A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself

by Peter Ho Davies

  He thinks of those long cross-country drives with his wife when they were younger, moving from job to job. How lonely those drives would be for one, how bleak, without the talk, the companionable silences. Sometimes his wife would sing along under her breath to the music. He never heard her sing otherwise, not even in the shower. He wasn’t sure she was aware of it. He’d be very quiet, still in his seat, not wanting to make her self-conscious by drawing attention to it, not wanting her to mind him beside her, loving her silently, as if he were glimpsing her alone.

  He wonders if these women sing to the radio. Hopes so for their sakes.

  (In the car with the boy, meanwhile, all they’ve listened to for a week is “Who Let the Dogs Out.” When he mentions it to Barb, she grins. It’s one of the songs the clinic plays to drown out protesters when their chants gets too loud.)

  * * *

  Just once one of the women sees his wedding ring, tells him fervently how lucky his wife is to have him. He shakes his head and she thinks he’s being modest. But it’s not that. It’s been so long since he’s thought of either of them as lucky. And yet compared to most of these women, he knows they are.

  * * *

  That afternoon, Barb asks him to stay late so she can show him how to close up—to turn on the cameras, to set the alarms. First, she hands him a bucket and broom, sends him out to the sidewalk, to where the antis have chalked prayers and slogans.

  Abortion kills twice, he reads, a baby and a mother’s conscience—Mother Teresa.

  “No bigger expert on motherhood than a nun,” Barb says, scrubbing away. “I mean, c’mon, it’s right there in the name.”

  The boy’s mother once chalked a hopscotch court on their drive to improve his balance. The ghostly outline of boxes still visible even after rain.

  Because of the shift he can’t pick the boy up from school that day. His wife goes instead.

  That night they fight in scorched whispers.

  “I have a job,” she reminds him.

  “You act like it’s a hobby ​—” he begins.

  “And you act like it happened to you! You were just there. It happened to me!”

  It happened to us, he wants to say. It happened to you, yes, of course, but it also happened to me, because I love you. Wants to say, but can’t because for a moment it isn’t true.

  Instead he reminds her that he is the morning person. He wakes the boy, makes his breakfast, packs his lunch, walks him to school. She may have gotten up nights for a year; he’s staring down a decade of six a.m. starts. His schedule is more flexible, so he’s often the afternoon person, too. Picks the boy up, gets him a snack, arranges playdates. Sometimes he feels more like a waiter, a valet, a secretary, or a chauffeur than a father.

  “Oh, poor you,” she hisses, “you barely have time to be a knight in shining armor.”

  * * *

  All the doors he’s held for women down the years. A tiny gallantry still appreciated by many. Now the gesture makes him think of how he’d told her it was her choice, told her he’d support whatever she wanted. How saying those things was like holding a door. After you. So fucking polite. It’s a woman’s right—no question—but a part of him thinks that lets men off the hook, spares them something. It was her choice. But if you hold a door open, aren’t you ushering someone through it? This way, please . . .

  She never liked the term “choice” anyway. Says it smacks of capitalism, the market. Choose a phone, choose an outfit. Like shopping. It’s nothing like shopping! It’s not a choice, if there’s no other choice.

  * * *

  Books have started to show up on her nightstand, books with “anxiety” and “trauma” and “healing” and “mindfulness” in their subtitles. Recommendations from her therapist. He’s shy of them, as if they were her diary, afraid to touch them, afraid of what he might find. They’ve had so little privacy, the two of them, since the boy was born.

  * * *

  At school it’s Art Fair (or “Fart Air,” as the boy insists on calling it, correcting them dutifully, as if it’s a contractual obligation of first grade). They sit through performances—massed recorders, xylophones—and wander the echoing halls hunting for his art, their disquiet spiraling as if it’s him they’ve lost. When they finally find it—one muddy abstract, the paper stiff and buckled with paint—they stand before it in silence, the three of them.

  “What is it?” the father asks, and the boy shrugs. “Art.”

  When they ask the teacher at their next conference what else he’s been making, she sighs, produces a folder of collages. “It’s all he ever wants to do. The other kids call him ‘The Rock,’ because he’s always with paper and scissors. They love wordplay,” she simpers. While she’s putting the folder away, the father leans close to the mother, whispers: “I’m cunting!” And she has to clutch her mouth to stop laughing.

  * * *

  Flexible schedule or not, it’s not always easy balancing his teaching and parenting. “But,” as a colleague has joked, “a kid is a good excuse. You can cry off evening events—readings, lecturers, dinners—cut out of meetings early for pickup, plead recitals and soccer games.” Art Fairs. “A good excuse if you’re a man,” another colleague, notes acidly. “Men get to have it both ways.” She means he also gets to duck bath time, bedtime, sometimes to go to functions.

  For a couple of years, he kept a third option—telling his wife he had to work, his colleagues he had to parent—in reserve, folded up tightly, in case of emergency.

  But now he wonders: Is volunteering an excuse? And if so, for what?

