You live in a small town in the middle of America. You grew up in the Baptist church, a thrummy, hummy sort of place, where the preacher rocks up and down on his heels and picks his way through each sermon in nuanced cadences, pushing shopping carts full of enunciated twelve-dollar words through motifs and metaphors that wind their way through the hills and dales of the gospel. He has the power of the Holy Spirit. Parishioners come in calm and leave all revved up. You develop receptor sites for the Word of Jesus, you see Him everywhere, in a beautiful sunrise, in a baby’s first smile, in the cute little rabbits that frolic across the garden in the spring. There is no place in your world for doubt or fellowship with anyone outside the church, including an eighteen-year-old college boy named Jed. However, he offers to retrieve some punch for you at a church dance. It’s all very safe, and the two of you chitchat about nothing more threatening than the unseasonably chilly weather and an unusually large unkindness of ravens hunkered down unblinking on the huge centuries-old live oak behind the church. When the two of you dance, Jed keeps you at arm’s length under the watchful eyes of the chaperone. You are almost sixteen.
Jed sweet talks his way into taking you on a double date to the movies with the preacher’s son and his best girl Audrey. He picks you up at home and impresses both of your parents with his respectful manners and handsome good looks. You arrive at the theater, where a popular tearjerker is playing. As soon as the lights go down you see out of the corner of your eye that Dale and Audrey are necking, his hands roaming under her innocent chiffon blouse with the modified pouf sleeves and the little pink tie. Jed gives you a meaningful look and nods in their direction as if to say, “See, that’s how it’s done,” then starts unbuttoning your blouse. You have no idea what to do, so you let him, while pretending to watch the screen. If the preacher’s son is doing it with another girl, it must be okay. You’re nervous, although Jed seems to know what he’s doing.
But, of course, it doesn’t stop there, and the next time you go out you are on your own because Dale and Audrey are mysteriously “busy” that night and have backed out at the last minute. Jed knows a nice place you can go that turns out to be in the middle of nowhere, and that’s where you get pregnant. For five months you aren’t sure because you tend to be irregular, but by the sixth month you confide in your best friend, Vernice. There’s no such thing as a pregnancy test yet. Vernice tells her mother, who tells your mother.
Your family prays about what to do. Of course, your parents both have their own secrets. For example, your mother gobbles downers to get past the fact that your father, her husband, fools around with his secretary when he goes out of town for conferences. These conferences seem to come up more and more frequently. It’s not that your father loves his secretary; it’s that she’s everything your mother is not. She is young and has green eyes he could dive into if they were pools, and chestnut hair she wears in a modified pageboy that reminds him of the seventh-grade teacher he had a crush on all through junior high. She has big firm breasts that she shows off with tight sweaters and cinched belts. Your father thinks that your mother has “let herself go.” Your younger brother might also be cause for concern, if either of your parents paid any attention. Only you know that he’s not interested in girls. What’s wrong with me? he asks you plaintively.
When your mother’s prayers—that your troubles, and hers, will magically disappear—go unanswered, she consults your grandmother, Arletta, via an expensive long-distance call for advice. Arletta, who is sixty and still plows her own fields with a team of oxen, knows exactly what to do and has your mother send you out of town to a home for wayward girls—or, as they tell the ladies at church, to a “summer drama camp.”
At the Home of the Unified Perfection Church, the staff acts well- meaning, but they clearly have nothing but disdain. They don’t give you much to do except meaningless craft projects. You’re anxious and you want to talk to someone, but you’re not supposed to speak to any of the other girls or tell anyone your last name, to protect your family back home. When you peek into the staff office as you walk by, you can see folders with first names and numbers on them. It’s clear from the way they treat you that the staff is simply biding time with each of you. You have been labeled a “bad” girl, and that label will follow you in life, long after you leave this place.
You may not have been scared at the Home of the Unified Perfection Church when you first came, but by the time you are ready to deliver you will be good and scared. Your parents called you a slut when they found out and then disowned you, and now you have nowhere to go once the baby is born. You desperately want to keep your baby, but are now being told you can’t, that a loving Christian family has already been chosen and there is no turning back, because they’re expecting to be a family and they cannot be disappointed.
