Nathan Hill - The Nix

“Do you have the package?” she asks.

“Yes.” Faye gives her the crinkly brown bag.

“Thanks.”

“Margaret? Is everything okay?”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “We can’t have dinner tonight.”

“Okay.”

“You have to go home now.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

Margaret is staring at her feet, not looking at Faye. “I’m really sorry. For everything.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Listen,” she says, and now she looks at Faye for the first time. She stands up straight and points her chin out, trying to look tough. “Nobody saw you come here tonight.”

“I know.”

“Remember that. You can’t prove you were here.”

Then Margaret nods to Faye and spins on her heel and leaves, locking the door behind her.

IN 1968, in Faye’s small Iowa river town, the girls of the graduating class knew — though they never spoke of it — dozens of ways to get rid of unplanned, unwanted, unborn children. Some of these methods were almost always unsuccessful; some were nothing more than old wives’ tales; some required advanced medical training; some were too horrible to think about.

The most attractive were of course those that could be done innocently, without any special chemical or apparatus. Long-distance bicycling. Jumping from a great height. Alternating hot and cold baths. Placing a candle on the abdomen and letting it burn all the way down. Standing on one’s head. Falling down stairs. Punching oneself repeatedly in the belly.

When these failed — and they almost always did fail — the girls moved on to new techniques, remedies that wouldn’t arouse suspicion. Simple, over-the-counter things. Douching with Coca-Cola, for example. Or Lysol. Or iodide. Ingesting incredibly high quantities of vitamin C. Or iron tablets. Filling the uterus with saline solution, or a mixture of water and Kirkman Borax Soap. Eating uterine stimulants like julep. Or croton oil. Calomel. Senna. Rhubarb. Magnesium sulfate. Herbs that initiated or increased menstrual flow, such as parsley. Or chamomile. Ginger.

Quinine was also effective, according to many grandmothers.

And brewer’s yeast. Mugwort. Castor oil. Lye.

Then there were those other methods, those things that none but the most desperate would ever consider. Bicycle pump. Vacuum cleaner. Knitting needle. Umbrella rib. Goose quill. Cathartic tube. Turpentine. Kerosene. Bleach.

None but the most desperate, the most alone and unconnected, those who had no friends with medical access who might procure certain behind-the-counter items. Methergine. Synthetic estrogens. Pituitary extract. Abortifacient ergot preparations. Strychnine. Suppositories known in some quarters as Black Beauties. Glycerin applied via catheter. Ergotrate, which makes the uterus stiffen and contract. Certain medicines used by cow breeders to regulate animal cycles — difficult to acquire, polysyllabic: dinoprostone, misoprostol, gemeprost, methotrexate.

What was in that paper bag? Almost certainly not small chocolate bonbon things, Faye decides as she drives home, rounds the corner into Vista Hills, regrets that she did not open the bag. Why didn’t she open it?

Because it was stapled, she thinks.

Because you’re a coward, another part of her thinks.

She has an abstract feeling of panic and distress right now. How strangely Margaret had acted tonight. Dr. Schwingle too. A feeling like there’s something she’s missing, some essential fact whose revelation she dreads. The air is misty, the sky not raining so much as lightly spitting, a humidity like when the girls boil things in home ec. Once, one of the girls forgot her pot and left it there to burn all day and the water boiled out and the pot got scorched and red-hot and its plastic handle melted and then outright burned. It set off all the alarms.

Tonight has that same quality to it. Like there’s something very close and dangerous and alarming that Faye has not yet noticed.

She’s sure of this when she arrives home. Only one light is on in the house — the kitchen light. There’s something wrong with that one lonely light. From outside it looks almost green, like the color of cabbage once you cut way down deep into it.

Her parents are there, in the kitchen, waiting for her. Her mother cannot look at her. Her father says, “What have you done ?”

“What do you mean?”

He says they got a phone call from Harold Schwingle, who said Faye had been in the store tonight to pick up a package. What kind of package? Well, let me tell you, said Dr. Schwingle, I’ve been in this business long enough to know that any girl buying the things Faye bought tonight is only trying to do one thing.

“What?” Faye asks.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” says her mother.

“Tell you what ?”

“That you’re knocked up,” says her father.

“What?”

“I cannot believe you let that idiot farmer boy shame you like this,” he says. “And shame us, Faye.”

“But he didn’t! There’s been a mistake.”

The phone had been ringing all night. Calls from the Petersons. And the Watsons. And the Carltons. And the Wisors. And the Krolls. All of them saying, You should know, Frank, what I heard about your daughter.

How on earth did everyone know this? How does the whole town already know?

“But it’s not true, ” Faye says.

And she wants to explain to them about the birthday party that never happened, and about Margaret’s strange behavior tonight. She wants to explain what she immediately understands is the truth: that Margaret is pregnant and needs certain drugs without her father knowing, so she used Faye to get them. She wants to say all this but she can’t, first because her father is now in a blind rage about how she’s ruined her reputation and how she can’t show her face here ever again and how god will punish her for what she wants to do to her own child —yelling more words at her right now than he’s spoken to her in the last year — and also because she feels an attack coming on. Coming on strong now because she’s having trouble breathing and she’s sweating and her field of vision is beginning to narrow. Soon it will be like looking at the world through a pinhole. And she’s fighting off the feeling that this is the Big One, the really big seizure that finally kills her; she’s fighting the sense that these are the last breaths she will ever take.

“Help me,” she tries to say, but it comes out a whisper, inaudible above her father, who’s now telling her how many years he’s worked to gain a good reputation in this town and how she’s ruined it all in one night, how he’s never going to forgive her for what she’s done to him.

For how much she’s hurt him.

And she thinks: Hang on.

She thinks: Hurt him ?

Because even though she’s not pregnant, if she were pregnant, wouldn’t she be the one needing comfort? Wouldn’t she be the one the neighbors were talking about? How is this about him ? And she feels suddenly defiant, suddenly uninterested in defending herself anymore. And when her father reaches the end of his lecture and says “What do you have to say for yourself?” she stands up as vertically and nobly as she can manage and says: “I’m leaving.”

Her mother looks at her now for the first time.

“I’m going to Chicago,” Faye says.

Her father stares hard at her for a moment. He seems like a twisted version of himself, the expression on his face like when he was building that bomb shelter in the basement, that same determination, that same dread.