“I don’t know.”
“I’d never stay here,” he said. “I’m moving to Milwaukee or Chicago to make something of myself.”
I was, of course, too young to know there’s no surer sign of a man who won’t make something of himself than his repeated assertions that he will, and I also was bewildered by why we were having this conversation. The wish to go upstairs was like a bar of gold hovering vertically inside my chest. “I went to Chicago with my grandmother,” I said.
“Yeah? Congratulations.” Though his comment had its desired effect—it made me feel foolish—I couldn’t tell if it meant Pete himself had or hadn’t been. “I could take over the farm, but farming is for chumps,” he continued. “I had to get up at six this morning to feed the chickens. You break your back in the fields, live at the mercy of the weather, and for what? I’m looking for a white-collar job, business or banking. Andy liked it here, but I never understood why.”
We both were quiet. I don’t think he’d meant to mention his brother, I think he’d temporarily forgotten my connection to Andrew or perhaps he’d even forgotten Andrew’s death.
All this time, there had been no light on in the kitchen, and we sat there in the gloomy quiet. In an unfriendly voice, he said, “Come here.” I stood and walked around the table. He was wearing the same tan corduroys from before and a sweater with wide black and red stripes. “Get on your knees,” he said.
When I was kneeling in front of him, I said, “Like this?”
Sarcastically, he said, “Pretend you’re in church.”
He held my gaze a she unbuttoned his pants, unzipped them, and slid them to his ankles along with his white jockey shorts. His penis looked shockingly small, but he took my hand and brought it toward him and said, “Move it around and rub it,” and soon his erection had sprung to life. “Come in closer,” he said. “Now put it in your mouth.” Even as he spoke, he was cupping my head with one hand, pulling me in.
Years before, in sixth grade, my classmate Roy Ziemniak, our dentist’s son, had described this act to Dena and me, and I hadn’t known whether to believe him. He had apparently been telling the truth.
I gagged twice in the first minute, and then I tried to keep a rhythm, up and down, and I thought, I’ll count to twenty-five, and I made sure to count with Mississippis in between so real seconds were passing: One Mississippi, two Mississippi . . . Above me, I could hear Pete sighing increasingly deeply. After thirty-four seconds, I raised my head. His eyes were closed, but he opened them quickly, and his voice sounded half sleepy and half desperate—it did not sound cruel—when he said, “No, you have to finish.”
When I’d resumed, I began to cry. I didn’t want him to notice, and I don’t think he did, preoccupied as he was; there was a lot of wetness down there already because I was drooling from not swallowing. When at last he erupted into my mouth, I quickly pulled back my head, and most of it dribbled onto his pale, hairy thighs. There was only a little I wiped from the edge of my lips, a tiny bit that might have gone down my throat. He leaned over to pull up his jockey shorts and trousers, and I bent my head, my tears flowing rapid and hot and unobstructed. Perhaps thirty more seconds had passed when he said, “Are you crying?”
I’d been sitting with my knees forward and my rear end balanced against my heels, and I shifted then so my rear end was on the floor and my knees were a tent. I crossed my arms, leaned my face into them, and wept so hard my shoulders shook.
“What’s wrong with you?” I heard Pete say.
When I looked up, he towered over me. A minute before, he’d been sitting and I’d been kneeling, but he’d gone higher when I went lower. Our eyes met, and I could feel my face contract (it would have been so different with Andrew; I would have wanted to make him feel good, and afterward he’d have held and kissed me). I said, “I know there’s nothing I can do to make it up to you or your parents, but I miss him, too.”
“You don’t think the two of you were in love, do you?” The fury in Pete’s tone told me not to answer. “That he was your boyfriend?”
I did not reply, but I had stopped crying and gone on a kind of bodily alert. I suddenly knew I would be leaving this house very soon, and the likelihood was slim that I would ever come back.
“My brother wasn’t your boyfriend,” Pete said.
I wiped my eyes, I tucked my hair behind my ears. As I stood, I held on to a chair.
