Shrill

by Lindy West

  Some years ago in the past (no one knows how many for sure), a baby was born: his mother’s pride, hearty and fat, with eyes like pearls and fists like very small fingered hams. That baby was named David Coverdale of Whitesnake. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world and many, many years later, an even better and newer baby came out. They called that one Britt Daniel of Spoon. The two would never meet.

  The son of an itinerant barber-surgeon (his motto: “Oops!”) and his raven-haired bride who may or may not have been Cher (she definitely wasn’t, say “historians”), Daniel spent his formative years traversing America’s heartland, on leech duty in the back of the amputation/perm wagon. Despite mounting pressure to join the family business—“the Daniel child’s bonesaw work truly is a poem!” swooned Itinerant Barber-Surgeon’s Evening Standard Digest—Daniel heard the siren song of song-singing and fled the narrow confines of his itchy-necked, blood-spattered world.

  Little is known of Daniel’s whereabouts and associations in these dark interim years (when consulted for comment, David Coverdale of Whitesnake said, “Get away from me, please”), but he emerged in 1994, saw his shadow, and formed the band Spoon, stronger and taller and more full of handsome indie rock and roll than ever before. After the great big success of 2001’s Girls Can Tell, 2002’s Kill the Moonlight, 2005’s Gimme Fiction, and 2007’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Daniel—along with Jim Eno (inventor of the bee beard), Eric Harvey (feral child success story), and Rob Pope (white male)—birthed Transference: in Daniel’s words, Spoon’s “orangest” and “most for stoners” album yet.

  Asked about her son’s new record, Daniel’s mother, who is definitely “not” Cher, quipped: “Too metal!” Reached for comment on whether or not Daniel’s nonCher mother is really qualified to judge the metalness of things, David Coverdale of Whitesnake said, “Seriously, how did you get this number?”

  I am so, so sorry, the band Spoon.

  Step Fifteen: Get a Job Blogging for a National Publication with Thousands and Thousands of Commenters Who Will Never Be Satisfied No Matter What You Write

  At a certain point you just have to be like [jack-off motion] and do you.

  Step Sixteen: Ask Pat Mitchell if She Is Marlo Thomas at a Banquet Honoring Pat Mitchell

  Hollyweird Fun Fact: Pat Mitchell does not like this at all.

  Step Seventeen: Break a Chair While Sitting on the Stage at a Comedy Show

  I went to see my friend Hari work out some new jokes at a small black-box theater in Seattle. The ancient theater seats were too narrow for my modern butt, so I moved to an old wooden chair that had been placed on the side of the stage as overflow seating. A few minutes into Hari’s set, a loud crack echoed through the theater and I felt the chair begin to collapse under me. I jumped into a kind of emergency squat, which I nonchalantly held until the producer rushed out from backstage and replaced my chair with some sort of steel-reinforced military-grade hydraulic jack.

  Step Eighteen: Admit that You Lied Earlier About How Old You Were When You Peed Your Pants in Class

  Third grade. It was third grade, okay? Are you happy?

  This is the only advice I can offer. Each time something like this happens, take a breath and ask yourself, honestly: Am I dead? Did I die? Is the world different? Has my soul splintered into a thousand shards and scattered to the winds? I think you’ll find, in nearly every case, that you are fine. Life rolls on. No one cares. Very few things—apart from death and crime—have real, irreversible stakes, and when something with real stakes happens, humiliation is the least of your worries.

  You gather yourself up, and you pick the pepperoni out of your hair, and you say, “I’m sorry, Pat Mitchell, it was very nice to meet you,” and you live, little soldier. You go live.

  When Life Gives You Lemons

  I don’t keep track of my periods and kind of think anyone who does is some sort of neuroscientist, so I have no idea what prompted me to walk over to Walgreens and buy a pregnancy test. Maybe women really do have a weird, spiritual red phone to our magic triangles. I never thought I did, but for whatever reason, that day, I walked around the corner, bought the thing, took it home to my studio apartment, and peed on it. I probably bought some candy and toilet paper too as, like, a decoy, so maybe the Walgreens checker would think the pregnancy test was just a wacky impulse buy on my way to my nightly ritual of wolfing Heath bars while taking a magnum dump.

