Billie Standish Was Here

by Nancy Crocker

  “It seems like at least current events would be new,” Miss Lydia said. “It isn’t like history repeats itself that quickly.” She chuckled at her own joke, but I felt too low even to humor her.

  “We don’t study current events,” I explained. “Too bogged down in history, I guess.”

  “What?” Miss Lydia squawked so loudly it woke me up some. “They aren’t teaching you to pay attention to the world around you?”

  I didn’t think so.

  “Well, how are you supposed to take over when it’s your turn?” she asked. The idea of anybody I knew at Cumberland Consolidated taking over anything was so funny I nearly fell out of my chair.

  She didn’t laugh with me. In fact, she looked pretty sore. “There’s not any one of you aiming to grow up someday?”

  I said, “Someday, sure.” But I didn’t understand what she meant and she looked like she was trying to think of words that could penetrate my thick head.

  “Time magazine,” she said finally. She looked pleased with the announcement.

  I said, “Yeah, I noticed you get Time every week.” I was bringing her mail to her every day after school. It wasn’t getting any easier for her to get around on her feet. “What about it?”

  “From now on you’re going to take each one with you as soon as I’m through with it and after you read it we’ll talk about what’s going on in the world.”

  It sounded like a lot of work. “Oh, I don’t think—”

  “Oh yes, you are. You don’t have to be sitting in a brick building at a desk to learn, you know. Most of my education came from being married to Mr. Jenkins.” Her face lit up when she mentioned him. “We read books and he talked with me about them like I had a mind as fine as his. . . . I learned a lot when we traveled together, too. Yes, sir. If that school won’t bother to give you an education, I’ll just take on the project myself.”

  I didn’t want to be anybody’s project and I told her so. Then I said, “And besides, don’t I have any say in the matter? I thought we were friends.”

  She thought for a few seconds. Estimating my fee, I imagine. “Pretty, pretty, pretty please with sugar and cream on top?” This with her hands clasped under her chin and without the hint of a smile.

  I cracked up and she started laughing, too. I said, “Okay. I’ll give it a try, anyway.”

  That night I read my first article about the war in Vietnam. I understood the individual words, but for all the sense it made to me it might have been written in French.

  As it turned out, we’d have many other things to discuss before we got around to Vietnam anyway.

  The next day I felt so punk I thought I might be coming down with something. I caught Harlan watching me feel my stomach and it hit me like lightning—I was starting to show symptoms. No doubt about it. The rest of the day I felt achy and lethargic and on the verge of tears. Even when I wasn’t contemplating my future. Or lack of it.

  I was starving by lunchtime and wolfed my food so fast I felt miserable. Even Miss Wilson noticed something was wrong. She said, “Billie? Are you feeling poorly?” and two big fat tears rolled down my cheeks before I could stop them.

  I just shook my head and bit my bottom lip. What could I say? Any mention of being sick would mean a phone call home. A phone call home would require an explanation, maybe even a trip to the doctor.

  I couldn’t say a word, even though it was becoming clear this was a secret I would not be able to keep much longer. I had been scared of being pregnant ever since I’d found out it might be possible. But I never had got so far as “then what?”

  Miss Lydia had told me to let her think on it and I had.

  I slumped through the afternoon feeling fat and hopeless. Things had started getting somewhat peaceful at home, and now I was going to bring home The Worst News a Daughter Can Tell You. Age eleven years, ten months would beat the old Cumberland record by nearly four years. I’d be one of those girls people talked about the rest of their lives. The example mothers used to keep their daughters from ruining their lives.

  Then there was the poison icing on the cake—if this came out in the open, I’d have to name a name. There would be no getting around that.

  Everybody and their dog would know what Curtis had done to me, but I’d be the only one to focus on. The only one they’d look at and whisper about. And the women of Cumberland counted to nine so well and so often, it wouldn’t take long for them to figure out a “when” to go with the “what.” Once they were there, it wouldn’t be more than a mayfly’s life before everyone decided Curtis’s death had not been an accident after all.

