Alexander Hamilton was a bastard.
He was also a soldier in the Revolutionary War, the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Quasi-War.
Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler. Then he cheated on her with Maria Reynolds. Hamilton resigned from office. Later on, he was shot by Aaron Burr in New Jersey. Later on, he died from his wounds in a house on Jane Street in New York City.
The End.
D–. Her teacher had written across the top, Where is your thesis statement? Where are your supporting paragraphs? This is your midterm American history paper, not some outline for a Wikipedia entry. This is unacceptable. Redo.
“Is that why you chose me? Revenue Cutter Service?”
“Yup.” She wasn’t embarrassed to admit it.
“Shoot. A D-minus? That’s ’cause you’re a girl. I would have flunked you. That paper sucks.”
“He’s right.”
“About what?”
“I did copy it from Wikipedia.”
“Why?”
She chewed her cheek while she thought. “To establish the mediocrity democracy promotes.” I could see a mole shaped like a mushroom at the base of her neck. “Just kidding. I did it ’cause no one’s teaching me what I need to know.”
“What’s that?”
She studied me, bit her lip, but said nothing.
“Honey,” I told her, jealous maybe, feeling cruel, “your boyfriend’s been dead for decades.”
* * *
I swim for the surface, though with no moon, there is no surface. I kick and flail, kick and pitch into the black water until I strike solid steel, and the full weight of the trouble I’m in arrives. I am under the ocean, under the hull of a half-loaded tanker. It is nighttime in America. In one direction there’s air. In the other, miles of something else. Port and starboard are gone, replaced with a sudden memory of how I used to follow the path my father’s tractor cut through some very tall grass, a green tunnel. I remember a grasshopper’s weight bowing over a stalk of gama grass. My hands are on her hull, her heft. My lungs ache. She’s huge. I cling to her underside, a lamprey, a remora. Inside, it’s dry. Inside, air. I search her for a curve that might show the way back in, hoping she got whatever it was she wanted.
* * *
Thirteen girls wait in the principal’s office. Fourteen if you count me, the recording secretary. Though at forty, I’m not a girl anymore. And usually I’m just the regular secretary, but today there are legal concerns. Today we’re official, so, recording secretary.
The scent of tropical fruit rises from the girls’ hair. Their lotions and perfumes smell of the pharmacy. Better than the stale lunch on my breath. I stand. I sit. One pregnant teenager is a sight to catch your breath. Thirteen pregnant teenagers is an eclipse of sun, moon, earth.
“So.”
There’s a lot I could tell them. I was also pregnant in high school, a condition that ended in a Matamoros doctor’s office. Or he said he was a doctor. I could tell the girls about that, if speaking intimately to the thirteen didn’t feel like speaking intimately to Queen Elizabeth or the Virgin Mary. Though the Virgin Mary may be a bad example.
I verify the spellings of their names. “Meghan Collins? Meghan with an h?”
“Yes.”
“Kristina Lepore? With a K?”
“Yes.”
“Nancy Dean? That’s easy.”
Nancy smiles quickly, scared she’s in trouble. I hear my office phone ring. It has been ringing ever since the girls started showing. Television, newspapers, national magazines. Parents wondering what we’re doing.
“Amy England. Diane Nolan. Elizabeth O’Brien. Brien with an e. Lisa San—”
“—chez.”
She volunteers before I can even get there.
“Sanchez. Of course. Katy Leese. Katy with a K? Leese with three e’s?”
“Right.”
Each girl gets one moment of attention and a smile. I already know the proper spellings. I have their transcripts in front of me, but the room’s so quiet I have to say something. “Well.” I smooth the papers in my lap. “So. When are y’all due?”
Principal Caplan arrives. Principal Caplan has sweat in his sideburns. One pregnant teenager is a persimmon, odd but understandable. Thirteen of them is biting into a piece of molded fruit. Too ripe. Caplan’s mouth opens. He takes his seat, hiding most of himself behind a formidable partner’s desk. Principal Caplan has no partner. Neither of us does. Not really. My not-really boyfriend is a tankerman on the Gulf, so it’s a life of dry spells when he’s out at sea. Rumor is he’s getting into port tonight, but he hasn’t called yet.
