Page 5

Chapter 5

Someone was ringing a bell and Fern couldn’t open her eyes, but she knew the house was collapsing around her. The walls were falling down and the roof was blowing away and the bell kept ringing. She struggled up through layers of sleep and finally opened her eyes. It was daylight. She was still in the Home. She really needed to pee. Again.

Out in the hall, someone kept clanging a bell.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Rose said from her bed. “We hear you, Ethel.”

The bell stopped. Fern stared at the ceiling, heart pounding. Rose stood and stretched, shucking off her shirt.

Fern caught a flash of her tight, rounded belly bisected by a dark brown line, her breasts pointing down to either side, before she looked away.

“Wake up, Holly,” Rose said, chucking a pillow at the tiny blond mouse.

Holly wriggled deeper into her covers.

Fern got up, found her housecoat, and trundled to the bathroom. She was so bored of having to pee all the time.

Inside, it was an explosion of girls wrapped in towels and shower caps, brushing their hair, unwrapping their hairdos, getting out of the shower, waiting for the shower, taking out their curlers, spraying their hair, spraying deodorant, curling their eyelashes, brushing their teeth. Briony knelt on the floor shaving another girl’s ( Tansy’s? ) legs since her stomach was too big to bend over. Laurel sprayed a blast of Vespré up between her legs.

None of the girls wore housecoats. None of them wore girdles. All of them were talking to Hazel.

“My mom says it’ll hurt like the worst pain you can possibly imagine,” Flora said.

“I bet it feels like getting shot,” Daisy added.

“Can it!” Hazel snapped. “It’s bad enough without your juvenile speculation!”

“You’re too much, man,” Jasmine said.

“Yeah,” Flora said. “We’re just trying to, like, help.”

Sitting in her stall, Fern tried to think of the worst pain she could possibly imagine. Probably when her dad bit off the tip of his tongue. Her mom had to throw out his shirt because it was nothing but blood down the front and it swole up so big he couldn’t talk for a week. Fern figured childbirth would hurt at least that bad. Maybe worse?

The same bell started clanging again and they all marched downstairs and lined up. Breakfast was corn flakes, a hard-boiled egg, and a bowl of stewed prunes. Fern was starving but after half an egg and a few spoonfuls of corn flakes her stomach felt packed.

“You’re lucky,” Hazel said from beside her. “I’ve got Prunella.”

Fern looked at the glass of thick lavender sludge on Hazel’s place mat.

“Dr. Vincent says you can’t eat solid food before going downtown,” Hazel explained.

Before Fern could ask what was downtown, Mrs. Deckle came into the dining room.

“Finish your breakfast and get your bag,” she told Hazel. “Miss Wellwood is waiting to drive you to the hospital.”

As Hazel gulped her Prunella, Fern noticed a little paper cup full of pills sitting beside her plate: white ones, red ones, tan ones.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Deckle?” she asked. “Am I supposed to take these pills?”

“Are they at your plate?” Mrs. Deckle asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Fern said.

“Then you’re supposed to take them,” Mrs. Deckle said.

“But what are they?” Fern asked.

But Mrs. Deckle was already walking out of the room.

“They’re your pills,” Daisy said. “You have to take them.”

Fern swallowed her pills one by one, but she really wished someone would tell her what they were. Hazel put down her empty glass.

“Well,” she said, pushing back her chair. “Here goes nothing.”

Fern’s chest went hollow. Hazel was the only girl here she actually knew. Girls called goodbye as she left the room.

“Will we see her again?” Fern asked.

But everyone was already getting up from the table. Some of the girls went upstairs, some went to the classroom, some went out back to smoke. Fern didn’t know where to go. She decided to go to her room and take off her girdle. There didn’t seem to be any point in wearing it here.

“There you are,” someone said as she started up the pink stairs. Nurse Kent stood at the end of the hall. “Fern, right? I’ve been looking all over for you. Come on. You’re late for clinic.”

At least someone was telling her what to do. She followed Nurse Kent through the kitchen, where Hagar stood over an aluminum pot while Iris washed a colander full of greens and Jasmine peeled potatoes into the trash. She and Nurse Kent went out the screen door.

The air felt clean and steamy as the sun cooked the dew off the grass. The backyard was all weeds and cockleburs, but it felt cooler than inside the Home. Nurse Kent led her down a concrete path toward a low stucco bungalow standing against the wall of pines surrounding the yard.

“We haven’t been properly introduced,” the nurse said. “Nurse Kent.”

“I’m Fern,” Fern said, and that didn’t sound like much, so she added, “From Baltimore.”

“Well, Fern from Baltimore,” Nurse Kent said, opening the bungalow door. “Welcome to the clinic.”

