Sometimes when you looked at them you could tell how frightened they were to see you walking around outside of them. They practically bled where you had been taken out. They didn’t just want to protect you now, or flank you on both sides into the future. They wanted to keep traveling back to the night you were born and make sure you got there safe every time. They wanted to tie off every reality where you didn’t get born like an umbilical cord. When they talked about abortion the verbs they used were “sucked,” “scraped,” “ripped,” “vacuumed out,” and when they said them, it was plainer than plain that they were talking about you, and the violent rushing in the gut they felt when they thought about your absence. The possibility that you might not have existed was so vast and you were so small—they held you in their arms and thought of large and minute laws, past, present, and future laws that would force the world to let you through, that would force whatever government there was to let you enter the country, the state, the city, and finally the little four-cornered house, and finally your mother’s body, and finally your own. That was what it was.
• • •
MY SISTER HAS THE NEWEST BABY in the world now, and she gave her an old name, Etheldreda, the name of some Middle English crone that you would go to for a packet of herbs, who lives alone in the thickest part of the forest among dried lavenders and chamomiles and mustards. When I am with my sister’s children, something happens to time and suddenly we are playing together against it, with an instinct I never experience elsewhere. When I’m bouncing the baby, spinning her in circles, lying on my back and raising her up and down for kisses, time simply stops, it can’t make a move against me as long as she’s there. Her personality is lined up inside her intact, the way you’re born with all the eggs you’ll ever get. I think, “So appleness and aboutness, you have those too. Some quality goes through to the core, and that is you. Wheatness, wineness, stoneness.” There’s a wholesome feeling in the bones that ought to be ground up for loaves of bread, something golden. A reflex reaches out of my hand sometimes and catches her before I even know she’s falling. There is a call that rings in the hindbrain, that says come back to your senses, come back to all five of them, and after that come to the sixth. But I cannot, or I will not.
The twinge you are feeling right now is the twinge of wondering whether I am really right-thinking, whether I am really on the right side when it comes to this subject. I put that twinge in because I sometimes feel it myself. But after all that, you must understand I had to leave right-thinkingness behind.
• • •
THERE IS A SPACE above Missouri that is crowded with prayers for the unborn, just as there is a space above Las Vegas that is flocked full of magicians’ doves. In the 1970s and 1980s, in the Midwest, Catholic rules-lawyering met with Protestant fire-breathing and gave birth to something new. It was the Movement, and for a while our whole lives were tied up with it. The air of a subculture is a different air; it has words in it, even messages. It is harder to breathe, but it gives purpose to every part of you, every cell. It propels you forward, it works through you, your eyes produce a spotlight wherever they fall—a hot white beam of accusing clarity—and everything you look at is bathed in it.
There is a picture, as I have mentioned, of my father at a pro-life Halloween party in the early eighties, dressed as Dracula and pretending to bite the necks of other pro-lifers. You are not alone in thinking that this sounds like the worst Halloween party anyone ever had. We had pro-life bumper stickers on our car, and pro-life pamphlets scattered among our books. My older sister cried each year on her birthday because it fell on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade—that was the sort of fact we knew, even as children. We were forbidden to put quarters into March of Dimes candy machines, because the March of Dimes wanted to eliminate birth defects, and the only way to do that, the logic went, was to eliminate all the babies who had them. Remember those little silver foot pins that people wore in the eighties, intended to remind you just how small a pair of feet could be? We had so many of those around our house, in junk drawers and change dishes, that one time I swallowed one and we had to wait for two days to see if it would pass through me intact. Like a penny, and it was currency too.
We patronized pro-life businesses, which in the Midwest, back then, was easy to do. It was possible to buy a pro-life pizza, despite the fact that a pizza is by its very definition made out of choices. In my mother’s closet I can still find hangers with pro-life messages printed on them. The Midwest, contrary to popular opinion, does not lack a sense of irony. It might have too much of one.
It’s the habit of most movements to characterize the opposition as infinitely stupid and infinitely wicked all at the same time, and ours was no exception. What did the enemy look like? A typical story might feature a large woman in a sweatshirt going to the hospital with stomach pains, and the doctor telling her it was because she was giving birth right that very minute. “And thank God,” the person telling the story would say, campfire shadows leaping up their face, “because she was one of the leading feminists of the day, and she would have aborted the child without hesitation.” It was accepted wisdom that the average feminist couldn’t tell bad indigestion from a head emerging between her legs, and that therefore the country was overrun with women in big shirts who didn’t know they were pregnant. This is the only thing that strikes me as funny now, the feminists in big shirts. Back then, though, it never occurred to me to question any of these stories. It was always my religion to believe anything anyone told me.
“How would you feel if you aborted . . .
“. . . Einstein?” they would whirl around and demand, when they were feeling especially rhetorical. Poor Einstein got aborted so often in those arguments—he was the bomb to end all bombs. If that didn’t work, what if it had been Jesus? If that didn’t work, what if it had been you?