  I always throw a decoy purch’ in the cart any time I have to buy something embarrassing like ice cream or vagina plugs. (Obviously, on paper, I disagree with this entire premise—food and hygiene are not “embarrassing”—but being a not-baby is a journey, not a destination.) Like, if I want to eat six Tootsie Pops and a Totino’s for dinner, I’ll also buy a lemon and a bag of baby carrots to show that I am a virtuous and cosmopolitan duchess who just needs to keep her pantry stocked with party pizza in case any Ninja Turtles stop by. The carrots are for me, Belvedere. Or, if I want to buy the super-economy box of ultra-plus tampons, I’ll also snag a thing of Windex and some lunch meat, to distract the cashier from the community theater adaptation of Carrie currently entering its third act in my gusset. Maybe I’m just buying these ’pons for my neighbor on my way to slam some turk and polish my miniatures, bro! (IMPORTANT: One must NEVER EVER use tampons and Ben & Jerry’s as each other’s decoy purchases, as this suggests you are some sort of Bridget Jones situation who needs ice cweam to soothe her menses a-bloo-bloos, which defeats the entire purpose of decoy purchases, Albert Einstein.)

  So, peeing on things is weird, right? As a person without a penis, I mean. I could show you the pee-hole on any crotch diagram—I could diagram pee-holes all day (AND I DO)—but in practice, I’m just not… entirely clear on where the pee comes out? It’s, sort of, the front area? The foyer? But it’s not like there’s, like, a nozzle. Trying to pee into a cup is like trying to fill a beer bottle with a Super Soaker from across the room in the dark. On a moonless night. (This is one of those disheartening moments where I’m realizing that I might be The Only One, and I may as well have just announced to you all that I don’t know how shoes work. What’s the deal with these hard socks??? Right, guys?

  .

  …

  .…

  … Guys?)

  So, I pee on the thing a little bit, and on my hand a lot, and these two little pink lines appear in the line box. The first line is like, “Congratulations, it’s urine,” and the second line is like, “Congratulations, there’s a baby in it!”

  This was not at all what I was expecting and also exactly what I was expecting.

  My “boyfriend” at the time (let’s call him Mike) was an emotionally withholding, conventionally attractive jock whose sole metric for expressing affection was the number of hours he spent sitting platonically next to me in coffee shops and bars without ever, ever touching me. To be fair, by that metric he liked me a lot. Despite having nearly nothing in common (his top interests included cross-country running, fantasy cross-country running [he invented it], New England the place, New England the idea, and going outside on Saint Patrick’s Day; mine were candy, naps, hugging, and wizards), we spent a staggering amount of time together—I suppose because we were both lonely and smart, and, on my part, because he was the first human I’d ever met who was interested in touching my butt without keeping me sequestered in a moldy basement, and I was going to hold this relationship together if it killed me.

  Mike had only been in “official” relationships with thin women, but all his friends teased him for perpetually hooking up with fat chicks. Every few months he would get wasted and hold my hand, or tell me I was beautiful, and the first time I tried to leave him, he followed me home and said he loved me, weeping, on my doorstep. The next day, I told him I loved him, too, and it was true for both of us, probably, but it was a shallow, watery love—born of repetition and resignation. It condensed on us like dew, only because we waited long enough. But “I have grown accustomed to you because I have no one else” is not the same as �
��Please tell me more about your thoughts on the upcoming NESCAC cross-country season, my king.”

  It was no kind of relationship, but, at age twenty-seven, it was still the best relationship I’d ever had, so I set my jaw and attempted to sculpt myself into the kind of golem who was fascinated by the 10k finishing times of someone who still called me his “friend” when he talked to his mom. It wasn’t fair to him either—he was clear about his parameters from the beginning (he pretty much told me: “I am emotionally withdrawn and can only offer you two to three big spoons per annum”), but I pressed myself against those parameters and strained and pushed until he and I were both exhausted. I thought, at the time, that love was perseverance.

  I’m not sure how I got pregnant—we were careful, mostly—but, I don’t know, sometimes people just fuck up. I honestly don’t remember. Life is life. If I had carried that pregnancy to term and made a half-Mike/half-me human baby, we may have been bound to each other forever, but we would have split up long before the birth. Some people should not be together, and once the stakes are real and kicking and pressing down on your bladder, you can’t just pretend shit’s fine anymore. Mike made me feel lonely, and being alone with another person is much worse than being alone all by yourself.

