A Termination, page 1
Also by Honor Moore:
Our Revolution
The Bishop’s Daughter
Red Shoes (poems)
Darling (poems)
The White Blackbird
Memoir (poems)
Mourning Pictures (play in poems)
Honor Moore
A TERMINATION
A PUBLIC SPACE BOOKS
NEW YORK
A Public Space Books
PO Box B
New York, NY 10159
Copyright ©2024 by Honor Moore
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2024
A Public Space gratefully acknowledges the support of the New York State Council on the Arts and the individuals, foundations, and corporations whose contributions have helped to make this book possible.
The names and identifying characteristics of some of the individuals appearing in the book have been changed to protect their privacy.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024932803
ISBN: 9798985976922
eISBN: 9798985976939
www.apublicspace.org
987654321
For my nieces, my nephews, and my students
A few things I wanted you to know
I Did Not Tell
Not my lover, not my parents, and they said I couldn’t tell a friend. I remember my terror that the psychiatrist would not believe me. I’m sure I cried. I’m sure I told him I did not want to marry the father and was certain I could not care for a child. All of this complicated further because I’d unwillingly had sex with a man other than my lover, so I never knew who the father was and there was no way to find out. My lover was one of my professors; in those days, there was no taint of the criminal in such a relationship, nor were they unusual. You could not have persuaded me then that what I felt was not love but a desire to be him, to seize his talent for myself.
But I got pregnant, which I denied until the test came back. I think I must already have known what the results would be when I started to feel oddly happy and found myself standing in the middle of the room, sun pouring through the window, my hands across my belly. The psychiatrist wrote a letter and an obstetrician performed my abortion in a hospital. The month was April, the year 1969.
I
I Stand in the Middle of the Room
I was twenty-three and my hair was long, almost to my waist. A movie camera would take in a lovely young woman. Why have I always been tormented by my weight? I have full breasts, and on this particular morning, they are sensitive to the touch. And perhaps suddenly larger. Did I already know I was pregnant?
I stand in the middle of the room and stroke my belly. I keep refining that image. I am standing in the sun, wearing a cream-colored, silky tunic, my hands are on my belly and I am thinking this: I am proud. Sun, son. I have always believed I would have had a son. Fifty-two years old by now, a physicist or a famous oncologist.
I am trying to picture walking into the hospital that morning. I see myself spin through glass doors, and what comes to me is something medieval—hair shorn, an outcast shamed for her sexual excess, sunlight permanently removed from planet Earth. I always get sad in April. The change of season? I remember no sympathy from my friends, who at the time were mostly young men, but it’s possible I never told them I was pregnant. I don’t think I knew, one of them said recently.
Standing in the sunny room, my hands on my belly. I still do that sometimes when I am overweight. Hands on the belly as a boast. This is my body, and I have made it.
It’s April again and I am sad: April is the cruellest month (T. S. Eliot, 1922). Apocalypse within. Not until now do I identify that sadness. I’d thought love led to marriage, pregnancy, motherhood, happiness. The abortion disrupted that inevitability, but I was young and I paid no attention. Paying attention now, I would say the word sadness lacks dimension: freedom also, and the fear of being seen.
Seven years later, walking a path drifted with snow, I slip on hidden ice, and as I pull myself up, he calls to me from the porch of his studio: January, an artists’ colony. He was beautiful, his body, and my body’s response to what we did. He had a house on an island off the coast of Spain and that was where I imagined we would live. I would be barefoot and baking bread, our child wailing, the colors chalky blue and white. My body is smooth and open, my face its ideal, and he would make love to me whenever the child was sleeping. We have many children, went the dream, which gave way to an open sea. Decades later I would spend three weeks on a Greek island with a couple and their first child. Every day we would go to the beach, the baby on a striped blanket. How merciful the sun was on that island. My skin got dark that summer but never burned, and one evening I read my poems for them as the sun set through the windows, turning the room gold.
Thirty years after the slip on the ice, another winter, and there he is in the main hall of the same artists’ colony. He says hello, introduces me to the Russian painter he’s driven here for a residency. My usual ability to disguise discomfort deserts me, and I cannot summon more than hello. Right here, in the place where it happened. The pay phone in its wooden booth is still there; I remembered his voice in my ear, heated and desperate; he’d had to leave early and I stayed out the month, emptied out but young enough to assume this was forever, which of course it was not.
After that surprise encounter, he wrote me that my indifference that day had hurt him terribly. How could I snub him after what we had? I made some excuse, not able to remind him that he had gone back to his wife while I had left the man I lived with.
The phone booth was gone the next time I returned to the colony, along with the history carved and inked on the wooden interior—They all cheat on their wives, said the older woman poet—various phone numbers, graffiti. And the circle I’d inscribed in purple ink as we talked, over and over outlining the dime I needed to get the operator to charge the call. Don’t you understand, the psychiatrist said, that “Ten Cents a Dance” (Rodgers and Hart, 1930) is a song about prostitution?
