Joan Zimmermann was born in New York, New York and currently resides in the state of Virginia. She has been a writer and editor since 1994, largely in technology and biomedicine. She has been an independent consultant with NASA since 2001. She holds a B.A in English literature/pre-medical studies and an M.S. in Biology. She selects her reading material from a number of large and disorganized bookcases, and divides her remaining time between her grandchildren and a sweetly disobedient senior shiba inu. She has been writing fiction and poetry since she was a child.
The Abortionist
By Joan Zimmermann
The couple hover in the waiting room. The mother, small and compact with a thatch of greying hair, expensively shaped and trimmed. The father has a bullish face, a controlled smile, a richly appointed paunch. He has ferociously curly hair, and curly eyelashes that belie the darkness in his mien; the effect is one of clown shoes on a satyr’s hooves. Dr. Patty Freemark motions them into her office. The quiet daughter keeps her eyes on the floor. She is maybe 14, thinks Patty. Honey-brown hair shining like satin, cheeks reddened by embarrassment, fair-skinned, slender. Terrified. Patty directs them to chairs upholstered in soft blue cotton, then seats herself behind a worn oaken desk.
We don’t know how this happened! The mother gesticulates, distraught, avoiding all eye contact with Patty, instead training her attention to the watercolors on Patty’s office wall as she stammers and tries to tell the story. A few chickens, fancy ones that had caught Patty’s eye one idle afternoon. There is Miss Pringles, a black and tan Brahma with fuzzy feet and a commanding attitude. She is depicted in a few strokes, breast outthrust, the garden coop behind her suggested by cross-hatching and green blobs of leaves. The mother remains staring hard at Miss Pringles while Patty turns her attention to chatting up the girl, and then explaining the procedure in simple detail, assuring her that it will not hurt. The story of how it happened is not important. What is much more important is preventing the appearance of yet another unwanted child, and yet another bonanza of misery for a 14-year-old girl.
Patty turns back to the mother, who is still addressing the chicken paintings.
We don’t know how this happened!
The father interjects, smooths back his curly hair. Pedantic and haughty, with a smirk:
Well, we all know how it happened, Evelyn.
What a sick fuck, thinks Patty, glaring at him and fighting an urge to throw a stapler at his face. Then she returns to the more important subject, smiles warmly at the mother and girl, and adjusts her glasses.
In the only state that still allows abortions, countless patients from all over the country continue to seek out Dr. Freemark. Girls raped by their fathers. Girls molested by their priests or pastors. Girls pulled off the street by unchecked gangs of men and boys. Meek girls coerced into sex by avid, domineering boyfriends. Strong girls held down by five fraternity brothers. Girls and women penetrated by state representatives, House members, and U.S. Senators. And women who simply do not want to be pregnant. But the federal theocracy, full of pious malignancy, is now bearing down, preparing to give birth to a slouching beast.
There is a sampler in Patty’s kitchen alcove, cross-stitched by her friend Karen. It says, in brown Gothic lettering: “I like green tea, yarn, and three people.” The sampler depicts a cross-stitched floral teacup, next to a cross-stitched skein of peach-colored wool to round out the sentiment. Patty thinks it’s treacly to the point of nausea, but because she is one of the three living beings referenced in the needlework, she says not a word about its presence. The other living beings to which the sampler refers are Karen’s daughter, Caroline, and Karen’s dog, Florence. Florence was part of the package after Karen divorced Karl, an assistant professor with a social pedigree, a vast single-malt whiskey collection, and an obsession with Internet pornography. It had taken some doing, involving months of polite subterfuge followed by explosive legal exchanges with Karl’s wealthy and collusive family, but eventually Florence, a dog very much worthy of personhood, joined the hysterical chickens and rescue mutts on Patty’s spread. Karen moved her belongings into the expanded porch at the rear of Patty’s house, where she currently stitches, writes articles for underground zines, and spends hours in the garden. Florence follows her around, flopping under lilac bushes and honeysuckle, while instead of uncovering tombs, Karen overturns the sod in Patty’s yard. Armed with her Excel spreadsheets, she calculates blooming seasons, color combinations, temperature averages, and sunlight/shade patterns.
