“I’m going to do it,” I tell Alice when we arrive at my locker.
She nods, tight-lipped. “When?”
“This morning, I guess. Now. Why not? I haven’t eaten anything yet today.”
“Are you sure you feel up to it?”
“I’m okay. I need a bottle.” I glance around as if there might be one lying in the hall.
She opens her lunch bag and extracts a jam jar filled with mashed potatoes. “Here,” she says in a low voice. “Empty it in the washroom. Clean it really well with soap and then rinse away every last smidgen of the soap with hot water and then dry it with a paper towel. It should be as sterile and dry as possible. If I were you, I’d wait until after the bell. You don’t want anyone seeing.”
I take the jar. Again, she has astonished me. I feel like a novice spy being briefed by the head of the agency.
“Oh, God,” I say. “What if I’m pregnant?”
“Not so loud!”
“I’ll have to have an abortion. I’ll have to go to that Dr. Jekyll guy in Buffalo.” According to Nola MacDougall, a girl in my home-room class whose cousin has been pregnant at least twice, there’s a mad-scientist doctor in Buffalo who will give you an abortion for next to nothing because he needs fetuses for his experiments.
‘You won’t have to do any such thing,” Alice says, close to anger. “Don’t think that way. All you have to think about right now is scouring that jar, doing your business in it and taking it to the drug store. Okay, how much money do you have?”
I dig through my purse and find my wallet. Five dollars and fifty-five cents.
“That might not be enough.” She snaps open her purse, removes her wallet, unzips a pocket behind the empty credit-card section and withdraws a folded ten-dollar bill. “Take it. No, take it. Just in case. You can pay me back later. I’ll go to the office and tell them you were feeling poorly and went home.”
Only now, at the prospect of deception, do her cheeks redden.
“I’ll tell them,” I offer.
“No, no, no. They’ll phone your house and ask Mrs. Carver to come pick you up. Oh, gosh, I hope they believe me and don’t phone anyway. But it’s true, isn’t it? You are feeling poorly.” She squares her shoulders. “Well, I’ll just have to make them believe me, that’s all there is to it.”
Parker’s Drug Store is in a plaza about a half mile north of the school, behind a block of high-rise apartments. Walking there, I start fretting about the jam jar tipping and leaking all over my purse. I take it out, wrap it in Kleenex and hold it in my hand. If I’m pregnant what will they find in the urine? I imagine some kind of marine life, not sperm but a corrupt offshoot. For my seventh birthday my mother bought me a goldfish that I called Judy Garland and carried from the store in a clear plastic bag. I am now reminded of this. We had Judy Garland only a couple of weeks before she slipped down the drain while my mother was cleaning the bowl. “She’ll be happier in the sewers,” my mother said. “Who wants to live in a goldfish bowl anyway?”
“A goldfish,” I sobbed.
“Judy Garland was going round the bend,” my mother said.
My mother’s name—Grace Hahn—is the one I give to the pharmacist.
“Telephone number?” he says.
“Oh, I’ll wait.”
The pharmacist (Mr. Parker?) looks like Liberace. It’s hardly reassuring that the verdict should be left in the hands of a liver-spotted old man wearing a rust-coloured toupée and lipstick. Or am I hallucinating? He slaps a label on the jam jar. “Two hours.”
“I’d like the quick service, if that’s all right.”
“Two hours is the quick service.”
I wait in a donut shop across the road from the plaza. I order a Coke float but can’t drink it because my stomach is still queasy. “Please God,” I pray, although I’m no longer sure what it is I want. To be pregnant is an event, a crisis. It is either a trip to Buffalo or Abel and me living together. Not to be pregnant is going back to my empty life before the summer, emptier for containing no hope and no boy, not even Tim Todd.
The waitress has a sympathetic, motherly manner. She calls me sweetie. Maybe she know’s why I’m here, maybe this is where all the pregnancy-test girls wait out their two hours. There is a Miss Chatelaine magazine on the counter, and I leaf through it, page after page of beautiful, happy, unpregnant models. I try to read an article called “Looking Super on a Shoe String” but keep getting distracted by the architecture of the letters, the needless dots above the i’s and j’s, the gaping c’s and u’s, the alien, insolent z’s and all the words in this article that start with z: zingy, zip, zest. When the two hours are up I return to the drug store, certain that the worst is going to happen. Except I still don’t know what the worst is.
The pharmacist says nothing, just hands me a receipt with “Positive” written across it.
I expel a relieved breath. So it must be that I don’t want a baby after all. “Thank you,” I say.
“Positive,” he says,“means you’re pregnant.”
“Pardon?”
‘You’re pregnant.”
For a moment, owing to his toupée and unnaturally red lips, I think he’s toying with me. “But positive—”
“Means you’re pregnant.”
“Are you … Is it ever wrong?”
His hound-dog eyes look me up and down. “Not when it’s positive.”
A moment later, made weak in the knees by a boy at the cash register who, from the back anyway, could be Abel, I decide to go to Vancouver and tell him. Spring it on him, face to face. If I’ve somehow scared him away, then my belly—I push it out and already it seems enormous—then this should scare him back.
I leave the plaza almost happy. I’m going to see Abel. My earlier misgivings (he’ll marry me only out of duty, I’ll be stuck in his basement) I don’t revive. I picture Mrs. Richter cooing at the bundle in her arms. I picture Abel playing Brahms’ lullaby on the piano. I even picture giving birth, insofar as I envision thrashing my head on a white pillow while Abel paces in an adjoining room. I’ll have to quit school, of course. The thought exhilarates me. Goodbye, Maureen Hellier and her cohorts. Adios, chemistry, geography.
Since it’s too early to go home, I head for Matas Parkette. The back of the bench I sit on is so scored with initials and hearts it’s like grille work. When Abel and I were kids I wanted him to carve our initials into the magnolia behind his house, but he wouldn’t take a knife to a tree. I feel heartened, remembering this. Light funnels along the grass, and everywhere black squirrels—the lucky kind—leap like frogs, and this also gives me hope.
I devise my travel plans.
The money should be no problem. In my bank account I have over two thousand dollars, more than half of it deposited by my father for my university education. Provided I can reserve a seat on the Saturday-morning flight, which is the one Abel recommended back when we were talking about my visiting him at Christmas, I’ll arrive around nine in the morning Vancouver time, before he has left the house. I’ll phone from the airport and have him pick me up. No, I’d better take a taxi—Mr. Richter might already be out somewhere in the car. We’ll spend Saturday together, and part of Sunday. What will I tell my father? Oh, anything. Some story about going to visit the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa with my civics class. Such an outing is, in fact, scheduled for the spring. He’ll be all for it. I’ll say I can save money on the chartered bus to the airport if he gives me a lift.
At the milk store in Matas Plaza I change a quarter for two dimes and a nickel and then use the pay phone outside the restaurant. A few quick calls and I’ve made my flight reservations. Next, I go to my bank, two doors down, and without raising an eyebrow the teller hands me, me—a strung-out-looking hippy girl—seven hundred and fifty dollars in ten-and twenty-dollar denominations. Mrs. Carver would say I have the black squirrels to thank. Maybe so. But I also feel that everything going so smoothly is a sign I’m on the right track. Less than four days from now I’ll be with Abel. He’ll put a hand on my belly.
“A little you in there,” I’ll say. I’m already sure it’s a boy.