I fold myself down on the portable kneeler in front of the former seminarian, whom I will never refer to as Father. “The patriarchy must be crushed in all its forms. How is it that my research has brought me here? I’m GLAD you never get to have sex. I hope that you can see all twelve of my gray hairs from up there and are reminded that witches exist. I—”
“Oh, be quiet,” he says, and holds my head in this weird way like he’s about to crush it, and says some run-together intimate sentence, and then presents me with a holy card. At first I do not feel different, but then I realize it has made me more hilarious.
“I licked your hand, dude,” I tell him when I stand up, and he wipes it on his gorgeous outfit.
In the corner are Leonard’s female relatives, stamping and doing handclaps, their head wraps forming a yellow rose. They are here from Nigeria. Leonard’s nephew pinwheels through the room in a great ecstasy. A new suit, a trip across the sea—he is bursting out of his outlines. It wouldn’t surprise me if he grew an inch in the night. He nearly runs, with that gleeful noticing look in his eyes which means he’s going to grow up to be good at jokes.
Children, as usual, are the cure for fine ironic feelings. I think how it might have been to travel to another continent to watch my father be ordained, and how it might have meant something different to me then—how the ceremony might have seemed part of the horizon’s broadness, or a tangerine sunrise through a plane window, rather than that relentless narrowing to a point.
The nephew waits in turn to be blessed by his uncle, who now has that power. His face is expectant, it is open like a door. And who knows what feels narrow or wide to him now, or what will.
16
ABORTION BARBIE
MISSOURI, 1985
The alphabet had been radicalized; it marched for me now. The words in their order marched. This meant that I knew how to read. This meant that I could read the signs. They said ABORTION STOPS A BEATING HEART and IT’S A CHILD, NOT A CHOICE. Some of the signs had pictures on them too, always the same picture, a picture of a fetus turned to the side with its thumb touching its lips and a human rope floating out of its belly and a pulse of black omniscience for an eye. The fetus was the suffused red lit-up color you saw behind your eyelids, or when you put your hand over a flashlight. But I did not say fetus, I was told never to say that, they had told me to call it a baby.
There was no difference between born and unborn, they told me, they were just different rooms of the same house.
We had stepped outside into the light. It was morning and we had set up camp on the sidewalks all around the clinic. If you looked at the sidewalks closely, you could see flecks of quartz and mica, and sometimes two names inside a heart, and if you paid attention you often found a penny. I was masterful at finding pennies because I was always looking down. We sat on folding chairs and rummaged in a cooler for cold drinks and fanned our faces, probably with the literature. My mother told me to stay close and not wander. I was not the kind to wander anyway, not into this kind of a crowd, which had a strong thrumming bloodstream that might carry you off. It was not like any crowd I had met before. The energy was high, but it felt like the distinct opposite of a parade. We were waiting for something to happen, but I couldn’t tell what. Ribbons of people moved through and among us with greater purpose, but I couldn’t tell where they were going. My father was here too, but I couldn’t see him.
“Why are we here?” I asked my mother, just like that, as children sometimes will when they need to get the story going. She hesitated, and then her voice rang hard out of her red head, somewhere between me and the sun. “Because these people kill babies,” she said. The sentence was full of determination, as if she had made the decision to be open with me, to speak to me as an adult. I felt the shock of cold water. I said, “White babies?” because there was a book in one of our bookcases that told how babies were thrown off the sides of ships on their way over from Africa, and I must have been able to read, because I had read that.
“All babies,” she responded. “Black, white, red, yellow babies. Purple babies,” she added wildly, to show how far these people would go, after something that didn’t even exist, but I had seen purple babies: my little brother Paul went purple when he cried. He was flushed purple now, in the sun; like everything else in the world, the sun seemed to have it out for him personally. I looked up at him. His head lolled on my mother’s shoulder and a spit-up rag was tucked under his chin. Something loud and rushing had happened to my hearing—it was full, I couldn’t hear anything more. These people kill babies. I looked at him until my eyes got full too and the sense of it shook me by the shoulders. My brother was a baby. Why did we bring him here, if these people wanted to murder him? Had she gone crazy, had everyone gone crazy?
In my head I asked, “How do they kill them?”
In my head she answered, “They take them away from their mothers,” and tightened her arms around him.