Every Sunday a pastor visits to talk about Life Eternal. Now, Eternal Life is predicated not only on what God we serve—he intones to all you assembled girls in various stages of girth—but on what religion we choose at the end of the day. All truth is specific.
You allow yourself to take stock of who is left and who has disappeared. Did Valerie No. 3 give birth already? She didn’t look that large. What about Karen No. 8? You heard the staff talking about her in hushed tones after she had been moaning all day in her bed. At first, they dismiss her pain as “a cry for attention” and “nothing to worry about,” telling all of you to go about your business and stop being busybodies. But when the moaning gets louder and more urgent, when Karen No. 8 starts screaming incoherently and seems to be bleeding and a doctor finally arrives, when they set up a screen around her bed and finally whisk her away in a gurney to what you hope is an ambulance, you all put your hands on your bellies as if reassuring yourselves that it won’t happen to you, that your baby is safe at least for now, if only because someone has paid good money to ensure that nothing will happen to this precious cargo.
The pastor continues. Why did Juliet kill herself after Romeo died? That’s called English class, and it’s open to interpretation, he cantillates. But whereas the study of English is broad, the subject of math is narrow: 2+2 equals 4. The only answer to the question that I asked is 4. It’s not 5, it’s not 6, it’s not 7. I’m here to tell you that Christianity, like math, is the truth. And truth is narrow. All roads do not lead to the truth, he insists, and all religions do not lead to Heaven. Everybody has the right to believe in what they want to believe in, but everybody’s belief isn’t going to get them to Heaven. Their path to God is not the same as our path to God. Our path to God is a one-way street. Jesus says, I am the Way, the Truth and the Light. No man comes to the Truth unless he comes through Me. You only get to God through Jesus. Am I right, young ladies?
The room starts to spin. The pastor looks at you, and you feel your skin crawl. Of course, he must be right, because if he’s not, why have you ended up in a place like this? He tells all of you: You can be sincere, you can be nice, you can be warm, you can even cry, but if you come to God through any other means, you will not be blessed, and your children will not be blessed.
Some of you start to cry then, as if on cue. The sound of snuffling and sniffling is like a Greek chorus of affirmation to what the pastor is by now almost shouting.
And, if you are worshipping the right God the wrong way, it is still not good enough. You can come in here right now and say, “Although I am a sinner, I deserve to be blessed. I deserve to be blessed because I’m sincere. I deserve to be blessed because I’m nice. I deserve to be blessed because I helped my neighbor the other day. I deserve to be blessed because my parents made ample amends for the behavior that drove me here.” But ladies—and here he looks around at all of you, and you feel better that he calls you “ladies,” not what the staff call you when they’re talking behind your back—ladies, we are saved through faith. God blesses us because we come to him through faith and through grace. We do not wish for your hapless babes not to be blessed, do we?
Now the Greek chorus is louder, with nose blowing and sobbing and around of Amens. You are now eight months pregnant, by your count. It’s getting harder to walk. The donated clothes are not fitting too well, and they hang on you like a blanket of shame.
You wonder what Jed thinks about your sudden absence. You wonder if you meant anything at all to him. Once your parents made the decision to ship you off, they wouldn’t let you call him, they just surprised you with two packed suitcases and a taxicab. There was no time to let anyone know. When you arrived at the Home of the Unified Perfection Church, you were forced to sign a form that you willingly consented to the adoption of your baby, because the staff tells you that you will be charged with child endangerment if you do not. You signed, first because you have nowhere else to go, secondly because you think you still have plenty of time to make things right with your parents.
At the end of your eighth month, try as you might, you are stewing in your own juices, awash in a cocktail of nervous kidneys and clenched jaw, as useless as rubber lips on a woodpecker. You have no idea where those of you who are new mothers go, or what happens to the new babies. It becomes obvious to you now that you want to keep your baby. And yet, still, nobody from your family calls or visits. Nobody writes back to you. You wonder how you’ll manage as a sixteen-year-old unwed single mother with no skills and no resources. You think about calling Arletta. She’s a tough old bird, but since the true difference in age between her and your mother is exactly sixteen years, you have a feeling she might be more understanding than she lets on at first blush. You ask the staff if you can make a phone call, but the staff says no, none of the “guests” are allowed to use the phone.
