This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Cheryl Strayed
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
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eISBN: 9781542020596
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1
Is it mine?” he asked.
Geraldine sat in Jim’s parked car, looking out over the river into Mexico. Not his car but the car he’d borrowed from someone he knew—a higher-up on the base.
“Of course it is,” she said, not taking her eyes off Mexico. “I mean, how could you even ask that?” She turned to him now, too humiliated to say what he knew—that she’d only ever been with him.
“Fuck,” he said and banged his hand on the steering wheel. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”
They sat in silence then, until something under the car’s hood began ticking all on its own.
“I think it was the time when we went into that room at Roger’s party,” she said and looked at him, struck even now by how handsome he was.
“Fuck,” he said again, but more broken this time, as if he was on the verge of tears.
Geraldine wasn’t anywhere near tears herself, having spent the previous two days crying, ever since she found out. She felt drained and numb, her mind a whir of what now. “It’s due in mid-January. I mean if we—”
“We’ll have to talk through our options,” he interrupted.
He was nineteen and she was seventeen. They’d known each other barely four months. He was the son of a coal miner from Ohio, about to be sent to Vietnam. She was a military brat from nowhere because she and her mother and two younger siblings had spent their lives following her father from base to base, wherever he was stationed. Oklahoma, Virginia, Germany. They were in El Paso now, where she’d graduated high school a few weeks before.
“I’m sorry,” she said and reached over and squeezed his leg. She couldn’t help but think that she’d ruined his life.
It didn’t yet occur to her to wonder about having ruined her own.
2
Jim knew somebody. Somebody who knew somebody who had a girlfriend who had gone to this guy and then everything was okay.
It was 1964.
Jim had called this fellow—the doctor—and the doctor said to send her with one hundred dollars in cash and to send her alone.
“Alone?” she gasped. “Why alone?”
“Because it’s illegal, dummy,” Jim said. “I’ll drive you and pick you up a few blocks away, but he doesn’t want anyone pulling up in front of his house. It raises suspicion.”
“Okay,” she said uncertainly, her heart thudding like she was trapped at the bottom of a pool.
“I don’t make the rules,” he said without pity.
They were sitting on a picnic table that was tucked into the shade of an open space-age-looking shelter in a park she’d never been to, no one else in sight. She looked out at the expanse of grass that spread before them, scorched yellow by the heat, and remembered a girl at school named Anita who’d had to go to the hospital last fall because of something that had gone wrong during an abortion. Or at least that was the rumor. Geraldine didn’t know Anita well enough to inquire, and afterward, the girl had never returned to school.
“It’ll be okay, babe,” Jim said, as if reading her mind.
“How do you know?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.
She stood up and leaned against the cool concrete wall of the shelter in the spot where they’d had sex ten minutes before, making it quick in case someone came along. At Jim’s inducement, they’d been doing it as often as they could, taking advantage of the fact that she wouldn’t get pregnant because she already was.
Her appointment was set for Thursday at noon, he told her. He’d return for her at three. She was to go to the gate at the front of the house and press the intercom and say bonita when someone answered.
“Bonita?” she asked.
“It’s his code word.”
“It’s the Spanish word for ‘pretty,’” she said.
“Like you,” he said and came over and took her hands, like he possibly loved her.
She was young enough to be grateful for that.
3
Over the intercom she was instructed to wait in the backyard and then buzzed through the gate. She walked down a narrow strip of concrete that ran along the side of the house to the yard, where there were three pink metal chairs covered in dust under a big tree. She stood near them in the shade, holding her little embossed leather purse with a hundred dollars inside.
After a few minutes, a man emerged from the house with a small brown dog on a leash. He looked to be in his fifties, older than her father, his hair thick and gray, his eyes bloodshot and piercing blue. “Geraldine?”
“Yes,” she said and blushed.
“Nice to meet you,” he said and shook her hand without telling her his name.
“Bonita!” she blurted, though she’d already said it over the intercom, and blushed harder.
“I generally like to take care of the payment first,” he said.
“Oh yes.” She pulled the neat stack of twenty-dollar bills from her purse, handing it to him with a smile. There was no reason for this not to be friendly.
“My wife had to run out and get a few things before we get started,” he said. “She’s my assistant. It shouldn’t be more than five or ten minutes, but make yourself comfortable in the meanwhile.”
Geraldine was shaking so hard by now she sat down on one of the filthy chairs. When she did so, the little dog came over to greet her, licking her toes through her sandals, whining with pleasure as she scratched his scraggly head. “Oh yes, you’re a pretty boy,” she said sweetly in a high-pitched tone, feeling calmed by him. “Such a pretty boy.”
“It’s a girl, actually,” said the doctor. “I like to say she’s a real bitch.”
