State Champ, page 9
“You shouldn’t run there, then,” someone said. “That’s not safe.”
I got stuck on that because I always feel like, if you admit you think something isn’t safe, you’ve given someone somewhere a weapon whose use you can’t control. Later I listened to the podcast myself and learned the cops had kicked the man all the way down that huge hill. He’s had bad headaches since. He can’t work. When he complained and the city eventually surprisingly punished the cops, things got worse, not better, for him, since from then on cop after cop has sought him out to mess with in retribution. Because you got beat you have to get beat. What if a deer had been there that night, an antsy young buck with big fuzzy antlers? Could he have run full speed into this human scene? But cops famously have guns. What would I have done? If I’d been running by right then? Cops don’t beat up young white women too often, with the exception of their own personal girlfriends. But wouldn’t they arrest you for being there, they’d come up with something? And my probation had just ended. But maybe just by saying something, I could have … By appearing, like a reminder of something … none of this happened.
Still, at the bottom of the hill I’d picture the man sometimes, I imagined extending a hand, leading him along the overgrown trails to escape. Watch my feet and you won’t trip.
But no one was there to help him. No one helped him at all.
* * *
Come to think of it, no one’s here to help me.
Unlike every single patient who ever
Rose after Rose after Rose
I am here by myself. I am alone here.
Head pounding, stink, don’t want to lift my head.
Is my pulse right?
Blood like exploding, bam bam bam. Cheeks, teeth, small and hard.
Would love some room-temp blue Gatorade and those pink little licorice pellets.
Dr. Park comes then goes.
I swear the roaches are multiplying.
It’s not necessary
Was that what I was supposed to think about? Or the other thing Dr. M said, forever ago?
Summoned there by the criminal
Yes I was.
* * *
Monica & part-time Stevie & even Donna were always trying to get Dr. M to up our security. Stevie would dog-ear a magazine her boyfriend got in the mail like a perv. Upgrades to window glass, locks, panic buttons, camera systems. We got mailings with coupons. Dr. M shook her head.
“She doesn’t remember,” Monica would say. She’d wait till Dr. M had headed toward the back but Dr. M could still hear. “She wasn’t living in the States when guys were bombing clinics, walking into clinics and just shooting people. Snipers waiting for doctors. One guy was holding, like, a bowl of soup for his son, turning to put it on the table, and he was shot through his kitchen window right then.”
“One guy”—Monica looked at me—“shot two receptionists in one day. Two clinics. He walked into the first, shot the receptionist in the throat with a rifle, left, walked to the next nearest clinic, shot the receptionist there.”
So I said: “After one clinic was bombed, they hung a big sign on the construction site that was rebuilding it. HELL NO, WE WON’T GO. Then they opened right back up.”
While they were talking I’d read this on Wikipedia.
They treated me like I wasn’t one of them, but I got it.
“Who cares whether I lived here then?” Dr. M would say. “You hardly need to live in America to know American violence.”
* * *
Rose didn’t always say anything, or not to me, but sometimes I thought I could tell. She’d carry herself like her entire self had betrayed her. After a second-trimester job, Dr. M washed her hands a while then walked up and sipped from a reusable straw out of a reusable cup she kept on the far end of my desk like I didn’t work there. She started talking to me like I’d asked her a question, like I did anything besides shoveling people and forms back and forth in bad light. A dictator, she was saying, who’d passed a bunch of laws. After that, thousands of victims of rape were jailed, sometimes flogged, sometimes sentenced to death by stoning (though usually aren’t you lucky they didn’t end up carrying that out). Laws stayed on the books for decades. If you accused someone of rape and you couldn’t prove it, you’d get charged with adultery, fornication. To prove anything you had to have 4 adult Muslim men on your side, like swear-to-God witnesses. Women’s testimony was nothing. It counted for nothing. So girls and women got locked up for years for the crime of their own rape.
I used to have a chair that made a fun squeak when you rocked back and forth, till Donna fixed it.
