“Does Tim know?” She nodded again. “What did he say?”
“He offered to marry me, right away. I’m not going to do that,” she said quietly, and her mother thought she looked suddenly like a woman and not a child, as she listened to her. Pennie seemed different. Knowing about the baby had already changed her.
“What do you mean you’re not going to do that?” her father asked, raising his voice.
“I’m not going to marry him, make him leave Stanford, give up all his plans and dreams, to be a husband and father at eighteen. That’s not fair.”
“Life isn’t fair,” Paul said angrily. “It was good enough for me, it’s good enough for him. Why does he get to follow his dreams, while you ruin your life and have an illegitimate baby?”
“He’s eighteen, Dad. You were twenty-four. You were in business school. He hasn’t even gotten to college yet. And I’m not ready to be married with a baby either.”
“You should have thought of that before you got into bed,” her father said harshly. “If you won’t have an abortion, you have no other choice except marriage.”
“She has other choices,” Eileen spoke up in a clear, strong voice. “Do you want to give the baby up, Pennie?” Tears filled Pennie’s eyes, and she shook her head.
“No, I don’t. I don’t think I could do that. I don’t think I could even have an abortion, after seeing the baby on the sonogram today. I guess I’ll have to have it the way I am. I can stay in school till Christmas, if they let me, or go to another school where they would. And if you help me with someone to take care of the baby, I could stay here with you and go to community college a year from now, instead of the schools I was going to apply to.” Bye, bye, Ivy League.
“So he gets to go to Stanford, and you go to a second-rate school and get saddled with a baby at eighteen, without a husband or the respectability of marriage. Why the hell should he get away with that? I didn’t, and neither have a million other guys like me. If you play the game, you have to be willing to pay the price. If you’re having a baby, you need to get married, even if you get divorced later. He owes you at least that. This is his fault too. He can’t just waltz off, and you can’t let him off the hook. I’m not going to let that happen,” Paul said angrily. He was determined that Tim should pay the same price he had for his youthful mistakes.
“She doesn’t have to get married if she doesn’t want to,” Eileen said firmly. She felt as though her own sins had been visited on her daughter. This was like a painful déjà vu of what had happened to them eighteen years before. But they didn’t have to resolve it in the same way. “What do you want, Pennie? In a perfect world.” But the world was no longer perfect, as Pennie had discovered abruptly the day before. Now it would never be perfect again. She would be doomed to a marriage like her parents’, where they loved each other but not enough to forget that they’d been forced into marriage eighteen years before, or to forgive each other for it. She didn’t want Tim to feel that way about her in twenty years.
“Maybe we could get married one day,” Pennie said softly, “if we still want to. But I don’t want a baby to be the only reason why we do. He’ll hate me for it in the end.” There was silence in the room. No one denied what she’d said, which spoke volumes about her parents.
“I don’t hate your mother because we had to get married,” Paul spoke calmly, “but it gave us a rough start.” And just when Eileen had wanted to go back to work again, she had gotten pregnant with the twins, and wound up in bed for months. “But we’ve done fine. Your mother and I love each other,” he said, without looking at Eileen. “You and Tim are young to get married. It’s going to mean a lot of sacrifices for both of you, but I think you should. He needs to make some of those sacrifices too. Not just you.” Paul was monumentally upset by her news.
“People don’t get married because they’re pregnant in this day and age,” Eileen reminded both of them. “And I agree you’re too young. It will change your whole life. I think you should give the baby up,” she said, looking at her daughter with empathy, and thinking about her own experience. “Twenty-two was too young too, but it’s a lot different from seventeen. A couple desperate for a child could give the baby a wonderful home, better than you two could. The chances of a marriage working out at your age are slim. It’s hard enough when you’re older. As teenagers, it’s more than the two of you can cope with, or should have to.” She was deeply sympathetic and felt sorry for both of them.
“Would you let me live here with the baby?” Pennie asked her with tears swimming in her eyes. “Even if we get married, if Tim goes to Stanford, I’ll need a place to live.” The tears spilled down her cheeks and her mother got up and went to put her arms around her. Pennie melted into her mother’s embrace and sobbed. Paul watched them, feeling helpless. He still couldn’t believe this had happened, and they had a grandchild on the way. He was forty-one years old, and not ready to be a grandfather yet. But more important, he was heartbroken for Pennie and that she had to face the burdens of marriage and motherhood so soon. He knew only too well what that was like.
“Of course you can live here,” Eileen said, wiping the tears from her own eyes. She felt as though she had doomed her daughter by example with her own mistakes. “But I really think you should think about putting the baby up for adoption. Talk to Tim about it. I think he’d be relieved.”
“I won’t do that, Mom,” Pennie said, certain of it. She wasn’t going to give their baby away. She loved Tim too much to do that, and would love their baby too.
“They have to get married,” Paul said, sounding angry again. They were a Greek chorus, telling Pennie what to do, neither of them with the answers she wanted. All she wanted was for them to be supportive of her, and help her with the baby as a single mother at eighteen. They weren’t prepared to do that yet, but Pennie hoped that eventually they’d come around, without trying to force her to do things their way. This was her first major adult decision, and she knew that it had to be her own, and Tim’s. Neither of them had been prepared for it, but ready or not, it was the hand they’d been dealt in a very grown-up, high-stakes game. Now they had to pay the price, or she did.
Tim’s parents were more unified in their reaction, as they were in life. They had a good solid marriage, came from the same conservative upper middle–class background, and shared the same values. Bill and Barbara Blake were both furious about what had happened. They blamed Pennie for it, accused her to Tim of trying to entrap him, and his father flatly forbade him to marry her because she was pregnant. Tim’s mother wholeheartedly agreed.
“You can’t marry her for that. What if she has a miscarriage two months later, then you’re stuck with her. How do you even know she’s pregnant? Maybe she’s lying so you’ll marry her.” Bill Blake took nothing at face value. He had never liked how seriously involved Tim and Pennie were at their age. Bill and Barbara were both in their early fifties. They had had trouble conceiving Tim, and Barbara had been a virgin when they married. The idea of Tim having a child out of wedlock was horrifying to them. But they didn’t want him getting married at eighteen either. Like Pennie’s mother, they thought that giving the child up for adoption was the best idea, and suggested it to him, to his dismay.