Where are you when the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade? I am at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Washington, DC, nearest the Supreme Court. My job is to help keep the sidewalk clear for people to walk into the clinic, which promises “Care no matter what.”
My partner and I wear orange tunics identifying us as Pro-Choice Clinic Volunteers. We’re trained not to respond to the “Antis” yelling through bullhorns, waving pictures of fetuses, and chalking menacing messages on the sidewalk. Six kneeling seminarians recite the Hail Mary in a loop, and they’re joined by three nuns. One nun breaks ranks to chase women; she says, “Motherhood is beautiful. God loves you and your baby. You have a choice.” It’s hard not to shout down that last assertion. After 49 years of legal access to abortion in America, let’s see how long you have a choice. But as visitors make their way to the clinic, I open the door and my mouth only to say, “Welcome to Planned Parenthood” and, as they leave, “Would you like some company?” in case they want me to escort them through the protestors. If they prefer to go it alone, I say, “Take care.”
The Antis woo the incoming, “My name is Terrisa, and I can get you an apartment, a doctor . . . ,” but if rebuffed, they growl, “Fuck you, you’re going to hell!” They yell, even to the food-delivery people, “You have other options!”
My least-favorite Anti moves into my line of vision and shouts through her bullhorn, “You’ll dream about me!” A year later, this woman has just been convicted for making an appointment under a false name, then chaining herself to chairs to block patients from doctors; she also claims to have obtained aborted tissue to give it a proper burial. (Update: Donald Trump granted her a pardon on his fourth day in office.)
Pedestrians or passing drivers often thank us for what we do. We make a heart with our hands. The Antis scream, “Assholes! They’re in it for the blood!” Their favorite lines are, “An ambulance took someone away last week” and, “We have a free clinic where you’ll get everything you need.” I guarantee their clinic’s motto is not “Care no matter what.”
What I need when I get home is an espresso and ibuprofen. Then I go out my front door, armed with my forked weeder to clear my own sidewalk. I pry randy bastards that try to cover the concrete and tug spiky-leaved dandelions up by their long hairy taproots. Garden much? Even I can see that there’s more to it than that.
I live happily in Washington, DC, but I grew up in Oklahoma City in a household ruled by a lawn fanatic. My siblings and I had to weed an hour a day, even as the unrelenting Oklahoma sun bleached his green grass gold. In a subdivision without sidewalks, my father railed against kids who thoughtlessly stepped on our yard. In those days, we walked to school in the morning, home for lunch, back to school, and home again after, so the same kid could trample his precious putting green four times before we sat down to supper.
At one family meal, Dad read to us from an article that said charred grass sends nutrients into the ground for the next season, and he announced that he was going to torch the lawn. As if we lived in a national park, where fire pops the cones of mighty redwoods to release the pine nuts. My memory is of him watering down our roof and the fence between us and our neighbors as my mother backed out of the driveway, unable to stand it. It’s disturbing to think of her alone in that car and us watching her leave.
We were thrilled by the audacity of Dad tossing lit matches into the yard. Whoosh! the crispy grass went up like a haystack, and fire blazed from his clean-cut shrubs to the curb. When the heat crackled the hair on my arms, it occurred to me to back off. Dad hadn’t told us that. Sirens wailed from two directions to get to our corner lot, their trucks spilling out firefighters, as dusty smoke plumed toward the street. Nothing to see here, Dad assured them, and they backed the hell off, too, paying him a weird amount of respect. No lectures, let alone reminders that he had three children. The men clapped Dad on the back and told him to give them fair warning, next time.
What were he and the firefighters thinking? A dry, windy Oklahoma day, and a blanket of thatch—burn, baby, burn! We were all for this ridiculousness because we were thinking burned lawn, end of weeding, right? Wrong. To get the nutrients to make their way into the ground, we had to rake the charred remains an hour a day, remembering to leave our sneakers with their ash-black soles in the garage. Burning the lawn kept kids from walking on it.
But I was talking about sidewalks, or lack thereof. For years, my parents circled the block every night after dinner. They were so identified with their habit that they were once introduced as Mr. and Mrs. Walker, the Walkers. Neither was politically active, to the point that it was almost unseemly to get worked up about a cause. So we were surprised when Mom got herself elected to the neighborhood association for the sole purpose of getting sidewalks installed. Sidewalks would keep children from traipsing across lawns—didn’t everyone hate that?—and give us safe passage. She thought it would be an easy sell, but other than her, no one was willing to pony up money for something the city should have installed before houses were built. When she visits us in DC, Mom can’t believe people let their sidewalks go, and I stand here sweeping in her honor. I remember my own stroller, dog, toddler experience trying to get safe passage to the pediatrician, playground, school.
I also remember what happened to me 49 years ago.
