Little Sacrifices (20 page)

It was over in a minute. I lay curled on my side holding my stomach and crying. My leg was wet. ‘May, please stop. I didn’t mean to make you cry. It always hurts at first. It’ll feel nice next time. I promise.’

My legs shook when I stood up to smooth my skirt. There was blood on Charlene’s bedspread. I didn’t know there’d be blood. No one mentioned that. ‘Clay.’

He followed my eyes. ‘You’d better get some wet towels.’

‘Me?’

‘Well, it’s your mess.’

I started to cry again.

‘Jesus Christ, will you stop carrying on like I tried to kill you or something! You’re acting like I forced myself on you. You wanted me to. You didn’t put up any fight.’

He was right. I wanted to. I hobbled with my knees together to the bathroom, sniveling as I went. There was blood all over my legs. I wiped at it until the skin was raw. I found my girdle in the towels and put it back on, wincing as I pulled it into place.

I went straight back downstairs without looking into Charlene’s room. Let him wonder where I went. In the ballroom, happiness parted company to let me past. The adults were all at least tipsy, and a lot of the kids too. I was so faded around the edges that no one noticed me. Charlene stood sentinel over her birthday cake with a jack–o–lantern smile and her two best friends beside her. Clay was laughing into Minty’s ear. He hadn’t waited upstairs after all. His eyes flicked over me without stopping, and the enormity of what happened punched me in the gut. I stepped outside and threw up in the Boyd’s flowerbeds. Shame made breathing hard. Or maybe it was just my girdle.

Duncan wasn’t due until eleven and as tempting as a walk home was, I didn’t dare risk having to make explanations. With everyone busy chewing their way through Charlene’s cake, the front porch was deserted. I rocked myself on the swing at the side, ticking away the long minutes.

At home I begged off tired, and ran upstairs to eyeball my dress for signs of foul play. The smears on the inside lining were already going rusty. I ground a washcloth into the fabric until it looked clean, but the taint would never really come out. I jammed my sweet sixteen dress in the back of the closet, so at least it was out of my sight, if not my conscience.

Chapter 29

The matter of Charlene’s bedspread was the hottest gossip in school by lunchtime on Monday. Her parents were understandably livid at the prospect of a deflowering in their daughter’s bed, and a full–scale witch hunt was underway by the day’s end. Everyone met at Duke’s to compare theories and be grippingly revolted, though the story got a little thin with the telling. To hear Charlene carry on, you’d have thought there’d been a bloody murder at the house.

Minty butted into the middle of her friend’s theatrics. ‘All right girls, it’s time to get to the bottom of things. Charlene, how many guests were there?’

 ‘
Minty,
I don’t appreciate you interrupting me. I was just telling–’

‘I’m sorry, Charlene, but surely everyone in the school knows the story by now.’ She lowered her voice and leaned close. ‘These kids are just looking for a thrill at your expense.’

Charlene was tetchy about being the object of anyone else’s gossip, as Minty well knew. ‘Fine then. Mother planned for ninety guests.’

‘Well we can forget about the adults. There’s no earthly chance that any of those ladies were virgins when they walked through your door. That leaves the girls.’ She looked pointedly at each of us.

Ceecee sat up straight and grinned. ‘You can count yourself out.’

Minty was about the only girl above suspicion, by virtue of the fact that she had no virtue left to speak of. She laughed. ‘Jealousy doesn’t wear well on you, Ceecee,’ she shrugged. ‘But I have to concede your point. So, May. Did you lose your virginity on Saturday night?’

My pulse jumped from my neck. ‘No!’ My face flushed as I tried to talk my heart out of kicking up an aneurism.

‘All right then. Ceecee?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Charlene, I won’t even ask you.’ Charlene’s lips puckered like a goldfish. ‘
Not
because it’s out of the realm of possibility, but given your reaction to the event I can deduce that you are not the culprit. So, that leaves, what, thirty girls to think about?’

‘Excuse me a minute. I’m bursting.’ My jellied legs carried me to the bathroom, where I tried to breathe away the panic rising in my throat. Saturday’s secret was heavy, but the consequences of losing my virginity alarmed me a good deal more than Charlene’s soiled bedclothes. I’d been sick since Saturday night and the more I thought about Clay, the more I threw up. Nerves, I told myself. I hoped so. Mirabelle’s predicament hugged my mind close, acquainting me first–hand with what Mirabelle’s diary couldn’t begin to convey. The combination of disappointing my parents and having to live with the consequences of a few unguarded minutes was almost physically crushing.

