Chapter 19: Char’s visit—Pregnant
During Char’s weekly visits she wears the baggy hippie smock of the day—paisley! It amply hides her early pregnancy.
“Why can’t I tell him?” She asks herself and so many others. Actually, she already knows the answer. “He’ll try to escape. He’s so overprotective. I know he’ll suffer just knowing.” Then her hope, “Won’t it be such a fabulous surprise? He’ll love having a child to touch and hold.”
She is fully aware of the pain that not telling him might inflict and she doesn’t fool herself about the risk. He might go berserk. Feel betrayed. Hate her. She’s damned if she tells him while he’s locked up, damned if she waits. Beseeching guidance from the Goddess, she heeds the warning that comes repeatedly in her dreams: “Do not tell him, not now!”
For Jared, visits from the start were bittersweet and quickly turned bitter. He had a rash of visitors once out of Seg—“Mostly guilty liberals!” Sean snorts. Everyone except Char and his Mom quickly got a “Please don’t visit” note. His mother—ever his comforter—defends him. “He just has to do this his own way.” But some, even family members, put him down. “Even in prison he’s living in his self-centered world!”
His brothers and sisters—especially Eddie—are silently relieved that this obligation is wiped away. They love him, each in their own way, but visiting prison spooks them all; not to mention that it embarrasses them. That their kid brother is a con—a violent felon to boot— is not an accomplishment they consider a highlight of the family’s biography. Only Larry and Marian remain stubbornly faithful, speak proudly about him every day.
When it comes to Char, Jared just doesn’t know what to do. It’s not this two-lesbians-plus-one-stud thing—he’s not sure she’ll stick with that. It’s just that he’s locked-up, caged. Jesus, I yearn to see her, smell her, just tingle my fingers up and down her arms.
Yet when he sees her, he also knows he falls to pieces. He tells Sean, “Man, it’s like choreographed time bombs. After the first half hour, inmate 8867-147 starts to become human again. Thaws. Dig it! The desire for a snuggle is wrenching. Then on the hour I start to believe there is something like intimacy. By the time she’s ready to leave, inside I’m weeping, sobbing, condemning myself for having caused all this horror to myself and especially to her. I’m ready to crawl over to the Control Booth, pleading, promising the Watcher everything he’s ever dreamed of, ‘If—if you just let me go!’ Fuck it all! The fucking hack—he’ll just smile a sweet fatherly grin, pat me on the head, and lead me by the hand back to Char, just like a whipped puppy.”
Jared knows this as the invisible spectacle. What actually goes on in the visible realm is the dance of inches. The Rules say, “You can embrace once upon meeting and once upon parting.” In between, only rigor-mortis is tolerated. The unanchored, unpadded polystyrene seats are not to be moved—not a degree left or right.
“Turn your chair around!”
“Take your hand off her knee!”
“Drop your arm!”
Such are the routine commands of the Watcher who roves about like a coach working the bench, giving orders. Little reprimands, even at times praise and encouragement, “Jackson, you’re almost out of here. Your wife should be proud. You’ve been doing well.” Or “Nice kid.”
Sometimes slips into kindness happen. After all, the hacks are human. They have kids to read to and tuck in at night. Despite that, they are artists of the infraction. They can spot a thought coming from a con’s head that will turn into a violation. Before the kiss becomes too prolonged, before the knees do what only knees can do in the visiting room, they are there, “Enough of that!”
On Char’s third visit, it happens. As Mike would phrase it, “There’s couple’s karma. Man, that’s hard stuff!”
As usual she comes camouflaged by a long and loose granny dress. Jared kisses her sweetly, ever ignorant about her secret. If he were more observant of the cosmetic, he would notice the puffs and roundness that pregnancy often induces in the face and arms. Char is an angular, slender woman and carrying a few extra pounds fills out her face in a noticeable way. Noticeable to most—not to Jared.
They chat for an hour about this and that until she senses she’s ready. Jared picks up that there’s something on her mind that she’s working around to. Between cups of coffee, walks to the vending machine and back, he realizes that something’s different with her, this time.