One day while you’re making yet another red-and-yellow potholder, you start having contractions. The staff brings over a wheelchair right away so you don’t upset the others who aren’t as far along. They take you in a car to the hospital. You feel an urgency they don’t seem to feel. Over your protests they shush you and tell you to stop being such a baby. The irony of being a baby having a baby is not lost on you.
At the hospital a white-haired doctor snaps on some gloves as you’re changed into a gown. He’s humming a popular tune. He doesn’t seem to want to listen as you insist that your baby is being stolen from you. Still humming, he examines you. Three hours go by. Nurses come and go. Only one person from the Home’s staff stays with you, and she’s yawning in the corner and doesn’t bother to hide the fact that she’s bored and constantly looking at her watch. Your contractions start coming faster and faster. You scream, because now the contractions are more painful and they’re lasting a lot longer.
After fifteen hours, you give birth to a baby girl. The doctor—who has already gone home, had some sleep, and come back—is still humming the same tune, although you wonder if you’re not imagining things at this point, because surely that can’t be true. You think your little girl must be beautiful and perfect, but the nurses whisk her away without letting you see her. You notice that there’s a different staff member now. She tells you it’s better this way, for the baby to go straight to her new family. In a few days, you’ll go home, too, and you can put this whole thing behind you and get on with your life. You’re exhausted, hoarse, and covered in sweat.
You demand to see your baby, but you’re told that she’s gone already. Because you still insist, one of the nurses eventually wheels you over to the newborn nursery. You can see nine newborns there, five of them wearing pink caps. Which one? you ask the nurse. She says, I couldn’t tell you even if I knew.
Instead of going home to your parents, you call Arletta. She’s willing to help, but for the sake of peace in the family she arranges for you to stay with friends in another little town. You get a fresh start in the fall at a new high school and focus on your school work. Your grades are close to perfect. You have an after-school job as a waitress in the local diner to help pay rent to Arletta’s friends, who turn out to be a very nice and supportive older childless couple. Everyone here calls you “sweetie” or “honey,” and you feel like you’re getting more affection from this accidental second family than you ever got from your real family.
Boys no longer interest you, so sometimes they tease you about how square you are, about how you won’t put out. If they only knew, you think. You try not to let it get to you, and just study harder. In your senior year, your counselor pulls you aside and tells you there are several colleges where she thinks you should apply. In the spring, you’ve gotten into all of them, with full scholarships. You choose the one that’s furthest away from back home.
College flies by. You’re sad to hear via Arletta that your parents have kicked out your little brother, and then that they’ve divorced. You still haven’t spoken with them. You know that your mother drinks a lot, and that your father is on his third wife. Only Arletta and your new family come to your graduation. After college, you get a job, meet a nice man, get married, and have three sons. You never tell anyone about the little girl who was whisked away. In her memory you plant an apple tree in your backyard. In the spring you inhale the fragrance of its blossoms; in the fall you bake pies.
You tell yourself you’ve made peace with the past.
One early spring afternoon you are finishing up the dishes when outside your kitchen window you see two ravens perched on a low branch of your apple tree. You grab a sweater and walk outside, carefully, quietly, so as not to disturb them. Underneath the branch you see a small rabbit that doesn’t seem to be moving. It’s hard to tell if it’s dead or alive. You stand for a moment. You have thoughts to gather. There’s a song running through your head and you realize it’s the same one that was playing at that church dance where you met Jed, so many years ago. For just a few moments it’s you, the rabbit, the ravens and the song. For just a few moments, your heart is holding its breath.
Judith Cooper’s fiction and essays have appeared in the New Stories from the Midwest anthology, The Normal School, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Pleiades, and many other publications. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship, an Individual Artists Program (IAP) grant, and several other awards. She has been a fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hambidge, The Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Germany, Carraig-na-gcat in Ireland, and has had several residencies at Ragdale. She lives and works in Chicago.