Authors: Lawrence Block
“Linda—”
She waited.
“I’m glad that it happened tonight.”
She didn’t say anything. The statement didn’t seem to require an answer.
“But I’m a little worried that it might have been bad for you. That you might take it the wrong way.”
“What do you mean?”
He couldn’t go on, and after a minute she understood what he was getting at. He was concerned for her, concerned that the act of intercourse might cause her to slide back down to the state she’d just finished crawling back out of. Could that happen to her now?
No, she told herself. Not in a million years. Giving herself tonight had been a thoroughly different sort of thing, a healthy act as opposed to the sick and twisted sort of thing she had been in the habit of doing. If anything, making love with Joe would help her, help her to be honest with herself and decent with others.
“Don’t worry,” she said.
“I don’t mean to—”
“I know. It’s all right.”
And everything
was
going to be all right. She was sure of it now, as sure as she could be of anything. All she had to do was keep going the way she was headed and she didn’t have a thing to worry about. That was all—just keep plugging in school, keep going to bed early and getting up early, keep going to classes and studying hard and keeping her mind on what she was supposed to be doing. The rest of the world would take care of itself if she could manage the difficult business of holding up her own end.
He let her out at her door and she walked up the stairway to her room. She got to work at once, settling down at her desk with a book open in front of her. She scanned page after page, her eyes taking in a paragraph at a clip as she read through the book.
Next year would be a problem, she thought. Her parents would have to find out and in all probability she would have to strike out on her own. But somewhere she would find a college that she could work her way through, and from there on in everything would be all right.
Exam week came. The Spanish final was first and she walked into the exam room feeling confident and walked out of it feeling still more confident. It was amazing how quickly she had managed to get the language down pat once she had really started to work on it.
The English final was the next day and she was a little worried about it.
But before it was time to take the exam she got the shock of her life and all thoughts of tests and classes left her head immediately.
THERE WAS NO SINGLE ACT or event that brought the full force of the shock home to her. The shock came instead as a sudden awareness of something she should have known all the while.
This didn’t make it any less of a shock.
She was sitting in her room, the Spanish exam over and done with, the English exam due the next day. She was at her desk, studying valiantly, when she decided to take a ten-minute break to rest her eyes. So she left her desk and sat down on the edge of her bed and let her mind wander.
She realized with something of a start that she was a good three days late for her period. This didn’t shake her up too badly, since she had been late before without being pregnant. She digested the thought carefully and her mind almost managed to swing from that topic to another less dangerous topic when another realization came to her and her fingers began to tremble uncontrollably.
She hadn’t had her period last month.
God in heaven, how could she have missed without being aware of it? It seemed impossible, but she was so caught up in the new routine of studying and living the good life that she had passed from one day to the next without even thinking about the whole thing. That meant that instead of being three days late she was a month and three days late, which in turn seemed to indicate—
That I’m pregnant
, she thought.
She stood up and began pacing the floor of the room, up and down and back and forth. Her mind was reeling and she had trouble staying on her feet.
It was ironic, she thought. Now that she had managed to stop sleeping around, now that except for Joe she hadn’t let a guy get near her in weeks, now she found out that she was pregnant. She might just as well have been sleeping around all along, for all it mattered to her now, for all the good virtue was going to do for her. But no—she had stayed pure as the driven snow. And now she was knocked up.
She had to be sure. One way or the other she had to know for certain, though she couldn’t figure out how she could possibly be anything other than pregnant. She was rarely late and she had never missed completely in her life; the odds against a miss now were tremendous. It might have been different if she had been worrying lately about missing, because she knew that girls who were worried over pregnancy frequently missed a period for purely psychological reasons. But she hadn’t given it a thought in the longest time.
How could she know for certain? There wasn’t a doctor in town that she could go to. She knew there was a test that they sold in drugstores that you could take on your own, but the thought of picking one up in a Clifton drugstore was appalling. It would be all over town in a minute.
But not knowing was even worse. She decided quickly that she could grab a bus to Springfield where no one knew her and buy a pregnancy test at one of the drugstores there. Then she could take the test in a gas station rest room or some place and find out once and for all.
Maybe she wasn’t pregnant. Maybe she was really all right and she just skipped for some reason she couldn’t figure out. Maybe—
Well, she had to find out.
She closed the book on her desk, slipped on a corduroy jacket and hurried out of the dormitory. She raced down the stairs to the ground, along the path to the street, down the street to the main road of the town. At a lunch counter in town she bought a round-trip ticket to Springfield; then she waited outside for the hourly bus. She chain-smoked while she waited for the bust to come, lighting one cigarette from the stub of the last, her mind racing and her lips praying silently that everything would be all right, that she was not pregnant.
The bus came.
She sat near the driver and watched through the front window as the bus rolled along down the two-lane highway. The bus seemed to be crawling and she wanted to shout to the driver, to urge him to hurry and get her to Springfield so that she could find out what was the matter with her.
Finally the bus pulled into the terminal. She jumped up from her seat and got out of the bus, hurrying out of the terminal and rushing through downtown Springfield, not sure quite where she was going but knowing that she ought to be able to locate a drugstore somewhere in the general area of the bus terminal.
She found a drugstore after almost walking right past it. There was a male pharmacist on duty, a tired looking man with a green eye-shade and a soiled white shirt. He looked at her and his eyes were bold as he stared at the front of her blouse visible through the corduroy jacket. She wanted to button the jacket up so that the dirty little man couldn’t look at her, wanted to run out of the drugstore and find some other place. But she forced herself to be calm, and her voice was normal when she spoke.