“Dear me, how can I convey all this to you? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone over this, preparing to tell you. Let me just say it. I’ve moved into the Bread and Roses commune.”
Char notes his puzzled eyebrow reflex. “I know, I know, they did have a different reputation when you knew them.”
Maoist Mamas from Hell! Jared can’t help himself, her name comes throttling out, careening off his teeth, “That’s where Aaren lives!”
Char’s patting his knee as if settling down a frightened child. “Right, but Aaren’s been transformed. I mean, you wouldn’t believe her . . . “
Jared chimes in, ringing incredulous, “She gave up Mao?”
“Geez, yes, sort of—she still finds a lot there. Mao’s wife is a really strong figure for her, but okay, Aaren’s still one of our leaders, working out the theoretical side of feminism. Like always.”
Jared’s tipped more than a bit off-balance by this Aaren and Char living together revelation. It stirs up his mind and heart—but not in a good way. How can he know that Char is just about ready to blow him to bits?
“There’s something you and I have to decide, today.” Char speaks with her teeth clenched and as if someone is banging the words out from astride her tongue. That declaration made, at “today” she abruptly stands, tugs and adjusts her dress, then turns towards the ladies’ room. She leaves without another word.
Jared is baffled and perplexed. His male mind can only come up with the fail-safe conclusion, Must be her time of the month again?
Although the Sisters—under Aaren’s direction—prepared her for this visit, her firm resolve and confidence was immediately shaken by seeing Jared. His condition—captive, prisoner—evokes deep sympathy, she wants to reach out and console him, not disturb him. How can she go through with it? Say it?
After ten minutes of waiting, he’s certain that “the rag” is what’s bothering her. But after another ten he begins to be concerned. Maybe she forgot her stuff?
He looks around the room to see if there’s any other CO whose wife or girl is visiting. As he notices Harley and his wife, Char suddenly materializes back at his side. She’s sickly pale and toting a wad of paper towels.
“Are you okay, honey?”
“I’m fine. We have to get on.”
She looks straight at him, eye to eye.
“Jared, I’m pregnant.”
No fanfare. No slow build to the climax. Just pow!
At first it doesn’t register. Jared actually hears her say, “I want to get pregnant,” and a flurry of ridiculous thoughts run through his mind. But then it hits him.
“You are?!”
“Yes.”
He’s waiting. The wait of fear, self-distrust—the wait of the withering penis where a guy dreads hearing that it is not his.
“We were blessed on our last night together or just before—at least its close enough that I feel this child came that night. This is our blessing.” He exhales a sigh of relief and without uttering a word mentally yells, Yes, yes, I remember, I remember! . . . Phew, it’s mine!
“I’m sure it happened then. I wanted to tell you as soon as I got back from Europe but things were, you know, things were just strange. It hit me that you were in prison, I mean, really far away. So I talked with friends. I even asked your sister Marian. Everyone—everyone agreed that I should wait until I was absolutely sure.”
Char’s feelings of guilt over this hesitation don’t interest him. In the blitz of this ambushing joy, Jared is basking in the upside o
f it all.
I’m a dad! is the refrain singing within his spirit. He’s smiling a goofy smile. Who deserves to be this happy in the Joint? No one! So—hold on, bucko! As Dylan’s weatherman predicts, the wind shifts.
Jared slips back into being Inside, away from the visiting room and all its pretense of normalcy. Jared’s switch is flipped.
“How far along are you?”
“Nearing seven, maybe eight weeks, if my counting’s correct.” February’s almost over.
Have to decide today, right now!
Then something deep within startles him, he hears with inmate ears, feels with caged heart. Click! He is wild with terror, falling through the floor, crying out to be saved—Over here! Help me! Come over here and rescue me. Throw the rope! He sees himself in a pit. Sees his child—it has to be a son—looking down at him, watching his father in the pit: caged, chained, humiliated. Pathetically holding in his hand letters from Bruiser and Dikbar, a chastising telegram from Uncle Sam, a video of his wacky night in Seg.
