A Gathering Storm

Dazed and numb, I stood on a trash-strewn, concrete median in a steady rain on busy South Fifth Street in Springfield, Illinois, that day in late May 1961. The storm was moving closer; thunder rumbled somewhere off in the distance, and soon it was pouring. Six lanes of speeding cars whizzed around me in all directions — colored lights blinking red to yellow to green, reflecting off the wet pavement — as I tried to figure out what they were doing, why they were there, why I was here, with one foot on the traffic island and the other in the busy road.

I barely felt the raindrops streaming down my face and hair. Water ran down my arms and soaked through my blue-plaid cotton blouse. I vaguely realized that my matching powder-blue flats were probably ruined from the fast-forming puddles. But what did it matter if my clothes were perfect and all matched anyway? My life would soon be over.

Out of nowhere, a car sped straight toward me as I vacantly stared at it. I tried to move, but my body was frozen in place, not responding to the danger at hand, as if we were playing a game of chicken. A horn blared. Muddy water splattered onto my legs and skirt.

The car veered off sharply, barely missing me. Or maybe I jumped out of its way a bit.

But I did want to die, to lie dramatically young and lifeless, in the middle of the road. My parents and friends — my entire high school — would come to my funeral and cry over my casket. Maybe they would never find out what I now knew.

I was pregnant. Pregnant.

The previous day, my mother had asked me if something was wrong because my period was late. I had no idea but obviously, after she had questioned me several times the past few days, I had to find out. Today after school, I had taken a city bus to the public library under the guise of doing homework, but my mission was far more urgent. With one eye keeping watch down the aisle, uneasy that someone would see me in the Health Education section, I furtively checked the stacks, looking for books that could explain my problem. My face flushed as I leafed through a few pages of one. The books, with intimidating titles such as A Mother-Daughter Talk and Boys and Bodies, contained within their pages things I had never known or thought about. I shrunk back against the shelves and swiftly scanned through another volume. There it was, a chapter called "What Are the Signs of Pregnancy?" My eyes quickly skimmed over the words.

Instantly, I knew. All the subtle signs were there: sore, swollen breasts, the tiny bit of nausea I had begun experiencing just days before, and the telltale sign most females know instinctively from the time they are born: my period was late — by nearly three weeks — I quickly realized. There was no other explanation. I had to be pregnant.

For a brief moment, I stood there, frozen, suspended between girl and woman. Then I quickly moved toward the library desk and found the courage to check out the book. I stuffed it into my book bag and — breathing so hard and fast I thought I would faint — slipped out the back exit door of the building.

Hoping no one had seen me, I ran to catch a bus to Carole's house, also on South Fifth Street. She was the first person I thought of; I had to talk to her. She was one of my best friends but was ever so much more mature and worldly than my other girlfriends, most of who were, like me, innocent and naive. Surely she would know what to do.

I clamored onto the dirty, wheezing vehicle that was bound for her neighborhood. She lived in a small, gray-shingled place with dirty, chipping paint and scruffy tufts of grass scattered around a muddy yard, situated right on an entrance ramp to Route 66, which bisected our town.

In my confusion, I had jumped off the bus before it stopped, and rather than moving toward her house, I had run in the opposite direction. Blindly flying across the lanes of fast-moving cars, I dashed onto the median strip to where I then stood, facing the traffic and the oncoming storm. Pregnant.

I regained my bearings just in time to see more cars coming towards me. I have to get out of this street before I get hit. Completely soaked and with water pouring off my body, I dashed back across the lanes of traffic and ran the short distance up the sidewalk to my friend's house. I was panting, my heart was pounding, and I couldn't get there fast enough.

I quickly let myself into the familiar entry hall, kicked off my wet shoes, and ran up the stairs into her girly, lavender bedroom where I knew she would be. I imagined her listening to the radio and curling her golden-red hair up in curlers, or trying on a new shade of mascara, still doing the teenage girl things we did every day, but suddenly I was grown up. I was old. I would never be seventeen again.

Carole was lying on the floor with her legs propped up against a wall, twisting the cord of her purple Princess phone around in her fingers, talking to her boyfriend, Bill.

I dried off with an old bath towel on the floor and flopped onto her bed. Shivering with fright and the dampness of my clothing, I began scanning the library book I'd checked out, again reading the words I didn't want to see and the things I didn't want to know, trying to comprehend it all.

