He isn’t sure how virtuous that makes it.
He’s still smarting a little at the end of the interview when Barb asks if he has any questions, and he realizes he wants to ask her if she’s had an abortion. And then he realizes he doesn’t need to.
It reminds him of going for the procedure with his wife. They had known somehow, just known, that all these women—the nurses, the doctor, even the receptionist—had gone through it too. Without anyone saying. Something about the quality of their sympathy. It had come to them like a balm that they weren’t alone.
(One in four, he tells his wife later. The chances of a woman having an abortion. He’s read it on the clinic website. One in four. Not a coin flip, of course. But also not a roll of the dice. In fact, the exact chance of flipping a coin twice and calling it right—two heads, say—both times. I’m no expert, she advises, but you should probably try not to say “two heads” when you talk about abortion.)
* * *
That evening at dinner he watches the boy carefully separate the foods on his plate. He doesn’t like them to touch.
Everyone has their own abortion, the father reminds himself, just like everyone’s kid is different.
He asks the boy about his day. He’s typically vague. It’s as if he walks out of school and forgets everything that happened inside by the time he gets home.
In return, the boy asks about his day—his wife looks up at him—and he . . . lies. Because, of course, you can’t tell a child. What he feels, he realizes bleakly, his instinctive response, is to protect the child from even the word abortion, the very idea.
* * *
But when Barb calls him the next day, invites him to the clinic to shadow her, he sets the phone down with relief. As if he’s passed something.
“Let’s try a shift a week for a month,” she says, “see how you do.”
* * *
It is the Time of Screens. Screen time: a drug dispensed in careful doses. It makes them irritable if the boy has too much. It’s Angry Birds, not angry words, he mutters.
But it allows them to eat at restaurants in peace, his little head bowed over a device as if saying grace. Another tiny shame, pocket-sized.
They fill their phones with educational games with names like Math-a-Magician and Gramma-Ray.
They bargain earnestly. Make him read a book first, as if Captain Underpants were good for him.
The father stays awake into the small hours, leveling up.
Someday soon they know he’ll start begging for a phone of his own; someday slightly less soon they’ll give in. “He’ll never be bored,” the father says, a respite from their need to entertain him, but also a loss. In his memory, childhood feels less like innocence than boredom, long blank stretches punctuated by vivid moments. “He’ll have the attention span of a goldfish,” the mother says. So maybe he will be bored, the father thinks, if our distraction devices are always that little bit slower than the flicker of our attention. “He’ll never be alone,” she concedes. But this, too, seems alien to the father, an only child, loneliness the constant companion of his childhood.
So much of his parenting, his teaching, those instincts, are based on his recollections of being a child, a student. What does it mean that his son’s youth will be nothing like his?
* * *
His first day escorting, Barb meets him at the same café, tells him what to expect at the clinic. “What to expect when you don’t want to be expecting.”
He spills sugar on the table, brushes it away, slops his coffee.
“Should be a quiet day,” she says. “Most days there are a handful of protesters, a couple dozen on the weekends. Their big shindig every year is called the Jericho March—there are at least a hundred then. But that’s not until Easter. They march around the building, tooting everything from tubas to kazoos, hoping the walls will come a-tumbling down. Lot of nuns.” Barb calls it “The March of the Penguins.”
She calls days when the crowd is thick “heavy”; days when it’s thin “light.” She smirks at his blushes.
She checks the weather every morning. It helps predict the turnout. Good weather—more protesters. Filthy weather—fewer. Today’s forecast: “Cloudy with a chance of assholes.”
By chance, the boy has a kazoo. By chance, they own the DVD of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. By chance, penguins are the boy’s favorite at the zoo.
“Excuse the bad jokes,” she says. “Old habit.” She was an EMT for twenty years before she retired. “Whatever gets you through, am I right?”
It’s a purple state but a college town, so the protests are mostly peaceful, she goes on, “if you can call that racket peaceful.” At least there’s no “speed-bumping” or “hood-surfing,” terms that sound like so much skater slang to him, but which she explains refer to protesters lying down in front of cars or spread-eagling themselves across them, respectively.
“What about”—he lowers his voice—“guns?”
She shakes her head.
“Never felt the need of one.
“Seriously,” she adds, “we’re careful, of course. But their chief weapon is shame, shame and intimidation, intimidation and shame . . . Their two weapons are shame and intimidation . . . and lies . . . their THREE weapons are shame, intimidation, and lies —”
“And an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope!” he chimes in.
“Huh!” She grins. “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition sketch! You’ll do.”
And it dawns on him that this was the test, and not of his sense of humor exactly.
* * *
After a recent session his wife noted: I was always brought up to think of therapy as a little, you know, shameful.
And now?
Now I think everything’s relative.
* * *
They call it a “prayerful presence.”
Do you have children? they ask him.
They describe themselves as “prayer warriors.”
Do you have children?
Women they turn away they call “saves,” which makes him think of soccer.
Barb is orienting him. They’re both wearing pink neon vests, emblazoned with the clinic logo.