It’s all just too pitiful. Turn of the screw. He looks at her and doesn’t see the mother of his child—he sees another captor. Char is Quinn with her special womanly instruments of torture, ripping out his heart.
“How can I have a son while I’m in here?” he snaps.
Powerless: In here I can’t have anything. Nothing! He swings his knees out and away from her. His eyes drill her, barely masking his fury.
“How could you do this to me?”
In the moment, Jared’s question comes across somewhat comically. She’s amused at the cosmic reversal of roles. Now it’s the guy playing out the hand of the abandoned lover, banged up and betrayed!
“Jared, we did this together. Remember?” Almost a tease; a fond memory.
He turns full face forward, sits ramrod upright in his chair. Strongly, clearly he’s broadcasting messages of rejection, distaste, repugnance. The drastic shift in his mood jolts her. She’s hearing him loud and clear, is stung by his repulsing energy.
“Oh, my god!” What’s happening? “Jared,” in despair, “we’ve got to talk with one another!”
Jared bites his words, “So talk.” He refuses to hear it but inside he spits out a venemous So talk, Bitch! He can’t hear the word but his left hand begins to tremble slightly, twitches then shakes, he grabs it, steadies it—this the arm broken by Quinn.
Char’s fighting a heart-breaking panic. Slowly and methodically she wrings her hands as if scrubbing for surgery. This is an uncharacteristic act, almost neurotic. She’s renowned for her unruffled calmness, especially in emergency room crises.
“Do you want this child?”
The sentence scrawls across Jared’s mind as if he was watching a foreign movie, reading subtitles. He hears her speak, watches her mouth shape the words. They appear one by one, popping up on his mental screen. “Do . . . you . . . want . . . this . . . child?”
It’s an incomprehensible question to Jared. Nowhere in his Catholic past, nowhere in his past in any way defined—genetically, spiritually, psychologically, historically, soulfully—could this question be a question. I am a Catholic is the only answer. At least the only one to Char because like him she’s Catholic. Abortion was where she disagreed with her Sisters. “There’s no ‘right to abortion.’ It’s an act of violence against the child and yourself.” He’s talked with her about this often, and they were in complete agreement—being nonviolent meant no abortion.
Jared turns and interrogates with detective eyes. His fear of her escalates with every glance, every word, every breath, like water near boiling, slowly up and faster up, then frenzied. Who is this woman?
“What?” Jared snaps. It’s more of a command to “Stand and deliver!” than an intellectual inquiry. Char hears what only a Catholic girl could hear in this question—the voice of the nuns pounding into her her dutiful role as mother. “It’s why God made you a woman, to bring souls to earth.” She shoots back just as forcefully, “I’m not going to let you guilt-trip me. I am beyond that. All this Catholic past we share is pure crap.”
Jared falters. Who is this talking? He reacts, “Wait—wait a minute, Char, I wouldn’t count myself a ‘true son of the Church.’ Sure, I’m a renegade but even this hint of abortion—I mean, you?”
“I just don’t know if you’ll ever be able to understand because so much has happened since you left.”
“Jesus, it’s only been two months. You’re pregnant, you went to Europe, what else are you talking about?”
“Goddes yes, you know, both wonderful events, but really incredible things have happened. I mean incredible changes among women . . . among the Sisters.”
The anger, the fear, the specter of Quinn, hearing “abortion” as if being sentenced once again, he’s more agitated and at bay than when on trial. He’s not in control and it’s overwhelming him. He fights the moment, pretends that it’s a bad dream, but it clearly is not. She’s there. This woman he loves, this woman he ….
Escape! He would if he could but the border to Canada has iron bars around it. Panicky, he wants this visit to end right now, but he’s not even in control of that. He can’t just get up and leave, the Watcher would hassle him no end. He looks around the room, lets loose a small sigh of relief over the simple fact that they chose a corner today. No one is paying attention to them. The Watcher has to strain to make out what’s happening.
As for Char, what Jared just said has stung her with its power of righteousness, something she’s admired when it’s been directed at other adversaries. She’s never been his target and despite her best attempts at control and composure she squirms.