Dr. M said: “If I tell most Americans” (she whipped her hand around at the clinic and sounded a little bit vicious) “about all that, they’ll think it’s another story about backward Muslims in a backward country. But the dictator was backed by the US. America loved him, they kept him in power over us, used him to fight the Cold War and destroy hundreds of villages. This is an American story.”
She didn’t say if she thought I was different, I’d get it, though that’s what she was implying (was it?) by telling me. Or she didn’t care what I thought, so I was a perfect audience, like talking to a drunk pane of glass.
But didn’t I get it?
“Well here we have this great system where if you’re raped you won’t go to jail, but then neither will he.”
Did I say that?
Here I am, all by myself on Dr. M’s couch, mouth rotting like an old rape kit.
Maybe Dr. M didn’t tell us what she was up to because we never ever shut up. Maybe it was, like, calming to do a bunch of abortions without hearing us all sharpen our knives on each other. I get it, Dr. M. Sometimes you gotta go it alone.
And for years we’d been crying or smart-ass-ing our way through all the hallway-size laws all the janitor’s-closet-size laws all the clinic-must-be-at-least-2000-feet-from-a-public-school laws all the temperature-in-clinic-must-be-between-75-and-80-degrees-Fahrenheit-and-between-50-and-60-percent-humidity laws all the garbage-cans-must-be-kept-entirely-clean laws all the hospital-admission-privilege laws all the patient-transfer-agreements-with-hospitals-are-required-for-abortion-clinics-to-have-but-patient-transfer-agreements-with-abortion-clinics-are-illegal-for-hospitals-to-make laws all sent to little government men by an army of think-tank Janines, signed sealed delivered. Around us clinics kept closing. And this was before they dropped the big one. Eventually there’ll be just like one abortion clinic left in New York, one in LA. They’ll each smell exactly like Gwyneth Paltrow. And I think everyone knew the whole time this was where things were going. We didn’t know how they’d get us there but I think we knew, someday it’d just be us and the phone screaming and no help coming. If you’re in a state like this, goodbye healthcare, hello more fentanyl. Which is something, I guess, I mean it’ll take the edge off.
I need Steve’s/Mike’s article to come out. I don’t feel clear. I need some takes, some comment threads. I don’t know why I thought writing a journal would help, unless someone reads it and tells me what it all means.
And why is Steve the new John? 14 days in, like my hunger strike is ovulating, I could have a new little baby hunger strike, and John has done nothing. You took some photos. OK. The whole time we were not-dating I was like this guy has a job. I liked that about you. It was something distinguished, what a professional, he went to a good school. But maybe you’re a reporter like we were dating? So, not? I never read your articles, or like once a year I’d scroll around. They seemed fine, I mean, I didn’t know all that stuff about city council and the football stadium renovation or whatever. What a public service. But maybe that was like, a failure to launch. Or you’re just from this city, where failure is a kind of success, it’s like a pH balance just for us, a failure deodorant that works on everyone here. And now I’m caught up in that again, just when I thought I had found my own thing, I was escaping Loserville, just when I thought I was striding down the straightaway, breaking away from the pack—maybe the pack is right on me. Where is Steve? Where is someone? How big is my lead?
“Angela,” Krys said to me once—I’d told everyone I’d sign any document lying about the size of our hallway, I’d tell a judge hand on Bible we had an Olympic-sized pool for a hallway, and I was just off probation, who gives a shit, if they came out and measured it, I’d just act blonde, like always, eyes wide, like I had literally no idea, just so surprised by tape measures, who cares—“Angela,” Krys said, “grow up. Stop pretending like you’re some sort of martyr for the cause.”
Huh.
Day 15
In our last convo Steve—how can there be a Stevie and a Steve? Christ. Mike it is—had said the article would be out soon but when’s soon? I texted you, like what is soon for reporters? also talking to this guy (linked to Mike’s cringe social presence), did u contact him re photos?
