Going Home (part 3)

My mother left Andrew, she was convinced he was a serial killer by that time, and moved back to Iowa and her mother’s house for awhile. She told me she was going to get a job and her own place and I could come live with her and quit my soul killing job. I was still stupid enough to listen to her and I did it. I was so tired of that backbreaking job, the mistreatment and the loneliness, I took her at her word and moved back. I now shared my old attic with my mother and brother. I didn’t sleep there a lot. I found the closeness uncomfortable. A couple of weeks after that she moved in with a new boyfriend. Jesus Christ. I stayed with them once in awhile, because they had a TV and plumbing, but, I wasn’t around much. He was a nice guy, but, I knew I wasn’t really welcome. I had enough sense to know when to move on, so I didn’t wear out my welcome anywhere. That was a great fear of mine. Being homeless on the street is not what it’s cracked up to be and I didn’t care what the hippies said about that. I’d been there and I didn’t like it. It doesn’t even seem now like I ever lived anywhere at that time. I was homeless, but, making it. Sometimes I was at gran's, but, I felt guilty, like I was too much of a handful for her. Sometimes my mother’s (which was the only place I could shower), sometimes at Ann‘s crazy house. If you were hungry you could get dinner there anytime, like couple of fish sticks on a piece of folded over white bread. Those people had next to nothing and I felt guilty eating their food so I tried not to unless I was real hungry. I still think of that and how they occasionally fed me with their own. They had so many kids, they’d never notice another one hanging around. Well, they did, but, they had sympathy for me and I am still indebted to them in my mind. I tried to clean their house when the parents went to work sometimes, to earn my keep. That was an impossible job, but, I always helped the girls do up all the dishes at least. And I’d clean up the living room, so they had a place to sit down and watch TV when they came home all worn out from work. I still wonder how they handled the bathroom. All those kids and the one toilet was forever broken. The problem must have been in the sewer line and wasn’t fixable without some big bucks. It would be piled up a foot past the rim with shit and smelled so ungodly, you’d put your shirt over your head to run past it up the stairs to the girls quarters. Sometimes it would be emptied, I’d notice because someone would forget to close the door. Then it would start over again. I have no idea what they did about that. I never went in there. Ann and I peed out back. I knew she walked all the way uptown to poop in the one public toilet and she had for years, we just didn’t talk about it. It was shameful to her and I understood. And people talked in town about what a trash bunch they were and it still makes me mad. They worked so hard, didn’t have two nickels to rub together and yet they took me in part time and fed me and made sure I didn’t freeze to death out on the streets and they did it off and on for years. Those people who talked them down wouldn’t have done that. Instead of the town talking shit why didn’t the city fix their sewer line? Because they were poor and didn’t matter. They sure wouldn’t get away with treating people like that now. One of the people who talked dirt about them was my aunt Bitch Face, the same woman who threw me out, hungry, at a Christmas family dinner. She sure wasn’t better than them, just because her toilet worked, I knew that much. People need to shut the hell up sometimes. I got a full time day job babysitting a sweet little girl while her mother worked and she paid me a little. That worked out well. I stayed there sometimes. I still had my nights free. Many nights I crept into the old hippie decorated car parked in front of Ann’s place to sleep until the city made them haul it off. The damn city, they stole my room and I still hate them. I turned seventeen and no one noticed, but, my grandma who gave me a small bible and $20 bucks. I appreciated it, that was a lot of money for her. I didn’t like that bible, I had other ideas about things like that, but, I kept it because she gave it to me.
*
I’d met this guy I liked, his name was Ricky. Or Rickie, I’m still not sure and now I don’t care enough to find out. His middle name was Allen. He’s the only person on here besides family, who’s name I didn’t change because I don’t care about him. I did though, back then. Ann and I had met him and his buddy riding around and we rode with them a lot, cruising the town loop. It was something to do. He seemed quiet and nice. He was never loud, never in fights, never in trouble and he just liked getting high and driving around in his yellow hot rod. I guess his car was really hot, I wasn’t impressed with cars, only the fact that he had obtained it for himself. It meant, to me, that he must be a hard worker. Like me. Because I knew his family wasn’t rich. He was one of the prettiest boys I had ever seen. He was twenty, slim and had long slightly wavy light brown hair that hung past his shoulders and blue eyes and he was just handsome. He wore little wire rim hippie glasses that made him look intelligent. He dressed like a hippie and smoked pot, but, his clothes were store bought hippie clothes and I knew that. Mine were the real deal and you can’t buy those, I’d hung out with the real deal and I knew he was fronting on that level. But, he just seemed so nice I ignored it. He also had no ideas on the state of the war or the world, wasn’t interested in politics and I doubt he even knew who the vice president was. I’d tried initiating discussion and he wasn’t interested in “the movement.” But, no one else I knew in Iowa was either, so I stopped talking about it all the time. At least he liked good music. His favorite band was The Moody Blues and he played their Question Of Balance tape constantly in the eight track player of his car. I kept thinking maybe he was deep and I just wasn’t getting it. What ever, he was so good looking.
