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.”