by Minrose Gwin
My father rubbed his mouth with one hand, then his whole face with both hands. He hadn’t looked at me since the night he had asked me who the father was. He’d kept after me, getting up in my face. Finally I told him the truth: that I didn’t actually know, that there were two boys, that I loved them both.
“You slut,” he’d said, “you whore.” He’d grabbed my arm at the wrist, put his face up next to mine so I could smell the cigarettes on his breath. “Who? Who are they?” His eyes raked my body, his lip curled.
I told him I wouldn’t tell, he couldn’t make me tell. He twisted my wrist, making me cry out.
June burst into my room. “You let her go. Don’t you go hurting her!” Then, as if she hadn’t done enough damage, caused me enough grief, she named names.
Dad dropped my wrist. “What? Those two fags?” His tone was as thoughtful as it was cold.
The two of them, Dad and June, stood there staring at me, at my stomach, at the place between my legs. I felt like the polar bear at the zoo, bone weary from the dead weight of human eyes.
“Get out,” I said to them. “Get out of my room.”
“Gladly,” Dad said. “And you. You stay in.”
THAT NIGHT I tried to figure out how to get to the phone to call the boys so we could hightail it over to New Orleans. George had it all figured out. We’d change our names; New Orleans was huge, they’d never find us. We’d get one of those little shotguns up high off the ground and eat gumbo and oysters. We’d have a dog that lived under the house. Everything would be coming up roses by now if we’d gone last week. I’d told them I was a ticking time bomb, we couldn’t wait forever; but they were just boys, they thought we had all the time in the world.
Fortunately for us, I was taking typing as an elective. All the girls took it (to make a living should we not land husbands) and home ec (which would hold us in good stead if we did, and which June and I had had a crash course in after our mother died). I’d almost failed the latter for being unable to sew a straight seam. Typing, on the other hand, was my true calling. I got up to sixty words a minute in a month. I liked the way my fingers flew across the keyboard, the way the words took shape on the page. What struck me was how many words you could form out of twenty-six letters of the alphabet, how many meanings words could carry, strapped to their sturdy backs. How fleshy and full of possibility they seemed as they took shape on the paper in my carriage.
I pulled my suitcase out from under the bed and added a few last-minute items: underwear, pants with elastic waists, and shirts and flip-flops, some shampoo and cream rinse, my pink brush rollers, and hair spray. I had my Camp Winnatoba sweat shirt hanging on the door to my closet, ready for me to pull on over my pajamas once the moment was right and the boys came to get me. In my purse I kept my makeup bag, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, three cans of Cherry Coke, and what was left of a bag of stale Fritos. I’d been pilfering the grocery money and had twelve dollars and fourteen cents, plus a coupon for a six-pack of 7 Up, which the boys drank like water.
We were going to push off Dad’s old Rambler in the dead of night. We were going to vamoose, abscond, take off like pigeons from the roost, trace the shape of the sleepy Gulf through the swamps and marshes, following the stars in the southern sky. Orion the Hunter, his dog Canis Major, the constellations of Carina, Puppis, and Vela.
Daniel and George talked about getting jobs loading and unloading down at the docks. They thought it’d be exciting and educational to unload goods off of those big ships from exotic places like India and France that brought perfumes and spices and cans of escargot to our shores.
After June and Dad went out the door, I sat on my bed and ate the peanut butter sandwich and Fritos from my getaway bag and drank two of my cans of Cherry Coke. The crumbs rained down and lodged between the nubs on my spread. I picked them out and ate them too.
The phone rang in the hall and I ran for it. Dad got there first. He yelled into the receiver and then slammed it down. He whirled around. “Get out of my sight. And don’t even think about leaving the house.”
Later June knocked on the door to my room and came in with a plate of spaghetti from supper. She’d piled it high with meatballs. My mouth watered.
I jumped up from the bed and stopped her in her tracks. “Look what you’ve gone and done. You’ve just gone and ruined all our lives.”
She just stood there with a smear of red sauce on her cheek from supper. She had on Mama’s apron, splattered in red. How my fingers itched to slap that cheek of hers!
