Girl One(16)

“Let me see. She mentioned going to see … oh, you know. The famous ones. I don’t know if she ever made it.”



* * *



Back in the sun-warmed Chevy, I opened my mother’s notebook and flipped, with shaking fingers, to the list of Mothers and Girls. Deb and Bonnie Clarkson, Mother and Girl Seven, were the only ones who fit the glossy term famous. Like sunflowers, the Clarksons always turned in the direction of the nearest flashbulb. I sometimes spotted them on afternoon TV with their identical teased bangs, feverish streaks of blush.

It felt like I’d been gone from Chicago for weeks already but it had barely been twenty-four hours. I had time left on the clock. Minnesota was a day of driving. It didn’t sound unappealing. I wanted to keep moving. I wanted to go somewhere, talk to somebody else. I couldn’t return to Chicago and pretend nothing was wrong. I had questions for my mother: I wanted answers. There was a tilted symmetry to it. Maybe my curiosity could bring us back together, since it was responsible for pushing us apart.

I yanked the key in the ignition, waiting impatiently for the Chevy to struggle back to life. Him. That kept rolling around at the back of my head. This male pronoun that was supposed to help me track down my mother. The one who looks out for you. Only one man had ever looked out for me, and he’d been dead for years.

It wasn’t as if I had an overabundance of hims in my life right now, or ever. Growing up with the word virgin attached to me, I’d had an even rockier relationship with my hymen than most girls. I’d had sex for the first time at sixteen, a purposefully average age, selecting a boy from my class who was just unpopular enough not to brag. I’d only wanted to see how it would work. Was my vagina even functional, or was it really glued shut or lined with tiny razor-sharp fangs? My first time having sex turned out to be underwhelming, more a process of discovering that I could, in fact, have sex. Propped awkwardly on top of me, the boy had pulled back: “Do I even need to use—anything? You can’t get pregnant that way, right?” A fierce blush on the word pregnant.

The truth was, I hadn’t known. I still didn’t. I knew I got a period roughly every four weeks, and since I’d moved away from home, I’d started testing myself for luteinizing hormone levels to catch ovulation. The joint privilege and annoyance of being the oldest Girl was that I didn’t have anybody else like me to look up to. No other bodies to use as a guideline. Bellanger hadn’t even lived to see me reach adolescence.

Since that routine deflowering, I’d had only short-lived relationships. Most men were less interested in me than in the story of me. The bragging rights involved in screwing the Amazing Unscrewable Girl. In eighth grade, a sweaty-faced man once cornered me in a dark parking lot, whispering that he was my real father while staring at my breasts under my Tears for Fears T-shirt. There were men out there who ranked the mothers of the Homestead from the ones they’d most like to fuck to the ones they’d least like to fuck. The daughters too, even before we’d reached puberty. It all made for a shallow dating pool.

The closest thing I’d come to a romantic prospect lately was Dr. McCarter. He was nearly twenty years my senior, but I responded to his keen intelligence, the way he could look at a woman and know the exact pattern of her internal organs, understand her abilities. At least I wasn’t a surprise to him.

The Chevy finally sputtered to life, the lights on the dashboard muted and dim, and I took off into the late-afternoon light, Madonna on the radio, whispering seductively about sex and apologies and human nature.





7

Time magazine—May 13, 1973

In Praise of Patience

On Mother’s Day, a day set aside to celebrate the too-often-unsung champions of home and hearth, it’s difficult not to think about the woman who currently defines “motherhood” in an entirely new way. Dr. Joseph Bellanger took time out of his busy schedule to grant this exclusive interview, along with Margaret Morrow, the first woman to give birth at the Homestead.

Time: On this Mother’s Day, Margaret, will you be sending your own mother any bouquets or cards? Will she get to meet her granddaughter?

Margaret: I’m not really in touch with my folks. The Homestead is my family now. Sometimes life doesn’t give you the family you want and you have to make your own.

T: What was it that drew you to working with Dr. Bellanger, Margaret? Not many young ladies would agree to be part of such an unusual project.

Bellanger: Margaret was always wonderfully open to my ideas. All the young ladies have been such receptive listeners, and so patient with an old man like me. I’m quite grateful to them.

T: But surely you realized, Margaret, when you agreed to this project, that you might be shutting off other avenues in your life. You’re only twenty-five. You still have time to meet someone and perhaps start a family with him. Do you worry that your unconventional daughter will prevent you from marrying?

B: You haven’t given that much thought, have you, Margaret? Josephine is your whole world. Anyone can see that much.

T: But Margaret—if I may—do you think Josephine will one day want a father in her life? Do you worry about explaining where she came from, when she’s older?

M: I would say that her fatherlessness is the most remarkable thing about her. It’s what makes her special. Why would she resent the very thing that—

B: But then I certainly—I wouldn’t say Josephine is without a father. On a practical level, I love that little girl as much as I love my own boys. Every milestone she reaches is a fresh delight to me. Not merely because I’m watching my creation take shape—monitoring her health, her development—but simply because Josephine is a wonderful child.