Without Opening My Mouth

A few months after moving to New England for graduate school, I went home to Utah for the holidays. I was homesick: I wanted to be farther from the center of the earth. One day, over sandwiches in the kitchen, absently flipping through a magazine, my mom asked me if she had ever told me about my great-grandmother's abortion.

I went very still, then said: "Are you serious?"

She nodded.

"An abortion? Does grandpa know?" Her son.

She shook her head. "Just me."

My happiest memory of my great-grandmother involved her calling me up to her sparkly red wheelchair at a family gathering and giving me a silver dollar. She'd spent the last years of her life in a nursing home, watching wrestling and Jazz games and getting meaner every year. I was very young and hated going to see her — her room smelled like talcum powder and the dirty interior of a microwave. And besides, I thought then, death had nothing to do with me. I wasn't alone in my aversion to her bitter temper or the sight of her blue, swollen legs; my mom would visit her when few others in the family would. She had told my mom during one of those visits, toward the end. Maybe it came up while my mom was rubbing her feet or playing her at cards. I'm not sure, because my mom won't tell me any more.

I see things out of the corner of my eye. Last night I saw a spider on my nightstand, which rolled away into the wood as I turned. Sometimes I see a face, looming out behind a door, that flattens into clear shadow when I look. I got my first pair of glasses after I told my mom the bare counter looked "fluffy." The center of my vision cleared, but my periphery remained densely populated with bodies, evacuees from the center. Sometimes they show their face. Afterwards my heart pounds, my brain worries over itself — "I swear something was there, right there." This is the closest I've come to having a vision.

Joseph Smith's Plat of the City of Zion is a one-and-a-half mile square city plan, gridded and then filled with smaller rectangles, that has only ever existed on paper. He said it was shown to him in a vision. It bristles with numbers. Its central grid, housing people and places of religious community gathering, is surrounded by another grid of agricultural fields, which would supply the center. Each square is divided into rectangular lots, which lie perpendicular to their neighbors, so that from above — as if one is standing next to a table on which it has been spread — it looks like a quilt, or a woven trivet. At the center of the plat, two squares stare out. These are for gathering places, 24 temples, which up close have been figured as large identical buildings, not unlike a child's drawing of a house — square body, triangular head — but which from far away look like a cluster of eyes.

In Utah, Brigham Young and his followers found a desert, apparently empty as paper. Hopelessly biased toward the metaphorical, as many Mormons still are — myself included — Young saw a huge salt lake, fed by a smaller freshwater lake via a river, and called the place Zion, and the river the Jordan. As the Sea of Galilee feeds the Dead Sea by way of the Jordan River, Utah Lake feeds the Great Salt Lake. Brigham Young claimed it for God and the hundreds of travelers strung in a long line across the plains behind him.

As hundreds of converts continued migrating from Europe and the eastern U.S. to the land now known as Utah, Young adapted elements of Joseph Smith's Plat of Zion: grid city; numbered roads; temple as center of the plat. But after a few years of centralizing the decentralized, he took on a more complicated sin: language. That which holds within it an empty core: the inexpressible. In an address given in 1852, he said:

Brigham Young commissioned the creation of a new alphabet to accomplish this rolling back of signification. Street signs, textbooks, and newspapers were transliterated to the Deseret Alphabet, which was intended to be perfectly phonetic, partly inspired by the Pitman system of stenographic shorthand. Among other innovations, it was designed to have no ascenders and descenders (as in "d" or "g"), and devoted a single glyph for the word "the" (𐐜). Though it helped some European converts learn spoken English quickly, it also made the characters look so similar to each other that they became difficult to read. Usage all but died out within twenty years.2

Even today, I wonder why Brigham Youngdid not believe that the cavity in the center of every word that makes interpretation possible might be the dwelling place of God.

When Terry Tempest Williams' mother died, she left Williams the three shelves' worth of journals that were kept on display in her home. Years and years of records. "Don't read them until after I die." Afterward, Williams opened them one by one and found every page blank.3

I listen to a radio interview with historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich about polygamy in early Utah. Terry Gross asks her the unanswerable: Why would women choose to be in plural marriages? Were they fulfilled? Could any of them have been lesbians, secretly intimate with other women in the marriage? Ulrich's answer: "Alas, 19th-century diarists don't talk about sex." She says, "In order to understand sexuality in the 19th century, you have to look at the consequences — when were babies born? How many babies were there?"4

For a long time when I was a child an angel would sit on the top of my bedroom door and watch as I went to sleep. It was ugly, gripping the wood like a lemur, crouched like a monster. Sometimes I was afraid of it. Sometimes I imagined it as a kind of guardian — whether the kind that supervises or the kind that protects, I wasn't sure. As I drifted off I wondered if it was a single being who returned, or if they operated on some kind of shift system and different angels would stand guard on different days. Sometimes it comforted me. It had wings sometimes; other times it wore a long dress and stood at its full height.