“Get out and stay out.” I snatched the plate from her.
She planted herself in the doorway. “What did you think was going to happen, Grace? Did you think people weren’t going to notice when you got big as a house? What were you going to do with it once it came, drop it in a basket on the church steps? At least now you can go stay with Frances, and nobody’ll know.” She said all that in the most reasonable way possible.
I thought of my aunt’s dank house, dark and gloomy from the overhanging trees that scraped the roof on rainy nights. I thought of Daniel and George heading for New Orleans without me. At least we would be in the same city. I could run away from Frances’s and meet them there, though of course without me they would have no reason to go; they could just live out their cozy lives here in Opelika. They could go to football games and drink milk shakes; they could lie naked together under the covers and shiver in the crisp night air. I sank to the floor.
June squatted down beside me, her eyes bright, her breath cheesy. “Which one was it, Grace? Which one got you pregnant?”
If I could mark the moment when things turned sour between me and my sister, the way a bottle of milk will curdle overnight in the refrigerator, it was when she asked that question, as if my child, my child were a seed spit from the sparrow’s beak. Before she asked those questions, before my father had looked at me the way he did, shame was simply a word that required the fingers to strike letters on all three levels of the typewriter, a good word for practicing dexterity. Now I saw myself as she and Dad saw me, as a fool, the one left holding the bag. Daniel and George would still have each other; Frances would have my baby. I’d have nobody.
I reached out and shoved my sister. She tumbled back, onto the floor. How she reminded me of a flipped cockroach. How I wanted to kick her in the soft middle part, stomp her face in. I raised one hand. “Get the hell away from me. Remember this day, remember I said I’d always hate you for as long as I live.”
She scrambled to her feet and backed out of the door. When she shut the door, I could hear her rev up to cry. And I was glad.
I wolfed down the spaghetti and meatballs. I knew exactly how June made the sauce, how long she cooked it, the extra oregano she put in because she knew I liked it, the sugar that sweetened it, how she used ground chuck and Progresso breadcrumbs and Worcestershire for the meatballs, sautéed them crisp before dropping them into the sauce at the last minute.
IN THE END my father told me to stay at Frances’s. Why should he give up his pension when Frances would take me for free?
It was still warm when I first got there. My aunt lived in a bustling neighborhood out by the lake. There were a couple of small grocery stores, a barbershop, a po’boy dive called Mimi’s, and a constant parade of people eating snowballs from the Harrison Street Snowball Stand a block down. While she was at school, I would sit on her front stoop half hidden by palmetto leaves watching people come and go, laughing and talking together. At night I dreamed of rescue, the boys throwing rocks at my window, the way we’d planned. Sometimes the crack of the rock against the window seemed so real I’d get up to look out into the dark.
November marked the fourth anniversary of my mother’s death. It had turned cold and rainy. The city lights hid the stars. Clouds flew across the face of the moon like huge dark birds.
At night as the salt air blew off Lake Pontchartrain and the fanned leaves from the palmetto scratched at my window, I began to dream that a giant oak was gro
wing inside me, the roots tangled in the rolls of my intestines. The trunk, thick and knobby, rose up between my lungs; the branches curled around my heart.
After I got larger, Frances wouldn’t take me out. She said she didn’t want anybody to know where her baby had come from. She had this way of eyeing my belly sideways, out of the corner of her eye. Dad sent money for my clothes, but she wouldn’t take me to the store to buy them. One pink number she’d selected had balloons on the top, which made me look like a clown. I’d grown upward as well as outward, and the outfits were too short. My belly poked out between the tops and the bottoms, and the pants stopped at midcalf. Every night Frances gave me my studies for the next day. Sometimes I did the homework, sometimes I didn’t. She didn’t own a TV, said they made you stupid. When she came bustling in from school in the afternoons, I’d be so glad to hear the sound of her voice that tears would well up in my eyes. After supper, she’d tell me to clear the table for my lessons. She drilled me on my commas and semicolons, World Wars I and II. She made me conjugate Latin verbs, translate the stories of Caesar’s conquests, her Lady Schoolteacher Smell surrounding me like his conquering army. She told me about the early writings, poems and teachings scratched out on something called papyrus, which had been found tucked away in caves. We studied the constellations and galaxies, the nature of gravity, the space race. Now the sky was full of dogs and chimps, each and every one terrified and lonely. Frances’s lip quivered when she talked about the animals. In her spare time, she wrote letters, signed petitions. Sometimes she put her elbows on the table and rested her head in her hands and dozed a bit while I translated. I knew I should thank her for keeping me up on my studies, but I began to view the lessons with a dread akin to nausea; after a while, I couldn’t tell the difference.