I was in ninth grade at Hefner Junior High, where I greeted the school each morning over the loudspeaker, giving announcements, an inspirational thought, and closing with, “Please bow your head for a moment of silent prayer.” Yes, in public school. One of my mother’s favorite Bible quotes is “It rains on the just and the unjust,” and after teasing her with a postscript I’d heard—“but more on the just, as the unjust stealeth away their umbrellas”—I offered that whole bit as the morning’s thought for the day.
That night, I might have ended up crippled or worse for lack of sidewalks. Unlike the weed dispensaries popping up like, well, weeds, Oklahoma City used to have a church or gas station on every busy corner, and at the end of our block was the Mormon church, where my best friend Lori went, a Baptist church, and the Presbyterian church we attended. After dinner, Mom and I went to the spring singalong and then headed home.
It was twilight, between the pinkening of a beautiful Oklahoma sunset and the blinking on of streetlights, the signal for neighborhood kids to report home. At 14, I was already a head taller than Mom, and with no sidewalk available, she walked along the curb and I walked in the gutter just below her. We were eye to eye, talking and generally cracking each other up, so I was looking into her eyes when a drunk driver in a Pontiac sedan veered toward the curb and plowed into me head-on. His right front bumper hit my right thigh, and the impact bent both my knees backwards and doubled me over, where I split my head open on his hood ornament, leaving a shank of my straight brown hair in his crosshairs.
Next thing I knew I was looking up into the branches of a redbud that was just beginning to bloom. I never saw the car coming, but I was wide awake on the lawn of the Mormon church, where I’d been flung. I’d knocked down my mother, whose knee was bleeding, which didn’t explain why there was so much blood or why my thigh was swelling to the size of a watermelon. People pulled over, and Mom told them to run to our house and tell my father that his child had been run over, to call for help, and get a quilt. The grizzled driver appeared at my side, and I smelled his breath as he sat with us, following my mother’s appeal to recite the Lord’s Prayer in an endless loop.
Like the day our lawn went up in flames, I heard the sound of sirens and then silence. A cop stood over me saying I wasn’t his jurisdiction. Our street marked the boundary between Oklahoma City and a neighborhood called Warr Acres, and he said that I’d been hit on the Oklahoma City side of the street. I knew my father was there when he ran at the cop, enraged. I’d never seen him go after another adult; my mother kept calling out my father’s name to comfort him, though she stayed on the ground cradling my head. More sirens showed up, and I was lifted onto a stretcher. “Oh, sweetie,” my mother said, “it rains on the just and the unjust.” And, verily, I said unto her, “But more on the just as the unjust stealeth away the umbrellas.”
I was conscious in the ER, when a woman slit my jeans from my bell bottoms up to the top of my leg then cut across, releasing my hugely swelling right thigh. I remember thinking “cutoffs,” as if I hadn’t known the origin of the word. I was conscious when a mustached man shaved my head, joking with a nurse that he should use the razor to trim his mustache so it wouldn’t tickle me. Then I wasn’t conscious.
That ER doctor sutured two layers of my head closed, an inner one and a surface one, 39 stitches in each layer; another drained fluid from my right knee and splinted that leg. I woke up to the news that nothing was actually broken. My mother gave the driver credit for pulling over, but she also told me he’d refused a breathalyzer test.
I missed the last six weeks of ninth grade—they gave me As and called it a wash—which I spent on the couch while my family went to work and school. A good friend of my mother’s, a reader, gave me a boxed set of Chaim Potok, so I got a crash course in Hasidic Judaism and those who are cut off from it. This was before remote controls, and the TV channel I committed to ran black-and-white reruns of Perry Mason, The Addams Family, and The Dick Van Dyke Show, three different family models with men in suits. On Perry Mason, square-shouldered men in rounded cars depended on Della Street (“Doll,” to Paul Drake), whose petticoat-puffed skirts and stiletto heels took her from a day at the office to a steak dinner with her two men. When it was time for physical therapy, my goal was to recover fast enough for Mormon summer camp.
The Mormons. Whatever you think of Mormons, they were incredibly generous to me, and also fun. From fourth grade to senior year, I went to their youth group with my friend Lori, and to this day, I’m called on at dinner parties to correct people’s misconceptions—or corroborate their conceptions—about what Mormons believe. I was their cheerful skeptic who never professed to believe, even as I sang their songs and listened to their dating advice, which my mother joked amounted to “No!” The Mormons organized dances, road rallies, and carnivals, keeping us busy so we didn’t you-know-what.
I made it to camp that summer—hell, the next year, I was president of Mormon summer camp. I also played on their basketball team, where a coach taught me to deftly execute the defensive pick and roll. For the unfamiliar, when a teammate got the ball, I planted myself between her and the opposing guard—this was the pick—then pivoting, I rolled away, giving my teammate safe passage to the goal.