*
Ann and I talked a lot about what boys want and weather we should do "it" or not. Free love was a huge concept that was sweeping the country at the time, and yet, here we were, seventeen and knew jack shit. We would have gladly just done it, gotten it over with and made our boy friends happy, but, contraceptives were not available back then. No one could just walk into a drug store and demand rubbers. Least of all an unmarried teenage girl, and they were the ones who needed them most. They would have notified our parents, the churches and probably tried to run our whore ass’s out of town and that’s no lie. We’d heard truck drivers knew of places where they sold them in machines in rest stop bathrooms, but, we didn’t know any truckers. And even if we had, how could we talk to some man about that? You couldn’t talk about it at all except in late night whispers. Free love was a distant concept not fit to discuss in small church oriented towns. It was serious stuff.
*
Someone perfected a new invention called The Pill about that time and it was on the news. It was a huge development and controversial as all get out. Churches everywhere were up in arms it. Nationally, groups for and against were formed and eventually the crisis reached Hicksville. It was decided by the town fathers, ministers and who ever else runs this shit hole, that we would indeed get the pill. It was legal and they couldn’t fight it anymore. But, there were stipulations. Only married women could even ask for it otherwise there’d be big trouble. Possibly even a jail term. Ann’s newly married sister, IverNelly was the first person I knew who got it and she showed it to us. In a hushed silence we looked at the round container like it was the holy grail. Awestruck, we stared. We didn’t even breathe. Imagine, just imagine, for the first time, women were in charge of something in their life. And it was a big something. Iver said she was never havin’ no more babies. She had a houseful by now. She looked like someone had given her a million dollars in cash, her round freckled face flushed as red as her hair, just thinking at the possibilities. I will never forget that moment in history. It was a big one and unless you lived through it, you can not know how big it was.
　
Well, that was that. We wracked our brains trying to figure out how to get our hands on The Pill. Our other cousin went to a doctor out of town and pretended to be married and called herself Mrs. Someone and asked for it. Records were checked, she was asked to produce her marriage licence and her real doctor was called here in town. So were the cops. She didn’t get a jail sentence, but, she got probation from a judge for “truancy.” And she took such a beating from her holy roller parents I thought they damn near killed her and she was grounded for life. And called a whore by the entire town. The whole family was thrown out of the church. I didn’t go to church, even for Ann’s mother, and I didn’t care what anybody in this crummy town thought, but, my grandma, but, damn, that’s a shit pot of trouble to get in just to have sex with your boy friend. I couldn’t risk it. I was in enough trouble all the time, it seemed like.
*
The preferred method of birth control was the same as what my mother always slapped into me. Nice girls do not do it. Period. But, I knew they did. The only other thing to do, was just to have sex with someone you wanted to marry. Then if you got pregnant, you just started married life a little early. That was bad and caused endless gossip, but, it eventually died down and life went on. Everybody likes babies, they can bring on forgiveness, even with the most stoic supporters of abstinence. You were eventually going to get married and have babies anyhow, it was expected and there was no other choice. So you did it, but, only with someone you loved and wanted to marry.
*
I didn’t know if I was in love or not. I didn’t have much experience with love. I loved my grandma and I loved my friends, but, is that the same thing? I had no idea. I’d never said it to anyone and no one had said it to me. But, Ricky was my boy friend, that was a known fact. I went riding around with him every night and he even took me to the drive in once and he paid. That’s a boy friend. He was cute as hell, quiet and seemed nice and he wasn’t mean. I could marry him, I guess. If I had to.