If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (13 page)

“Shut the fuck up,” Ginger said suddenly, sounding like the old Ginger. “All of you, just shut the fuck up! How come, yeah, how come when I was drunk and stoned all the time, screwing anything that moved, no one said a Goddamned thing? Stumbling around the corner like a—a—a common tramp? Or when I got pregnant? Or when I dropped out of school? How come none of you had anything to say then?” She was standing up now, glaring at us.

We stared at her, openmouthed.

“Ginge—” Nanny started, but Ginger cut her off.

“Don’t fucking ‘Ginge’ me,” she said. “Just don’t, Nanny. Your mother always called you home for dinner. All your mothers. You always had to be home for dinner. That’s the difference, that’s the whole difference right there.” She sat down again and folded her arms across her breasts.

Liz said, “What the fuck does that have to do with—”

“Liz,” I said. She stopped. Nanny was wiping tears from her eyes. I remembered the times we’d all head home from Comanche Street, bitching about having to set the table, cut up iceberg lettuce for a salad. Ginger would be sitting in the doorway of Eddy’s, smoking. We’d wave good-bye, calling, “Later, man,” envying her freedom, her not having to be anywhere to straighten the napkins, lay the forks to the left of the plates.

“I asked you home for dinner,” Nanny said. “Plenty of times, I—”

“It’s not the same thing,” Ginger said through clenched teeth. “It’s not the same thing at all.”

Suddenly her face relaxed back into a tranquil mask. Her eyes became hooded and her mouth turned upward at the corners.

“But I don’t know what I’m getting so upset about,” she said, her
voice filled with false brightness. “Casey said this would happen. He said this was just what would happen.” She clasped her hands in her lap. Her knuckles looked smooth and strong.

“What did Casey say would happen?” Nanny asked, curious.

“He said my friends would try and talk me away from the light,” she said. “He said you would try and keep me in a sinful state so you wouldn’t feel so bad about yourselves. Ginger, the whore. Ginger, the slut of the earth.”

“Jesus, Ginger—”

“Please don’t,” Ginger said quietly.

“Don’t what?”

“Take his name in vain,” Ginger said, bowing her head. I could see Liz getting ready to explode.

“Ginger, the guy’s a skeeve,” I said, and when everybody turned to look at me, I went on, “He is, Ginger. Every time he’s around I get these vibes—he gives me the creeps, for real, man. I’m sorry, I’m sorry for saying it, but—I think he’s a—a false prophet.” I was afraid Liz and Nanny would laugh after I said that, but they just nodded in agreement.

Ginger smiled sweetly. “Peace, sister, you’re allowed to speak your mind. And if that’s the way you feel, then it’s very, very fortunate for you that you’re not the one moving in with him.” She stared straight at us, her smile never wavering.

“Whoa! Say what?” Liz asked, putting her hand up to her ear. “You’re not moving into that—”

“Yeah, I am,” Ginger said firmly, staring Liz down.

“Ginger,” Nanny said softly. “Why?”

“To be closer to Jesus,” Ginger said. “Closer than I am in this friggin’ apartment, that’s for sure.” She stared at us, looking like a mannequin in a storefront window, until we got up and left.

That was really the beginning of the end, though no one wanted to admit it.

“Oh, man, where were we?” Nanny mourned, as we walked back up to Comanche Street. “Where were we that we didn’t see this coming?”

Liz leaned her hand on my arm as she stopped to pick a piece of glass from her foot. “Where was Jesus?” she asked, throwing the shiny sliver into the gutter.

Nanny kept trying. She even enlisted her mother to call Mrs. Shea and intervene. They weren’t friends, but they’d all known each other since they lived in the city and Mrs. Devlin didn’t like seeing Nanny so upset.

“So she’s moving in with this preaching joker into a—what? One of those communes, is that what it’s called?” Mrs. Devlin asked.

“It’s an unsavory situation, Ma,” Nanny said.

Mrs. Devlin looked hard at Nanny. “It’s a what situation?” she said.

“Ma, I’m telling you,” Nanny said, and Mrs. Devlin went to the telephone in the kitchen and dialed. She and Mrs. Shea chatted awhile and we could hear her saying, “It’s an unsavory situation, Didi,” and finally, she hung up the phone, shaking her head.