“I’d like one of those home pregnancy tests,” she said.
The druggist smiled. She wanted to hit him, to wipe the grimy smile off his face.
“For your mother?” The irony in his voice was not concealed.
“No,” she said.
“For whom?”
She didn’t answer.
The druggist came out from behind the counter. She saw now that he was a short little man barely as tall as she herself was, a thin man with stooped shoulders. She guessed that he was about forty-five years old.
“Those tests are kind of expensive,” the druggist said. “Run you close to five bucks!”
“I can afford it.”
“Might not have to,” he said. “I might be willing to give you the test free if you want.”
His eyes eliminated any possible doubt as to what he was talking about.
He continued to ogle her and she continued to get quietly sick to her stomach. Was that what she was—a roundheeled tramp who would sell herself to save paying for a pregnancy test? Could the little weasel actually believe she would take him seriously?
“Just sell me the test,” she snapped.
“No reason for you to be spending all that money!”
He reached out a hand and she watched, paralyzed and unable to move. His hand slipped inside her jacket and fastened on one of her breasts.
The hand tightened.
She kicked up, suddenly, automatically. She caught the druggist right where she wanted to catch him, right where it would hurt the most. An agonized moan sprang from his lips and he sank to his knees, holding himself where she had kicked him as if the touch of his hands would alleviate the terrible pain.
He was trying to say something but she didn’t stay around to hear it. She turned and ran from the store, continuing blindly down the street on the run. After a few blocks she found another drugstore where the proprietor didn’t leer at her and she bought the test.
The directions were simple enough. Instead of going to a gas station she took an inexpensive room at a second-rate hotel where she would be sure of complete privacy and ample time.
Before she took the test she stretched out on the sagging bed and closed her eyes. The test had to turn out negative, she told herself. She couldn’t be pregnant—why, she wouldn’t even be able to tell who the father was! It could be anyone of a dozen or two dozen boys.
She got up finally and took the test.
It was positive.
She was pregnant.
Naturally she didn’t believe the test. She left the hotel and looked through the yellow pages of the Springfield phone book for a local doctor. She found one who was open and went to him for an examination.
The examination left no trace of doubt in her mind. The test might have been wrong but the doctor was certain.
She was pregnant.
By the time she reached the Clifton campus she wasn’t sure how she had managed to get back. She couldn’t remember anything that happened after she had left the doctor’s office. She was in a daze all that time, walking without knowing where she was going, winding up at last at the bus station and getting on the bus for Clifton. She couldn’t even remember the bus ride, couldn’t remember getting off in Clifton and walking back to her dorm again. It was as if she had suddenly been transported from the doctor’s office to her own room, as if she had teleported from place to place like a character in a science fiction story.
She was back in her room again, back in her room and quietly pregnant. The doctor had told her that she was almost two months pregnant, that the baby would be around in less than eight months. She got undressed now and stood in front of her mirror, wondering how long it would be before the new life that was growing in her womb began to show. Not too long, she decided. Not too long and her stomach would swell up and stick out, and anybody who saw her walking along the street would know what she had done and what had happened to her.
What would she do? Where would she go? She couldn’t go home to Cleveland even if she wanted to, not the way she was now. And she remembered the verse to
Careless Love
:
What oh what will mother say,
What oh what will mother say
What oh what will mother say
When I come home in the family way …
Mother, she thought solemnly, would not be likely to approve. Any school that she might want to transfer to would be even less likely to cast an approving eye on her swollen stomach, for that matter. She found herself wondering insanely if any of the college catalogues had special information on the qualifications necessary for unmarried and pregnant applicants for admission. Probably not, she decided.
What could she do?
Two months ago she might have committed suicide and would at least have given the idea serious consideration. Now she rejected it the instant it occurred to her. Suicide wasn’t the answer, not now, not when she was just starting to learn how to live life. Now there were too many things she was enjoying and too many things she wanted to do. She wanted to live, not to die.
Pregnant.
Well, she thought, this was one worry Ruth would never have. When two girls made love neither of them got pregnant. She prodded her stomach with her fingers, wanting to rip the fetus out of her womb and strangle it with her bare hands, and she almost envied Ruth at that moment.
What could she do?
Well, she could have the child—that was one answer. She could go off to some city where no one knew her and get a job doing something or other. God alone knew what kind of job she could get, but one way or another she would be able to get by. Nobody starved in the United States any more, and she could work up until the fifth or sixth month, maybe longer if she got the right kind of loose clothing to hide her condition from the world.
And then she would have the baby and go right back to work again. It wouldn’t be much of a life, taking care of a kid and working, but lots of other girls managed to stay alive that way.
For that matter, she thought, she could give the baby away. She could have it and then give it to a couple who could provide a better home for it than she could. But after she carried the baby for nine months she might not want to give it up. Then where would she be?
Up the creek
, she answered herself.
Up the creek in a lead canoe.
Without a paddle.
When the answer came it seemed too easy. She forced herself to do nothing at first and went back to studying for the English exam. But the page did somersaults in front of her eyes and she couldn’t get any more studying done for the time being.
She left the dorm. At the cafeteria she had a tasteless dinner that she could only eat half of. Then she walked out of the caf and circled around the campus for around fifteen minutes.
Until she ran into Joe.
They met and they began talking. It was always easy for her to relax in a conversation with Joe and this was no exception. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular and she told him that she wasn’t either, so they wound up sitting on a bench in the middle of the campus, sitting side by side and talking easily.