My fourth-floor dorm looked out onto dried grass-covered hills, a slow-moving creek and a tennis court with dead weeds in the cement cracks. My college was poor and only a few students tried to hit the ball around. The rest of us worked.
Since freshman year my friend Betty spent most of her weekdays in my dorm room because she was a commuter student. This meant she still lived at home with the last four of eleven kids. Her Mom had died five years ago of heart failure, and Betty joked, “Getting fertilized and popping out babies stopped her ticker.” Her mom was told at pregnancy number seven, by a cardiac specialist, that she had a bad heart, but a priest told her to keep on making babies. It’s what she was called to do on this earth.
And then it happened to Betty in early November of her sophomore year. “Diane, I need $400. I’ll pay it back after Christmas.”
“Why?” I asked. I’d just walked in my dorm room, carrying a basket of clean clothes. It was Friday afternoon, and I was done with my classes. I always did laundry then to avoid the rush on Saturday and Sunday in the basement room with only two washers and dryers.
“You know why,” said Betty. She called herself a hippie and wore overalls and Birkenstock sandals. She was pretty with brown eyes and dark long hair.
“Ask Tim,” I said. She’d been with Tim off and on for a year.
“He refuses. Says it’s wrong.”
“I agree. Don’t do it.” I felt my guts churning. God, I was Secretary of the Right to Life student club. I wore a silver bracelet that had the date of an aborted baby on it. Even though I was never sure how they got this name and date. My fetus’s name was Baby Jocelyn.
“I have to. I can’t raise a baby alone, and I need to finish college.”
“I’ve seen other students with babies. There’s one in my history class.”
Betty was at my desk with my electric Corona typewriter in front of her. She was typing a lesson plan for her Elementary Methods class, due on Monday.
“I’ve talked to her. She has her mother to help raise him. I have a father who will disown me if he finds out.”
Betty’s dad was a beer distributor in the tristate area where three states (Iowa, South Dakota and Nebraska) touched, and he was doing very well. He was a 4th degree Knights of Columbus and had a hat with a plume, carried a sword under his red cape and went to a lot of funerals.
“I’m begging you, Diane, I need your help. You said you’d be there for me.”
“Where will you go to do it?” I couldn’t believe I was even talking about this so casually as if I were asking about where to get a haircut.
“There’s a woman in South Sioux. I just show up at a motel with cash.”
“How did you find this out?”
“I knew another girl who did it last year.”
“So, you just asked her?”
“Yes, that’s how it works. She got me in touch with this creepy guy I met at a bar on 4th St. He gets $100 for each one.”
“Did you go by yourself?”
“I took my younger brother but he waited in the car. I had to talk to this guy alone. He wore a green John Deere cap.”
“Weren’t you scared?”
“God, yes. But I had to do it.”
The next day I wrote myself a check for $400, detasseling money from the summer, and went to the business office to cash it. Sister Regina wanted to know what it was for. “Getting my car fixed.”
She gave me a strange look. “Why don’t you write the check to the mechanic?”
I felt my armpits getting wetter, and I knew my face was tomato red. “He works on his own and doesn’t have a real business,” I said.
“Seems kind of shady to me. You take some of the guys with you to make sure he knows what he’s doing.”
“I help my brothers fix their cars all the time. I know more than most of the guys here.”
She counted out six 50s and five 20s. Then she found an envelope, used of course, with the address scratched over in ink. She watched me. “You’re awful jittery for getting your car fixed.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Thanks,” I whispered and hurried out of her office.
I handed Betty the cash on Monday afternoon. She tried to hug me, but I pulled away.
She gave me a funny look but didn’t say anything. She took off out of my dorm room and I didn’t see her for a few days.
I was supposed to have a Right to Life meeting on Tuesday, but I didn’t go. I told the President I was quitting. I had too much school work to do. And I found myself hiding out in my room after classes. When Fr David asked me to read at mass, I said I was busy babysitting.
Betty showed up on Friday looking pale and weak. She smelled like she hadn’t changed her pad. “You stink,” I said.
“I have an infection. I’m on antibiotics. Loads of them.”
“How do you know?”
“Went to the school nurse yesterday morning and she sent me to the ER. Had a D & C yesterday afternoon.”
“Oh, God, she’ll tell Dr. Knowles and you’ll get kicked out.”
“I begged her not to tell him. She guessed what was wrong.”
I handed her a towel and a half bottle of bubble bath. “Go. Soak.”
“Can’t soak, but can shower.”
She returned twenty minutes later smelling a lot better. She seemed cheery and that bothered me. She plunked down on my bed and studied me. “You look like shit.”
“I feel like shit. I can’t sleep or eat or concentrate. I think about it all the time.”
“What if I told you I had a miscarriage. I never made it to the motel room.”
“I still would have sinned because I gave you the money and I knew what it was for. I’m an accomplice.” I looked up at her. “Did you? Have a miscarriage?” I was hoping. Please, make it so.
“No, I did it, and it was bad. The woman wore a bloody apron because she did another one before me. I don’t think she was a real doctor.”
“Oh God, I’m a killer,” I wailed. I felt lunch come shooting up my esophagus, and I grabbed my waste backet. I kneeled on the floor with my head looking at my grilled cheese sandwich at the bottom.