“I tried, doll,” she said to Nanny. “But let’s face it. Didi Shea was never the brightest bulb in the chandelier when it came to mothering those pups.”

“What’d she say?” I asked.

“She said Ginger was free, white, and of legal age to do what she wanted. And finding Jesus was better than a lot of other things she’d found these past few years.”

“She is not legal,” Nanny pointed out. “She won’t be eighteen until November.”

“Well, there you go.” Mrs. Devlin sighed.

“Fuck her, that’s the way she wants it,” Liz said when Mrs. Devlin left the room. Even Nanny finally gave up, and I thought Ginger moving into the peeling yellow bungalow would make her disappear into a new kind of life we’d never be able to follow.

But even though we rarely saw her after she moved in with Casey, it didn’t feel like Ginger was really lost to us until she left Elephant Beach for some Jesus ashram in a place called Lubbock, Texas. The landlord was tossing them out of the yellow bungalow because they hadn’t paid the rent in like five months. How could they? No one worked; they just hung around the rocky yard watching the baby toddle across the cracked grass, looking stringy and saved. I’d wondered at first if the baby was one of the attractions, if Ginger wanted to be a part-time mother and atone for giving away her little son. But she never mentioned it, and the few times we saw her in the yard with the other women, she made no move to pick the baby up or play with it. Casey had people in Lubbock, Ginger explained. Family? Other Jesus freaks? We didn’t ask and she didn’t elaborate. She told us there was a post waiting for him and they could live far more cheaply and apparently Lubbock was closer to Jesus, populated with good, simple folk who were righteous and down-to-earth.

“Not like us sinners,” Liz said, raising her eyes to the sky like she was looking for heaven.

On their last day in Elephant Beach, when they were loading up the truck in full view of everyone at Eddy’s, Nanny, Liz and I walked over and begged Ginger to let us buy her a farewell egg cream for old time’s sake. She was wearing a faded blue-and-white housedress and scruffy shoes that looked like bedroom slippers. She went over and spoke to Casey, who was tying mattresses to the roof of the van with one of his pale disciples. Casey turned to look at us, then back at Ginger, then back at us.

“He doesn’t want her getting too close to the devil worshippers,” Liz whispered. “He’s afraid we’ll steal her away.”

Finally, we saw him nod, and Ginger came over and we crossed the street and went into Eddy’s and ordered chocolate egg creams all around. At the last minute Ginger ordered a double vanilla fudge ice-cream
sugar cone with sprinkles. She laughed nervously, sounding very young. “What the—I mean, my last cone at Eddy’s for who knows how long,” she said. “How do I know they even have sprinkles in Lubbock, Texas?”

Behind the counter, Desi took a paper toot he used for snow cones and filled it with sprinkles. He handed it to Ginger. “My going-away present,” he said. “Knock yourself out.” She leaned forward to kiss him, as she would have in the old days, then caught herself and bowed her head in thanks. Desi sighed and moved to the other end of the counter.

“But what am I worrying over?” Ginger said, sounding like a television housewife. “We have Jesus on our side. He’s always been faithful. He will provide whatever we need, no matter what.”

“Then why didn’t he provide the rent money for that rattrap across the street?” Liz snapped, and when we all looked at her, she said, “Sorry, man, I just—it just seems so sudden, you leaving like this. I mean, summer’s not even half over.” She reached over and put her arm around Ginger’s neck, pulled her close and kissed her cheek, loud and wet and sloppy.

“What’d your mother say?” Nanny asked. “When you told her you were going?”

Ginger shrugged. “She hugged me good-bye and wished me well,” she said, her voice even. “Actually, she said, ‘I hope you know what the hell you’re doing.’ Told me to keep in touch.”

Ginger kissed us all good-bye and we stood in front of Eddy’s, watching the Jesus freaks load themselves into the white van. Casey was already in the driver’s seat, waiting. Ginger turned back and waved to us, once, before disappearing into a small sea of clamoring bodies. As we watched the truck pull away from the house, Liz began crying. Nanny and I looked at each other over her head; Nanny’s eyes shrugged. We were the emotional ones, sniffling at movies and sad songs, with Liz usually rolling her eyes, saying, “And now, for the next performance of the sob sisters.” She loved Ginger like we all did, but they hadn’t been tight enough for her to be weeping so bitterly. In the distance, church bells
chimed a christening at St. Timothy’s, or maybe a midweek wedding. Father Tom said they were popular lately because they were cheaper than on the weekends.

