“Are you sure?” This was not typical. Claudia blamed Ash Wednesday, the overrepresentation of religious professionals. “I could swear I saw a woman.”
In hats and scarves and chunky winter coats, the protestors were ageless, shapeless, sexless. A few had set down their signs to pray the Rosary. A figure in a blue parka made its way along the middle ring, stooping to wipe the snow from each sign.
“There.” Claudia pointed. “That’s a woman. Coincidentally, she is cleaning.”
“Coincidentally,” Mary said.
The Ash Wednesday protest had been planned for weeks. Mary had heard about it in church. Her priest had made the announcement with great enthusiasm. On the first day of Lent, the faithful would hold a sidewalk vigil on Mercy Street. They would ask the Blessed Virgin to inspire the young women, to save the unborn babies. They would pray for wisdom, for divine forgiveness, for grace.
HAILMaryfullofgracetheLordiswithThee. The words ran together like the disclaimer after a radio commercial, a glib announcer racing through the fine print.
“Those fuckers,” Mary said, meaning the priests. “Anything to change the subject.”
The subject, in her mind, was unchangeable: the child victims, the Archdiocesan cover-up, hundreds of lawsuits settled in secret. There was only one subject, and Mary would not be distracted. Her convictions were solid and unyielding. Each year on Ash Wednesday, she did patient intakes—height, weight, blood pressure—with a smudge of holy soot on her forehead. How or whether she explained this to the patients, Claudia had no idea. It was a lesson you learned over and over again, doing this work: people live with contradictions.
HAILMaryfullofgracetheLordiswithThee. Mary Fahey had heard these words from earliest childhood, her own name offered to the heavens in prayer.
Was that weird? Claudia asked her once.
I never thought about it, Mary said.
THE PROTESTORS WERE A FACT OF LIFE, A DAILY NUISANCE LIKE traffic or bad weather. Some days there was only one, an old guy in a Sox cap. Claudia had given him a nickname, Puffy. He arrived each morning like a dutiful employee, in a down coat the color of trash bags. In May he’d swap it for a yellow windbreaker. To Claudia it was like the daffodils sprouting, the first rumor of spring.
In the beginning she tried talking with them. She had no experience with religious people and was surprised, actually surprised, at the way every conversation devolved into godtalk. It was like arguing a point of fact with a stubborn child who parrots a single refrain: Because my dad said so! To which a reasonable adult might respond:
He said that? What were his exact words? Are you sure you heard him right?
Or:
I’ve never seen your dad. Are you sure you have one?
Or:
Who asked him? Seriously, your dad needs to mind his own.
Her attempts at rational discourse went badly. On her very first day of work, a man approached her on the sidewalk—a stocky guy in Dockers and a fleece jacket, the most ordinary-looking person imaginable.
“Please, Mother,” he said.
She can still recall his lilting voice, so gentle it seemed sinister. Also, it was the first time a grown stranger had called her Mother, which isn’t something you forget.
“Please, Mother. Our Lord Jesus Christ is speaking to you. Please don’t kill your baby.”
He had been to Starbucks. She could smell it on his jacket.
“I work here,” she said.
The change in his demeanor was immediate, like an actor breaking character. He looked at her as though he’d stepped in shit.
“You are doing the devil’s work,” he said.
Claudia said, “So I’ve been told.”
When he called her a cunt and damned her to eternal hell, the damnation didn’t faze her; as a nonbeliever, she found it slightly comical. The name-calling was more disturbing. Not so much the word itself as the way he said it: triumphantly, as though winning an argument. For a certain type of man, cunt was a concealed weapon—discreet, portable, always at the ready. What did it mean to him, this angry stranger who didn’t possess (and had possibly never seen) the body part it referred to? A body part he considered loathsome, the vilest thing a person could possibly be.
It was just a word; Claudia knew this. In Britain and Ireland, cunt was used casually, recreationally—a good-natured insult between mates who, go figure, were usually men. She had learned this years before, in the early days of online dating, from a Tufts professor of English literature. At a noisy pub a few blocks from campus, he explained that cunt was a synecdoche, a figure of speech in which a part stood in for the whole. (“Like a head of cattle,” he added helpfully.) Then he delivered a discourse on synecdoche and metonymy, which weren’t the same thing but were somehow related. Professing this took quite a while, and required him to use the word cunt several times. He seemed not to understand, or maybe he did, that to the female ear, cunt is brutal, exquisitely personal—half of humanity reduced to a body part, a single purpose: This is what you are. This is all you are.
The part stands in for the whole.
Claudia didn’t explain this to the Tufts professor. She didn’t want to say the word, and she particularly didn’t want to hear him say it. He was just some guy she’d met on the internet. Her cunt was none of his business.
SHE FILLED HER MUG AND WENT DOWNSTAIRS. THE WAITING room was bright and cheerful, painted a sunny yellow. There were comfortable chairs, tables stacked with cooking and decorating magazines, boxes of Kleenex strategically placed. One wall was covered with giant photographs, taken by the director’s son while he was in the Peace Corps: smiling African women in colorful dresses, carrying bundles on their shoulders, backs, and heads. They carried water jugs, bushel baskets of bread or fruit or laundry. They carried all the things you’d expect them to carry, except babies.
That morning, half the chairs were occupied: several pairs of women who might have been sisters or roommates or mothers with daughters; an Indian couple in professional dress, each staring at a cell phone. A boy and girl, college-aged, sat shoulder to shoulder holding hands. They wore look-alike hoodies and sweatpants, as though they’d just come from the gym.
She crossed the waiting room and continued down a long hallway to the call center. The door was open a crack. A woman was talking on the phone, a voice Claudia recognized. Naomi had worked on the hotline for as long as there’d been one, her most dedicated volunteer.
“What was the first day of your last menstrual period?” Naomi asked.
This was always the first question.
The call center was packed with cubicles. Each held a desktop computer and a standard-issue office telephone. At each workstation was posted a printed notice: SILENT CALL PROCEDURE.
In the corner cube Naomi consulted her chart, a cardboard wheel the size of a floppy disk, to calculate gestational age. The younger volunteers used the online version, but Naomi was old-school. She hunched over her wheel like a medieval soothsayer, reading tarot or tea leaves.