Inside it was bright and air-conditioned, but not arctic like Miss Wellwood’s office. The reception area was pale pink and had an eye chart on the wall beside posters of the human body. Fern couldn’t get over how everything in the Home was pink. Across from a closed wooden door, a pink-painted hall ran down to the far end of the bungalow, lined with pink doors.

“Take off your shoes and step up on the scale,” Nurse Kent said.

“Hazel’s going to have her baby today?” Fern asked as the nurse weighed her and took her height.

“She’ll go downtown to Flagler Hospital and have it there,” Nurse Kent said. “Take a seat.”

“It hurts a lot, doesn’t it?” Fern asked. “Like the worst pain you can possibly imagine?”

“You’ve been listening to old wives’ tales,” Nurse Kent said, strapping a blood pressure cuff around Fern’s arm. “Pain in childbirth is out these days. Modern medicine makes it so you don’t feel a thing.”

“But isn’t it supposed to hurt?” Fern asked. “Like a punishment?”

Nurse Kent’s eyes flicked up from the blood pressure cuff.

“That’s old-time superstition,” she said. “Now, did you already go to the bathroom this morning?”

It wouldn’t hurt? An actual nurse had told her she wouldn’t feel a thing? Fern felt a faint flicker of hope.

Nurse Kent asked Fern her age and if she had any illness in her family, and if she’d had any operations. She pricked her finger and wiped her blood on a strip of paper. She made her pee in a glass jar. When Fern came out of the bathroom and put the warm jar on her desk, Nurse Kent immediately stood up and said, “Let’s go see the doctor,” and Fern wasn’t ready. It felt too sudden. She didn’t want to see a doctor again.

The nurse opened the wooden door on the other side of the reception area and pushed Fern inside. An enormous leather chair sat behind an enormous wooden desk, and perched on the chair sat Dr. Vincent in his white doctor’s coat, reading the newspaper with a magnifying glass.

“So,” he said, without looking up, drawing the word out for almost thirty seconds. “Which one is this?”

“This is Fern,” Nurse Kent said.

“Have a seat, Fern,” Dr. Vincent said, moving his magnifying glass to another article.

Nurse Kent patted the back of a hard wooden interview chair and Fern sat down. Then she put Fern’s file on Dr. Vincent’s desk and closed the door on her way out. Dr. Vincent put down his magnifying glass and picked up her file. He plucked a pen from a breast pocket sagging with them.

“How have you been eating?” he asked. “Are you getting enough sleep? Lack of appetite? Blurred vision? Do you wear corrective lenses? Any headaches?”

He didn’t look up once and she delivered her answers to the top of his bald head.

“Any constipation?” he asked. “Nausea or vomiting? Painful urination?”

Fern studied the framed diplomas behind him while she answered.

“Is the baby active?” he asked.

Yes, and every time it moves I have to pee , she wanted to say. Instead, she replied, “Yes, sir.”

He scribbled something in her file with a flourish, capped his pen, and looked up at Fern for the first time.

“I think it’s safe for us to assume that you are a primpara?” He smiled.

Something else Fern didn’t know. Would she ever stop feeling stupid?

“Sir?”

“It means this is your first pregnancy,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“And when did your last menstrual cycle begin?” Dr. Vincent asked.

At least Fern had gotten something out of her humiliating visit to Dr. Rector.

“I’m due on August fourteenth,” she said.

Dr. Vincent stopped smiling.

“Pardon?” he asked.

“My doctor,” Fern said, stumbling a bit. “He told me I’m due on August fourteenth?”

Dr. Vincent’s eyes went wide.

“Did he, now? Well, far be it from me to question the wisdom of a fellow doctor but I’ll practice my own medicine, if that’s all right with you. Now, when did your last menstrual cycle begin?”

“November,” Fern said, swallowing hard. “The sixth.”

“November the sixth,” he said. “In the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and sixty-nine.”

He leaned forward and flipped through his desk calendar, licking his fingers with each turn.

“You’re due on August fourteenth.” He smiled. “A Friday. Well, isn’t that fine?”

Dr. Vincent sprang to his feet and came around the desk. He seized her right hand and pressed down hard on the back of each finger. He reached for her face and pulled down the skin under her eyes with his thumb, moving her head left and right by her chin. Fern snuffled back snot.

“No edema,” he said. “That’s good. And with three months to go and, oh, I’d say five pounds left, we’re going to have to do a little caloric restriction, nothing drastic. Let’s have you hop up on the table.”

Behind her stood a wooden examining table that looked like an antique. It had a burgundy leather top and fancy brass handles on the drawers. Fern had been trying not to look at it.

“I’ve got four other girls to see this morning,” Dr. Vincent said. “Chop-chop, darling.”

Her knees felt weak as she pushed herself up. She made herself walk to the table and climb on top and sit, feet dangling. Dr. Vincent approached, shaking Sen-Sen from a little paper box and laying their black grains on his tongue. He pressed his stethoscope against her back.

