Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

In her office she listened to the radio. Tuning briefly to WSNE, she heard an advertisement for Sunnyvale Farms convenience stores, followed by snatches of the Gospel of John. She took the letter from Louis Holland out of her shoulder bag, held it up to the light, and put it back. Outside her window, disappointed tourists were shaking their heads stoically. She didn’t let herself leave Hoffman until one-thirty.

When she came up from the subway at Kendall Square, she heard the unmistakable blurred, flattened voices of policemen speaking on their radios. Blue flashers fought the whiteness of the afternoon.

She’d been given a key to the basement door of the clinic, but she’d never planned to use it, and she didn’t now. She passed a foursome of Cambridge cops on the sidewalk and saw what they were waiting for. Fifty members of Stites’s church were standing in front of the clinic, pressed together in their allotted parking space like cows in a cattle car. The cops were waiting for them to cross the yellow tape.

Across the street, in the shadow of another twenty church members brandishing their placards, two news photographers were taking pictures, and a brassy-looking female reporter was adjusting her audio recording device.

STOP THE SLAUGHTER. ABORTION IS MURDER. THANKS MOM I LIFE.

Stites himself was standing at the yellow tape with a megaphone. He must have seen Renée before she saw him, because already, as she left the cops behind her, he was raising the tape. Twelve women ducked under it. In two rows of six they sat down and linked arms in front of the clinic door.

“We are here to rescue the unborn .” the megaphone said. “We are here to save innocent lives .”

Traffic was building up in the street. Stites looked straight at Renée. “ Everyone here was once no more than a fertilized egg .” his megaphone said. “We are all here by the grace of our Lord and the living love of our parents .”

Twosomes in blue were taking limp grandmothers and stewardesses by the armpits and dragging them to waiting police vans. The gym teacher dug her heels into sidewalk cracks expertly.

“Renée,” Stites said, megaphone lowered.

She looked at the sky. She’d never seen it so white and empty.

“Take one second and think,” he said. “You were just a tiny speck of cells once. Everything you are, everything you ever felt, came out of that speck. And you’re no one but yourself, you’re no accident, you’re no random thing. You’re you. And that speck inside you is no one but himself, or herself, and she’s just waiting to be born and have the life God means for her to have.”

She looked at the ground. She wouldn’t have guessed her mind could ever feel so closed.

“We love you,” Stites said. “We love the person you are and the person you can be. Just think about what you’re doing.”

He leaned over the yellow tape imploringly, but the plane he inhabited did not intersect with hers. He belonged to a species that was not her own, and this word of his, “love,” was simply a function peculiar to his species. “We love you” made as little sense to her now as a whale saying, “You strain plankton with your baleen, just like me,” or a turtle saying, “You and I have shared this experience of laying eggs in a sandy pit.” It was revolting.

The way had cleared for her to enter the clinic. The Group of Twelve, in two police vans, was singing “Amazing Grace” in separate keys and time signatures.

“Renée,” Stites said, “Please listen to me.”

“This is unforgivable,” she said, merely stating the obvious. She went inside.

“Oh dear,” said the blond counselor. “Did you lose the key?”

Renée handed her the key. “How long have they been there?”

“Since this morning.”

“I think they’ll go away now.”

The clinic was frosty with airconditioning and bluish lighting. In a clean white cell, she took her clothes off and hung them on a hook. The jeans, outermost, unflattened, with one hip turned out and the knees slightly bent, were a vivid effigy of her.

“I don’t want a tranquilizer,” she told the nurse.

In the adjacent room the table had been set for her, with a smaller side table set for Dr. Wang, the essential stainless flatware gleaming on a paper placemat. No fish knife, no soup spoon — it was a one-course meal.

The subject lay down in her powder-blue smock. Her face, on the low end of a cushioned gradient, was a deep, purpled red. The speculum was inserted; it said: “This may pinch a little.” The tenaculum was applied, chloroprocaine hydrochloride administered by needle. With her slender, nimble fingers Dr. Wang tore the sterile paper wrapping from a 6-millimeter cannula.

K-Y jelly applied. Vacuum cleaner activated, hose attached. In and out the cannula went. In and out, up and down. A revelation was the scraping sound it made. It wasn’t a sound you expected from a body; it was the sound of an inanimate object, a trowel scraping the side of a plastic bucket, the last drops of milkshake being sucked from a waxed-paper cup. In and out the cannula went. Ruff, ruff, said the uterus.

“Ow,” the subject said, again stating the obvious, as the contractions started. She was trying to resist a riptide. Her foot muscles tightened in the stirrups of the pillory, which had wheels now and had been rolled out onto the sidewalk so that every passing scientist and secretary and adolescent and church member could, by simply glancing, see between her parted naked legs, up the speculum, and into the red center of her self. The nurse stroked her forehead. The vacuum cleaner was turned off.

“Everything seems to be very normal,” said Dr. Wang.

In the recovery room Renée was given orange juice, an Ergotrate tablet, and a powdered-sugar doughnut that was the first food she’d had since seven in the morning. The cramps weren’t bad, but she was given envelopes with Darvon and more Ergotrate. She was given various straightforward instructions and warnings. She was asked if she had a ride home.

On the dot of five they let her get dressed.

“Let me take you out the back way,” the counselor said.

She shook her head.

“You have to try to rest until tomorrow.”

“I will.”

She was surprised to find a darkened sky outside. A wind with thunder in it upended the hair of the remaining protesters, who were standing in their parking space exactly as they’d been when she last saw them, as if the parking space were the entirety of their planet and their hair were upended by its careening through the air. They looked at Renée somberly, without hatred. Across the street Stites was chatting with the brassy reporter, making her laugh. Smiling, he turned and looked right through Renée. There was a discrete crack of thunder. She waited for a blue Hyundai and a black Infiniti to pass. Then she crossed the street.

“Howdy, Renée. This is Lindsay, from the Herald.”

“Hi how are you today!” Lindsay said.

The church members in their parking space had turned 180 degrees and were looking at their minister. Before he knew what she was doing, Renée took his megaphone from his hand and darted behind a streetlight standard. She faced the congregation, the milling bystanders, the waiting cops, the photographers, the reporter and the minister.

“Hello,” she said, pressing harder on the plastic Speak button. “HELLO. MY NAME IS RENÉE SEITCHEK. I’M GOING TO INTERVIEW MYSELF.”

Stites stepped in front of her, grabbing for the megaphone. “That’s not yours, Renée.”

She dodged him. She backed up the sidewalk, keeping him in view. “MY STATEMENT,” she said. “SINCE YOU’RE ALL SO INTERESTED. MY STATEMENT IS I JUST HAD AN ABORTION.”