Campus Tramp

by Lawrence Block

  She had to be sure. One way or the other she had to know for certain, though she couldn’t figure out how she could possibly be anything other than pregnant. She was rarely late and she had never missed completely in her life; the odds against a miss now were tremendous. It might have been different if she had been worrying lately about missing, because she knew that girls who were worried over pregnancy frequently missed a period for purely psychological reasons. But she hadn’t given it a thought in the longest time.

  How could she know for certain? There wasn’t a doctor in town that she could go to. She knew there was a test that they sold in drugstores that you could take on your own, but the thought of picking one up in a Clifton drugstore was appalling. It would be all over town in a minute.

  But not knowing was even worse. She decided quickly that she could grab a bus to Springfield where no one knew her and buy a pregnancy test at one of the drugstores there. Then she could take the test in a gas station rest room or some place and find out once and for all.

  Maybe she wasn’t pregnant. Maybe she was really all right and she just skipped for some reason she couldn’t figure out. Maybe—

  Well, she had to find out.

  She closed the book on her desk, slipped on a corduroy jacket and hurried out of the dormitory. She raced down the stairs to the ground, along the path to the street, down the street to the main road of the town. At a lunch counter in town she bought a round-trip ticket to Springfield; then she waited outside for the hourly bus. She chain-smoked while she waited for the bust to come, lighting one cigarette from the stub of the last, her mind racing and her lips praying silently that everything would be all right, that she was not pregnant.

  The bus came.

  She sat near the driver and watched through the front window as the bus rolled along down the two-lane highway. The bus seemed to be crawling and she wanted to shout to the driver, to urge him to hurry and get her to Springfield so that she could find out what was the matter with her.

  Finally the bus pulled into the terminal. She jumped up from her seat and got out of the bus, hurrying out of the terminal and rushing through downtown Springfield, not sure quite where she was going but knowing that she ought to be able to locate a drugstore somewhere in the general area of the bus terminal.

  She found a drugstore after almost walking right past it. There was a male pharmacist on duty, a tired looking man with a green eye-shade and a soiled white shirt. He looked at her and his eyes were bold as he stared at the front of her blouse visible through the corduroy jacket. She wanted to button the jacket up so that the dirty little man couldn’t look at her, wanted to run out of the drugstore and find some other place. But she forced herself to be calm, and her voice was normal when she spoke.

  “I’d like one of those home pregnancy tests,” she said.

  The druggist smiled. She wanted to hit him, to wipe the grimy smile off his face.

  “For your mother?” The irony in his voice was not concealed.

  “No,” she said.

  “For whom?”

  She didn’t answer.

  The druggist came out from behind the counter. She saw now that he was a short little man barely as tall as she herself was, a thin man with stooped shoulders. She guessed that he was about forty-five years old.

  “Those tests are kind of expensive,” the druggist said. “Run you close to five bucks!”

  “I can afford it.”

  “Might not have to,” he said. “I might be willing to give you the test free if you want.”

  His eyes eliminated any possible doubt as to what he was talking about.

  He continued to ogle her and she continued to get quietly sick to her stomach. Was that what she was—a roundheeled tramp who would sell herself to save paying for a pregnancy test? Could the little weasel actually believe she would take him seriously?

  “Just sell me the test,” she snapped.

  “No reason for you to be spending all that money!”

  He reached out a hand and she watched, paralyzed and unable to move. His hand slipped inside her jacket and fastened on one of her breasts.

  The hand tightened.

  She kicked up, suddenly, automatically. She caught the druggist right where she wanted to catch him, right where it would hurt the most. An agonized moan sprang from his lips and he sank to his knees, holding himself where she had kicked him as if the touch of his hands would alleviate the terrible pain.

  He was trying to say something but she didn’t stay around to hear it. She turned and ran from the store, continuing blindly down the street on the run. After a few blocks she found another drugstore where the proprietor didn’t leer at her and she bought the test.

  The directions were simple enough. Instead of going to a gas station she took an inexpensive room at a second-rate hotel where she would be sure of complete privacy and ample time.

  Before she took the test she stretched out on the sagging bed and closed her eyes. The test had to turn out negative, she told herself. She couldn’t be pregnant—why, she wouldn’t even be able to tell who the father was! It could be anyone of a dozen or two dozen boys.

  She got up finally and took the test.

  It was positive.

  She was pregnant.

  Naturally she didn’t believe the test. She left the hotel and looked through the yellow pages of the Springfield phone book for a local doctor. She found one who was open and went to him for an examination.

  The examination left no trace of doubt in her mind. The test might have been wrong but the doctor was certain.

  She was pregnant.

