No dude-ranching man ever got hold of us like that again. We were more careful from then on. We studied the eyes, and the backseats, to make sure there wasn’t anything strange in them. We were fools, but we wanted things: summer, night, drink, air on our arms, the swell of music, the achy swell of music, or the quiet of the lake roads with no cars, past the parking lot, asters and seeding grass on the side, and us walking, smoking joints, letting the smoke burn and prick our lungs, our legs languid, our eyes stained calm, our legs in a matched pace before we turned and went back inside to dance. Conspirators. Emotional business partners. That’s what we were.
Years before, when we were eleven, we’d already begun our myriad personal rituals of assertion and disguise. We’d pretend we were teenagers, put on our “baby doll” dresses, a style briefly popular in the sixties: puffy sleeves and epaulets through which you could thread the chain of a color-coordinated change purse. We’d smear our lips with Yardley lip gloss, plastic pots of strange, sticky pink, which we applied and devoured and which would probably later cause an array of small, inoperable tumors, but from early on it was what we required. Applying thick, distracting tints to my lips was a habit I retained into adulthood, though sloppily, headed for a middle age of hasty, shiny red leaking outside the lines of my mouth, like modern art only scary. As early as sixth grade my teacher had pulled me aside and said, “Benoîte-Marie, what are you wearing on your lips?”
“Nothing,” I replied, my first lie to an institutional figure, but I’d felt cornered.
She looked all around my face. She looked at my earrings, which were silver cake decorations I’d glued on with Elmer’s.
One of the candies had fallen off in recess and now I had a big scab of glue on my ear. I reached up and picked at it.
“Are you wearing one color on your top lip and a different one on your bottom?” she asked, incredulous.
I was. I thought it looked better that way. Why did she have to be so harsh, with her widow’s eagle eye? I had once brought her lilacs, and she’d sent me straight to the principal’s office. She knew they were from a neighbor’s bush and not my own. Our yard had no lilacs.
“You don’t need that stuff,” she said. “You’re too young.”
“What stuff?” I said, and she sighed and let me go. (Decades later, in my one lone year of Housewife’s Bathrobe Disease, my husband at work but not me, I would roam through the house, still in slippers and a robe, my face unwashed, my hair unbrushed, but I’d put on lipstick, a bright Indian Red or Scarlett O’Hara, and schluff through the house like that, sort through papers, vacuum.) Our mothers let us do this — wear makeup, and stockings and garter belts, and go off — because they had other concerns. Sils’s mother had a job and sons in a rock band. Mine was at a meeting or church or some information fair for foreign students, and at home, when she wasn’t mimeographing committee memos from a metal box of brownish jelly heated on the stove (pages and pages of purple lettering produced this way from a single typed sheet), she was chatting with Mrs. LeBlanc, or curled on the couch beneath a raincoat, napping off a depression. Sils and I would go downstreet and lurk. Look for “cute guys,” we said. Though when we actually came upon a band of them, my heart always sank.
But it was those times mostly that bonded me to Sils, and made me able later to spot the slightest thought working its way across her face, like a bit of weather, and that is how I knew that morning, my mother dropping me off in front of Storyland, and me glimpsing Sils arriving at the same time with Mike, and slipping bowlegged off his bike and scraping her ankle on the hot exhaust pipe, a loss of agility peculiar for her, that she was pregnant. It was the spaciness of her worry, the slight separation both from Mike and from me, whom she seemed to try to reach via quick bolts of light and dark she threw into her eyes and then yanked away, put in storage, her eyes becoming a snowman’s coal. She’d throw, yank, turn away in loneliness. At home in her room she played E-minor 7 to E-major, over and over on her guitar, saying nothing. Then she’d look at me as if I’d only just arrived and say, “What?”
She wasn’t telling me, because she thought I was a child. A child with a cottage cheese sandwich. That’s what I believed she thought. I was sure.
And so that is why, when she finally did tell me, days later—“I can’t believe this, Berie, but I may be pregnant”—I leaped like a hired hand to respond.
“I’ll help you,” I said.
Though some part of me also hung back, shocked and disbelieving, unable to proceed through the moment, the information. No matter that you anticipate a thing; you get so used to it as part of the future that its actuality, its arrival, its force and presence, startles you, takes you by surprise, as would a ghost suddenly appearing in the room wearing familiar perfume and boots. We were in the Storyland employees’ lounge, getting dressed, she as Cinderella, me as my usual striped goof in a pinafore and hat.
“It might not be true,” she said. “I feel so bloated. I feel like I’m going to get my period any day now.”
“That’s one of the signs,” I said knowledgeably. I read all the books, fascinated with gynecology the way an android might be.
“When Chrissy Messita was pregnant she had to go to Vermont.”
“I’ll drive you,” I said. I only had my learner’s permit, but I was getting good.
“I suppose I can get Mike to drive. But thanks.”
I was quiet, thinking about her and Mike Suprenante and what their baby might look like.
“What car would you get, anyway?” she asked.
“What?”
“Whose car would you be able to g—”
“My parents’,” I said quickly. I was too young myself for a driver’s license, but I thought what I could do was get LaRoue to drive us. “I could wait and catch them on a nice day, when they walk everywhere anyway and wouldn’t miss the car.”
“I don’t think it works like that,” she said. She leaned over and placed her breasts in the bodice of the dress, cakes in a cup, and then she turned around for me to zipper her. “You have to make an appointment and go when the appointment is.”
It was then that I realized she meant the abortion clinic, not the unwed mothers’ home. Last year two pregnant girls we knew from school — Mary Mills and Sara Hayward — had gone to the home to live for four months to have their babies, and Mary Mills, afterward, had serrated her arms with a grapefruit spoon. Abortion was newly legal in the state, but in our county no doctor would perform one; you had to go to Vermont.
“Oh,” I said, “that’s right.” The tinny calliope music started up in the park, and I grabbed my cashier’s box, the one with the money and the thick roll of orange tickets, and headed for register three upstairs, to empty the box into the drawer.
“Tonight,” Sils called after me. “Don’t forget.”
“Okey dokes, artichokes.” I actually said that. When I was fifteen I actually said that a lot.
I phoned my mother late in the afternoon to say I wouldn’t be home for dinner; I got LaRoue instead. She was working at a kennel that summer, cleaning dog cages, and grooming cats, which no one there liked to do except her. “I don’t know,” she said in her strange proprietary way. “I don’t know. Mom won’t be too pleased.” Mom. She always called her that. Now I grew strange and proprietary. “She’ll live,” I said and hung up. I didn’t think about LaRoue, who she was, what she might have wanted in her life or from me, who was not exactly in it, but dancing along at the edge like a bean. I acted fidgety with her, jumpy and busy.