On weekend afternoons, she pored over Dr. Spock, marking passages and taking notes in the margins. “‘Trust yourself,’” she intoned. “‘You know more than you think you do.’” She looked up from her reading and smiled. “That’s reassuring, don’t you think?”
I peeked at the book, but it scared me; so many things can happen to a little baby: safety pins and mysterious infections, cripplings and blindings and fevers. You could drop it on the floor, roll over in the bed and smother it, break its floppy little stem of a neck. Pillows and stuffed toys could smother it, don’t leave them in the crib. Television would fry a baby’s brain.
ONE MORNING, JUST as I was getting out of bed, a little bird fluttered inside me, as panicky as the sparrow Mama had captured. I thought something was wrong, that I was going to lose the baby. I went into the kitchen. “I think the baby’s dying,” I told Frances. “It feels like it’s trying to get its breath.” I felt lighter already.
She smiled and said, “Oh honey, that’s just the baby kicking, that’s just the baby saying hello to you.” She walked over to me and reached for my belly.
I backed up. “Don’t touch me.”
Her hand hovered, then dropped to her side. “Oh Grace, you must be really unhappy. This too will pass.”
DAD AND JUNE drove in for Christmas afternoon. When they saw me, they stopped dead.
June gave me some Raspberry Bloom lipstick and nail polish to match, wrapped separately. She’d made a new concoction she called Angels’ Wings: chunks of angel food cake in a Pyrex dish covered by boiled custard with dollops of meringue on top. All afternoon the three of them sat around and talked about everything but the baby. June complained about how hard Latin was, how the Opelika Gators had finished out the season with only two losses. Dad talked about a new furniture factory, a spin-off from the mill, how it was bringing new jobs to town. I listened for a while, then said I was tired and needed a nap. When I woke up it was the middle of the night and they were gone. I tossed and turned. How was I ever going to go back home when this was over?
But there was no such thing as this being over, my baby wouldn’t be gone once I’d given birth. Nor, in that moment, did I want it to be. As Frances and Dad had hatched their schemes, I’d made my own plans. I would graduate from high school, being sure to take shorthand to perfect my secretarial skills. Then it would be Katy bar the door; I’d move to the City and be out in the world making my own living. I’d get myself to a little balcony apartment in the Quarter and acquire the things a baby needs. I’d wait for George and Daniel to find me. Then, one day, we would knock on Frances’s door and tell her to give me my baby back. We’d kidnap it if we had to. This was the story I told myself as I tried to get back to sleep.
IN NEW ORLEANS, winter crawls into your bones. By the first of the year a grim rain had set in and the pumps had stopped working. One late afternoon as I peered through the half dark at the flooded street outside, I gave up on George and Daniel. They hadn’t called, hadn’t written. As the dank weeks dragged on, I found myself more lonesome for my mother than for the boys. I began to feel hollowed out, preparing to give birth to some strange mutation of emptiness.
One morning in late January I woke up at dawn. The sky was slate gray, and a cold wind was whipping up from the lake. Frances was stirring in the kitchen. I waited until she left for school and went in to get some breakfast. She’d left a grapefruit half with the sections precisely cut, cinnamon toast on a cookie sheet on top of the stove, a boiled egg still in its water. I took the grapefruit in one hand, the toast in the other, and threw them across the kitchen. Then I took the pot of water with the egg in it and turned it upside down. I smashed the egg under my heel.
