by Joanna Scott
I’d gotten halfway across the room before she rushed over to stop me. Wouldn’t I listen to what she had to say, she asked me, the challenge colored with an accusatory emphasis. I’d only meant to encourage her to be forthright with me, but instead she was acting as though she’d been abandoned. I felt an urge to do just that—to get on with my life and leave her to ensnare some other willing stranger.
I motioned to the stools at the counter by the window and said I’d be right there. I filled my cup with more coffee and bought a ginger ale for Nora and joined her a minute later.
I pushed the soda in front of her. She took little sips through the straw while she stared out the window. Maybe she needed a prompt from me, but I preferred to wait. She waited with me. Through the smudged plate glass we watched the crowd swell at the intersection and with a surge move forward with the light. We watched a man who’d been pulling a reluctant child by the wrist scoop up the boy and carry him across the street. We watched a woman hail a taxi.
“You wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had,” Nora said at last—not what I’d been expecting from her. “This crazy lady I met on the street, she invited me up to her apartment, and when we got there”
“You shouldn’t be so trusting.”
“That’s just what she said. But I could tell right away that she was harmless.” She went on to recount the adventure from the moment she’d met the woman to her culminating hunch.
“Her hunch?”
“She thought I wanted her to be my mother!” We both laughed at this, but our laughter soon evaporated into an awkward silence. Keep going, I thought. Tell me the truth.
“The truth is,” Nora said, startling me with the echo of my thought, “she was sort of right. I mean, I am looking for a mother. Are you my mother? Ha, just kidding. Anyway. The truth is, I am looking for a mother. But not for myself, not, I mean, it’s just...”
She sipped her ginger ale between lips pressed into a tight, flirtatious smile. I felt suddenly as though I were being teased with a strange kind of courtship, though I was stupidly slow to guess the content of her insinuations.
“What I’m saying is...it’s all about...it’s about how I’m looking for a mother. I mean a mother for my baby.”
“You’re having a baby?”
“That trouble we were talking about earlier. Get it?”
She’d thrown me off guard. I was supposed to offer help in the form of guidance, but now I couldn’t match her obvious implications with their meaning. The trouble, her trouble. Get it? She was just a child herself. She didn’t know what she was saying. What was she saying? “This guy, you know, he just.” The motor of her voice shut off again, but only for a few seconds. “Forget it. Don’t ask me to talk about it!”
“That’s fine.” I was conscious of the stares of other diners and made a gesture with my hands to calm her. I had no sense how to articulate my sympathy, partly because I still hadn’t quite let myself understand what she was telling me.
“So anyway.” She touched her belly. “Here we are.” She closed her eyes and settled back into her chair as if she were preparing to sunbathe.
I wanted to suggest that surely there was someone else in her life more deserving of her confidence. But her tone of voice conveyed fragility. I watched her, trying to imagine her thoughts.
“It’s so hard to explain,” she finally resumed, leaning forward. She’d slipped her straw from the glass and was drawing designs on the counter with dribbles of soda. “Everything was fine, and then this happened. This shit. I could, you know, get rid of it. But I’m going to do it.” She was drawing loops and crosses. Or was she signing her name? “I mean, go ahead and have it.” She sucked air through the empty straw, then held it like a cigarette between her fingers.
“Nora...” It was the first time I’d spoken her name aloud.
“I’m just looking for someone to take care of it. Not just anyone. Someone who can buy it stuff and take it on vacations.” She spoke as if she were recounting a dream. “And give it the kind of bed with a canopy or maybe bunk beds, depending, you know, and a pool in the backyard, and on visits to the city you can eat those little tea cakes and take carriage rides and see a show. This is why...why...” She inhaled, drew back her head, squeezed her eyes shut. I thought she was going to vomit all over the counter. Instead she sneezed violently. Once she recovered, she said in a quavering voice, “This is why I’m here.”