“Breathe in,” he said, and his breath smelled like licorice. “And out. And again. Now lie back and raise your dress to your chest.”

Her joints locked. She’d never exposed herself to a man before except Dr. Rector

(and Guy)

and she didn’t want this old man to see her swollen belly with its blue veins. She knew it was the price she had to pay to get out of there, but she couldn’t make herself do it.

“My doctor at home examined me,” Fern said. “He said I was fine.”

Dr. Vincent smiled like it was the most amusing thing he’d ever heard.

“As talented as I’m sure your pediatrician is,” he said, “this is a job for an actual doctor. We’re concerned with the health of your baby, darling, not your blushing modesty.”

Before she could figure out a way to stop him, Dr. Vincent pulled her dress up and pushed her down flat. Her belly settled onto her kidneys and immediately Fern had to pee again. Where had that come from? She’d just peed five minutes ago.

Dr. Vincent laid his hands on her enormous, swollen belly and she jumped. They were freezing cold. He squeezed her stomach with both hands, kneading way too hard. She clenched in her pee as he pulled something over his head, and suddenly he was wearing the stupidest party hat Fern had ever seen. A long, delicate antenna with a trumpet on the end stuck out from his forehead like a unicorn horn, and two rubber tubes tucked into his ears. He leaned over her belly, his licorice breath tickling her face as he pressed the cold circle of the trumpet against it hard, grinning, eyes closed, listening.

“There it is!” he shouted, straightening. “The miracle of life! Go behind the screen. Remove your clothes.”

Fern wasn’t stupid. She knew you eventually had to take off your clothes in front of the doctor, but not this one. Not now.

“Sir?” she asked. “Please?”

“Remove your clothes,” he said, walking back to his desk, taking off the horn hat. He shook out more Sen-Sen. “Brassiere and panties, too.”

There was a white screen behind the table, and Fern knew she had to walk behind it and undress. She forced herself to cross the office. For months she had hidden herself beneath layers of clothes, and now she had to stand naked and pregnant in front of a stranger.

She stood behind the screen. Her hands unzipped her dress. They were shaking so hard it took her two tries. From the other side of the screen, Dr. Vincent hummed a jaunty little tune. Fern stepped out of her dress. She unhooked her bra and rolled down her rubber girdle. She stood on the cold floor in her bare feet, protecting her body with her hands.

“Darling,” Dr. Vincent said. “If you don’t put on the examination gown and get out here posthaste I’m going to come back there and do it for you.”

A piece of white fabric hung on a hook. Fern dragged the smock on and tied it in back. At least it was something. She came out from behind the screen.

“Up on the table, head at the other end,” Dr. Vincent said.

As she climbed onto the table, trying to keep the smock over her bottom, Dr. Vincent inserted two twists of metal into sockets on the other end with loud bangs.

“Lie down and place your feet in the stirrups,” he said. “Right on those pedals there.”

Fern wasn’t sure how he meant, and she hesitated. Dr. Vincent grabbed her ankles and dragged them into the stirrups.

“Don’t make such a fuss,” he said. “Relax, darling. Relax!”

Instinctively, Fern tried to squeeze her legs together. Dr. Vincent forced them apart.

“If you’d kept them closed then,” he said, “you wouldn’t have to open them wide now.”

He buckled straps around her ankles to hold them in place. In the pit of her stomach, Fern knew what was about to happen, and her heart kicked against her ribs. Dr. Vincent stood between her legs, slathering his fingers with lubricant. The baby fluttered inside Fern, feeling like panic. She didn’t want this. She wanted to get away. Then she heard her mom’s voice.

Happiness isn’t about doing what you like, but learning to like what you have to do.

Fern took a deep breath. She stared at the ceiling. She tried to lie still no matter how much it pinched. She told herself she could endure anything that got her one step closer to going home.

***

Fern stared up the Pepto-Bismol waterfall, preparing to walk up those endless stairs. She felt greasy between her thighs. She needed to take a shower. She needed to be alone.

“There you are,” a woman said. “Fern, right? I’m Miss Keller. We’ve got an appointment.”

Fern couldn’t handle this. She didn’t want more people poking at her and making her feel stupid. The woman came around and stood in front of Fern. She looked glamorous, like Peggy Lipton in The Mod Squad . She held out her hand.

“Miss Keller.” She smiled. “Everyone calls me Diane.”

Fern reached out to shake her hand, but she was still holding her girdle. They both looked down at it.

“I don’t need one, thanks,” Everyone-Calls-Me-Diane said, and her smile glowed. “Come on in to my cave.”

She walked around the side of the stairs and Fern followed, because she knew she had no choice. Behind the stairs was one door that led outside and another that led under the stairs, with two worn Peanuts cartoons taped to it. One of them showed Snoopy doing his happy dance. Fern didn’t have time to read the other because Diane was opening the door and ducking inside.