He laughed and Geraldine laughed along with him, wanting him to like her, or at least to not think poorly of her for being there. She’d never been in trouble at school. She’d gone to church most Sundays at her mother’s insistence. She obeyed her curfew and did her chores and babysat her two younger siblings on nights when her parents went out. She was what people called a good girl. She felt an absurd urge to tell the doctor that now, to assure him that the mistake that had been made that necessitated her being there had been only one misstep in a lifetime unmarked by them. To make the case, if not for her innocence, well, then for her goodness.
“We’ll be in there,” the doctor said and gestured to the garage that sat along the edge of the yard. “It’s my office, so to speak. There’s a bed in there where you can rest afterward, until it’s time for your friend to pick you up.”
“Jim,” she said for no reason other than she wanted to draw him into this, to make it seem as if she wasn’t as alone as she felt. She looked at the small pale-green building, its lumbering front door scuffed and warped with age. It seemed preposterous that what was about to happen to her was going to happen inside that decrepit place. She wondered if the doctor had a regular job too, if he worked at a clinic or a hos
pital, or if he only did this, but she was too shy to ask.
“I understand your last period was in April?”
“Yes,” she answered without looking at him.
“It should be a straightforward affair.”
She nodded, hoping he wouldn’t elaborate. She’d spent the past several days willing herself to keep from imagining the particulars about what an abortion might involve. To settle her mind that morning, she’d decided it would be like the pelvic exam she’d had for the first time the year before, only more extended, and at the end of it, she’d be free.
A tapping sound came from the direction of the house, and they both turned to see a woman standing inside one of the windows, brunette and middle-aged. The doctor’s wife. She gave them a wave before disappearing from view.
“You sit tight and we’ll be out in a few minutes to get started,” the doctor said.
When he was gone, Geraldine stood up and smacked the dust from her pants and went to the far edge of the yard, suddenly sure she was going to vomit. She’d been doing that every day for the past week, barely managing to conceal it from her mother. She bent and retched, holding on to the rickety fence that separated the doctor’s yard from the adjacent property, though little came up because she’d been told not to eat breakfast. When she stood she saw that the house behind the doctor’s seemed to be abandoned—its yard an indecipherable bramble of Texas bushes she didn’t know the names of. She bent to retch again, and then she stayed down there, feeling a temporary peace overtake her as she stared at the patch of dirt at her feet, where a few ants wandered among the tiniest tendrils of weeds that poked up through the soil.
Go, a voice in her head boomed with such clarity she barely recognized it as her own.
4
I’m going to have a baby,” she announced to her father while he was eating breakfast. He had a paper napkin tucked into his collar to keep from dripping milk on his shirt. “I’m sorry,” she added when his eyes went from his newspaper to her.
What she would remember for the rest of her life was the cracking sound that came from the hallway the moment after that.
Her mother dropping the broom she’d been holding.
5
She wore a yellow dress. Also yellow shoes that belonged to her mother that made Geraldine furious because they had a green bow on the toes that she hated. She wanted the shoes to be yellow and yellow only, with no idiotic bow.
Her mother said, “You can’t let a thing like that bother you now. Not now that you’re going to be a wife. You’ll soon learn that life is not all fun and games.”
“I never said it was, Mother!” she replied as wickedly as she dared.
This was in the ladies’ room of the El Paso courthouse, fifteen minutes before she thought she would be married and thirty minutes before her father would find a note for her on his car windshield—from Jim, saying sorry, but no. When it was only her mother pushing a bobby pin into her pretty strawberry blonde hair.
“You’re hurting me!” she yelled, and her mother shushed her and rubbed the spot where she’d placed the bobby pin a moment before, as if she were soothing a cranky child. And immediately Geraldine felt soothed, being her mother’s child.
“How’s that?” her mother asked when she was finished.
Together they gazed at Geraldine in the bathroom mirror, the evidence of her beauty and the gravity of the moment obliterating the silliness about the shoes.
“There’s so much ahead of you,” her mother said, her voice wobbling. “I wish you and Jim every happiness.”
“I know, Mom,” Geraldine said instead of thank you.
6
Most of all, her parents did not want to be embarrassed.
“But we don’t even know anyone in El Paso!” Geraldine protested.
“What kind of example do you think you’ll be setting for your brother and sister if you stayed here?” her mother asked. “Especially your sister! Did you even take a minute to think about her when you were out there gallivanting around doing whatever you like?”
“I wasn’t gallivanting anywhere!” she hollered. They were sitting around the kitchen table at breakfast time. Her siblings were away at summer camp, so it was safe for them to shout at each other about such things. She thought about them then—Bobby and Debbie. They were little more than a year apart from each other, but six and seven years younger than her. When she imagined telling them she was pregnant, a terrible pressure seemed to push against her skull.
