It will be a relief when we can leave here. This is “interim”—not “permanent.”
The Huron County Women’s Center turned out to be a nondescript cement-block building at the far end of South Main, in a neighborhood of warehouses, discount furniture and carpet stores, rubble-strewn vacant lots. The building might have been a small factory, not a medical center; it did not seem to be a medical center “newly opened”; a single-story building set back in a grassless lot, with oddly shuttered windows like great blind eyes. You could see—we could see—that there’d been graffiti on the sand-colored walls that had been crudely repainted and had dried in uneven patches like mange. Beside the building an asphalt parking lot was crowded with vehicles of the general type and quality of our 1991 Chevy station wagon: vehicles that would have drawn from Darren the adjective cruddy.
Much of South Main looked derelict and abandoned. What a disappointment! It did not seem possible that our father Gus Voorhees whom we’d been led to think was a very special person worked here.
Then we saw, on the sidewalk in front of the Center, a dozen or more people (men, women) standing oddly still, with picket signs resting on their shoulders. We could not see the words on the picket signs, or the pictures—(for some picket signs bore pictures). Several of the picketers also held what appeared to be bead necklaces in their hands, which one day I would know to be rosaries. These individuals seemed to come alive, seeing us. Quickly our mother said, “Ignore them! Please. Do not look at them.”
Hurriedly we crossed the lot slantwise toward the front door of the Center, to avoid passing too near these strangers. Even so, Darren stared insolently at them. His boy’s face, subtly blemished as if wind-or sunburnt, was taut with a kind of mortified and indignant shock; his eyes gave no sign of seeing. Frightened Melissa, and frightened Naomi, willing to be commanded by their mother, hurried along pulled by her and made no attempt to see.
The picketers called after us—but we did not hear.
We are praying for you. God bless you!
God forgives you.
God loves you.
These were nonsensical words, truly we did not hear. Naomi resisted the powerful instinct to shove fingers into her mouth and to suck, which helped to not-hear.
Those beautiful children have been born—they are blessed of God!
Pray for all children—blessed of God!
The heavy metallic front doors of the Center were locked and were windowless also. On the much-painted cement walls beside the doors you could see shadow-shapes of words scrawled beneath the paint, but you could not read the words.
Other shapes, spidery and spiky, might’ve been swastikas. A small calm voice warned me—Don’t look closely, Naomi.
Often this voice came to me, at such times when I felt like one making her way across a raised platform that is very narrow, the width of a plank. The warning is Don’t look closely, you will fall. This voice had first slipped into my head at the time of the white box.
Is it strange, the voice addressed Naomi?—as if Naomi herself were not the source of the voice?
I have not asked any psychologist, therapist, or doctor if such a voice is “normal”—or if it is a kind of low-mimetic schizophrenia. For truly I don’t hear the voice, it is more as if I feel it.
Sometimes you feel vibrations in your skull, along your spine. The tingling of nerve-endings. Without such nerves, there is no pain—without pain, there is no consciousness.
And did I know, at age ten, what a swastika was, and what a swastika meant? I did not.
Though very possibly, Darren knew.
We were quiet now. Our mother had ceased her bright nervous chatter as she rang a buzzer beside the front door. How badly we wanted not to be here!
The picketers continued to call to us, as one might call to stray dogs for whom they had little hope—Hello? Here! Listen—please. God bless. There must have been a rule, a law, something regulated, that forbade the picketers from following us up the walk, to the front door of the Huron County Woman’s Center, but our mother was uneasy, glancing over her shoulder as if she feared the picketers might rush at us. She fumbled to ring the buzzer another time. And again, when there was no response from inside, she rang the buzzer. How awful this was! Our father worked here.
A sensation of dread rose in my chest, I could not bring myself to look at my brother and to see in his pinched face how he was vindicated—We should not have come here! This is a mistake.
At last the heavy door was opened by an agitated-looking woman in a white nurse’s uniform who told us she was sorry, the Center was closed. Our mother protested, “‘Closed’? You can’t be closed! Your hours are nine to five. Has something happened?”
“The Center will be open again later this afternoon . . . We are seeing no new clients right now, only just people with appointments.”