Violation: Collected Essays - Sallie Tisdale

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let us go.

      My mother and my glacial aunt tentatively asked me to quit school and stay with her. I refused. I held back, and my grandmother let go. When the furniture was divided, my mother kept her bed; it’s where I sleep now when I visit them.

      All my cross-grained, melancholy generations have gently collided with each other, as generations do, like bottles of milk rattling along, sliding up the track to jostle other bottles along. We wait our turn. My mother’s father is dead, her mother is dead, my father’s father and three stepfathers are dead. And between us my brother and sister and I have seven children jockeying for position by the fireplace, playing our old games. This Christmas my mother watches her grandchildren and her television from a hospital bed, where the tree used to go. She is dying of cancer, the same cancer that killed her mother.

      Each year around my birthday the little ornamental cherry tree in front of her house bursts into bloom, luxuriant and top-heavy. I used to sit in its lap of low branches; now I pick blossoms off the top. The bubbling frog creek is a dry gully; the noisy park clean and quiet. I see strange faces in the streets, new shapes, house-peaks along empty hills. It is time to think things through, to follow the thread where it enters the knot until I find its exit. Time now to confess my tenuous hold on adulthood before I am orphaned in turn.

      She has filled the drawers of my old dresser with her wedding albums and old baby pictures and clippings of my brother’s high school football games, neatly scissored. She takes with her where she goes a voice I’ve heard from birth, a step, a chime, the smoky car. A door closes, irrevocably, on rooms cluttered in certain ways by her passage, on a dusty piano, sun-dried towels, and certain plays of light on certain trees. Chipped crystal stays, without her use, and the dark bedroom and high dark bed, without her smell. I begin a definition of love made fundamentally of the familiar. These things and these places, the way a shadow casts in August and seamstress hands and the cool wet smell of the grass in the early morning, are not things I’ve used much for years. I have been inattentive in my turn and made another family, holding hers in reserve, available. She is dying and sad and scared to die, and takes with her the remnants and desires of my life till now. She lets go and I hold back, watching her grow weak and frail, disconcertingly familiar as she disappears from sight.

      She was never the mother I wanted her to be. We have never chattered over coffee, grown girlish together while my daughter watched. For a long time I tried to change her, reproachful, and failed, not seeing how she had tried to change me long ago. She won’t change now; she is merely herself. So is my father, blustering and mad. He meticulously catalogs videotapes of old movies, John Wayne and Errol Flynn, their favorites, to watch alone half-asleep in the evenings after she dies. My silent brother and my shrill, half-panicked sister won’t change, not much, and neither will I. We are the gifts we were given. I sit by her bed in sadness, an unspoken summing-up held, like so much else, back. These are the people I am accompanied by, my escorts. We dance attendance on each other, as families do, and little else. There is little else to do.

      And I go home, wherever it is, and confront a son resentful of my tight rein. He demands a faster adulthood, receiving power in unexpected shifts and abrupt shufflings. I grab the leash and run the other way. He is hurt by my mother’s coming extinction, blustering like my father, his grandfather, her husband. I grow dizzy in the sticky threads, resistance against the spin. He is letting go of me and I am holding back, for I know he has no idea, no possible idea of all the many surprises still in store.

      Zyzzyva, Winter 1986–87

       For more than thirty years I’ve been writing about the way family wraps around our lives. There is no escaping it, even when we escape—one way or another, we are made of it. This was one in a series of essays I wrote about the sticky threads woven around us by both parents and children—a web we create, long for, celebrate, and hate.

       Fetus Dreams

      WE DO ABORTIONS HERE; THAT IS ALL WE DO. THERE ARE weary, grim moments when I think I cannot bear another basin of bloody remains, utter another kind phrase of reassurance. So I leave the procedure room in the back and reach for a new chart. Soon I am talking to an eighteen-year-old woman pregnant for the fourth time. I push up her sleeve to check her blood pressure and find row upon row of needle marks, neat and parallel and discolored. She has been so hungry for her drug for so long that she has taken to using the loose skin of her upper arms; her elbows are already a permanent ruin of bruises. She is surprised to find herself nearly four months pregnant. I suspect she is often surprised, in a mild way, by the blows she is dealt. I prepare myself for another basin, another brief and chafing loss.

      “How can you stand it?” Even the clients ask. They see the machine, the strange instruments, the blood, the final stroke that wipes away the promise of pregnancy. Sometimes I see that too: I watch a woman’s swollen abdomen sink to softness in a few stuttering moments and my own belly flip-flops with sorrow. But all it takes for me to catch my breath is another interview, one more story that sounds so much like the last one. There is a numbing sameness lurking in this job: the same questions, the same answers, even the same trembling tone in the voices. The worst is the sameness of human failure, of inadequacy in the face of each day’s dull demands.

      In describing this work, I find it difficult to explain how much I enjoy it most of the time. We laugh a lot here, as friends and as professional peers. It’s nice to be with women all day. I like the sudden, transient bonds I forge with some clients: moments when I am in my strength, remembering weakness, and a woman in weakness reaches out for my strength. What I offer is not power, but solidness, offered almost eagerly. Certain clients waken in me every tender urge I have—others make me wince and bite my tongue. Both challenge me to find a balance. It is a sweet brutality we practice here, a stark and loving dispassion.

      I look at abortion as if I am standing on a cliff with a telescope, gazing at some great vista. I can sweep the horizon with both eyes, survey the scene in all its distance and size. Or I can put my eye to the lens and focus on the small details, suddenly so close. In abortion the absolute must always be tempered by the contextual, because both are real, both valid, both hard. How can we do this? How can we refuse? Each abortion is a measure of our failure to protect, to nourish our own. Each basin I empty is a promise—but a promise broken a long time ago.

      I grew up on the great promise of birth control. Like many women my age, I took the pill as soon as I was sexually active. To risk pregnancy when it was so easy to avoid seemed stupid, and my contraceptive success, as it were, was part of the promise of social enlightenment. But birth control fails, far more frequently than laboratory trials predict. Many of our clients take the pill; its failure to protect them is a shocking realization. We have clients who have been sterilized, whose husbands have had vasectomies; each one is a statistical misfit, fine print come to life. The anger and shame of these women I hold in one hand, and the basin in the other. The distance between the two, the length I pace and try to measure, is the size of an abortion.

      THE PROCEDURE IS disarmingly simple. Women are surprised, as though the mystery of conception, a dark and hidden genesis, requires an elaborate finale. In the first trimester of pregnancy, it’s a mere few minutes of vacuuming, a neat tidying up. I give a woman a small yellow Valium, and when it has begun to relax her, I lead her into the back, into bareness, the stirrups. The doctor reaches in her, opening the narrow tunnel to the uterus with a succession of slim, smooth bars of steel. He inserts a plastic tube and hooks it to a hose on the machine. The woman is framed against white paper that crackles as she moves, the light bright in her eyes. Then the machine rumbles low and loud in the small windowless room; the doctor moves the tube back and forth with an efficient rhythm, and the long rail of it fills with blood that spurts and stumbles along into a jar. He is usually finished in a few minutes. They are long minutes for the woman; her uterus frequently reacts to its abrupt emptying with a powerful, unceasing cramp, which cuts off the blood vessels and enfolds the irritated, bleeding tissue.

      I am learning to recognize the shadows that cross the faces of the women I hold. While the doctor works between her spread legs, the paper drape hiding his intent expression, I stand beside the table. I hold the woman’s hands in mine, resting them just below her ribs. I watch her eyes,

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