Sit. Listen. I need you to understand what they did to us when we were girls. That's the important thing you have to remember. We were unsocialized girls, fast girls, loose girls, emotionally immature girls, girls who grew up too fast. Rose wasn't even eighteen, Holly had just turned fourteen, I was fifteen. Whatever you wanted to call us, we were children.
I still feel like I'm going to get in trouble if I say their real names. I've kept this secret for so long I don't know how to tell it. But someone needs to know what happened to us down there.
You see, we'd been taught that the devil was the worst thing in the world, but we were too young to understand that there were worse things than the devil. We were too young to understand that their job was to convince us that the most natural thing in the world was evil, and the most evil thing in the world was natural.
We were girls. That's what they called us in their articles and their speeches and their files: bad girls, neurotic girls, needy girls, wayward girls, selfish girls, girls with Electra complexes, girls trying to fill a void, girls who needed attention, girls with pasts, girls from broken homes, girls who needed discipline, girls desperate to fit in, girls in trouble, girls who couldn't say no.
But for girls like us, down there at the Home, the devil turned out to be our only friend.
She didn't think things could get any worse, then she saw the sign.
Welcome to Florida, it read. The Sunshine State.
She knew she shouldn't ask. She knew she stood in a puddle of gasoline and every word was a lit match falling from her lips. She knew her dad hated her. But that sign made her throat squeeze shut so tight she couldn't breathe, and her bloated stomach pressed on her lungs so hard she couldn't get enough air, and she'd suffocate if she didn't say something.
"Dad," she said. "Why're we in Florida?"
His hands tightened around the steering wheel until it creaked, but he kept his eyes on the road.
"Huntsville's the opposite way," she said, trying to stay calm.
They'd been driving for hours and in all that time he hadn't looked at her once. He'd shown up at Aunt Peggy's that morning so angry his hands shook as he snatched her clothes and stuffed them in her suitcase and slammed it shut. One of her bra straps stuck out the side, but she didn't think it was smart to say anything.
It isn't too smart for a girl to be smart, her mom had always said.
So she just made herself very, very small. For hours and hours she made herself so incredibly small. But they didn't know anyone in Florida. They didn't have any relatives in Florida. This was kidnapping unless he told her where they were going. He had to tell her where they were going. So she resorted to the one thing she knew could reach him.
"I saw the trailer for that Planet of the Apes sequel," she said because he loved science fiction. "It's about nuclear war. I bet they got the rockets all wrong."
"Goddammit, Neva!" he exploded. "Do you understand what you've done? You have ruined your mother's health, God knows what you've done to your brother and sister, and now you've ruined your aunt Peggy's good name. I don't even know who you are anymore. It'd have been better if you'd never been born!"
"Where are you taking me?" she bawled, terrified.
"I'm taking you wherever I want!" he bawled back.
"What's happening, Dad?" she asked, and she couldn't help it, she was so scared. "Why are we in Florida?"
He shifted from side to side in his seat, adjusted his hands on the wheel, then addressed the windshield like it really needed to understand this was for its own good.
"We found a place for you to stay," he explained to the windshield. "With other girls in your condition. After you're better, I'll come get you and we can put all this behind us."
The full horror of it hit her.
"You're sending me to a Home?" she asked.
Headlines from confession magazines streaked through her brain: Disgraced Debutante Left to Rot in House of Shame! Good Girls Say No—Bad Girls Go Here! They Gave Away Their Own Flesh and Blood! During rehearsals for Arsenic and Old Lace Margaret Roach had told them about the Homes. They were run by nuns who beat the girls, made them work in industrial laundries, and sold their babies, and Margaret Roach was a Catholic so she would know. The Homes were for poor girls, trashy girls, fast girls. They were for sluts.
"Daddy, you can't do this," she begged, because he had to understand, he had to turn the car around, there had to be another way. "Please, please, please, take me home, or to Granny Craven's, or talk to Aunt Peggy again. I promise I'll stay in the bedroom and I won't make a sound and I'll vacuum and wash dishes and I'll do whatever she says, but you can't take me to a Home. They aren't for people like us. They're for Catholics!"
He turned to face her, briefly, and in that moment she saw how much he hated her.
"You've ruined everything," he said, cold and flat. A simple statement of fact.
He was right. She had ruined everything. Her mom had always told her she was going to ruin her grades by spending too much time on dramatics, she was going to ruin her eyes by reading in the dark, ruin her reputation by riding in a car with boys, ruin her figure by eating two desserts, and every time she did it anyway and nothing bad ever happened, but now she'd finally done it. Now she'd finally done something so bad nothing would ever be the same again. Now she'd finally ruined her life.
She was being sent to a Home.
She wasn't one of those wilting violets who cried at every loud noise but she couldn't help it, her body did whatever it wanted these days, and now she leaned her head against the hot window and wept—big, ugly, racking sobs.
Her dad clicked on the radio.
“. . . Brother, you are not prepared for Hell. You thought life was one big sinning party and there'd be no price to pay and now you're burning in the pit and finding out how wrong you were. Look up and ask for help, but what kind of help can there be in Hell . . .”
Florida was Hell. Back in Alabama they had hills and trees and lakes, but Florida was an endless flat tabletop with no escape from the sun. It beat down on the highway, cooked the roof of the station wagon, sent sweat slicking down her bulging stomach, trickling into her rubber girdles, pooling underneath her butt.
Her dad fiddled with the radio and a comforting ballpark voice cut through the static:
“. . . sets up, and here’s the pitch. It’s a fastball on the outside corner, and it’s a ball. Ty walked him. That is the first walk he’s given up and . . .”
She stopped crying somewhere around Tallahassee. Pretty soon after that, her dad pulled over at a Burger King and left her in the car. Sitting for so long had made her feet swell and her kidneys bruise, but she couldn’t make herself get out and walk around. Whenever they stopped at a rest area people saw her protruding stomach and at first they smiled, but then they saw the bare ring finger on her left hand and looked away or shook their heads or stared back at her over their shoulders, like she was an animal in the zoo.
Wasn’t that what they’d all said about Donna Havermeyer last year? All she’d done was gain a lot of weight and skip graduation and suddenly all the girls were talking about how she’d gotten pregnant by an officer up at the Arsenal, and then Racee Tucker said what did you expect, her whole family’s nothing but Arkansas trash, and she’d laughed, too, and now here she was. She bet that was what all those people at the rest stops thought: Look at that Alabama trash.
Her dad got back in and handed her a single skinny cheeseburger from the bag. He pulled out a Whopper for himself. She used to eat a single cheeseburger when they went to Sno Wite’s because she was an actress and cared about her figure, but she didn’t have a figure anymore. Now she wore her mom’s old deck shoes because they were the only ones that fit her swollen feet, and her mom’s old plaid maternity dress, and she had two chins and they were both covered in pimples, and her bust had popped a button on her dress yesterday. She