I wanted to scream, but my throat tightened. Fear of my friend's mother lurking around a corner made me swallow it, and instead I motioned to Carole: Get off the phone! Get off the phone! Now!

Click.

In a stage whisper in case her mother was home, I mouthed, "I think I'm pregnant! I'm pregnant!"

Her huge green eyes slowly opened wider, eyebrows raised in disbelief. Her glossy red mouth dropped open, and I think her hand came up and touched her lips, sort of slow motion. That would have been just like her — dramatic.

"You mean, you and Rich did it?" she gasped. Rich had been my steady boyfriend for the past three months. She had set us up on our first blind date, which happened to be my seventeenth birthday.

I stammered, "Well, I'm not sure. I don't think we went all the way —"

"How could you? What do you mean you don't know if you did it or not?" she said, her voice rising.

"I don't really know. I'm not sure. It was on prom night. Rich wanted to go to his house instead of the after-prom party at the school. Then he just kept wanting to do all these things to me, and he kissed me a lot, and, well, you know. I didn't want to, but I think he did it anyway. I kept telling him no over and over and pushing him away, but he kept trying. It wasn't fun or romantic or exciting. What do you think happened?" I begged her to give me something else to explain the symptoms I had been experiencing just days before, to tell me it was just the weather, or maybe I was coming down with a cold, so my body was messed up. I began to cry, growing more panicky by the minute.

"I don't know. You'll have to figure it out," she huffed as she tossed her long, copper curls and turned away, disgusted with my naive tears and distress. Although she seemed aloof and annoyed, I couldn't leave. I didn't know anyone else who could help me out of this.

Why was she being so uncaring? Perhaps she was having the same thoughts as I was: It could have been her. It should have been her. After all, I played first flute in the all-city and high school orchestras. She couldn't even read music. I was a ballet dancer and junior teacher for my dance school, someone young girls looked up to. I might study dance in Chicago one day. She didn't have any talents or activities, except our "social clubs," which were actually just snobby high school Greek sororities. I was on track to go to medical school; Carole only wanted to get married to her boyfriend. I went to church a lot more than she did. I was so much more pure and good. I was a nice girl — a really nice, good girl.

A tense, high-pitched laugh suddenly escaped from Carole from her nervousness or from seeing me near hysteria. I was shaking all over, from the cold rain, the fright. She laughed until she cried, and then I cried too.

I wanted to ask her, "Well, do you and Bill do it?"

I thought they did; rumors were around. I was pretty sure Julie and her boyfriend did it too. No one ever asked, but what did they do out there together and alone so many nights? Where did they go? Rich and I never saw them when we were out.

Though close friends, my girlfriends and I never actually talked about sex because we didn't have the knowledge or know — more than vaguely — what "it" was.

Carole begged me to tell her what all had happened that night. I tried to explain more, but sadly, any further words about it became so tightly lodged in my throat that I couldn't speak them for many more years to come.

The Big Night

Until that prom night, my life had been that of a typical innocent, teenage girl in the late 1950s and early '60s. I was a junior in high school, had above-average grades, and spent time doing things with my many friends. I played the flute, cello, and piano, and I was a ballet dancer. I went to school dances and rode with friends in cars as, one by one, we eagerly passed our driver's tests and abruptly entered the world of independent teenagers riding in fast cars with boys. My parents were stable. They had good middle-class jobs, my mother being a junior high school English teacher and my father a midlevel manager at Allis Chalmers, a farm equipment manufacturer.

My unruly, naturally curly hair drove me crazy, and I worried that I might weigh five pounds too much, although I had never even hit one hundred pounds. We were good Methodists and the family went to church together, although my father was occasionally irreverent toward my mother's rather excessive piety. Manners were important, being a lady was important, and we didn't wear white clothing after Labor Day. Our house was a small bungalow in an average neighborhood. We were squarely in the middle class, a product of the "I Like Ike" era of happy parents who had survived the Great Depression, then the war, and finally were ready to marry and settle down to a life of two-week family vacations every summer and raising well-behaved children.

My friends and I went to the best high school in town, cheered our sports teams at Friday night games, and dutifully did our homework while we talked and giggled on our Princess phones in our bedrooms at night. We spent long hours planning parties and dances and car washes for our clubs and high school sororities.

