The seventy-one-year-old self is stepping aside during this portion of the blog posts while my nineteen-year-old Younger Self comes forward to share her long-secret/hidden story …

She surfaced last year during my recovery from a traumatic injury. The last several posts have circled around to meet her in 1968, a tumultuous year for our country and for this kid. Shortly after my injury in late 2018, I asked for awareness regarding how to face experience as painful and long-lasting as the healing of my broken/shattered humerus. That’s when I began listening to her. Why? Because it was time to remember that she has a story to share which culminates with three life-changing gifts. 

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.
Henry David Thoreau

I’m taking my twelve hours+twelve dollars off. I’m visiting Patti and Sandy in the rambling campus house where I feel different. I see, through these two creative women, a way that I would like to live. They and their home are warm and inviting; house plants spiral up along the edges of intricately patterned white lace curtains casting shadows against walls painted deep and calming indigo blue. Cooking aromas, fresh bread, and soup mingle sensuously with sandalwood incense making lazy spirals in a holder on top of the bookcase. Art-in-progress rests on tall easels; homework sketches of nudes drawn in charcoal stand beside the main table where the sewing machine is surrounded by books on painting, color theory, and poetry. I become curious to know more about Hans Hoffman, Kandinsky, Anais Nin, and Rumi.

In the light-filled front room, I see speakers, as well as several electric and an acoustic guitar. There’s a drum set, a keyboard, and an ornate silver flute that rests in an open black leather case lined with red velvet, a pair of brass cymbals sit on the low coffee table with a tall stack of sheet music, ashtrays, matchbooks, and rolling papers.

Dancing to Judy Collins singing ‘Both Sides Now‘ I float in slow circles around the table. Hugging the velvet beaded doll cradled over the bulge of my 6-month pregnant belly, her wide elastic straps sewn to the shoes of the soft sculpture legs loop over my stocking feet helps me feel calm. I catch a glimmer of my dream, being my artist self, but I quickly scare myself and push that idea down out of sight. Instead, I soak up what I can. I admire these gentlewomen. I sing quietly,”… I really don’t know clouds, love, or life at all.”

Late in the afternoon, a car pulls off the brick road into the short driveway, car doors bang followed by heavy footfalls on the back porch, the kitchen door opens and laughter rolls in along with the drummer and the other three boys from the band. 

Remain calm

I haven’t seen the baby’s father since I gave him the news last fall. I even told him the part where the older girl whose name I never knew or can’t remember came by the apartment and, hearing of my situation, went to the corner drugstore, returning she mixes a glass of orange juice laced with white powder she calls quinine. She tells me that after drinking it I will experience stomach cramps and then ‘lose the baby’. It’s October, a few days since Doctor Perchan gave me the news that I would be giving birth in June. I swallow the gritty liquid. Soon, I’m doubled over on the bathroom floor. Cramping/crying out loud pain brings the elderly landlady up the stairs demanding, “What’s going on in there?” The girl steps out into the carpeted hallway and explains that I have a stomach ache, maybe something I ate. The orange juice cocktail doesn’t do what she said it would.

The drummer listens to my report, looks concerned and nods.

The next day I receive a call from his band manager. He’s a super popular and brash disk jockey with instant name recognition. Why is someone famous calling me? He spits, “Stay away from my boys! You try to get anything from my boys and I’ll make sure everybody knows that you slept with every guy in the band and that’s not all! You have no way to prove anything! Stay away from my boys!” “GO AWAY!” The receiver slams down like a smack across my face.

I’m the culprit. My doing. It never occurs to me to “try to get anything” from the drummer.

Even before I’m born I’m listening as dad threatens mom saying, “This better be a boy!” My first failure is that I’m the second girl. Within eight years there are four girls and of the four, I’m a target. He tells me in many different ways that I’m stupid. I hear him say ‘Shape up or ship out!’ repeatedly. Leaving Fenwick Alley at ten, enduring the move to the suburbs both dad and I get disoriented. I couldn’t get on track. He’s sad, mad and I’m bad. He tears up my carefully prepared, organized portfolio for my high school final, dashing my art dream. The new dream: ship out as soon as possible. 

With two jobs and a shared rent, I’m able to think about other things besides friends heading off to college, art school or war. I learn that an apartment draws people. Through the summer we gather. 

I’m eighteen. I’m just trying to get something right. When I find out I’m pregnant it never dawned on me to make someone else responsible. I’m well trained. That’s why I’m shocked after The Voice rises up speaking to my boss when she tells me that I’ll go to Mexico and again at the meeting in the backroom of the dress shop, saying that ‘I didn’t do anything wrong and I don’t deserve to be punished’. The Voice rises again at the convent when it’s determined that I will be staying in the adoption agency home for unwed mothers. The Voice says, ‘I won’t stay here. I didn’t do anything wrong and I don’t deserve to be punished.’

He walks into the kitchen with the others, sees me sitting at the table drinking peppermint tea, six months pregnant with the baby that he pretends has nothing to do with him. All eyes of the boys in the band float over invisible me, nod hello to Patti and Sandy head to the living room where the sound system and instruments are ready for practice.

Later in the evening, I wander into the front room to listen as they begin several rounds of Eight Miles High. The mood is bright when they break, I’m welcomed over to the sofa to sit beside the drummer. I long to have him ask anything about what it’s like for me. His head hangs forward, chin-length blond hair covering my view he asks me how I’m doing and before I can say a word he wonders if I can ‘lend’ him any money. I dig into my skirt pocket and pull out the ten from my twelve dollars pay. He takes the money, leans over and gives me a quick hug.

I fall asleep on the sofa, a tear rolls down my neck, listening to the click-clack of the trains pulling in and out nearby. In the morning I have freshly baked granola with Patti then bundle up catching the 10:20. I’m feeling all a-flutter from having been away. I need to calm down.

We all meet on the weekends in the best clubs for live music. The guys are the house band at ‘Otto’s Grotto’, the gathering place in the basement of the swank Statler-Hilton Hotel downtown. Little Patti, with her round glasses and waist-length braid and Sandy, tall and sophisticated, both art students a few years older than me, wait tables at the ultra-cool underground coffee house/bar, La Cave, walking distance from the house they rent. For all of us to converge here on my twelve hours leave has me swirling with feelings. The Voice reminds me: ‘You didn’t do anything wrong and you don’t deserve to be punished.’

I make it through Monday serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner while also scrubbing nine of the ten bathrooms. In one of the bathrooms, the house painter is touching up the inside of one of the ornately decorated toilet lids. I lean against the door frame watching as he adds glossy red to the heart that cupids flutter beside; one cupid points a metallic gold arrow at the heart while the other cupid holds a plunger. Tuesday I shake the bed linens in the master bedroom into the cold morning air then dash up the back stairs to the attic grabbing a sweater. It feels too chill. Changing into my work uniform I feel that something is happening. Back down in the copper kitchen, I’m mopping the floor when the next thing I remember is looking up at the domed ceiling. I’m sprawled on the parquet in the ballroom. The water pail tipped soaking my skirt.

I remember the stretcher but I don’t remember the ambulance. After the examination, the Catholic Charities doctor informs me, “You’ve been working too hard. You need two weeks’ complete bed rest or you will lose this baby”. The next day I call Mrs. from the payphone in the hallway. She hears what I need and says, “You can’t come back here. Who will take care of us?”