It wasn’t just that she was in love with a boy from a bad neighborhood. That wasn’t all that happened.
‘When did you find out?’ I ask.
‘Just after Christmas,’ Diane says, pausing, maybe taking in how I’ll react. ‘I started getting sick all the time. My mother took me to the doctor, and that’s when I found out for sure.’
She eyes me carefully. Will I be like those heartless girls at Winkler’s? Will I tell her she’s nasty? Dirty?
A bad girl?
‘You must have been so scared,’ I say at last, still grappling with my surprise.
‘Oh, Evie, I was terrified,’ she says with a sigh, and I’m not sure if she’s sighing from the memory or relief that I haven’t acted like her old friends at the drive-in.
‘And you didn’t tell Johnny?’ I ask.
Diane sniffs, shakes her head no. ‘My parents watched me like hawks afterward. There was no way to get to him. My sister wouldn’t help, like I said. And then maybe there was a part of me that didn’t want to tell him. I thought maybe he’d want to get married. In fact, I’m sure that’s what he would have wanted. And I wasn’t ready for that, even though I loved him. I love him. I felt so … trapped.’
Suddenly I can hear Cheryl’s worried voice on the other end of the phone. Her lonely letters from Fort Hood.
‘What was it like in Dallas?’ I ask, immediately embarrassed by my question. ‘Maybe you don’t want to talk about it,’ I add. But Diane waves away my concern and spills out her story in the soft, slow voice of a girl who’s had too much to drink at a party and too much heartbreak in her life.
She fills in all the blanks I’ve been wondering about. The days in Dallas were long and terrible, she tells me, spent learning shorthand and playing cards. Torn from everything familiar, even the familiarity of her stuffy, stilted homelife. Night after night she was surrounded by other sad girls and their swollen bellies, trading their sorrowful stories like prisoners trade cigarettes and stamps. There were pinch-faced matrons who told Diane and the other girls they were bad, that this was their punishment, that a mother wasn’t supposed to be a girl like them.
‘We spent hours just bored out of our skulls, taking classes in secretarial skills because girls like us sometimes don’t find husbands, and we’d have to find a way to survive in the world,’ Diane says, her teddy bear still tight in her hands. She grimaces at the memories.
Diane’s story ends with a baby, of course. That’s the natural finish to it. But this baby isn’t with Diane. I don’t know if she’ll want to tell me that part. We just sit in the quiet. At last Diane peers out the window next to her bed. It’s dark now. I try to imagine Grandma and Mama angry at home, but I can’t leave Diane right now. There’s no possible way I would.
‘When the pains started,’ Diane begins, still gazing out the window, ‘the maternity home put me in a taxicab and sent me to the hospital alone. I was in a dark room by myself, with a nurse coming in every so often. The nurse was chewing gum. That’s what I remember. I was having a baby and she was chewing gum as calm as you could.’
‘Oh, Diane, all by yourself?’ I ask. She nods, and I feel tears well up in my own eyes. Just imagining it seems awful. I can’t imagine living it. And Diane did.
‘At the end a doctor came in, and I finally had my baby,’ she says. ‘What a sweet little gumdrop with fingers and toes. A little piece of Johnny and me, and I got to hold that angel for just a moment. Those two little eyes stared up at me, and I remember thinking that they hadn’t seen the stars or the ocean yet, but at least they’d seen my face.’
Tears are rolling down my face now, and I wait for Diane to cry, but she doesn’t. Her drunken voice has somehow grown still and measured as she tells me this part. Like she’s bearing witness. Testifying. Like she has to make sure someone knows exactly what happened to her. I listen, barely able to breathe.
‘Then not long after that, this woman from the adoption agency in a gray suit and hat came and took my baby right through the door and out of my room. And that was it.’ This comes out as the slightest of whispers. Her gaze out the window is vacant.
I don’t know what to say. We’re both just quiet for what feels like forever. Diane breaks the silence at last when she says, ‘Thank you, Evie. It feels good to tell someone.’
I reach out and squeeze her snotty, wet hands. ‘I’m glad you could tell me.’ I pause, struggling to find the words for something I’ve just realized. ‘You’re so brave to tell me that.’ If I’d never gotten to know Diane, would I have thought she was brave based on how she looks? No. But bravery takes a lot of different forms. I know that now, and I’m glad I do.
She squeezes my hands back, too. ‘I don’t feel brave, really, but all right, I guess,’ she says, the tiniest, briefest of smiles on her face.
Her hands still in mine, I ask her if Johnny still doesn’t know what happened.
Diane shakes her head. ‘He doesn’t have any idea. I told you it was complicated when we ended up at Eastside together. Johnny was hurt. He thought I’d just disappeared. And for me … I didn’t know if I could tell him about the baby when it was so painful for me to even think about it myself, much less talk about it. And … as much as I love Johnny, I guess there was a part of me that was …’ Her voice trails off.
‘A part of you that was angry?’ I guess, thinking back on how resigned and resentful Cheryl seemed when she understood she would have to marry Dennis.
‘Yes,’ Diane says, letting go of my hands and clenching her fists for emphasis, relieved by my answer. ‘Yes. I was angry at him. I know he was miserable when I disappeared, and that’s why Connie hated me at first. But he didn’t get stuck in that awful place in Dallas. He didn’t have to carry our baby for all those months and then sit there, helpless, while our child was ripped away. And he didn’t have to take being called a slut by his own parents because he wasn’t the one who’d gotten herself pregnant.’ At those last words she scowls, her face twisted up with anger.
‘It’s different for boys,’ I say, thinking about what would have happened to Cheryl if Dennis hadn’t offered to marry her and she hadn’t lost the baby. He could have said no and joined the army anyway, disappearing into a brand-new life. Cheryl would have been the one trapped. Stuck. Just like Diane.
‘It sure is,’ Diane says. ‘A girl doesn’t get herself pregnant, you know. I mean, it wasn’t Johnny’s fault. And it wasn’t my fault, either. But I paid for it.’
‘You sure did,’ I say. ‘I’m so sorry, Diane.’
‘So you don’t think I’m’ – she lowers her voice – ‘a slut?’
‘Diane, no, of course not,’ I say. ‘Never. You were in love.’
Diane surprises me with a big hug, pulling me in tight. One of Miss Odeen’s vocabulary words slides into my mind. Surreal. It’s surreal that tomorrow will mark one week since the night Diane and I first met at Winkler’s. It feels like one year ago with all that’s happened.
But Diane Farris is my friend. And I’m so glad she is.