  * * *

  On a break at the clinic, Barb introduces him around. The doctor offers brisk thanks, a handshake as firm and dry as a diagnosis, the anesthetist, a serene welcome, as if she expects him to fall asleep before the end of her sentence. When he tries to engage them—thank them in turn for their work, their bravery—they blink. “It’s a legal medical procedure,” the doctor tells him, “nothing more, nothing less.” She’s not wearing a mask, but she might as well be. (Later Barb will tell him that she does often don disguises to come to work—glasses, hats, wigs—never wears the same outfit in that she wears out.)

  He talks longer with one of the nurses, Jenna. She’s similarly down-to-earth if more forthright. “People get too bent out of shape over a few cells. We’re not talking life-and-death here. We’re talking potential life-and-death, something women deal with every month.” One of her jobs is to conduct the ultrasounds that women are obliged by state law to view before they get an abortion. “They don’t actually have to look—I tell them they can close their eyes or turn away—but I have to do it anyway.” She sighs at the injustice, the existential pointlessness of her job. The staticky images as dreary to her as black-and-white TV. People still ooh and aah over the techno-marvel of ultrasound. To her it’s just a cheap magic trick. “Hey, presto! The lady vanishes! And what’s this? A fetus! Ta-da! As if the woman didn’t even exist.”

  He knows from physics, from the uncertainty principle, Schrödinger’s cat, that we can’t observe anything without changing it (any more than as a writer he can’t retell something without changing it). He asks how many women change their minds when they see the images. “None,” Jenna says.

  * * *

  Everyone knows another word for cat is pussy, he thinks.

  And everyone knows pussy is another word for clit is another word for cunt is another word for snatch is another word for twat is another word for gash.

  But not everyone knows another word is box.

  In the box in the thought experiment, before it’s opened, there’s a chance the cat is alive, there’s a chance the cat is dead. But theoretically it’s neither alive nor dead before it’s observed. That’s what’s inside these women, he reminds himself—not a baby, not a fetus—just a chance.

  Another word for another word for another word. And the word for that, he knows, is meiosis.

  Jenna it turns out is also an alias. “Last name Tulls,”
she tells him with a slow smirk, waiting for the penny to drop.

  * * *

  Found on the Planned Parenthood website as part of his research: a cute cat video, part of an explainer on female sexual anatomy.

  https://www​.plannedparenthood​.org/learn/health​-and​-wellness/sexual​-and​-reproductive​-anatomy/what​-are​-parts​-female​-sexual​-anatomy

  You can’t make this up, he thinks.

  * * *

  His son’s new best friend is Siri.

  So play with him, his wife snaps. He misses you.

  The boy likes to take photos with their phones. An acceptable hobby, they decide. Maybe he’ll be a photographer. At night the father looks through them—feet, clouds, suddenly himself—the back of his head while driving, his hand on a fork, a slice of the mother stooped over the sink. Is this how he sees them?

  He shows the boy photos he’s taken of him, centered in the frame. The boy flicks through them at dizzying speed—kindergartner, toddler, baby—as if his life were a flipbook. All the way back to the hospital, and fast-forward again.

  * * *

  Nazi. Butcher. Baby killer. Barb calls it “stoning.”

  When his wife asked him about facing the protesters for the first time, he joked: “Worst workshop ever!”

  Comes a bright spring Saturday, daffodils budding on the verge, the biggest crowd he’s seen so far, spittle shining in the sunlight.

  He marvels at how a painted white line can hold them at bay, like magic. “That’s no line,” Barb tells him darkly. “That’s a fault line, the crack in America! You can’t have politics, democracy, if one side thinks the other side are baby killers.” He wonders what she thinks of the other side, what she calls them to herself (“antis” seems so mild by comparison). “Sexists? Fanatics?” She shakes her head. He’s hoping for one of her salty quips—Motherfuckers, maybe—to lift his mood. Finally, she says: “You want to force a woman do something with her vagina she doesn’t want to do? You’re a rapist.”

  He glances over, but her face is stiff, scanning the crowd.

  Nazi. Butcher. Baby killer.

  “Names, names, names,” she chants under her breath.

  He’s getting warm in his nylon vest.

  Barb, too, by the look of her. She flaps the collar of her blouse, and he catches a glimpse of a gold star at her throat.

  Sweat prickles his nape, his hairline.

  Nazi. Butcher. Baby killer.

  “How do you stand it?” he asks her, raising his voice over the din. “How do you stay so calm?” It’s midafternoon now, their third hour. His legs are trembling a little, his jaw hurts from clenching, his shirt clings. “For them,” she says simply, meaning the women. If their blood pressure gets too high, she’s told him, the procedure has to be delayed.

  Hence the wisecracks, the nicknames.

  Nazi! Butcher! Baby killer! At first he thought they only meant Barb.

  At first he thought his rage was for her, on her behalf. Protective. Sheltering.

  Baby killer. He feels something loosening in himself. It’s so hot. He feels his pulse throbbing in his fists. Yes, he thinks. Yes I am! And what makes you think I stop with babies?

