In Trouble (16 page)

Margaret ran away with her baby. She was the one like me who was going to keep it. Well, she gave birth a week ago. There’s a separate building here where they keep the babies until they’re sent away, and they’ll let you visit if you want. Some of the girls don’t. They leave as soon as they can. Margaret went every time she could.

Last night about 10:30, the lights were already out and suddenly the bells started ringing like crazy. We saw the shadow of the nuns running in the hallway. When they turned on our light, Sister Mary Thomas stood there and wanted to know who of us knew. Everyone looked at me because I was Margaret’s closest friend here, but I didn’t know. I’m glad for her!

After that, Elaine’s handwriting got shaky. “They keep telling me I’m being selfish,” she wrote.

I’m so confused. Am I selfish? What do you think?

Sister Mary Thomas tells all of us all the time that what we did was shameful and we should be grateful for what they’re doing for us here. The social worker 187

said to me who was I to think I could give a baby a good life. “You need a husband for that,” she said. I told her I would have one. Did you mail my letter to Neil? He hasn’t written. I don’t understand it. Maybe he never got it. Will you call him for me? The doctor told me it’s going to happen soon. Maybe in a week or sooner. Please will you call? Here’s his number . . .

I couldn’t bear to read on. Sometimes I think hope is when you don’t want to know. I knew. I knew Neil would never come. He hadn’t answered her phone calls. Why would he answer her letter? He was a stinking jerk. But deep down a tiny piece of me understood. I didn’t want to have a child either. But he should have told her, the stinking rotten jerk.

I wrote her a two-word letter. “I’ll call.” It wouldn’t help, this I knew, but I’d call. There was a deep hole in my chest filled with ache. I never knew before that an ache was something you could put both hands around—it had a shape, a thickness, a weight. Elaine was so frantic about Neil, she couldn’t even ask me what was happening with me. Strange, but it didn’t make me angry. Just very sad.

Three days later there was another letter. That’s too fast. I pulled the first envelope out of the waste basket.

Elaine had reversed the numbers of our building. The first one had been mailed over ten days ago. I tore open the second letter. It was very short.

I’m home. They took away my beautiful baby.

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39.

I walked from the station to Elaine’s house. It wasn’t far, just a couple of blocks from the town’s main street, Elaine said. All these porches with nobody sitting on them. No rockers. So much for Hollywood.

Elaine’s house had a sloping lawn up to her porch.

I didn’t see a bell, just a knocker. The door opened almost immediately, and Elaine stepped out and gave me a hug.

The kitchen was big and opened onto a small back porch. She offered me coffee, and when I said “Sure,” I remembered Paul and tonight’s movie date.

“Can I make a quick call?”

She pointed to a phone on the wall. I dialed the
Record
office at school. He’s there most Saturdays working on layout.
Please be there alone!
I didn’t want Elaine to hear me 189

say his name. When he answered, I said only that I’d have to call later. I might not make it.

I needn’t have worried. Elaine was sitting on the back porch, paying no attention to me. She poured the coffee, and we sat and drank.

“I’m drinking again,” she said and raised her cup. I couldn’t tell if she was angry or resigned. Maybe both.

She didn’t ask about me, and I didn’t say anything. I’d come because she’s my friend, but not a two-way sharing friend anymore, at least not now.

“You look tired,” I said.

She bit her lip. “They let me see her only once. I don’t know where she will be, who’ll hold her when she cries, who’ll tickle her belly.”

“It’s a good Catholic fam—”

“Stop it!” And then she said, “I can’t cry. I’ve run out of tears.”

We sat for a while, and then there wasn’t anything more to say. When I left, my head was spinning. I was desperate to get what I wanted, and so far I hadn’t. Elaine had made her choice, but nobody, not Neil, not her parents, not the Home, had listened. What does it mean to choose if you can’t get what you want or if nobody listens?

I called Lois from Penn Station. I didn’t blame her, I said.

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40.

Dad and Mom have a friend who’s an obstetrician. They were political friends back before Dad went to prison. He didn’t “cross the street,” so he’s one of the good guys so far as I’m concerned. And he was good to me.

Mom’s the one who called him, and she took me to his office. He wanted to talk to me alone, no mother, no nurse.

He needed to know when I thought it had happened (it was not a day I’d forget) and when I’d had my last period. But mostly he told me what I should say on the information sheet his nurse would give me. He listed a bunch of symptoms—

unusual discharge, excessive bleeding, bad cramping—that kind of thing. At the next visit, he said he would do it.

“Here or in the hospital?”

He came out from behind his desk and held the door open. “Here.”

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I didn’t have a chance to ask any other questions, which was fine. I didn’t want to know if it would hurt or anything like that. It was going to happen.

Later, when I told Mom it was not going to be at the hospital, she said she knew. If I went to the hospital, they’d have to have a record, a lab report, about everything that happened. He could be fired for doing it without clear-ance. Maybe even thrown in jail.

Hospital boards! I could hear Lois saying, “With some hospitals, you have to convince them you’d kill yourself if they don’t help you.”

The rest is hard. I went three days later. When the nurse came for me, Mom gave me a hug. I looked back, and they stood there, Dad with his arm around Mom.

The nurse took me into a room and told me to undress. “Everything off.” She handed me a white gown.

“Open to the back.”

Nothing warm and cozy. Just as well.