“Did you hear me?” Pete said. “He wasn’t your boyfriend.” As I pulled on my coat, it occurred to me that he might try to bar my exit. “What you just did,” he said, “only whores do that, and my brother would never have dated a whore.”
I walked out of the kitchen, down the hall past the living room and front staircase. Pete followed me, but when I reached the door, he stayed over ten feet back. I grasped the doorknob, turning it, and he said, “See, you can’t even defend yourself. That’s what a whore you are.”
That this ugliness had arisen so quickly between us—it could only mean it had been there all along. I looked back at him and said the one thing I knew was true. I said, “I’m sorry it wasn’t me instead of him.”
IT WAS THEN in my life that I entered a twilight in which all I tried to do was move forward. I saw how, with Pete, I’d been trying to fix the situation—I’d been trying in a perverse way, but trying all the same—and now I understood that the situation was unfixable. That, in fact, I’d made it worse. And it wasn’t as if I could take consolation in the idea that I’d been martyring myself: I’d mostly liked it when Pete touched my body, I’d liked the physical aspect (he had been a naked, hairy man five years older than I was, stroking me in ways he ought not to have tried and I ought not to have allowed—of course it had been exciting) and I’d also liked the plot of it, wondering what would happen next, thinking about something that was close to Andrew without having to think about his death. But the end result had turned out to be rancor, rancor on top of tragedy, as well as new and incriminating secrets, misbehaviors that would further hurt the people who knew me if they learned of them. The solution was to retreat, to shut down, and doing so did not require effort. Rather, it was the opposite of effort—capitulation.
I went to school, and I continued to turn in all my work, most of which I completed in study hall; after sophomore year, study hall was optional, and in the past, I’d spent it in the gym with Dena, sitting on the bleachers while boys in penny loafers shot baskets, ducking when the balls came threateningly close. In the evenings, I watched television or played cards with my family just enough so they wouldn’t think I’d stopped watching television or playing cards with them, and at meals, I talked enough so they wouldn’t worry that I was on the brink of doing something rash and destructive, which I wasn’t. I didn’t have the energy.
I tried to read novels, once my most reliable refuge, but even when I was immersed in sixteenth-century Scotland or contemporary Manhattan, I could always feel the dread of my own life at the edge of the page, an incoming tide. Sometimes the dread simply washed right over me, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. It was worst in the morning, when I first awakened. I’d feel sick, literally nauseated, and occasionally, if I was still, it would pass. But more often I’d have to hurry to the bathroom, where I’d vomit into the toilet bowl and then try not to cry. It would be five-fifteen, five-twenty, and it would seem impossible that the day had gone wrong already.
At night, I’d lie on my bed with the lights on and my eyes shut, and I’d listen to “Lonesome Town,” and I’d feel the song steadying me, cradling me, the way another person can hold you in water when you are nearly weightless. “You can buy a dream or two / To last you all through the years,” Ricky Nelson sang. “And the only price you pay / Is a heart full of tears.” I’d fiddle with the silver necklace I’d been wearing that afternoon outside the library; though a part of me wished I hadn’t given the heart pendant to Andrew’s parents, the fact that I was bothered by its absence seemed a sign that I’d made the right decision.
/> ONE MORNING IN early November, I emerged from the bathroom after throwing up—it was not yet six o’clock—and found my grandmother standing in the unlit hall, specter-like in her pink satin bathrobe and white slippers. “Were you sick in there?”
“I’m fine,” I said softly. “My stomach hurt, but now I feel better.”
She scrutinized me. “It’s not a way to stay thin, you know. It’s an old trick that lots of girls try, but it’s bad for your teeth and makes your cheeks swell. Before long, you’ll look like a chipmunk.”
“Granny, I didn’t make myself throw up on purpose.”
“If you’re worried about gaining weight, it would be much more ladylike to smoke. Cigarettes curb your appetite at the same time that they burn calories.”
I knew cigarettes were bad for you—Mr. Frisch had told us in biology—but I didn’t want to argue with her.