He presses on, “You want to kill this child? Have things changed that much that now you’re a minion of violence? Is this the ‘transformation’ you spoke of, the transformation of Aaren? Are you women now waging war? Is that the change that’s taken place? If it is, it would be better if you killed yourself and let the child live!”
Char pales. His words carry that peculiar death sentence that she and all good Catholic girls hear from their earliest years. “If it’s a choice between saving the life of the mother or the child, the child comes first.” Birthing as death sentence. As a male Jared is judge, jury and executioner. Char’s Sisters—most passionately those with Catholic backgrounds—tried hard to prepare her for this. They warned her that Jared would turn on her but she found their suggestion incredulous. “He’s not like that. He supports me, supports us in our struggle. He’ll understand the greater violence of having a child now while he’s in prison.” Few Sisters were convinced. Now she’s devastated by the reality. She tries to reconnect with him by touching his shoulder but he recoils and spurns her.
Earnestly, she appeals for understanding, “Jared, you know what nursing has meant to me. How much I love being in pediatrics, love kids. I don’t have to tell you all that. But is it the right time for this child? You’re in prison and there are so many things I must do.”
“Must do? Must do!” He tears at her heart like a vulture on a fresh corpse. “What’s that, tell me! C’mon, tell me, what must you do that’s more precious than having a child?” Fucking-A!
Char reaches within to tap the strength she draws from the support and love of her Sisters. With them she’s gained insight into how and why women are the true slaves and prisoners within patriarchy and capitalism. “The all male trinity,” Aaren says, “think about it. Three dicks and no cunt! Tell me, how can you create anything if you don’t have cunt?” Aaren’s language is rougher than Char’s but her message is right on! “How can we accept their ethics of control? Control of our bodies. Who here has taken a man’s name? How many of you have lived as ‘Mrs. Man’? We have got to be strong when we face these facts, for they are acid truths that burn our hearts but they free our minds.”
At first, Char out-right rejected Aaren’s “man-hating” refrain. They argued, heatedly. “You must stop thinking about your father as your protector. Didn’t he train you to wa
nt a man like him? And your brothers, pimps for their guy friends. Trying to set you up with ‘a good buddy.’ For what? Some dinner and a fuck! We women have got to face it, Men are our enemy!”
Then Char realized that Aaren was calling for more than a revolution, as in a full turn of the wheel. She demanded an involution and an exvolution—the turning inside-out and outside-in of everything. “Sisters are bold! Sisters are strong! Sisters are one!”
“You’re not going to have it, right?”
Four other Sisters come in with Aaren. She asks them to grab some pillows and sit on the floor forming a small circle around Char. This is a Warming Circle, a common practice among the Sisters. These are formed when one or more Sisters discern that another Sister needs counsel, even if she hasn’t specifically requested it. Char is a bit surprised but then not. It’s clear to all the Sisters that she’s in turmoil over the pregnancy. Although Aaren has avoided these Circles, she now finds it to her advantage to call one for Char. She takes Char’s hands and sits down facing her, each on a large pillow in the center of the group. She states the question as if the answer is clear, “You’re not going to have it, right?”
“I don’t know.” Char tries to draw her hands to press upon her womb but Aaren holds them firmly and she can’t. It’s a conscious ploy. “Look at me, Sister,” she says, eyes locking, coldly and fiercely staring. Char is snared.
“You need to know. You don’t have much time.” Char knows this, she doesn’t want to go beyond three months, she’s read all the literature.
“Yes. I know.” Softly. Halting. Char begins to flush, suddenly feeling very hot all over. Her hands are still locked in Aaren’s. She wants to but can’t wipe her forehead.
The Sisters begin to chant, slowly, rhythmically, becoming a chorus strongly but not loudly singing, “You are free! You are free!”
“Do you hear your Sisters?”
Char nods.
“You are free. Do you believe that?”
Char nods.
“Say it. Say it out loud.”
