Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

‘These are the results of abortions,’ he said. ‘Pure and simple. These are human children that someone killed and removed on purpose, and then pickled like cucumbers, and then sold to this department for money.’

He looked up when I walked in, but he kept on talking. ‘This is an outrage ,’ he said. ‘We should refuse to work in this room. The people who bought and sold these have no respect for human life, no respect for those of us who have accepted Christ and the holy scriptures. We should refuse to tolerate this.’

One of the girls giggled nervously and a boy stabbed a pair of dissecting probes into the pockmarked black wax of a tray. ‘Brian,’ I said. ‘That’s enough. We have work to do.’

I knew I had never had any control over this group and that I was about to lose them for good. I tried to imagine how one of the other teaching assistants would handle the situation. They had tips and tricks and favorite students. They always seemed to know what to do.

‘Tell me why we should put up with this,’ Brian said.

I searched my mind for what the department head had told us. ‘Because what you’re saying isn’t true,’ I said. ‘Those specimens are miscarriages — spontaneous abortions. They were already dead. They came from hospitals. It’s perfectly legitimate.’

I wasn’t sure I believed this myself — the specimens disturbed me and I’d always avoided the back of the room where they stood. ‘They’re the best way for you to understand the sequence of human development,’ I said. ‘They’re meant to teach you respect for human life. Not to cheapen it — look at them. You can see how early they have a shape, hands, a heart. You can see what a miracle life is.’

‘They’re pickled,’ Brian said. ‘Like meat. Where’s the respect in that?’

On another day, I might have had an answer for him. But I was unfed, exhausted, wired from too much coffee, and when I looked at the jars again, at the gray, faded bodies with their folded knees, their shadowy faces, their eyes closed in endless sleep, I burst into tears. Brian was right; they were horrifying. Plastic models, pink and cheerful, would have served just as well.

The students moved silently toward their seats, leaving me alone with the jars. One of those embryos — fifty-six days, eight weeks — might have been the child I’d given up for Randy. A recognizable small person, with an enormous head, tiny arms and feet, a ghost of an ear, an eye. I had gone to the clinic alone, more frightened of the pain and invasion than of what I was actually doing. The doctor had been quiet, steady, slow. ‘I’m removing the products of conception,’ he’d said in his soft, flat voice. ‘Breathe slowly. It won’t hurt.’

It hadn’t hurt much then, but it hurt now. I looked at the jar, and as I did my right side was stabbed with a pain so sharp and startling that I fell to the floor.

I woke to a ring of faces above me. Students, the department chairman, Page. Walter. ‘Grace,’ Walter was saying. ‘Grace?’

‘I think it’s my appendix,’ I said weakly. It might have been; the pain was in the right place. But I knew it wasn’t. It had to be my ovary, struggling to pass another egg through the tangled web of tissue. I would have welcomed appendicitis: let it rupture, let it burst. Dark poisons spreading through me, an operation and a stay in the hospital between cool white sheets. No classes, no tests, no labs. I fainted again.

What I got for my pains was an evening in the Emergency Department at Cooley-Dickinson, just long enough for the doctors to rule out appendicitis, a strangulated bowel, gallstones, pyelonephritis. Just long enough for the resident gynecologist to examine me and to announce gravely, in Walter’s presence, that I had chronic pelvic inflammatory disease that had probably damaged me already.

‘Is that serious?’ Walter said. His face was tired and drawn in the cruel hospital light. He’d left a class behind, I knew. And a grant that was due, and a ringing phone, and a thesis committee. I’d never been sick before, in all our time together, and I was surprised how much I’d frightened him. ‘I hate hospitals,’ he’d muttered, as we waited in the curtained cubicle. He’d rubbed his fingers along my arm, stroking, smoothing, soothing. Soothing himself as much as me.

‘It’s not an emergency,’ the doctor said. ‘She fainted from the pain of a cramp, and there’s nothing acute going on. But these chronic inflammations are serious enough. She needs long-term antibiotic therapy, and frequent exams. But she doesn’t need to stay here now.’

‘Thank you,’ Walter said. He let go of my arm and stood to shake the doctor’s hand.

The doctor smiled and turned to me, and Walter moved away to gather my clothes. ‘Have you ever had an abortion?’ the doctor asked.

I made a face at him, trying to signal that yes I had and no, I didn’t want to discuss it. The doctor read only half my face. ‘It’s no crime,’ he said gently.

Walter looked over his shoulder at me. ‘I had one a long time ago,’ I muttered. The white paper drape in my lap was as stiff as a placemat.

‘What?’ Walter said carefully. He looked from the doctor to me.

‘Before I knew you,’ I said.

The doctor made some notes in a chart. ‘Have you had trouble conceiving since then?’

I answered yes again. Walter dropped into an orange plastic chair and buried his head in his hands. He was so upset that he couldn’t spare a word to comfort me, and when I was discharged we drove home in silence. He put me in bed and draped a heating pad over my sore side, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye. ‘I can’t believe you never told me,’ he said hours later.

I thought of all the other things I’d never said. ‘It wasn’t your business,’ I said. ‘I didn’t even know you then.’

‘So?’ he said. ‘So what else don’t I know about you?’

‘I hate school,’ I said. ‘I’m not going back.’ I pressed my hand to my mouth as if I could stuff those words back in. They surprised me at least as much as they did Walter.

He didn’t believe me at first. He thought I was sick, that I had a fever, that I was just run-down, and when I went to drop out he made me take a leave of absence instead. ‘Health problems,’ I wrote on the withdrawal form, and Walter chose to believe that.

Perhaps I believed it in part myself. Certainly I grew pale and queasy when I thought of returning to that lab and that row of jars, and I had as much trouble as Walter facing the idea that all that had drawn us together was falling apart. When I told him embryology reminded me of medieval cosmology, all description and airy theory, he looked at me as though I’d set a flag on fire.

‘I want us to visit another doctor,’ he announced, after a week of uneasy silences and bitter meals. ‘A fertility specialist.’

‘Why?’ I said. ‘It’s only been a year. And the doctor didn’t say I couldn’t conceive — he just asked if we’d had any trouble.’

Walter drew himself up and tucked in his chin. ‘The implication was clear,’ he said. ‘You had this abortion. You had an infection. You didn’t take care of yourself. We need to know what our chances are. And somebody here has to take some responsibility.’

I was in no position to argue with him. I’d left school, betrayed him, lied to him; after I’d been taking antibiotics for six weeks, I went to the new doctor as meekly as a lamb. I had test after test, each more humiliating than the last, and after the laparoscopy the doctor finally said, ‘Your left ovary’s dysfunctional. But your right one doesn’t seem to have been affected at all. You’re producing viable eggs.’

‘So?’ I said.

‘So, you’ve been having unprotected intercourse for — what? A year now? You should be pregnant. Let’s check Walter out.’