Girl, Ruined

ONE DECEMBER morning in 1967, in the early hours before a dull winter sunrise, I labored alone on the fourth floor of Immanuel Hospital in Omaha, Nebraska. I had expected labor to be work, more or less like it sounded: teeth-gritting effort, sweating, and grunting. Instead furious stallions stampeded across my eighteen-year-old belly, and no amount of shameless screaming in the direction of the fluorescent-lit hallway could quiet them. In the respites between contractions I looked out a window at the shadowy shapes of downtown-Omaha office buildings. Then, when my torture resumed, I turned my head back toward the slit of white light from the corridor and screamed for drugs.

“You’re doing great,” said a male intern who entered the room briskly, as friendly as my high-school chemistry teacher, then thrust his arm up to the wrist inside me. If such thrusting meant drugs would be administered sooner, then have at it. More doctors and interns came, each time a different arm plunging deep and taking its mysterious measurements. What were the numbers they mumbled? I didn’t know. My body was theirs, as if I’d been arrested, my freedom forfeited. I hadn’t had lessons in breathing or the kinds of pillow-supported floor exercises women learn today. I hadn’t had young-mom friends who had gone before me and brought back war stories and useful tips. My baby was to be put up for adoption, which relegated me to a different category: pregnant but not a mother-to-be; laboring but not toward any reward. For this reason, I suppose, explanations had been withheld. Somewhere just down the hall, I imagined, the legally pregnant mothers labored communally in dorms, comparing contractions and banding together to demand drugs, epidurals, Wild Turkey. I was kept separate, as if in quarantine.

I had been assigned a social worker named Camille, a girl only a few years older than I was and distinguished from me primarily by the spiral notebook and ballpoint pen she carried. Because I was pregnant and unmarried, my parents assumed I suffered from some mental or emotional disorder, and so I required not just Camille, earnestly jotting all manner of clinical observations about me, but a private psychiatrist. The one chosen for me, Dr. Russell, was an acquaintance of my mother’s cousin Belle, and he’d recommended that I not waste energy thinking about the delivery. My ob-gyn — also chosen for me by Belle — was Dr. McGoogan, a breezy, white-haired man who could have been my grandfather and treated me as if he were my pediatrician rather than my obstetrician. But he was a private doctor and therefore preferable to whatever doctor the social-service agency might have provided. (In my family private always meant “better.”) Having him was supposed to be a comfort, particularly at the delivery. Like Dr. Russell, Dr. McGoogan had assured me that labor was nothing to worry about. “No big deal,” he said. “You’ll do fine.” The fact that neither of these men ever had experienced or would experience labor and delivery did not occur to me; instead I focused on Camille’s lack of such experience. What did she know?

Camille’s approach was ponderous and awkward. Several times, in her green and graceless way, she had broached the subject of delivery. “Some folks have a hard time,” she’d said, and I’d cringed at her use of the word folks. “When you get married . . . ,” she’d said, elongating the a in married as if to emphasize the sweetness and desirability of that condition. “We don’t want you to have troubles later on,” she’d said, and I’d snapped, “Who is we?” Underlying our conversations was the assumption that after delivery I would be returned to virgin status, placed back on the marriage market, and someday have real children when, as Camille repeated despite my audible sighs of impatience, “the time is right.” I knew this, yet I hated the sunny, sappy, nonclinical way Camille articulated it. It was beneath me to listen to her sorry, farm-girl patter. Camille’s unwanted visits had urged upon me a truth I did not want to accept: that I, who had volunteered in an inner-city day camp, brought old clothes to the church white-elephant shop, and collected money at school for the poor, now was the one who needed help.

MONTHS EARLIER, when I’d told my parents I was pregnant, my mother had first raged at me, then collapsed into a murky pool of self-pity and helplessness, and Belle, the family fixer, had stepped in to rescue her. In charge of damage control, Belle had arranged the necessary services to erase from my family any lingering taint of my sexual waywardness and its unfortunate byproduct, a child. Her detached efficiency, her complete faith in the correctness of the plan for the safe and hygienic removal of my baby, airlifted me from the horrors of my father’s blame and my mother’s desire to see me punished. Belle, in her elegant way, left details to the imagination. Her characteristic quip was “That’s all taken care of.” No need to linger over unseemly particulars or speculate about future fallout. Sometimes during my exile in Omaha Belle’s oldest daughter, a young newlywed, offered me support and a friendly ear, and I looked up to her as the kind of woman I might someday become: confident, respectable.

