The whole operation happens fast, this leap into consciousness and language. One day she finds a book I wrote and sees my photo on the back cover, and turns to me, astonished. “You wrote all these words?” she says, eyes big, and I see her glimpse the truth at the brink of literacy: that an entire treasure chest of language exists, and that one might actually have that much to say.
In the next few months she decides she will be a writer when she grows up. Every few weeks she asks how the book is coming that she knows she is in, and before I have a chance to answer she tells me about her book—or books, as she is writing several at once. We have what I call joint editing sessions, which really involve roaming around between fantasy and reality. We lie on the living room floor and make up stories. I borrow from old favorites—Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, for instance, where the kids walked on the ceilings of the house. But mostly I listen. Tyler’s plots are Byzantine and free-associative, and I occasionally rein her in with questions or plot suggestions. This week I’ve been hearing the adventures of a young girl named Kayla and her hapless family, involving several car accidents, crutches, and sleepovers. Finally, bored with the demands of fiction and her laborious plot, Tyler leaps to her feet and uses her outstretched hands to make the point. “TIME PASSES.”
So with that stage direction, Kayla’s baby brother is grown: His sleepovers have turned into fatherhood in the blink of an eye. But what happened to Kayla? I ask. I’m interested, but I’m also trying to give Tyler some subtle instruction on finishing thoughts. If she wants to be a writer, she has to follow her tumbleweeds down every trail she invents.
“Kayla lives alone,” she announces. “She has a farm with lots of animals—goats and sheep, three horses, chickens, a German shepherd, and two border collies. She makes apple pie and can eat it whenever she wants. And she has a pool the length of a park! And she can swim in the snow at night.
“Her house is full of peace and quiet and she has a fantastic life.”
7
Austin, Texas, 1970
One morning on the way to Latin class, I found $7 lying on the grassy mall. My heart fluttered when I saw the money, and I reached to pick it up. I needed it for the illegal abortion I was having in a couple of weeks. I was nineteen and six weeks pregnant and not in love, and my ex-boyfriend and I were planning to drive to Mexico, where you could get the procedure done for $160. We had agreed to split the cost. To get my share, I had been going without lunch and typing student term papers for $10 apiece. Now, with the $7, I was halfway there.
I had moved to Austin several months earlier, and met a tall, soft-voiced fellow who had just returned from studying French literature at the Sorbonne. We smoked dope together and sat on the grounds of the capitol listening to music and speeches about smashing imperialism, and evenings we would go back to his place and make gentle, not-very-interesting love to the background swoon of the Moody Blues. He introduced me to Sartre and sometimes mumbled to me in French during sex, which thrilled me but only for a while. He was mellow but controlling—a lethal combination I spotted pretty quickly. I had plenty of half-doomed relationships still ahead of me, but even then I knew the satin-voiced version of prison was not for me. Within a few months, we would each move on to other gardens—he to a pretty hippie girl with long braids and a quiet demeanor, I to my first women’s liberation rally.
But a couple of weeks after we’d broken up, my period was late: The bright, somehow affirming blood flow didn’t show. “I’m late.” That was how we put it back then, and I doubt any two words were as frightening to a young woman of that time and place, when the future unfurled with some promise and some risk but certainly alternatives to the shotgun marriages of our mothers. “I’m late” was the female equivalent of being 1-A—your future revealed with a draft notice or a pregnancy test done at a doctor’s office with the attendant tight-lipped judgment. We were three years away from Roe v. Wade, and if somewhere in the glistening years of youth you didn’t get your period, the options were draconian: become a mother when you were still a child, carry to term and give the baby up for adoption, or risk your life in an illegal, difficult-to-find medical procedure. I chose the last.
Birth control was hardly the buffet of choices it would soon become. A year earlier, in Amarillo for the summer, I’d gotten a prescription for the pill after being coached by friends. First I made an appointment with the doctor whose name I’d been given. The code phrase to use with the receptionist was “family planning.” Then I went to Woolworth to buy a fake engagement ring. On the day of the appointment I donned the ring along with heels and stockings and marched into his office. It was clear there would be no exam. I sat across from a grim-faced doctor, and my voice shook while I talked too fast about my imaginary fiancé. I knew he didn’t believe me, and that it didn’t matter. He was tight-lipped and refused to meet my eyes when he handed me the scrip. I felt embarrassed by his discomfort, and I made up for it by thanking him excessively.
The early birth control pills had three times the estrogen of later replacements, and the side effects were awful. I threw up every morning the first week and put on ten pounds in a month. By the time I’d moved to Austin and started dating the French major, I’d given up the pill, relying on condoms and denial for protection. And before the skipped period that changed everything, I had been scheduled for an appointment at university health services to figure out my options.
The ex had shown his character when I told him I was pregnant, though I was already done with him by then and didn’t expect much else. He seemed impatient and guilty, as though I had visited this plague upon him and it was bound to be an enormous hassle. He was from a wealthy family, and when I told him all I needed was half the money for an abortion, he didn’t even try to hide his relief.
