red slider turtles and levonorgestrel
Wednesday 9 June 2004 | I like a cookie
Newly returned from my Planned Parenthood appointment, I am fairly bursting with love for my fellow woman and her reproductive health rights, ready to phone my senator, ready to march on Washington, ready to, to, to do—okay I don’t quite know what, but something. Become a union organizer maybe. There it’s been all this time, this little shabby white-brick clinic in my hometown offering the services of angels all along and I didn’t know what was behind its unassuming tinted windows, its modest sign reading simply “Community Health Services.” I felt awash with affection for the Hispanic receptionist and the white girl probably ten years younger than me who took my urine and blood and the solid short matter-of-fact Texan nurse named Donna who did my Pap smear and lectured me about folic acid and gave me three months’ worth of tricylic pills in a paper bag along with a dozen rainbow-colored condoms. I even beamed beneficiently on the paperwork, the horrible standardized many-times photocopied and almost illegible paperwork, because it asked me blunt questions like, “Have your partners been primarily male/female/both?” and “Is your predominant sexual practice intercourse/oral/anal/other/none?” In my hometown—my miserable little cramped repressed hometown, a place I associate with being silenced and invisible, to be asked such questions, openly—I’m sure none of the other people in the waiting room understood why I was so jubilant, sitting over there in the corner with the clipboard and the ballpoint pen and the privacy act forms.I’d already started experiencing an atypical (because premenstrual) joy today, as this morning I charged up my cellphone and found I had a message from N. Last night the phone had run down and hung up on us, and he’d apparently had a closure moment of saying goodnight to my voicemail. He also announced that he was going to call me tonight, “just because,” he said defensively, “I can, and I don’t care if you think it’s too soon, so there, and I miss you.” I saved the message, a huge ridiculous grin on my face.
Then, I randomly decided to call the Librarian in his library, because he’s sent me three emails and I’ve not answered any of them on account of I’m too petulant and depressed about not getting to go back to NM and see him and write the second part of the manuscript together this weekend. Hello this is L. may I help you, he says, all in a phrase. Hello yourself it’s me and sure you can try, I reply in similar breathless fashion. We both start laughing and go on to have an absolutely brilliant 45-minute conversation. I don’t know if I can condense it, only that he’s impossibly dear to me and was totally stand-up and attentive and warm and helpful and consoling and provocative and I’m so glad he’s over, if he is over, and I certainly hope he’s over, all his judgment of and misplaced contempt for me. He admits that he misses me and keeps looking for my little red car, “not,” he says dolefully, “that I have any right to expect to see it, or any reason for wanting to so badly.”
We admitted to each other that we were both looking forward to this weekend in a most sickening fashion, and that it’s therefore probably just as well we don’t get to have it. I told him all about Maman and being homesick. Finally, he hypothesized that things are completely over between me and the M., but conjectures that I’ll hook up with the N. in some kind of serious permanent fashion. All of this rapid unsolicited speculation on his part alarmed and puzzled me until I decided that, in true patriarchal Librarian fashion, he’s trying to reassign me to another male as hastily as possible, because he thinks I won’t continue invading his mental pantry then. It was nonetheless a really lovely talk—he was immediately present, as though he’d been expecting my call, and had already thought of all the things he wanted to say. I like him too much right now.
The nearsighted nurse saw my prior history of depression, and asked if I was having any trouble since being separated from my husband. I was silent for a moment before saying, You know what, I’m okay. I’ve got really good friends right now. And it was true and I gave thanks in my heart for them all.
Then the third joy-inducing event occurred later as I was on my way to the clinic. I was in the little red car about a hundred yards outside my parents’ gate when I stopped because a large turtle was strolling down the middle of the gravel road. I put the hazard lights on and went to coerce it into choosing one verge or the other. It was a mature red-eared slider, not too shy—every time I’d try to pick it up, it would duck inside its shell deceptively but then make a dash for it just as I got close. Finally I realized which direction it wanted to head (west, toward my parents’ place) and thus was able to herd it successfully thither. Feeling ridiculously happy as I headed to town listening to Ani’s most depressing vitriolic definitive personal-is-political magnum opus, “serpentine,” which, like the Moritat, will now always make me think of the Film Critic. And that knife you stuck in my back is still there / it pinches a little when I sigh…and I feel that’s still true, the rusty messerspritz won’t ever be gone—but maybe there was a reason I had that experience, and I just don’t know what it is yet. And maybe I’ll stop thinking, someday he’ll miss me and he’ll be sorry and he’ll try to contact me again—maybe I can…maybe—you know—oh, hell.
In one of our last communiqués, I referred to him as a North Carolinian; and this minor error haunts me.
In the clinic, there was a poster commemmorating [that seems to have too many Ms but I can’t work out where the extra one is] the thirtieth anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, and I got all verklempt over that too. My life is what it is, and the lives of so many women and men are what they are, because Sarah Weddington argued a case all the way to the Supreme Court and won it there in 1973. If Bush is reelected, as he almost certainly will be because 1) John Kerry is clinically dead, 2) Ashcroft will stage another terrorist attack, and 3) the election will be rigged anyway, then his lame-duck we-can-do-whatever-the-hell-we-want administration will do everything in their power to overturn it, once they’ve drilled the Arctic into Swiss cheese that is, and this is something far graver than replacing Hamilton’s likeness with that of Reagan on the $10 bill. Oh girlfriends we going to have a fight on our hands.
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