I’m only now realizing (it’s evening now, must have been late morning then) you haven’t replied. Are there other major political actions occurring in the city this week? Did some suburban mom fail to match her lipstick to the exact red hue of our racist baseball team’s old logo?
Bright orange popcorn. Salty cheese dust.
Do you think if I think about food it attracts the roaches?
Scrolling around. No one else has done what Dr. M did? Just ignore the law and keep giving abortions. Or, they have, but they haven’t been caught. That’s what we don’t know, if there’s a secret army of Dr. M’s. How do you decide who won’t turn you in, who you can give the little wink to, the come-back-later? I’m sure Dr. M thought no one would turn her in. I bet she trusted everybody. It’s not that she’s naive. She just really feels like she’s in charge. It’s not like she thinks, like with her brain, that she can control every situation. But she feels that way, and in life that’s what you go by. Like, who do you sit next to on a crowded bus? You don’t weigh the factors or like examine your bias. You go by instinct, by smell.
You can see why other docs don’t follow her lead. 12 years in prison, bad news, shut-down clinic. Some places you can get sued just for giving a ride. Jailed for dropping off a pill. Just for suggesting “abortion” as if people wouldn’t know if you didn’t tell them. I mean thousands of years ago women were chewing on plants, exploring their options. They probably had the same problems. Here’s a tiny kid, a 10-year-old, she can’t give birth, anyone could eyeball it, try to help.
Scratch that—I think maybe people don’t know their options. That’s something we do need help with, knowing our options. That’s why those crisis centers sprang up everywhere. If you could tell people a baby-story, right away, get it in there, you could build a shiny world around this nausea they were feeling, this way their body was getting hijacked. Then they’d have a story about babies and mommy and god, not a story in which abortion exists …
That’s why I was proud of myself, if I may say so, for thinking of this hunger strike. It’s not like anyone said, here’s a thing you could do, Angela.
Angela, do you mind helping out? Dr. M asked that a lot, in her very special tone.
No, I chose my own thing. And so did she. The main thing she didn’t choose was me—that I would be the one in here, after it all went down, raising a stink. Literally, it stinks in here. All those years, I was just around, not exactly wanted, but here.
They had a little party for me at 5 years on the job. No one including me thought I’d make it that long. The party was low-key but OK. Donna brought in a huge thing of flowers, there was nowhere to fit it on my desk, these tip-toppling sunflowers, eventually I put the vase on a table in the waiting room, and all afternoon Roses kept kind of wafting their faces toward the flower faces, catching the scent.
“It can be hard to keep a receptionist at a place like this,” Monica said at some point. “Before you we kind of burned through them.”
That answered some questions about why they put up with me, though not my questions about what the other girls couldn’t put up with. I mean I’m sure the bad pay didn’t help. Someone named Darcie had left a lot of notes I mostly didn’t bother reading, although they did come in handy when the old printer jammed.
A couple weeks after the big law changed, after everything kicked off and the heartbeat law started rolling its way into the real world, I heard Dr. M actually scream. She was in the back. I hadn’t heard this exact sound before but I knew what it was. That’s Dr. M screaming, I thought. What now? What worse thing could be happening? was the dumb thought I had, jinxing everyone. But the scream was personal. Dr. M’s dad had died. Her last living parent, now dead.
I had personally wondered whether my dad was alive or dead, since he didn’t exactly exist. Even my aunt kept mum about that. Your mom never told us anything, she said. I don’t know if that’s true, or if my aunt was making a sort of executive decision, but I think I’ve pissed my aunt off enough over the years that if she had something to say, she’d say it. And I don’t know what could be so bad she wouldn’t tell me, since my day job exposure-therapy-ed me to all the options. Well, just tell me if I start dating someone who’s actually my brother, I said to my aunt last time we tried to talk about it which was not recent. Angela, you never tell me who you’re dating, she said. Fair point. But she kind of knew about John so he’s in the clear, fwiw, and we don’t look alike.
