Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

Her dad fiddled with the radio and a comforting ballpark voice cut through the static:

“…sets up, and here’s the pitch. It’s a fastball on the outside corner, and it’s a ball. Ty walked him. That is the first walk he’s given up and…”

She stopped crying somewhere around Tallahassee. Pretty soon after that, her dad pulled over at a Burger King and left her in the car. Sitting for so long had made her feet swell and her kidneys bruise, but she couldn’t make herself get out and walk around. Whenever they stopped at a rest area people saw her protruding stomach and at first they smiled, but then they saw the bare ring finger on her left hand and looked away or shook their heads or stared back at her over their shoulders, like she was an animal in the zoo.

Wasn’t that what they’d all said about Donna Havermeyer last year? All she’d done was gain a lot of weight and skip graduation and suddenly all the girls were talking about how she’d gotten pregnant by an officer up at the Arsenal, and then Racee Tucker said what did you expect, her whole family’s nothing but Arkansas trash, and she’d laughed, too, and now here she was. She bet that was what all those people at the rest stops thought: Look at that Alabama trash.

Her dad got back in and handed her a single skinny cheeseburger from the bag. He pulled out a Whopper for himself. She used to eat a single cheeseburger when they went to Sno Wite’s because she was an actress and cared about her figure, but she didn’t have a figure anymore. Now she wore her mom’s old deck shoes because they were the only ones that fit her swollen feet, and her mom’s old plaid maternity dress, and she had two chins and they were both covered in pimples, and her bust had popped a button on her dress yesterday. She tried to make the cheeseburger last a ladylike amount of time, but it was gone in three bites.

They drove through Florida for hours, and there was still more Florida to go. They passed a yellow painted billboard for Gatorland (SEE All Kinds of Animals), then one for the Fountain of Youth (Beautiful Ladies Will Give You a Drink of This Famous Water!), then more alligators (SEE—Tons of Gators!). Above them, buzzards circled in the merciless blue sky.

A curtain of static ate the baseball game, then a jolly grandfather said:

“…demonstrations on a number of the nation’s college campuses, most of the protests related to the U.S. involvement in Cambodia…”

The radio chewed static, then:

“…is one for eleven at the plate this year, his batting average is point one nine zero one. Here’s the shoe strike delivery, it’s on the outside corner, it’s a fastball, and that’s…”

She’d tried everything to fix this. She’d searched for Humphreys 11 but couldn’t find it anywhere. She’d bought a bottle of castor oil and drunk the whole thing, but it only gave her the runs. She’d jumped off her dad’s worktable in the basement over and over until her legs gave out, lifted the dictionary above her head until her arms cramped; she’d even drunk turpentine, but she barely managed a capful before throwing up. She’d closed her eyes when she crossed the street and prayed she’d get hit by a car until she realized they’d probably do an autopsy and everyone would find out.

No matter what she did her stomach kept growing like it wanted everyone to see how stupid she was. They all kept finding ways to make her feel stupid. That second night at Aunt Peggy’s after dinner, they’d told her she could ask anything, and she’d asked how they covered up the scar where they took out the baby, and her uncle Albert had busted a gut laughing and said it came out the same way it went in.

“But,” Neva said, because it had to be more scientific than that, “it can’t fit!”

Then her aunt Peggy had said Enough of that kind of talk and excused her from the table.

No one would tell her anything. They’d shown films in school about emotional maturity, and fire safety, and getting along with others, but no one had ever shown them a film about having a baby.

Another burst of static stabbed her in the bladder, and she realized she had to go to the bathroom again. No, no, no, no, no. She couldn’t ask her dad to pull over now, not when he’d finally stopped yelling at her. She clenched everything inside herself as hard as she could.

