Story 3: Price of Silence

Most people don’t associate an abortion with a BLT. But I do.

**

“The ineluctable modality of the visible,” I quoted to my high school boyfriend, Michael. A very nice boyfriend, like well-salted mashed potatoes with brown gravy. In his parents’ living room, which had an elegant Berber carpet. “What the hell does Joyce mean by that?”

“What don’t you understand?” he asked.

“I know what the words mean,” I said in a snotty tone. “OK, so I had to look up ‘ineluctable.’ But what if you’re blind, for instance? You could escape the visible that way.”

“But you’re not blind, Natalie.”

“No, but what’s more important? That you can’t escape seeing? Or is he really talking about how we see? Modality means “one of the main avenues of sensation.”

“You had to look up two words out of six?”

I shrugged.

“Especially when two of the six are ‘the’?”

I glanced sourly at Michael, who was grinning at me. I could never find anything wrong with him. No matter how hard I looked into him, his good qualities always confounded me: his teeth were straight, he was kind, he had wavy but short brown hair and brown eyes, and he liked me. Everyone thought he was quite the catch. I examined him again, carefully.

“I can explain it to you,” he said.

“Really?”

“Turn around,” he said, “and don’t look at me again until I tell you.”

I complied. Fabrics moved and disturbed the air behind me. I began to blush.

“Now you can turn around.”

He stood by the couch completely naked. I realized I had never before seen a whole, nude male body—I had only felt parts in the dark. The couch was beige. I shook my head. There was a red throw folded over its back. He spread it over the cushions.

“I’ve never heard of a girl bleeding every time,” he said.

“The second time,” I informed him. I stood up, and my arms hung at my sides, relaxing. I was tired of maintaining distance.

“I think second place is better than first,” he said.

**

We parked twice over Thanksgiving break my freshman year of college. That first evening, on Thanksgiving night, we stopped behind a row of shops on 28th Street, north of Pearl, in Boulder. I hadn’t brought a condom, but Michael always had one, so I didn’t worry. And besides, once we had curled up close together on the front seat, I didn’t want to talk about birth control. I didn’t want to talk at all. I wanted to be nothing but physical.

He rested his chin on my head and played with my hair, twisting it gently this way and that with his fingers. I put my hand up to where his pulse was beating rapidly in his throat. I had hoped that seeing him again would bring back my old affection for him, and it seemed to be working.

As our bodies arched and lengthened across the back of the seat, he pulled me on top of him and pushed up my skirt. I didn’t even bother to take off my underwear. I found myself wondering over him: curly hair in need of cutting, soft blue wool sweater, brown eyes closing to reveal how long his eyelashes were, breaths that began to show as November air seeped into the car. I felt lost.

When we had finished, we turned on the heater and huddled until the car warmed up. He pulled a photograph from his jacket and pressed it into my hand. It showed a jagged, scarred piece of metal.

“That’s my UFO,” he said. “Come see it in New Mexico next semester?”

I nodded, and he drove me home. He kissed me for a long time before he let me go, promising to call first thing in the morning.



I knew in October I didn’t want to be with him anymore. I caught myself enthusing over him to other people, mostly women, and the looks they gave me told me how fake I was. But I couldn’t help myself. I had to dredge up every ounce of feeling for him, wring it out, and hang it up to dry in my soul. He was my second boyfriend. I felt he had saved me from rusting into disuse after my first boyfriend, Ben, who didn’t think to ask before he deprived me of my virginity. It’s not that he took it that bothered me; it’s that I didn’t have the chance to give it to anyone. I’m left with the memory of a gift that has no practical value.

By the week before Halloween, I had picked up the phone five times to call Michael and break up with him, and it hurt me to mouth the words that I would have to use. I couldn’t bring myself to say “I don’t love you anymore” to my second lover.