Liz let out a strangled cry. We waited, me and Nanny, for the sound of her tears to stop filling the air. Above us, a flock of seagulls cawed loudly, aligned in a circle of sorrow.

for catholic girls who have considered going to hell when the guilt was not enough

Today

T
he woman who answered the door could have been any one of our mothers. She had the kind of ashy blond hair that could have been Clairol Nice ’n Easy, or she might have had it done at a beauty parlor, like Antoine’s on Main, where our own mothers went to get dolled up for weddings and holidays. Her skin was sun-washed and creased around her eyes, which made her look older than she wanted to, because she dressed young: faded straight-leg jeans rolled into cuffs above her ankles. A white Indian shirt embroidered with gold thread. Hanging silver earrings. Bare feet, with coppery polish on her toes. I tried to get a good look at her fingernails, because that’s the first thing they always tell you: dirty fingernails, after you pass through the dark alley to get to the dirty
table in the middle of the night. But she was holding the door halfway open and her hands were hidden.

We were standing in front of a three-story brown wood house with carved white shutters and a wraparound porch with wicker rocking chairs and a widow’s watch that looked like the top tier on a wedding cake, at the high end of a road where you looked down at the ocean. Below us, the dunes rose up like small mountains and the sand really did have a silver cast, lighter and finer than the sand we were used to; that was how the town of Silverwood got its name. The houses here were farther apart than the ones in Elephant Beach, and the street was bathed in milky quiet, that special, hot summer afternoon stillness where everyone’s either at the beach or huddled up inside with their air-conditioning.

“I’m—I’m here for my two o’clock appointment,” Liz said. That’s what Beth had told her to say. No names, no phone calls. No checks or credit cards; cash only, in an unmarked envelope.

“Come in, please,” the woman said, smiling. Her voice had a lilt, like she was singing the words. She held the door open wide. Muted sunlight streamed through the windows; the gauzy curtains lifted in the breeze. In the foyer we glimpsed the living room, which had a fireplace that took up almost a whole wall, filled with egg-shaped urns of flowers. Bunches of dried starfish hung from the walls. There were window boxes on the porch as well, filled with red and purple pansies. There were candles on the mantel, on the coffee table; votives, tapers, tea lights, covered in glass and pewter.

The woman closed the door behind us, turned the lock, shot the bolt. She then opened a door on the left side of the hall and motioned us to go in. It was an office with a big desk, bookcases lining the walls, dark, slanted shades at the windows. A cushiony red love seat and chairs clustered around a small table covered with seashells of all sizes.

“Sit down, please,” the woman said, sitting in the fat red chair that
faced the windows. Liz sank into a corner of the love seat and I sat down next to her.

“This house, it’s like spectacular, man,” Liz said in some new bright voice that didn’t sound like her own.

“Except for the mice in the walls,” the woman said, smiling. “Who come out at night and keep us awake.”

“This house is too beautiful to have mice,” Liz said loudly. “This town is too beautiful to have mice running around.” I turned to look at Liz. I had never heard her use this fawning, kiss-ass tone before, not to her parents or teachers or even Dr. Steadman, our high school principal, that time she was caught cutting so many classes that she almost didn’t graduate.

“Maybe that’s what attracts them,” the woman said.

“Who?” Liz asked wildly.

“The mice,” the woman said gently. Then she asked, “You have something for me, yes?”

Liz stared at her blankly.

“I said, you have something for me, yes?” the woman asked again, still smiling.

I nudged Liz, tapped her purse. “Oh!” she said. “Oh! I’m so . . . sorry, man, really, I’m . . .” She rummaged in her purse and came out with an envelope. She held it out to the woman with a shaky hand. Her voice was making me sick. I wanted her to lose that fake, fawning tone and sound like Liz again.

The woman didn’t take the envelope. She sat gazing at Liz. She had the calmest eyes I’d ever seen, green or gray, it was hard to tell. The light in the office was dimmer than it had been outside in the foyer, which was fine. All that streaming sunlight made me nervous. It was a perfect beach day, not a cloud in the sky. It was like a painting you could have named
July
. The breeze through the window carried the scent of the ocean. Wind chimes tinkled on the porch. The whole thing was giving me the creeps, everything so white and bright and airy. It should have
been raining. The curtains should have had dirty edges, filthy hems from sweeping against a sooty windowsill. A body should have been falling out of the closet, bathed in blood. We should have come at night, in the dark, when children were asleep. But Beth had told us two o’clock on Thursday afternoon, so here we were.