ALTOGETHER, Nora and I spent about an hour in the Automat. Only an hour—the brevity still amazes me. I’d gone in to have lunch, and I’d come out with the prospect of adopting the child of a child. How could I accept? How could I refuse? I wanted to help, and at the same time I felt the need to protect myself. Although I wouldn’t have been willing to admit it at the time, an awful part of me still distrusted Nora Owen and wanted nothing more to do with her.
But I was twice her age, I reminded myself, and I could show her the proper concern. Yet she didn’t seem to want my concern and made it clear when she’d finished her appeal that she preferred not to return to the subject, at least not right then. We exchanged phone numbers and addresses and parted with the ease of strangers who had become acquainted under more typical conditions. At no time did I actually agree to Nora’s proposal, but neither did I directly refuse. We would continue to talk, we promised each other. I gently suggested to Nora that she see a doctor. I didn’t offer to give her money or even to return the change from her twenty, and she didn’t ask.
I told no one—not even Paul, my fianç—about meeting Nora Owen. In the weeks that followed, weeks I spent privately struggling to come to terms with my responsibility to the girl I’d met at the Automat, she called me three times: once to say that she was doing well, though she hadn’t made an appointment with the doctor yet, and once to say that she’d had an episode of bleeding. It was then, during this second phone conversation, that I asked her whether she’d ever had a test to confirm the pregnancy. She said she didn’t need any test. The third time she called she asked to see me in New York. We made plans to meet at the Automat again, and there she told me that she was no longer pregnant. Or perhaps—a suspicion I kept to myself—she’d never really been pregnant.
Nora refused to speak about what had happened to her and brushed off my suggestions that she talk with a doctor. She insisted that she was fine. Better than fine, she assured me. She readily accepted when I offered to buy her lunch—though not tuna, I promised. Roast beef, I offered. Cheese, she said, and with that she began to laugh.
We stayed in touch through the next couple of years, meeting once in a while for lunch or a walk in the park. It was during these subsequent conversations that she offered, in bits and pieces, a more extensive explanation of what had happened.
Her story turned out to be a familiar one. She’d been drinking rum and Cokes at a party and ended up in bed with a boy she’d been infatuated with for months from afar, a high school senior. Nora was so disoriented from the liquor that afterward she hardly remembered the experience. Word, though, traveled quickly around school—what she’d done came back to her in the gossip of her friends, whose disapproval made it impossible for Nora to confide in them or anyone when she began to suspect that she was pregnant.
She didn’t know what to do. The days passed, she said, like pages she was turning without actually reading. She forgot to wash her hair or do her homework. Afternoons she hung out in the cemetery adjacent to her school, smoking cigarettes, watching the squirrels and birds, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of a neighbor, an older boy she’d known for years, a boy of sixteen with the mind of a seven-year-old who, she felt a need to add, had a talent for catching frogs in the cemetery pond. He was a gentle kid nicknamed Little John, though according to Nora he was more than six feet tall. Believing him to be her only true friend, she finally confessed that she was going to have a baby. He explained that the best baby stores were only a train ride away, in the city. He offered to help her choose a good baby.
&
nbsp; She left the cemetery when a younger boy named Larry came along to catch frogs with Little John. Nora went on her own to New York. Somehow her path led her to the Automat on Forty-second Street. I regret that I was initially so resistant to her, though she never seemed to hold this against me. I tried to find ways to repay her for the twenty-dollar advance she’d paid for my confidence.
In the time we spent together after our initial meeting, she interrogated me about my own life. I showed her a photograph of Paul, and she declared that she approved. In an atlas we found in a bookstore near the Automat, I pointed to the general location of the town in Ohio where I’d grown up, a town so small it didn’t even merit a dot on the map. I told her that I’d married my first husband at the age of twenty-two, and we’d divorced three years later. I explained how I’d supported myself in graduate school with waitressing jobs, and since earning my degree I’d been bouncing from one temporary teaching post to another.