Caplan looks like gray meat. We’ve been putting in twelve-hour days ever since pregnant teenagers started sprouting like fungi in our district. We’re in one of those storms of media attention a person hears about. Everything awful and shrill and not from here is bursting down our doors, climbing in through the drainpipes.
Caplan stares at a stupid poster in his office that praises teamwork, that urges us to remember “Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable.” He’s too tired to know where to start with the girls. I cough to get him going, priming the pump, reminding him who is principal.
“Here’s what I want to know,” he says. I record his words in shorthand scribble. “Is this some sort of pact? A promise to raise the babies together?” He looks at each one of the girls with fatherly intention. “That’s what they said on the news last night. Is that true, girls?” He clears spit from his lip edge. “I’m thinking it must be, because I know pregnancy’s not contagious.”
Hormones course past brains and ovaries. Lip balm and lonely slumber parties. Hot tears, humidly occult locker rooms, ringworm, and beige bra straps. Liz glances at the other girls’ shoes. “Like, are we a coven of witches or something?”
Caplan tastes that idea. He nods his head. The man is stripped down to his bare nervous system, losing more of his comb-over every day. “Yes. Are you?”
Katy runs her hands across her belly. She’s the largest. The skin is tight. She scratches and the other girls catch on, adding friction to their own bellies, basketing their fingers underneath to cradle the heft. All hands on deck. Caplan studies the roundness. Thirteen moons in the sky would be less surprising. He struggles to read the meaning in these bodies, like attempting braille for the first time. Frustration bugs his eyes out. Pregnancies as protolanguage, saying things the girls can’t.
“No.”
But what? And why can’t the girls just say whatever they need to say? I give my own stomach a rub. Maybe they are too young to know what they need to say. Or maybe nobody taught them how.
Caplan slaps his hand on the desk. “Your parents are talking to lawyers and detectives. They’re talking to your doctors. I just want you to tell me who did this to you.”
Circled as wagons, the girls say nothing. Their toes twist. I tuck my face into the collar of my blouse, smell the fabric softener there. There’s an insult confused with Caplan’s question, making it clear how little he understands the girls in his care. They did this themselves. These bodies belong to them.
Caplan slaps his desk a second time and after a silence long enough to pour a cup of coffee in, he stands and opens his office door. He allows the district psychiatric counselor to enter. Caplan does not care much for Ellen. She wears turquoise jewelry. She used to be the drama coach but the town cut that program.
Ellen swoons and drops to her left knee in the midst of the thirteen. One pregnant teenager is a broken home. Thirteen pregnant teenagers is a Category 5 hurricane barreling toward Galveston.
Ellen asks the girls simple questions. “Do you eat breakfast? Have you seen a recent film?”
I record her words.
She asks, “Which subject in school is your favorite? What kind of music do you enjoy?” And then she asks, “Did you know that ‘teen porn’ is the most Googled search term on the Internet?”
The thirteen remain silent. Caplan boils. Ellen fingers her chunky bracelets.
/> “Really?” I ask. The room is so quiet. And all Ellen wants is to be able to talk to girls who won’t talk. Ellen expands her gaze to include me. The girls bite their cheeks to not giggle. No one says a thing, so I have nothing to record. Ellen refreshes her face of anguish.
“Teen porn” floats in the room, flicking its fins.
It’s hard getting old. Hard on a body, a mind, hard on a country. I formulate a fantasy of Ellen in a red, white, and blue negligee, clasping her chest like some neglected housewife, crying, If it is porn they need, take me! Spare these young ones and use my forty-year-old, semiprecious body instead. Sub/dom, bondage? Fine. Facials, pee play? Horrors I’ll endure to protect our young girls. Take me. Use me. I insist!
Caplan breaks the quiet. “Thank you for your guidance, Ellen.” He tries to excuse her.
But Ellen dusts off her slacks. “I’m not done yet.” She stands with a hand on one hip. “Is it the law requiring a probe and a heartbeat that’s preventing you from enjoying a normal high school experience?”