But he was also second in another way—second in my emotions. I hadn’t loved Ben—it’s not that. I realized I didn’t love Michael either. I had mistaken gratitude for love. And I also realized that if I had avoided Ben, Michael would never have appealed to me. Ben and Michael, Michael and Ben—they were a perfectly matched pair. To staunch the bleeding caused by Ben, I had to have someone who bored me. After less than a year, I was ready to move on.

**

After I came back from Thanksgiving break, I didn’t get a pregnancy test right away. I hoped for my period for one week, then two—the strangest weeks of my life.

I was clenched tight the entire time, but a few times every day a word would erupt into my consciousness: “Pregnant!” I was so afraid that word would come out of my mouth that I’d lose focus on whatever I was doing, and people began to give me odd looks. Debbie, best friend that she was, told them it was a reaction to finals, but I knew people were talking about me since I’d gushed so much about Michael in the weeks before Thanksgiving, mostly in an effort to convince myself that I would be happy to see him again.

Finally, Debbie took me with her to the drugstore one day to purchase a test and then went to the library so I could be alone. I sat on my bed and watched the test go positive. An alarm was going off in my room, and I couldn’t turn it off.

Debbie came back earlier than she had promised. “I couldn’t stand the suspense,” she said, picking up the test. Then she put it down and sat at her desk.

I plucked the picture of Michael’s UFO from my shelf, remembering Michael’s arms around me. Over Thanksgiving, his sensuality had reminded me how I’d fallen in love. Now, looking at this picture, I could easily imagine him proposing as soon as he knew I was pregnant.

Suddenly, Debbie said, “I blame this on Ben.”

Startled, I looked over at her. She had turned away slightly, her hands upturned and open on her knees. I knew what that meant: she was trying to be gentle but say what she really thought.

“Ben!” I said, brightly. “Now there’s ancient history.”

“With Ben, you were cautious, but I told you not to be. And ever since Ben, you’ve gotten more reckless.”

I glared at her. I wasn’t in the mood for this conversation. “Oh, so now I’m reckless.”

“I’m trying to apologize!”

She got up and came over, leaning against my part of the wall-long desk. “You keep trying out different things since Ben. Not dating. Dating a nice guy who’s boring.”

One part of me still wanted to defend Michael, but I said nothing. Debbie stuck to her program. “Ben didn’t let you choose whether to have sex. I think you’re trying to choose. Two years later.”

My hands were folded quietly in my lap. “I don’t understand why you’re apologizing for Ben.”

“Because I encouraged you to go out with him. I’m sorry.”

After that, I was afraid to open my mouth the rest of the evening because a scream might come out. I might walk up to her and break her nose. Or maybe I should hit myself instead.



The morning after Thanksgiving, Michael and I drive all the way to Cherry Creek North in Denver to ogle the shoppers desperate for bargains. I sit on his lap outside a coffee shop, feeding him thick coffee and chocolates in the cold. As if he were my baby bird, just fledged.

I say, “What if I got pregnant last night?”

His eyes brighten. “Then we get married. You quit school and live with me and my UFO in the desert for seven years. You support me and our children (I laugh at the plural, because I know I want a big family) through law school, and then I take over. I get a job with a New York law firm and you get your degree from NYU and a job with a publishing house and discover all the great new writers. Everyone who told you not to quit school will envy us for how well our lives turned out.”

And that is how it happens. Every year, on our anniversary, we fly from New York to Denver and have coffee and chocolates again, at that same spot. The shop changes, becomes a restaurant and a bar and an office, but we are there every year, always the same.

**

Did you know that the first subject in the Yellow Pages is Abortion Alternatives? “For businesses that advise against abortions and provide assistance, counseling, and/or information on abortion alternatives.” In early January I called one of the pregnancy centers and told them I was pregnant and exploring my options. Strange to offer such an intimate detail after only a few seconds of conversation. The voice on the other end said quietly, “We think abortion is murder, but we don’t condemn those who have one. We just try to get people to see the beauty of life.” Right then, I saw myself shoehorning my belly into desks at the beginning of class next fall, trying to find an adoptive family, having conversations, enduring the looks. I saw myself in the delivery room, with my mother and her mother, both smiling, delighted at the ease with which I’d conceived. But the woman on the other end of the line, safe in her telephone receiver, wouldn’t be traveling with me. She wouldn’t be standing beside me while I made explanations to everyone I knew. What a Pharisee. It was like waking from a dream in which something pressed down on me. I hung up.