Facts and figures were handed around: fingers at this many weeks, heartbeat at this many weeks, brain activity at this many weeks. The size of a berry, a plum, a cantaloupe. Now it could feel pain, now it was dreaming, now it could survive on its own outside the womb. Facts crowded the world, like the dead and the living. These things were facts. But what else was?
• • •
AT THE KITCHEN TABLES, over tea, the women would dream up the worst possible scenarios and then at the end they would say, in the alto tones of a martyr, “Well, I would keep the child.” Always I would keep the child, with the flame-circled air of a person setting her jaw and throwing her head back and making the heroic choice. But what they were asking was for there to be no choice at all. That was the country they wanted.
When the men walked in on these low susurrating conversations, they looked unnerved, as if they suspected us of trying to decide something in their absence. When they walked out again, we resumed. What if, and what if?
“What if it was your own grandfather?”
“What if you were twelve years old?”
“What if the baby’s head was twice the normal size? What if there was something wrong with it?”
“Well, I would keep the child.”
And even, “What if you knew it would kill you?”
And the answer, “Then I would die,” while we, the children who would be left behind, watched from the corners of the room.
• • •
THEN I WOULD DIE. Good sentences repeated themselves for me, and that was a good sentence. It got its teeth on some soft part of you and just bit. Why, these women are wild, I marveled. What it meant was that all civilization left the body when a child was born, that the city and all its government were neatly ejected from a woman and she reverted to feral woods again. It meant that childbirth turned a mother into something with twenty claws, and she would turn them on herself if she had to.
• • •
THAT ISN’T THE END. The end is that we took in a woman named Barbie. Barbie was pregnant, and she wanted an abortion, but my f
ather talked her out of it. She was alone in the world and poor; she didn’t think she could take care of a child. We could help, he must have said. We would help her through it. And so she lived with us as long as her state of grace lasted, talking on our beige phone, curling the cord between her fingers. Her back was always to me, her hair plummeting down between her shoulder blades as if her beauty had nowhere else to go and had jumped the cliff of her. It hung in free fall, and she cradled the phone against her ear and talked. Once my mother asked her to babysit me and my sister Christina for an afternoon, and after a long look of assessment she shrugged and left us alone and walked down to the corner store to get some Twinkies. She was nineteen years old. She stayed with us and got big as houses, and then she had her baby, and we never really heard from her again.
What happened to Barbie? I was told we had helped her, that we had rescued her from an enormity she didn’t really want to commit, from the shame, the guilt, the rushing vacuum. “But where is she now?” I asked much later, when the story began to seem strange, unfinished, organized around its missing pieces. “When is the last time anyone talked to Barbie?” On the beige phone she liked so much, curling the cord between her fingers? What was her baby called? No one seemed to know. After she disappeared, we moved into the enormous rectory that we all thought of as the mansion, and for years I felt we had shut her in one of the innumerable rooms, where she still lived and where we never visited. The thought persisted that I might open a door to her one day. It is far worse to be haunted by a living person, carrying her baby in her arms.
• • •
THAT IS HOW I RECALL IT, but I know I must have the details wrong because I always have the details wrong, or else I have the details right but nothing else. I work up the nerve to ask my mother about it. We’re sitting in a little hole called The Peanut after the seminarian’s long-awaited ordination, wearing dresses fit for the cathedral and improbably eating chicken wings. I took notes all throughout the ordination and I want to take more now; I am in that noticing and setting-down mood where the day is your dog and sits up begging for attention. “Did Barbie have long hair?” I ask. “When I try to picture her I can only see her back, and I’m sitting at the kitchen table and watching her talk on the phone.”
She nods. “Long blond hair. She was beautiful—she looked like a Barbie, actually. But she was an alley cat. She would go out on the weekends and just pick up men.” She looks around the bar and focuses on a regular slumped over and sleeping next to an empty pitcher of beer. “She would pick up a man in a place like this. She didn’t care at all.”
“How did Dad find her? He didn’t stop her on the way into the clinic, did he?” I worry that he might have taken her by the arm or kept her from entering the doors, even though I know that wouldn’t have been his style.
“Oh, everyone in the pro-life movement knew about Barbie.” She lowers her voice as though speaking of the dead. “Barbie was a repeat offender.”
I turn this over in my mind: repeat offender. A police-station phrase, a phrase that puts someone in cuffs. She neatens her pile of bones and drinks water. “Alley cat and repeat offender,” I think.
“It wasn’t her first abortion. It was her third or fourth, and she had other living children too.”
Where were they? Where was the rest of her family? Why were we her refuge, and were we a refuge at all? “Who was she always talking to on the phone?”
“Usually her grandmother. Her grandmother was a drunk and she used to call us in the middle of the night, ranting, making no sense.” I think about asking where Barbie’s mother was, but I forget. I think about asking what her baby’s name was, but I forget that too, or maybe my mom doesn’t know it—maybe she hasn’t known it for a long time. We don’t sound like ourselves. We’ve taken up the rhythms of a gentle interrogation. On the wall behind her is tacked up a poster of a bigheaded alien with black eyes, and it stares steadily at me.