Belle had arranged for me to leave my home in a Chicago suburb and live for six months in Nebraska with the Zalkins, for whom I performed the jobs of nanny and maid in exchange for room and board and twelve dollars a week. They called us pregnant maids “work-wage girls.” I learned years later that the program was developed during a period when maternity homes were overcrowded, and it was discontinued in the early seventies, after such arrangements were determined to be fraught with exploitation.

The Zalkins lived modestly on the husband’s salary as a foreman in his father’s wiping-cloth factory, and my principal qualification to be their domestic servant was affordability. Mrs. Zalkin touted me to her friends as her “new live-in.” The morning before I was taken to the hospital for delivery, I mopped the Zalkins’ basement floor, put away toys, ironed a basketful of kids’ laundry, and carried the clothes up to the bedrooms on the second story of their split-level house. My back was tight and hurting, but my big stomach had become such a part of me that I was almost agile despite the discomfort. I was happy doing housework; it made me feel cleansed and calm. With the help of Dr. Russell, the psychiatrist, I had reframed my pregnancy as an immutable biological process, proceeding by laws that were beyond my control. I was a soldier marching to orders. Delivery was to be my liberation, my release with a clean slate. I ticked off the days and weeks on a calendar, proud of my maturity. I could wait. I could march. I could cope.

I lay in bed that night, as I did every night, facing the ceiling, my feet on a pillow, unable to sleep because of the pain gripping my back. My due date had come and gone two weeks earlier, and I had begun to feel as if I would never be free to go home.

Sometime in the night I got up, went into the bathroom, and sat on the edge of the tub while my stomach cramped. The sink was shining, the soap scumless in its pink holder, the towels squared and fat over the towel bars, everything just the way I had left it at 9 p.m. Each evening after the kids were in bed, I tidied up the bathroom, a service that made Mrs. Zalkin feel like she lived in a fancy hotel, she said. She’d decorated the room down to the last detail. The walls, the toilet-seat cover, the towels and washcloths, and even the rubber ducky belonging to the four-year-old were pink — but I wasn’t allowed to call it “pink.” It was “Brazilian blush,” Mrs. Zalkin said: couldn’t I see the peach in it? I’d had a peach bathrobe at home with a princess Empire waist and green flowers stitched around the neckline. I’d worn it proudly the morning after the first time I’d had sex with my boyfriend, feeling elegant and womanly. (It wouldn’t even have fit me now.) So I knew the difference between peach and pink. But I did as Mrs. Zalkin asked and called it “blush” — Brazilian blush.

I thought the cramps I was having might be contractions, but I wasn’t scared. My only worry was the awkwardness of knocking on Mr. and Mrs. Zalkin’s bedroom door to wake them. I’d been instructed to do this when I needed Mr. Zalkin to drive me to the hospital, but what if this was a false alarm? Then I would have gotten them up in the middle of the night for nothing, intruded into their marital space, seen them with their hair mussed and their pajamas either twisted or, worse, lying on the floor by the bed. So I waited to see what would happen.

I was still sitting at the edge of the tub an hour later when Mrs. Zalkin tapped on the door, asked if I was ok, and, after hearing my answer, decided it was time.

The streets of downtown Omaha were deserted. All the traffic lights flashed red, and Mr. Zalkin cruised through the intersections without stopping, probably eager to unload me. We rode in silence: what does a forty-year-old man say to a pregnant teenager in labor? The contractions were far apart. My water had not broken. I was still not convinced that this was labor, but Mrs. Zalkin, veteran of three deliveries, had assured me I should go and had called Dr. McGoogan, who’d agreed.

At the hospital Mr. Zalkin escorted me to the entrance, wished me luck, and loped back to his still-idling car the way he had on summer afternoons on his way to a Shriners meeting, his tall red fez balanced on his head. For a moment I thought he might turn back, but he didn’t.

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