Char swallows, tries to find her voice, she is uncomfortable and feels trapped because she knows what Aaren wants, understands what the phrase fully implies. She gets out a high pitched, “I am free,” at which the Sisters hasten the beat and up their volume, start swaying and Aaren starts to slightly sway with Char pushing her gently back and forth. They do not sing, they are fully tuned into one another. Aaren lets the Sisters’ chant work its hypnotic magic—she’s in total control.
Aaren is reaching out through Char to strangle Jared. Her hatred of him is so fierce that she’s willing to twist Char’s soul till it shatters.
Still hand locked, “Tell us what it means to be free.”
Char know the Sisters’ code. “To be free” means free of men, everything male, all patriarchal morality. She’s been in conversations-on-end about abortion. She’s heard, “Having a child is a means of your oppression unless you choose the time and place. Unless you make it a truly revolutionary act, one that benefits all the Sisters.” Aaren especially pressed all the Sisters to make having a child a communal decision, an act of solidarity, and in this way deal a death blow to male dominance.
“I know you, Sister,” Aaren says firmly, authoritatively. “I can hear you inner voices. How that Catholic God threatens you with damnation. Curses you, threatens to make you sterile if you disobey. I can feel His hatred, taste his vileness. Sister!” she shouts, making everyone snap-to and pay attention, “Sister! Create yourself. Right now, right here, within the loving embrace of your communal lovers. We do not want you to be pregnant. You have a higher calling. We need you to dedicate yourself to the struggle, commit yourself to getting elected to public office. That is where you will serve us best. Where you will find your true calling.” Sweetly, “Sister, love us. Love us as you stand and set yourself free.”
The thousand arguments pro and con about abortion fly through Char’s mind.
“It’s just cells. It’s not a person until it can live outside the body.”
“You’re young. You’re fertile. You can do this when you want, not have to accept it as a burden.”
“It’s male morality, clear and simple. Male doctors, male priests and male judgments! They’ll call you a whore and a slut just because you want to be free!”
Her head is bursting. Her heart is heavy. Then she is startled. It all becomes amazingly clear. She is hearing the Sisters’ common voice. Feeling their deep love. She is being transformed, radically changed. She is free!
For the first time since she knew “the child—our child” was within her, she feels nothing. Keenly senses that her womb is already empty. Fantasy. Stupid romantic me! I’ve been tricking myself. Just wanting to hold onto Jared. She can feel the Sisters’ love, their strength, their hearts linking with hers. She slips out from “Char, a good Catholic girl” as if shedding her skin and slips into the embrace of her Sisters, becomes one with their heart and body. She trusts them. She loves them. She and Aaren stand. Char raises her and Aaren’s arms high, shouts, exalting, “I am free!”
Aaren’s frees Char’s hands but stays linked with her eyes, tethered to her heart. “He is how you, Sister, must speak to him. ‘I must work for the benefit of my Sisters. I must dedicate my life each day, every day, to freeing my Sisters from their shackles. You, Jared, of all people should understand! This is how you lived your commitment to nonviolence, to stopping the war.’”
Aaren pauses to let the words sink in, then continues. “Be strong. Say this with steel in your voice. ‘It’s become very clear to me that if I become a mother I will not be able to commit my whole time to the struggle.’ Then let him know that you are in control of your own future, say, ‘I’ve been asked by the Sisters to consider running for State office out of South Minneapolis.’”
Upon hearing this, Jared is as overcome by her words and all that’s happening as he was on his first Inside day in Seg. Instinctively, he reaches for the hibakusha. He needs some grounding. But it’s not under his shirt. Why today, why now?
Yet something does rise up from near his heart, a foreboding presence and a desire. He wants to break something, smash something to smithereens. Damn! Powerless, again: trapped, caged. His only outlet is a daydream skirmish—he’s cutting off heads, witch blood stains his broadsword.
“You would kill the child so you could run for political office?” Jared can barely believe what he hears. The absurdity of this turn in their conversation totally boggles his mind. His murderous fantasy vanishes as all his energy shifts to deal with the oddity of balancing the moral gravity of having an abortion with the seemingly irrelevant statement about running for public office.
Char doesn’t respond, doesn’t take his bait. Something within her commands her to not answer.