She returned and took me down a long hall to a room with a table. It had those stirrups. I hate them. The doctor and another nurse were already there. The doctor said something about a routine D and C. He handed a chart to the second nurse. “Excess bleeding coupled with irregu-larity,” he said. The nurse who had given me the gown was standing a little away from the table. “Yeah, right!” was written all over her face. The light overhead was very white. Very bright. They put something over my face.

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I woke up in a bed next to a window. Outside I could see cars on the street. People going places, on the move.

Move on, move on, move on, they seemed to be saying.

Everybody does in their own way. I guess that’s what I figured out. Dad was right, you can’t choose for someone else.

Mom and Dad took me home, and I stayed in bed the rest of the day, Scruffy by my side. Grandma sat in her rocker next to my bed. We all slept on and off. Late in the afternoon there was a light knock on my door.

Dad. I put my finger to my lips, Grandma was dozing.

He came in and closed the door behind him.

Dad doesn’t seem to have trouble anymore with doors.

I hold my arm up, and the sun through the window casts a shadow.
My
shadow. Mine alone.

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AUTHOR’sNOTE

Picture this. You’re a teenage girl in 1956 and discover you’re pregnant. You’re terrified to tell your folks. In many communities, girls who get “in trouble” this way are

“bad,” “loose,” “sluts.” It’s always the girl’s fault. Nobody thinks anything about the guy. And then what happens when you start to show?

Chances are you’d be sent away to a home to give birth and give the baby away. Most of these places were run by the Salvation Army, Florence Crittenton Services, or various Catholic charities. Each had its own policies, but the basic plan for their unwed clients was the same: give birth, give up the baby. A shroud of secrecy covered the entire event.

Would you have any other choices? Abortion was illegal and dangerous. Many women tried it themselves, 195

some with coat hangers, some with the techniques Jamie tries in this novel. “I considered suicide,” a real-life Jamie told me. Another woman who helped her pregnant friend said, “We crept to this place in Brooklyn. Skulked along the street and watched to make sure no one saw us go in. Not shame, but fear.” If you could find a medical professional, conditions could be unsterile. You’d often be given little or no anesthetic. Some hospitals would perform what they called a “therapeutic” abortion, but a whole raft of specialists had to testify that you were unfit to have a baby, or were a danger to yourself or others, et cetera.

Now picture this. You’re a pregnant teenage girl in the twenty-first century. If you want an abortion, it’s technically legal. But—and it’s a big but—you still may not have that choice. It depends on where you live, how old you are, how far along you are, and whether you need your parents to approve the procedure. In 87 percent of the counties in the United States you won’t be able to have a legal abortion, for there’s no doctor who will do it. Even if you can get to a place that will give you an abortion, you may have to walk through a lineup of people who will scream that you’re a “murderer.” Today women’s options are becoming more limited.

There are politically active groups that oppose choice.

Some want to prohibit all abortions, even if a woman has been raped. There are a few individual members of these groups who are so opposed to “taking a life” (that of the 196

unborn fetus) that they are willing to take the life—that is, murder—of the doctors who perform abortions. The first murder took place in 1993. By mid-2010 there had been eight such killings.

The U.S. Supreme Court case
Roe v. Wade
gave women a choice; it didn’t force anyone to have an abortion. And pro-choice advocates want women to continue to have that choice as a matter of law, unlike Jamie in this novel. They are afraid that the increasing legal restrictions will bring back the days of “back-alley” abortions or women mutilating their own bodies because they can’t get legal medical help.

But even with all of today’s restrictions, there are still many more options than there were back in 1950s and 1960s. So why would a teen reader in the twenty-first century be interested in reading about a pregnant teen in 1956?

There’s a famous quotation from the philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

If we don’t know what has happened, we can’t appreciate our choices today and what we might lose if laws are changed. Although the historical setting is different, the pressures on young women remain the same. “Do it, baby, if you love me,” and of course there continues to be rape.

Every event and choice depicted in this novel actually happened to someone. I interviewed dozens of women who went through these experiences in the 1950s and 1960s.

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Their stories are powerful links to today: how do we make important decisions, what do we value, how do we understand what is happening to us? These are the same questions whether it’s in the twentieth or twenty-first century.

The all-important personal question is still “What do I want to do with my life?” And one way we can begin to think about that is by meeting and living with characters, both real and fictional.

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ACkNOwLEdgMENTs

With much gratitude to all who told me their stories.

They’ve informed Jamie with truths I could not otherwise have known. And with particular thanks to writer friends who read and believed: Anne, Phyllis, Liza, and Miriam. And to Jill Davis, who first listened and loved Jamie’s voice, and then Andrew Karre, my editor, who with generosity and wisdom helped Jamie, and me, reach deeper.

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ABOUTTHEAUTHOR

Ellen Levine is the author of many books, including
Henry’s Freedom Box
, a Caldecott Honor book, and
Darkness Over Denmark
, which was a National Jewish Book Award finalist and was awarded the Trudi Birger Jerusalem International Book Fair Prize. Her book
Freedom’s Children
won the Jane Addams book award and was named one of the Ten Best Children’s Books of the Year by the New York Times. Levine is a woodcarver and a lapsed civil-rights lawyer, and she taught at Vermont College’s Master of Fine Art in Writing for Children and Young Adults program.

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EllEn lEvinE is the author of many

books, including
Henry’s Freedom Box,
a Caldecott Honor book, and
Darkness Over
Denmark,
which was a National Jewish Book Award finalist and was awarded the Trudi Birger Jerusalem International Book Fair Prize. Her book
Freedom’s Children
won the Jane Addams book award and