What would she do? Where would she go? She couldn’t go home to Cleveland even if she wanted to, not the way she was now. And she remembered the verse to Careless Love:
Mother, she thought solemnly, would not be likely to approve. Any school that she might want to transfer to would be even less likely to cast an approving eye on her swollen stomach, for that matter. She found herself wondering insanely if any of the college catalogues had special information on the qualifications necessary for unmarried and pregnant applicants for admission. Probably not, she decided.
What could she do?
Two months ago she might have committed suicide and would at least have given the idea serious consideration. Now she rejected it the instant it occurred to her. Suicide wasn’t the answer, not now, not when she was just starting to learn how to live life. Now there were too many things she was enjoying and too many things she wanted to do. She wanted to live, not to die.
Pregnant.
Well, she thought, this was one worry Ruth would never have. When two girls made love neither of them got pregnant. She prodded her stomach with her fingers, wanting to rip the fetus out of her womb and strangle it with her bare hands, and she almost envied Ruth at that moment.
What could she do?
Well, she could have the child — that was one answer. She could go off to some city where no one knew her and get a job doing something or other. God alone knew what kind of job she could get, but one way or another she would be able to get by. Nobody starved in the United States any more, and she could work up until the fifth or sixth month, maybe longer if she got the right kind of loose clothing to hide her condition from the world.
And then she would have the baby and go right back to work again. It wouldn’t be much of a life, taking care of a kid and working, but lots of other girls managed to stay alive that way.
For that matter, she thought, she could give the baby away. She could have it and then give it to a couple who could provide a better home for it than she could. But after she carried the baby for nine months she might not want to give it up. Then where would she be?
Up the creek, she answered herself.
Up the creek in a lead canoe.
Without a paddle.
When the answer came it seemed too easy. She forced herself to do nothing at first and went back to studying for the English exam. But the page did somersaults in front of her eyes and she couldn’t get any more studying done for the time being.
She left the dorm. At the cafeteria she had a tasteless dinner that she could only eat half of. Then she walked out of the caf and circled around the campus for around fifteen minutes.
Until she ran into Joe.
They met and they began talking. It was always easy for her to relax in a conversation with Joe and this was no exception. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular and she told him that she wasn’t either, so they wound up sitting on a bench in the middle of the campus, sitting side by side and talking easily.
The conversation roamed from topic to topic but she was careful never to get talking about what was really on her mind. It had seemed so easy when she had thought of it — tell Joe she was pregnant and he would offer to marry her. It was as simple as that.
She didn’t love him. But he loved her and he would love her more if she met him halfway. He was the kind of guy who would marry her if she said the word, marry her just to keep her from having an illegitimate child.
That was the way he was.
And, she told herself, it wouldn’t be such a bad deal for him. She would love him if she lived with him and she would make him a good wife — faithful and considerate, interested in his work and happy to be with him.
It made sense on paper.
But, as she sat next to him on the bench, she realized that she couldn’t go through with it. Figuring out how logical it was didn’t help at all when the chips were down. How could she possibly ask Joe to marry her? How could she possibly dare to cheat him out of the chance of real love, for a wife who married him because she loved him and for no other reason?
And, as she thought about it, it occurred to her that Joe wasn’t the only one who would be cheated by that kind of marriage.
She would be cheated as well.
Oh, it would be convenient for the time being. But she would be stuck for life with a man she didn’t love, a man who was marrying her out of the goodness of his heart and not because the two of them would be right for each other. And she would spend the rest of her life wondering what might have happened if she had had the guts to work things out for herself instead of jumping at the easy answer.
She didn’t know what to do. But she did know what she couldn’t do. She couldn’t trap a guy like Joe, couldn’t stick him with a marriage that didn’t have a chance of working out properly. Joe was the kind of guy who could love somebody else’s child as his own, but this didn’t mean that he didn’t have the right to a better life than that.
No, Joe deserved better and so did she.
She didn’t tell him she was pregnant.
The conversation dragged on, finally dying by itself. Joe walked off in one direction and she walked off in another. The parting was more significant to her than just the end of a conversation. In a sense, Joe Gunsway was walking out of her life and she was walking out of his. There were only a few more days left in the period and they probably wouldn’t see much of each other with exams and all. Next year he would come back to Clifton and she would be somewhere else.
But it was better that way.
She went back to her room. Ruth was there studying and Linda had a strong impulse to tell her, to share the horrible secret with the girl who had become her best friend in the world. Four times she was on the verge of blurting out the news and each time she changed her mind.
She didn’t want to tell Ruth, she realized. She didn’t want anybody in the world to know, not now and not later. She didn’t want to have the baby, for that matter. She wanted to fall down a flight of stairs and have a happy little miscarriage. Or to go horseback riding and bounce the little bastard into the next county.
There had to be some way. She wasn’t cut out to be a mother. God, she wasn’t nineteen yet! What kind of a home could she give to a child?
But what could she do?
She sat down at her desk again. Studying had proven to be a better escape than sex or drinking — and, as it turned out, an infinitely safer one. Besides, pregnant or not pregnant, she was going to take that English exam tomorrow. She might as well try to pass it.
Once again studying proved to be a successful escape. She got lost in the book, lost in a world where Linda Shepard didn’t exist and where all the women in the book seemed to be bereft of ovaries for all the thinking they did about sex and for all the sexing they did. In this respect the book wasn’t true to life by contemporary standards, but at the moment Linda didn’t mind this in the least.
She studied from 7:30 to 10:15. By that time the print was doing a little dance on the page and she decided that she deserved a rest for a while. She closed the book and took a walk outside.
It was a warm, clear night. The stars were out and the moon was full enough so that she could see where she was going without any trouble.
She walked aimlessly at first but after the time spent studying her head was a good deal clearer and she didn’t feel as bad as she had felt earlier. Now she was able to concentrate on the problem at hand and to get some idea of the possible solutions she had.