“…Guardsmen moved in after the students smashed windows and set fires on the campus and the surrounding…”

Up north, soldiers were shooting students, and kids were smashing up their schools. The Weathermen were blowing up buildings in New York City, and her dad thought he was going to lose his job because Apollo 13 had blown up in space. Out in California, freaks were murdering people in their houses and shooting them in their cars. Everything was spinning out of control. Even her body was revolting.

“…Look out, Tonto! It’s the Lawn Ranger! The Lawn Ranger, here to save you from yellow lawns, wilting bushes, and dead flowerbeds…”

The sound of the Lawn Ranger’s automatic sprinkler system sprayed from the speakers. Her bladder throbbed.

“Dad?” she tried.

He ignored her. A wave of static.

“…lift up your eyes and beg for water, just a drop, just a trickle on your parched lips, and know that in Heaven there is a fountain…”

She’d taken him to the fountain on Valentine’s Day.

She’d gone with Guy to the drugstore to get a Clark bar. He always needed sugar when he studied, and on the walk back she insisted they go through the park and made him sit near the fountain.

“What’s with all this sappy stuff?” He smiled.

Then he kissed her. Her bosom had been getting bigger and she knew he liked that, so she leaned into him and they necked for a minute, and then he said:

“Dad gave me the car tonight.”

It should have been perfect. This was the first time she was actually going steady with a boy on Valentine’s Day, even though he didn’t hold her hand at school or give her his varsity letter or sit with her at lunch, but she knew that was because he was seventeen and she was fifteen and he didn’t want to get razzed.

Last year it had been perfect, and when the world got scary at the end of the summer Guy told her he’d always keep her safe. Always. She watched him play football, and they went to see 2001 at the drive-in where they mostly necked, and at the Splashdown Whoop Up in Courthouse Square he took her hand, and it felt like a bubble named Always protected them, and so she told him, right there by the fountain.

She knew he’d be scared at first but she also knew that when he got over his surprise he’d squeeze her hand and say What are we going to do, Nev? or maybe Do you think we’re too young to get married? or maybe put his arm around her and tell her they’d get through it together. Instead, he pulled away from her and stared into the fountain.

Her dad stared straight ahead at the road. The station wagon jolted over roadkill and lightning forked through her bladder. The sound of a waterfall filled the car:

“…tropical Hawaiian vacations, hear the waterfalls, see the sun going down over the waves, dive into one of our three swimming pools…”

Finally, Guy turned to her and his eyes were full of tears and he said, “How could you do this to me?”

Then he got up and left.

After that, she was scared all the time—scared that Guy would tell his parents, scared her parents would find out, scared Hilda would figure it out, scared Deb had figured it out and that was why she wasn’t talking to her.

Her heart stopped beating normally and just fluttered inside her chest. She couldn’t eat but her body betrayed her and she found herself standing in front of the fridge in the middle of the night scooping up leftover meat loaf with her hands and cake icing with her fingers. She started throwing up every morning before school, hugging the toilet in absolute misery, a towel draped over her head so no one could hear.

Her stomach kept growing, even when she wore two girdles. She kept letting out the waist of her plaid skirt until she couldn’t let it out any more, and then she used safety pins, and when those stopped working she found a big kilt pin. For Christmas she’d gotten a red plaid poncho and she wore it all the time. When people pointed out it was seventy degrees she told them she was reducing. Her face got hairy like Michael Landon in I Was a Teenage Werewolf and she quit the school play because how could she go onstage like this? She started playing hooky, sneaking out and buying a ticket to the matinee where she’d sit through the same show over and over again, ducking into the restroom whenever the manager came down the aisles with his flashlight.

Of course they found out. She’d had to go to school for her biology presentation (“The Fossils of Alabama”) and when she fainted in the ladies’, Hilda took her to the infirmary, where the nurse examined her, then sent Hilda away, locked the door, and said, “Either you tell your parents or I will.”

That night her dad had dinner at home for once. After, she waited until Chip and Midge were watching TV, then sat her parents down at the kitchen table and told them calmly what had happened and how she didn’t think it meant anything had to change. They could tell school she had mono. She could do her classwork from home. She wouldn’t go outside. When she had the baby it could go straight to the orphanage.