  I imagine he would have softened, and loved the baby; we would share custody amicably; maybe I’d move into my parents’ basement (it’s nice!) and get a job writing technical case studies at Microsoft, my side gig at the time; maybe he’d just throw child support at me and move away, but I doubt it. He was a good guy. It could have been a good life.

  He didn’t want to be in Seattle, though—New England pulled at his guts like a tractor beam. It was all he talked about: flying down running trails at peak foliage; flirting with Amherst girls in Brattleboro bars; keeping one foot always on base, in his glory days, when he was happy and thrumming with potential. He wanted to get back there. Though it hurt me at the time (why wasn’t I as good as running around in circles in Vermont and sharing growlers of IPA with girls named Blair!?), I wanted that for him too.

  As for me, I found out I was pregnant with the part-Mike fetus just three months before I figured out how to stop hating my body for good, five months before I got my first e-mail from a fat girl saying my writing had saved her life, six months before I fell in love with my future husband, eight months before I met my stepdaughters, a year before I moved to Los Angeles to see what the world had for me, eighteen months before I started working at Jezebel, three years before the first time I went on television, four years and ten months before I got married to the best person I’ve ever met, and just over five years before I turned in this book manuscript.

  Everything happened in those five years after my abortion. I became myself. Not by chance, or because an abortion is some mysterious, empowering feminist bloode-magick rite of passage (as many, many—too many for a movement ostensibly comprising grown-ups—anti-choicers have accused me of believing), but simply because it was time. A whole bunch of changes—set into motion years, even decades, back—all came together at once, like the tumblers in a lock clicking into place: my body, my work, my voice, my confidence, my power, my determination to demand a life as potent, vibrant, public, and complex as any man’s. My abortion wasn’t intrinsically significant, but it was my first big grown-up decision—the first time I asserted, unequivocally, “I know the life that I want and this isn’t it”; the moment I stopped being a passenger in my own body and grabbed the rudder.

  So, I peed on the thingy and those little pink lines showed up all, “LOL hope u have $600, u fertile betch,” and I sat down on my bed and I didn’t cry and I said, “Okay, so this is the part of my life when this happens.” I didn’t tell Mike; I’m not sure why. I have the faintest whiff of a memory that I thought he would be mad at me. Like getting pregnant was my fault—as though my clinginess, my desperate need to be loved, my insistence that we were a “real” couple and not two acquaintances who had grown kind of used to each other, had finally congealed into a hopeful, delusional little bundle and sunk its roots into my uterine wall. A physical manifestation of how pathetic I was. How could I have let that happen? It was so embarrassing. I couldn’t tell him. I always felt alone in the relationship anyway; it made sense that I would deal with this alone too.

  It didn’t occur to me, at the time, that there was anything complicated about obtaining an abortion. This is a trapping of privilege: I grew up middle-class and white in Seattle, I had always had insurance, and, besides, abortion was legal. So, I did what I always did when I needed a common, legal, routine medical procedure—I made an appointment to see my doctor, the same doctor I’d had since I was twelve. She would get this whole implanted embryo mix-up sorted out.

  The nurse called my name, showed me in, weighed me, tutted about it, took my blood pressure, looked surprised (fat people can have normal blood, NANCY), and told me to sit on the paper. I waited. My doctor came in. She’s older than me, with dark, tightly curled hair, motherly without being overly familiar. “I think I’m pregnant,” I said. “Do you want to be pregnant?” she said. “No,” I said. “Well, pee in this cup,” she said. I peed all over my hand again. “You’re pregnant,” she said. I nodded, feeling nothing.

  I remember being real proud of my chill ’tude in that moment. I was the Fonz of getting abortions. “So, what’s the game plan, Doc?” I asked, popping the collar of my leather jacket like somebody who probably skateboarded here. “Why don’t you go ahead and slip me that RU-486 prescriptsch and I’ll just [moonwalks toward exam room door while playing the saxophone].”

  She stared at me.