That was the beginning: until I was much older, I thought my brother was a bright and moving target. I thought people followed us and kept him in their sights. Whenever we were in crowds, I felt them slipping through s
paces with their eyes on my brother, wearing disguises and clothes that would blend, hunting him. We had been careless and now they were after him. That he was never captured was due to my vigilance, my alertness, my awareness that they were on the family scent, that they would stop at nothing. I should have asked who—who were these people, what did they look like, why did they do it—but she might not have been able to answer. If they were as she described them, could they even have human faces? If the enemy was so different from us, how could they walk on two legs?
The atmosphere was blue and shining and loaded with something like bullets. After a moment, I understood that it was us. It was our faces, our eyes, it was the ejection of breath from our mouths. It was copper-tipped and ready, it was us. All around the clinic, we were everywhere. We glittered. Girls and their mothers walked past us with their heads down, and I was not a girl and her mother, I was something else. I remember being held up in the air among the signs, and the merciless interpretation of the sunshine beating down. The signs would not stop talking, now that I knew how to read; they would not stop saying ABORTION STOPS A BEATING HEART and IT’S A CHILD, NOT A CHOICE and EVERY CHILD IS A WANTED CHILD. What the sentences were trying to tell me was that the truth was in turns of phrase. The slogan that reaches across all movements is this: if you arrange the words neatly enough, people will understand. There was one that sounded prettier, BEFORE I FORMED YOU IN THE WOMB I KNEW YOU, and that must have come from somewhere else.
The signs would not stop talking and the picture with one eye wouldn’t stop staring. It looked the way the drumming in your ears felt when all the blood had rushed to your head. It was screaming with oxygen and solar orange, like something out in the night that needed to arrive to us. It was suspended, even though it must have already been born, two or five or even ten years ago. I closed my eyes and willed it to arrive, saw a flash of my little brother bobbing in the blackness, felt a wave of dizziness and opened them again. I was waiting for something to happen.
My father was sitting in a folding chair in front of the clinic’s doors, with his legs apart and his hands folded, waiting. The focus of the crowd intensified and poured toward him, as if this were church, as if he were starring in a passion play. There was a sudden whirlwind of efficient movement around him, it was the police, he was standing up peacefully, they were turning him around by the shoulders, they were putting handcuffs on him, they were leading him away, and red white and blue lights were going up. He had been arrested, I understood, and something else: he had gone there intending to be arrested. He was not the only one. There were a few other people with him, though I hadn’t really paid much attention to them. One of them was a nun. I heard it whispered admiringly that she had been arrested twenty-five times. I heard it whispered that she refused to eat and they had to put a feeding tube in her. I looked back at my brother just in time to see him spit up on my mother’s shoulder. His hair swirled out from his cowlick like a fingerprint, as if it were intended, as if it were someone’s design.
• • •
LATE THAT SAME AFTERNOON, we went to pick him up from jail—not a scary place at all, just a square place piled with paperwork. There were nameplates on the men’s desks, with the names printed in gold. It was crowded with the same beige metal and sharp corners and fat bellies in white shirts that I would later encounter in schools, and had the same smell of petty bureaucracy that stacked paper up even in your nostrils.
Where were the criminals? I wondered. Where were the murderers? Hadn’t they caught any of them? The word “murderers” had floated above the crowd outside the clinic, heated, urgent, so maybe they were all still loose. I saw only sharp corners and my father, who looked none the worse for his imprisonment. His collar opened its little white window on his throat, and he squared his shoulders at us and looked proud. Was jail something you could just try on for a while, like a robe, like a vestment? He had been given only a dry bologna sandwich and it tasted like sand, that was the first thing he told us—you know men, the saying went, always thinking of their stomachs.
I examined him carefully to see if he was different. He looked just the same only more so, as if he’d gotten a good watering. His face was serene. He felt complete. He had said his piece with his whole black-and-white body, while other bodies slipped by him one by one and he did not listen or could not hear. I thought of the way the handcuffs shone in the sun as if they had just been poured, and were cooling around his wrists for the first time. I considered the cell and thought its emptiness had a certain appeal. My father was the sort of person who liked to be alone in a little belly with his thoughts, with his own heartbeat booming everywhere around him, and so was I. We were people made of isolate particles. We drove home with him and he told us about jail.