They sent Chip and Midge to Granny Craven’s that night, like they didn’t want her contaminating them. Of course they called Guy’s parents. Of course they all had a meeting to decide what should be done. Of course she wasn’t allowed to attend.

She felt her grip slipping on her bladder. It was becoming life or death.

“Dad?” she asked, and her voice sounded too loud in the car. “Could we maybe pull over for a minute? At a gas station or something?”

He stared straight ahead, and she was too scared to repeat herself.

“…whatever goes to Hell, stays in Hell. It’s permanent. It’s over with. Judgment has been rendered. And let me tell you something, brother, there is no forgiveness in Hell, there are no second chances…”

They’d sent her to Aunt Peggy’s in Montgomery. At first it was okay. She had to hide in the back room and not make a sound when people came over, and she couldn’t call home, and the only thing to read was Uncle Arthur’s magazines, but she could handle it. Then it felt like the days were getting longer, and she hadn’t brought any books because it felt frivolous to pack books, and she sat in that bedroom on her lumpy sofa bed, staring at the wall, starting to come unwound.

Aunt Peggy wouldn’t let her leave the house, not even to go to the library, so she’d snuck out to the drugstore for some paperbacks. She didn’t have any money, but there was loads of room under her poncho. How was she supposed to know Aunt Peggy would search her room while she was taking a bath? Her mom always said she had the devil in her, and she knew she needed to do a better job controlling her impulses, but Aunt Peggy could have just loaned her the money to pay for those books. She didn’t have to call Dad.

She couldn’t help it. Her body betrayed her.

“Daddy,” she said, and it came out in a little kid’s whine that she hated. “I really have to go to the bathroom or I’m going to have an accident.”

Nothing happened, then he sped up. Up ahead was a gas station with a souvenir stand outside, and he pulled into their parking lot and shut off the engine. Immediately, the inside of the car started to bake. Outside, families on vacation in plaid shorts and Hawaiian shirts walked back and forth from the gas station to the souvenir shack to their cars.

She reached for the door handle and he grabbed her arm.

“Here.”

He took a quick look to make sure no one was watching, then put his entire ring finger in his mouth, slicked it with spit, and worked his wedding ring over his knuckles. He handed it to her, warm and wet, and she slid it over her ring finger, then opened the door and hauled herself out of the car.

She walked to the gas station on swollen legs, the Florida sun baking the top of her head, the hot asphalt frying the bottoms of her feet. A woman in sunglasses smiled at her pregnant stomach. She held her left hand up near her belly so they could all see the ring on her finger, but she was fifteen years old and six months pregnant and she wasn’t at all confused about what they actually thought. Her dad had laid it out pretty straight.

It would be better if she was dead.

Chapter 2

Finally, they veered off the highway onto a narrow road cutting through pines. As the houses got fewer and farther between, her heart shriveled. They passed a trailer with too many children in the front yard wearing nothing but diapers, and then the pines got closer together, and the road got darker, and her dad slowed at a mailbox labeled 462, put on his turn signal, and eased into a gloomy tunnel of trees.

They crunched along slowly, tires popping pine cones, until they emerged and came face-to-face with the thing she’d read about, the thing she’d had nightmares about, the thing Margaret Roach had warned her about, the thing she’d heard her mother’s friends whisper about: the Home for Unwed Mothers.

It needed paint.

Three stories of long dismal planks, with four big Gone with the Wind columns spaced across its dismal front porch, holding up its dismal roof. Once upon a time it might have been on a local tour of historic homes, but now it looked like Bette Davis’s face in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? She couldn’t imagine having to live in this peeling wreck for the next three months.