I lived at an off-campus dorm where I was paired with a soft-spoken roommate named Kirsten, and I woke up one day and felt the tenderness of swollen breasts and thought oh God no and then I was flooded with nausea. Kirsten heard me gagging in the bathroom before breakfast, so I told her. She was concerned and no-nonsense, rational in the face of my crisis, and she knew what to do. She called her boyfriend, who had been through this a year earlier with his former girlfriend. Chris was fluent in Spanish and a sweet, thoughtful guy, and he jumped into action. There was a doctor in Reynosa, Mexico, he told me, a female physician who financed her clinic by performing abortions on norteamericana girls like me. No back-alley coat-hanger job like what you got in the States. Chris made the call and set the date, and within a couple of days we had a plan.
* * *
—
About five hours south of Austin, Reynosa is a border town in northern Mexico. Back then it was a sleepy place, with a small mercado and street-side cafés. Kirsten and Chris were driving me, and we wanted to get there and back in the same day, in case I needed medical care in the States. My ex, dutiful but cold, insisted on going, and though I didn’t particularly want him along, I was too tired and scared to argue.
The four of us made the trip down in rock-hard silence. My fear when I revisit it now was hard, too—a stony numbness, some place outside of time. A strong resolve and no tears. The overriding thing I remember was the desolation of the road going by as we sped south—I was in the back seat, and I spent most of the time staring out the window.
The waiting room at the clinic was crowded with patients. We were the only Americans, and I was sure the other patients knew why I was there. A few people looked toward me and then turned away, a gesture that seemed more sad than judgmental. Such is the egocentrism of youth: the assumption that these people paid much mind to the young gringa in their midst. We waited a long time to see the doctor, a weary-looking, courteous woman in her forties. Chris translated the instructions she gave us. She handed me prescriptions for antibiotics and muscle relaxants, which must have been a pre-op anesthetic, gave me directions on where to go and how to take them. She told me to come b
ack in two hours.
We walked across the square to la farmacia to get the pills. The man behind the counter smiled when he handed me the bag, and not in a nice way. I was startled; in those days, Mexican pharmacies were pretty much unregulated; you could order amphetamines or tranquilizers as easily as aspirin. I got a Coke to swallow the dose of pills, and we walked over to an outdoor café to kill the time.
And then the drugs must have taken effect, because I remember only one scene from the next several hours. I am on my back on a hospital bed in a spare, clean room with a single lightbulb overhead. The doctor is in the corner, and she calls over a girl—fifteen or sixteen—to stand next to me. The girl is very pretty, with enormous eyes, and I take her hand. “Hija?” I say, for daughter, and she smiles and nods. Then everything goes dark.
We left the clinic sometime later. It was night and I was lying in the back seat of the car, and Kirsten nudged me awake as we approached the long line at U.S. Customs. Our car was pulled over and all the doors thrown open. The agents told me to get out of the car, and I was taken inside a room at the customs building, where a female agent strip-searched me. I was half-asleep and off-balance and weak, and I held on to the wall during the search so that I wouldn’t fall. I was still bleeding. No one asked me anything. I had enough Spanish to understand a little of the mocking conversation going on among the border guards. They’d targeted me because the pharmacist had called ahead to alert them.
They took away the painkillers I’d been given and eventually let us go. I was too doped up to care much while any of this was happening, or to be outraged by it later—it seemed merely one in a line of indignities that went with being a sexually active young woman in 1970. We got back to Austin around midnight, and I slept for ten hours. The next day I walked over to student health services to be checked out, the place where I’d verified that I was pregnant. The doctor who saw me was a low-key man in his forties. When he finished the exam, he came around the table and patted me on the shoulder. He said, “Whoever did this did a good job.”
After I finished at the health center I walked over to the Nighthawk, a local restaurant on Nineteenth Street that bordered the UT campus and had the comfort of good food and leather booths. I sat in a booth and ordered coffee with milk, a large Coke, and a chicken dinner that could feed a football player. Then I walked out into the Texas sunshine, well and home, and my eyes teared with thanks for the bright, precious thing that was my life. A few weeks later, I was fitted for an IUD.
* * *
—
Sometime the following spring I wandered into my first women’s liberation rally, part of a tectonic shift that helped haul the Western world into the modern age. I was a white woman of privilege—a middle-class background in America, for starts, and the beginning of a college education—but I wasn’t immune to the common cruelties of a society where women could still be treated as property or as biblical Jezebels. At nineteen, with good intentions and above-average intelligence, I had a fairly ordinary and entitled life. Here is part of what was ordinary: Already I had encountered academic favoritism (Professor Mean) and sexual harassment (in a summer job in Amarillo, the boss offered me $1,000 to sleep with him, then threatened to fire me when I said no). I had been “taken advantage of,” which is what they used to call date rape, and then assaulted by a frat boy I’d dated. I’d been told that women made lousy lawyers (not aggressive or articulate enough), that “chicks” who took a stance against the Vietnam War were “just looking to get laid,” that, in fact, getting laid was what we were good for—the start of a long, monochromatic path of motherhood and marital servitude. All these messages were direct but impersonal, embedded tenets that even the smartest or most defiant girl could not ignore.