And then I waited. I was early in my second month, I figured, and still unsure of my decision. Since Christmas break ended, Debbie had asked me twice what I intended to do. I had no answer for her.

Conversations with my parents gained a new subtext. My parents were both pro-choice; I knew that. But I didn’t believe my mother would support a pro-choice decision by a daughter she’d just managed to bear to term. Every time I tried to tell her, I saw the delivery room again, and one of my female relatives lifting a child from my arms and carrying it away.



Michael knelt down in front of me. “Natalie, will you marry me?”

“No,” I said. I regretted the words as I said them. Not because I wanted to say yes, but because I was being forced to say no.

Once I refused Michael, everyone began to talk to me as if I were a child. I couldn’t stand it. I wrote a letter to my parents, Michael, Debbie, the world:

“I’m going off by myself to have this child. I’ll tell you where I’m going, but don’t come after me. I need to do this by myself.”

I chose Columbia, Missouri. Two hours from my grandparents in Kansas City. More than 600 miles from Boulder and Michael and my parents, those who wanted to make me into a child. Another college town, with lots of people my age. The University of Missouri, if I could ever afford to attend. But I didn’t worry about that at first. I just took a temp job in an office, enjoying the busyness and, I must admit, the necessity of sitting down most of the day. I knew I couldn’t take a job that required me to stand.

I had never been so alone before. In my one-room apartment, three flights up at the top corner of the building, I often stood on the balcony, watching students walk below me, my hands just clasped underneath my belly, feeling her move. I always assumed it was a girl. It was a family tradition, after all: no woman in six generations had given birth to a boy. As the months progressed, her movements became sharper. She seemed anxious about how we would live when she was born.

“I have a plan,” I told her, pulling my belly up slightly.

I wondered if she heard, wanted to answer. I went on musing to myself. I had enough money to live on for a year. I would stay home with her until the next summer, work for a few months, and then enroll in school after I became a Missouri resident. The university had all kinds of programs for students who were parents.

“You’ll be taken care of,” I assured her.

A swirling sensation inside me, as if she’d turned over and gone to sleep.

**

I’ve taken the feminist studies courses. I know the history of abortion is long but not celebrated. Some would have you believe it began with Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, eleven years after I was born, but let’s face it: no woman wants to be number 7 baby machine. We’ve always used whatever we’ve had at hand to dispatch unwanted children.

On the other side, people have always disapproved. Tried to limit us. Tried to confine us to the “natural.”

You’ll notice none of these people refuse medical treatment or forgo flush toilets. They just want conception to be natural—that is, naturally unimpeded.

**

The second entry in the Yellow Pages is Abortion Providers: “For businesses that provide assistance, counseling and/or information on abortions and either perform abortions or refer clients to businesses that do.”

After Debbie prodded me the third time, I said to her: “If I have this child, I’d have to marry Michael.”

It was late on a Sunday night. I was straightening up my side of the room, preparing for Monday’s classes. Debbie sat at her end of the desk, everything in place, doodling with colored pencils. She snorted and scrawled large, multicolored spirals down the page. “I don’t see why!”

“Think about it. Who’s going to take care of the kid while I’m in class or doing homework? You?”

“A babysitter,” she argued.

“Who’s going to pay for that?”

She took her time answering, carefully filling in some of the spirals. “Your parents,” she admitted.

“So why shouldn’t they just raise it? Or one of my aunts?”

Debbie fiddled with her streaked blonde hair. “I think you should make one decision at a time. Do you want this child, or not?”

“I do want to have children,” I said, considering, “but I want to get married first.”

“To Michael?”

