“I came,” he said. “Did you?”
“Women aren’t supposed to the first time,” I whispered definitively.
—
At first Polly had mailed me wacky packages: a whole cartonful of Welsh’s Fudge Bars, another of sardines in mustard sauce. But then the packages stopped coming. Hadn’t I thanked her enough? God, I was selfish. Hadn’t I written and thanked her? Is that why they stopped? A pile of letters from my sister lay trapped under a paperweight on the corner of my desk, whimpering to be answered. Gail said it was bad. I really was selfish. Something must be happening to stop the packages. How bad was it back there? Was it very bad yet?
Soon I had hardly any news at all, not even the letters from Gail saying how awful it was at home without me, but I did get the note from the Financial Aid Office. Polly and Ted had neglected to fill out the financial aid forms for my sophomore year. “We filled them out once, wasn’t that enough?” my mother said when I finally called home. “Can’t you do something about it there?” I floundered into the Financial Aid Office and found from the avuncular officer that I was eligible for scholarships I hadn’t known about. The college would pull me behind its veil.
The dormitory bathroom with its row of toilets and sinks offered holy privacy late on Saturday nights. There I stood, luxuriously washing my face all alone, waiting for Mike to make his weekly call, pretending that a phone date was just as good as one in person, when Maggie and Lily burst in.
“Amy is packing,” they whispered at me. “Amy is leaving the school right now.”
“Right now? It’s one o’clock in the morning!”
“Amy’s getting married. Gary’s going to marry her,” said Lily, adjusting her corduroy bell bottoms.
“Amy’s in trouble,” Maggie whispered, her eyes widening.
“Amy’s pregnant,” said Lily, the realist.
“Leaving school forever, you mean, permanently?” I asked in astonishment.
“Well you can’t live in a dorm with a husband and a baby, Molly,” Lily said in exasperation.
“Is she”—I hesitated—“is she thinking about…?”
Maggie finished my sentence for me: “Not having it? Getting…” Now Maggie hesitated.
“An abortion?” I said for her.
“Absolutely not!” Lily declared. “He wants to marry her! They want the baby.”
I thought of Agnes on welfare, the one Gram dragged me to see so long ago, standing over her ironing board with her baby in a laundry basket. But unlike Agnes, Amy was so pretty, her thinness so chic, and now she would be ruined by Gary Wexler, himself so hip, so lithe. His body would not change, but hers would. I would rather die, I thought, no, I would die, my spirit so squashed that it would bleed from me, and then I might try to take my own life. I remembered Sylvia Plath, sticking her head in an oven while her two babies slept in the next room. Those babies, I thought. Later when I learned of Gary Wexler’s suicide, I took it as a confirmation. A spirit so crushed could not have gone on, I reasoned. A cloud over the couple had released its poison vapor. He had hanged himself with a belt from a rafter of the converted barn on the commune where he and Amy were living with the baby and Gary’s teenage brother. It was his brother, the runaway, who had crept up the stairs to find him.
My selfishness, which had become a self-attention, and sometimes a kind of self-respect, had begun to harden around me like a scab. But beneath the crust I was wounded and could easily imagine killing myself, just to feel free of my burdens. I knew I really was not the same as Gary Wexler, yet something in me was afraid of becoming him. What was happening at home now that I was gone? Was it really bad? It must have been bad for Gary, I thought briefly, then turned my thoughts to the living room on Pilgrim Road. How did Amy feel about having a baby, living with her parents, now? How bad would it have to be before you never wanted to feel again?
Mike, holed up at Dartmouth with a fearful look in his eyes that never seemed to leave them through my next two visits, and his visit to me, seemed to have a secret panel in his voice that refused to open, although he dutifully dialed me every weekend. Nothing could remove the Plexiglas wall I felt between us, as if we were having prison visitations. I couldn’t reach him. Or he couldn’t reach through the glass to me.
Boys brushed against me in the cafeteria line, in the bookstore, and Maggie and Lily urged me to come to the dances, and I went, and danced with the boys who ate in the dining hall and slumped in their chairs in my classes. Like ground water that ebbs in hot summer, Polly, Gail, and Mike seeped away I abandoned the dry well, stashing my sister’s unanswered letters in my underwear drawer, skipping the Sunday calls home. But I did call Mike and, after three consecutive tries, finally managed to break up with him the cowardly way, long distance.