Betty wanted me to go to bed, but I couldn’t be still. I paced the room and then grabbed my rosary and began mumbling Hail Mary’s.
“I can’t live this way,” I sobbed. “I’ll never be able to go home and face my mom. She hates women who do what you did.”
After another hour of my moaning, Betty stood up and said, “Jesus, what the hell do you want me to do?” She walked over to the window and pulled me around to face her. She was angry and annoyed.
“Move back time. I wish you’d never asked me.”
“God, you’re a mess.”
“Why shouldn’t I be? I’m a murderer.”
There was a knock on my door and Cyndy across the hall wanted to know what was wrong.
Betty smiled and said, “She broke up with her beau from home. Got a letter.”
“I didn’t know she was dating anyone? Well, okay. I’ll check on her later.”
Betty slammed the door. “Just shut up. God, you’re obsessed. I thought you had it together. I was wrong.
“Don’t. Don’t say that. That’s so unfair. Look what you made me do. I already failed a quiz today because I can’t study.”
Betty poured herself the last dregs of coffee from my percolator. She looked skinny in her OshKosh overalls. “Would confession make it better? Get rid of your craziness.”
“Yes, but I know Fr David from reading at mass. I can’t go to him.”
“Then we’ll go out of town. Come on.” When I resisted, she softened. “We’re doing this together.” She was the old Betty, the kind, warm person I had grown to love. She squeezed my hand and pulled me down three flights of stairs to the parking lot to her 1962 Chevy Impala.
We drove for thirty miles to Rushton and parked in front of St Anthony’s Church where there was a young priest.
Betty knocked on the rectory door and talked to the housekeeper. The young priest was teaching a class at the high school across the street. School would be out in fifteen minutes. “Do you know where his classroom is?” Betty asked.
“Top of the stairs, honey.”
We waited in Betty’s car and when we saw the high schoolers leaving, we entered the building and climbed the stairs.
The young priest in his black suit and Roman collar walked us to the tiny chapel, and one at a time, he heard our confession.
I cried most of the time and emptied his box of Kleenex. “Go in peace and sin no more,” he said. I felt cleansed. Free. The weight off my conscience was amazing. How good it was to have this sacrament called confession. Like going to a car wash.
He blessed both of us before we left.
Once in the car, Betty asked, “What’s your penance?”
“I have to work in the Birthright office for six months.”
“I got the same and a couple of rosaries.”
“Are you going to do it?” I asked.
“Nope. And you?”
“Yes. I have to. I won’t be absolved if I don’t.” I was pissed at Betty. What the hell? We’d been forgiven, and she acted like it was no big deal. She could have carried on day after day without having her soul wiped clean.
Betty didn’t come to my dorm room like she did before. She was hanging out in Cyndi’s room across the hall. When I met her going into the bathroom, I couldn’t look her in the eyes. I’m sure my face turned white with shame.
Cyndi asked me, “What’s going on with you two. You used to be such friends.”
“We just drifted apart,” I mumbled.
I followed through with my penance. I worked in the small storefront office at a desk with a phone. Young girls would call for help. We didn’t ask any questions about how they got themselves pregnant or who the father was, but we said we’d help them either keep the baby or put it up for adoption. We’d cover the costs.
In my last month of working, a girl named Ada, age 13, came into the office and sat across from me. She said she’d been “touched bad” for months by her dad and uncle. If they found out she was pregnant, they’d kill her. Her older sister had run away six months ago when her belly started to get bigger.
I was tortured by Ada’s pleas for help. I couldn’t sleep at night thinking of these men who were supposed to protect her rutting on her. She said they covered her mouth with a rag or greasy fingers to stop her from yelling. One time she hid in the attic, curling up in a sleeping bag. The next morning when she came down, her dad beat her with his belt saying she’d damn well better be in her bed that night. She was, and he jammed his thing into her so hard she bled. Her sister let her skip school and soak in the tub. Then her sister gave her a new jar of Vaseline to rub down there. But she left shortly after and then Ada was alone.
Months later, when she missed two periods, she guessed the reason. She was examined by a woman doctor at the Birthright office, and it was confirmed. Across the desk, I felt her jittery hand squeeze mine and hold onto me. She was afraid. When I told my supervisor, she said it was sad, but we couldn’t do much more than listen to her.
I broke the rules and called Betty. She talked to Ada and met her at a different motel room a few days later. Betty told me this new doctor was safer, cleaner. We never discussed what happened, but there was an understanding, a detente, between us.
I’d never felt the same sympathy for Betty that I’d felt for this 13-year-old Ada. I thought Betty was a sinner. She’d had fun sex and then an abortion and wasn’t sorry for what she did. I wanted tears and anguish and fear, but she held herself together, didn’t show me how afraid she was. I wrote her a letter letting her know I was wrong in how I had judged her. I never heard from her again, but I saw her at a James Gang concert in Ames at that big auditorium.
After my six months at Birthright were done, I asked to continue for two more years. Secretly, I aided a few young women who’d been raped. I sided with the girls against the men who did that to them. I accepted that I sinned and would continue to be a sinner. The bracelet with the fetus’s name receded to the bottom of my jewelry box.
Photo by Stephanie Harvey on Unsplash
