Miss Janie’s Girls

by Brown, Carolyn

  “What did you expect?” Greta asked. “A five-star hotel with pictures of pretty roses in gilded frames hanging on the walls? There won’t be mints on your pillow every night, either, and you don’t get room service. You got the speech before you came up here, didn’t you? No outside contact with anyone, especially the miserable son of a bitch that got you pregnant. No personal anything. Just have your baby, give it to loving parents to raise, and leave so the next pregnant girl can have your spot. Chop, chop! There’s a couple that can’t conceive waiting, and you’re here to make them happy.”

  Janie sat down on the edge of the bed that looked less used. “That’s not exactly what they said.”

  “Pretty damn close, though, isn’t it?” Greta eased down on the other twin bed. “Might as well unpack. Tomorrow we start back to school. I’m a junior, and my baby is due in six weeks. My roommate just left yesterday. She had a baby boy. She got to hold him for an hour before they took him away. When’s your baby due?”

  “The doctor said toward the end of April.” Janie threw her suitcase on the bed and opened it. “Where are you from?”

  “Little town south of Richmond, Virginia, but we’re not supposed to talk much about where we came from or exchange personal information.” Greta winked. “You’re breaking the rules.”

  “If we hadn’t broken the rules already, we wouldn’t be here.” Janie picked up seven pairs of white cotton underpants and looked around.

  Greta pointed toward a set of double doors built into the wall with drawers below them. “Bottom two are yours. When I move out, you can put your things in the top two. Biggest belly gets the upper ones, so it doesn’t have to bend as far.”

  Janie opened the third drawer and put her panties to one side. “So basically, we are supposed to have this”—she laid a hand on her stomach—“that’s what Mama always called it, anyway. It was never a baby or her grandchild. Once we have it, we’re supposed to hand it over like it’s a hamburger at a café and never think about it again.”

  “Yep,” Greta answered. “Who’s Aunt Ruthie?”

  “Mama’s great-aunt,” Janie said. “My folks think they’re punishing me, but I’d rather live with her in a town that doesn’t even have a grocery store than go home to them. Where are your folks sending you?”

  “I’m going back home, but there’ll probably be a set of rules engraved in stone and set up in my bedroom. God only knows that I sure won’t ever again be allowed to roam free and wild or go to the horse stables without a chaperone. You’d think getting pregnant out of wedlock was a sin that would cast a person straight into hell, wouldn’t you?”

  “According to my mother, that’s where I’m headed. When this is over, I’m supposed to spend hours and hours on my knees begging God for forgiveness for my sin.” Janie took her toiletries to the bathroom and began to pace the floor. “Someday in the next hundred years, it won’t even be a big deal, and women won’t be looked down on for doing what men have been doing for years. I hope I live to see that day. My brother, Luther, got his wife pregnant before they married, and Mama and Daddy adore her.”

  “I bet they told everyone that the baby was premature.” Greta put air quotes around the last word. “That’s what happens when the baby comes before nine months after a couple gets married. Boys don’t get sent away to homes, because they can’t get pregnant. The sin is always on us girls. Folks don’t worry about them, because what boys do isn’t obvious to the world like a swollen belly is. Short story is that boys will be boys, and they can’t ruin the family reputation.” She laid a hand on her stomach. “I hate these smocks they make us wear.”

  She’s right, the pesky voice in Janie’s head said. Boys live by different rules than girls, and you know it, but someday things are going to change. Wait and see.

  “My folks are telling people that I’m on a mission trip with Aunt Ruthie for this semester.” She tucked a strand of dark-brown hair back up into her ponytail.

  “I’m away on a tour of Europe.” Greta shrugged. “That’s what my folks told everyone anyway. A private tutor went with me and my grandmother, who really is away on a long tour, and I’ll be joining her as soon as the baby is born. The tutor will really be teaching me while we’re traveling, so that when I go back for my senior year, no one will ask questions.”

