Girls Like Us

by Randi Pink

  The sidewalk lifted, and the large crowd blurred into bouquets of color—red, white, green, blue, yellow. She swallowed a giant lump of air in a gulp and felt it coming back up. A rising and rising from the low place she sang from. She hadn’t eaten at all. There was nothing to come up. Nothing but swallowed air and music.

  “‘Chelsea Morning,’ ‘Chelsea Morning,’ ‘Chelsea Morning…’”

  In that moment, Michael caught the plea in her eyes and tilted his head. What’s wrong? he mouthed.

  But it was too late. She threw up on the tie-dye lady’s open sandal.

  The world settled after that. The bouquet of colors turned back into a sea of people, the sidewalk lay back down, and the wetness coated her mouth again. She squeezed her eyes shut once and then opened them wide to get her bearings. The disgusted woman stood in front of her, shell-shocked by the vomit on her bare toes. The rest of the small crowd had dodged it and scattered.

  Sue looked from the woman’s outraged face to the vomit on her foot. It was bright yellow, like Joni’s “Big Yellow Taxi.”

  “You okay, Sue?” asked Michael, who was also keeping a safe distance from her.

  “What’s today?” she asked him.

  “Saturday.”

  “No,” Sue snapped. “I mean the date.”

  The frozen woman with the newly yellow toe said, “May twenty-seventh, 1972.”

  Sue simply replied, “Shit.”

  * * *

  The next day, Sue and Michael rode the bus back to Kenilworth in silence. Well, mostly silence, except for the gagging coming from Sue. Her world revolved around sound, and on that bus, she heard herself as a chorus of an angry body, deciding, once and for all, to either accept the thing or push out the thing. It sounded like she herself was at war on the inside.

  The bus didn’t help. The driver seemed to aim for every uneven crack in the freeway and dodge everything smooth. Sleep evaded her completely. All she had was a miserable, bumpy, vomit-filled ride from hell.

  Her mother would be furious. That much she knew. And her father, too, if he was even in Kenilworth. The protests kept him at the capital most days. Even during Senate recesses, he stayed in his Washington apartment. For the sake of the country, he’d tell her before kissing her on the cheek. She’d always wait until he was gone to wipe his spit off her face. Yeah, right, for the sake of the country. For the sake of war was more like it. She hoped he was still in Washington. He was the last person she wanted to see. Seeing her mother, though, worried her.

  Sue’s mother was a quiet woman named Margaret. Tall, slender, demure, she was raised in New England, right alongside the Kennedys. She’d been on the Vineyard when the Chappaquiddick episode happened. She’d told Sue about the late-night sounds of zooming police cars and so many blue and red lights that it looked like the Fourth of July had come around again. When her mother described “the incident,” as she called it, she never allowed her voice to rise above a womanly whisper.

  And as a rule, Margaret never let her hair or fingernails grow too much without being tended to, and she rarely kept a pair of shoes long enough to get scuffed on the bottom. To the world, she was a superior snob, and she never parted her lips to disagree. If her mother were an instrument, she’d be a flute of a woman. Tinkering and adding airy, breezy flavor to the symphony. Sue, herself, was a proud acoustic guitar. Even Sue’s father treated his wife like a fancy pocket square to give a pop of expensive color to his suit. Sue, however, knew who she really was.

  Sue’s mother was the queen of thought commentary. She whispered her anger into her tea and secretly donated money to the brand-new National Public Radio station called WBEZ. She was the fiercest of women, quietly making differences no one would ever know about. Polar opposite of her father, Sue thought. He was a show pony, prancing around to white-tie dinners with crooked Richard Nixon. Holding the president’s umbrella in perfect weather for a chance to be photographed alongside.

  Her mother, though, was the one who’d lit Sue’s fire of activism. In 1968, she brought Sue to Chicago to witness the Democratic National Convention. When mayhem broke out, Sue expected her mother to retreat like everyone else. She didn’t.

