Look at You Now Read online

  “I have a doctor you could see; we could go when we get back. We don’t have to say anything to your dad just yet.” She was so calm and nice, but I started to panic. I wanted to know right then that I wasn’t pregnant; the idea of it was too big to process. How could I have ignored my growing stomach, and this new nausea? How could I have been so stupid? A new, overwhelming reality was sinking in. The wife said she wouldn’t mention anything to my dad. She was such a nice lady, which made it hard to hate her, and I wanted to hate her … for my mom. She handed me some saltines, stroked my hair, and sauntered the French bikini back up the ladder. She was young, and really cool, and looked remarkably like Farrah Fawcett.

  We left the Caribbean after ten days and arrived back in Chicago late at night. Dorothy was asleep when we returned. I was supposed to go to school the next day. I’d already missed two days because of our vacation. I could barely function, living with the notion that I might be pregnant. A hellish fury of fear was taking over. I got up early the next morning, dressed, and left the house so I wouldn’t have to see my mom or anyone. I was sweating even though it was freezing cold that day. I drove downtown to meet the new wife at her doctor’s office. They did a pregnancy test and then the doctor put an instrument on my stomach that sounded exactly like the ocean, like the crashing of the waves against the boat when we sailed. We heard a thump, swoosh, thump, swoosh, thump, swoosh. The doctor and Farrah Fawcett looked at each other, and then the doctor said to me: “That sound … is the heartbeat of a baby.”

  What? What the fuck? I pushed his hand away from my body and went into some sort of shock. I couldn’t speak; I could barely breathe.

  The wife called my dad and told him to meet us at their apartment in the city, right after the doctor’s appointment. I was still in disbelief. How had I let it come to this? How did the wife figure this out before me? We sat down in the fancy living room with my dad and the wife, whose name was actually Kate, and she told him I was pregnant. My father looked at me a long time, and then out the window over the buildings at Lake Michigan, and then told me he was really sorry for me; he was sorry for the situation. He was sad—really sad. I’d never seen him like that, and it ripped hard at me. I didn’t know Lee even had that kind of emotion inside. I knew what a massive disappointment this was. I knew that I had made him feel this unbearable unhappiness. It was unforgivable. My dad stood up and said he’d have to call my mother. He was going to ask her to come downtown to meet us at his and Kate’s apartment, which threw me into a complete tailspin.

  “No, Dad, please no. I will tell Mom myself. I’ll drive home right now and tell her, and then call you.” My mother and father hadn’t really spoken since the divorce. And my mother had never met the Farrah Fawcett wife, and I didn’t want her to have to endure all of that because of me.

  “That will not do, Diz,” my father said. “She needs to come here and we will all talk about it and figure out the plan.”

  “Dad, we can do that tomorrow at a restaurant or something, but please don’t do this. Don’t have her come here. I think that would be really hard for her. Please.”

  “Stop it, Liz, that’s ridiculous. Your mother is a grown woman. I’m going in to call her.” I kept begging, but he turned around sharply and told me to sit down, which I did. I always did what he asked; that’s who I was.

  My mom arrived an hour later. She was wearing her black pencil skirt, with black pumps, a navy blue wool coat with brass buttons, and a paisley silk scarf around her neck, composed like always. But the look on her face will remain fixed in my memory forever. I watched Dorothy take in the elegant apartment with its floor-to-ceiling windows. She looked at the walls, the carpet, the lush upholstered furniture, the life my dad was living without her, and then stopped at the astounding view of the city and Lake Michigan out the window. And finally she looked at me, and I wanted to disappear. She didn’t know yet.

  I remember the moments before he told her, thinking to myself, The second my mother knows it will all become real. My hell, my pain, the reality of my shame will begin. I don’t know why that was true, but it was. She sat down in an overstuffed chair in the living room, keeping on her coat. Maybe she didn’t think she’d need to stay long. I was on the couch and my dad was in another big chair, and we formed a triangle. Farrah Fawcett sashayed into the room wearing a short flowery dress and cowboy boots. Oh God, I thought, she’s here in front of my mom. She smiled and offered us beverages. I could barely watch. My mother managed a soft Katharine Hepburn “Helllllloo.” There was a framed picture of my dad, the wife, and the wife’s four-year-old daughter on the table next to the couch. Dorothy noticed it and then looked back out the window. It was excruciating: to watch my mom seeing my dad together with his new wife, seeing their home, their contentment together.

