became the reason the public needed to put me in here. Though, deep down, I’m fairly certain nobody truly believed any of it. When I told Stewart Harris of my creative role as press secretary for the prosecution, he quickly got a gag order until the trial was over. By the time it was, I didn’t care enough to answer the question of “why” to the remaining press who were actually interested enough in my life to even cover the story for local periodicals with circulations of less than one thousand.
When you try to find the answer and explanation for a law, a scientific discovery, a tumor, and you can’t identify its reasons, then you just cut it out. Surgically remove anything potentially cantankerous. Cauterize society around it so that we’ll never know the real answer.
For example, two months after I moved to Philadelphia and began my freshman year of college, my first semester was cut short by an emergency abortion and partial hysterectomy. I was in Van Pelt Library gathering some books for a paper I was writing on the French Revolution when I fell down into a crumpled ball. A quiet librarian found me in the stacks (somewhere in the
N
s of History) and took me to the overpopulated waiting room of the emergency room at HUP. I really can’t tell you much else, other than the fact that I left a nasty pool of blood in that spot in the library, and I’m told you can still see a stain.
By the end of the week, I was no longer able to have children. Evidently, the child that Andy and I had conceived three months earlier was growing in my overrun uterus. A handful of fibroids had also decided to take up residence and refused to share the space. The child we conceived had, no sooner than it developed a heartbeat, lost thatheartbeat in the
N
s of the library and then later was cleaned out at the HUP Center for Women’s Health with another two letters I grew to hate. It would almost have been predestined had the miscarriage brought me to my feet in the
D
s and
E
s of History. That way, when people trace my life history back to this point in time, they could look at books about the Diaspora, Evolution, or Ethiopia instead of Napoleon or Nefertiti or even an edited survey of North Korea.
People always look at that moment in my life as the colorful influence that painted the following five canvassed years. The whispers, the articles, the prosecution’s theory, the voices that sit above my cell like poisonous gas.
Can I have children? Can’t I have children? Did I blame men forever? Do I blame myself? Whose fault is it? Were the doctors to blame? Did they need to remove her uterus? Maybe she could still have had children if she tried harder. If she wanted it more. If she wanted it badly enough. Really, can she not have children anymore? Really? Did Sarah know about it?
The prosecution dubbed it the Van Pelt Incident. The origin of my downward spiral, the egg to my angry chicken … you see where I’m going. But the truth is, it was simply the worst physical pain I’d ever experienced. Nothing more.
After the Van Pelt Incident, I spent four days in the hospital and was visited by only one person—the librarian who stumbled upon me in the stacks that day. She hand-delivered the book I was researching at the time so I could finish my report on the French Revolution, and also brought me a book on nuclear energy from the
N
section that no longer had any use to the library. I finished the history paper but decided not to turn it in. I remained a student at Penn until the end of the semester but didn’t return after the Christmas break.
The bottom line is that I’ve never sweated through another night worrying I might be bringing a little Noa into the world. Most important, no matter what they say, I’ve never really cared.
Besides, I know that’s what Oliver’s really doing here. He’s another paid marionette trying to get an answer to Mama Marlene so she can get that interminable “why” out of her system and
When you try to find the answer and explanation for a law, a scientific discovery, a tumor, and you can’t identify its reasons, then you just cut it out. Surgically remove anything potentially cantankerous. Cauterize society around it so that we’ll never know the real answer.
For example, two months after I moved to Philadelphia and began my freshman year of college, my first semester was cut short by an emergency abortion and partial hysterectomy. I was in Van Pelt Library gathering some books for a paper I was writing on the French Revolution when I fell down into a crumpled ball. A quiet librarian found me in the stacks (somewhere in the
N
s of History) and took me to the overpopulated waiting room of the emergency room at HUP. I really can’t tell you much else, other than the fact that I left a nasty pool of blood in that spot in the library, and I’m told you can still see a stain.
By the end of the week, I was no longer able to have children. Evidently, the child that Andy and I had conceived three months earlier was growing in my overrun uterus. A handful of fibroids had also decided to take up residence and refused to share the space. The child we conceived had, no sooner than it developed a heartbeat, lost thatheartbeat in the
N
s of the library and then later was cleaned out at the HUP Center for Women’s Health with another two letters I grew to hate. It would almost have been predestined had the miscarriage brought me to my feet in the
D
s and
E
s of History. That way, when people trace my life history back to this point in time, they could look at books about the Diaspora, Evolution, or Ethiopia instead of Napoleon or Nefertiti or even an edited survey of North Korea.
People always look at that moment in my life as the colorful influence that painted the following five canvassed years. The whispers, the articles, the prosecution’s theory, the voices that sit above my cell like poisonous gas.
Can I have children? Can’t I have children? Did I blame men forever? Do I blame myself? Whose fault is it? Were the doctors to blame? Did they need to remove her uterus? Maybe she could still have had children if she tried harder. If she wanted it more. If she wanted it badly enough. Really, can she not have children anymore? Really? Did Sarah know about it?
The prosecution dubbed it the Van Pelt Incident. The origin of my downward spiral, the egg to my angry chicken … you see where I’m going. But the truth is, it was simply the worst physical pain I’d ever experienced. Nothing more.
After the Van Pelt Incident, I spent four days in the hospital and was visited by only one person—the librarian who stumbled upon me in the stacks that day. She hand-delivered the book I was researching at the time so I could finish my report on the French Revolution, and also brought me a book on nuclear energy from the
N
section that no longer had any use to the library. I finished the history paper but decided not to turn it in. I remained a student at Penn until the end of the semester but didn’t return after the Christmas break.
The bottom line is that I’ve never sweated through another night worrying I might be bringing a little Noa into the world. Most important, no matter what they say, I’ve never really cared.
Besides, I know that’s what Oliver’s really doing here. He’s another paid marionette trying to get an answer to Mama Marlene so she can get that interminable “why” out of her system and
Similar Books