“But, Molly, it’s almost summer!” he choked out in our last conversation. “We almost got through it!”
“I can’t,” I rattled, “I can’t, I can’t.”
—
Spying disdainfully out our window at a panty raid a few weeks later, Lily interrogated me, “So what are you using?”
“What do you mean?”
“For birth control, dummy.”
“Well, Mike used condoms.”
“But now you don’t have Mike!” she said exasperatedly. “And you can never tell.” Amy and Gary had unnerved Lily as much as they unnerved me. Every morning she ceremoniously clicked the dial on her birth control pills, popping a pink one into her rosebud mouth as the three of us left for breakfast. I was a good influence on them, they’d decided. All of us ate breakfast together now and sometimes even Maggie went to classes, that is, when she didn’t have an extra studio with the cellist-in-residence. More and more she disappeared with the wild-browed maestro.
At Lily’s insistence, in preparation for the squads of boyfriends whom she supposed were poised to descend, I made an appointment with the local gynecologist who looked like a grizzled sheep with granny glasses. The disc of pills he prescribed for me was different from Lily’s; it dispensed white and blue in a twenty-eight-day sequence. The quarter grades came out, and I was fine, and my scholarship secure. The literary magazine wanted me, and my petition to take Independent Study in creative writing was granted. Everything rolled in sequence for me, and for Lily, but Maggie had two Incompletes.
“What are you still doing here on this campus?” Lily demanded of her. “Why aren’t you going to music school where you belong?”
Maggie looked up in protest. “But I love studying with Piotr!” He was the maestro. She called him by his first name now. Her lessons had doubled.
“But what if you want to be a professional musician?” Lily persisted. “Why are you hanging around at a liberal arts school?” Maggie had hung around high school in the same way until her college counselor telephoned to the Admissions Office and filled in the application for her after the deadline for everybody else.
“I’m playing my cello, All-ass-man,” Maggie said, “and I’m going to finish my Incompletes next quarter and play in Aspen this summer. So get off my back.”
Lily was continually on everyone’s back. The literal pain in the ass, Maggie called her. She was just like Gram. Had Lily not been busy planning anti-war rallies with military zeal, she could have been in the military, a wood nymph in mufti. But Maggie with her cello was like a great boulder in the middle of Lily’s stream of organizing. Lily simply had to part and rush around her. I knew why I fit in with them so well. I loved Maggie’s single-mindedness and her art; I loved Lily’s life by the book and her zealous organization. They let me go my own way through their examples, even if Maggie was vaguer and more aimless in the rest of her life than I could ever be, and even if Lily exhausted me with the direness of her taking charge. We shared our meals, our makeup, our movie passes, and our gym lockers. We’d combined our lives, the three girls at the end of the hall.
Lily was Papa Bear, and I was Baby Bear, and now Maggie would really be Mama Bear, because she had never bothered to m
ake the appointment with the sheep-faced doctor. She finally told Lily and me over the cafeteria pot roast one Sunday night that she was three weeks late with her period.
“I’m surprised you even keep track,” Lily said.
“Even I keep count for that, All-ass,” Maggie said.
“Oh, Maggie, you’ve got to get to the gynecologist!” I cried.
Of the three of us, only Lily had a car, her father’s cast-off battered gray Lincoln. Two days later, after Lily made the appointment, we took Maggie for the pregnancy test.
—
“Are you telling Mr. Spiderbrow?” Lily demanded the next week when Maggie hung in the doorway in her nightgown, whispering the positive results. “Are you telling him? And if you’re telling him, are you having it?” Piotr the spikey-browed cellist was married.
This time I yelped for Maggie. “Lily, come on, give her time to decide!” I knew, though, that Maggie never decided anything except what piece to practice next. She was wholly focused on that wooden mother’s shape, the cello.
“You haven’t got much time. You’re almost eight weeks pregnant!” Lily’s voice rose.