The woman said, “Before we go upstairs, I’m only going to ask you once, yes? Do you want to go through with this?”

Liz took out her Marlboros, lit two, and handed me one. She began flicking ashes in the largest seashell, the kind we picked up on the beach at home all the time and used for ashtrays in our bedrooms.

“Because if you don’t, you can walk back out that door right now and that’s the end of it,” the woman said. She didn’t sound mad. She didn’t look like she cared one way or the other.

Liz blew smoke up at the ceiling fan. Beneath the huge frames of her sunglasses, her cheeks were still stained and splotchy from crying on the bus.

“I can tell you this is safer and less painful than childbirth, and will take far less time than a root canal,” the woman said. I could see the corners of Liz’s mouth turn down, her lips begin to tremble.

The woman focused on me. “And you are her good friend, yes?” I nodded.

“And no matter what goes down in the next few minutes, you both know that whatever happens here is confidential, not to be talked about outside of this house, or I could lose my medical license and that’s one less option for women to be safe.”

The word “safe” echoed through the cool room. I thought it was a strange choice of words. It was not a word I would have chosen. It was only after she’d spoken those words that I realized the woman was the doctor. I had thought she was a nurse, an assistant, someone who took care of the preliminaries. I thought the doctor would be short and mannish-looking, with pinched lips and close-cropped dark hair and lines in her forehead, wearing a dirty white coat. I wondered if the woman had children herself,
if she sent them to day camp or to the beach with a babysitter, with strict instructions not to come home before a certain time. Or if they were grown, our age, and suspected but weren’t sure what was going on in their own house. I tried to imagine how I would feel if I suddenly found out my mother was performing abortions in the basement or out in the backyard shed. I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t get my mind around such a thing. There were no family pictures on the doctor’s desk, in the office room. There were no pictures of real people anywhere around.

The woman put her elbows on her knees, rested her chin in her hands. Liz crushed her cigarette in the shell on the coffee table. A single spark refused to die. She took a deep breath.

“Okay, man,” she said. “Let’s do it. Let’s do it now.” She sounded like Liz again. She stood up and held the envelope out again. This time the woman took it. She went to the desk, opened a drawer, and the envelope disappeared. She walked to the door and opened it, then beckoned us through with a graceful finger. I’d been so engrossed in looking around that until now I’d forgotten to look at her hands. She wasn’t wearing polish on her fingernails. They were cut short and square. They looked short and square and strong and clean.

Last Monday

“You swear on your mother’s life you didn’t tell Beth it was me?” Liz asked Nanny for like the ninetieth time.

We were sitting in the Shot Glass Saloon up in the Point, at the other end of Elephant Beach. It was dark and dim and everyone looked familiar even though we didn’t know them. We’d purposely come here because it was several miles from the Trunk and anyone we would run into. Even so, Liz had insisted on us wearing dark sunglasses and black jeans and tee shirts and bandannas so that no one would recognize us. It was four thirty in the afternoon and we were sitting at a table in the corner, drinking whiskey sours on the rocks and planning Liz’s abortion. She’d
gotten pregnant after balling Cory in an AMC Gremlin, her least favorite car on her father’s lot, but the only one that had been available. It had been a cramped and hurried encounter; she said she wished it had happened in the Pontiac Bonneville, classically restored and big and roomy as a bed, but it was a premium seller and Cory was afraid her father might notice something was amiss. When she’d told Cory she was late, he’d just nodded and said, “Bummer.” The next day he gave her two hundred dollars and told her, “More where that came from if you need it, just get it taken care of. I don’t want to know the details.”

Nanny shook her head. “I told you,” she said patiently. “Beth doesn’t want to know. She says the less people know, the better. She’ll make the call and set up the appointment. Then she’ll get back to me with the day and time.”

“How does Beth know her again?” I asked. Beth Fagan was in her last year of nursing school at Joshua Stern Medical Center in Manhattan; she’d been the midwife at Maggie Mayhew’s home birth. She said it was a deep and life-changing experience, even though everything had gone wrong and Aunt Francie said it was a miracle the baby had been born at all.