She calls them “antis.” He heard it from her mouth as “aunties” at first.
They call her “Nazi,” “butcher,” “baby killer.”
They ask him, “Do you have children?”
Barb’s been an escort for four years, ever since she retired. “Better than being a greeter at Walmart!” Though in her nylon vest she could pass for one.
They offer to pray for him. “Thanks,” he tells them distractedly, adds sheepishly, “That’s okay. I’m fine.”
He knows he’s not supposed to engage them. It’s policy.
“But that’s awfully boring,” Barb tells him with a wink.
“You get to know them,” she says, “the regulars.” She points them out. They’re clustered on the sidewalk between a scrubby grass verge and the mouth of the driveway, where a painted white stripe marks the property line. “That’s Mary with the rosary, Mitch with the candle. He used to kneel, but he had a hip replacement last year.” She gives him a wave—Mitch!—and the man brandishes his Bible. “Helps to know their names if you can. To defuse things. Sometimes you overhear them; sometimes they volunteer them. Sometimes I make them up—I had a Norm and a Cliff for a while. Helps to recognize them, any new faces stand out. Regulars have regular behavior. Newcomers are wild cards.”
I’m a newcomer, he thinks.
Do you have kids?
“Helps if they know your name, too, or think they do.”
Barb is not Barb’s name.
“It’s my stage name.” She taps her name tag. “After Barbara Bush. Makes me smile when they’re cussing me out.” He sees the resemblance suddenly in her tight, rosy cheeks. “Who’d you wanna be? George? Donald? Dick?” She cackles.
Do you have kids?
When they ask him his name—“So we can pray for you”—h
e blurts, “Sam.”
“My father’s name,” he confesses to Barb. He doesn’t tell her they’d considered calling a girl Samantha.
We’re praying for you, Sam, they chorus.
* * *
“I have kids,” Barb murmurs almost wistfully. “Two boys. Grown and gone. Don’t hear from them one season to the next.” She shrugs. “I tell myself, ‘If they take you for granted, it means you did something right.’ ”
It’s the last place he expected to find a mother figure.
* * *
At the clinic she hands him an umbrella, even though the sky is clear, even though there’s an awning for them to stand under. “For clients,” she says. It’s a big golf number with a long silver ferrule, which makes it feel a bit like a lance or a spear. He leans on it, trying to feel dapper, trying not to feel like a doorman. Still, he likes the idea of holding an umbrella for a woman. It feels courtly, chivalrous. But, when the first women arrive, Barb has him open the umbrella to shield them from the antis. It makes him feel like the Penguin in Batman, maybe Gene Kelly, though he resists the urge to twirl it.
“It’s spitting,” Barb explains, and she doesn’t mean the weather.
* * *
There’s nothing “virtuous” about any abortion to the antis, he knows. Even those “certain circumstances” of the poll question—the life of the mother, say—are off the table now. Barb’s line—after a protester brought her own daughter in to the clinic a few years back—is that the only exceptions the antis believe in are rape, incest, and me (and not even those first two sometimes!). She means it as an example of hypocrisy, but he clings to it—the uncertainty of principle—as a tiny glimmer of hope.
* * *
He picks the boy up from school after his shift and takes him to Dairy Queen—just reopened for the season—even though it’s turned into a brisk spring day, sky ribboned with cloud. They’re the only ones there. The boy looks up from his Blizzard and says slyly, “This place is deserted!”
“DQ?” the mother asks him, looking at the father. “What did you do to deserve that?”
For ten minutes the worst that could happen was brain freeze.
Later that night she tells him, “I’m sure it’s a good thing to do; I’m just not sure it’s a good thing for you to do.”
He wonders what that’s supposed to mean.
He wonders if she’s been talking about him in therapy.
* * *
His next shift Barb points out other faces in the crowd. Ted in his trench coat. Martin with the long beard of a prophet. Keith, a skinny Black man with a diamante cross on his chest (“You bear it well, Keith!” Barb calls). Bald Dale peering myopically over a lurid sandwich board. Joan dressed for church with her hat, gloves, and patent leather handbag filled with flyers. Eileen with her empty umbrella stroller, trying to look tragic, but coming off like an absent-minded grandma. Several are old enough to remember when abortion was illegal.
Some are too shy to cause much trouble. Just bearing witness—“silent but deadly,” Barb calls them. Then, there’s your chanters, your hymn singers, your screamers. In between are your “sidewalk counselors.” Less shouty, but still a nuisance. They won’t physically obstruct, but they do like to approach clients, talk to them. Polite at first. Lots of ma’am-ing. Jeans and ties. They want to ingratiate themselves, convert people. They hate the screamers almost as much as us.
Barb has nicknames for many of them. Ted is “the Flash”; Martin is “Gandalf”; Dale is “Kilroy.”
They call her: Nazi, butcher, baby killer.
Stan-the-stache is a Vietnam veteran, wears a fatigue jacket, a cap with an MIA patch. His hair is a close-cropped gray, and when he shouts his scalp flushes red beneath it. “I always wonder if someone called him ‘Baby killer!’ when he came home,” Barb murmurs. “How’d he like it?”
