Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  I thought he might be home because he works as a waiter six nights a week from four to twelve.

  “Jill!” he roars. “What’s up? Anything wrong with Donna?”

  “No, I haven’t seen her. Listen, Lennie what was the name and phone number of that doctor who does abortions?”

  “What’s wrong, you in trouble?”

  He’s a friend of Mike’s rather than mine. “No, it’s a friend of mine from the neighborhood. I told her I knew somebody.”

  “Just a minute. I got it written down somewhere.” He disappears off the line while the operator coos, “Please signal when through.” Meaning I have run past three minutes. Lennie, hurry up!

  Finally he comes back. “Yeah, well he’s Dr. Lytton Manning in Dexter. You call and say you need to have a growth removed. That’s the phrase.”

  “He’s got some sense of humor, that man.”

  “Yeah, well you bring one hundred dollars in cash in an envelope and you give it to the receptionist. Then she gives you a date. You pay the other two hundred when you go in. You give it to the receptionist the same way.”

  “Three hundred dollars?”

  “That’s it. So how are you otherwise? How’s Mike? I wrote him but the bugger never answered me.”

  “He’s fine,” I say limply. “Listen I’m on my lunch hour.”

  “Well, have a ball. See you at school.”

  Maybe. I walk very slowly back to work. Three hundred: that’s what I’ve earned for six weeks’ work. It would eat up my fall payment for the goddamned dormitory where we are forced to live. Plus I would have to manage to get to Dexter, Michigan, twice. Hopeless.

  On my next two lunch hours I see a doctor a day. Each gynecologist examines me, painfully, and tells me I am pregnant. I try out my routine, including telling each of them I will kill myself. They tell me they can call the police; they tell me I must have the baby; they charge me one ten dollars and one fifteen; they lecture me on morality. I am late back to work both days.

  Is there any point being me? After turning up the water heater I stand in the kitchen. Mother weeds the garden, kneeling among the tomato plants lined up in their shagginess against the south-facing wall of Dad’s garage. Why wait to bear this child or die tomorrow in a bloodbath? For all my pride, I have been to the auction block and returned unsold. My love rots like old meat. If Mike cannot finally love me, whoever will? Why persist in studying out my agony? She got me quinine; we have the mustard. Last remedies.

  From the holder over the stove I take the sharpest knife and unbutton my blouse. Black-ridged handle, long bright blade. Can’t cut my breasts. Slide between. My heart beats there against my fingertips, against the point of metal. I dare you. If you don’t do it, it’s because you’re scared. Mother has often called me coward. In the gang I would take any dare to duck that label.

  I prop my arms on the Formica counter. Forgotten anything? A note. Dearly beloved, I grew weary of it all. Bye-bye, yours affectionately, Jill. Give Donna my bankbook. Nuisance, Mother will find the body. To evaporate cleanly. Melodrama. Last words, a literary influence. I must have learned something from all this exercise. Now Mother weeds the bean plants. The elm leaves glow. A sparrow lights among the sweet pea vines on the fence. On the sill before me three tomatoes and a peach are ripening. Sunlight blanches the fuzz over the blush of the skin, rounded fruit, deeply grooved as flesh. My mouth waters.

  I give a sudden lurch and the knife enters. Before I can control my reaction, I pull the blade out, letting the blood course down, dark, running. It hurts! I watch the blood well out. Think, damn it. Life doesn’t mean, only people mean. I wanted so much. If only my mouth would stop watering. I can smell that peach faintly. Have to swallow. I should close my eyes and push the knife in to the hilt, but I cannot make myself. All the peaches I will never eat. I haven’t ever tasted a fruit that wasn’t good in its way, pears, Bartlett and Anjou and russet, honeydew melon pale pistachio green; no wonder paradise is a grove of fruit trees. Dusty purple plums, grapes splitting with juice. I haven’t had any black or red raspberries this summer. With cream.

  In spite of all, sun and peaches, young beans from the garden, I wipe the knife and put it back. If I die tomorrow, I die. The blood from my chest wound is staining my jeans. I mop it with a paper towel, which I then push against me as compress. It is soaking through. As soon as the bleeding stops, I will eat this peach. Now I will go to work attacking my body in earnest.