At one point she asked me about the papers in my briefcase. I briefly described my current research. I didn’t admit that I’d given up on the project and would never finish it, though I did complain that in the documents I’d been dealing with—old diaries and letters and odd scribblings in the margins of books—I couldn’t tell the difference between legend and history and wasn’t even sure if the events I’d set out to describe had ever actually taken place. Nora replied, “So what?”
PART II
What Will Happen
Or else Nora doesn’t get hopelessly drunk at a party and lose her virginity to a boy she hardly knows. In this version, the year passes uneventfully, and in tenth grade she joins the junior varsity basketball team and becomes known in her school as a rising star.
I picture her on the first day of her future, doing what she always does after basketball practice: she puffs rings into the damp air with the smoke from her cigarette as she walks home along the top of the low stone wall bordering the cemetery. The Baggley boy is at the pond today, as usual, scouring the mud for frogs. Though he’s known to be a major creep, Nora has always tried to be friendly with him. But today for some reason she prefers to ignore him; she doesn’t wave back when he waves at her.
She jumps off the wall into the meadow separating the cemetery from the woods backing up to Willowbend Lane, which leads to Flanders Street and Nora’s house. She is deep in thought, planning the order of phone calls she will make to friends, when twelve-year-old Larry Groton lunges from behind the thick cover of a hemlock bush with a roar, shaking what she thinks is a baseball bat. She’s slow to figure out the joke and staggers back a few steps, causing Larry to double over with laughter. He thumps his bat against the ground, the hollow sound revealing that it is just a plastic Wiffle ball bat. “Don’t pretend you weren’t scared, Nora!” he shrieks, delighted with himself. But she’s not scared anymore. She’s only appalled at having to deal with a stupid little brat like Larry Groton. “Now get out of my way,” she demands, whipping her book bag through the air and knocking the bat from Larry’s hands. When he bends over to pick up the bat, she hip-chucks him, pushing him to the ground.
She stomps toward Willowbend Lane while Larry, after scrambling up, takes off in the opposite direction, plunging through the wet grass and heaving himself onto the wall. Hearing the loose stones clattering, Nora looks behind her to watch Larry stumbling along the top of the wall, heading in the same direction from which she has just come. “Who’s scared now!” she shouts after him. In response, he raises the bat and brings it down with a pathetic popping sound, the effort causing him to lose his balance, and he falls backward into the cemetery, disappearing from sight.
Nora hesitates, suspecting another one of Larry’s tricks, and in the time it takes her to consider that he might be hurt, she notices that the Baggley boy is loping along the paved path from the pond, heading toward the place where Larry has just fallen.
Even at a distance, the Baggley boy looks like a creep. His hands are weirdly small for his long arms. His face is a mulish oval, crowned with brown, stringy curls. Nora even thinks she hears gulps of hee-haws coming from deep in his throat.
Why would the Baggley boy be laughing? There is only one reason Nora can think of, and it has to do with Larry Groton, who probably isn’t hurt at all but instead is lying behind the cover of the wall waiting for Nora to come help him so he can scare her again. Whether they are creeps or stupid little brats, boys will go out of their way to torment girls. Larry is probably preparing to pounce on Nora—that’s why he hasn’t yet clambered to his feet. And if the Baggley boy can’t stop laughing as he runs along the path, it means he’s in on the joke.
Nora turns and heads away from the cemetery, leaving Larry and the Baggley boy to their idiotic games. At home she takes a long shower, toasts a couple of frozen waffles, and eats in front of the television. She wants to call someone and tell what happened, but she’s embarrassed by her own foolishness.
She’s asleep on the couch by the time her mother returns home, though it’s only 7:15. Her mother, who is lucky to have income from a family trust fund to compensate for her meager alimony, has spent the day shopping in New York. She wakes Nora to show her the new navy cardigan she bought at Saks.