  Since the day the doctor had told Janie that she was pregnant, no one in her family had spoken about it. She and her mother had sat on the front pew at church just like always, and her father had aimed his sermon right at her for the next four Sundays. It seemed that just by doing the very thing that her mother and father had done to bring her into the world, she’d turned herself into a modern-day Jezebel, someone who was totally unfit for polite society.

  The lady in the office on the first floor had suggested that things would be better if she didn’t make close friends here in the maternity home, and she’d signed a paper saying that she wouldn’t try to contact her roommates after they had given birth and left, or anytime in the future. She was to finish out her time until the baby was born, and then she was supposed to never think about the experience again. That would make her whole and fit when it was over, and ready to find a good husband.

  Janie felt a weight lift from her heart and soul at just being able to talk with Greta about her situation. Maybe they would be friends. Maybe not, but having someone to talk to eased the pain in her heart of being given away like a puppy.

  She opened the curtains and looked down at the parking lot below. Snow flurries flew around, and her father held his hat down with one hand as he hurried over to his shiny black car. He had a folder under his arm—probably all the papers she’d signed.

  He got into his car and didn’t even look up to see if maybe she was in the window. Cold and indifferent, she thought, like the day he had taken her into his study and told her that he and her mother had arranged for her to go away to a maternity home in Dallas. They would leave on Christmas morning, and the folks in his congregation would think that they were simply going to spend the day with Aunt Ruthie in Birthright, like they always did. According to her mother, the Good Book said that the elder of a church should take care of the elderly, and since Aunt Ruthie was old, they shouldn’t leave her alone on the holiday. Everything had been carefully planned so that no one would ever know about the disgrace Sarah Jane had brought on the Jackson family.

  Her mother had come into the study while Janie was still reeling from that news of her banishment and had reminded her wayward daughter that her ancestors had helped in the founding of Whitesboro. Now that daughter had put a huge blot on the family name. Janie had heard about the family’s involvement in the history of Whitesboro so often that she could have recited it back to her mother, but she had kept her mouth shut. Ethel Adams Jackson had a mean right hand, and she didn’t spare the force when she got mad. Janie had sported a red handprint on her face lots of times after she had smarted off to her mother. Evidently, that was another sin, somewhere down below pregnant before marriage but still on the list.

  Janie had looked up the history of Whitesboro in the school encyclopedia to make sure it was true, not merely some lore her mother had made up and told her from the time she was big enough to listen. That’s when she found out that after the Civil War, the women in Whitesboro were prohibited from going out on Saturday nights because shootings were so common. Like the men from the Adams family were not involved in a single one of those shootings—truth probably was that they just didn’t get caught. What Janie thought didn’t matter one little, tiny bit. Her mother’s precious family tree wasn’t so pure and spotless, and it was all Janie’s fault.

  “How old are you?” Greta broke the silence between them.

  “Fifteen, but I’ll be sixteen on March fifteenth,” Janie answered.

  “Beware the Ides of March,” Greta said.

  “Mama brought that up a lot, especially this last month, when she found out that I’d brought shame upon the almighty family tree. You would have thou
ght that there was a book in the Bible called the Gospel According to Shakespeare, and the first verse had to do with the Ides of March. The rest would have been about wayward daughters who ruin the family name,” Janie said as she watched her father drive away.

  “Amen!” Greta raised a hand toward heaven. “I bet every girl in here has heard all about that. Who’s the father of your baby?”

  Janie whipped around and glared at the girl. “Kind of nosy, aren’t you?”

  “All we’ve got is each other for the next six weeks. We’ll be escorted to classes like we’re prisoners,” Greta informed her. “Actually, I guess we are. We’re being punished for messin’ around before we were married all legal-like. Our sentence is the time we have left in the months it takes to produce a baby and give it away. We don’t have much choice in whether we want to keep it or not. Our parents put us here because we’re underage, and the law says they have authority over us. I know because my dad’s a lawyer, and, believe me, he read me chapter and verse from the law books about his rights and mine. My mama raises Thoroughbred horses. And yes, I’m nosy. If we talk to each other, maybe it’ll help us both keep from losing our minds in this place.” She swung a hand around to take in the whole room.