The girls had been busy while I was gone. I returned to the table amid their self–congratulations. They’d fingered their goat. The innocent’s name was June Wardor. Minty sparkled brighter than usual as she made her case. ‘Of course it makes sense, don’t you see it? They’ve been going steady for positively ever. You don’t remember seeing them most of the night, do you? Me either. And where is she? Has she talked to you today?’

Charlene admitted she hadn’t.

‘There you go.’

‘Shouldn’t we ask her?’ Ceecee was a good egg at heart.

Charlene’s voice was too shrill by half. ‘Ask her? We can’t ask her!’

‘Of course not. She’ll never admit it, not now that the whole school knows.’

‘Well then, how are we supposed to find out?’

Minty smiled. ‘Girls. It’s time we enlisted some help.’ She swiveled on her stool. ‘Clay?’

I’d done my best to ignore him when we walked in, but he was bothersome as a canker sore, uncomfortable even when he wasn’t visible. His smile slid off–kilter. ‘Yes, ladies?’

‘Clay, come here a minute.’ He couldn’t very well disobey Minty. No one could. She lowered her voice to a whisper so he had to lean real close. ‘Clay. We’ve been thinking about this nasty business on Saturday night. And we need your help.’

‘Uh, glad to help. If I can.’ Another wave of nausea made my mouth sweat.

Ceecee blurted out, ‘We think we know who was in Charlene’s room.’

Minty scowled at her friend and gathered the conversation back to herself. ‘If you can keep your ears open around the other boys and let me know if you hear anything, anything at all, you’d be doing a great service for poor Charlene. Will you do that?’

‘Sure I will Minty. But I have to be honest.’ He looked at me. I tried to give him a brain tumor, but it didn’t take. ‘I’m sure that given the holy blazes that’s come out of Saturday, it’s unlikely anyone’s going to be bragging about it.’

‘But you’ll let us know if anyone says anything? Especially, say, Ronnie Ramon?’

Her suggestion tightened up his grin. ‘I have gym class with Ronnie. And a couple of the other fellas are friendly with him. I’ll see what I can find out for you. Gotta go now, though. Bye!’

You’d never guess to look at him that less than forty–eight hours earlier he’d seen me in the altogether. As soon as my lip started to wobble I made my excuses and dashed for the sidewalk, where breathing came a little easier. So did tears. I was grateful the girls didn’t suspect my part in the drama, but guilty about setting up innocent kids. I knew Clay would have plenty to report about Ronnie. He had the perfect scapegoat and after his performance at Charlene’s, I had no doubt he’d use it.

I started and spun around when he grabbed my arm. The bastard still made my heart jump. ‘What do you want?’

‘Are you crying?’

‘No.’ I sniffed.

‘We need to talk.’

‘Pshh, no we don’t.’

He made me stop walking. ‘Yes. We do.’

‘Fine then. What do you have to say?’ I wouldn’t forgive him even if he said he loved me. I didn’t care how much he asked me to ... at least not right away.

‘You’re not going to say anything about Saturday are you?’

And for a minute I’d thought... but of course he wasn’t going to declare his undying love. ‘Exactly what about Saturday are you referring to?’

‘You know. About us. About what happened.’

I wrenched my arm from him. ‘Don’t worry, Clay, your reputation will remain intact. I’m not going to let everyone know how big a sucker I was for your stupid lines. I don’t need to look like any more of an idiot than I already feel. Go ahead and tell your stories about June and Ronnie. I’m sure our friends will have no trouble believing you.’

‘You’re ugly right now, May. I didn’t realize you were such a bitch. You’ve got no right to blame me for what happened. You were just as willing as I was.’

‘Yes, I know. More fool me.’

He gave me a look like I’d just killed his dog. Then he walked away.

His words hurt all out of proportion. I’d been so stupid. He didn’t love me any more than he did Charlene, or any of the other girls he’d probably sweet–talked out of their drawers. And there had been others. Of course there had. How else would he have known that it would hurt the first time, unless he’d already thrown himself on some other poor girl? For that matter, how did he know where Charlene’s bedroom was in the first place? He was nothing more than a silver–tongued bully. Jim had been right all along. The tears leaking onto my lip weren’t for love.