  I’d have to go away. That was all there was to it. I’d have to tell Mama and Daddy. My life still wouldn’t be worth much, but at least they couldn’t turn Miss Lydia in. Not without letting the whole world know what had happened, and they wouldn’t do that for their own sake. They’d have to find a home somewhere or somebody to take me in.

  Either I went away or Miss Lydia would have to. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t let you off for murder even if you were older than Adam and had killed somebody worthless.

  After all we had done, it was going to get away from us anyway. We wouldn’t be able to stick together. I didn’t bother wiping the tears away at that thought. I just sat at my desk in the back row and leaked trails down my face all through fifth-grade math. Sitting in the back row there was nobody to see me but Miss Wilson. She either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

  I stopped by home after school to regroup before facing Miss Lydia and made a discovery that boosted my bad nerves up to a panic. I made a beeline across the street, jabbering like a chimpanzee before Miss Lydia even got the door all the way open. She made me slow down, then started getting all worked up herself. She told me to show her. I couldn’t, so I ran back home.

  I couldn’t show her my panties while I was wearing them. I just couldn’t. I put them in a paper bag, pulled on a clean pair, and ran back to find Miss Lydia holding the door open. She ripped the bag from my hand, tore it open, and burst out crying.

  It was worse than I thought. “What? What’s wrong with me?” I started blubbering too.

  She said, “Lands, child. Oh, my sweet, sweet girl. Oh, lord,” and she pulled me into a bear hug.

  “What, Miss Lydia? Please!”

  She took off her glasses and mopped her face with a handkerchief before she collapsed into a kitchen chair. “Oh, honey, you really don’t know, do you?”

  I thought I had made that clear. For want of words I shook my hands like they were on fire.

  “You’re menstruating,” she said. “You’ve got your first monthly.”

  I wasn’t ready to accept that. “That—” I pointed at the sack. “That’s not what that is!” Whatever I really had was so bad she couldn’t say it out loud.

  Her voice got gentle and she said, “It doesn’t always look like you’d expect, Billie Marie. I should have known your mama wouldn’t tell you and told you myself. But especially at first, it doesn’t always look like what it is.”

  It started to sink in. “But that means—” The seed hadn’t sprouted. It wasn’t there anymore. There was no Curtis, no baby. . . . There was nothing but me inside me. My belly wasn’t going to announce Miss Lydia’s and my secret to the whole world after all.

  I stumbled into a chair. All that had changed in the last few seconds grew to such enormous proportions so fast I felt a jolt that raised goose pimples on my arms. I didn’t start crying so much as explode into tears and Miss Lydia joined me.

  We just bawled—there’s no other word loud enough to describe it. Then we joined hands across the table and smiled wet, mottled-face smiles at each other. Then we bawled some more.

  I had gotten my future back. It was going to be mine after all.

  Miss Lydia and I had not tiptoed anywhere close to the subject since that day the doctor’s office told her they’d lost my test.

  But sitting there bawling in her kitchen made it pretty clear just how present
the question had been in each of our minds.

  Miss Lydia was put out with me at first when I blubbered on about how terrified I’d been that I’d have to go away. She said, “I thought we had agreed we could talk about anything?”

  “Same to you,” I told her.

  We sat and looked at each other accusingly. Finally she sighed and said, “Well then, can we also agree that keeping a secret all to yourself comes with a heavy price tag?”

  “Agreed.” It sure had for me.

  “And in this case it was a cost neither one of us could really afford?”

  I nodded. We’d needed each other and both gone without.

  “Okay. Then how about we make a pact right here and now that from now on we just trust each other?”

  I swallowed and nodded.