Fern followed and found herself in a tiny room filled with files. Boxes of files leaned against every wall, with more files piled on top. There were stacks of files. Towers of files. There were so many files there was barely room for a desk.

“Pull up a rock,” Diane said, moving some files out of her chair so she could sit. She leaned back and banged her head on the wall behind her. “Ow. Every time I start to get a big ego this office brings me down to earth. I’m the social worker, in case no one remembered to tell you.”

Diane waited for Fern to say something, but Fern just sat there in her greasy underpants.

“There’s no need to be frightened,” Diane said. “A lot of people have funny ideas about what a social worker does, but I’m only here to help you decide what’s best for you.”

Fern didn’t know what this woman wanted her to say.

“You look like an interesting girl,” Diane said. “I’d like to get to know you if I can.”

She settled her prim face into a patient waiting expression. Fern stared at a box of files in the corner. She snuck a look at Diane’s face and it was full of pity. Fern felt tears prick the corners of her eyes. One slipped down her face, leaving a hot trail behind.

“Poor kid,” Diane said. “Some guy really did a number on you, didn’t he?”

Fern didn’t know what she was talking about, and she didn’t care. All of a sudden, there was only one thing she needed to know.

“Do I have to go back to that doctor every week?” she asked.

Diane’s mouth made an O.

“Oh my gosh,” she said. “You saw Dr. Vincent? Right before?”

Fern didn’t trust herself to speak, so she nodded. Diane slapped herself in the forehead.

“I’m a dunce,” she said. “You’ve never had an internal exam before?”

Fern didn’t know how Diane knew, but that made it even worse. She shook her head.

“I’m so sorry,” Diane said. “That’s a heavy scene.”

Fern noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, and she wasn’t pregnant, so what did she know about heavy scenes?

“You won’t have to do one again,” Diane said. “Not unless there’s something seriously wrong with the baby. And you look healthy enough to me.”

She smiled. It was too goofy for a face that pretty.

“Trust me,” Diane said. “I’ve heard it from every girl in this house. They call him Polar Bear Paws.”

A smile twitched Fern’s lips.

“But look,” Diane said, leaning forward, switching on her professional face. “He didn’t do it to hurt you. He did it to make sure the baby’s healthy. And just like he’s worried about your physical health, I’m worried about the health of your emotions. If you ever need to rap, you can find me in this office and you can say anything to me. You’ve been given a great gift, Fern. One not a lot of people get.”

That took her by surprise.

“A gift?” she asked.

“On the level,” Diane said. “Most of us, the decisions we make today shape our tomorrows. If I decide to cut off my hair, or vote for Cramer, or eat an entire chocolate cake, I have to live with the consequences. But your gift is that you have a chance to start over. It’s like life is a notebook, and the page you’re on is full of mistakes and places where you’ve erased too much, and maybe you’ve written some boy’s initials in the margins over and over, but now you have a chance to turn to a fresh page and start over.”

Fern wanted that. She wanted that so bad.

“How?” she asked.

“There are couples out there,” Diane said. “Professional couples, loving couples, couples who can’t have children. And you can change their lives, Fern. Legal words aren’t very pretty, but do you know what lawyers call it? Surrender. Isn’t that beautiful? Surrender. You stop struggling, you stop fighting, and just surrender. Doesn’t that send you?”

“Yes,” Fern whispered.

“And after you surrender,” Diane said, “you go home. And you never have to think about this place again. It’ll be like it never happened.”

Fern wanted that. Fern wanted that so badly.

“I want to surrender,” she breathed.

Diane opened a folder and handed her some papers stapled together.

“You’re making the right decision,” she said, turning to the last one. She laid a pen on the desk beside Fern. “You’re a girl in a bad situation, but surrender means you can move on with your life. You won’t even have to see the baby. When you go to the hospital you’ll go to sleep and the doctor will give the baby to the adoptive family before you wake up, and you’ll come back and rest in the clinic a few days, then go back to your old life, and no one will ever even know you were here.”

Fern picked up the pen, then hesitated when she saw that her dad had already signed.

“You’ll meet the right guy one day,” Diane said. “You’ll get married. You’ll have other children. You’ll forget all about this.”

Fern wanted to surrender, but there was something about committing it to paper that stopped her. How could she put it down in black and white? A mother was supposed to love her baby, but this paper would record forever that she was an unnatural mother. It felt too big; the consequences reached too far into the future. She couldn’t wrap her head around it.

“Spill, Fern,” Diane said. “What’s eating you?”

No, Fern thought. She wasn’t a mother. She was just a girl in a bad situation. That’s all.

She signed.

Right next to her dad’s signature, she wrote what Diane told her to write. Right there on the blank line, in perfect cursive, she wrote, “Jane Doe.”