  Thursday night. I am half dead and nausea is a constant state, my heart is beating erratically, and yet I am still pregnant. Upstairs in the hot and airless attic, I prepare to follow Mother’s last instructions. Through the floorboards the hoofbeats and gunshots of a Western arise. “Don’t cry out,” my mother warned me. “Keep your mouth shut.” Squatting in the ruins of my old sanctuary, by force I open my womb.

  If it were even a couple of years ago I would tell you more, but if I do so now, desperate young girls, desperate middle-aged women, the victims of rape, incest, battering, far more numerous than we like to believe, all the women who simply do not believe in catching a baby as you might the flu or pneumonia, would be tempted to do as I did, just because I survived it but barely. There have to be better ways. I cannot include a recipe for action that is likely to kill you.

  Friday I do not go to work because finally hard pain wakes me and my fingers on the pillow show wet and red. Now in my belly giant hands twist. Contractions. Wryly I realize what I did not understand: that I am going into labor. My ears ring, the room hangs speckled as I gape at it. Five minutes, five hours? I swell and split until I cannot lie on my back or my right side or my left side but writhe like a landed fish on the dock gasping for oxygen. The lowered shades and the blue-and-white curtains rise and fall, rise and fall languidly. The air lies like a warm damp towel on my sweating face. I knead my body trying to squeeze the pain out. Occasionally Mother comes in, speaks.

  “What?” My ears buzz.

  “How is it?”

  “Bad.”

  She unwinds the sheets from my legs and tucks them in far away at the foot. Biting her lips she stands over me, then hurries away.

  The pains deepen. Pain is bigger than I am; I drown in it. The contractions sharpen and ease in regular quickening waves but under the crests continuing is a substantial mass of pain always deepening. When I cry out, Mother comes at once and glares at me, drawing back her hand as if she will slap me. I know I must be silent and so I am. I twist my hands, thrash in bed, writhe.

  Twenty-odd years later pain makes me mute. Since that day I have never recovered my voice when pain touches me hard. When I burn my thigh, when I cut my hand deeply, when I drop the typewriter on my foot, my vocal cords seize up as they never do in anger or danger. I weep but cannot speak until the pain ebbs.

  In my mouth, a bitter ragged taste. Black fungus on the tongue, the taste of dying. All the blood is rushing from me, I feel it flowing. Forever, pain wrings me and the blood bubbles out. “Mother!” Why doesn’t she come? Has she run away? “Mother?”

  She trots in. “Shhhh! Don’t make noise.”

  “I was calling. Not noise. Help me up.” I am being squashed. The press closes on me. Got to move. Leaning on her I drag into the bathroom. “Go away. Wait outside.”

  She backs from me hesitantly. Fear rises from her like the smell of sweat.

  “Shut door!” Vomit hot and acid charges up my throat. Back uphill to bed, leaning. Blood runs down my legs, red footsteps across the throw rug. I sink into bed. Pain sings in my ears like a choir of giant and hungry mosquitoes. My hands knead my body as if they could pinch out sensation. I ring like a cracked bell, bong, bong, pulling my guts out with it, all, out and down and down….

  I open my eyes as if tearing open a package. Cling to the light. If I go under I won’t make it back. I touch the freshly formed scab between my breasts and laugh silently. Now when I am really boiling in death’s muddy river, I swim, I thrash to stay alive. The histrionics with the knife have
no more to do with it than our games in the vacant lots with dime-store guns had to do with war. The blue-and-white curtains wave good-bye with bored flops. How much blood boils out, bright, beautiful on the sheets, huge rose that blooms from me. Mother peers down, hands plucking at her apron, lips moving. “You’re so pale, chickie, your lips are white. What to do…. Oh God, dear God, don’t let her die. She’s punished enough now. Listen to me!”

  Punished. I want to laugh. We are always in different stories.

  “Push, Jill!” She squeezes my arm. “Push it out of you. Bear down. You have to push it out!”

  I hear myself moan far away. Her hand covers my mouth and nose. I stop making the sound and she lets me breathe. She paces biting her thumb, tugging at her hair. Through the whine of pain I cannot hear, but her lips mutter ceaselessly. Sweat hisses through my pores. Blood scalds my thighs. I thrash. My belly ripples spasmodically. The bed buckles, kicks under me. Must go. Something is forcing me. I heave over the side and crumple. “Bathroom. Must.”

