Let's Go Play at the Adams'

and stroked her thigh (well, I guess there just isn't all that much different you can do, she had

thought), and she had consented. She had liked it. There wasn't that wild, randy look that

some of them had. If she had had to put it into words, she might have said that she was being

worshipped-it had seemed so, anyhow-and that was certainly permissible. I just might, Barbara

had thought, I just might, and if I do it and like it, I just might keep on doing it. But she hadn't.

There was her innate "niceness."

Barbara's mother and father hadn't reared her to do it in a parking lot. Or in a rented motel

room (at least, she didn't think so). Or in the woods (not most

137

woods, anyhow). Just exactly where she would consent to Ted's loving, Barbara hadn't

decided (at that time). She supposed she would know it when it happened. Anyway cars

kept coming and going with their headlights; it was cold and cramped and just out of the

question. At best, she wordlessly promised to go to bed with Ted at some unspecified time

and place and to submit-she used it in the grand sense of girlish surrender-to his whims

(which appeared .. safe and pleasant). Yet even that hadn't happened.

Mostly because of money, because of time, because of the lack of a place to be safely

alone, because of her own aversions, they simply hadn't connected. Instead summer had

come, and they had split until this coming fall. Therefore young John Randall, many and

many a mile away and unknown then, had ultimately taken for his own what was honestly

promised to Ted.

Again, it wasn't fatal, she supposed.

I'll live, Barbara said. After all, I'll live. Some girls lose it to a bicycle seat.

Nonetheless she felt sorrowful, deprived unfairly, and changed against her will for the rest

of life. John had altered her. He might also have made her pregnant. She thought about it-it

was too late to do anything else now.

On the one hand, marriage and children were what Barbara considered herself best suited

for. She just. wasn't an activist; she had no desire to compete; politics were like real-life

comic strips, and teaching her field-was only meant to fill in the time until some young

man came along to organize her and get her tracking in the right direction. Sometimes this

seemed grim (particularly at school where there was so much talk of careers, and so on),

but most of the time it seemed nicely possible. Moreover, at her age, this might happen at

any time: it could happen this fall, or it could be three or four years from now. The way she

regarded it, she had "four years left at best." At that time, if not before, her focus would

properly shift to love, impregnation, gestation, birth, and rearing of 138

young. If sometimes she seemed to swing along in cropped hair, suntan, cotton frocks, and

carelessness, it was all something of a put-on; the older she got, the more she thought distant

thoughts.

Being pregnant, that is, being trapped by a baby out of wedlock, however, was another thing

entirely. In no way was she a Libber. Getting knocked up, there was the commonly shared

nightmare that walked the balls of the girls' dorms, visiting the poor ones ( automobile back-

seat girls) in their small suites and the richer ones (motel doubles, ski-weekend girls) in their

sorority bedrooms, causing each young transgressor to frown into the darkness and wonder,

"Am I, am I?" That was the situation where, having broken the deep taboo, you suddenly felt

cosmic, impersonal consequences coming out of the night to expose you: life was over,

finished,

and how much too soon, too.

·

How could I have been so stupid? Well I got carried away, etc., away, away, far away.

Such was the rehearsed, the long-avoided fear that came with Barbara's troubled thoughts

tonight. She would have to have an abortion; surely in these circumstances, they would let her.

At the necessary idea, however, she shrank back a little.

Barbara knew a girl who had had an abortion, a legally arranged, expensive, fancy one, and

the girl had told her about it. She had described checking into the large university hospital (in

another city) accompanied by her parents (everyone shifting embarrassed in their plastic

chairs), had described signing in, being shown her two-bed room, getting undressed, having

the tests, getting pubic hair shaved off, having Daddy come up later with candy, magazines,

and flowers and that absolutely betrayed that noble look in his eyes. What remained highest in

Barbara's mind, however, were the forms. In the evening, a brisk, young lady doctor had

brought the girl several papers to read and sign for herself, and the lady doctor had sat there,

coolly efficient, ready to answer any and all questions while the girl read.

139

The patient understood that she had requested and was to have an operation for the

removal of certain tissue matter from her body; the patient understood that the hospital