The Nix(96)

“Of course,” she says. “I have a date with him tonight.”

“Do you?”

“Yes,” she says, as instructed. “We’re going out tonight.”

“Has he proposed to you?”

“What?”

“If he were a gentleman he would have proposed to you by now.”

And Faye feels defensive under his criticism. What comes out sounds hollow. “All in good time?”

“You really need to think about what you’re doing, Faye.”

“Okay. Thanks very much,” she says, and she leans over the counter and closes her fist around the brown paper bag with a loud, poignant crunch. She doesn’t know what’s happening here, but she wants it to be over. “Goodbye.”

She drives quickly to the Schwingle house, a grand thing that sits on a rocky bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, a rare point of elevation in the otherwise gentle rolling flatness of the prairie. Faye drives up through the trees to the house, which she finds unexpectedly dark. The lights are off and everything is silent. Faye panics. Did she get the date wrong? Were they meeting somewhere else first? She’s considering driving back home and calling Margaret when the front door opens and out she walks, Margaret Schwingle, in sweatpants and a baggy T-shirt, hair disheveled in a way Faye has never seen before, scooped to one side like she’s been sleeping on it.

“Do you have the package?” she asks.

“Yes.” Faye gives her the crinkly brown bag.

“Thanks.”

“Margaret? Is everything okay?”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “We can’t have dinner tonight.”

“Okay.”

“You have to go home now.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

Margaret is staring at her feet, not looking at Faye. “I’m really sorry. For everything.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Listen,” she says, and now she looks at Faye for the first time. She stands up straight and points her chin out, trying to look tough. “Nobody saw you come here tonight.”

“I know.”

“Remember that. You can’t prove you were here.”

Then Margaret nods to Faye and spins on her heel and leaves, locking the door behind her.





8


IN 1968, in Faye’s small Iowa river town, the girls of the graduating class knew—though they never spoke of it—dozens of ways to get rid of unplanned, unwanted, unborn children. Some of these methods were almost always unsuccessful; some were nothing more than old wives’ tales; some required advanced medical training; some were too horrible to think about.

The most attractive were of course those that could be done innocently, without any special chemical or apparatus. Long-distance bicycling. Jumping from a great height. Alternating hot and cold baths. Placing a candle on the abdomen and letting it burn all the way down. Standing on one’s head. Falling down stairs. Punching oneself repeatedly in the belly.

When these failed—and they almost always did fail—the girls moved on to new techniques, remedies that wouldn’t arouse suspicion. Simple, over-the-counter things. Douching with Coca-Cola, for example. Or Lysol. Or iodide. Ingesting incredibly high quantities of vitamin C. Or iron tablets. Filling the uterus with saline solution, or a mixture of water and Kirkman Borax Soap. Eating uterine stimulants like julep. Or croton oil. Calomel. Senna. Rhubarb. Magnesium sulfate. Herbs that initiated or increased menstrual flow, such as parsley. Or chamomile. Ginger.

Quinine was also effective, according to many grandmothers.

And brewer’s yeast. Mugwort. Castor oil. Lye.

Then there were those other methods, those things that none but the most desperate would ever consider. Bicycle pump. Vacuum cleaner. Knitting needle. Umbrella rib. Goose quill. Cathartic tube. Turpentine. Kerosene. Bleach.

None but the most desperate, the most alone and unconnected, those who had no friends with medical access who might procure certain behind-the-counter items. Methergine. Synthetic estrogens. Pituitary extract. Abortifacient ergot preparations. Strychnine. Suppositories known in some quarters as Black Beauties. Glycerin applied via catheter. Ergotrate, which makes the uterus stiffen and contract. Certain medicines used by cow breeders to regulate animal cycles—difficult to acquire, polysyllabic: dinoprostone, misoprostol, gemeprost, methotrexate.

What was in that paper bag? Almost certainly not small chocolate bonbon things, Faye decides as she drives home, rounds the corner into Vista Hills, regrets that she did not open the bag. Why didn’t she open it?

Because it was stapled, she thinks.

Because you’re a coward, another part of her thinks.

She has an abstract feeling of panic and distress right now. How strangely Margaret had acted tonight. Dr. Schwingle too. A feeling like there’s something she’s missing, some essential fact whose revelation she dreads. The air is misty, the sky not raining so much as lightly spitting, a humidity like when the girls boil things in home ec. Once, one of the girls forgot her pot and left it there to burn all day and the water boiled out and the pot got scorched and red-hot and its plastic handle melted and then outright burned. It set off all the alarms.

Tonight has that same quality to it. Like there’s something very close and dangerous and alarming that Faye has not yet noticed.