If you were to move your hand and watch it, you would decide its trajectory, its arc of motion, without deciding it. You'd describe its movement without describing its movement—from left to right — You'd give it a resting place — cup — before it arrives. The cup is in your palm before you reach it. You feel its plastic roundness as a future memory.

The details I know: it happened in one of the mining camps where my great-grandfather went to find work. It was likely during the Great Depression. It was dangerous. It prevented her from having any future children.

The details I don't know but imagine: Whether it occurred in Utah, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, or Wyoming. Who she may have talked to about her plans. When she decided to do it. How she did it. How she had learned to do it. Who she had learned it from. If it happened outdoors or in a tent. If she kept it from her husband. If she kept it from her four children. How she survived. Whether the other women in the camp knew. If she had access to running water (unlikely). If she had access to electricity (likely, though not much). If she had access to professional medicine. If she had money for professional medicine. If she was employed in the camp at the time. If it was winter.

The artist Trevor Paglen, researching the geography of prisons, stumbled upon maps of the Nevada desert that showed vast blank spots. Knowing that the world "has been elaborately and meticulously mapped," he assumed it must have been a mistake on his part. He eventually realized "the images I was looking for were missing, not because the desert hadn't been mapped, but because what they showed was secret . . . Just as a Band-Aid announces the fact that it conceals a wound, blank spots on maps and blacked-out documents announce the fact that there's something hidden." Beneath these Band-Aids are the test sites, military bases, weapons ranges, and other government facilities that litter the open desert and aspire to be unmapped. "Blank spots on maps outline the things they seek to conceal," he writes. "To truly keep something secret, then, those outlines also have to be made secret. And then those outlines, and so on."5

A baby: the only available evidence. I am one kind of evidence, and the baby that does not exist is another. Only vacancy, a generational hallucination; carried by rumor, never delivered.

Anne Hutchinson had been imprisoned throughout the winter of 1637 and 1638 for preaching against the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In March she was banished from it, so she traveled for miles on foot in the early spring cold to what is now known as Rhode Island. When she arrived, she went into labor. She delivered a hydatidiform mole — an abnormal placenta, with an unviable or entirely absent fetus. A bundle of grapes; a "monstrous" birth. Hearing rumor of her miscarriage, John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote to her doctor to confirm. Her doctor responded:

Winthrop wrote back: "see how the wisdome of God fitted this judgement to her sinne every way, for looke as she had vented misshapen opinions, so she must bring forth deformed monsters, and as about 30 Opinions in number, so many monsters."7 A so-called prophet may utter falsehoods with her mouth, deceiving many, but her womb will always tell the truth.

The Greeks named the tearing of the veil between earth and heaven apocalypse, an uncovering — the revelation of information that would end the world. I imagine information burning through the atmosphere, melting the very stones to liquid. What would the boiled-over pot of this world look like without its cover, after this dream wherein all lies and false powers melt away like gold, back into the cracks of the earth? A bare, stripped truth, cold and depilated. Would this constitute the end of interpretation, then? A state in which truths could no longer be hidden or deferred, sold to language? I wonder what information would accompany not a clear, transparent speech, but the clarity of silence. In the cold aftermath of revelation, perhaps there would be nothing left to say.

From my house at age fourteen, I could look up to the mountains and see a cave like an eye-socket high above the valley. When I first heard the legend that serial killer Ted Bundy took young women to a cave in that same canyon to murder them, I assumed wrongly it was to this cave, this vacant abscess — though this cave is high, impossible; inaccessible to any human without harnesses and ropes. I knew Elizabeth Smart had been kidnapped at fourteen, stolen from her bed thirty miles away. My body at fourteen was a recent problem, inviting constant surveillance. Older men and their wives in church had warned me and other girls my age about our power over men. Though boys did not seem to like me, I was not allowed to have sleepovers — not because I'd get into trouble with my friends, but because of their fathers. These two pieces of information were irreconcilable.

Once, a counselor at a church youth summer camp pulled me aside before we left to meet the boys. While everyone waited, she asked me to kneel on the dark bathroom floor to see if my skirt reached my knees. There was an air of urgency, anxiety. I knew if I wasn't careful my breasts, hips, my skin, perhaps other things about my body, things I worried I had no means of identifying and covering in time, were going to kill me.

In eighth grade, when everyone found out Becca had been having sex with the seminary president, we all assumed it was her fault. I remember my surprise when he went to jail — I figured it must be something like a formality. Even so I felt sick with a nameless sickness, walking into that building for months. Becca came back for a while, but she eventually switched schools.