I’m stuck with John like Dr. M is stuck with me? That’s who’s here. That’s who heard your little scream, Dr. M. Timeline-wise, she must have started the secret stuff not too long after that, not long after her dad passed. After the scream she came up to the front and I gave her a little pack of tissues I’d taken out of Krys’s purse. I don’t think I said anything. It’s awkward when someone’s dad dies and the next person they talk to has never even had a dad. I get it, that’s not ideal. But there we were. Dr. M put her hand on my shoulder, tank-top weather, I think just for balance, her hand felt dry and hot and my skin always feels very cold. Sometimes people literally scream when I touch them, I’m that cold.
Mike called back and he had some of my same Qs, it went something like:
“Hi Angela, is this a good time to talk?”
“Sure. Never eating frees up some time.”
“I have a few more questions, and then our fact-checker will give you a call later to confirm things, OK?”
“OK.”
“Great. So I wanted to ask you again about the illegal procedures. Dr. M”—he uses her real name but I call her what I call her—“performed after hours, without anyone else’s knowledge”—
“If we knew we’d be accessories, so yeah we didn’t know.”
“Right, but it seems like other people might have supported what she was doing, so I’m wondering how you felt when you found out. Did you agree with her? Were you upset that her actions ultimately got the clinic shut down? You all lost your jobs. You could have been charged. And now you can’t provide any healthcare—like contraception, anything—or even the abortions that are still legal. So I’m wondering if you thought what she did was effective, or the right choice under the circumstances.”
“The abortions she gave were all effective.”
“Of course—but now you can’t provide anything. Some people would say she acted recklessly and endangered the clinic and everyone who worked there.”
“OK,” I think I said.
“So do you agree? Or do you think getting arrested, getting media attention, having a big public trial, was the point? Do you think publicity like that and protests like yours may be more effective right now than the limited care the clinic was allowed to offer under the new restrictions?”
I hope I said: “People don’t do things because they’re effective. Like, is having sex effective? It bothers me that if I bombed an abortion clinic everyone would just get it. You could write it up without even talking to anyone. Like, that would make sense to everyone. Same if someone had walked in here and shot me in the face. That would make total sense. But if you try to do something else, anything else, everyone is like, whoa you’re crazy, who signed off on this?”
He didn’t understand, I don’t think. Maybe I didn’t say it right, he moved on: “Well, let’s talk about how the heartbeat law works, then, and what happened after it went into effect about a year and a half ago. In your state, abortion is now illegal after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, roughly 6 weeks—”
“Embryonic cardiac activity. No such thing as a 6-week-old fetus, we’re not fetuses till week 11. Anyway 6 weeks is 2 weeks. They start the clock on the first day of your last period. So before you were pregnant at all. Like, the first 2 weeks of your so-called pregnancy you weren’t pregnant. So let’s say you ovulate—you like generally, Mike—around day 14. So that’s when you get pregnant, 2 weeks into your pregnancy, by their rules. Then sometime after day 28—and this is a picture-perfect storybook period for fairytale princesses—sometime after day 28 (but it could be day 30, 32, 34, whatever) you’d expect day 1 of your cycle, meaning blood. So you wait. No blood. You wait a couple more days, no big deal. Then you’re like hmm. But at that point you have about 1 week left in which to buy a test, take it, make an appointment, get time off work, get yourself to the clinic, confirm yep, then get the abortion. If there’s a 3-day waiting period on the procedure, that could blow your chances right there. And even a 1-day waiting period means more appointments booked up at the clinic, which means it’s harder to schedule things, trust me. And lots of people don’t get their period super regular anyway, and lots of people spot when they’re pregnant, there’s still a little blood—so they might be like, great, fantastic, I can stop worrying about that sloppy withdrawal with Mike the other Friday. Point is, no one should talk about 6 weeks. It makes it sound like, oh, you could still buy and wear and return a pantsuit in that amount of time. Nope. It’s not like that. What you should be wondering is, what is it like?”
He was upset about the name thing. Just like Mike.
“Don’t take it personal, for context my phone is full of numbers without names and those are guys I’ve actually slept with.”
