Living Out Loud

  It would be some feat to come up with a standard of obscenity that reflects my experiences; those of my mother, who was as perturbed by the fleeting flash of breasts as she was by the blood in the Psycho shower scene, and those of my grandmother, who lived through the enormous brouhaha over the “damn” in the last scene of Gone With the Wind. That’s why it’s so terrific that, until now, we have set such standards for ourselves. Those who make movies of people beating up other people should be arrested as an accessory to assault. That’s not a crime of sex, but a crime of violence. Meanwhile, I would like to maintain the obscenity standards set so well by my mother and me that afternoon in our living room. She exercised her personal right to throw a dirty book at the wall, and I exercised my personal right to read it and discover that it was not really dirty at all. It worked just fine then, and it will work just fine now.

  HOMELESS

  Her name was Ann, and we met in the Port Authority Bus Terminal several Januarys ago. I was doing a story on homeless people. She said I was wasting my time talking to her; she was just passing through, although she’d been passing through for more than two weeks. To prove to me that this was true, she rummaged through a tote bag and a manila envelope and finally unfolded a sheet of typing paper and brought out her photographs.

  They were not pictures of family, or friends, or even a dog or cat, its eyes brown-red in the flashbulb’s light. They were pictures of a house. It was like a thousand houses in a hundred towns, not suburb, not city, but somewhere in between, with aluminum siding and a chain-link fence, a narrow driveway running up to a one-car garage and a patch of backyard. The house was yellow. I looked on the back for a date or a name, but neither was there. There was no need for discussion. I knew what she was trying to tell me, for it was something I had often felt. She was not adrift, alone, anonymous, although her bags and her raincoat with the grime shadowing its creases had made me believe she was. She had a house, or at least once upon a time had had one. Inside were curtains, a couch, a stove, potholders. You are where you live. She was somebody.

  I’ve never been very good at looking at the big picture, taking the global view, and I’ve always been a person with an overactive sense of place, the legacy of an Irish grandfather. So it is natural that the thing that seems most wrong with the world to me right now is that there are so many people with no homes. I’m not simply talking about shelter from the elements, or three square meals a day or a mailing address to which the welfare people can send the check—although I know that all these are important for survival. I’m talking about a home, about precisely those kinds of feelings that have wound up in cross-stitch and French knots on samplers over the years.

  Home is where the heart is. There’s no place like it. I love my home with a ferocity totally out of proportion to its appearance or location. I love dumb things about it: the hot-water heater, the plastic rack you drain dishes in, the roof over my head, which occasionally leaks. And yet it is precisely those dumb things that make it what it is—a place of certainty, stability, predictability, privacy, for me and for my family. It is where I live. What more can you say about a place than that? That is everything.

  Yet it is something that we have been edging away from gradually during my lifetime and the lifetimes of my parents and grandparents. There was a time when where you lived often was where you worked and where you grew the food you ate and even where you were buried. When that era passed, where you lived at least was where your parents had lived and where you would live with your children when you became enfeebled. Then, suddenly, where you lived was where you lived for three years, until you could move on to something else and something else again.

  And so we have come to something else again, to children who do not understand what it means to go to their rooms because they have never had a room, to men and women whose fantasy is a wall they can paint a color of their own choosing, to old people reduced to sitting on molded plastic chairs, their skin blue-white in the lights of a bus station, who pull pictures of houses out of their bags. Homes have stopped being homes. Now they are real estate.

  People find it curious that those without homes would rather sleep sitting up on benches or huddled in doorways than go to shelters. Certainly some prefer to do so because they are emotionally ill, because they have been locked in before and they are damned if they will be locked in again. Others are afraid of the violence and trouble they may find there. But some seem to want something that is not available in shelters, and they will not compromise, not for a cot, or oatmeal, or a shower with special soap that kills the bugs. “One room,” a woman with a baby who was sleeping on her sister’s floor, once told me, “painted blue.” That was the crux of it; not size or location, but pride of ownership. Painted blue.

  This is a difficult problem, and some wise and compassionate people are working hard at it. But in the main I think we work around it, just as we walk around it when it is lying on the sidewalk or sitting in the bus terminal—the problem, that is. It has been customary to take people’s pain and lessen our own participation in it by turning it into an issue, not a collection of human beings. We turn an adjective into a noun: the poor, not poor people; the homeless, not Ann or the man who lives in the box or the woman who sleeps on the subway grate.

  Sometimes I think we would be better off if we forgot about the broad strokes and concentrated on the details. Here is a woman without a bureau. There is a man with no mirror, no wall to hang it on. They are not the homeless. They are people who have no homes. No drawer that holds the spoons. No window to look out upon the world. My God. That is everything.