Karen Moore and Patty Freemark had become fast friends at a 1974 freshman mixer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Patty had caught the biology bug there, while Karen discovered archaeology and anthropology, much to the disturbance of her family. Karen’s family had expected her to follow in her father’s footsteps and become an engineer. She was adept at mathematics but hated the classes, as the lecture halls were filled with boys who loudly discussed her “big jugs.” They followed her with their eyes as she trudged up the aisles, books held tightly to her chest. Even her professors were mesmerized and talked only to her breasts when she attended office hours. It was unbearable, and so she abandoned that path for the archaeology department, which featured two female lecturers and one trembly, ninety-year-old emeritus.
Patty had been a rock hound, with a fearless and rock-solid fist. A budding scientist at 6, a fierce adventurer at 11. By age 13, she had punched a street bully in the nose, and kneed another one right in the jewels. Word got around after that. She was eventually freed from the barren cityscapes on the wings of a scholarship. When Karen showed up at the college mixer, brilliant and meek and uncertain amongst the pimply and self-assured, shrinking her posture to minimize her breast size, Patty instantly took on the role of defender, their fit as natural as a she-wolf and pup. By the end of senior year, the pair had spent uncounted hours digging up fossils in the shale and moss-covered banks of central New York, driving around in an old Plymouth Fury that Patty had managed to scrounge from her grease monkey pals. Patty had parlayed her brain into med school, while Karen opted for a professorship. But things fall apart.
They’re coming for us, Patty.
Yeah, I know.
Karen has a bucket of feed looped over her arm and Patty follows her. Behind Patty trails a long line of Leghorn chickens. Patty even bobs her head a little, like her neck bone’s connected to her toe bone. The morning is young and the upstate Spring has of late turned up the wattage, so that trees have leafed out in a week’s time, and honeysuckle is throwing its scent. One hundred miles northwest of New York City, a small town called White Bird sits on its feathers. Patty checks her watch.
15 minutes then I gotta get ready.
A rotund Senator with curly lashes strides up to the podium with a bill to ban abortion entirely in New York State. Penalty: 20 years in prison for the woman who has the abortion, life in prison for the abortionist. Connor Boyle is a native of Philadelphia, where for many years he has consumed founding father fantasies about his absolute right to stride. The thought gives him a hectic coloration, under the graying bush of formerly Black Irish curls. He now shares his magisterial fantasies with 59 white men under the Capitol dome, which have fueled the fire for a majority vote. He enjoys his life immensely, with accoutrements available only to moderately wealthy, personality-impaired, overweight men of a certain age. Young escorts feature heavily during this stage. As do birth control pills and implants, which thanks to a Supreme Court decision, are now forbidden to those not in power. This latter fact is not discussed at the Senate’s regular prayer breakfasts.
There has been much talk in White Bird about what Patty and Karen “are.” When the Honorable Connor Boyle comes into town, he likes to sit in the crumbling luncheonette on the main street, chatting up the locals and sniffing around for good gossip, the kind that can steer him to the things he wants. And today he wants the name of an abortionist. He knows how to lean in and unearth the dirty stuff, the stuff the townsfolk distrust and fear. He orders a ham and cheese sandwich, on rye, and leans back to drink in the small-town atmosphere, to sip at its periphery, to puncture its secrets, like a mosquito on a rich, pulsing vein.
In a corner of White Bird, where a trail leads up to the knees of the Catskills, the sniper’s rifle scope glints in the treetops. First he picks off Florence, and then Karen, and after allowing Patty ample time to scream in horror, he scores the third kill. Later that day, he will collect an excellent bonus from the Honorable Connor Boyle.
The Galway Review 