“It’s to your benefit if this is resolved privately,” her father said.
“Why?” she asked, but of course she knew. “Is it because you think I care what people think of me? Because I don’t!” Geraldine declared, though it wasn’t true. She was wearing her Dairy Queen uniform, which had grown tight around the middle and the bust, and she’d become self-conscious of that, worried that people would guess the truth.
“As we’ve explained, this particular home comes highly recommended,” her father said.
“I don’t care,” she said very calmly, as if she were in control of everything. “I’m not going to Portland. I’m going to Duluth to live with Val,” she continued with great certainty, though she could feel her future life unraveling with every syllable. It now seemed impossible that it had only been last Christmas when she and her cousin Valerie were seniors in high school and had hatched their plan. How they’d work their summer jobs after graduation until September, when they’d meet up in Duluth, a couple of hours from the tiny Wisconsin town where Val lived with her parents. How they’d rent an apartment and find jobs and enroll in a program at the local secretarial school that a few of Val’s girlfriends had attended.
“So you want to ruin your life?” her mother asked. “Is that what you want?”
Geraldine put her face in her hands.
“Do you?” her mother persisted. “Answer me!” she shrieked.
“No,” Geraldine said and looked at her mother. In her eyes she saw the same frantic sorrow she felt, and the shock of that recognition—of their sameness—felt like a jolt.
“Then don’t,” her mother said and burst into tears.
“Mom,” said Geraldine as gently as she could, but that only made her mother cry harder.
“This isn’t what I wanted for you,” she said through her sobs. “I wanted you to have a kind of life I didn’t get to have. For you to have opportunities. For you to be—”
“Helen,” her father said sharply.
Geraldine was crying now too, silently, the tears falling down her face and dripping onto the table. She reached over and clutched her mother’s hands with both of her own, suddenly, momentarily, and for the first and last time, feeling they were together in this. “I’ll still have my life, Mom. I promise.”
“I think what your mother means is we anticipated you’d be married before you got pregnant,” her father said crisply, standing up from the table to get the coffeepot from its electric burner.
Her mother pulled two paper napkins from the little dispenser that sat on the kitchen table, handed one to Geraldine, and blew her nose into the one she kept. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“Emotions are running high,” said her father.
“It’s just that I don’t know why I have to go away,” Geraldine said, though by now she knew it was useless.
“Because it protects you,” her mother said matter-of-factly, back to herself. “You go to Portland, you get it over with, and afterward, you can go on with your life, Ger.”
“It’ll be like it never happened,” said her father.
“Except it did happen,” Geraldine said coldly and wiped the tears from her face with her hands. She looked at her parents, clear-eyed and astonished, like she understood exactly who she was for the very first time. A prisoner of her own body.
Her father poured himself a cup of coffee. His spoon made a dinging sound against his cup as he stirred in the sugar. A bell, marking the end of somet
hing.
7
The woman who ran the home for pregnant and unwed girls in Portland insisted on being called Aunt Ruth. Even her husband, Frank, called her that. Aunt Ruth had a soft, dimpled chin and hips and butt and thighs as thick as an elephant’s. When she first stood up, she walked with a limp and had to hold the backs of chairs and sides of tables until her joints warmed up. She taught Geraldine things she’d never imagined doing. How to grow her own herbs. How to knit a scarf. How to make blackberry preserves. How to bake bread, which they ate fresh out of the oven with dinner every night, all ten of them at a long rectangular table—Aunt Ruth and Frank and Geraldine and the seven other pregnant teenagers who lived in the house.
Nancy. Babs. Linda. Anne. Sandy. Miriam. Rita.
Geraldine never forgot their names in spite of herself. Together, they lived like a flock of secrets on the second floor of Aunt Ruth’s house—paired up based on their due dates in the four bedrooms that fanned off the wide landing at the top of the stairs. When two of them departed, two more replaced them. Miriam and Linda became Joni and Alice. Nancy and Anne became Vivian and Kathy. Geraldine spent her every waking hour with them. They ate their meals together and smoked on the front porch so they wouldn’t gain too much weight and played poker and talked about their boyfriends or ex-boyfriends or refused to talk about them because their hearts were broken or because they’d never loved them to begin with. They put their hands on each other’s bellies when one or another of their babies was kicking and danced to the radio that sat on a table in the landing area after they finished the evening chores that had been assigned to them by Aunt Ruth. They festooned the headboards of each other’s beds with construction-paper garlands while they were at the hospital giving birth, and they carried each other’s suitcases down the stairs after it was over and done with and they were weepy and empty-handed and their breasts had stopped leaking and their abdomens had shrunk down enough that it was safe to go home.
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