  She pulls me up screaming, “Stand up! I can’t carry you!” The mirror dandles me dead white, a grey face. My vision burns out speckled. The room swings into black. “Jill, don’t fall. I can’t hold you!”

  I hang my head till the light seeps back. Must sit, must. Stumbling I trip on rubbery tissue, dark and clotted. Long hell corridor swinging, closing like a press. Must.

  The bathroom floor is cold against me as I squat. A nail drives in blow after blow. Push on it. Must.

  Slowly the room slides back. The contractions ebb, rise serrated, ebb. Gradually my body quiets like a pond long after a rock. I pull myself up.

  “Did you pass it, Jill?”

  “Yes.” Back to bed. “Blood’s pouring out.”

  “Raise your legs.”

  “Can’t.”

  She props a mound of rags under me.

  “I’m cold.”

  “It’s hot in here.” She fans herself.

  The air across the sill freezes me. “I’m cold.”

  She shuts the window. “Is that better?”

  My teeth are chattering. “I’m cold.”

  “I don’t want to spoil the blanket. Everything’s soaked.” She hovers, then sighs and pulls it up.

  The curtains hang limp and straight. Done, all done. The amber light spreads over my eyes, lukewarm and smooth and syrupy. I sink and settle, I unfold. My ears still ring but pain has let me drop from its claws. I lie where I have fallen not quite sure I am alive but glad anyhow. Beautiful the light red through heavy lids. Let me float down to the bottom, all the way down….

  When I wake, Mother sits at the sewing machine darning socks, watching. “How do you feel?”

  I touch myself gingerly. “I’m still bleeding but it’s not running out.”

  “Do you feel okay otherwise?”

  “A shadow. Breathing is hard.”

  “Let me bring you lunch.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “You’ve got to take something. Milk, maybe?” She smooths the sheet.

  “I can’t.”

  “Do you want to see him?”

  “Yes, but don’t tell him I did it. Say I miscarried.”

  “You’re sure you want to see him?”

  “Yes.” Then as she rises I add, “I’m filthy. The bed, me. I’m stuck to the sheets.”

  I cannot lift myself but with the sponge we clean me. I can roll to one side if she pushes. Then rest. The clean sheets feel cool as peony petals. I drowse and wake. Water runs in the tub. Mother scrubs furiously at the floor but I float detached, an escaped balloon borne on gentle high currents. Occasionally a small pain spreads in light ripples and then quiets. Euphoria.

  Mike stands awkwardly, one hand on the jamb. He crosses as if walking on ice and leans over me. His lips move.

  “You have to speak loud.”

  “What is it, Jill? What happened to you?”

  “It’s all over.”

  “She said you miscarried.”

  I nod.

  “That’s impossible. You can’t have been pregnant.”

  “I was.”

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “They said I was pregnant.”

  “I mean today.”

  “No. Don’t want any now. Not any longer.”

  “I’m taking care of her,” Mother says from the door.

  “You’re not trained. I’ll call a doctor.”

  I strain to hear them. “Don’t let him, Mother.”

  “Do you want to bring more shame on her?” Mother hugs herself. “No! I won’t have it.”

  The bed dips under his weight. “Pumpkin.” He strokes the hair back from my face. “If she opens a can of soup, will you let me feed you?”

  Dozing, I know when he returns because his arm goes around me. Every time I open my mouth, soup fills it. A thick creamy taste vaguely of chicken comes into being. The soup forms a hot lake in my midriff, anchoring me so that I stop floating and once more lie in bed.

  Through the wall comes rhythmic sloshing from the tub where Mother is trying to wash the sheets, the throw rug, the towels, the rags, so that the blood will not set as stains before she puts them in the wringer-type machine downstairs. A streak of sun from the edge of the shade lights on his ruffled hair. He looks so young, I wonder I never noticed it before. How could he help being weak, poor boy trying to become his father. He craves authority, rules, patriarchs to tell him how to cope. Only I cannot trust him anymore.

  “Hello there, pumpkin. Feeling better?”

  “Uh-huh. Get me a brush.”

