by Nathan Hill
“Good lord,” says Faye’s mother. “Look at them. They’re like hoboes.”
“I’m going out,” Faye says.
“They probably started as nice boys,” says her mother. “They probably took up with the wrong crowd.”
“I have a date tonight.”
Her mother looks at her finally. “Well. You look very nice.”
“I’ll be back by ten.”
She passes through the kitchen, where her father is twisting off the top of the percolator. He’s brewing coffee and fixing a sandwich in preparation for his ChemStar shift tonight.
“Bye, Dad,” she says, and he gives her a quick wave. He’s wearing his uniform, his gray jumpsuit with the ChemStar logo on the front, the interlocking C and S on the chest. She used to joke with him that if he removed the C he’d look like Superman. But they haven’t joked like that in a long time.
She’s opening the outside door when he stops her. “Faye,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“The guys at the factory are asking about you.”
Faye pauses in the doorway, one foot in the house and one foot out. She looks back at her dad. “They are? Why?”
“They’re wondering about your scholarship,” he says as the percolator’s top clatters off. “They’re asking when you’re leaving for college.”
“Oh.”
“I thought we agreed not to tell anyone.”
They stand there in silence for a moment, her father scooping spoonfuls of coffee grounds, Faye gripping the doorknob.
“It’s not something you have to be ashamed of,” she says. “Me getting into college, and getting a scholarship. That’s not—what did you call it? Bragging?”
He stops fussing with the percolator then, and looks at her and smiles his tight smile. Puts his hands in his pockets.
“Faye,” he says.
“That’s just—I don’t know what that is. Doing a good job. It’s not bragging.”
“Doing a good job. Right. Does everybody get this scholarship?”
“No, of course not.”
“So you’re special then. You’re singled out.”
“I had to work hard, get good grades.”
“You had to be better than everyone else.”
“Yes, I did.”
“That’s pride, Faye. Nobody is better than anyone else. Nobody is special.”
“It’s not pride, it’s…reality. I got the best grades, I scored the highest marks. Me. It’s an objective fact.”
“Do you remember the story I told you about the house spirit? The nisse?”
“Yes.”
“And the little girl who ate the nisse’s meal?”
“I remember.”
“She wasn’t punished because she stole his food, Faye. She was punished because she thought she deserved it.”
“You don’t think I deserve to go to college?”
He chuckles and looks at the ceiling and shakes his head. “You know, most fathers have it easy. They teach their daughters to value hard work and a day’s wage. Chase off the wrong boys and buy an encyclopedia set. But you? You complain if a book is a poor translation.”
“What’s your point?”
“Everyone already thinks you’re a big shot. You don’t have to go to Chicago to prove it.”
“That’s not why I want to go.”
“Trust me, Faye. It’s a bad idea, leaving home. You should stay where you belong.”
“You did it. You left Norway and moved here.”
“So I know what I’m talking about.”
“Do you think it was a mistake? Do you wish you’d stayed back there?”
“You don’t understand anything.”
“I earned this.”
“What do you suppose is going to happen, Faye? Do you really believe that because you work hard the world is going to be kind to you? You think the world owes you something? Because the world isn’t going to give you a damn thing.” He turns around to attend to his coffee. “It doesn’t matter how many straight-A report cards you have, or where you go to college. The world is cruel.”
Faye is still angry about this as she drives to the pharmacy. Angry at her father’s cynicism. Angry that what always earned her the most praise—being a good student—is now the thing that makes her a target. She feels double-crossed by this, betrayed by some implicit promise made to her long ago.
And she thinks maybe it’s providence that she’ll be seeing Mrs. Schwingle tonight. Because if there’s anyone in this entire town who would not accuse Faye of being pretentious, it is Mrs. Schwingle, who brags about her world travels and worships whatever new thing the elegant ladies of the East Coast are doing. Certainly Mrs. Schwingle, of all people, could sympathize.
Faye arrives at the pharmacy and walks up to the counter, where she finds Harold Schwingle standing with a clipboard counting aspirin jars.
“Hi, Dr. Schwingle,” she says.
He considers her sternly and coldly for what seems like an oddly long moment. He is tall and wide, his hair cut high and tight with military precision.
“I’m here to pick up my package,” Faye says.
“Yes, I suppose you are.” He leaves and remains somewhere in the back room for what seems like far too long. Over the tinny speakers a brass band plays a waltz. The automated air freshener releases a small poosh and a few seconds later there’s the cloying, perfumey odor of synthesized lilacs. There is nobody else in the pharmacy. The overhead lights flicker and buzz. On the counter, buttons for Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign stare woodenly back at her.
When Dr. Schwingle returns he’s carrying a dark brown paper bag, stapled shut. He drops it—and not particularly gently—on his side of the counter, too far away for Faye to comfortably reach it.
“Is this for you?” he says.
“Yes, sir.”
“Will you swear to that, Faye? You’re not buying this for someone else, are you?”
“Oh, no sir, it’s for me.”
“You can tell me if it’s for someone else. Be honest.”