  By the time she reached the Clifton campus she wasn’t sure how she had managed to get back. She couldn’t remember anything that happened after she had left the doctor’s office. She was in a daze all that time, walking without knowing where she was going, winding up at last at the bus station and getting on the bus for Clifton. She couldn’t even remember the bus ride, couldn’t remember getting off in Clifton and walking back to her dorm again. It was as if she had suddenly been transported from the doctor’s office to her own room, as if she had teleported from place to place like a character in a science fiction story.

  She was back in her room again, back in her room and quietly pregnant. The doctor had told her that she was almost two months pregnant, that the baby would be around in less than eight months. She got undressed now and stood in front of her mirror, wondering how long it would be before the new life that was growing in her womb began to show. Not too long, she decided. Not too long and her stomach would swell up and stick out, and anybody who saw her walking along the street would know what she had done and what had happened to her.

  What would she do? Where would she go? She couldn’t go home to Cleveland even if she wanted to, not the way she was now. And she remembered the verse to Careless Love:

  What oh what will mother say,

  What oh what will mother say

  What oh what will mother say

  When I come home in the family way …

  Mother, she thought solemnly, would not be likely to approve. Any school that she might want to transfer to would be even less likely to cast an approving eye on her swollen stomach, for that matter. She found herself wondering insanely if any of the college catalogues had special information on the qualifications necessary for unmarried and pregnant applicants for admission. Probably not, she decided.

  What could she do?

  Two months ago she might have committed suicide and would at least have given the idea serious consideration. Now she rejected it the instant it occurred to her. Suicide wasn’t the answer, not now, not when she was just starting to learn how to live life. Now there were too many things she was enjoying and too many things she wanted to do. She wanted to live, not to die.

  Pregnant.

  Well, she thought, this was one worry Ruth would never have. When two girls made love neither of them got pregnant. She prodded her stomach with her fingers, wanting to rip the
fetus out of her womb and strangle it with her bare hands, and she almost envied Ruth at that moment.

  What could she do?

  Well, she could have the child—that was one answer. She could go off to some city where no one knew her and get a job doing something or other. God alone knew what kind of job she could get, but one way or another she would be able to get by. Nobody starved in the United States any more, and she could work up until the fifth or sixth month, maybe longer if she got the right kind of loose clothing to hide her condition from the world.

  And then she would have the baby and go right back to work again. It wouldn’t be much of a life, taking care of a kid and working, but lots of other girls managed to stay alive that way.

  For that matter, she thought, she could give the baby away. She could have it and then give it to a couple who could provide a better home for it than she could. But after she carried the baby for nine months she might not want to give it up. Then where would she be?

  Up the creek, she answered herself.

  Up the creek in a lead canoe.

  Without a paddle.

  When the answer came it seemed too easy. She forced herself to do nothing at first and went back to studying for the English exam. But the page did somersaults in front of her eyes and she couldn’t get any more studying done for the time being.

  She left the dorm. At the cafeteria she had a tasteless dinner that she could only eat half of. Then she walked out of the caf and circled around the campus for around fifteen minutes.

  Until she ran into Joe.

  They met and they began talking. It was always easy for her to relax in a conversation with Joe and this was no exception. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular and she told him that she wasn’t either, so they wound up sitting on a bench in the middle of the campus, sitting side by side and talking easily.

  The conversation roamed from topic to topic but she was careful never to get talking about what was really on her mind. It had seemed so easy when she had thought of it—tell Joe she was pregnant and he would offer to marry her. It was as simple as that.

  She didn’t love him. But he loved her and he would love her more if she met him halfway. He was the kind of guy who would marry her if she said the word, marry her just to keep her from having an illegitimate child.

  That was the way he was.

  And, she told herself, it wouldn’t be such a bad deal for him. She would love him if she lived with him and she would make him a good wife—faithful and considerate, interested in his work and happy to be with him.

  It made sense on paper.

  But, as she sat next to him on the bench, she realized that she couldn’t go through with it. Figuring out how logical it was didn’t help at all when the chips were down. How could she possibly ask Joe to marry her? How could she possibly dare to cheat him out of the chance of real love, for a wife who married him because she loved him and for no other reason?

  And, as she thought about it, it occurred to her that Joe wasn’t the only one who would be cheated by that kind of marriage.

  She would be cheated as well.

  Oh, it would be convenient for the time being. But she would be stuck for life with a man she didn’t love, a man who was marrying her out of the goodness of his heart and not because the two of them would be right for each other. And she would spend the rest of her life wondering what might have happened if she had had the guts to work things out for herself instead of jumping at the easy answer.

  She didn’t know what to do. But she did know what she couldn’t do. She couldn’t trap a guy like Joe, couldn’t stick him with a marriage that didn’t have a chance of working out properly. Joe was the kind of guy who could love somebody else’s child as his own, but this didn’t mean that he didn’t have the right to a better life than that.