Meanwhile, though I pleaded for them to forgive him, my parents sued the driver of the car that hit me. Mom explained that if I required surgery, a lawsuit would provide money for that. Our lawyer said that after refusing a breathalyzer, the man also refused a blood test, which should have cost him his license. I argued that he’d stopped when he could have driven on, that people make mistakes, and that we were coming from church, for heaven’s sake. Weren’t we supposed to forgive people? I’d paddled the Illinois River at camp and also played a season of basketball by the time I had to tell my story on the stand.
That day, my parents sat up front with our lawyer and I was in the first row of courtroom pews, behind the driver’s lawyer. Though the layout was familiar to me from Perry Mason, the floor was weird—hundreds of small circles dented the linoleum, as if nail heads had been hammered into the tiles. When the old man entered, he shuffled past me and swung through the gate to join his lawyer with a jolly, “Hey, Johnny.” I knew he was a car salesman, which must require a driver’s license, and I pictured him in a lot full of big, rounded coupes with chrome underbites, like the ones I’d watched Perry and Paul Drake pilot around Los Angeles.
I heard his lawyer say that the plan was to knock his drunk driving charge down to a $250 fine and reckless driving, so they wouldn’t revoke his license again.
Then I heard the old man say, “Jesus, Johnny. Can’t you get me off with reckless driving and no penalty this time?”
He may as well have tossed a lit match into the room. I smelled his sour breath in my nose as he recited the Lord’s Prayer, and sirens went off in my head. Like the night I lay on the Mormon church grass, like the day my father burned the lawn and the firefighters asked him for fair warning next time. I burned with rage-filled shame—or shame-filled rage, as if I were on trial for stepping into his crosshairs.
This man’s Pontiac snapped the ACL in both my knees, dented and numbed my thigh, and split my head open like a melon, if melons bled. Why did I feel any shame at all? He seemed to be saying that if I hadn’t been standing in the gutter, I wouldn’t have gotten knocked up, I mean down. He seemed to be saying that it takes two to get run over by a car. I thought I might pass out, and I followed my physical therapist’s advice when the pain of bending my leg made me dizzy. “Snickelfritz,” he called me, “keep your head down and your spirits up.” I took slow breaths until the dents in the floor made themselves clear.
Through dozens of Perry Mason episodes, I’d marveled at the women’s tiny, belted waists and impossibly high-heeled pumps, and as things came back into focus, I realized what had befallen the hallowed floor beneath my feet. It was riddled with dents that anxious women, legs crossed and feet swinging, had made hammering their pointy heels into the linoleum as some fool decided their fate. Mine was a sick kind of shame, ashamed at wanting to give an undeserving man a clean slate and sick with dread that there would be a next time, and she might not recover, might not have the safety net of parents, surgeons, a physical therapist who called her Snickelfritz.
After lawyer’s fees, I was awarded $6,500, which I later put toward a master’s degree in creative writing, which in turn inspired my father to disinherit me. That’s another story, and, to his credit, he changed his mind around the time my first novel came out.
I haven’t needed surgery yet, despite the fact that your ACL doesn’t grow back—my orthopedic surgeon says when they snapped in both knees, they were probably reabsorbed by my body. Fortunately, my hair grew back to cover the scar across my head. I currently walk at least three miles a day, and the most noticeable problem I have is that I can’t ride a bike or kneel. My yoga teacher teases me that I won’t kneel to her, but I don’t kneel to or for anyone.
On the steps of Planned Parenthood, the kneeling seminary boys chanting Hail Marys inspired the only joke I’ve coined on duty. Q: What was Jesus’s favorite brand of underwear? A: Fruit of the Womb. Their teacher praises them and posts his aborted-fetus sign on the sidewalk. Once, in all the commotion, a pedestrian’s German shepherd sniffed around and then peed all over his sign. No one mentioned in our training that we couldn’t laugh. Another Anti, a twenty-something man trying to impress the woman with the bullhorn, gives the nuns pointers on approaching women. That’s rich: a guy mansplaining to nuns on how best to badger women about their reproductive health.
Clinic visitors could be coming for a job interview, a PAP smear, birth control, an abortion, a COVID shot, prenatal care, to deliver a pizza—it’s not my business. One woman stands on the front landing and yells at the Antis, “Can’t a woman get a PAP smear without you fuckers coming at her?” She accepts my offer to accompany her to the metro. Every few steps, she swivels her head to shout over her shoulder, “Fuck you!” and then swivels back to say “Sorry.” I tell her she doesn’t have to apologize to me. I agreed not to engage the Antis, but she can say whatever she likes.
As a 63-year-old, post-menopausal mother of two who never had to face having an abortion, I don’t need to be here. But when a friend asks why I do it, I tell her I have to.