“From Joshua Stern,” Nanny said. “It’s kind of like an underground thing, but all the nurses know about it.”

“If it’s so underground, what’s she doing living in Silverwood?” Liz asked.

Nanny snorted. “Would you think to go looking for an abortion doctor in Silverwood?”

“So, what, I just knock on the door and say, ‘Hey man, I’m, like, here for my abortion’?”

“Pretty much, yeah. Beth will tell us everything we need to do.”

“And she doesn’t have to know my name or anything?” Liz squinted through the cigarette smoke.

“She doesn’t want to know your name,” Nanny whispered. “Because if anything happens, she could lose her license, go to jail—”

Liz was staring hard at Nanny. “What is this ‘if anything happens’? What’s going to happen? If nobody’s looking in Silverwood for this abortion doctor, then please, somebody tell me, what the fuck is going to happen?”

“Lower your voice,” Nanny hissed. Heads at the bar were beginning to lift and look us over.

Sure enough, the cocktail waitress came by. Her face had that creased look of too many cigarettes and her voice was chipped and hoarse. “Everything all right over here?” she asked, and Liz burst into tears. Nanny and I looked at each other helplessly. The waitress peeled off some cocktail napkins from the stack on her tray and handed them to Liz. The napkins had “The Shot Glass Saloon” written in bold red script, and beneath the letters, a cowboy brandishing a six-shooter, standing next to an old-timey saloon with swinging doors. There were no cowboys in the Shot Glass, only drunks with nothing better to do than sit at the bar drinking boilermakers, listening to Frank Sinatra’s voice from the jukebox singing “It Was a Very Good Year” forty-seven times.

The waitress looked at me and Nanny. “Boyfriend problems?” she asked. She lit a cigarette and laid it on her tray with the smoking end outward.

Nanny looked at me. “Kind of,” I told her. The minute she’d missed her period, Liz had started planning her wedding. The ceremony would be on Comanche Beach at sunset, and the reception would take place at the new Knights of Columbus catering hall, right on the bay. Liz would wear a red velvet granny dress with a matching crown of roses in her hair. We’d all be bridesmaids and wear any shade of velvet we wanted, except green, so it didn’t look like Christmas. Cory would get promoted to manager of her father’s dealership and they’d buy the house that had been for sale forever on Weber Avenue, by the bay, where all the bedrooms faced the water. Even though Cory McGill had never taken Liz to dinner, met her mother, or hung out with any of her friends.

The waitress looked at Liz and nodded. Her eyes were winged with
eyeliner at the corners and her roots were showing through at the crown, at her temples. She dragged heavily on her cigarette, placed it back on the rim of her cocktail tray, laid the tray down and put her hands on our table.

“Let me tell you girls something about men,” she said. “They’re all a hundred years out of the trees, and there’s not a Goddamned thing you can do about it.”

Last Night

The night before, Liz and Nanny were supposed to come to my house so we could go over our plans for the hundredth time. We were going to take the bus; Liz didn’t want to drive in case anyone recognized her car, even though Silverwood was at the other end of Long Island and no one we knew ever hung out there. After it was over, we’d be staying overnight at the Dancing Dolphin Motel; Nanny had the good idea to call the Chamber of Commerce and get a recommendation. It sounded funky and cheerful, and we told our parents we were taking the train to the city to shop at Macy’s and see a movie, maybe
The Godfather
, and stay overnight at Nanny’s grandmother’s apartment in Washington Heights. Liz still insisted on us wearing our incognito outfits, even though I tried telling her we’d only draw attention to ourselves since nobody in Elephant Beach wore black in summer unless they were going to a funeral. Liz thought that if we wore our black bandannas and shades either no one would recognize us or they’d think we were too crazy to deal with and leave us alone.

We usually didn’t hang out at my house, because I lived farther away from Comanche Beach and Eddy’s and all our other hangouts. But Liz didn’t want to talk at her house, and Nanny was terrified of her mother overhearing us, since the walls of their bungalow were thin. Wednesday was my mother’s mah-jongg night so she and her friends would be playing in the kitchen and wouldn’t have heard a bomb go off once they got
going. We would have the back porch to ourselves. I waited out there, lying on the chaise lounge, munching on mah-jongg food, nonpareils and M&M’s, reading a book about growing up in the 1950s when life was simpler with happier endings.