house. The quiet around me rang with the earlier silence and the looks, the question of, Who did this to you? I heard my cousin John tell Dina that he’d heard I got around. Meggy murmured that this family became less with every generation. Pat pretended he hadn’t heard anything; he just kissed Gram on the cheek and walked out of the house. Mary was praying silently on one side of the room while Ryan prayed loudly on the other. Gram appeared confused by the tumult, and then increasingly unhappy and tired as she measured everyone else’s reactions against her own. Mom and Dad looked sick to their stomachs, their mouths loose as they tried to figure out what to say.
All I’d wanted was to feel a man’s hands on me. I wanted lips on mine and skin that I could reach and follow and own. I wanted that kind of oblivion, the delicious kind, the powerful kind. I wanted it so badly my entire body ached. But the general announcement of my condition seemed to make that impossible. For the first time, it occurred to me that I might be physically undesirable. I had never considered the idea that being pregnant might affect my sex life. But what would a man think when a woman who had even the faintest mound to her belly came on to him? He would wonder if I was looking for a husband and father, not a lover. My body would suggest more than I wanted it to. There would be questions, concerns, emotions—nothing I had ever asked for when I stepped up to the bar and checked out the room.
I didn’t go to the Green Trolley Easter night, and I haven’t gone there since. I haven’t had sex, or anything even approaching sex, in over two months. That is the longest I have been celibate since I was sixteen years old. I don’t know what this dearth is doing to me. I feel like my only option is to wait and see. Wait and see what happens, wait and see how it all turns out. I am waiting, specifically, for someone to tell me what to do. I am hoping someone will say, This is how you will make everything right.
I have been keeping quiet and staying in the house. I have given myself over to the ebb and flow of everyone else’s reaction to my situation. That is how I tell time now. I have lost track of hours, mealtimes, and days of the week. I am listening too hard, waiting too intently, to pay attention to those kinds of logistics. Instead, several soft, quiet days will blur together into one, into waking and eating and going through letters looking for people who are worse off than me.
I had one phone conversation with my mother about my situation, and since then she has left a few breezy “I’m on my way out the door, just checking in to make sure you’re okay” messages on the answering machine when she guessed or hoped I wouldn’t be home.
The one real conversation we had was very short, and as with all of my worst conversations with my mother, it twisted and poked and yanked at every nerve in my body.
She called me clearly in tears. There was a big, watery gulp before there were any words, and then she said, “Do you think this is my fault, Gracie? Is it something I did or didn’t do?”
“No, Mom. This has nothing to do with you.”
“Of course it does, don’t say that. I didn’t even know you were involved with that young man . . . Joel. Can I ask—”
“We’re not together anymore, Mom. He won’t be involved.”
There is a note of panic in my mother’s voice that makes me wonder if she has been drinking. “Oh Gracie, why didn’t you tell me? I could have helped you.”
I am almost certain my mother thinks I should have had an abortion. Quietly, without bothering anyone. She prides herself on being a modern woman, with all of its complications and sacrifices. But she is not modern enough to embrace my single, pregnant status. She doesn’t know how to present this to her women’s group. This kind of event would never take place in the wonderful mother-daughter relationship she conducts in her head. At the moment she doesn’t even recognize me as her daughter.
I do feel badly. I have busted up the game my family has been playing since Lila