  It took a long time that night for sleep to come. I had stayed at Miss Lydia’s till my folks came home, then pulled Mama into the bathroom to tell her. At first she blew out an exasperated sigh that raised the hair up off her forehead. Then she shook her head with her lips pressed into a thin line—like this was something I’d chosen to do and it was all to aggravate her. Then she showed me what to do and assured me that yes, it was that uncomfortable and I’d get used to it. I wasn’t sure about that part.

  Daddy acted so embarrassed later that I knew she had told him. It felt a little like being naked at the doctor’s office—there was nothing officially wrong about it, but it felt kind of creepy anyway. I stayed as far away from him as I could.

  It was bedtime before I was finally alone to think. First thing, I thanked God even though I was bent double with cramps by then. Then I said ten Hail Marys for good measure. And ten more after that.

  I spent some time that night thinking about this new part of my life. I did some multiplying and figured I was going to have over four hundred fifty periods before they stopped. Whether I liked it or said “whoa, Nelly” didn’t matter. They would come.

  I couldn’t imagine that any of the future four-fifty-plus would carry the emotional freight of this first one. But I had never considered the possibility that any of them would. No doubt there were millions of women staring at their bedroom ceilings at that very moment either because their period had come or because it hadn’t.

  I had entered the “childbearing years.” Every cycle of the moon, my body was going to remind me that it was designed as a baby-making machine.

  I felt so much wonder. More than a little disgust, as well. Noble and beastly both at the same time. It was like being a member of a sorority with millions of members who hadn’t elected to join.

  And I had a whole lot more questions for Miss Lydia.

  Chapter Twenty

  S  he had baked gingersnaps the next afternoon that were still warm when I brought her the mail. She was humming, too, and I realized she really had been a lot more worried than she had let on. We sat and munched and made jokes about my day at school for half an hour before I got to the point.

  “I gotta ask you about something,” I started.

  “Sure, dumplin’. About what?” She was practically giggly.

  “Intercourse.”

  Well. If you ever want to stop a room dead silent and get some undivided attention, I could suggest using that word. It hadn’t sounded all that powerful when Dr. Matassa used it, but it must have just seemed tame in the same conversation as “rape.” Right now Miss Lydia looked like a frog on the business end of a gig.

  “You said we could talk about anything.” I could feel myself blushing and it was making me furious.

  “We can. We most surely can.” She looked like she was reminding herself to blink. “You just shifted gears on me a little abruptly, that’s all.”

  We sat with our hands in our laps looking at each other. There was a fair amount of expectation in the air. After a couple of minutes, she cleared her throat. “What exactly was it you wanted to know about—it?”

  “Everything!” I blurted out. Then we both let out the kind of nervous chuckle that doesn’t signify anything funny has ever happened in the history of the known universe.

  I backed up. “No,” I said. “It’s just that I never knew—or at least I didn’t realize I knew—until that day you first asked about my, um, ‘monthlies,’ just how babies got started. Mama kind of skipped over that part.”

  “I imagine a lot of mamas have trouble talking about that part. Mine sure did.” Miss Lydia stared into the distance and then nodded like she was making up her mind. “Okay, where do you want to start?”

  I shrugged. Sometimes you feel like you don’t even know enough to form a halfway decent question.

  Her voice got gentle again. “Well, then, let’s start at the beginning. How did you think babies got started?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember thinking about it much. I guess I’d heard them called gifts from God and little blessings so much—”

  “You figured you prayed for them and they came?”

  It seemed stupid. Juvenile. “I guess,” I said. “Something like that.”

  “Well, Billie Marie, I think that’s pretty. I really do. But it doesn’t take into account the babies that come by accident, does it?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I knew girls who had babies and weren’t married had done something shameful, but I didn’t know what. And I never put so much thought into it that I could have explained, but I guess I thought that even God makes mistakes once in a while. He sure seems to have bad aim sometimes, like when somebody good dies young and leaves his kids to grow up poor.”