My grandmother reached out and held her thumb and forefinger around my chin, so I couldn’t look anywhere except at her. Since eighth grade, I’d been taller than she was, but she usually wore heels that eliminated the discrepancy in our heights. Now I was gazing down on her. “Don’t punish yourself,” she said. “It never makes anything better.”
ONCE I WAS at school, amid the noise and all the people hurrying toward obligations that didn’t really matter, I’d often wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off staying home, if I shouldn’t drop out altogether. But home was no better, just bad in a different way. Gradually, I came to understand that I needed to leave Riley, to go to college and not come back. And I needed to enroll somewhere other than Ersine Teachers College in Milwaukee, which had fewer than twelve hundred young women in the whole school. It was too likely, in such a small community, that my story would get out, someone there would know someone from Riley, or one of my high school classmates would also enroll. I suppose it’s a mark of my provincialism at the time that I thought applying to the University of Wisconsin in Madison was a radical move. The school had an undergraduate and graduate population of more than twenty thousand; this, I thought, would surely be enough in which to get lost.
THE SECOND TIME my grandmother caught me vomiting, she didn’t wait in the hall; she sat on my bed paging through the copy of The Rise of Silas Lapham that she’d found on my nightstand. Her voice was raspy with morning as she said, “Close the door.” When I had, she said, “That was very foolish of me before, wasn’t it? Thinking you were trying to lose weight.”
I stood by the bureau and said nothing.
“We’ll go to Chicago, and we’ll have it taken care of. Next week, likely. I need to make a few calls. You can do as you see fit, but I’d advise against saying anything to your parents. I just can’t imagine what purpose it would serve.”
I felt an impulse then to express incomprehension, except that I did comprehend. At night, when I listened to “Lonesome Town,” I knew. She was right.
“Isn’t it—” I hesitated. “Isn’t it illegal?”
“Certainly, and it happens all the time. You can’t legislate human nature.”
“You don’t think that I should have it?”
Quietly, she said, “I think it would kill you. If circumstances were different, I would say, ‘Go live at a girls’ home in Minnesota, go to California.’ But you don’t have the strength. You’ll be strong again, but you’re not strong now.”
As she spoke, I could feel my lips curling out, the tears welling in my eyes. I whispered, “I’m sorry for disappointing you.”
“Come sit by me,” she said, and when I did, she rubbed my back, the palm of her hand sweeping over the white cotton of my nightgown. After a moment, she said, “We have to make mistakes. It’s how we learn compassion for others.” She paused. “You don’t need to tell me whose it is. That doesn’t matter.”
WE TOOK THE bus rather than the train. At my grandmother’s instruction, I had gone to school as if it were a normal day, but before the end of first period, I’d been summoned to the principal’s office, where my grandmother awaited me. We walked quickly to the bus station, rode the bus to Chicago—“I’m sure there’s someone who does it in Riley, too,” my grandmother said, “but I’d have to ask around, and I don’t want people talking”—and from the bus station on Broad Street, we took a taxi to the hospital. As directed by my grandmother, I had not eaten or drunk since the night before, and in the taxi, my stomach turned, filled with nothing but anxiety. “I’ve given your name as Alice Warren,” my grandmother said. “Just as a precaution.” Warren was her own maiden name.
“You don’t think I’ll get arrested, do you?”
“You won’t get arrested,” my grandmother said.
“And the doctor won’t use dirty tools?”
My grandmother looked at me strangely. “I thought you understood that Gladys is performing the procedure. That’s why we’ve come here.”
My grandmother was not permitted in the operating room. I wore a blue hospital gown, and when I lay on the table, the nurse had me set my feet in metal stirrups. “The doctor wants to talk to you before we put you under anesthesia,” the nurse said, and ten or twelve minutes had passed before Dr. Wycomb appeared in a white coat. She squeezed my hand, and the warmth of her grip made me realize how cold I was.