The picture of his UFO had migrated to my desk. Debbie walked over and held it up. I tried to hold in my laughter, but my guilt wasn’t equal to the task. Debbie had asked and answered the question for me. Michael didn’t belong in my life anymore, and I wouldn’t bear a child to a man I didn’t want to marry.

I called an abortion clinic the next day.

**

The procedure itself depends on where you go. Some places have you come in twice: on the first day they insert a laminaria, which is a kind of natural dilator, in your cervix, and then the next day they vacuum out the fetus and maybe use another tool to scrape out any remaining tissue. But the place I went to dilated me right on the table. That hurt, but it wasn’t the most disconcerting part.

Inside my belly, a muscle began to cramp rhythmically. It clenched and unclenched, and I remembered those balls, half as big as we were, we used to play kickball in grade school. The ones that were an odd shade of red and textured, that yielded to a foot or a hand. When it was my turn, the kids on my team would start chanting—“Natalie! Natalie! Natalie!”—because I could kick it farther than anyone. It was the only time in my life I felt truly popular. But now, this morning, I couldn’t look at my stomach because there was a hand just under the skin, squeezing my own personal kickball: I lay there with my feet in the stirrups, with the vacuum tube finally inserted through my cervix, my belly cramping rhythmically. I stared at the cheap travel poster on the ceiling and wondered how far inside it had gone. Would it touch the top of my uterus? Cause a perforation?

Afterward, they twisted a tie around a plastic bag, the kind people use to carry goldfish home from the store. The liquid in it was uniformly red. I couldn’t help searching for some form in it, but there was none: only blood, now separate from me.

I told no one but Debbie.


It stuck with me, that feeling of being vacuumed out.

Once I’d had a conversation with my Aunt Jennie, my mother’s sister, about her refusal to have children.

“I couldn’t stand the waiting,” she told me. “I knew it would take me years to get pregnant.”

“It didn’t take Mom more than a couple,” I reminded her.

“True. But then she had the hysterectomy. Not being able to have any more children hurt her so badly that I just didn’t see how having a child could be worth it.”

I shrugged. Sometimes Aunt Jennie doesn’t concern herself with how she sounds to others. I thought she was making excuses for her inability to stay with a man long enough to raise a toddler, at the very least.

I finished school in Boulder. Then I went to New York. I found new writers for a whole string of publishing houses. They may not have been the best writers in the country, but they were by far the strangest. I enjoyed how they reconstructed reality.

My life didn’t turn out the way I expected. I fell in love again and again and came to crave that new beginning. I sought it in work and men and I always found it. A life of newness is a life of constant movement, appropriate for a city like New York. It was hard to explain my life to my family or to old friends in Colorado. Even Debbie told me my life was unstable. But it wasn’t. After all, a river isn’t unstable, yet it moves constantly. I thought of myself as one of those small Western rivers, transplanted to the East. To people who are accustomed to the seemingly slow-moving, wide rivers of the East, I was nothing more than a creek. I didn’t mind that I couldn’t carry much on my back.

**

When I think about the abortion itself, whether it was a good or bad thing, it confronts me like a monument; like the Missouri River that I must swim, right now; like the keyhole before the narrows on Longs Peak. It was such a relief. I can’t imagine myself without it. How do you approve of or condemn such experiences?

It was so easy to get pregnant. I told myself I had escaped the family curse. My uterus worked the way it was supposed to. So why rush to be a mother?



I always knew it would happen again.

Despite family history, despite mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers longing to be pregnant like so many unmilked cows, I knew my body would have to choose for me, as it chose when I was eighteen and conceived Michael’s child.

But once I’d had the abortion, my attitude about children changed. I had thought they’d be so easy for me, that I’d broken the family curse. And I guess my pregnancy proved that theory correct, in a way—but my certainty that I didn’t want that first child exiled my family ambitions to the hinterlands of my life.

The intervening years can be quickly dispensed with. Finishing school; work: five writers I’m truly proud to have introduced to the world in eighteen years; a string of lovers; travel to every continent.