  Dressed in low heels and a pink peplum dress, her mother, with perfect posture, stood her ground in the chaos. Sue was just thirteen years old, tugging at her mother’s ruffles, but she wouldn’t budge. That’s when Sue realized how much her mother despised the war, and maybe even her own husband. Even still, everything Sue had learned about her mother, she’d done through observation. The woman rarely spoke outside of rehearsed niceties. Her mother was a bag of pieces of a whole that she had to pour out and put together over the span of her life. Those big pieces, like the protest, were rare and welcomed, but usually, Sue made do with the tiny shards between manicures.

  “You sleeping?” Michael’s wiry voice broke through the bus’s background noises.

  “No,” she replied. “I can’t sleep.”

  “What are we supposed to do about this?” Michael said, all of his attractive confidence replaced by ugly apprehension. “I’m not ready for…” He looked around before continuing. “A child.”

  “Nobody’s ready for a child,” Sue replied, upset at the sound of him—boyish, squirrelly, scared. “Where did you put my guitar?”

  “Who the hell cares where your stupid guitar is, Susan!” he said in a loud whisper before cowering under the gaze of the man one seat over. “My dad is going to kill me. And my grandmama.” He placed the back of his hand on his forehead like a woman about to faint on a soap opera.

  Just then, Sue felt the magnitude of her mistake. He was a pussy. A paper tiger. A kid in a candy suit pretending to politic. She wanted to vomit again, but on him this time. Sue wasn’t afraid of pregnancy or her father or mother or anything else for that matter. The only thing that scared her, in that moment, was being attached to a snobby rich kid who’d been pretending this whole time. To, God forbid, share a child and a home and a life with a boy like this. Her instinct was to dismiss him from her presence and never speak to him again. She’d done faker boys like that tens of times. But she was stuck. And that was the mistake.

  She looked him over and felt a rumble in her stomach before saying, “Shit.”

  * * *

  Guitar in hand, Sue walked through the front door to find her mother sipping tea in the front room. With pursed lips and a furrow between her eyes, she said, “Susan, sit.”

  Two words strung together from her mother’s lips were a lot. She dutifully sat.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked her daughter before lifting an empty cup from the side table and pouring. “Mint.”

  Sue took the tea in one hand, never fully releasing the neck of her guitar as a comfort. Thankful to be off the loud bus, Sue acclimated to the quiet. This was the life she grew up living. A soundless, expensive sipping of tea.

  “Where did you go, Susan?” her mother’s tea-burned voice asked. “You were away for a day and a night. I worried.”

  Sue thought of telling her mother right there. Then she changed her mind about that, because she wasn’t sure what would happen. The quiet ones were the scary ones, Sue thought. Those who sit and brood without blabbering on and on about everything could do the most damage with their words. People assumed they were blank and without opinion. No, they were the most thoughtful. Taking in every single detail of the world. Soaking it up. Devising plans and donating secretly to causes they cared about. To Sue, quiet meant strength of will. Control over one’s self. When she really thought of it, the act of reacting was the weak act. Resistance of emotion was the real strength. And in that way, her mother was more powerful than God.

  But then again, she’d seen the activist within her mother, hiding, but there.

  “I missed a cycle last month,” she decided to say to her with a phony confidence that made her think of Michael. “Pretty sure I’m pr-preg—” Sue stopped there, unable to say the word.

  When her mother said nothin
g and showed no emotion whatsoever, Sue was uneasy. So she did what she always did when she felt out of sorts. Searched for sound. Honing in on the patter of her own heartbeat and the whistle of her breathing. Then searching for her mother’s heartbeat and breathing. They were small sounds. Nearly unable to be heard at all. They needed a cat, she thought. Or a very small dog.

  Her mother took another sip of tea.

  “I’m sorry…” Sue began, but her mother held a manicured finger in the air.

  “Let’s not,” she said simply. “I need time to think. You are excused.”

  * * *

  Time to think is a tricky monster of a thing. It could mean anything, really. Time to devise a plan for how to get your daughter out of her predicament. Time to figure out how to kill your daughter without getting caught. Time to sip tea and eat an extra bite of shortbread cookie. It could mean anything in the world.