“Cross my heart, Dr. Schwingle. This is mine.”
And he breathes in a dramatic way that reads as exasperation, maybe disappointment.
“You’re a good girl, Faye. What happened?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Faye,” he says, “I know what this is. And I think you should reconsider.”
“Reconsider?”
“Yes. I’m going to sell this to you because it’s my duty. But it’s also my duty, my moral duty, to tell you I think it’s a mistake.”
“That’s very nice of you but—”
“A big mistake.”
She was not prepared for the intensity of this conversation. “I’m sorry,” she says, though she doesn’t know what she’s apologizing for.
“I always thought you were so responsible,” he says. “Does Henry know?”
“Of course,” she says. “I have a date with him tonight.”
“Do you?”
“Yes,” she says, as instructed. “We’re going out tonight.”
“Has he proposed to you?”
“What?”
“If he were a gentleman he would have proposed to you by now.”
And Faye feels defensive under his criticism. What comes out sounds hollow. “All in good time?”
“You really need to think about what you’re doing, Faye.”
“Okay. Thanks very much,” she says, and she leans over the counter and closes her fist around the brown paper bag with a loud, poignant crunch. She doesn’t know what’s happening here, but she wants it to be over. “Goodbye.”
She drives quickly to the Schwingle house, a grand thing that sits on a rocky bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, a rare point of elevation in the otherwise gentle rolling flatness of the prairie. Faye drives up through the trees to the house, which she finds unexpectedly dark. The lights are off and everything is silent. Faye panics. Did she get the date wrong? Were they meet
ing somewhere else first? She’s considering driving back home and calling Margaret when the front door opens and out she walks, Margaret Schwingle, in sweatpants and a baggy T-shirt, hair disheveled in a way Faye has never seen before, scooped to one side like she’s been sleeping on it.
“Do you have the package?” she asks.
“Yes.” Faye gives her the crinkly brown bag.
“Thanks.”
“Margaret? Is everything okay?”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “We can’t have dinner tonight.”
“Okay.”
“You have to go home now.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
Margaret is staring at her feet, not looking at Faye. “I’m really sorry. For everything.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Listen,” she says, and now she looks at Faye for the first time. She stands up straight and points her chin out, trying to look tough. “Nobody saw you come here tonight.”
“I know.”
“Remember that. You can’t prove you were here.”
Then Margaret nods to Faye and spins on her heel and leaves, locking the door behind her.
8
IN 1968, in Faye’s small Iowa river town, the girls of the graduating class knew—though they never spoke of it—dozens of ways to get rid of unplanned, unwanted, unborn children. Some of these methods were almost always unsuccessful; some were nothing more than old wives’ tales; some required advanced medical training; some were too horrible to think about.
The most attractive were of course those that could be done innocently, without any special chemical or apparatus. Long-distance bicycling. Jumping from a great height. Alternating hot and cold baths. Placing a candle on the abdomen and letting it burn all the way down. Standing on one’s head. Falling down stairs. Punching oneself repeatedly in the belly.
When these failed—and they almost always did fail—the girls moved on to new techniques, remedies that wouldn’t arouse suspicion. Simple, over-the-counter things. Douching with Coca-Cola, for example. Or Lysol. Or iodide. Ingesting incredibly high quantities of vitamin C. Or iron tablets. Filling the uterus with saline solution, or a mixture of water and Kirkman Borax Soap. Eating uterine stimulants like julep. Or croton oil. Calomel. Senna. Rhubarb. Magnesium sulfate. Herbs that initiated or increased menstrual flow, such as parsley. Or chamomile. Ginger.
Quinine was also effective, according to many grandmothers.
And brewer’s yeast. Mugwort. Castor oil. Lye.
Then there were those other methods, those things that none but the most desperate would ever consider. Bicycle pump. Vacuum cleaner. Knitting needle. Umbrella rib. Goose quill. Cathartic tube. Turpentine. Kerosene. Bleach.
None but the most desperate, the most alone and unconnected, those who had no friends with medical access who might procure certain behind-the-counter items. Methergine. Synthetic estrogens. Pituitary extract. Abortifacient ergot preparations. Strychnine. Suppositories known in some quarters as Black Beauties. Glycerin applied via catheter. Ergotrate, which makes the uterus stiffen and contract. Certain medicines used by cow breeders to regulate animal cycles—difficult to acquire, polysyllabic: dinoprostone, misoprostol, gemeprost, methotrexate.
What was in that paper bag? Almost certainly not small chocolate bonbon things, Faye decides as she drives home, rounds the corner into Vista Hills, regrets that she did not open the bag. Why didn’t she open it?
Because it was stapled, she thinks.
Because you’re a coward, another part of her thinks.
She has an abstract feeling of panic and distress right now. How strangely Margaret had acted tonight. Dr. Schwingle too. A feeling like there’s something she’s missing, some essential fact whose revelation she dreads. The air is misty, the sky not raining so much as lightly spitting, a humidity like when the girls boil things in home ec. Once, one of the girls forgot her pot and left it there to burn all day and the water boiled out and the pot got scorched and red-hot and its plastic handle melted and then outright burned. It set off all the alarms.
