Fern surrendered to the Home. It was a machine that took in wayward girls and put out adoptable babies, and it operated according to one principle: a strict schedule disciplined lazy minds.
At six every morning, Mrs. Deckle walked the upstairs halls, ringing her bell, and the girls had thirty minutes to get downstairs for breakfast. After breakfast, everyone worked (except Rose, who was on strike, and Iris, whose parents told everyone she’d been hired as a lifeguard in Daytona Beach so she had to sit out back and work on her tan). Work meant that instead of their parents paying $3.73 a day for room and board, they got it for free.
Girls altered donated maternity clothes, stitched curtains, and patched sheets. Girls worked in the kitchen with Hagar. Girls cleaned. Fern had never cleaned like this before. They mopped the Cong until the linoleum shone, vacuumed the halls until the carpets fluffed, and once a week they polished the Wellwood family silver. All morning long, as the fans spun, the house crawled with an army of pregnant Cinderellas, scrubbing and wiping and washing and dusting until there wasn’t a single dead waterbug lying on its back or a speck of dust to be seen. As Miss Wellwood reminded them, “These are the skills you will need to maintain happy marriages and homes of your own one day.”
Miriam supervised the cleaning. She was Hagar’s sister, and while they looked identical—short and solid with midnight skin, square jaws, strong noses—no one would ever confuse them. Miriam was soft where Hagar was hard. She smiled where Hagar frowned. Hagar went through the day barking an endless litany of abuse, threats, and, if she was in a good mood, stories about girls killed in freak accidents, by rare diseases, or by their men. Miriam barely spoke, and when she did it was in a whisper so low only her sister understood her. Hagar corrected the girls with snarls, while Miriam guided them with small shakes of her head, adjusting a broom here, bending a wrist there, her big hands fluttering over them like hummingbirds.
At noon they ate lunch. Meals were vital to the well-being and development of their babies. According to Dr. Vincent, inadequate diets would cause spontaneous miscarriage, premature birth, and lifelong abnormalities such as idiocy and epilepsy.
They had liver once a week, and no less than four glasses of milk every day. By the end of the first week, Fern was ready to moo. Two eggs a day were obligatory for girls not on restriction, and vegetables were mandatory. Girls were allowed to gain no more than seventeen and a half pounds throughout their pregnancies. If they started to tip the scales, they went on restriction.
Salads were always on the table: hot dog salad, tuna mushroom salad, cooked cabbage salad with a can of Campbell’s cheddar cheese soup poured on top, which made the girls gassy. The only one who shoveled it all down without complaint was Holly. Vital proteins arrived in the form of salmon custard pies and boiled ham dressed with a blend of applesauce and Tang. Honestly, it didn’t matter: everything tasted the same without salt.
After lunch, there was a half-hour nap to allow for quiet digestion, and then, with Mrs. Conradi out until September, the afternoons were filled with lectures. Miss Wellwood offered instruction on beauty culture and personal grooming and talks on etiquette and figure control. Laurel, who had been a secretary, taught interested girls touch typing.
Some days a Board of Education teacher came and lectured them on home economics and fire safety; other days Diane delivered talks with titles like “My Baby and Me: Hello and Goodbye” and “Changing What I Don’t Like about Myself.” Often she would give them an update about Ivy, one of the girls who had come through Wellwood House and, tragically, decided to keep her baby.
“I heard from Ivy again,” Diane would say, holding up a letter. “I’d like to tell you things have gotten easier for her, but life isn’t easy for a single woman with an illegitimate child. Her little boy came home from the playground last week and do you know what he asked? ‘Mommy, what’s a bastard?’ Can you imagine having to explain that word to your child?”
Fern felt profoundly grateful she wouldn’t have to deal with Ivy’s problems.
“Man, you’re so far gone,” Rose said later, lounging on a beanbag in the Cong. “She holds up the same letter every time. Ivy isn’t real. She’s an Establishment lie to brainwash us into obedience. Like Betty Crocker.”
“Blast off, hippie,” Briony said. “You don’t have all the answers.”
“I’ve got more answers in my little finger than you’ve had in your entire life,” Rose said.
“Betty Crocker isn’t real?” Daisy wailed.
Diane reminded them that they had nothing to offer their babies except unstable homes and poor parenting. Their high schools would automatically suspend them for having babies out of wedlock. Without diplomas, they’d never find jobs that would let them support a child. They’d have to live at home, their babies eating up their parents’ savings, leaving nothing but poverty and resentment behind.