“The baby lived with us too, you know, for a few months after he was born.”
I didn’t know. I feel a fierce desire for reparations for him; I hope that after all that, he was born one of those geniuses of lovability who sometimes show up on earth; I hope he only ever heard the word “no” when it was good for him.
“It wasn’t just Barbie, either. We had another woman living with us at the same time. Do you remember Maria?” As soon as she says it I can see her face: round and rosy and bent over her daughter, who had dark silky monkey hair all over her head. She had gotten pregnant by a Lutheran church leader and he wanted her to have an abortion, he pressed and pressed her to do it, so she fled to our house. “We did help,” she repeats, “we did do some good.”
She smiles her thinking-of-babies smile. “I took a picture of all three of them once, did you ever see that picture? Paul and Barbie’s baby and Maria’s baby. They were all sitting in your dad’s lap.” I have seen that picture—he’s wearing his collar and his hair is in black orbit around his head and he’s chomping his mouth open at the babies, who are all wearing white dresses and looking redder than they were when they were born, because now they had a reason to be angry: they had been baptized. I’m wearing a white dress too and I haven’t spilled a thing.
The house must have been like a women’s commune. It must have been nice, everyone taking turns with the dishes, rocking each other’s babies interchangeably, overt sunset colors of estrogen pumping through the air. Though probably it was more like Barbie eating Twinkies with her bare feet up on the kitchen table, and Maria walking strange halls at night, homesick for a married man, picking up the phone to call him and then setting it back in the cradle again. We moved away, my mother said, and didn’t leave Barbie our number. There was a reason—her voice tightens and ascends—“we couldn’t let her know where we were.” But her grandmother found it somehow and called us one night, drunk, repeating, “You didn’t help her, you didn’t help, you said you were going to help her and you didn’t.”
Right then Jason calls to tell me he just found three copies of my new book in the bookstore downtown. He sends me a picture of them all fanned out and I show my mother. “Can you believe it!” she says, shining with pride and hot sauce, and the smile on her face is the thinking-of-babies smile.
• • •
ON THE DRIVE BACK HOME from The Peanut, she tries to articulate some feeling about the movement. “The way those people used language—” She breaks off. “It was like they were using language just for each other. They said things that sounded like regular English, but they meant something secret, something only people in the group could understand.”
“Those are called dog whistles,” I tell her.
“There’s a word for it?”
I had the same reaction when I first heard it. To this day, I’m always shocked to find out there is a word for something, as if I spent my first seven years in the forest sleeping next to a bone.
“I told him I would never take you back to the clinic,” she says, because that is how these talks always end. “I didn’t know where it had gone wrong, but I could see how frightened you were.”
“How old was I?”
“Oh, you were still a baby yourself,” she says, surprised. “Three or maybe four. I had you there in a stroller.”
My mother drops me off at home and kisses me good-bye and I walk around the house and start writing outside in the still green backyard, a place where biology has pooled too, and a sound is coming diagonally to my ear that’s like a baby’s cry. But then so many things in nature sound like a baby’s cry.
• • •
OF COURSE I GREW UP and got married, and for all these ten years there hasn’t been the sight nor the sign of a child about me, and I’m not sure what kind of justice that is, poetic or otherwise. Sometimes my sister recommends me special vitamins and raspberry leaf teas, but so far I haven’t minded. The slogans are what stick with me the most. They hit almost in the
same spot poetry did, with a ring of perfect sense, of revelation, each slogan looked like the moment the clouds broke apart. I thought they were true because I could understand them perfectly, but as you grow up, you begin to understand something else. You understand it the first time you sit alone in the doctor’s office, full from head to toe with specifically female blood, struck in your very center with specifically female pain. Some new realization comes out to its fingertips, grows fingernails. You understand it the first time something goes uncannily wrong inside you, or the first time something goes uncannily right. Something had gone uncannily right with Barbie, she had fallen pregnant, as they say in England, she had put fruit out as easily as a red berry bush. A woman’s body always stands on the outskirts of the town, verging on uncivilization. A thin paper gown is all that separates it from the wilderness. Half of its whole being is devoted to remembering how to live in the woods. This is why Witch, this is why Whore, this is why Unlucky and this is why Unclean. This is why attempts to govern the female body always have the feeling of a last resort, because the female body is fundamentally ungovernable. Barbie, the neatest, tannest, blondest doll who ever existed. Barbie, from the Greek, meaning foreign or strange.
17
MISSOURI GOTHIC
Once a month, I dream that I am back inside the mansion with all my high school friends, and a masked man is picking us off one by one. The mansion, as my mind conjures it, is a boxed infinity that contains all my different houses. A hundred childhood rooms unfold in it, one after another, and the dream ends with me backed into a closet of the rectory we lived in when I was a teenager, the one next to the church called Our Lady of Mercy, unable to move even a muscle. My friends are long gone, and I am alone with him, whoever he is, whatever he wants. Then a carbonated feeling in the head, and my body streams upward, and I wake.
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