Tonight has that same quality to it. Like there’s something very close and dangerous and alarming that Faye has not yet noticed.
She’s sure of this when she arrives home. Only one light is on in the house—the kitchen light. There’s something wrong with that one lonely light. From outside it looks almost green, like the color of cabbage once you cut way down deep into it.
Her parents are there, in the kitchen, waiting for her. Her mother cannot look at her. Her father says, “What have you done?”
“What do you mean?”
He says they got a phone call from Harold Schwingle, who said Faye had been in the store tonight to pick up a package. What kind of package? Well, let me tell you, said Dr. Schwingle, I’ve been in this business long enough to know that any girl buying the things Faye bought tonight is only trying to do one thing.
“What?” Faye asks.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” says her mother.
“Tell you what?”
“That you’re knocked up,” says her father.
“What?”
“I cannot believe you let that idiot farmer boy shame you like this,” he says. “And shame us, Faye.”
“But he didn’t! There’s been a mistake.”
The phone had been ringing all night. Calls from the Petersons. And the Watsons. And the Carltons. And the Wisors. And the Krolls. All of them saying, You should know, Frank, what I heard about your daughter.
How on earth did everyone know this? How does the whole town already know?
“But it’s not true,” Faye says.
And she wants to explain to them about the birthday party that never happened, and about Margaret’s strange behavior tonight. She wants to explain what she immediately understands is the truth: that Margaret is pregnant and needs certain drugs without her father knowing, so she used Faye to get them. She wants to say all this but she can’t, first because her father is now in a blind rage about how she’s ruined her reputation and how she can’t show her face here ever again and how god will punish her for what she wants to do to her own child—yelling more words at her right now than he’s spoken to her in the last year—and also because she feels an attack coming on. Coming on strong now because she’s having trouble breathing and she’s sweating and her field of vision is beginning to narrow. Soon it will be like looking at the world through a pinhole. And she’s fighting off the feeling that this is the Big One, the really big seizure that finally kills her; she’s fighting the sense that these are the last breaths she will ever take.
“Help me,” she tries to say, but it comes out a whisper, inaudible above her father, who’s now telling her how many years he’s worked to gain a good reputation in this town and how she’s ruined it all in one night, how he’s never going to forgive her for what she’s done to him.
For how much she’s hurt him.
And she thinks: Hang on.
She thinks: Hurt him?
Because even though she’s not pregnant, if she were pregnant, wouldn’t she be the one needing comfort? Wouldn’t she be the one the neighbors were talking about? How is this about him? And she feels suddenly defiant, suddenly uninterested in defending herself anymore. And when her father reaches the end of his lecture and says “What do you have to say for yourself?,” she stands up as vertically and nobly as she can manage and says: “I’m leaving.”
Her mother looks at her now for the first time.
“I’m going to Chicago,” Faye says.
Her father stares hard at her for a moment. He seems like a twisted version of himself, the expression on his face like when he was building that bomb shelter in the basement, that same determination, that same dread.
She remembers once he had come up from the basement, his clothes powdered gray from whatever construction was happening down there that night, and Faye had just taken a bath and she was so happy to see him that she broke free from the mass
of towels her mother used to dry her and she bolted out the door, happy, bright, bounding like a rubber ball. She was wiry, sinewy, she had just bathed, she was nude, she was eight. Her dad stood in this very kitchen and she burst in and did a cartwheel, that’s how happy she was. A cartwheel, oh lord, imagine it now, at the cartwheel’s middle, spread open like some giant tropical plant. What a thing for her father to see. He frowned and said “I think this is inappropriate. Why don’t you put on some clothes,” and she ran to her room not quite knowing what she’d done wrong. Inappropriate for whom, she wondered as she stood naked looking at the neighborhood through her big picture window upstairs. She didn’t know why her father had sent her here, why she was inappropriate, and she looked out her window and perhaps thought about her body for the first time. Or maybe she thought for the first time of her body as a thing separate from her. And who cares if she imagined a boy walking by and spotting her? Who cares if this image would continue to interest her for reasons that would never be entirely clear? From that moment, there was no other purpose to Faye’s big picture window than to imagine what she looked like through it.
That was many years ago. Faye and her father never talked about this. Time heals many things because it sets us on trajectories that make the past seem impossible.
And now Faye is back in the kitchen, and she’s waiting for her father to say something, and it’s like the space that opened between them that day has reached its apogee. They are two bodies orbiting each other, connected by the thinnest tether. They will either drift back together now or fling themselves forever apart.
“Did you hear me?” Faye asks. “I said I’m going to Chicago.”
And now Frank Andresen finally speaks, and when he does there is just nothing in his voice, no emotion, no feeling. He’s dislodged himself from the moment.
“Damn right you are,” he says, and he turns away from her. “Leave and never come back.”
| PART FIVE |
A BODY FOR EACH OF US
Summer 2011
1
“HELLO? Hello?”