Caplan coughs wildly, as if by hacking loudly enough, he can travel a few seconds backward in time and erase the school’s connection to the procedure Ellen has just suggested. Even if, privately, he’d counsel the same. This is Texas and he’d like to have a job in the morning, though the chances of that are getting slimmer and slimmer.
Some of the girls have polite smiles. Five of them check their cell phones in a chain reaction. Caplan gulps from a glass of ancient water on his desk until Amy or Grace—I think it is Amy—finally asks, “Sir, may we be excused?”
Caplan stops gulping. I’ve never seen the man so sad. He stares at his hands as if they are now the size of paddles or tabletops—useless in the delicate work of raising children, braiding hair, tying shoelaces. Worse than useless—dangerous, bruising, deaf.
Caplan nods. Thirteen pregnant girls waddle their way out of his office. I plug in our hot pot for two more cups of coffee, but then I notice the last cup I made him untouched on his desk, cold. It’s too much for one man, particularly one with old-fashioned ideas about protecting the children in his care.
With the girls gone, like some sort of palate cleanser or smelling salts, Caplan allows himself to watch a YouTube video of Jerry Lee Lewis pounding away on a poor Baldwin.
“I love him,” Caplan says. “I love the Killer. Just look at him.”
I was never a huge fan. That business with the cousins and the dead wives. But together we watch “Crazy Arms” and “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous.” Jerry Lee’s up. He’s down. His fingers look like jumping spiders covered with gaudy gems big as babies’ fists. He plays piano with one foot on the keys. He plays piano with his elbows.
“Someday the only reference to us in the newspaper will be the field hockey scores.”
“Absolutely.” I try to cheer Caplan with a smile.
He switches off his monitor. “There are reports of three girls in Boling-Iago and five in Manvel. The governor’s calling me in the morning.”
“The governor? Why?”
“He wants someone to blame.”
“For every pregnant teen in Texas?” I hadn’t thought of that angle yet, a contagion, airborne spores we propagated.
Caplan follows something outside the window. “It’s not my fault.”
“Of course it’s not.”
He lifts his head, looking like a boy, asking permission. “I’m taking the afternoon off, okay? I need to think about what I’m going to tell the governor.”
“Good idea.”
Principal Caplan grabs his windbreaker from the coatrack and blows a raspberry as goodbye on his way out.
The files on my desk are stuffed to bursting. I touch the newspaper clippings and the sweetly scented insurance forms. There are op-eds and PTA minutes in which concerned community members blame Gardasil, high-fructose corn syrup in cafeteria lunches, loose relationships with biological fathers, Democrats, yoga, Republicans, dioxin-steeped feminine products. In all that paper, all those words, the girls say nothing. And I suppose that is the point.
* * *
The quiet of afternoon nature films pervades the hallways. At the end of a long row of lockers the thirteen gather together undisturbed. With the sun just so, buffed circles of wax are visible on the vinyl flooring. The girls speak softly, huddled in a whirlpool. The light is full of dust particles. One asks the others, “Have your feet swelled? None of my shoes fit anymore.”
“No, but I haven’t pooped in weeks.”
A round of giggles.
“And all this extra spit in my mouth. How come no one ever told us about that?”
Four girls shake their heads, knowing so little about the pregnant body, about American history, about life after pregnancy when stares of wonder turn to pity, disgust.
One mentions the tenderness of her breasts as she lifts off the ground. Words slip from lips; the current gently eddies. The girl in the air is joined by two others, floating, balloons. They glow, lanterns above, more and more girls still, until the last one, full of grace, so round, leaves her tiptoes and lifts off the linoleum. In the air, the girls dip and reel. One turns giddy somersaults. Weightless, swimming. “Woo,” she might say. “That feels good.” Big as stars. Beautiful as a poisoned sunset and just as far out of reach.
“Anybody’s gums bleeding?” one asks.
“When I brush my teeth.”
“What about your ankles?”
“Take a look.” Five others breaststroke over to Liz’s feet. “Like elephants’!”
More giggling.
“Nothing’s the way I expected it would be,” one girl says. “It’s like, you know, when you’re talking on the phone and suddenly you can’t remember a word? You wait for the word to come, feeling it on your tongue. Yeah. I feel this little life, little death floating nearby. I just can’t say it yet.”