“I don’t know…I don’t know…,” Maggie whimpered, then put her jeans on over her pajama bottoms and, without combing her tousled hair, padded out to the Film Society with us.
“I’m not telling him,” Maggie whispered to us in the dark as the credits to The Seventh Seal rolled. “I’m not telling him.”
“Well, at least you decided that,” I said softly.
“But what are you going to doooo?” Lily wailed.
“Shut up!” both Maggie and I hissed.
Lily lowered her voice. “If you’re going to want, if you’re going to need…If I’ve got to get the phone number…”
“Maybe.” Maggie said “maybe” as if it were a statement. “Maybe get the phone number, Lil.”
The next day Lily cruised the Snack Bar for phone numbers. And the day after that I went from table to table in the cafeteria asking for contributions. It was like collecting for the United Way in the suburbs.
—
Brown sooty apartment building on the West Side. Down to the basement, as to a bomb shelter. A kind of blitz in progress. The blitz of men with our lives in their hands in a legislature far away. Who was the man in shirtsleeves who ushered us with hissed whispers into the suite of basement offices painted an unsterile-looking green? He was disgusted that there were three of us. He wanted one patient and one driver only. It was like a war. We were the resistance who showed up despite crossed wires. Why was he doing this? Why was he risking his license? Or had he lost it already? Was he a doctor at all? All the time I thought of him as a possible butcher, but he was also a savior. Lily and I knew he had to be a real doctor because of the way he ordered us around. “I don’t have a nurse here! I can’t! You, here, wash your hands, then hold these.” Lily washed her hands in a little sink and held the kidney-shaped aluminum bowls.
Pregnant Maggie was led to another room I couldn’t see into very far. Lily followed behind to hand the doctor the bowls. I stayed in the outer room, which was an examining room with a little sink where Lily washed her hands. In a moment the doctor appeared at the door telling Lily to sit down. “You, make yourself useful!” he said to me. “Take these and wash them out in the sink.” He held two kidney-shaped pans full of blood. I only saw blood in them, no bits of anything like a fetus before I turned my head away. “Go sit down,” he whispered with sudden sympathy. “I’ll do it.”
And so he performed a perfect abortion and saved Maggie’s life in a basement suite, rescuing our friend who made the mistake we could have made, might still make, as the war went on, winter after winter. He had done a neat job, taking $500 in cash in 1967, and the three of us turned loose onto the streets where, in a strange elation, we drove to the Village to wander among the jewelry shops on this, my first trip to New York.
In our flowered dresses we searched among the storefronts for what we all wanted to buy: filigreed rings that opened up, Lucretia Borgia–style, to reveal a secret compartment. When we found them, we forked over $20 apiece, and then drove in Lily’s rust-finned Lincoln north of the city, up into Dutchess County, to Maggie’s parents’ blue-shingled nineteenth-century house where Maggie and I spent a safe weekend, after our day of espionage, though Lily’s duties weren’t done. She sped on to Troy where her mother lay, an invalid, in the turreted town house where Lily grew up with her beloved, incompetent father, older sister, and half brother. What was left of the Allisman lumber fortune had been spent on Yale and Wellesley tuitions for them, while Lily was dispatched with a few bucks to a state school. Her dad had moved in with his rich mistress, and Lily had organized a sibling council with her sister and brother, the agenda to scare up caretakers for their mom.
Maggie’s only weekend duty was to pretend that nothing had happened, and mine was preventing the family dog from scarfing up her bloody sanitary napkins from the wicker garbage basket in the bathroom and revealing all to her four sisters, one of whom at least would surely tell Mr. or Mrs. Mack, who spent the weekend on two parallel chaise longues with a wine bottle on a glass table in between.