Junior prom was coming up, and much of the excitement for girls revolved around choosing our dresses. Two weeks before the date, another friend, Nancy, and I rode the bus to St. Louis to shop for ours.

"Oooh, how do you like this one? I love the velvet spaghetti straps, don't you?" I said excitedly. I watched myself twirling in the mirror as the full, chiffon skirt swung gracefully around my hips and legs. "Let me see what you've got on; come on out and model it for me!"

Nancy replied from her dressing room, "Wait till you see this one! Turquoise! It fits me great!"

Junior prom would be by far the biggest, most exciting dance either of us had ever been to. It was rumored to be better than senior prom since there was some sadness associated with that event; friendships and high school life would be ending soon, everyone drifting off into other places and new lives. But not now, not for juniors. This was a time only for fun for the Springfield, Illinois, High School class of 1962.

I chose the innocent-looking, calf-length, white dress with velvet straps. Nancy bought a long, pink gown with a short jacket over the shoulders. We traveled to different departments within the store to find elbow-length, white gloves with buttons at the wrist and dyed-to-match satin pumps for each dress.

Back at home, I carefully took the dress and layers of tissue paper out of the box and arranged the dress with matching accessories on my bed, excited to show my mother. I clenched my hands and waited. She smiled and then nodded. She liked it. Relieved, I hung everything up and packed the shoes into a bag so they wouldn't be soiled.

Rich, my first steady boyfriend was my prom date. He had graduated from a different high school three years earlier and was already a part-time student at the community college. At twenty, he was more mature — and much more polite — than any boy I had previously dated, which wasn't many. He came on to me fast and strong, sweeping me off my feet before I knew what had hit me and turning on charm that was difficult to resist. On our second date, he whispered in my ear, "I've never felt like this about a girl before," very flattering talk from an older college boy who was so much more experienced than I.

Rich's family lived on Lake Springfield, the most exclusive part of town. To describe his home as a "house" was actually not accurate; it was a mansion in every sense of the word. To reach it, visitors drove down a long, winding driveway edged with flowering shrubs, past a four-car carriage house where Rich kept his shiny, new MG sports car, and came to rest in a large gravel circle near the front doors of the Tudor-style mansion. The main house contained five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, various sitting and living rooms, and a dining room where at least sixteen people could be seated and served comfortably.

On the backside of the house, a large, green lawn sloped gently down to the lake where a sleek, wooden Chris Craft motorboat was docked in the sparkling water, next to a two-bay boathouse. On the right side of the expansive lawn, a narrow gravel path, bordered with flowers, curved slightly to the right and led down to a smaller lakeside cottage his family called the summerhouse.

The comfortable screened cottage, complete with a small kitchenette and bath, was furnished with casual couches draped with soft, pastel beach blankets. An expensive stereo stood on thin, little wooden legs next to stacks of recent 45 and 78 rpm records. Percy Faith's "Theme from a Summer Place" was the musical hit of the summer, and we played it over and over the afternoons we were there. Usually he picked me up after school, and we drove to his house now that the weather was warm, where we swam awhile, listened to music, maybe kissed a couple of times — nothing more — then drove back into town. It was a perfect place to while away carefree, warm spring days.

The entire house, the Hollywood-like setting, and Rich's expensive sports car presented me with a side of life so different from my family's middle-class existence that, of course, I couldn't help but be impressed. Sometimes I felt as if I was starring in a popular Sandra Dee movie like Gidget.

On prom night, Rich brought me an orchid for my corsage. An orchid! It lay delicately in a tiny glass vase in a droplet of water to keep it fresh, waiting to be pinned to my shoulder. No girl at my high school had ever received an orchid corsage, I was sure. Rich was smartly dressed in a new suit and narrow tie, the sweet scent of Old Spice on his cheeks and down his neck.

He opened the passenger door into his gleaming new black MG, canvas convertible top down, and leather seats lovingly polished. He gently took my gloved hand as I stepped in. My smiling parents waved from the doorway.

The hall at the Illinois State Fairgrounds had been transformed into a spring wonderland of artificial flowers and yellow, tulle bows for the prom. A live band played hit songs like "Dedicated to the One I Love" as we entered. I quickly scanned the crowd to find my clique of friends, and we joined them as I glanced sideways at the other girls' dresses. Was mine as pretty as theirs? Did my hair look okay?