  Lee wasted no time. He wore his blue-and-white pin-striped Brooks Brothers button-down, khaki pants, and soft leather loafers, and had his vodka with a splash of soda next to him on the table. He looked at my mom—everything about him attractive—and began, “Dorothy, our daughter—the daughter you live with every single day of your life—is more than four months pregnant.” There was a long pause. My mother didn’t move. My dad continued, never raising his voice: “How in the world can that be? Do you see nothing? You don’t know when or if your own daughter gets her period, or gains weight, or throws up? What the hell is going on in that house?”

  My mom was staring past Farrah Fawcett, out the huge plate glass windows; her face was surrendered, her eyes blank. Kate was uncomfortably messing with the tray of drinks. I could not hold back the tears. The tears came for a million reasons: I was pregnant, it was now indisputably real, and my father was torturing my mother, stabbing her with a horrible knife of blame, turning it over and over again. I couldn’t believe what was happening—and all because of me. I let out an audible cry. My mother turned to me with a look I’d never seen and a voice I’d rarely heard, strong and cold.

  “Pull yourself together, Liz, and stop crying.” Then, with what I’m sure was the last shred of dignity she could find, she politely asked Farrah Fawcett to leave the room.

  Kate stood up and said, “Of course.”

  Lee went on. “It took my wife one day, Dorothy, one day of being around Liz to ask her if she might be pregnant. You’ve had seven children, for Christ’s sake. What kind of a mother does this?”

  I wanted to die. The room was still. I was choking back everything that wanted to come out. I wanted to say, But, Dad, I was in a bathing suit on the boat, she’s been seeing me in winter coats. That’s not fair … But then my mother, with seamless composure, answered, “Perhaps, Lee, if Liz had a father in her life, one who showed up more than one Sunday a month, who cared about her more than himself and hadn’t deserted his family, she wouldn’t feel the need to be having sex. As far as the kind of mother I am, I imagine the answer to that is not going to change the fact that she is pregnant. It would be wise for us to figure out what to do here, Lee, rather than cast stones.”

  Her eloquence floored me. But then my dad continued.

  “The doctor has informed us that an abortion is out of the question,” Lee said. “She is too far along; it would endanger her life, so that is off the table.”

  “What doctor, Lee?”

  “My wife’s doctor, who saw Liz this morning.”

  She responded, “I see.”

  Shit. Now Dorothy was going to think I’d confided in Farrah Fawcett. She was going to imagine I trusted Farrah Fawcett to take me to a doctor rather than her. She would know I ditched school that day, lied to her, and instead shared the truth with my dad, the man who left her. She’d think I liked the new wife better than her. When that wasn’t at all how any of it happened. There were so many levels of awful to all of this.

  My mother said softly, “We have to find a place for Liz to go to have this child. She cannot have it here. No one can find out about this, Lee.”

  My dad furrowed his forehead. “Obviously.”


  They discussed me for a long time, almost like I wasn’t right there. I watched them like a game of Ping-Pong. My dad thought I could go to Europe. But my mom said that was too far; she wanted to be near me. Dad said they could rent an apartment for me, but my mom said I was too young to live alone. They were both clear that whatever I did, wherever I went, no one could find out. All I could think was what havoc and pain I’d wreaked on my parents, both of them. I wanted to curl up and disappear. My mother finally declared she needed a day or two to find a place for me. Then she said the words, mapping out my future in plain English for the first time.

  “You will give this baby up for adoption, Liz.”

  My dad added, “That makes sense. Anyone would be lucky to have her child.” Lee stood up and paced the soft carpet in his loafers, and then turned to me. “Does Daniel know?”