I kept my blue Corvair in the multistory outdoor parking lot of the building where I lived. Did I drive myself to the hospital? No drugstore pregnancy tests yet, so I must have gone to the gynecologist, a balding older man who wore glasses, whose surname started with B, this detail from memory as I kept no journal. I’ve kept a journal only when I wanted to know and understand what was happening—my mother’s death, the era in my life when I returned to men after years of women lovers—but in New Haven at twenty-three, I didn’t want to know and understand. I didn’t believe in anything I was doing.
I was at drama school training to become an arts administrator. I had proved myself talented at it—summer productions directed by brilliant young men in a small theatre at Harvard, raves in the Boston papers, once even the New York Times, though of the young women who supervised and arranged, no mention. The solution was, I thought, graduate school. A degree called an MFA would make what I did glamorous.
There would soon be books praising the rebellion of our generation with titles like The Greening of America (Charles A. Reich, 1970), but they were all about the boys. What color green was a girl? (We didn’t yet call ourselves women.)
The building where I lived was on York Street, three blocks from the school. Across the street another concrete building housed a supermarket and a café called the Stone Balloon. Joni Mitchell sang there but I didn’t go hear her, too scared to be alone. I didn’t go hear Leonard Cohen either, that voice singing “Suzanne” (1967) on my new KLH stereo.
Memory now moves me back to college, to one of those parties we always had after opening nights. I’m a freshman living in a dorm. No marijuana yet, but we drank, alcohol purchased by those who were twenty-one. Then I see him—the word I am looking for meant capture or get his attention—I know Mimi would remember but she’s dead now. Would Edie remember? I had a scene with … A dark room, his smooth, pale face catching the light. Why was it that we found him so sexy? He would jump to his death from an apartment building soon after we graduated. Later, it occurred to me that he must have been gay. Lasting image, he’s very drunk, his smile radiant, a garland of grapes on his head. Dionysus.
Someone asks what I’m writing about. Autonomy, I answer, and my abortion, then choke back a surge of the old shame. I had one too, she says. I was not going to let my body take over, goddamn it.
Femaleness. All my life I have been clearing space for it. Or was it claustrophobia? You’re in a closed car, fighting to get out.
I try another approach, writing as if to my nieces. I hardly know what you think of me, your never-married aunt. You might recognize me at twenty-one, but only because there’s a family resemblance. I have just graduated from college and am staying in Cambridge for the summer to produce a season of plays. I feel an undertow, almost physical, pulling me back. Do you ever feel that way?
Three friends and I have rented a big apartment on Trowbridge Street. I have a secret boyfriend, secret because of the intensity of the sex we are having, my first multiple orgasms, secret because I suspect that the brilliant young men who write and direct do not want me stepping out.
Driving in downtown Boston in snarled traffic: Since then, I cling to it as a metaphor, me in traffic in a blue Corvair. I was finally alone. Important to understand the relief I felt. So much ruckus at home. So much to do at the theatre. So much noise. I am both relieved by solitude and terrified of it.
There were two men who might have made me pregnant. I remember one night drink
In a small house in Connecticut, a grand piano, a man playing Chopin. He always gets very drunk at his dinner parties. Jordan and Daisy, he says, addressing two of us on the cream-colored sofa (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925). Which am I? Neither. Rereading in my fifties, I find myself not in the two women but in Nick Carraway, the narrator. I participate, make jokes, reply, but like him, I hold myself at a distance.
I climb the stairs of the outdoor lot and get into my Corvair. I had not told my parents I was pregnant. Such a fuckup, almost willfully skipping days of birth control pills.
My mother and abortion come into the same frame only when she is advised, pregnant for the sixth time, to have an abortion herself, that her health may otherwise be in danger. She refuses. Each birth was a canto in the epic of her childbearing, and I remember the story of that one: she felt the head sliding out, got herself to the hospital and almost instantly gave birth. My confirmation to the Episcopal Church was the next day, and my mother was not there. I remember the weight of the bishop’s hands on my head, as she must always have remembered the solidity of my sister’s head emerging from between her legs.
I painted the white bookcase orange enamel and maybe the shelves black. I set its end against the wall so it extends into the room, a boundary between living room and dining room. My apartment in New Haven is the first place I lived by myself. I placed my light-blue Royal typewriter at one end and will sit there to write. My favorite color then was blue, but orange was edging in.
I also had an orange suit, smooth wool and the light-orange color of cantaloupe, with a long jacket I loved because it covered my shameful buttocks. What’s that behind you, my mother would say.
I want to stick to my subject, which is consciousness. When did I first smoke dope? Was I stoned when I invented my fallback future? When did we start talking about extending time, extending the duration of time. Consciousness and I think of looking at someone more intensely than usual.