  No, Joe deserved better and so did she.

  She didn’t tell him she was pregnant.

  The conversation dragged on, finally dying by itself. Joe walked off in one direction and she walked off in another. The parting was more significant to her than just the end of a conversation. In a sense, Joe Gunsway was walking out of her life and she was walking out of his. There were only a few more days left in the period and they probably wouldn’t see much of each other with exams and all. Next year he would come back to Clifton and she would be somewhere else.

  But it was better that way.

  She went back to her room. Ruth was there studying and Linda had a strong impulse to tell her, to share the horrible secret with the girl who had become her best friend in the world. Four times she was on the verge of blurting out the news and each time she changed her mind.

  She didn’t want to tell Ruth, she realized. She didn’t want anybody in the world to know, not now and not later. She didn’t want to have the baby, for that matter. She wanted to fall down a flight of stairs and have a happy little miscarriage. Or to go horseback riding and bounce the little bastard into the next county.

  There had to be some way. She wasn’t cut out to be a mother. God, she wasn’t nineteen yet! What kind of a home could she give to a child?

  But what could she do?

  She sat down at her desk again. Studying had proven to be a better escape than sex or drinking—and, as it turned out, an infinitely safer one. Besides, pregnant or not pregnant, she was going to take that English exam tomorrow. She might as well try to pass it.

  Once again studying proved to be a successful escape. She got lost in the book, lost in a world where Linda Shepard didn’t exist and where all the women in the book seemed to be bereft of ovaries for all the thinking they did about sex and for all the sexing they did. In this respect the book wasn’t true to life by contemporary standards, but at the moment Linda didn’t mind this in the least.

  She studied from 7:30 to 10:15. By that time the print was doing a little dance on the page and she decided that she deserved a rest for a while. She closed the book and took a walk outside.

  It was a warm, clear night. The stars were out and the moon was full enough so that she could see where she was going without any trouble.

  She walked aimlessly at first but after the time spent studying her head was a good deal clearer and she didn’t feel as bad as she had felt earlier. Now she was able to concentrate on the problem at hand and to get some idea of the possible solutions she had.

  She didn’t make much headway at first. Then she got an idea—there was one person in the world who could help her, one person in the world who would know exactly what to do.

  One person.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE PHONE RANG THREE TIMES before he answered it. Then she heard him lift it from the hook and say: “Hello.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “This is Linda,” she said. “Linda Shepard.”

  He didn’t say anything and for a moment she was afraid he was going to hang up on her. She listened to the silence, her fingers trembling once again, her throat tight.

  “I have to see you,” she said desperately.

  “What for?”

  “I don’t want to say over the phone.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “The line’s not tapped.”

  “This one might be.”

  He laughed at that. “C’mon over,” he said.

  Then there was the sound as he replaced the receiver. She didn’t hang up right away, however. For a long moment she stood with the receiver next to her ear and listened to the silence, hardly able to believe what she had heard, hardly able to believe that Donald Gibbs had just gotten through telling her that it was all right for her to come over to his apartment. Then, hardly aware of what she was doing, she hung up the phone and drifted down the staircase and out the door.

  He was waiting for her and the first thing she thought was that he looked the same as ever. His hair was still cropped close to his head and his beard was neat and well-trimmed. His eyes looked impossibly tired and there were deep lines in his forehead and around the corners of hi
s mouth. She wondered how long it had been since he had had some sleep; the combination of the Record and final exams must have been keeping him awake constantly.

  “Come on inside,” he said. He led the way and sat down on the edge of his bed; she took a seat in a chair across the room from him. He didn’t say anything and she didn’t know just where to begin.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “Let’s have it.”

  She still didn’t know what to say. Her nerves were on edge both from what she had to talk to him about and from the experience of seeing him again, of being with him at his apartment. She had passed him in halls during the past few months and had run into him in the cafeteria from time to time but they hadn’t spoken before, not since they broke up.

  “You’re so tense you’re shaking,” he told her. “You better let me have it.”

  Abruptly she said: “I’m going to have a baby.”

  Nothing registered in his face. He didn’t seem particularly surprised or shocked or upset.

  He said. “Whose?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “I just found out today.”

  “When’s the happy day?”

  “I’m about two months gone. Maybe a little more.”

  He nodded. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit one for himself, offering the pack to her more or less as an afterthought. She took one and lit it herself, dragging deeply on it.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He stared at her thoughtfully. “You must want something,” he said. “We haven’t spoken to each other in months. What is it that you want?”

  In a small voice she said: “Help.”

  She couldn’t look at him now. She turned away and looked at the wall instead, then puffed nervously on the cigarette. She tried to blow smoke rings but the smoke refused to form circles and trailed to the ceiling in shapeless wisps.