Silence. A full minute. When she breaks it, she’s in full self-control.
“I want to be a mother but not right now. You and I did not intend to have this child. In that way it is unwanted. I want to wait until you and I can want, together.”
“You and I?” Jared can barely contain his outrage—it almost makes his head explode. “You and I?” But I don’t know who you are! How could we ever do that?
Bitch! Witch! Child killer!
Despite the utter turmoil of this disastrous visit Char is desperately waiting for Jared to aid her, comfort her. When talking with the Sisters it finally became clear that the course she’s taking is not immoral. It happened not within an airy intellectual discussion about right and wrong, rather it came as she grasped that “pregnant” meant her own body. “I’m pregnant.” She says time and again in front of the mirror. Touches her womb. But what she can no longer say is, “I’m with child.” Not now. Not this early on. The Sisters are right, the fetus is not a child. Maybe it’s part of her person, but in that light it’s her personal decision to make.
She anticipated that Jared could and would understand that. For she knows, as all the Sisters know, that she could have ma
ny children later. “How many eggs will you have in your life? What makes this one special?” Surely he’d want to wait too.
Crazy as it is, Char still needs Jared’s consent, his affirmation. Even just a nod, an encouraging “You can do it!” Something that helps her make the final break with their shared Catholic past—not a leap into the void, not a jump from the bridge, rather a steady walk away, arm in arm. She needs a sense of emotional continuity. To hear a good Catholic boy like him say, “Char, you’re such a swell girl! When I get out, we’ll have a dozen kids!”
Jared looks at Char, peers with prophetic sight. He foresees only doom for his son.
Spectrally, he watches as another face of Char gradually appears— hideous, her hag face, ugly, crawling with warts and streaks of puss. Hatchet in her hand. She is the Evil Witch who pushes children into the oven, bakes them with the loaves and feeds them to their fathers. She who steals children and turns them into toads and wild creatures. Dreadfully, Char is Eve, the liar, the agent of the snake, befuddling, betraying, seducing. Lying, lying, lying! to Adam.
He weeps for his son. Weeps that he should die so young. Weeps for their ever too brief kisses. God our Father, have mercy on us!
He gives her no comfort. His words to this wretched woman are sharp, a rebuke, a condemnation. He barks at her, not caring that others can hear. “Go ahead, abort the child! You’re unfit to have him! I don’t want you to touch my child!”
He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all . . .
Jared rises like the first swirl of a whirlwind, stands with jaw muscles throbbing, fists clenching and unclenching, righteous, feeling the thunderbolts of Yahweh in his grip, poised to obliterate her on the spot—the sin offering, burnt.
“Hear me clearly, Char, you cannot, I mean it—I command it!—you cannot have this child. If you do—now listen to me, if you do, I will …” He stumbles, falters, for even in the depth of his wilding rage he can’t speak the word he’s struggle so hard not to utter, not to act out. He stammers, “I will… I will …” But he doesn’t have to speak for her to hear the word because his heart is on fire with lust, the lust of the predator for the prey: kill you. I will hunt you down and kill you!
Char has never known this Jared. Never felt this Jared’s savage heat. Doesn’t want to know him, feel him. She’s scared. Deathly scared. Her eyes lock on him, she’s ready to scream, Help! Help! She remembers: “He’s no different than any other guy. These ‘nonviolent’ guys are as sexually screwed up as any Marine or fucking rapist. Hear me Sister!” Char is hearing her Sisters. Run! Run for your life! She wants to but then doesn’t have to, instinctively knows that the Watcher is here to protect her, her and all women visitors. She’s safe. After all, it’s just a “visiting” room she can leave, so she does. Never turn back, Sister!
Char stands and as she readies herself she collects all his words, coolly places them in a distant recess of her heart, secure there, protecting herself.
She moves close to him, toe to toe, becoming eye to eye not in body but in power. She is rising up as a slave shedding chains. “This is my decision, not yours! I came here to consult you, not to have you command me!”
Touching her belly, “This is my body! I am not your body!”
The Sisters are correct!
Kill the dove! Page 19