  Sue squeezed the skinny neck of her guitar until her fist ached. She needed to play. As soon as her rear end hit the carpet of her bedroom floor, she began playing “Chelsea Morning.” Too high and pitchy for public, but perfect for herself. Hearing herself squeal like a stuck pig, she truly didn’t do Joni justice at all.

  * * *

  Sue woke to the sun shining in her eyes and attempted to flick the crook from her neck, since she’d foolishly used her guitar as a pillow. Her stomach rolled louder than a thunderstorm, and she wanted to cry. She began to play instead.

  “How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man?”

  Bob Dylan was a poet more than he was a singer. She’d never loved his voice that much. His lyrics, though, were utter magic. The strings of her guitar dripped tears by the time she reached the last line of the song.

  “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”

  That song always teased out Sue’s trapped emotions. Along with the tears, it drew out anger. Michael Matthews, passionate protestor, was actually a coward, worried sick about his grandmama. And the thing inside her was half his.

  Sue had slept with six guys in her life. The first two were duds. The third, nice enough. And the fourth was a total loser. But the fifth, Malcolm Engel, should’ve been the father of this baby.

  There was a small knock on Sue’s cracked bedroom door, her mother’s knock.

  “You sang beautifully,” said her mother, standing at the edge of the threshold, waiting to be invited in.

  “Come in, Mother.”

  Her mother held her hands as she entered, one over the other, as if she’d practiced how to walk in the mirror. She took a seat on the chaise at the foot of Sue’s bed and crossed her ankles. And then, quiet. Comfortable quiet, but quiet nonetheless.

  This was why Sue had taken up the guitar. Raised in a large, hushed home, Sue had wanted to fill it with something else. Something interesting. Waves of sounds from pitchy Joni to slow, deep Johnny Cash. Her mother, in her way, encouraged it. A smile here and there—Sue thought her mother liked it. Besides, there was no pressure on her mother to speak or converse or add to dialogue. All she had to do was listen and nod as Sue played.

  “You’ve missed how many cycles?” she asked after a while, forcing her lips apart like jackhammers.

  “Two.” Sue shook her head. “Maybe three?”

  “Ahh,” her mother replied, like she’d just heard that a squirrel had gotten into the attic.

  “I’m sorry, Mother.”

  “I know.”

  A fly on the wall would’ve thought it strange—a daughter telling her mother she’s pregnant and the mother quietly taking it in. But this was how they were. It had always been the two of them quietly against the whole world. While her horrible father fought for his own political photo ops, they were there like this together. Always.

  “I’ve thought of a solution,” her mother said slowly, and then paused. Anyone else would’ve seen her as heartless, but Sue saw anxiety all over her. Sue knew she was about to say more than she wanted to, so Sue smiled and nodded, encouraging her mother to find her words.

  “I…” her mother began, and then lost her words. “I…” she began again, and lost them again. “You…” She closed her lips into a tight line, and Sue knew her mother wouldn’t open them again for some time. She needed to think.

  “Want me to play while you think?” Sue asked, lifting her guitar to release some of the pressure from her mother.

  Her mother nodded, seemingly grateful.

  “I’ll play your favorite.

  “When you’re weary, feeling small. When tears are in your eyes, I’ll dry them all…”

  “Stop,” whispered her mother. The tears ran quickly down her face like they would on a marble surface. She was crying. Sue had never seen her mother cry before.

  “Mom,” Sue started, but now she was at a loss for words.

  Her mother scrubbed the tears from her cheeks and forced the words through her body. “You have to go away. Your father must not know. No one can know. Do you understand?”

  Sue nodded in terror. Go where? How would this ever work?

  “I help a woman,” her mother continued. “A wonderful woman who takes in girls like you.”

  “Girls like me?”

  Her mother shook her head, frustrated at her own phrasing. “This is why I don’t speak. All things come out differently than I intend them to.”

  “It’s okay,” Sue replied, still stinging from the phrase “girls like you.” “Please go on. You’re doing well.”