If I’d had a son, would he have looked like one of my nephews? I think of him, turning slightly toward me. And into view comes a former student—it was as if he wanted me to be his lover. Can we have a cup of coffee? he said; I’d like to talk to you. Maybe that’s how I will come to have a son, in reincarnations. Usually, they are an age that would have them born close to 1969. Why didn’t you take him home? said my therapist more than once: a younger man I’d met in a café, the flirtatious waiter in the Indian restaurant two blocks from where I live. I wouldn’t do that, I said.
Diapers, and my mother trying to figure out a more efficient method—Pampers not yet in existence—dirty cloth diapers put in a drawstring bag to be picked up, a new batch delivered. Jab a safety pin first through one side of the diaper, then the other. Oh the softness of their skin: the smell of Desitin still makes me faint—it came in a tube like toothpaste; it signified clean, though the fragrance of baby excrement was not unpleasant.
The phone ringing, the doorbell ringing, a child shouting or weeping, the cleaning woman, the repairman, someone from the church. My mother spent her life distracted. A wave of noise slowing and fading out. I wanted quiet. When I managed to be alone, I was happy. An early quiet—one of the bathrooms in my grandmother’s enormous house, a very large tub with wide, silvery spouts, the soft sound of water rushing, then it’s full, the water aqua. You look out the window to green fields, the Guernsey cows with their rust-brown-and-white coats. I have a black-and-white snapshot of two of them in a field there, in a silver picture frame. In the distance, the dairy where milk and heavy cream were bottled, butter churned, cottage cheese cultured and strained.
I tell my grandmother about my apartment and ask her if she has an extra bed and she sends one, brass, from the governess’s bedroom. I ask her for a rug and she says, Go buy one you like and I’ll pay for it. I didn’t know where to go for a Persian rug like the ones she had, so I went to Greenwich Village and bought a Navajo one that was too small. I asked for a clock and she sent me an awful modern brass one. She didn’t know I was lonely for old and precious things.
One day in college, I decided to be happy. I woke up sad and looked in the mirror over the bureau and smiled at myself. Good morning. Good morning. I’d smile back at myself and then go to breakfast in the dorm. It was something I told friends about, a mirror trick.
Diet pills were my mother’s idea. She didn’t like what was happening to my body, breasts, bottom. Small orange pills and I’d have no appetite. My mother did not menstruate until the age of sixteen, was “flat chested” until she had children. It was she who wanted nine of us, eighty-one months of her body’s life. Big, small. Fat, thin. Would her body ever return to normal? A decade after her final child was born, she put herself on an early version of the Atkins diet—high protein, no carbohydrates. I have always associated rare hamburger with the cancer that killed her.
I keep the pills on top of the orange bookcase. I run out of them, and my mood plummets. I did not want to be estranged from how I really felt, I thought, so I went off of them cold turkey and told no one. For days, I felt so heavy I could hardly get up from a chair, so far down, I thought I would die. It was during about then that I lost the gold pin, textured and set with tiny sapphires and rubies, that my aunt, my godmother, had given me. I had worn it on the apricot suit with the long jacket.
Once, in my sixties, on a massage table I hallucinated myself within my mother. Her vagina had a narrow opening, its walls were dry and stiff, and I couldn’t get out. I believe that my skull was slightly distorted in shape at birth. You can see it still, the opening for my right eye slightly smaller than the left, the right side of my face slightly compressed. I think it contributed to the headaches.
It has always been that way, my father would say in a tender tone of voice. Your face has an asymmetry I like, said the older European woman photographer when I was in my forties.
It’s the summer I graduated from college. The large living room of a second-floor apartment on Mount Auburn Street. Empty coffee-stained paper cups and vodka bottles, stench of cigarette smoke. A classmate and I, both women, have arrived as arranged, expecting pages of the script, and he is making excuses. Tomorrow, he declares. The season will open with his translation of Aristophanes’s Peace. The year is 1967 and the draft is on, now thirty-five thousand recruits per month.
Often we’d pull him from his bed: Okay, okay, okay. Not vodka, I now remember, but rum and Coke. He drank too much, but he was the engine of our theatrical endeavors, redeemed by talent, excoriating wit, charisma, his status as a brilliant young man. He got sentimental like any drunk, but I was still scared of him. I had ways of dealing with the fear: I folded it up and placed it on the shelf where I kept the perfectly adequate dimensions of my real self—she had no language, the fear was chartreuse, acid green.
He was my first gynophobe. He made unpleasant allusions to the female anatomy and coached actresses as if they were strippers. Give it all you got, baby. That’s it. Come to Daddy. He had unerring intuition, got what he needed in a performance by verbal assault, insult, flattery, and seduction. I enabled him. All the women did, I want to say; now I see that we were two kinds of women. Those of us who were at Radcliffe or in for the summer from Vassar. And girlfriends or one-night stands recruited in Boston bars, he seduced into costume design, bed, or both. Such a snob. I had nothing but contempt for those women.
I am Margaret Fuller and I accept the universe. Words of a play I saw in the early 1970s (Megan Terry, Calm Down Mother), the first ever I saw by a woman of my generation. The actress had red hair.