  Daniel was my boyfriend.

  “Know what, Dad?”

  “Know that you’re pregnant?”

  “No, Dad, I didn’t know until today. No, he doesn’t know.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to tell him, and then you’re going to have to explain to him that he will not be telling anyone else.” Daniel and I had been together for more than two years, since the middle of my freshman year of high school. He was my first boyfriend, he was in the grade above me, and we were crazy about each other. I lived, drank, and breathed Daniel for a couple years. We began to fall in and fall out—it was complicated as high school relationships can be—but the road just kept leading back to each other. I think we both knew our lives were headed onto different tracks. We were back together, at the end of the summer, before Daniel left for college. I’d gone to visit him once in the last four months.

  “Lizzie, go call him right now and tell him the situation, and be sure to let him know he is not to tell anyone about this. Is that clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then get his parents’ phone number for me.” His parents’ number? My dad pointed to the hallway and said, “Go in my bedroom.”

  I sat down on the bed and dialed Daniel’s number. As I told Daniel what was happening, I felt a piercing pain in my chest. I hadn’t had time to think or process what was happening. I’d been with my parents the whole time. I was crying hard and couldn’t speak for a few moments, but Daniel’s voice calmed me down and I got it out—I was pregnant. He was shocked and worried. I wondered if he also wished we’d talked about it, instead of letting things go too far. It was way too late now. I told him my parents were going to call his parents and that no one could find out. He was quiet and then said he would call his parents first. Daniel’s parents lived a simpler life than ours. His family had been incredibly kind and gracious to me over the years, and I knew them a lot better than my family knew Daniel. And in all the time we’d been together, our parents’ paths had never crossed. They didn’t know Dorothy and Lee, what they were like, how they handled things. My dad knocked on the door and walked in.

  “Is that him on the phone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you get his parents’ number?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell him goodbye.” I told Daniel I had to go. I hung up the phone and felt my dad looking at me.

  “This is unbelievable, Liz.” It was unbelievable. Everything inside me stopped, and I felt myself go dark. Like a horrible, black reset button on my life had been hit. Disappointing my parents like this was a torture I could barely take. It was almost more frightening than the pregnancy itself. I saw the sadness, and love, and defeat on my dad’s face. But it was too hard to look in the eyes of the man who had believed I could be something great in this world.

  • • • •

  Ms. Graham offered me a cup of water and some nuts toward the end of our Tuesday afternoon session. I figured I should eat them, since I wasn’t going to be eating dinner. I was never going to be eating dinner there ever again.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “How did you end up deciding to come to the facility, Liz?” Ms. Graham asked.

  “My mom found it. She told me it was a Catholic home for unwed mothers, which isn’t exactly what this is, right?”

  “Right, not exactly.”

  “She told my dad the same thing, so maybe he doesn’t know this is a locked facility. I don’t know.”

  “Liz, you’re not locked in here. You are free to come and go as you please.”

  “Yeah, but the people who live here aren’t, right?”

  “Correct. They cannot come and go. But I can assure you, as I have assured your mother, that you’ll be taken care of here, and you will adapt.” Those words didn’t mean anything to me. I wondered why adults always imagined they knew things about young people, when in truth they were clueless. Ms. Graham carried on. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk about your health and the baby. I question if you know how important it is to make sure that you do what you need to do to keep yourself and your baby healthy.”

  “I know that fainting is not a good thing, and I don’t want it to happen again.”

  “Good, that’s what I mean.”

  “I can see that I have to pay more attention to eating, but I have a hard time feeling hungry when everything feels so sad. And no offense, the food—at dinnertime, anyway—well it’s terrible, even for someone who is starving.”

  “Okay, perhaps we can figure out something beyond the cafeteria for you for dinner food. I know that it’s not very good at all; the girls are used to it, I guess. Maybe you could get a hotplate for your room; you can warm up soup and things?”

  “Yeah, okay.” Anything to keep me out of the mainstream would be a good thing. I knew I would never feel comfortable here.

