Because it’s dangerous to live with Daddy.
“Don’t you love Daddy? Are you mad at Daddy?”
Yes. I am mad at Daddy. But yes, I love Daddy.
MEMORY, UNDATED: FLYING GLASS
Her mouth was so dry, it felt like her tongue was all stitches!
Black-thread stitches, she’d seen on her daddy’s forearm when the gauze bandage was removed, and the sight of it was so terrible, she shrank away and could not even scream.
Oh what has happened to Daddy what has happened
They’d said flying glass. Something had been thrown through a window, and there had come—flying glass.
Sixty-six stitches in Daddy’s left arm, that was covered in wiry dark hairs.
Sixty-six black-thread stitches so ugly, the sight of them penetrated her brain like shrapnel.
Sixty-six black-thread stitches but Daddy laughed saying he was grateful for at the ER they’d told him it had been sheer luck that one of the three-inch glass slivers hadn’t severed a major artery in his arm.
Shut her eyes tight. Had not wanted to see. Her brother Darren stared and stared.
My brother memorized everything, I think.
Of that life in Michigan, that is lost to me.
I don’t remember anything clearly. Like shattered glass. You see how it has fallen to the floor, but you can’t imagine what it was like before it was shattered not the shape of it, not even the size.
I don’t remember but if I write down a few words, other words will (sometimes) follow unexpectedly.
“Her mouth was so dry, it felt like her tongue was all stitches!”
“ROT IN HELL”
After Daddy died our mother received letters in the mail or jammed into her mailbox or shoved inside the screen door of her house or (a few times) shoved beneath the windshield wiper of the car she was driving.
It was a mistake to open such letters, she knew. And yet.
So awful, she might fall to her knees on the (hardwood) floor clutching such a letter in her hand.
Her face was a face crushed in a vise of pain. Her face was a face you dared not look at, the fear was you might burst into laughter like a silly child scared to death.
Now you know what its like you athiest bitch. You & yours will rot in Hell.
BABY KILLERS
INTERVIEW(S)
What do you remember most about your father Dr. Augustus—“Gus”—Voorhees?
What do you remember most about your family life in Michigan?
And where specifically did you live in Michigan?—Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, Saginaw, Bay City and—one or two residences in Detroit?
Did you always live with both your parents, or did your father sometimes live elsewhere? And if so, did Dr. Voorhees try to get home often?
Did you ever visit him?
How were his absences explained by your mother—(if they were explained)? Did you and your siblings miss not having a father you saw more often?
How did you and your family feel, having to move so frequently?
Did it interfere with your schooling? Your social life?
(Did you have a “social life”?)
Were your teachers aware of who your father was? Your classmates, friends? Your neighbors? How did that impact upon your relationships?
Were you proud of your father?
Did you (sometimes) resent your father?
Did you love your father?
IT WAS SAID—by your father—that your mother Jenna Matheson was the “ideal wife/companion” for him—did it seem to you, and to your brother and sister, as far as you can speak for them, that your parents’ marriage was “ideal”?
Did your mother ever express regret, or disappointment, or frustration that she’d had to set her law career aside, to help further your father’s work?—to be a full-time mother and assistant for Dr. Voorhees, for many years?
Was your mother a “full-time” mother—or is that an exaggeration?
Was it known to you and your siblings that your father was a “tireless crusader” for women’s reproductive rights in the Midwest and in Michigan especially?
Was it known to you that your father was a “crusader” for abortion rights?
Did you know, as children, what “abortion rights” meant?
Did you know that your father performed abortions?
Did you know that your father had many enemies?
Did you know that your father was considered “difficult”—even by those who were his allies?
Have you read your father’s published writings? His (famous, controversial) address to the National Women’s Leadership Conference in 1987, in Washington, D.C.—are you familiar with that?
“There cannot be a free democracy in which one sex is shackled to ‘biological destiny’ ”—are you familiar with this much-reiterated remark of Dr. Gus Voorhees?
Do you or have you ever felt, as a girl, that you are “shackled to ‘biological destiny’ ”—or did you inherit a strong feminist identity from your parents?
Is there anything you regret, from your childhood in Michigan? Anything you wish might have been otherwise?—(excluding of course the tragic ending to your father’s life).
WERE YOUR PARENTS HAPPY?