THE NEXT DAY, Nora is invited by two friends to skip lunch and join them in the cemetery to smoke cigarettes. On the way they talk about how to cheat on the state driving test. They talk about diets. They are listing the foods that make them fart when a girl named Lizzie Marshall comes running across the field to warn them not to go to the cemetery because some kid had been murdered there yesterday and now the place is crawling with police.
They find out from the group gathered around the tennis courts what Nora has already guessed—that the dead boy is Larry Groton. Little Larry Groton. He was a good sport, someone says, and someone else agrees: Larry Groton was the kind of kid who just went along with everything.
For the next two days rumors swirl around the school. Larry Groton had been stabbed in the heart. Larry Groton had been shot. Larry Groton had been chopped into pieces by one of the cemetery’s walking dead and the police still hadn’t found his hands and feet. That Nora is more visibly shaken than her friends only confirms her reputation as an acutely sensitive girl. She keeps her thoughts to herself, reliving the memory in secret. Not even when Lizzie Marshall tells her that the elder Baggley boy had confessed to killing Larry Groton does Nora speak up.
The teachers explain to the students that after Larry Groton had taunted him and hit him with a Wiffle ball bat, the Baggley boy fought back. A heavy rock he’d thrown had struck Larry in the head. The local newspaper describes it as an accident. There is no trial. The elder child in the Baggley family simply disappears from his house. Some say he is hiding in the cemetery, feeding on corpses. Others say he’s been sent to a maximum-security prison. Lizzie Marshall says he’s in Fairfield Hills, in the psychiatric hospital.
Though Nora doesn’t admit it to anyone, she is convinced that she, not the Baggley boy, is responsible for Larry Groton’s death. Little Larry Groton. She can’t stop thinking about him. She no longer trusts herself. She has lived for fifteen foolish years and doesn’t deserve to live any longer.
Larry Groton Larry Groton Larry Groton. Home after basketball practice, Nora looks into the bathroom mirror that has steamed up from the shower and imagines Larry Groton’s ghost staring back through the fog.
LET’S SAY NORA DOESN’T GO to college, though not because of Larry Groton. She doesn’t go to college because her father gives her his car and his three-bedroom house in Providence. He says she can have the house all to herself while he’s in Indonesia, on the condition that she pays the utilities. The Buick, he tells her, is hers for keeps.
Let’s say she moves to Providence in the summer when she turns eighteen, against her mother’s halfhearted protests. Her mother has been thinking about putting their Connecticut house up for sale so she can move into an apartment in Manhattan with her boyfriend, Gus, who has a great proud mane of white
hair and only ever wears sandals, even in winter. He tells Nora that she is always welcome at his apartment—she can consider the sofa bed hers.
She makes new friends quickly—friends who still live with their families and go to high school and who treat Nora as an exotic creature welcome in their group because she lets them use her house for parties. Nora gives duplicate keys to whoever asks and encourages them to walk right in whenever they please.
She finds a waitressing job that pays well enough. Her tips, though, don’t come close to covering the utilities bills. She has lost track of her father’s route in Indonesia, and he is too involved in his work to write. Her mother is devoted to Gus, and Nora doesn’t want to give the two of them any indication that she is less than self-sufficient. She has no grandparents living. She has only her ancient great-aunt in New Jersey, who is wealthy enough to give money away.
Great-Aunt Lucy, who was a concert pianist and once performed in New York’s Town Hall, generously sends Nora one thousand dollars and advises her to go see the world. The recklessness of the idea makes it irresistible. Nora pays the overdue bills, finds some college students to stay in the house, sells her father’s Buick to a dealer for an ample eight hundred dollars, and buys a one-way plane ticket to Paris, along with a rail pass and a backpack. The challenge she sets herself is to stretch the cash in her pocket into a lifetime of adventure.
IN EUROPE, Nora is surprised to feel at home almost everywhere. She is adept at edging her way into groups of students and will travel with them on the trains from city to city, hostel to hostel, sharing their meals and parties and gossip. After a few weeks, she still has plenty of money to spend on whatever catches her eye. She believes she can return to America as soon as she is ready to go.