crouched at the foot of the fence, mouthing to each other, “Someone’s coming.”
When they climbed the ladder again, after night had fallen, they saw only the yellow lights of the distant dormitory windows and the bloated shadows of the girls who passed behind them.
The next morning, deprived of their ladder by an irate mother, the children heaved three issues of Teen Screen over the fence and were startled to hear the voice of some woman—a teacher or warden or nurse—warn them that she would call the police if they tried that again.
I could draw on my own experience to imagine how Sheryl felt in the months before that night, draw detail and scene from what I remember of my own brief pregnancy and from all the awkward and untimely pregnancies of my friends, but I fear something would be lost. Unwed mothers at that time, at the time Sheryl joined their ranks, were a specific group; they fell somewhere between criminals and patients and, like criminals and patients, they were prescribed an exact and fortifying treatment: They were made to disappear.
So I would have to add to my own memories of my own troublesome pregnancy not merely some sense of shame and a bit more drama but also a different kind of fear: when her period didn’t come (this would have been late spring, not very long after she had stopped to talk to me), when she found herself dizzy with nausea every morning, unable to eat her cereal (she would get up before her mother and grandmother, pour a bit of milk and a few crumbs of corn flakes into a bowl and leave it unwashed in the kitchen sink), when she had to keep herself from imagining the taste and the smell of the eggs, the frozen green beans, the jars of peanut butter she rang up on her register and packed into brown paper bags.
I would have to add to my own experience a kind of fear that another fifteen years would make obsolete: the fear of a criminal with the police at the windows and doors, of a patient trapped in some unrelenting illness.
If she was pregnant, an unwed mother, she would have to be sent away. In all her theories of love and dying and keeping one another alive, in all her certainty, she could not have anticipated this simple, insurmountable problem: if she was pregnant, she might never see him again.
Another month passed. Another period failed to begin. Her breasts felt tender, her stomach was no longer quite so taut between the protruding bones of her hips. Leaning with him against his car, listening to them all talk and laugh, watching some of the boys and some of the girls who had not yet become lovers move toward one another, she might have wanted to beg for silence. Please, just everyone be quiet. Her cigarettes were beginning to make her feel sick. She would have to pretend to sip from her can of beer, though the smell alone was enough to send her reeling. Rick, beside her, his arm heavy on her shoulders, would at moments seem a stranger, as the healthy always seem strange and uncaring to those who are ill. She would have to slip her fingers through his belt loop, pull him closer to her, rest her nose and her lips on the arm of his cool leather jacket. Closing her eyes against the dim parking-lot lights and the childish sound of their voices, she would have to breathe him in, the odor of the leather, of his aftershave and, indistinguishable from it, her own perfume, of the summer night, sun-warmed parking lot and litter.
Later, she held the bag of Coke and rum as he climbed the jingling chain-link fence. She followed him, lowering the bag over the top, pausing at the top herself to remember how her hands, even her legs, had shaken the first time she had made this awkward turn, from the outside of the fence to the inside. Making it easily now, her fingers knowing just how lightly to grip the thin wire, her toes finding just the right spaces even in the dark. Rick touched her legs as soon as he could reach them. Took hold of her hips with both hands.
At some point she
When they climbed the ladder again, after night had fallen, they saw only the yellow lights of the distant dormitory windows and the bloated shadows of the girls who passed behind them.
The next morning, deprived of their ladder by an irate mother, the children heaved three issues of Teen Screen over the fence and were startled to hear the voice of some woman—a teacher or warden or nurse—warn them that she would call the police if they tried that again.
I could draw on my own experience to imagine how Sheryl felt in the months before that night, draw detail and scene from what I remember of my own brief pregnancy and from all the awkward and untimely pregnancies of my friends, but I fear something would be lost. Unwed mothers at that time, at the time Sheryl joined their ranks, were a specific group; they fell somewhere between criminals and patients and, like criminals and patients, they were prescribed an exact and fortifying treatment: They were made to disappear.
So I would have to add to my own memories of my own troublesome pregnancy not merely some sense of shame and a bit more drama but also a different kind of fear: when her period didn’t come (this would have been late spring, not very long after she had stopped to talk to me), when she found herself dizzy with nausea every morning, unable to eat her cereal (she would get up before her mother and grandmother, pour a bit of milk and a few crumbs of corn flakes into a bowl and leave it unwashed in the kitchen sink), when she had to keep herself from imagining the taste and the smell of the eggs, the frozen green beans, the jars of peanut butter she rang up on her register and packed into brown paper bags.
I would have to add to my own experience a kind of fear that another fifteen years would make obsolete: the fear of a criminal with the police at the windows and doors, of a patient trapped in some unrelenting illness.
If she was pregnant, an unwed mother, she would have to be sent away. In all her theories of love and dying and keeping one another alive, in all her certainty, she could not have anticipated this simple, insurmountable problem: if she was pregnant, she might never see him again.
Another month passed. Another period failed to begin. Her breasts felt tender, her stomach was no longer quite so taut between the protruding bones of her hips. Leaning with him against his car, listening to them all talk and laugh, watching some of the boys and some of the girls who had not yet become lovers move toward one another, she might have wanted to beg for silence. Please, just everyone be quiet. Her cigarettes were beginning to make her feel sick. She would have to pretend to sip from her can of beer, though the smell alone was enough to send her reeling. Rick, beside her, his arm heavy on her shoulders, would at moments seem a stranger, as the healthy always seem strange and uncaring to those who are ill. She would have to slip her fingers through his belt loop, pull him closer to her, rest her nose and her lips on the arm of his cool leather jacket. Closing her eyes against the dim parking-lot lights and the childish sound of their voices, she would have to breathe him in, the odor of the leather, of his aftershave and, indistinguishable from it, her own perfume, of the summer night, sun-warmed parking lot and litter.
Later, she held the bag of Coke and rum as he climbed the jingling chain-link fence. She followed him, lowering the bag over the top, pausing at the top herself to remember how her hands, even her legs, had shaken the first time she had made this awkward turn, from the outside of the fence to the inside. Making it easily now, her fingers knowing just how lightly to grip the thin wire, her toes finding just the right spaces even in the dark. Rick touched her legs as soon as he could reach them. Took hold of her hips with both hands.
At some point she
Similar Books