But it was Maggie who told. She told Piotr the wild-browed married cellist, after all. And with the telling she came face-to-face with her talent. The maestro got her a late, post-deadline audition at Julliard, and when she was accepted, she left her Incompletes unfinished, went home for the summer, and transferred to Julliard for the next fall. Everything had changed. When Lily and I came back to school, we had to give up our little cul-de-sac for a regular dorm room. So the campus paper and the literary magazine were helped to run from our buzzing headquarters, the lonelier without Maggie, though she arranged to take the bus up many weekends, and Lily drove more often to New York, where her cousin’s family had an apartment. We loved staying there when we visited Maggie. It was vast and empty, kept almost as a crash pad for a family that came to the city once or twice a year. Like our dormitory suite, the Upper East Side apartment in its white brick doorman building was like a big book with blank pages, bound on one side by the distant authority of the richer branch of the Allismans. Now I had a place to go, because I couldn’t go home.
“He was standing at the Marshes’ fence, Molly, and then he was running like a quarterback, like he had a football under his arm!” my sister shouted on the phone from Flo’s house. Polly’s best friends, Flo and Ann Louise, had bought a house together after Ann Louise got divorced.
“Where did he run to?” I asked incredulously.
“He ran straight at the pool!” In a fit of energy a few years before Ted had put up an above ground swimming pool with metal sides, wasting half of our backyard. Nobody swam in it, just as nobody had skated on the ice pond Ted had carefully made a few winters before on Saturday mornings, when he was the most sober.
“Then he crashed into the pool, Mol, headfirst!”
“Oh my God, did he knock himself out?”
“Molly, no, he did it again! He did it lots of times! He just bashed his head at the pool, drunk as a skunk, till he was bleeding and everything. Then Mom was afraid he’d come after us.”
That was when Polly packed a bag and hustled Gail into the Plymouth and headed for Flo’s.
“Is Mom there?” I asked Gail. “Can Mom talk?” From my darkened dorm room I pictured Polly with her head bashed in, too.
“Are you OK?” I asked breathlessly when Polly’s cigarette hoarse voice came over the line.
“Yes, Molly,” she said. “Your father…your father’s got a concussion and we’re staying with Flo and Ann Louise for a while.”
Then Flo got on the phone. “Your mother called the police, Molly,” she said matter of factly. “They hauled your father to Mercy Hospital. But he’s out now. He’s staying with your grandparents.”
I heard a commotion in the background. Gail’s excited wail and my mother’s low-pitched cautionary syllables. According to Flo my father’s car was going past the h
ouse. Gail grabbed the phone from her.
“Molly, he’s going around the block again and again, screeching his brakes when he gets to us! Flo’s calling the police if he doesn’t stop! Wait, they’re making me get off the phone so they can call the cops, Mol. We’ll call ya back.” Gail hung up. I pictured Ted rubbing his butted head, tears streaming down his beerswollen face, stumbling back to the Marshes’ fence, zigzagging his way toward the pool, then pictured him holding his concussed head in the Emergency Room. I imagined Flo and Gail and Polly and Ann Louise gawking out the living room window at Ted’s Chrysler prowling, then screeching. A fear seeped into me like gas beneath a locked door. No matter how many locks I put on the door that I had shut against them, the gas streamed in. I coughed and coughed till I calmed down and reached for a cigarette. To Lily’s dismay, I had started smoking. Larks. Polly’s brand. I got my pajamas on and went to bed and smoked, uncensored, in the dark since Lily was out. But Gail didn’t call back.
Oh, Dad, did you take your tranquilizers? Everything had become really, really bad. If you had stayed, they wouldn’t be like this, I thought guiltily.
When the call didn’t come the next night, or the next, I didn’t call Flo’s house. I didn’t call Gram’s. I floated through my classes and drank chocolate milk shakes in the Snack Bar.
“That’s your third milk shake in three days!” Lily observed.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Want to go to New York this weekend?”
I had a big paper to write. “Nope,” I said.
“You’re quite a conversationalist these days,” Lily said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I have this paper to do.”
Lily left for the weekend and the sanctuary apartment high above the city, and I stayed home. I wrote the paper in the poetry room, though it was a history paper. Then I ate double mashed potatoes for dinner, alone in the dining hall. After the Film Society I went alone to the Snack Bar and had another chocolate milk shake with vanilla ice cream. By Sunday morning I called Flo. My mother and sister had reunited with my father who was all better and everybody was back on Pilgrim Road. “Just like nothing happened!” Flo exclaimed.
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