Her dad got out of the car, slamming the door. Her fingers dug into the vinyl. If she refused to get out, eventually her dad would have to give up and take her home. He couldn’t leave her in this place all alone, surrounded by hillbillies who couldn’t outrun their cousins, and hippies who probably couldn’t even remember the name of their baby’s father. They’d all have VD and blow grass and laugh at her for being square.

The rear gate of the station wagon crashed open and her dad grabbed her suitcase.

“Get out of the car,” he said. “Now.”

She didn’t want to get yelled at again, so she pushed open the heavy door and hauled herself out into a storm of screaming cicadas. Humid air flooded her lungs and sucked the strength from her body. Her sinuses melted into a waterfall and she wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Her kidneys hurt, her hips ached, and her legs felt too weak to propel her all the way to the front porch.

The rear gate slammed and a second later her dad trudged by, her red plaid suitcase in one hand, bra strap sticking out the side and bouncing with every step like it was real jazzed to be here. He stomped up the brick steps onto the porch and she followed, stumbling over tree roots and anthills, because she didn’t know what else to do.

The double front doors stood wide open behind a pair of closed screen doors. Behind their dirty mesh she saw a long, dark hall disappearing deep into the house. Her dad searched for a doorbell, then gave up and banged on the wooden frame. The sound got lost inside the enormous old house. He tried again.

“The butler got drafted,” a voice over their heads said.

They both looked up and saw a waterfall of hair so blond it was almost white hanging over the wrought-iron railing of a little Juliet balcony directly above them.

“Pardon?” her dad called.

“The butler,” the girl called down. “He’s busy getting his ass shot off in Vietnam, so you’ll have to let yourselves in.”

Her dad didn’t approve of women cursing, and his jaw clenched for a moment, then he licked his lips and forged ahead.

“We’re here to see Miss Wellwood,” he said.

“Never heard of her,” the blonde said.

“Look—” her dad started, but the blonde pulled her head back over the railing and they heard the slap of a screen door from upstairs and she was gone.

A surge of hope ran through Neva. They’d come to the wrong place! They had the wrong address! Now they’d have to go home.

Her dad picked up her suitcase, pulled open the screen door, and ushered her inside. She went because she knew they’d be back out in a minute.

The house felt distant and quiet, like a library. The muffled sound of a woman talking came through the closed double doors on their left. Through the open door on their right lay a dark room, its heavy drapes pulled against the sun, old-fashioned furniture crouching in its shadows. Halfway down the hall a gargantuan brass chandelier hung in midair like a spider, and beneath it a big industrial floor fan turned its head from side to side, pushing warm air around.

The hall terminated at a faraway frosted glass door bearing a hand-lettered card reading Office. Attracted to any sign of authority, her dad headed down the faded red runner, making the floorboards creak. She followed because she wanted to see how he’d react when they told him there wasn’t any such Home here, and no sir, they’d never heard of one like that around these parts.

The hall was lined with pictures in complicated gold frames: hunting scenes full of ducks and dogs, portraits of important men no one remembered, a faded print of a river. They were all so clean. Every twisty curlicue in every gold frame, every inch of carpet, everything had been scrubbed until it was spotless.

They reached the office door and her dad knocked. He’d barely finished when someone behind them said, “Got a smoke?”

They turned and Neva recognized the girl from the balcony and she couldn’t help herself—she stared. This was the first pregnant girl her own age she’d seen outside a mirror. She was a couple of years older, but not out of high school, wearing a white peasant blouse and a harvest-gold, floor-length skirt, and her thick blond hair hung straight to her waist.

Being pregnant had made Neva a swollen, lumpy potato with a runny nose and pimples, but this girl held her stomach high and tight in front of her. Her arms looked long and strong, her shoulders were wide, and she had heavy eyebrows, a delicate chin, and clear skin. She looked powerful. Her left hand was held out for a cigarette. She didn’t wear a ring.

“No?” She swiveled her hand. “What about you, sister? Any smokes?”