Barb is a vet herself—Army Nurse Corps, Gulf War One.
“Sometimes, I end up protecting them,” she tells him. “From boyfriends usually, or husbands, come to support their girlfriends and wives. Men! I get between them and the protesters, break up any eye contact, distract them with small talk about the weather, sports, whatever works. Remember the antis want a fight, but they want our side to start it, so they can call the cops.
“Once,” she tells him, “a man came back outside for a smoke. Asked me if we had cameras. Asked if I’d switch them off for a minute.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Can’t do it, sweetie. All that’ll happen is you’ll get hauled off and your lady will be alone. That’s not why you came here today. Am I right?”
He nods heavily, as he assumes the boyfriend or husband nodded.
“They call me names,” Barb laments. “But do they ever thank me?”
She expects him to look out for these men now, he knows, but he rarely does more than exchange a nod with them. “You might as well just grunt,” she notes. If one of the husbands or boyfriends went for an anti, he thinks, he’d as likely join in as break it up. He feels a dark, vaulting joy at the thought.
* * *
In the lulls when no one is coming or going from the clinic, the antis pull out phones like everyone else. “What’s an anti’s favorite app?” Barb asks. He shakes his head. “Blocky Road!”
* * *
Barb has a friend, a sympathizer, who lives nearby and makes a point of walking her retriever by the clinic each morning, letting it shit on the verge where the protesters gather. “It’s the little things,” she says, with a grin.
The boy’s current favorite movies are about a golden who plays basketball, football, soccer. (The father remembers when the only games dogs were good at were poker and pool.) “Watch with me,” the boy asks, but he has another shift.
* * *
(“Barb, Barb, Barb,” his wife says. “She’s got her hooks in you, all right. How old is this Barb?”
She knows; he tells her again. What she’s getting at is a different infidelity. The same one he wonders about when he asks if her therapist is a man. There are affairs, it turns out, and affairs. Affairs of the heart, affairs of the conscience, affairs of the soul.)
* * *
And then there are the clients, the women. By his third week, he starts to know them, too. By the set of their mouths, the stiffness of their shoulders, their eyes.
Not all of whom are there for an abortion, Barb reminds him. Some for contraception, some for breast exams, pap smears. “So don’t go getting all gooey. They might only have a yeast infection or a UTI.” The clinic only conducts procedures on certain days of the week, shifting the schedule periodically to try to throw the antis off.
Some are there for medical abortions: the abortion pill (two to be exact; one taken at the clinic; one later at home).
And then there are the women—further along—who are there for surgical abortions. The ones with no makeup or jewelry; who come with a friend or partner to drive them home; who look hungry, because they’ve been fasting for eight hours.
“Though many still wear their wedding rings,” Barb notes. “More than come with their husbands, actually. Of course, some are afraid to tell their partners,” she explains, “but some just want to spare them the guilt, to protect them. Remember that next time you’re feeling all manly heroic.”
She teaches him to give the women space, to never approach a car in the parking lot, to walk a step or two behind as a shield. But instinctively, he finds himself hurrying ahead at the last moment to open the door for them.
“Really?” Barb asks afterward. “I guess chivalry isn’t dead.” As if chivalry were a particularly tenacious roach.
Some of the women run, some of them cry, some of them shout back.
“What if your baby cures cancer?” the antis call.
“What if I do!” a young woman, a student by the look of her, yells back.
“Your baby might be Jesus!” they implore.
“My baby might be a girl,” another shouts back.
“Your baby might be Dr. King,” they tell Black women.
“My baby might be Malcolm!”
Your baby might be a scientist or a poet, he thinks. Your baby might be rich and famous, a leader, a hero. A gentleman, a scholar, or an acrobat. Or poor, or sick, or a woman seeking an abortion.
All the coin flips. All the what ifs. Like the litany of prompts he uses in writing class. Heads and tales.
He admires the women who shout back, but Barb shakes her head, tells him sotto voce, “They win if they get you to call it a baby.” She admires the ones who wear headphones.
* * *
“Some of them cry. Some of them laugh after,” Barb tells him. “They’re relieved, or they’re guilty. They want to talk about it, or they don’t. And it’s all normal. Some of them just need to hear that.”
He nods. He understands the need to be normal.
Some of them smoke, which startles him at first.
Some of them thank him, which makes him blush.
“I just walk them to and from their cars.”
“It’s maybe a little further than that,” Barb says. “They’ve so many strangers calling them names, judging them. Not just here—online, on TV, out there. It means something to have another stranger say it’s okay.”
The kindness of strangers.
He doubts it goes far enough, surveying the out-of-state plates in the parking lot.
Some of the women have driven for hours to get here. Six, seven, eight hours. Sometimes through the night. Barb’s found them sleeping in their cars when she opens. They can’t afford a hotel, can’t afford to miss two days of work. All those miles for this! Nothing but right-wing talk shows, Christian radio, and classical music for company.
A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself Page 7