  Miss Lydia didn’t laugh at me. She looked like she was turning it over in her head. “And that may be as good an explanation as any,” she said. “I’d never thought about it being a matter of aim before. But when it comes to babies, there’s only one that’s ever been born without a little human physical commingling.”

  I nodded. “I figured that much out recently.”

  Miss Lydia looked troubled. “Well, what was it that you thought—he—did to you?” We could talk about probably the most personal thing that existed, but she couldn’t bring herself to say her son’s name.

  I halfway yelled, “Well, I didn’t think he was trying to give me a baby!” I had known we couldn’t have this talk without Curtis coming into it and I’d thought I was ready. I’d been wrong.

  “No! No! That’s not it at all.” She chewed on her lip so hard it started to bleed. “Okay. I see. So there was no reason then for you to make the connection between the two. The . . . intercourse . . . and babies.”

  “Miss Lydia, what I want to know is why anybody would ever let somebody do that to them even if they wanted a baby real bad. How they could still like them and be nice to them afterward. Why any man who loved his wife would hurt her like that.” I had to stop and take a breath.

  She took off her glasses and pressed fingers on either side of her nose like she had a headache. When she looked at me again it looked like her heart was broken. I hoped I hadn’t done it.

  “Lands, child.” She stared at an empty chair across the room like she was talking to it. “What was done to you, done to me too, never ever should have happened. It wasn’t normal, any more than if a soldier came back from the war and shot his whole family just because once he got killing in his head he couldn’t get it out.”

  “I guess I don’t see how there could ever be anything normal about it.”

  “But you wouldn’t, child, that’s what I’m saying. In your instance—” She shook her head.

  I wasn’t sure she was getting my point. “But how can any man want to hurt somebody like that? I mean, if he loves her?”

  “Billie Marie.” I had never seen Miss Lydia hunt so hard for her words. “There’s all kinds of love. And love between a man and a woman, the kind that makes them want to get married, is complicated. I guess one of the ways you know you’re in that kind of love is when you—want to do that with him.”

  “Well then, why not just let him pull off your fingernails one by
one with pliers? I guess that’d really show him you loved him!” I was getting hot.

  “Sugar.” She pressed at her tear ducts again. “It’s not supposed to hurt. At least not after the first time. And I don’t know any more about what’s normal for the first time than you do.”

  “So Mr. Jenkins didn’t make you let him do that? You wanted him to?” I hadn’t planned to say that. It came out without warning. She had said we could talk about anything, but this was more than she had bargained for, I’m sure.

  She closed her eyes for so long I was afraid she had died of shock. I concentrated until I saw the shallow rise and fall of her chest. When she answered me it was like a voice in a dream.

  “Yes, child, I will tell you that I did. And it was then and only then—when I realized I wanted him to—that I stopped wishing I had died when my daddy . . . had his way.”

  “Not me,” I said. “I’m never gonna want to. I don’t care if it means I never get married or have babies or anything. I can’t imagine—”

  “Oh, but I hope that you will.” She raised her head, opened her eyes, and looked at me straight on. “Because that’s how you’ll know you got over it. That’s when you’ll know that you’re well. Oh, baby child, I do hope that you will.”

  “Nope,” I told her. “You told me I didn’t have to get married if I decided not to. Well, if that’s what it takes to be married, I’ve already decided.”

  “No, no, no, no, no, Billie Marie. Listen to me.” Miss Lydia’s face was clenched into a frown, thinking so hard. I leaned forward in my chair. “You’re thinking . . . what was done to you and what goes on between a husband and wife who love each other are one and the same, and they’re not. That’s like saying . . .” She stared past my shoulder then back into my eyes. “. . . an ostrich and a human being are the same because they’ve each got two legs.” She nodded. “The two have got nothing to do with one another,” she went on. “What was done to you . . . and me,” she reminded, “had nothing to do with love whatsoever. The most you could call it was scratching a filthy itch . . . by a couple of jackasses no better than animals.”