I’d Rather Die By Ice Than By Fire
Hidden in the countryside, a teenager keeps her secret.
Originally published in Literary Mama
Sarah fostered another unwed mother before me, and that girl left a box of things in the closet. There are letters, a diary, and a few pictures, and at night I sit on the foot of the bed underneath the ceiling light, and look through them. I sit and read in my mint green nylon nightgown, while the sweat trickles down my back and drips from the round of my belly.
The heat is intolerable at Sarah’s house. It’s humid here, with fields of corn and soybeans drinking up the rain and sweating it back into the long July days. The only air conditioning is in the living room. My room is upstairs, and it’s sweltering. There’s one window and a fan, but the fan doesn’t do much because the ceiling is low and slanted. It holds the heat over my bed like a tent.
I like Sarah and Bud and their kids, but it’s lonesome here. Not like it might have been at a home for unwed mothers where I could have lain in the dark talking to the girls in the beds next to mine. Here all I have for company at night are the things in that box. I feel guilty looking through someone’s private belongings, but I want to get to know this girl.
She was older. It sounds as if before she got pregnant, she’d been to a couple of years of college at one of the big universities, like Iowa City or maybe Ames. In my book, she would have been old enough to keep her baby, but her boyfriend was black, and a mixed-race marriage wasn’t much of a possibility in Iowa in 1970. Her boyfriend went off to Vietnam while she was expecting, which makes me think her situation was worse than mine. It was bad enough for her to have to give up her baby, but I wonder if her boyfriend came home safe. I can’t help thinking of that anti-war song where the guy comes back in a box.
The world is a terrible place. Boyfriends going off to war, babies and mothers split apart, couples unable to have their own babies, and me hustled off to the countryside to keep the shame of my predicament from ruining my family, while I worry that I’ll go to hell anyway even if my secret stays kept.
I’ve already requested that my baby be placed with a Catholic family. It’s all I…