  “And how are you feeling about the baby?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean have you felt it kick? Do you think about it, do you wonder if it’s a boy or a girl?” This baffled me. Did she not get that the baby in my stomach was the reason that my life was ruined? Did she not get that I’d never regretted anything more in my life than having sex and making this baby? That the baby was the reason I was separated from everyone I loved? That I was now tarnished, and bad? That my parents were going to have to suffer and lie because of me … and this baby?

  “I don’t … see it as a baby.”

  “What do you see it as?”

  “I don’t know … a thing … I guess?”

  “But it’s not a thing. It’s a small life there in your stomach, and you are in charge of it until it comes out.”

  I thought about it for a moment. “I guess I’m not very good at that.”

  “Is there any way you could begin to see that the baby didn’t do this to you, Liz?” Of course Ms. Graham was saying that I did it, the baby was an innocent and I was a perpetrator. She went on: “The baby is just a little life that didn’t mean to cause you pain and doesn’t know any of this. All it knows is the sound of your voice and the beat of your heart and the food and drinks that go down and feed it … when you eat.” I sat quiet for a long time. Her words were hard to hear, all this talk about the innocent baby.

  “Okay, I guess I should get a hotplate.”

  “Maybe your mom can bring one when she comes to visit. I also need to let you know that you are required to go to school here. The girls head over in the late morning and they stay until lunch. In order to meet the requirements for credit you must attend. Starting tomorrow, as you haven’t been since you arrived.”

  “All right.” The lump in my throat was coming back. I really didn’t want to cry in front of this woman again.

  “Is it the idea of school that is upsetting you?” Ms. Graham asked.

  “No, not really, it’s everything … sorry.” It was that there was an actual person in my body. It was trapped, I was trapped, and there was nothing I could do to change it.

  “I can see how difficult this is for you, and I wish I knew a way to make it easier.”

  But there was nothing anyone could do. Every minute
that passed made that clearer to me. There was no way to erase this. I listened to the muffled buzzing in and out of the main door in the hallway. And then I asked Ms. Graham, “Are you a nun?”

  She laughed a little. “No, no, I’m not a nun. I’m just a social worker. Do I seem like a nun?”

  “You’re calm and nice like one, I guess.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “Well, are there nuns here?”

  “There were a long time ago, but the facility has taken on a new face since then. There are no nuns working here.”

  “Okay. Are we finished?”

  “Do you want to be?”

  “Kind of, if that’s okay.”

  “That’s fine. I’ll see you here next Tuesday, same time. Wait, I want to give you something.” She handed me a card. “You can call me anytime.” There was a drawing of a silhouette of a girl with a pregnant stomach on the side of the card, and Ms. Graham’s name and phone number.

  • • • •

  I took the long way to the phone booth on my wing.

  “Mom?”

  “Hi, Liz, I’m just running out to the new office.” My mom had never had a job in her life until recently. She’d gone from her parents’ house, to college, to marrying my dad and having seven children. When my parents got divorced, it wasn’t just that she had to adjust to becoming a single mom with so many children—she was also trying to run the household financially, something she had never done. She told us all the time that the money she got from our dad just wasn’t enough. And it was pretty clear as time went on that we were living a lifestyle she couldn’t afford. Dorothy had been a devoted learner, a straight-A student her entire life, and a graduate of Northwestern. I imagine she could have done anything she wanted for work, but she was now forty-seven years old, and her only real experience was raising children and running a home. She made the decision, with the encouragement of my grandfather, to go to real estate school. To try and bring in the money she needed to keep up our life. She studied, got her license, and began selling houses. In a way it was perfect. I couldn’t think of anyone who knew more about our community than Dorothy. She was an almost obnoxious North Shore enthusiast. She knew every historical fact, hidden street, secret beach, beautiful home, forest preserve, government building, and grocery store in all the surrounding areas. But to me, the most impressive part was that she also knew exactly where, and what time, and for how long, the Good Humor man would be parked with his ice-cream truck on hot summer days.