“Yeah,” the others answer. “Sure. Sure thing.”
“And this part”—Annie spreads her arms, the wonder, the weightlessness—“is the weirdest part of all.”
“Except for growing a tiny human inside your body.”
“Yeah. That’s pretty weird, too.”
“Anyone else still puking?”
A door slams down the hallway. Milkweed seeds in hoopskirts, the girls fall back to the ground.
“No. But French fries are still the only thing I can really eat.”
* * *
Eventually my non-boyfriend calls. His tanker’s come in. He says he’d like to see me.
Caplan’s been gone awhile now, so I collect my things. I’ve done my duty. I finger the nameplate on Caplan’s desk, hoping it will still be there in the morning. He doesn’t deserve to lose his job. It’s not his fault alone. Adolescent girls can be hard to understand. They are like an uncontacted tribe of humans. And maybe they should remain that way. Maybe we should collect all the adolescent girls in America and send them out to sea together. Eventually the rest of us would miss them so much we’d try harder to understand why they are the way they are and why we think such awful things about them. We’d realize how scared and wrong we’d been to think girls are made only of light things.
I head down to the water to meet my sailor. At the edge of the wharf I’m terribly small under the twilight sky, next to this much industry. For one moment I turn back. I wonder, What if the pregnant girls followed me here? What if they flowed behind me, streams, beautiful daughters, rivers making their way to the sea? And what if the flood of girls doesn’t stop at the water’s edge as I have? What if the girls, with the help of several strong longshoremen, load themselves onto an armada of waiting tankers, barges, ships, and tugs? What if they leave us? Poor King George without his colonies. What if they leave the land barren? I imagine the girls waving goodbye, trailing streamers, scarves, a few tears. Not just the thirteen, but all of them, all girls, everywhere. Hundreds, thousands, millions of girls. And what if I don’t stop them? What if the Coast Guard does nothing to guard the coast? What if I even patted t
he hulls on their way out into the gulf because I’m not sure we deserve girls yet? “Take care,” I might say. “See you.”
“When?” A fifteen-, maybe sixteen-year-old, would want to know.
I’d shrug. Who can say how long it will be before the rest of us understand girls? Deserve them? How long until it is safe.
“Okay,” she’ll say. “Okay.” She isn’t scared of anything. She’s off to populate new lands, a redo.
It’s terribly quiet by the water, and in the quiet it’s awful to know what it would sound like if, or once, the girls, our girls, leave us. Once they all harden up into non-girls.
Which really is just foolish thinking. It’s only quiet because the girls are home having dinner with their families, watching television in order to learn the popular ways of love.
My not-really boyfriend arrives with a sixer. He’s been in for hours, he says, nearly loaded. Clearly, this is a booty call. With the beer in hand we steal down the ladder onto the tanker. I’ve been here before, or on others just like this one. Big as hell and half of Texas. The ships seem too large to be man-made. Each step disorients me, because if men didn’t build them, what did? Monsters? Magicians? I just don’t know.
He wraps one arm around my shoulders. He’s greasy. That’s fine, comes with the job, a tankerman skilled in handling natural resources. We drink on the deck, kissing, fooling around, tiny things. Then we drink some more, stare out to sea.
“I can’t stop thinking about those girls,” I say.
“You can’t protect them.”
“Why not?”
“Well, what are you protecting them from? Boys?”
“No.”
“Then what?” He drives his thumb into his chin. “They’re not special. They’re girls. They’re not pure.” He rubs his head, scratches the grime there.
I tuck my knees, cross my ankles. “I know.”
He keeps on. “They’re doing the strongest thing they can think of. Murder, death—that’s easy. Birth? Not easy.” The loading ship gurgles. He pats my back. Sometimes he’s smart. “Your girls are just taking a nine-month dip into the infinite. They’ll be back in PE before graduation rolls around.” He lifts his bottle of beer and tips it to me. “Sounds like she’s just about full. Let me go check on the load and then we can get out of here. ’Kay? Half hour tops, ’kay?”
The Dark Dark Page 3