But there was an answer.
“Do you really love the baby?” Diane asked, and of course they did because every mother loved her baby. “Then don’t you think giving the baby all the advantages you can’t—a loving home, a healthy life, a stable family—is the best way to show your love? Surrendering the baby to a couple who loves them is the best thing you can do. But of course, it’s your choice.”
Eventually, however, the lectures ran out and there were still hours to go before dinner. Girls had their appointments with Diane, girls were called out to the clinic (which everyone called the Barn because that’s where they used to get your milk out before you could go home), some girls wrote letters, a few girls called their mothers, but mostly they did jigsaw puzzles, played Go Fish, played Hearts, sewed layettes, did anything to make the clock tick faster.
“I never thought I’d miss school,” Flora said.
Briony led reducing classes in the Cong. Jasmine came to their room and stared at Rose’s lava lamp for hours. Clem styled and set the hair of any girl who slowed down from a fast walk.
“I’m getting my cosmetologist’s license,” she told them, cigarette dangling from her lower lip while she worked, its ash somehow never falling. “That’s harder than law school. An esthetician has to know finger waving, back-combing, roller formations, comb-outs, cross-combing, skip waving, and shingling. All a lawyer does is say ‘Your Honor’ and sue people.”
At five thirty sharp Mrs. Deckle covered her typewriter and put the knob back on the TV. She left the Home promptly at six when dinner was served. Miss Wellwood ate with the girls and led them in morally instructive conversation; then she had coffee in her office, went home at seven thirty, and the whole house unclenched. Girls stopped trooping out to the Smoke Shack, opened the windows in the Cong, and smoked while they watched TV. At ten p.m., Nurse sent them to bed. Then they woke up the next morning and did it all over again. Five days a week, except Saturday, which was Laundry Day, and Sunday, when they got to sleep in an extra half hour and Reverend Fellowes came and led them in Bible study.
And all day long, while they marched through their schedule, they talked. For their own good, they weren’t supposed to talk about their PFs (putative fathers), or home, or school, so instead they debated what was for dinner (tuna loaf), whether the hippies everyone said were living in the woods would kill them all in their sleep (probably), or when they’d be allowed ice cream again (never). They recounted the entire stories of their second-favorite episodes of their third-favorite TV shows. They talked about the Beatles and whether Paul was selfish to leave or whether they broke up because of Yoko, and what was the big hairy deal with Yoko anyway?
And in between Laurel’s descriptions of how her effective telephone technique and visual poise made her an ideal secretary, and Rose’s lectures on The Global Struggle against American Imperialism, Fern learned to tell them apart.
Tansy had been a ballerina but when she turned thirteen she had a growth spurt sideways instead of up and quit ballet to become a cha-cha champ. At night in the Cong, she’d catch the Big Ape out of Jacksonville on Jasmine’s transistor radio and make girls cha-cha with her, belly bumping against belly. Her parents told people she was taking care of a sick aunt in Miami.
Jasmine’s trip was astrology. She knew all about the secrets of the pyramids, the Bermuda Triangle, and the I Ching. Sometimes she’d burst into tears contemplating the loneliness of Bigfoot. She didn’t wear deodorant because of her orgone field and thought society overvalued sun signs. Her parents told everyone she was working as a counselor at her aunt’s Bible camp.
Iris wore pink frosted lip gloss and whenever she wasn’t tanning she drew pictures. She was pretty good at turtles and fish, but she cried a lot, especially after she got a letter from home, or when Daisy beat her at Go Fish, or when that Mutual of Omaha commercial came on TV.
Daisy was getting a puppy when she went home, and she let Clem give her a different hairstyle almost every week. So far, she’d had swoop bangs, a bouffant, a semi-bouffant, a flat-crown flip, a beehive, and a satellite. Her parents told people she was helping take care of a sick aunt in Nashville.
Flora was a champion baton twirler and captain of her school’s color guard. Her parents had to dig up their entire front yard after someone wrote yor daugter is pregont on it in weed killer. She was supposed to be taking care of a blind aunt in Virginia.
