You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down_ Stories - Alice Walker [26]
Some of Italy was still in his voice. “It’s nothing, nothing,” he said. “A nice, pretty girl like you; in school like my own daughter, you didn’t need this trouble.”
“He’s nice,” she said to herself, walking to the subway on her way back to school. She lay down gingerly across a vacant seat, and passed out.
She hemorrhaged steadily for six weeks, and was not well again for a year.
But this was seven years later. An abortion law now made it possible to make an appointment at a clinic, and for seventy-five dollars a safe, quick, painless abortion was yours.
Imani had once lived in New York, in the Village, not five blocks from where the abortion clinic was. It was also near the Margaret Sanger clinic, where she had received her very first diaphragm, with utter gratitude and amazement that someone apparently understood and actually cared about young women as alone and ignorant as she. In fact, as she walked up the block, with its modern office buildings side by side with older, more elegant brownstones, she felt how close she was still to that earlier self. Still not in control of her sensuality, and only through violence and with money (for the flight, for the operation itself) in control of her body.
She found that abortion had entered the age of the assembly line. Grateful for the lack of distinction between herself and the other women—all colors, ages, states of misery or nervousness—she was less happy to notice, once the doctor started to insert the catheter, that the anesthesia she had been given was insufficient. But assembly lines don’t stop because the product on them has a complaint. Her doctor whistled, and assured her she was all right, and carried the procedure through to the horrific end. Imani fainted some seconds before that.
They laid her out in a peaceful room full of cheerful colors. Primary colors: yellow, red, blue. When she revived she had the feeling of being in a nursery. She had a pressing need to urinate.
A nurse, kindly, white-haired and with firm hands, helped her to the toilet. Imani saw herself in the mirror over the sink and was alarmed. She was literally gray, as if all her blood had leaked out.
“Don’t worry about how you look,” said the nurse. “Rest a bit here and take it easy when you get back home. You’ll be fine in a week or so.”
She could not imagine being fine again. Somewhere her child—she never dodged into the language of “fetuses” and “amorphous growths”—was being flushed down a sewer. Gone all her or his chances to see the sunlight, savor a fig.
“Well,” she said to this child, “it was you or me, Kiddo, and I chose me.”
There were people who thought she had no right to choose herself, but Imani knew better than to think of those people now.
It was a bright, hot Saturday when she returned.
Clarence and Clarice picked her up at the airport. They had brought flowers from Imani’s garden, and Clarice presented them with a stout-hearted hug. Once in her mother’s lap she rested content all the way home, sucking her thumb, stroking her nose with the forefinger of the same hand, and kneading a corner of her blanket with the three fingers that were left.
“How did it go?” asked Clarence.
“It went,” said Imani.
There was no way to explain abortion to a man. She thought castration might be an apt analogy, but most men, perhaps all, would insist this could not possibly be true.
“The anesthesia failed,” she said. “I thought I’d never faint in time to keep from screaming and leaping off the table.”
Clarence paled. He hated the thought of pain, any kind of violence. He could not endure it; it made him physically ill. This was one of the reasons he was a pacifist, another reason she admired him.
She knew he wanted her to stop talking. But she continued in a flat, deliberate voice.
“All the blood seemed to run out of me. The tendons in my legs felt cut. I was gray.”
He reached for her hand. Held it. Squeezed.
“But,” she