  He’s staring at Martin, mouth writhing in his beard, picturing blood on his teeth, blood from his nose, blood flecking the gray. Picturing him crumpled on the sidewalk, curled up in—yes!—the fetal position. Picturing Dale with his grisly sign, recoiling ashen-faced from the gore.

  Suddenly, he feels Barb’s arm on his. His throat is raw.

  “Easy there, fella. Easy!”

  * * *

  There were no protesters at the hospital where his wife had her abortion. All they had to worry about there was running into pregnant women, new mothers.

  * * *

  “It still didn’t feel very virtuous,” he explains to Barb later over a beer. (“You look like you could use one,” she said at the end of the shift.)

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “No offense.”

  “Virtuous abortions,” she acknowledges, “for fetal abnormalities from rubella, from thalidomide, were important in getting the conversation about abortion going in the sixties. I just wish the conversation could have moved on a little since.”

  Virtue, he knows all too well from the invective outside the clinic, is something denied women getting abortions. They’re whores and harlots, terms almost as old-fashioned as virtue. Or, come to that, chivalry.

  “ ‘Virtuous’ abortions are tragic,” Barb is saying. “Regretted. Sympathetic. I get it.” She looks at him softly, and he sees that she does. “But they’re also rare—one in a hundred. And if those are the only stories that get told, then abortion in general seems tragic, when most women who’ve had them say they don’t regret it. Oh, they might regret the circumstances that require one, plus all the bullshit around getting one, but mostly they’re relieved.” She sighs. “Asking for sympathy is just another way of asking for permission.”

  He nods, he knows this.

  One of the women he walked back to her car asked him the time. She had three other kids, needed to be home to fix dinner. They bonded over mac and cheese, Velveeta over Kraft.

  The chance of a woman having an abortion already being a mother: 60 percent.

  He asked another, shyly, if she had any regrets and she nodded.

  “About five hundred of them,” she said, rubbing her fingers together. What she paid today. “Cheaper than another, mind you.”

  The chance of a woman getting an abortion being under the federal poverty line: 50 percent.

  “What a gentleman,” she said when he opened her car door for her.

  He’d watched these baby killers come and go all day.

  Theirs might not be virtuous abortions, he thinks now, but they all seemed less guilty than him. Too busy for shame, too poor in time and money. As if shame were a luxury. For them it’s not a choice, with all the handwringing that entails, so much as a necessity. And it seems to him that many of them are making a virtue out of that necessity. He envies them that.

  “Necessity,” Barb agrees. “It’s a mother, all right.”

  * * *

  He envies them their relief, too. Envies it, and worse. Some are downright cheerful, giddy, to have it over with, as if it were a tooth extraction. He catches himself wishing they were more circumspect, more somber. More ashamed, he thinks, burning with shame himself for thinking it.

  But why shouldn’t they be relieved? This isn’t the trauma—this is the trauma averted. Next to an unwanted conception, an unwanted birth, what’s an abortion? A dread lifted. Freedom to get on with life. As Barb put it once, “Abortion is life changing, sure, but also life not changing. That’s the point. That’s why people do it. It’s something that happens, but also something that doesn’t happen.”

  Perhaps that’s why it’s so hard to write about, even to talk about, a climax that doesn’t change anything. Perhaps that’s why the story of regret is so persistent (though a part of him suspects every story is a story of regret; that we tell them to redeem ourselves).

  * * *

  He tells Barb at the bar he doesn’t think he can come back, and she nods, relieved herself, he sees, that she doesn’t have to tell him not to. He can still feel it, the adrenaline tremor of murderous rage. Like nothing he’s felt before, except it reminds him of the way the baby’s crying summoned something similarly instinctive in him.

  “This wasn’t even that bad today,” Barb says gently. “They’re actually a lot worse when both escorts are women. Fucking sexists!” She makes a wide-eyed Who da thunk it? face.

  “It’s just the way they weaponize regret,” he rails. “And then we deny it.”

  “You know,” she says, “I didn’t mean to suggest before you two shouldn’t have regrets. How you feel is how you feel, obviously. I’m just saying everyone has regrets. You know who has regrets? Parents is who.”

  He raises his glass. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”


  * * *

  Later, he will understand that he’s not been at the clinic to do good, or even to gather material, so much as to find absolution. But he’s been looking in the wrong place. The doctors and nurses, Barb, can’t absolve him for something they don’t consider a sin. For them the Coca-Cola and saltines they offer women after the procedure are just that. He wants them to be some kind of communion.

  In fact, it’s them, he realizes with a dull pang, the antis, who are the only ones who can absolve him, forgive him. Because they believe he’s a sinner, and secretly he agrees. That’s why he hates them, really—because they won’t.

  * * *

  Later still, he will understand that all these feelings—his, his wife’s—just won’t fit between the lines, between the sides. In the political box. He doesn’t want to argue about those feelings, to defend them or justify them, he just wants to be left alone to feel them.

  * * *

  At home that night, he scoops the boy up in his arms, inhales his warm sweet scent, pulls his wife in to the clinch.

  “You okay?” she asks later when he tells her he’s done at the clinic.

  They’re on their knees picking up marbles.