"Broken Lines" by Andrea Bianchi
During the swirling conversation that always followed first-date introductions in the corners of dark bars, I used to slide my body over to the semi-stranger next to me and press into his palm my glowing phone.
And there, within the borders of a single screen, was a whole poem.
It contained only five simple stanzas, five lines each, beneath an understated title—a single word “(detail)” enclosed in parentheses.
Yet somehow, with its brief scene of “a woman without children,” I presumed the poet Billy Collins could articulate, far better than I could, the complicated response to the question that every date would pose:
“Why don’t you want kids?”
***
On the topic of possible children, I had always selected the option “no” located beneath my photo on online dating apps, and the men I met had always presented counterarguments, inquiries. But when I attempted to formulate a response in my own words, my reasoning invariably came out tangled.
Maybe it was tangled in the strands of my DNA, linked back to my father’s autoimmune diseases, which would be programmed into my descendants’ genes. Or perhaps my desire was tied to different, less identifiable genes, likewise transmitted to me by my father, who had never wanted children, as he once admitted to me.
So for as long as I could remember, I had been weaving together a plan to cut the lines that connected my defective eggs to my uterus.
Maybe I was ashamed to speak my ultimate reason for this drastic decision. A hope too bold, too vulnerable to admit in the banter and bravado of the initial uncertain conversations on first dates with possible partners.
I want to be someone’s everything, I wanted to say. And him mine.
I want to be enough.
***
That word, enough, repeats and repeats until it climaxes in the final two lines of Collins’s poem, which I had inscribed in capital letters onto a sign hung on one of my apartment’s walls.
ENOUGH, the poem proclaimed one spring evening a few years ago when I opened my apartment door for the first time to a date who had agreed to a relationship, despite our debates on procreation.
“Date me and convince me not to have children,” he proposed, as a solution to our irreconcilable differences.
Yet as this new man wandered through my home, he did not seem to see the handwritten lines. Perhaps his averted eyes were already resisting my attempts at persuasion on the topic of procreation. Or maybe he had already forgotten, only weeks before on our first date, reading on my phone the story in that poem.
The poem—narrated (I had always assumed) by a man—opens on the speaker and a childless woman drinking tea and turning the pages of a coffee-table book containing reproductions of paintings. “This one is my favorite,” the woman says. Yet her selection, the narrator notices, depicts only a portion of an original piece, presumably not included in its entirety in the tome. But she deems “a detail, a corner” as enough.
As was this moment enough, the man later realizes, in the eventual epiphany so characteristic of a Collins poem. “As was she enough.” Perfectly, he adds afterward, as if the word enough itself were not enough to convey her completeness as a woman who has borne no children.
I had always equated those unborn children with the unseen parts of the painting the poet enumerates. “[T]he countryside below / or the portrayal of some myth,” he guesses, might potentially be hidden beneath the sliver of sky that the woman has named as her “favorite.” And that was also the word I desired to have attributed to me. To be chosen for myself, not for what I could produce: my yet-unseen but potential children.
***
“I’m looking for the mother of my children,” a man once announced to me, long ago, in the sunshine of a first meeting. My sparkling wine had halted in midair; my giddy anticipation of a potential partnership halted in mid-date. I had turned to face him.
“I would encourage you instead to look for the love of your life,” I recommended.
“They are one and the same,” he replied.
That same sentiment was echoed now in my new boyfriend’s theories, shouted over the thumping beats of a DJ one early summer evening fraught with alcohol and arguments.
“A child is an expression of the love two people have for each other,” he insisted.
I could not comprehend how love for someone other than me could be called love for me. Love sees only the beloved, I believed. Two faces turned toward each other alone. Not only are other potential objects of affection—or, in the poem, the other elements of the painting—never seen, but the viewer does not even want to see them, or the fields beneath the clouds. Once she has found her favorite, she sees no need to continue seeking anything better. She is fulfilled in her choice—the way I wanted my boyfriend to be fully satisfied in choosing me, the childless woman.
How assured, as well, her selection seems. Her choice is given voice, emphasized as the poem’s only line of dialogue: “This one is my favorite.” A simple declarative sentence: subject, linking verb, predicate nominative. A plain announcement of nonconformity. Even her actions defy conventionality: she is drinking not coffee, but tea, the narrator notes twice, while seated at a coffee table. I used to see this irony simply as quintessential Collins humor, but perhaps the discontinuity also illustrates this woman’s quiet resistance to expectations. She sees no need for defensiveness against society’s common accusations—of selfishness—hurled at the childless.