Myrtle had memorized the TV schedule and knew every actor on every show. She loved to read old issues of TV Guide and had shown up at the Home with a black eye and a split lip because her dad flipped when her mom gave him the bad news, which was completely unfair because she swore she wasn’t pregnant anyway. She was supposed to be visiting her aunt in Newport News.
Laurel was a Scorpio, pregnant with her boss’s baby. He was married and Laurel wrote him a letter once a week but he never wrote back. She was desperate to get home because she didn’t like the looks of his temporary secretary.
“She lacks deportment and charm,” Laurel said. “But he has a weakness for brunettes.”
Briony claimed she didn’t have a PF, she had a fiancé, and they were getting married in December. At night in the Cong she sewed hankies with their entwined initials embroidered in the corners as wedding favors so her guests could remember her special day every time they blew their noses. Their initials were SU and TA, which Rose claimed stood for Stuck Up and Tight Ass, which hacked Briony off and kind of proved Rose’s point. Her parents told people she was staying with an aunt in Montreal to improve her French.
Fern figured that if a pregnant girl didn’t have any aunts she was up the creek.
Holly didn’t talk so no one knew anything about her except she was fourteen, she looked eleven, and she was a mental defective.
“Her parents will probably wind up sending her to the state hospital one day,” Laurel told them because she’d overheard Dr. Vincent discussing Holly while she was helping Mrs. Deckle file.
Fern could barely put away half her meals, but Holly ate like a starving prisoner. She didn’t brush her teeth or hair, and she always had dirty fingernails. Clem made the mistake of trying to comb out her hair one night, and Holly bit her on the hand. Hard.
“That’s the last time I try to do anything nice for another human being,” Clem said, rubbing the bite mark.
Everyone looked at Holly, who’d retreated to a beanbag chair on the far side of the Cong, hugging Precious Pup against her bulging stomach.
“Who’d knock up a basket case, anyway?” Iris asked, eyes already shimmering. “You’d have to be a real sicko to do a thing like that.”
Holly’s grubby funk reminded Fern of Midge, and the thought of her little sister in a place like this horrified her. So one night she got out her brush and sat on Holly’s bed.
“Why don’t you let me brush your hair, Holly?” she said. “I promise it won’t hurt.”
Holly held perfectly still as Fern slowly moved the brush toward her rat’s nest of blond hair. She stared at Fern through her birthmark as the brush got closer and closer and suddenly Holly’s head darted out, mouth wide, teeth flashing, and Fern yelped, yanking her hand back, dropping the brush. It clattered across the floor.
“Right on,” Rose cheered from her bed. “Don’t let them bring you down, Holly.”
She flashed her a peace sign, and Holly flashed one back, grinning.
“I’m just trying to help,” Fern said.
“Yeah,” Rose said. “That’s probably what Christopher Columbus said to the Indians.”
Fern thought that was a pretty unsophisticated view of the situation. The next day she went to Diane.
“Should she even be here?” she asked. “I mean, shouldn’t she see a special doctor or something?”
“Don’t you worry about Holly,” Diane said. “She’s one of the lucky ones. The minister at her church is adopting her baby. Holly’ll be just fine. Fern needs to worry about Fern.”
Fern was amazed at how quickly the outside world disappeared. Newspapers weren’t allowed because the wedding and birth announcements upset the girls, and the nightly news was always over by the time they switched on the TV. From what she caught on the radio, Fern got the impression that nothing outside had changed: death toll still going up in Vietnam, Communist agitators still stirring up student unrest at home, cities still falling apart.
One afternoon, desperate for something to do, tired of staring at Rose’s lava lamp, tired of feeling the baby punch her in the bladder, Fern dragged herself to the Cong, hoping some new books had materialized—all they had on the shelves were a 1963 set of World Book Encyclopedias that ended with J-K-L and four Reader’s Digest condensed classics. She’d read them all her first week.
They were still there, staring at her. Nothing new had materialized beside them, so she wandered over to the sofa where Flora lay on her back while Jasmine held a garnet necklace over her mountainous stomach. Daisy watched them, the B volume of the encyclopedia forgotten on the floor beside her. She’d been looking at pictures of beagles again.
“It’ll swing side to side if it’s a boy,” Jasmine said. “But it’ll go in a circle if it’s a girl.”
The girls all stared at Jasmine’s necklace, willing it to do something.
“That’s goofy,” Myrtle said from her jigsaw puzzle on the other side of the Cong. “The only way to know if you’re having a boy or a girl is if you have morning sickness.”