  “Lie still like a good kitten and I’ll do it.” He brushes my hair gingerly and pins it up in an amateur lump. “There. How’s that? You gave me a scare when I came in. But you’re better, aren’t you?”

  I nod.

  “How did your arms get so thin? You have to eat more.”

  “It’s over now.” And I won. I won my life back. My body, my self. I did it.

  Gently he slips his hand through the throat of my pajamas, over my shoulders and breasts. “Take better care. Don’t let that woman drive you to the wall.”

  “She helped me as much as she could let herself.”

  Weightlessly his hand moves over my breasts. As I look at him bent close, the brown eyes grave and luminous, the strong arches of his cheeks, a slow bolt of desire pierces me. It hurts. If I were not weak, I would take him in my arms. Hard to believe he has been mine, the long bones of his arm, the nutmeg hairs of his body and the mahogany hair of his head. I am glad to have seen him once more like this, suffused with the love I gave readily, readily.

  At four, half an hour later, Mother sends him home and I sleep. But at five she bends over me. “Jill, get dressed. It’s time for your father.”

  “I can’t move. Let me sleep.”

  “Get up!” She shakes my arm. “You can’t be lying there when he comes. He’ll want to know what’s wrong.”

  “Say I’m sick.”

  “Sick with what?”

  “The flu. A stomach virus.”

  “Nonsense. He’ll get suspicious and kill us both. Get up.”

  “I can’t!” I jerk from her. “Leave me alone.”

  When Father comes home, I sit propped in a chair in the living room dressed in too big skirt and too loose blouse with a magazine hanging open in my lap, still slowly bleeding.

  Brooklyn, 1963. The doctor botched the abortion and she is hemorrhaging. I am one of a group of women who help other women secure abortions. Sometime I’ll explain the name we use, collectively. Now this woman, fat, gentle, in her late thirties and the mother of five, is bleeding like a slaughtered pig—like I did. I pack her vagina with ice. I hold her against me, a woman twice my size and twice my body weight, and rock her like a baby. She feels cold as my hands, as the ice I have stuffed into improvised bags of Turkish towels between her thighs. Live, live, I whisper to her, dear one, sweetheart, angel darling, live. Only live. Through the whole night we are together until daw
n finds her still alive and the bleeding under control. In the morning we return her to out-of-work husband and clamoring children.

  Chicago, 1969. I am meeting with an outlaw abortion group, women who perform safe and cheap abortions for other women. The best doctor we had, in Pennsylvania, has been busted and faces prison. We are in trouble, but trouble is our whole reason for being. In my files are names and prices and directions for contacting abortionists in eighteen states. I even have information on Mexico and Guatemala. You never know when some woman may desperately need it.

  New York, 1970. We are marching, tens of thousands of us, through the streets of New York shouting for legal abortion for all of us. Half the march I spend with older women. I am sure every one of us has had an illegal abortion or aborted ourselves. We are criminals. Then part of the time I march with the high-school women. They make up slogans and shout a lot. We are many and angry and beautiful as we run along. At the square there are too many speeches and we all get cold and my nose runs, but no one can stop us any longer. We will be free. Women will not pay in blood for love. Children will not be born unchosen, unwanted, unloved.

  The following Saturday Mother calls a meeting. While my father stares at his joined hands, she reads out an oath for a year’s chastity, which she has me type in triplicate just like the invoices at Short Brothers I am back typing five days a week.

  Shaking his head, Mike reads it over. “What do you say? Are you going to sign this thing, Jill?”

  What a Biblical ring the oath has. “If I do not keep this Oath, may my right hand wither and my strength rot, may I never bear or beget living children and may my brain decay….” It’s easy to tell Mother wrote it. I meet his gaze. I say all three of you are acting in private plays. A great indifference grinds my thoughts to dust. Love is a word like the words on this paper, while I have learned no words bind beyond the noon of their saying. I also know that under my anemic indifference beats a will to live my own life strong enough to carry me through them and away. I will escape you all. I will choose what I do.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  Under the sickly light of the fluorescent fixture on the kitchen ceiling, with formality and silence we sign the oath. I write my name large, wanting to giggle. Three times. I get a copy, Mike gets a copy, they keep the original. One copy for both of them, they being one legal married body. Afterward Mother serves iced lemonade.