  CONDOMS

  Like many American women, I know a good bit more than I’d like to about birth control, much of it garnered from books, magazines, telephone calls to friends, and raunchy conversations at bridal showers. I remember in high school when a classmate began taking The Pill and suddenly started to look like a balloon at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. I remember when the women in my college dormitory gritted their teeth and had a plastic article that looked as if it had been made by Mattel placed inside their bodies. And I remember an absolutely uproarious all-female brunch where a friend described her first experience with a contraceptive device, which shot out of a bathroom window into the college quadrangle. She never retrieved it. I wouldn’t have, either.

  The only form of birth control none of us talked about much was the condom, because precious few of us had ever used or seen one, except at fraternity house water balloon fights. The most we had heard a man say on the subject of birth control of any kind was, “You took care of this, right?”

  Condoms are of national interest now because they might slow the spread of AIDS, and while I think this is all to the good, something about it makes me furious. I know that the threat of death is more serious than pain, pelvic disease, or infertility, but I really wish someone had thought about a campaign for condoms fifteen years ago.

  Perhaps the posters could have carried a picture of the Dalkon Shield. It’s a horrible-looking thing, that I.U.D., like one of those oversize pictures of a tick, with its fat round body and splayed plastic legs. But it’s even more horrible to talk to women who used it and who weep as they speak, who have had ectopic pregnancies that blew their Fallopian tubes apart or pelvic disease that left them with scar tissue. If we knew then what we know now, perhaps they’d be having children instead of surgery. If we knew then what we know now, perhaps there would have been condom commercials encouraging men to “give the women you love a break—use a condom.” But when we were becoming sexually active, condoms were a joke, and the joke was on us. Most of the time, women had sole responsibility for birth control.

  Now, as then, some men do not use condoms because they are “sort of a drag,” as one man told me (as opposed to birth control for women, which has sometimes led to a stroke or sterility). Perhaps this is changing, since dying of AIDS is obviously much more of a drag than using a condom. But some heterosexual men and women still see
m more interested in denial than protection, much less male contraception.

  Recently, I talked to the doctor who runs the health services office for a women’s college. She said that many students were asking the clinic for condoms. I also talked to students, and said I was pleased that, while protecting their lives, they were also persuading men to participate in birth control. I was somehow not surprised when this statement turned out to be wrong. Some of the women had gotten condoms and then stashed them in their underwear drawer. And there they sat, right next to the little wheel of pills or the plastic diaphragm case. These women were confident enough in their relationships to sleep with their boyfriends, confident enough to assume their boyfriends did not have AIDS, but not confident enough to ask those boyfriends to do something they might not want to do. The women, too, had heard that condoms were sort of a drag.

  I’ve never met a woman who exactly loved her method of birth control, but that doesn’t seem to have inhibited women from using it. The bottom line has always been that this is because we are the ones who get pregnant, which is true. But pregnancy and birth and all they entail have changed in the past fifteen years. We have seen men go to court to halt abortions and adoptions, insisting that fathers are just as important as mothers. We have seen the presence of fathers in the delivery room change from a curiosity to a commonplace. When the pregnancy test is positive, we even say that “we are pregnant.”

  But while society has come to expect participatory fathers, it does not expect participatory birth control. Women who take the pill don’t blow up like a balloon the way they once did, nor can women purchase an I.U.D. in the United States, because of the sheer number of lawsuits brought against their manufacturers. But one thing hasn’t changed: women still take care of birth control.

  Women take care of business. That’s why condom manufacturers are marketing directly to us now, even though most of the American men who have contracted AIDS don’t even sleep with women. We took care of business when we were trying to inhibit conception. I suppose everyone assumes that we’ll take care of business when it’s time to inhibit death, too. I suppose everyone is right. It still makes me angry. The manufacturer’s insert in a package of birth-control pills says you should take them under a doctor’s supervision: “They can be associated with serious side effects, which may be fatal,” the insert says, including blood clots in the lungs and brain, liver tumors, high blood pressure, gall-bladder disease. None of those are associated with condom use.

  SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT ABORTION

  It was always the look on their faces that told me first. I was the freshman dormitory counselor and they were the freshmen at a women’s college where everyone was smart. One of them would come into my room, a golden girl, a valedictorian, an 800 verbal score on the S.A.T.’s, and her eyes would be empty, seeing only a busted future, the devastation of her life as she knew it. She had failed biology, messed up the math; she was pregnant.

  That was when I became pro-choice.

  It was the look in his eyes that I will always remember, too. They were as black as the bottom of a well, and in them for a few minutes I thought I saw myself the way I had always wished to be—clear, simple, elemental, at peace. My child looked at me and I looked back at him in the delivery room, and I realized that out of a sea of infinite possibilities it had come down to this: a specific person, born on the hottest day of the year, conceived on a Christmas Eve, made by his father and me miraculously from scratch.