“What do you know about babies,” Daisy said. “You’re not even having one.”
“Hagar told me,” Myrtle said. “She knows all about babies. She’s delivered a whole bunch of them. She’s like a baby doctor for colored people.”
“Everyone knows it’s the position you’re in when you make the baby that turns it into a boy or a girl,” Flora said.
Daisy cracked up at that.
“Hush,” Jasmine said, focusing on her garnet. “You have to be serious if this is going to work.”
“I’m having a girl,” Rose said from the other side of the Cong, eyes closed, sitting on a cushion in a patch of sunlight. “Her name’s Blossom.”
“You’re not supposed to name it, stupid,” Briony said from the bridge table, drawing her needle through yet another hankie. “That makes it harder to give away.”
“I’m not giving her away,” Rose said.
Everyone stopped. Jasmine and Flora and Daisy stared at her, necklace forgotten. Myrtle stared at her. Fern stared at her. Even Briony lowered her sewing and stared.
“They won’t let you do that,” she said.
“I haven’t signed anything,” Rose said, without opening her eyes, fully aware she had the room’s attention.
“Your parents are going to flip,” Flora said.
“We’re going to live on a farm,” Rose continued, her voice certain. “Far away from cities, and shopping centers, and roads. We’ll live where no one can find us, and we’ll take our baths under a waterfall, and raise all kinds of animals, and get all the food we need from chickens and goats.”
“What do you get from goats?” Daisy asked.
“Goat cheese,” Rose said. “It’s got all the vitamins babies need. My daughter won’t get her vitamins from pills.”
“No man is going to marry a woman who’s raising someone else’s child,” Briony said.
“I’m not getting married,” Rose said. “It’ll just be Blossom and me.”
“And the goats,” Daisy said, caught up in the vision.
“No one’ll tell us what to do,” Rose said. “We won’t have a telephone or TV. At night, we’ll lie in the field and I’ll teach her all the names of the stars. People in the cities’ll choke to death on pollution and kill each other in the streets, but me and Blossom will breathe fresh air, and bake our own bread, and be free.”
No one said a word. They’d been told over and over that all they could do was ruin their babies’ lives. But on that long, hot, empty afternoon, they tasted what it would be like to see their babies, to hold them, to smell them, and it felt so real, and so true, that for a moment they felt like what they were, they felt like mothers, and it stunned them into silence.
At night, it got country quiet after ten o’clock and all Fern could hear was the blood pulsing in her ears and the ticking of Miss Wellwood’s grandfather clock downstairs. She could hear its gears grinding away, slicing off seconds of their lives until it chimed twelve, marking the end of another day in Wellwood House. Eighty-five days until she got rid of the baby. Eighty-five days until she went downtown. Ninety-five days until she went home.
Their bodies reshaped themselves with each passing minute, their bellies becoming bloody cauldrons brewing babies—dendrites blossoming like slow-motion fireworks, cells filling with triacylglycerols, placentas filtering oxygen from red blood cells. All of it happening in the dark, hidden away inside them.
The girls survived their mutating bodies as best they could. Myrtle was constipated, even though she claimed she was having one of those “hilarious pregnancies.” Clementine was ravenous for butter. Holly itched constantly. And Fern had to get up from the table at least once every meal to pee. She floated through each day in a fog because the baby never let her sleep. She’d think she’d finally found a good position and her body would get heavy and start to fall backward into the dark, then the baby would wedge itself under her rib cage or step on her bladder and she’d have to get up and walk to the bathroom and pee.
She was so bored of having to pee.
Kids in New York and Chicago were burning their draft cards and marching against the war. Kids in Ohio were getting shot by the National Guard. Kids in Los Angeles were breaking into houses and killing everybody they found. But here girls stared at the TV, and cleaned, and ate nut loaf, and sewed layettes, and marched to the bathroom.
They did jigsaw puzzles in the Cong and when they snapped the final piece into place they looked at it for a second, then swept all the pieces back in the box for the girls who’d come next. They popped vitamin pills, and went on caloric restriction, and got weighed in, and went hungry, and traded bippies for foot rubs, and rubbed witch hazel into their sunburns, and the fans kept spinning, and they kept lining up in alphabetical order three times a day for meals, and bippy by bippy, mail call by mail call, rerun by rerun, they counted down the days until they could finally go home.