  “A boy who worked on my grandpa’s farm last summer. He told me he loved me and that I couldn’t get . . .” Janie struggled with the word, even though she was mad enough to spew cusswords.

  “Pregnant,” Greta filled in. “We can say the word in here. The devil won’t come up and pull us down to hell for saying it out loud.”

  Janie took a deep breath and continued. “Pregnant, except on two days each month. He said that it was the rhythm method.” Evidently, Greta hadn’t been raised in the same atmosphere Janie had. “I guess he was wrong about those two days, because here I am.”

  “Guys will tell a girl anything when they want sex,” Greta said. “Crazy, ain’t it? The guys brag about it, and we’re not supposed to say the word above a whisper. They must enjoy sex, the way they chase after it, and no one tells us jack squat about how to keep from getting pregnant. I found out too late that there are ways and means. Of course, since girls like me and you aren’t married, we can’t have that new pill they’ve come up with. It’s not fair, but it’s the way it is. I hope I live to see the day when we can brag about having sex if we want to and we don’t have to be ashamed that we’re pregnant and not married.”

  Janie smiled for the first time. Greta had rocks for brains if she thought that her lifetime was going to be long enough to change the world that much. “I hope that someday unmarried women can get the pill. My mama fusses about the world going to hell in a handbasket because women are demanding their rights. She says that women should be content to do what God intended them to do, and that’s having babies and keeping house.”

  “Me too. When I get old enough, I’m going to march with those women who want the right to keep their babies and use birth control.” Greta sighed.

  “Did you like it?” Janie changed the subject.

  “Are we talking about sex?” Greta asked. “Not so much the first time. But later, with another boy, I did. A lot. He kind of knew what to do. The first one wasn’t very good at it.”

  “Two boys?” Janie gasped. Ethel Jackson would have dropped down on her knees at the front of the church and prayed for Janie until she starved to death if she found out that her daughter had been with two boys.

  “Yep,” Greta said. “The second one is the father of this.” She pointed at her belly. “But he joined the army when I told him I was pregnant. Not that he would have had to do that, because my daddy would have never let me marry him. He might have killed him or had him killed, but Daddy wouldn’t ever let me marry beneath the family name.”

  “Did you want to?” Janie asked. “Marry him, that is?”

  “Not so much,” Greta said.

  Janie had never talked so openly with anyone in her entire life about anything. She’d always been the preacher’s daughter, and folks didn’t discuss that kind of thing in her world. Girls like Greta were considered wild—sleeping with two different boys and then admitting it. Didn’t matter how rich they were; good girls like Janie didn’t associate with them.

  “What was your baby’s father like?” Greta asked.

  “He had dark hair and brown eyes, and he came up from Mexico with his dad to work for my grandpa.” Janie sat back down on the bed.

  “Holy crap on a cracker,” Greta gasped. “Did you tell your folks about him?”

  Janie shrugged. “Mama would’ve killed me graveyard-dead if I didn’t tell her. If it had been a white boy, I might not be here. Daddy would have made him marry me. I’m glad he wasn’t a white boy from a decent family. I don’t want to be married.” That was the first time she’d admitted she didn’t want to be a wife. Having a man tell her what to do, when to do it, and how to do it didn’t sit well with Janie. Even though her mother ruled the house, in public she put on a submissive face and deferred to her husband. That had confused Janie ever since childhood.

  Two men, though, before Greta was married—she could almost hear her mother gasping for air. But it was downright liberating to say that she wanted more out of life than to have to submit to a man’s every whim.

  “When you first came in here, I thought you were going to be all shy and backward,” Greta said. “I couldn’t get my last roommate to talk much. She didn’t want to give her baby away, but . . .” She shrugged again. “You’re in the tenth grade?”