I enjoyed looking at the mess I’d made of things, then I squatted down and cleaned it up.
Which is when I noticed the paring knife in the dish drain. I took it up and pressed the tip into my palm. It was surprisingly easy to draw blood. I pulled up my gown and touched my belly with the edge of the knife. A welt appeared, then a dot of red, then another dot. I thought about slippage, how easily one thing can lead to another, how bad luck coils and strikes. Two extra hours at the zoo and everything lost.
As the minutes and hours ticked by over the course of the day, the knife became my friend. I played with it, talked to it. I carried it around the house, my palm curled around it. I was holding it in my lap, letting the blade reflect the overhead light, when Frances came in the door. Her mouth fell open and she dropped her books and took it from me.
“Are you blue, honey?” she asked. “Maybe you should be with the other girls in trouble, in your condition? At least you’d have some companionship.”
I stared out the window, smeared with rain. “Out of the frying pan into the fire.”
“It’s not that I don’t want you here.” She turned her back to me, going to the kitchen sink to wash her hands. “All right. I’ll talk to your father. Meanwhile, you should read some books for fun, get your mind off things. I’ll pick some up for you tomorrow at the library. Oh dear, I should have thought of that.” She turned around and took a deep breath, a shaky breath. Her face resembled a plaster mask, there were dark circles under her eyes. The shoulder seams of her blouse had slipped down over her shoulders, which I noticed for the first time looked like the joints of chicken wings.
OUR LADY OF Perpetual Sorrows was up on Napoleon. A big house with columns, surrounded by a high brick wall broken only by a wrought-iron gate. The drive up to the building itself was lined in live oaks. Acorns crunched under the wheels of the car.
The gate opened as we approached. At the door, two nuns stood waiting. One took my suitcase and helped me from the car. The other had a few quiet words with Frances, who then turned to me and said she’d see me on Sunday.
I was put in a good-sized room with three other girls, two of whose names I don’t remember, our beds lined up against the walls. The other one, Lou Ella, was from a little town in the Delta. She was so skinny she looked like she was hiding a basketball under her dress, playing a joke. She said her uncle did it to her and it wasn’t the first time she’d been in this fix. The others she’d managed to get rid of. One was born the size of a chipmunk, scarcely alive and it she�
��d drowned. Our beds were close by and she whispered her stories to me as I tried to get to sleep. My bed was under the window and I’d watch the moon come up, the North Star and the Milky Way and the Dippers take their places in the night sky. Sometimes I thought I could see capsules filled with dogs and monkeys, dead and alive, alone and together, float silently past my window. I told Lou Ella to shut the hell up, not to fill my head with her ugly stories, but she wouldn’t stop. Sometimes I’d take long even breaths so she’d think I’d dozed off, but she kept right on, telling it all over and over, her terrible life.
The four of us in this one room were all due about the same time, but Lou Ella went first. The night her water broke, my first thought was how grateful I was I wouldn’t have to listen to her anymore. I knew I’d never see her again because the girls went straight home from the hospital. When the nuns came in to take her to the hospital, she began to cry and say how she didn’t want to go home. Please, couldn’t she come back to Our Lady? Couldn’t they find some work for her to do there? She’d mop floors, clean the bathrooms, cook the food. She’d work seven days a week, Christmas, Easter, and New Year’s. The nuns said for her to come along, she needed to get on over to the hospital; for her to get the suitcase she was supposed to have packed for the trip home. They’d had to buy her the suitcase; she’d come in with the clothes on her back.
She hadn’t packed her suitcase, that much I knew. So while she sat on the bed, big tears running down her scrawny face, the nuns packed it for her, as efficiently as wrens making a nest. One snapped it shut with a cheerful click and the other took her arm and pulled her up off the bed. “Come along now, dear,” they murmured, “the driver’s waiting.”
Two days later a new girl was in Lou Ella’s bed. She was the opposite of Lou Ella, wouldn’t say a word, not nice to meet you, not kiss my foot, for which I was grateful.