Until the nineteen seventies when pharmacies stocked home pregnancy tests, girls had to visit their doctor to find out if they were in a family way. And doctors weren’t known for taking their doctor–patient privilege seriously when it came to sixteen year olds. It seemed a drastic move to confess to something just to find out if I needed to confess it. Ma and Duncan would hang me either way. I turned to the only oracle I could think of that wouldn’t judge me.

The library sat on the corner like an old friend, comfortable and steady. Inside, the dust played in the light streaming from high windows, and little sounds, a chair scraping or a cough, volleyed back and forth between the stone walls. In summer it was about twenty degrees cooler inside than out, which no doubt convinced the patrons to sit contentedly in the unaccommodating chairs. A big reference section was tucked into the back, with shelves of books outlining every medical condition under the sun. I ran my finger across their spines, but they might have been written in Latin for all the sense they made. I didn’t know an epidermis from an abscess. I checked the card catalog. P for pregnancy yielded nothing. I took a look under M.

It is a misconception that self–help books are an invention of the feel–good generation. They were plentiful on the shelves where I searched for a book to tell me whether I was expecting. Marriage and other adult occupations were popular subjects from way back. Most of the helpful volumes had titles like Missus Dix’s
How to Win and Hold a Husband
and Mister Marshall’s
Living with a Husband and Liking it.
I stopped myself from leafing through them. Talk about putting the cart before the mule.

What I was looking for was a list of symptoms to figure out if there was a serious talk with my folks in my future.
The Human Body
had a lot of technical information that I wished I hadn’t read, and
The Baby
, I’m sure, was a big help after the blessed event. What I really needed was a book called
How to Know For Sure if you’re Pregnant without Having to Ask your Mother
.

Chapter 30

1934 Savannah

Mirabelle should have followed her gut feelings. Within a year Cecile was pregnant, and Mirabelle watched history repeat itself: visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children. She was shocked out of her boots when Cecile calmly told her one afternoon over tea. She was only thirteen years old. How such a thing could have happened on Mirabelle’s watch was beyond her. They were as close as two people could possibly be. Why didn’t she see what was happening? Cecile sat quietly picking at the tablecloth while Mirabelle tried to make sense of the news.

‘Who’s the father?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Someone you love?’

‘No.’

‘Does he know?’

Again no.

‘Cecile, what do you want to do?’

‘Do?’ she seemed perplexed by the question. ‘There’s nothing to do but have the baby. It’s my fault. I deserve to be punished.’

‘How can you say that? A baby isn’t a punishment, it’s meant to be a blessing.’

‘It’s a sin. This is my punishment.’ Mirabelle watched her daughter’s face. An adult looked back at her, making her want to cry.

A couple days later Cecile told Clare and Julius. Mirabelle was there for moral support, but the child didn’t need it. She delivered her news to the awestruck couple just as calmly as she had the first time. As Mirabelle watched the scene unfold, she couldn’t help but remember her own panic. At twenty–eight she’d nearly fallen to pieces. Cecile’s calm was commendable and disquieting all at once. So unlike her mother. She was truly Henry’s child.

Clare and Julius were decidedly less composed about Cecile’s announcement. Clare blamed Mirabelle for the whole thing. Julius didn’t say a word. He just stared at his daughter with his mouth open.

‘How did this happen?’ Clare demanded.

‘Clare, it doesn’t really matter how, does it? It did–’

‘You hush, Mirabelle! I was speaking to Cecile.’

‘Aunt Belle’s right, Mother. It doesn’t matter. It happened. Now I have to live with it.’

Julius roused himself out of his stupor. ‘What do you mean
live with it
? Something must be done.’

‘Over my dead body!’ Clare exploded ‘How can you even suggest such a thing, Julius? We are a Christian family. I will not tolerate compounding one sin with another. Cecile, you will have this baby.’

‘I know, Mother.’

‘Well, all right then. That’s enough about that. Who is the father?’

She wouldn’t tell her parents either. Mirabelle had to admit she admired her loyalty to the boy. Cecile sat obediently while her parents decided her life for her. She’d have to leave school in a few months, before she started to show, and Julius would arrange for a teacher at home. Mirabelle was relieved that Cecile wouldn’t be banished to Atlanta as she’d been. Luckily times had moved on a bit since nineteen eighteen. There would be scandal, sure, but it’d blow over eventually.