The House of Eve (35)
Through sheer luck, Eleanor was given an appointment for the following day. She had to cut two classes to make it, and then ride the bus over to the northeast side of town. The tires seemed to hit every pothole, jostling her around in her seat until she felt sick. Motion sickness, she reasoned. But it also felt like something was taking hold of her body.
The appointment happened without much fanfare. Eleanor was instructed to give a urine sample and to write her name and date of birth on the plastic cup. The pale-faced nurse, who wore a baggy white uniform, instructed Eleanor to call the office on the sixteenth of May.
“That’s two weeks. Why does it take so long?” Eleanor asked, panicked. For some reason, she had thought she would know the results immediately. There was no way she’d make it two weeks without worrying herself into an early grave.
The nurse touched her white cap. “Have you heard of the Hogben test?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Seems they should explain these things in school.” She scribbled something on her clipboard. “We have to ship your urine sample to a frog lab in Virginia. There they’ll inject a female frog. If in the morning the frog has ovulated, that will mean you are pregnant.”
It didn’t sound like an accurate test.
“I assure you. It’s never been wrong in all my years as a nurse. And I’m ancient,” she said with a wink, and then handed Eleanor a yellow slip of paper.
In the two weeks that she waited, Eleanor tried not to fret about the results, instead throwing herself into preparing for her final exams. But on Nadine’s advice, she didn’t breathe a word of the test to William.
“Men only need to know what they need to know,” she told Eleanor, and then, in typical Nadine fashion, she assured her that going to a cabaret would take her mind off things.
Since William was pulling an all-nighter for an upcoming medical exam, Eleanor had no excuse. She also didn’t have much fight in her as she watched Nadine lay out a summer frock for her to wear.
* * *
Exactly two weeks after she’d gone to the doctor, Eleanor woke up early and slipped into the wooden telephone booth at the end of the hall, sliding the glass door closed behind her. She lost her fingering in the rotary dialer several times because her hands were shaking so much. When she finally got through, and after waiting on hold for what felt like ten minutes, the nurse came to the telephone and reported her results.
“Positive.”
“What does that mean?” Eleanor asked, desperately hoping she had misunderstood.
“As in pregnant, dear.”
Eleanor couldn’t breathe after that. The walls of the booth seemed to close in on her, squeezing the blood from her brain. The nurse’s voice became white noise. All she kept hearing was “positive.” The results were positive. As in she was pregnant. How could this have happened? She was only nineteen, with two years left before she finished college.
“Thank you.” There was nothing else to say, so she hung up.
It was early, and the girls who hadn’t bustled out of the dorm for their eight a.m. class were still asleep. Eleanor sank down the side of the telephone booth, her knees huddled to her chest, and cried until her eyes were swollen and her legs had started to cramp. A shower would do her some good and help her to think things through, but she had no strength to move.
What Eleanor needed was her mother. She was the one person in her life who always knew what to do. But the news would crush her, because she had worked so hard to get Eleanor to Howard. Traveling up and down the highways, baking throughout the night, arguing with her father when he insisted that the money saved should be used to replace their battered car. The vehicle that they shared to make a living. With nothing left to do, she placed the telephone receiver to her ear and made the dreaded collect call.
Her mother accepted. “Sugar? What’s wrong?”
“How do you know something’s wrong?”
“?’Cause its first thing in the morning. High-rate time. Now spill it before you run up my bill.” She chuckled lightly, but Eleanor could hear the nervous undercurrent in her voice over the crackle of long-distance static that was often present during their calls.
Eleanor typically phoned home one evening a week after ten o’clock when the rates dropped. She could picture her mother in the kitchen standing at the stove wiping down the range. It was her nervous tic, and because of it, her stovetop always gleamed to shining.
“Mama.”
“Yes?”
Eleanor felt a wave of fear, guilt and shame congeal into a ball in her gut that kept the words stuck in her windpipe.
“Spit it out, Sugar.”
“I’m… pregnant.” Her voice was so small, she felt like a child, humiliated for disappointing her mother.
The dead silence on the other end of the phone made Eleanor wonder if she had uttered the words too softly to stretch across the many miles between them. But then after two pops of static her mother asked, finally, “By that doctor?”
On their weekly calls, Eleanor had told her mother all about William. From their first date at the Lincoln Theatre, to him picking her up from work at the department store, and every detail of walking through his castle of a home and meeting his kind father and uppity mother. She had painted the picture of a fairy tale, and now it came tumbling down.
“He’s not a doctor yet. But yes. It’s William’s.”