And then I met Mitch. I saw him across a new restaurant I had been trying to get into for months. I was with friends; he sat with a large group in my line of sight, though several tables away. I glanced at him throughout the evening; he always met my eyes. My friends left for other engagements; I was alone in the booth finalizing the bill when he sat down next to me.

“Have you had dessert?” he asked. I hadn’t.

It started like that, with food, and him asking me if I had had enough. When he was around, I felt as if I could have so much more.

This close, his eyes were calm, not appraising. His hair was so black that I had to touch it before dessert arrived, trailing my fingers through the curls just behind his ear. Then I rubbed my fingers together to see if the color had come off. He paid the bill for dinner and dessert. We went back to his apartment, which overlooked a tiny park.

“It’s not Central Park,” he said, “but it’s the best I can do.”

His best was good. Once I got into his four-poster bed, I didn’t want to leave. With the bed curtains down, we were completely enclosed. They shut out the traffic sounds and, if we wished, all the light. When we opened them, I could read the manuscripts I always carried with me. I stayed for three days, telling my boss I was working from home.

It didn’t happen just then.

Several months later I noticed that my period was late. My fortieth birthday was approaching. My birthday comes three days after Valentine’s Day, so I never get depressed about that holiday. I have always had something to celebrate that time of year. So I figured, what the hell, and bought a pregnancy test on Valentine’s Day. Yep, it was positive. I told Mitch that night, at dinner at his apartment.

He stilled. Even his hair, which had its own electric life, stuck out less righteously.

“Isn’t it romantic?” I asked hopefully.

“It’s a surprise,” he said. It was unlike him to be so diplomatic.

“I’m forty. It’s my last chance to have a baby.”

He shook his head. I hadn’t told him about Michael. Now I wouldn’t. Would I have wanted this child if I had kept Michael’s? So many questions lined up in back of that one I just cut them off.

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“I won’t have an abortion.”

Our relationship didn’t last long after that. He was there for the birth, and I was glad, but I told him soon after, “Only have a relationship with this child if you truly want to.”

He didn’t.

**

The Receipt

Every so often I get out the receipt and look at it. The name, address, and phone number of the clinic were stamped in the lower right-hand corner, with someone’s initials scrawled in large curly letters over them. In the lower left-hand corner, the amount paid: $175. The price of an abortion in 1981. This receipt had my name and the name of the clinic—no, it wasn’t the one in Boulder. I was afraid of someone seeing me there. Not to mention the “sidewalk counselors.”

**

Ten years later, after spending Christmas vacation with my parents, my husband and children and I were driving east along I-70 in Kansas. I woke up drooling, my neck in an unnatural position. Just then we passed a faded billboard: “Abortion stops a beating heart.” And another, and another, all with similar messages. Then a phone number: 1-877-GRIEVE.

It’s as if I were a lake, with a cold current circling from the bottom to the top. By the time we reached Chicago, I had to lie down and weep.

I’d thought having children had erased the abortion, but no. It was still there, hiding, waiting to surface.

**

Countermemory

Now everything seems to radiate outward from the abortion in all directions. It seems to have become the sun in my solar system. Or should it be a black hole? I don’t know, but it does illuminate things about me that I’d rather not see: the limits to my desire for children; how easy it was to say nothing to Michael, to lie by omission. I keep hoping for dusk, but I’m stuck in the northern end of my heart, where the sun hardly ever sets.

After I emerged into the waiting room and wakened Debbie, we went to lunch. Sometime in the middle of my ten-week pregnancy, food had lost its flavor and begun to resemble nothing so much as cardboard. I was lucky I never threw up, but just getting through the day and eating took so much effort. So I’ll never forget the sandwich I had for lunch, two hours after the abortion. We sat at a counter, with Debbie to my left, and I took my first bite of a BLT. The bread was toasted and smelled of butter and wheat. The iceberg lettuce crunched between my teeth. The bacon was crisp at some points and soft at others, as it should be, the tomato firm and a little sweet. I had never noticed before how one plain little sandwich could contain so many flavors and textures.

It tasted like freedom.