And no need for any of the promotional orations I declaimed as I tried to convince my boyfriend of my choice’s superiority. “Endless travel,” I tantalized. “Financial stability. Sex in any room at any time of day without any interruptions,” I promised him one morning as we lay naked on his living room floor, where we gazed up through the window pane into a sky as pale as the page of clouds the poet portrays in the favored painting.
“Aloft,” “billowing,” the narrator says. The clouds are beautiful on their own, without embellishment, and without the missing portion of the picture. “Tinged with red and gold,” he adds to further elevate them and the woman’s choice.
Those descriptions evidence his approval of her decision, I always believed. Or, at the least, he seems neutral, accepting. “I was thinking oddly” of her childlessness, he admits at first, his only hint at discomfort or disapproval—or worse, debate. Yet then, at the end of the poem, how comprehending he seems. How could a man understand so well, I always wondered, the wishes of a woman?
Perhaps the man is not the poet, though, but only the fictional narrator. A man who does not exist in reality, or even in the realm of the two-dimensional boxes arranged in rows beneath dating profile photos, where most men check “wants children.”
“Does Billy Collins have children?” I inquired of the Internet, then squinted at the lists of possible information and quickly, willfully concluded the results remained inconclusive.
***
I interpreted my boyfriend’s ambivalence as a sign he had finally begun to accept the idea of childlessness when, one late summer afternoon, he merely nodded at my announcement.
“I finally scheduled the surgery,” I told him. I would forever sever the tubes that linked my ovaries to my uterus, that connected my future—and maybe his—to possible progeny.
And just before the decisive slice of the knife was to remove the conduits, positioned like two parentheses around my womb, he delivered good wishes to my glowing phone lying by my side on the hospital gurney.
At the same time, the surgeon’s assistant leaned over the bed rail and listed the procedure’s possible risks: unintended puncture of internal organs, she said. And then, the less corporeal complication: regret.
I waved away the suggestion, for I had carried certainty deep in my uterus for years.
But afterward, under the “low and overcast” skies of November, the same season as the setting of the poem, my boyfriend decided my body was too broken now, incomplete. And he desired the whole mural of life’s possibilities: the mythical promise of unconditional love and immortality through parenthood, procreation.
“You don’t want—you literally can’t have—children,” he told me, “And I’m beginning to resent you for keeping me from finding someone who wants that with me.”
In his words, I heard the urgency of the poem’s opening line: “It was getting late in the year,” the narrator warns. “[T]he light was growing dim,” he later says. References to time—the ticking clock of nature and of biology, the aging of my boyfriend, perhaps the waning of the woman in the poem, who is maybe facing her last chance to change her mind about children, to prevent regret.
***
For the first time then, I noticed the words on my wall that followed the triumph of ENOUGH, PERFECTLY: “by herself,” the poet concedes. She ends alone, as had I, not just without children, but without a partner, “perfectly by herself / somewhere in the enormous mural of the world.”
The imagery of all-the-world-a-painting is marred, broken at the line break, by the wandering woman, lost, “somewhere.” Her location unidentifiable.
When this poem first appeared in the journal Crazyhorse—prior to the updated version in Ballistics— the poem’s final line opened not with that hopeless “somewhere,” but with the phrase “in her place”:
as was she enough, perfectly by herself
in her place in the enormous mural of the world.
I pondered the change, among others seemingly less meaningful (the transposition of the words girl and boy, the description of the coffee-table book as “large” instead of “expensive”) in the two different publications. I hypothesized that the poet had feared misinterpretation of the original phrase, “in her place”—too similar to the condescending idiom “put her in her place.”
As I searched alone for my own place, among the checkboxes on the Internet, then again on first dates in dark bars, I preferred the description of the woman’s—and my own—position as “in her place.” It seemed an expression of her certainty in her decision. Her knowledge of how integral she is to that “enormous mural of the world.” Confident she occupies the correct position therein. A position which she fully owns, with that possessive pronoun her.
She is established and held firm the same way the title, “(detail),” is encompassed by parentheses. Those marks—sometimes implying a sublimation of the content within, as if just an insignificant detail—here seem to encircle the word, proving the detail is whole in itself, book-ended by the cupping curves. And they contain an entire story—and an entire woman—with a beginning, middle, and end.
***
I used to think that story could explain, far better than my defensive arguments, my desire for childlessness, my wish to be enough. And since the form of poetry seemed so complete, the short poem so succinct, I had handed it to men in bars on my glowing phone.
Now, my body, in its incompleteness, tells the complete story: I can no longer provide a man with someone else to love. I am all I have to offer.
So my debates have stopped silent. My phone has gone dark. My body itself has become the poem.
Andrea Bianchi lives in Chicago, where she earned a certificate of creative writing from Northwestern University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Witness, The Rumpus, New Ohio Review, The Boiler, Eclectica, The Smart Set, and elsewhere.