Years later, in our twenties, my friend Laura told me about her recent therapy appointments. "We keep going over my past," she says, "trying to figure out why I hate men so much. She keeps asking me why — have I been abused, or raped? Am I suppressing something? But nothing's really happened to me. I don't know why I hate them so much, I just do."

Pausing once, turning off the light before taking off my glasses, I saw that my monster angel was the door's shadow cast by a small light in the hall. Just a textureless triangle.

My grandfather was a child in the mining camps. His own father, once wronged in a business dispute, gave his enemy a mug of black oil after dark and told him it was beer. The only other children in the camp were my grandfather's cousins. When they were playing too loud, their father, my grandfather's uncle, would hold their fingers over a candle flame until they cried. My face must have registered some shock, because my grandfather trails off here. "I've seen some things," he summarizes. I ask him, eventually, how his mother liked it in the camps, wondering how much he knew about her successful attempt. "Oh, she hated it," he said. "She waited ages to get a proper washing machine."

To know a thing is sometimes to destroy it. One geographer famously felled a bristlecone pine only to learn, to his deep shock, that it was older than any known non-clonal organism on Earth. Rings from that tree, named Prometheus, are shelved in dark drawers in various geography and biology departments around the world. Now Methuselah, a tree which has since surpassed that tree's age, slowly grows somewhere in a place called Methuselah's Grove in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest. This tree is not marked on any public map, protected by a consensus of silence. In writing this I wonder if I am circling around the location of some ancient organism, attempting to map it by process of elimination. Perhaps I'm marking lines that are so tiny and strange I cannot go back and read them, and whose interpretation will kill it without my ever having seen it.

How badly I want to believe that that which cannot be spoken, or cannot be spoken safely, acquires through its silence a shield of protection. But maybe I want this to be true because it is terrible to imagine otherwise — to accept the certain truth that some things are smothered and simply lost forever, never to be recovered or changed.

"Over the years, a surprising number of Agnes Martin's paintings have been vandalized. One viewer used as their weapon an ice cream cone. Another attacked with green crayon, while at a show in Germany, nationalists hurled rubbish. The grids in particular seem to attract embellishment. Martin herself thought it was narcissistic, a kind of horror vacui. 'You know,' she said ruefully, 'people just can't stand that those are all empty squares.'"8

When Roe v. Wade is repealed, I received a message from a historian looking to write histories of abortion in Mormon contexts. She'd gotten my name from a mutual friend, who knew I was working on this project. Abortion narratives like my great-grandmother's are exceedingly rare — or more accurately, kept secret — especially those that took place before abortion rights were protected by law. So the historian wanted to know as many details about my great-grandmother's abortion as possible. She wanted to know how it happened, and she wanted to know how she felt about it. I sensed that she wanted my great-grandmother to speak on behalf of those Mormons whose abortion stories have been lost, whose history is a blank expanse — to witness from the past the historian's own present grief over the Dobbs decision. It was a grief, an urgency I shared.

Currently, the LDS church permits abortion in the case of rape/incest and the health of the mother, including mental health. But it prohibits, in the strongest terms, any other cases, punishable by excommunication. The fear in those first weeks, which would come true, was that states would enact laws even stricter, somehow, than the Mormon church's own policies. Many Mormons shared their fear and frustration online in the weeks following the verdict, recognizing that Roe v. Wade guaranteed many of them, when they miscarried or had other health problems, safe and humane medical care. But there was a silence, a zone many Mormons did not want or know how to publicly approach, to publicly say: voluntary abortions.

So the historian asked me to speculate. I almost said that perhaps having a baby in the extractive environment my great-grandmother lived in was impossible, that the brutal, extractive landscapes that made capitalism function in that time and place were entirely hostile to life. Or that she couldn't stand to bring forth another child by her husband. Or that she simply did not want it, did not want to be pregnant, for any possible reason. But I curbed that impulse.

When I told her, instead, the one truth I know — that my great-grandmother went to her grave regretting her abortion — the researcher left my message on read. I speculate, here, that this is not the information she wanted. I almost typed back, into the silence, that the freedom to regret one's abortion is a necessary byproduct of the freedom to a safe one, but I did not. I mourn her secret, even as I bless the freedom it must have granted her. So I write it here instead.

Author's note: All names have been changed.

---

Lindsey Webb is the author of Plat (Archway Editions, forthcoming) and the chapbooks House and Perfumer's Organ. Her writings have appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and Lana Turner, among others. She lives in Salt Lake City, where she is a Clarence Snow Memorial Fellow and PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.

---

References