“I know this is difficult, Alice,” she said. “It will be over before you know it, though, and you’ll recover quickly. The way a D and C works is that I’ll expand the entrance of your uterus, and I’ll use a very thin instrument for the curettage. You might experience cramps and spotting for several days—you’ll want to use sanitary napkins—but you’ll be able to walk out of here.”
I nodded, feeling faint. I did not even know then what curettage meant, but back in Riley, I looked it up; the dictionary definition was scraping.
“If any problems arise in the next days or weeks, it’s important that you call me,” Dr. Wycomb said. “Your grandmother has my telephone number.” She was not distant—she still held my hand—but she was crisp and professional in a way that made me understand she was probably very good at her job.
“One more thing: I’ll leave these items with Emilie, and I want you to get them from her when you’re home. You need not discuss them with her.” Dr. Wycomb reached into a small brown paper bag I hadn’t noticed and extracted an object I didn’t recognize, a white rubber dome that she handed to me along with a capped tube, also white. “Fill the diaphragm with spermicide before you insert it,” she said. “Then push the diaphragm deep into your vagina so it walls off your cervix. Make sure to practice a few times before you’re in a situation where you need it and remember that spermicide alone isn’t effective—if your friends suggest otherwise, they’re wrong.”
Once, it would have been unthinkable, unendurable, to listen to my grandmother’s friend use the words spermicide and vagina. But by then so much had happened that was unthinkable and unendurable, and furthermore, the words themselves were overshadowed by the larger implication of her comments.
“It won’t happen again,” I said. “I’m not—” I wanted to say, I really am the girl I seemed to be last winter, but surely, the necessity of making such an assertion would undermine it.
“This is a conversation about health, not morality,” Dr. Wycomb said. “Once a person engages in sexual intercourse, the likelihood of remaining sexually active is high.” She patted my forearm. “I’m very sorry about the automobile accident,” she said, and then she called for the nurse.
WHEN I EMERGED from the fog of anesthesia, I was in a different room—I opened my eyes, closed them, opened them again—and my grandmother was sitting beside me reading. I blinked several times, my mind blurry. “Should I write Dr. Wycomb a thank-you note?” I asked.
“I don’t think that’s necessary.” My grandmother set a bookmark between two pages and closed the book. “She’s coming by to check on you, though, if you’d like to thank her in person. How are you feeling?”
“What time is it?”
“It’s after two. You’ve be
en sleeping for nearly an hour.”
“Isn’t my mother—Won’t she expect me home?”
“I told her I was meeting you after school to take you shopping. Alice, if you’d like to tell them, that’s your decision.”
“I’ll never tell them,” I said, which proved to be true.
When Dr. Wycomb came into the recovery room, I still was loopy. I said, “I hope you don’t go to prison because of me.”
Dr. Wycomb and my grandmother exchanged glances, and Dr. Wycomb said, “This is a very common procedure, Alice. You were my third this week.”
BACK IN RILEY, I could hardly make eye contact with my parents. Whatever you are, be a good one, I had grown up hearing my father say, and oh, how I had failed him, how I’d failed them all. On the weekends, when Mrs. Falke came over to play bridge with my parents and grandmother, I’d stand in the upstairs hall listening to the slap and turn of their cards, and they seemed to me like children.
I bled for a few days, and then I stopped. I was not even sore, not really. When an image or a feeling of Andrew or Pete came into my mind—they came at different moments, for different reasons—I’d try to suppress it. I waited for time to pass.
On November 22, a Friday, I was walking out of the cafeteria after lunch, just behind a few other students, when a sophomore named Joan Skryba and a junior named Millie Devon came toward us, running and crying. Though they were shouting, they were nearly incoherent. I couldn’t understand at first, and when I finally did, I still wasn’t sure I had because it seemed so unlikely—the president of the United States? President Kennedy? Then someone else, a boy, emerged from the cafeteria behind us and said the same thing, and everyone was talking at once, and a girl next to me whom I wasn’t friends with at all, Helen Pajak, took my hand and gripped it tightly. It wasn’t until I saw Mrs. Moore, my math teacher, weeping openly that I knew it was true: A little over an hour before, President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.