  Once I believed that there was a little blob of formless protoplasm in there and a gynecologist went after it with a surgical instrument, and that was that. Then I got pregnant myself—eagerly, intentionally, by the right man, at the right time—and I began to doubt. My abdomen still flat, my stomach roiling with morning sickness, I felt not that I had protoplasm inside, but, instead, a complete human being in miniature to whom I could talk, sing, make promises. Neither of these views was accurate; instead, I think, the reality is something in the middle. And that is where I find myself now, in the middle—hating the idea of abortions, hating the idea of having them outlawed.

  For I know it is the right thing in some times and places. I remember sitting in a shabby clinic far uptown with one of those freshmen, only three months after the Supreme Court had made what we were doing possible, and watching with wonder as the lovely first love she had had with a nice boy unraveled over the space of an hour as they waited for her to be called, degenerated into sniping and silences. I remember a year or two later seeing them pass on campus and not even acknowledge each other because their conjoining had caused them so much pain, and I shuddered to think of them married, with a small psyche in their unready and unwilling hands.

  I’ve met fourteen-year-olds who were pregnant and said they could not have abortions because of their religion, and I see in their eyes the shadows of twenty-two-year-olds I’ve talked to who lost their kids to foster care because they hit them or used drugs or simply had no money for food and shelter. I read not long ago about a teenager who said she meant to have an abortion but she spent the money on clothes instead: now she has a baby who turns out to be a lot more trouble than a toy. The people who hand out those execrable little pictures of dismembered fetuses at abortion clinics seem to forget the extraordinary pain children may endure after they are born when they are unwanted, even hated, or simply tolerated.

  I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former. That is what the fetus is to me, the almost living. These questions began to plague me—and, I’ve discovered, a good many other women—after I became pregnant. But they became even more acute after I had my second child, mainly because he is so different from his brother. On two random nights eighteen months apart the same two people managed to conceive, and on one occasion the tumult within turned itself into a curly-haired brunet with merry black eyes who walked and talked late and loved the whole world, and on another it became a blond with hazel Asian eyes and a pug nose who tried to conquer the world almost as soon as he entered it.

  If we were to have an abortion next time for some reason or another, which infinite possibility becomes, not a reality, but a nullity? The girl with the blue eyes? The improbable redhead? The natural athlete? The thinker? My husband, ever at the heart of the matter, put it another way. Knowing he is finding two children somewhat more overwhelming than he expected, I asked if he would want me to have an abortion if I accidentally became pregnant again right away. “And waste a perfectly good human being?” he said.

  Coming to this quandary has been difficult for me. In fact, I believe the issue of abortion is difficult for all thoughtful people. I don’t know anyone who has had an abortion who has been casual about it. If there is one thing I find intolerable about most of the so-called right-to-lifers, it is that they try to portray abortion rights as something that feminists thought up on a slow Saturday over a light lunch. That is nonsense. I also know that some people who support abortion rights are most comfortable with a monolithic position because it seems the strongest front against the smug and sometimes violent opposition.

  But I don’t feel all one way about abortion anymore, and I don’t think it serves a just cause to pretend that many of us do. For years I believed that a woman’s right to choose was absolute, but now I wonder. Do I, with a stable home and marriage and sufficient stamina and money, have the freedom to choose abortion because a pregnancy is inconvenient just now? Legally I do have the right; legally I want always to have that right. It is the morality of exercising it under those circumstances that makes me wonder.

  Technology has foiled us. The second trimester has become a time of resurrection; a fetus at six months can be one woman’s late abortion, another’s premature, viable child. Photographers now have film of embryos the size of a grape, oddly human, flexing their fingers, sucking their thumbs. Women have amniocentisis to find out whether they are carrying a child with birth defects that they may choose
to abort. Before the procedure, they must have a sonogram, one of those fuzzy black-and-white photos like a love song heard through static on the radio, which shows someone is in there.

  I have taped on my VCR a public television program in which somehow, inexplicably, a film is shown of a fetus in utero scratching its face, seemingly putting up a tiny hand to shield itself from the camera’s eye. It would make a potent weapon in the arsenal of the antiabortionists. I grow sentimental about it as it floats in the salt water, part fish, part human being. It is almost living, but not quite. It has almost turned my heart around, but not quite turned my head.

  GETTING INVOLVED

  It was a summer night when I heard the running footsteps behind me. I ran, too, and slipped into the hallway of my building, a locked door, a pane of glass insulating me from the outside. The woman was only a few steps behind me. Her face on the other side of the glass was black with mascara mixed with tears. She said someone had tried to rape her, and that she thought he was following close behind.

  It occurred to me afterward that everyone should be allowed more than a minute to suddenly discover what sort of person they are. That was all it took for me to play out the possibilities: a gang of thieves who used a seemingly distraught woman as their entrée, an unbalanced street person who would turn on me in the safe confinement of my own home. Or a rape victim.