  “Yes, I am.” Janie had decided in that short time that she liked Greta. “And you’re in the eleventh? Daddy said I’ll have school here.”

  “That’s right—we’ll be in the same room together,” Greta said. “We go from breakfast to the classroom and then to lunch. After that we come back here to do our homework. From three to five we can go to the game room if we want, and then there’s supper. Saturday, we do laundry. Sunday is chapel and boredom.”

  Just like prison, Janie thought.

  But at least you’ve got someone to talk to, and that makes things so much better, the voice in her head said.

  Amen, Janie thought.

  Greta went into labor on Valentine’s Day. Janie never saw her again. The very next day, a new roommate showed up—a short blonde-haired girl who was hard as nails and would be staying in the maternity home for six months. She took her things out of paper grocery bags and tossed them into the bottom two drawers with no respect for organization. She flopped down on the bed and laced her fingers over her stomach.

  “I’m Elizabeth. I’m seventeen, and this is my second trip to this place. How long have you been here?”

  Janie pulled out the chair to her desk and eased down into it. “I’m Janie, and I’ve been here since Christmas. You’ve really been here before?”

  “Two years ago,” Elizabeth said. “When are you due? You look like you’re having a baby elephant.”

  Janie raised her eyebrows. “I feel like I’m havin’ one, too. I’m due at the end of April.”

  “You won’t go that long.” Elizabeth sat up on the edge of the bed and eyed her. “You’ll deliver early. You’re too big already. Are you keeping it?”

  Janie shook her head. “I didn’t know that was an option.”

  “Not if we’re under eighteen,” Elizabeth said. “But at least we get three squares and a bed until the kid is born. My stepdad threw me out when he found out he had gotten me pregnant.”

  “What did your mama say?” A few months ago, the idea that a man would do that to his stepchild would have shocked Janie, but not since hearing a few of the girls’ stories in this place.

  “Mama is an alcoholic and does whatever he says, and she never believes me, but she did call the folks here and got me into the home, again, so I guess she ain’t all bad,” Elizabeth said. “I’ll be eighteen the week after this one is born, so I’m not going back home ever. How old are you?”

  “Sixteen in another month,” Janie answered.

&nb
sp; “I was your age when the first one was born. He belonged to my boyfriend.” Elizabeth pushed a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. “I wish this one did, or that I could tell the nice people who will get the baby that the father is a bastard who takes advantage of his stepdaughter.”

  “What happened to your boyfriend?” Janie asked.

  “He died in a car wreck two weeks before I found out I was pregnant,” Elizabeth told her. “If the baby boy that couple took home looks and acts like him, they’ve got a good child. Danny was a good man—maybe I should say boy, since he was only sixteen at the time.”

  Elizabeth was right in her prediction about Janie not carrying the baby full term. On the afternoon of April 15, Janie was doing her algebra homework when her water broke. Elizabeth hurried out of the room to the only phone on the third floor—a wall-hung black one that could only call the nurse’s station. In ten minutes, a lady in white appeared with a wheelchair and motioned for Janie to sit down.

  Elizabeth waved and yelled, “Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” Janie managed to say before the lady took her out of the room.

  Janie delivered a five-pound baby girl at one minute until midnight. At three minutes after midnight, she delivered another baby girl only three ounces bigger. She got to hold her twin daughters, with their jet-black hair and tiny little fingers and toes, for one hour before the nurse took them away. Watching that woman walk out of the room with her beautiful babies was the hardest thing Janie had ever had to endure, and she swore she’d never go through it again.

  Four days later Aunt Ruthie showed up at the hospital to take her to Birthright, Texas. Janie’s milk had come in that morning, and her breasts felt as if they were made of concrete. They throbbed, and the front of her blouse sagged with the moisture. For the first time since she had been taken away from her home, Janie wished that she could talk to her mother. She’d know what to do about the pain and the embarrassment of having big, sticky circles on her shirt. But her mother and father had been called to run a mission in Mexico and were packing to leave.