I thought it was the Texas legislature passing their 2021 bill outlawing abortion after six weeks—earlier than many women even know they’re pregnant—that prompted me to volunteer. My mother doesn’t like when the Bible verse “Whither thou goest, I will go” is read at weddings, because Ruth said it to her mother-in-law, so I told my mother I was volunteering because “Whither Texas goes, Oklahoma will go.” It didn’t take long before Oklahoma went not only there but also further, banning abortions after conception.
My job is to give people safe passage into the clinic, and my superpower, we have discovered, is the old pick and roll, that basketball move I learned playing for the Mormon church. When an Anti approaches a potential patient, I plant myself in front of their face; that’s the pick. I’m tall, and I plant my feet wide and spread my arms. Picture them trying to reach over or around me—and then picture the roll, which is me pivoting so the visitor’s way is now clear as I say, “Welcome to Planned Parenthood. Come on in.”
Whether or not you’ve had an abortion, as the saying goes, “Everyone loves someone who’s had an abortion.” Among the many women I love who have had an abortion, one told me that, single and pregnant 30+ years ago, she’d had an abortion but now believes that women should not be allowed that choice. She says her family would have come around, and that may be, but she had a choice. I think of my own father 30+ years ago. This is a man who cared so much about what people thought of his front lawn that he was willing to burn the house down to make his grass greener. I shudder to think how he might have reacted to the news that one of his daughters was pregnant.
Friday, June 24, 2022, I am at my post giving people safe passage when the Supreme Court news breaks. We knew this was coming—the news had leaked in May—yet I am blindsided. “Can you believe it?” the Antis yell back and forth, twirling on the sidewalk, and I very much want to break my vow of silence. No. No, I cannot believe it. Asked to rule on Mississippi banning abortions after 15 weeks, they reached back 49 years—400 years, if you count Alito citing 17th century British judge Matthew Hale as establishing precedence for a country that didn’t yet exist but knew what rules should govern the bodies of half the population.
Patients kept coming and we kept welcoming them. Passersby thanked us for helping—one brought chocolates and another asked if we wanted to pet his dog. We did. Several asked how to volunteer as clinic defenders. Still, it was so so sad. I believe women deserve care no matter what and that women have a right to privacy. If we believed women, Thomas and Kavanaugh wouldn’t even be on the court. I think about Anita Hill in 1991 and then Christine Blasey Ford in 2018 testifying. Justice? Justices? Those women were shamed and threatened; many believed that something happened to them, but not at the hands of these men, both of whom were confirmed to lifetime appointments.
That night, people show up on Brett Kavanaugh’s sidewalk to protest. He has made women’s lives more dangerous and potentially crippling in the name of his own beliefs, and I guess his church. Of course, he has a sidewalk and he always will. Of course, his daughters will always have safe passage. He is apparently livid that people are on his sidewalk offering their opinion on his opinion, which he says reflects the will of the founding fathers. Speaking of them, I once heard the journalist Cokie Roberts explain why Eliza Hamilton started the first orphanage in these United States. According to Eliza’s correspondence, when the Continental Congress went long in New York City, the founding fathers left behind some 80 women, not their wives, pregnant. That’s some precedent-setting.
My friend who asked why I volunteer said, “You could just give money. Or read to kids, give workshops to teenagers at risk. What makes you stand up there?” And I realize that standing up is the reason. Getting plowed down 49 years ago, and seeing the courtroom floor dented by the high heels of women who had to sit while the court decided their fate. Hearing my father announce he’d made a decision to set fire to our front lawn and watching my mother back out of the driveway. Having my father disown me because I wanted to learn how to express myself. Growing up in Oklahoma, going to college in Texas, choosing to live in Washington, DC. Standing up to bullies, I realize, is the reason I do this. My silence speaks volumes.
After squatting on my own front walk, I put down my stabby weeder and stretch my wobbly legs, then I pick up the broom, tears of frustration in my eyes. I’m just trying to give safe passage is the actual phrase that comes into my head. I’ll clear a path, at least for people who need to walk past or into our house. The weeds will grow back, and I’ll have to clear it again next time, won’t I? I stand here sweeping, furious and determined, pledging to myself that I will clear the sidewalk again and again, as long as I live here, as long as I live.
Mary Kay Zuravleff is the author of four novels. Her latest, American Ending, was an Oprah Daily pick and a finalist for the Langum Prize for Historical Fiction. She is also the author of Man Alive!, a Washington Post Notable Book, and The Bowl Is Already Broken, which the New York Times called “a tart, affectionate satire of the museum world’s bickering and scheming.” Her first novel, The Frequency of Souls, won the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of the Arts and the James Jones First Novel Award. She lives in Washington, DC.