  “She’s on her way to retrieve you now.” Her mother spoke through gritted teeth. “Your father will think you’re at camp. He’s preoccupied with the president, anyway.” She spoke about him like she would a person she’d rather not exist. “Who is the father of this child?”

  “Michael Matthews.”

  “Ahh,” her mother said with a pinch of disgust. She was no fan of the Matthewses. They were the type of rich people with golden faucets. Tacky rich. “Does he know?”

  Sue nodded.

  “Ahh,” her mother replied again. “I’ll have to handle them.”

  “Mom? Who is on their way to retrieve me?”

  “Her name is Pearline. The place is small. Please pack only necessities. And there will be no phone where you’re going, my darling,” she said, blinking away emotion. “I will write.”

  * * *

  The moment Sue had seen three other pregnant girls in the small, colorful apartment, she knew it was the right thing. No one slept that night. Not Lillian or Mary or Missippi or Ms. Pearline. The girls sat cross-legged on the bed and talked all night while Ms. Pearline frantically painted her pictures.

  Missippi was immediately Sue’s favorite. She loved her drawl and her innocence and her love of books. If Sue had a little sister, she’d want her to be Missippi—sugary sweet and curious about everything.

  “Who’s Johnny Cash?” Missippi had asked Sue in her unhurried twang.

  “Who’s Johnny Cash?!” Sue said, intentionally melodramatic. “Holy cow, let me show you.”

  She took out her guitar and began the song she knew they’d like. Everyone liked it. It was the most fun song to sing and play and listen to in the world. The song no one could hear without leaping to their feet and dancing: “I’ve Been Everywhere.”

  And Sue was right. All three girls got up and started twisting and laughing around the living room and kitchen as she sang. When she reached the first chorus of places, the girls threw their hands up and hollered.

  “I’ve been to Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota, Buffalo, Toronto, Winslow, Sarasota, Wichita, Tulsa, Ottawa, Oklahoma, Tampa, Panama, Mattawa, La Paloma, Bangor, Baltimore…”

  As the towns and cities rolled off her tongue, the girls shouted.

  “She said Chicago! That’s my city.”

  “Oh! I been to Tulsa! And drove through Tampa once.”

  “I’m from Baltimore! My hometown is in a Johnny Cash song!”

  Sue smiled. No matter who she played th
e song for, she got the same reaction. People were simply excited that a song had their hometown’s name in it. When she reached the end, they all clapped, and she bowed into her guitar.

  “I like that Johnny Cash.” Missippi gave her the widest, sweetest smile Sue had ever seen. Sue wanted to grab her into her chest. She herself wasn’t much older than Missippi, three years and change, but Missippi’s pregnancy seemed wrong. Who would do this to such an innocent soul?

  “Do you know old Chubby Checker?” Lillian seized Mary’s hand, and they began twisting together in the kitchen. “My mama loves him.”

  “Mine, too! Ooo,” Mary added. “Play ‘The Twist’!”

  “I’ve heard it, but I don’t know how to play that one.”

  “Girl,” Lillian told her. “Do you know how to do the twist?”

  Sue shook her head. Anxiety came back into her. She hated dancing. Actually, she never did it. Not even in private. She was a musician only; she created the music for other people to dance to. No, no, no. She would not dare dance in front of another soul. Not ever.

  Lillian held her hand out for Sue. “Come on. It’s just us!”

  “I can’t dance.”

  “You may not be able to dance,” Lillian replied. “But you can twist them skinny hips. Get up!”

  Mary began singing the chorus of “The Twist.” Sue had definitely heard that song before. It was an oldie, but a classic. She watched Missippi grinning and twisting with her way-out and out-of-place stomach.

  Missippi was enormous. Bigger than all of them. Round and sticking out like two basketballs stuffed under her nightshirt. Younger, sweeter, and so much bigger. Sue felt the look of pity creep in between her eyes, and she quickly shook it off. Sue never wanted anyone to think she felt sorry for them. It was a complex she’d developed long ago as a rich girl.