Before they could answer, the office door swung open to reveal a mature woman dressed entirely in lavender. Her thick blue hair was piled in a high bouffant, and she looked exactly like President Nixon if he’d ever dressed as a woman. Delicious cold air spilled out of the door around her.

“May I help you?” Mrs. Richard Nixon asked.

“I don’t think they speak English,” the blond goddess said.

“Go to class, Rose,” Mrs. Nixon said.

“I’m reading your fascinating notices, Ethel,” Rose replied, pretending to study a typewritten sheet pinned to a bulletin board.

“I called Friday?” her dad apologized. “To say we were coming? From Alabama? With my daughter?”

That made Mrs. Nixon’s face go sour.

“We were expecting you earlier.”

“I’m afraid we didn’t make very good time,” her dad said. “There were a lot of stops along the way.”

Mrs. Nixon turned her hard stare on Neva. She saw everything: the endless bathroom stops, her pimples, her body growing out of control, her baby getting bigger every day. She saw Guy on top of her in the back seat of his father’s car, his hands unzipping her corduroy skirt, his sweat dripping on her face, fumbling at the hook of her brassiere. She saw how stupid she was, how she’d ignored all the signs that Guy only wanted her for one thing, how desperate she’d been for someone to like her.

Mrs. Richard Nixon turned back to her father and pulled her lips away from her teeth in a smile, revealing lavender lipstick caked around an incisor.

“Yes,” she said. “They can be quite inconvenient. Come in.”

She retreated into her office and her dad followed and just like that, all the hope drained from Neva’s body. They had come to the right place, after all. This was the Home for Unwed Mothers and they had a bed waiting for her.

Inside the office a gray metal desk loaded with gray metal office equipment stood on a shocking scarlet carpet. A window-unit air conditioner rumbled away, making the air crisp.

“Miss Wellwood?” Mrs. Richard Nixon called through an open door. “The new girl has arrived.”

A tall gray lady emerged from the inner office, manila folder clutched in her left hand, her right hand already extended.

“Thank you, Mrs. Deckle,” she said, shaking Neva’s father’s hand, efficiently and professionally, like a machine designed for handshaking. “I’m Miss Wellwood. So pleased to meet you. You must be tired after your drive. May I offer you coffee?”

She looked like a piece of office equipment, from her short gray hair to her hard gray eyes. Her polyester skirt suit was beige, she wore a single pearl in each ear, and around her throat she wore a brown-and-yellow kerchief.

“No, thank you,” her dad said.

Miss Wellwood dispensed a smile to Neva and even her teeth were gray.

“Welcome to my Home,” she said. “One of the girls will show you around while I speak with your father.”

Her father was the only familiar thing she had left. Even if he hated her, the thought of being separated from him made her chest tighten.

“I’d like to stay,” she said. “Please.”

Miss Wellwood called through the office door.

“Rose,” she said to the blond goddess who was still pretending to read the bulletin board. “Please show our new arrival around.”

“I’m on strike,” Rose said.

“It is not a request.” Miss Wellwood smiled, and then in a swirl of choreography she pulled Neva’s dad deeper into the office and propelled Neva out into the hall.

“Dad,” she called, louder than she meant. She sounded like a baby but she didn’t care. He froze in the inner doorway and turned his head the bare minimum. “You’ll say goodbye? Before you go?”

He nodded as Miss Wellwood stepped between them.

“Don’t be a goose,” she said. “You’ll both have plenty of time to say goodbye.”

The office door closed in her face, leaving Neva in the hall. She felt the blond goddess sizing her up, and she had to say something so she didn’t seem like an idiot. What did people talk about in a place like this? Names. Her mother always told her that people liked to talk about themselves.

“Is Rose short for Rosemary?” she asked.

“How the hell would I know?” Rose said. “No one uses their real name in here. Got any smokes?”

“I don’t smoke,” she apologized.

“You better get some cigarette money from your old man before he splits,” Rose said. “Everyone in here smokes.”