Until we did, which was the first part of the battle. The women I met and allied myself with over the next several years were talented and wild and far more complex than any orthodox definition of who I’d been told women were, and that realization widened the sky and made every day feel like street theater. We threw ourselves across doorways and stormed stages and committed colorful acts of sabotage, but our greatest strategic victory was something interior: the shift when we stopped caring so much what men thought, or presumed, or demanded. When we turned our attention away from the status quo and toward one another.
This sounds naïve, or idealistic, and of course it was both and had to be at that age. Our vision and momentum were enough to create a carnival universe over the next decade: a couple of women’s theater groups and organic farms, a community of prophets and sinners who slept together or didn’t but who were loyal to the tribe first and foremost. We felt we deserved everything, and if it didn’t exist we made it up: Womenspace, the Fly by Night Printing Collective, the Soeur Queens. When we needed to sound legitimate we invented a name: the Women’s Cultural Arts Association, I think we called it, which didn’t accomplish much but looked good on letterhead.
Austin was an easy place to survive back then, and if you weren’t careful the milk-and-honey mecca could turn to quicksand. A lot of us leapt, or left, and the places we landed bore the scars and signatures of what it had taken to get there. Some women became mothers, some went to medical or law school or became musicians or activists. For me it meant that I got the nerve to return to graduate school, then pack the car with a typewriter and a couple of bottles of whiskey and head for the East Coast. The casualty list was also long—depression and substance abuse and rotten luck—and I used to think that meant something, something about tragic heroines and ultra-dramatic personae, but now I think it just has to do with life, with trying to stay the course. Watch enough decades go by and every path has broken stones along the way.
* * *
—
History is a series of snapshots, sweet or tattered images that shift through the years to haunt us, to give ballast to the entire story. And however much we waste time and heart imagining what might have been, the truth is that it’s impossible, really, to examine an unlived life. What we feel instead, I think, is the failed dream. Sometimes fantasy is merely a necessary lie—what gives breathing room to fact, to make the present bearable.
I know some of the memories are sepia-toned and suspect. At some point you shuffle the cards and call the deck a life. Maybe we were just young and beautiful fools, sitting around smoking and drinking and scripting psychodrama, avoiding the blueprint for growing up. I do know this: The women’s movement gave me a reclamation of self I had found nowhere else, and I don’t like imagining my life without it.
* * *
—
Here’s how the story might have turned out, in the alternative universe of pregnant at nineteen, year 1970, keeps baby.
—I marry the French major, reluctantly on both our parts, and divorce within a couple of years.
—Or: I leave college and move back to the Texas Panhandle, where my heartbroken parents help me in silent rage. Maybe I get a small apartment, a secretarial job; maybe I take night classes at the local junior college.
In either case I probably drink too much, become cynical and depressed. The next decade or two would be a mix of blind maternal love, exhaustion, and resentment for the freedom I had lost. For the open-ended paragraph of youth.
Each scenario makes me flinch: They all star a child I bear who suffers from my emotional immaturity, who needs more of everything than I had at that age. That’s the worst part, of course: one accidental pregnancy, two casualties.
And now: Did I ever second-guess my decision, after that day and night in Reynosa? Suffer any regrets, my biological clock trilling its alarm at what I had done? No—not ever, not at all.
For the first time in many years, though, I’ve thought about the other people in this story.
—My roommate and her boyfriend, whom I’d met only once or twice. They didn’t know me well; we were all so young. And yet they knew what to do, and more important
, were willing to do it, which included shepherding a pregnant woman across international borders for an illegal medical procedure.
—The customs agent, who conducted her cold strip-search on a young woman who was doped up and bleeding. Was the agent a devout Catholic, a mother, someone who could have ever been in a similar jam? Did she resent me, despise me, want to take a swing at my reckless, white-girl attitude? Or maybe she was just trying to keep her job. Be one of the boys.
—The woman doctor, whom I remember as patient and tired. What kind of a struggle was it, religiously or ethically, to do what she did? She treated me with dignity, and I assume she was the same with her other patients, people from town and pregnant girls from the States. What that cost her is something I cannot know. Whoever did this did a good job.
Then there was the beautiful girl, ángel, hija, standing next to me at the operating table while I went under. She is probably a grandmother now. I wish I could thank them both.
* * *
—
For decades, the routine intake for a standard medical exam has included a two-part question, with a blank space for the patient to fill in a number:
Pregnancies: _________. Carried to term: __________.
The question is a euphemistic protocol, and takes care of the messy business of writing, say, “miscarriage,” “abortion,” “trips to Reynosa.” Abortion in some places is still a scarlet “A.” “Carried to term—zero” covers several possibilities. It is designed to inquire about your body and what it’s been through, not your soul.
When I went in for a recent annual checkup, a new nurse practitioner ran through a medical history with me. She was a large, confident woman around forty, and I liked her immediately. We went through the questions staccato-style. Ex-smoker? Yes, quit at forty. Exercise regularly? Yes. Parents deceased, one sibling, living? Yes, and yes. One pregnancy, terminated?
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