I sat next to my brother and listened, and I heard that rushing in my head again, but this time I knew what it was: blood moving in and out of human shapes across the universe. Into and out of Patricias, into and out of Pauls. One could empty at any moment. A new one could fill.
My mother must have seen something in my face afterwards, the way I hovered over my brother and kept close to her in crowds, because she never took me back to the clinic again. She was a kind woman. She was other things too, but she was kind. The feeling did not leave for a long while, the feeling that death was after my brother, and then I forgot it, and remembered it only when we grew up and he went overseas with a gun in his hand and the merciless sun on the family face, though that is a different story.
• • •
YOU LOVE YOUR MOTHER most when you’re hip-height and can still hide in her skirts. In the churches, from behind my mother’s skirts, I watched the women. They held third, fourth, fifth babies in their arms. Sometimes they balanced one baby against the round belly of another. They walked more slowly than the rest of us, knee-deep in some meadow, and had a certain physical serenity, as if they’d handed their lives over totally to biology. They were happy the way crabgrass is happy, doing what they were designed to do, at large in the world, elsewhere called a weed, but they didn’t care. It was the look of vegetable love, growing wild over the kingdom of God. It was the look of bodily lushness, which takes in air and multiplies it and gives it back somehow greener. Their cheeks and lips were naked, and something else in their faces was even nakeder, some longing and some fulfillment lying skin to skin and side by side.
The natural order is a powerful narcotic. I don’t mean this in the sense of any opiate of the masses. If you sneer at religion as the opiate of the masses, you must sneer also at the brain, because the receptors are there. You must sneer at the body, which knows how to feel that bliss. What I mean is, a sweet look of lying down in poppy fields, of feeling control finally by giving over control, a look of wild and then tame relinquishment. In the mirror, I examined my face for signs of my mother and saw something else.
It’s not that they thought women were mere incubators—the men might have thought that, but not the women. The women were in love with the body’s seduction of itself, they bent backwards to it, they danced in their own arms and danced beautifully and looked down on anyone who didn’t. They dipped low, almost to the floor, they swirled their skirts when they weren’t wearing any, they felt a hand on their lower backs and moved with it. What it was, was a sense of pride. They wanted to be more of their noun than other women, as John Wayne was more of a man.
We are the ones, they often said among themselves, at kitchen tables and over cups of tea, who really respect women, who really understand them. The opposite of machismo is marianismo. You know, sometimes you run across a word that is meant for you, is part of the currency of your country. When I saw that word “marianismo” for the first time, I put it in my pocket. It was exact change in the form of a concept and I knew I would need it someday.
And when these women were depressed, it was elemental—it belonged to the older, blacker blood, it was an overspill of salinity that was trying to get back
to the sea. And when one of these women committed suicide, as they sometimes did, that was elemental too, there was no equivocation and they left themselves no out, it was suicide the way a man would do it. But here I find myself tempted to make the words march.
The fact is that mostly those women looked content, unless they weren’t, until they weren’t. In my mother, you had a woman who had never had a difficult pregnancy, never had a miscarriage, who could conceive of nothing else, no other idea: why would you not want children? Her milk always came in, as reliable as my books. There was no twisted branch inside her, only apples. She never had the feeling of a child going wrong inside her body, which she paid for later, maybe, with the feeling of a child going wrong outside of it. Helplessness, helplessness. I was hers, and then I was not. Later I would be hers again.
She was once slapped in a grocery store by a complete stranger, a woman who spat at her about overpopulation, who said, “How can you do this, when children are starving, starving . . .” I looked up at her uncomprehendingly; I think I was there. I was not starving. I was in the grocery store.
• • •
AND HOW IS THIS the same mother as the mother of my other stories? And how is this small, frightened speaker the same self? But my father’s house has many mansions.
• • •
YOU WILL HAVE ONE MEMORY where your mother and father are strangers, where they do not fit the story at all. They are too tall, their faces are distorted, they move in the middle of some spine-chilling scene, suddenly there is nothing funny or cozy or domesticated about them. There will be one deep-set square inch of the brain where they stand up next to each other and are as primally shocking to you as motherhood and fatherhood must have been to them.
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