  “What?” I said, one hundred combs clattering to the floor.

  Turns out, THE DOCTOR IS NOT WHERE YOU GET AN ABORTION.

  I’d been so sure I could get this taken care of today, handle it today, on my own, and move on with my life—go back to pretending like I had my shit together and my relationship was bearable, even good. Like I was a normal woman that normal men loved. When she told me I had to make an appointment at a different clinic, which probably didn’t have any openings for a couple of weeks, and started writing down phone numbers on a Post-it, I crumpled.

  “That’s stupid,” I sobbed, my anxiety getting the better of me. “You’re a doctor. This is a doctor’s office. Do you not know how to do it?”

  “I covered it in medical school, yes,” she said, looking concerned in an annoyingly kind way, “but we don’t do them here at this clinic.”

  “Well, why did I even come here, then? Why didn’t they tell me on the phone that this appointment was pointless?”

  “You want reception to tell everyone who calls in that we don’t do abortions here, no matter what they’re calling about?”

  “YES,” I yelled.

  She didn’t say anything. I heaved and cried a little bit more, then a little bit less, in the silence.

  “Is there anything else I can do for you right now?” she asked, gently.

  “No, I’m fine.” I accepted a tissue. “I’m sorry I got upset.”

  “It’s okay. This is a stressful situation. I know.” She squeezed my shoulder.

  I went home, curled up in bed, and called the clinic (which had some vague, mauve, nighttime soap name like “Avalon” or “Dynasty” or “Falcon Crest”), still wobbling on the edge of hysteria. Not for all the reasons the forced-birth fanatics would like you to think: not because my choice was morally torturous, or because I was ashamed, or because I couldn’t stop thinking about the tiny fingernails of our “baby,” but because life is fucking hard, man. I wanted someone to love me so much. I did want a baby, eventually. But what I really wanted was a family. Mike wasn’t my family. Everything was wrong. I was alone and I was sad and it was just hard.

  The woman on the phone told me they could fit me in the following week, and it would be $400 after insurance. It was the beginning of the month, so I had just paid rent. I had about $100 left in my bank account. Payday was in two weeks.

 
“Can you bill me?” I asked.

  “No, we require full payment the day of procedure,” she said, brusque from routine but not unkind.

  I felt like a stripped wire. My head buzzed and my eyes welled.

  “But… I don’t have that.”

  “We can push back the appointment if you need more time to get your funds together,” she offered.

  “But,” I said, finally breaking, “’I can’t be pregnant anymore. I need to not be pregnant. I’m not supposed to be pregnant.”

  I didn’t want to wait two more weeks. I didn’t want to think about this every day. I didn’t want to feel my body change. I didn’t want to carry and feed this artifact of my inherent unlovability—this physical proof that any permanent connection to me must be an accident. Men made wanted babies with beautiful women. Men made mistakes with fat chicks. I sobbed so hard I think she was terrified. I sobbed so hard she went to get her boss.

  The head of the clinic picked up the phone. She talked to me in a calm, competent voice—like an important businesswoman who is also your mom, which is probably fairly accurate. She talked to me until I started breathing again. She didn’t have to. She must have been so busy, and I was wasting her time with my tantrum. Babies having babies.

  “We never do this,” she sighed, “because typically, once the procedure is done, people don’t come back. But if you promise me you’ll pay your bill—if you really promise—you can come in next week and we can bill you after the procedure.”

  I promised, I promised, I promised so hard. Yes, oh my god, yes. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you! (And I did pay—as soon as my next paycheck came in. They were so surprised, they sent me a thank-you card.)

  I like to think the woman who ran the clinic would have done that for anyone—that there’s a quiet web of women like her (like us, I flatter myself), stretching from pole to pole, ready to give other women a hand. She helped me even though she didn’t have to, and I am forever grateful. But I also wonder what made me sound, to her ears, like someone worth trusting, someone it was safe to take a chance on. I certainly wasn’t the neediest person calling her clinic. The fact is, I was getting that abortion no matter what. All I had to do was wait two weeks, or have an awkward conversation I did not want to have with my supportive, liberal, well-to-do mother. Privilege means that it’s easy for white women to do each other favors. Privilege means that those of us who need it the least often get the most help.