Free Nora Jane by Ellen Gilchrist

package of Nacho Cheese Flavored Doritos and drinking a Coke. He held up a Dorito to Nora Jane. He waved it out the
     window in the air. The Mazda moved on. A metallic green Buick took its place. In the front seat was a young Chinese businessman
     wearing a suit. In the backseat, a Chinese gentleman wearing a pigtail.
    A plane flew over, trailing a banner. HAPPY 40th, ED AND DEB, the banner said. Things were happening too fast. “I just saw
     an airplane fly by trailing bread crumbs,” she said.
    “What did you say?” he said. “What did you just say?”
    “I said …oh, never mind. I was thinking too many things at once. I’m going over there, Freddy, in the lane by the water.”
     She put the turn signal on and moved over into the right-hand lane. “Now don’t talk to me anymore,” she said, squeezing the
     steering wheel, leaning into it, trying to concentrate on the girders and forget the water. “Don’t say any more until I get
     this car across this bridge.”

THE DOUBLE HAPPINESS BUN
    N ORA JANE WHITTINGTON was going to have a baby. There was no getting around that. First Freddy Harwood talked her into taking out her Lippes Loop.
     “I don’t like the idea of a piece of copper stuck up your vagina,” he said. “I think you ought to get it out.”
    “It’s not in my vagina. It’s in my womb. And it’s real small. I saw it before they put it in.”
    “How small?” he said. “Let me see.” Nora Jane held up a thumb and forefinger and made a circle. “Like this,” she said. ’About
     like this.”
    “Hmmmmmmmm.” he said, and let it go at that. But the idea was planted. She kept thinking about the little piece of copper.
     How it resembled a mosquito coil. Like shrapnel, she thought. Like having some kind of weapon in me. Nora Jane had a very
     good imagination for things like that. Finally imagination won out over science and she called the obstetrician and made an
     appointment. There was really not much to it. She lay down on the table and squeezed her eyes shut and the doctor reached
     up inside her with a small cold instrument and the Lippes Loop came sliding out.
    “Now what will you do?” the doctor said. “Would you like me to start you on the pill?”
    “Not yet,” she said. “Let me think it over for a while.”
    “Don’t wait too long,” he said. “You’re a healthy girl. It can happen very quickly.”
    “All right,” she said. “I won’t.” She gathered up her things and drove on over to Freddy’s house to cook things in his gorgeous
     redwood kitchen.
    “Now what will we do?” she said. “You think I ought to take the pill? Or what?” It was much later that evening. Nora Jane
     was sitting on the edge of the hot tub looking up at the banks of clouds passing before the moon. It was one of those paradisial
     San Francisco nights, flowers and pine trees, eucalyptus and white wine and Danish bread and brie.
    Nora Jane’s legs were in the hot tub. Her back was to the breeze coming from the bay. She was wearing a red playsuit with
     a red and yellow scarf tied around her forehead like a flag. Freddy Harwood thought she was the most desirable thing he had
     ever seen in his whole life.
    “We’ll think of something,” he said. He took off his Camp Pericles senior counselor camp shorts and lowered himself into the
     water. He was thirty-five years old and every summer he still packed his foot locker full of tee-shirts and flashlight batteries
     and went off to the Adirondacks to be a counselor in his old camp. That’s how crazy he was. The rest of the year he ran a
     bookstore in Berkeley.
    “What do you think we’ll think of?” she said, joining him in the water, sinking down until the ends of the scarf floated in
     the artificial waves. What they thought of lasted half the night and moved from the hot tub to the den floor to the bedroom.
     Freddy Harwood thought it was the most meaningful evening he had spent since the night he lost his cherry to his