Free The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler Page A

saw her face that she knew. She motioned for me and I got my books. We walked down the hall and she said, “I need you to come with me.” In the car she turned to me and said, “Are you really four months pregnant?” I was, like, “Me? Pregnant? Of course not. What are you talking about?” My sister had heard a rumor and told her. She reached over and sort of pulled my shirt up ever so slightly and touched my stomach and said, “Are you?” I said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
    She starts driving and we wind up in the parking lot of our church. My father’s car is parked there at three-thirty in the afternoon, next to the minister’s car. This is a party I don’t want to be going to. The Reverend and my father were sitting in his living room. I had never been in the Reverend’s home before. My mother sat down and my father said, “Okay, what’s going on?” I said, “Beats me. I have no idea what you people are up to.” He dismissed that. He talked right over that and said, “We’ve got a problem here. We’re going to get this taken care of. We have to figure out what to do with the baby.” That was the first time I had ever heard that phrase, “the baby,” and it was almost like a safety net for me. It wasn’t
my
baby, it was
the
baby. I could separate myself from this problem and I knew I wasn’t going to have to make any decisions about it, because it wasn’t
mine.
    I continued to deny it up and down: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s no baby.” My mother finally said, “Okay, if it’s not true, would you at least do us a favor and go to the doctor’s tonight, just to get it confirmed?” I said, “Sure, there’s nothing to confirm.” My father, my mother, and I drive to the doctor’s. He meets us there at eight at night. It’s this big, huge Victorian home that I’m terrified to be in. I had never met this guy in my life, never had any kind of exam at all, except for a dentist appointment.
    He takes me to the examining room, has me take off all of my clothes and put on a johnny. He does an internal exam and then he says, “Okay, you can put your clothes on.” I considered leaving through the back door, in the middle of the winter, to go to another planet. All I knew is I did not want to go back out into that room where my parents are waiting. We went home and there were some tears and I remember my mother saying those classic words “Why?” and “How could you?” until finally, out of emotional exhaustion, we all went to bed.
    Arrangements were made for me to be sent to this home. It was presented as an option at the time: “It would be more comfortable for you. If you’d like to do that, we’ll help you.” The night before I was scheduled to leave, my mother was starting to feel the effects of the impending separation and I had the very first, possibly the only, honest conversation I’d ever had with her. I felt safe enough, as we do when we’re feeling close, to ask her this question: “How do they get rid of the mark when they take the baby out?” I’d seen people in bathing suits and I could never tell if they’d had children. She stood there, three feet from me, with a look of horror on her face and said, “My God, Nancy, that baby comes out the same way it went in.” I said, “You have got to be kidding me.” She said, “No.”
    I mean, it’s borderline child abuse not to share this kind of information. How can anyone think that we will just absorb it naturally, or that it’s our responsibility as children to figure it out? It just mystifies me. I had no idea. I mean, we had never had pets. I didn’t live on a farm. We had a very puritanical, Beaver Cleaver lifestyle, and it just wasn’t anything that was ever discussed. I mean, as amazing as it sounds, I was sixteen and pregnant and I did not know how babies were born. It’s pathetic, but it’s true.
    At the maternity home there was a roster on a bulletin board,