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Article Excerpt
My grandmother Lillian, may her memory be for blessing, used to say, "You could be dying of cancer, but if my little pinky hurts, it's all I can think about." We thought she was a narcissist--albeit a self-aware one. Of late, I've come to wonder whether her condition was congenital, or maybe even endemic. It's like that quote from Anais Nin, "We don't see things as they are; we see them as we are." (1)
I want to tell you the story of how I've come to see a woman I call Eva. It's more than just Eva's story, which is interesting in itself; it's also my story, puny like a pinky.
The story starts on a frigid February morning in 1992, when my friend Jack, a criminal defense lawyer with a solo-practice in downtown Chicago, called to talk with me about his sixteen-year-old client, Eva, who had hidden her pregnancy from her family and then given birth in a toilet. Her case was going to trial. He had never heard a story like hers. Oddly enough, I had.
Three years earlier, in my first year of teaching, I was sitting in my office grading memos from my legal writing students when I got a call from a Will County defense lawyer, just south of Chicago. The lawyer called because she mistakenly believed the "Institute for Health Law" where I worked might have the sort of expert who could help her explain to a jury why her fourteen-year-old client hadn't told anyone she was pregnant and had delivered her baby into the toilet.
"This girl never had sex education," she said. "They don't teach sex-ed in Will County."
"She'd only gotten her period once," the lawyer added.
I listened to the slow whish of her breath in and out through the receiver.
"She sent her dad out for some aspirin while she sat in the bathroom. She thought she had cramps. When her dad got home, he found her passed out on the bathroom floor."
The lawyer paused again and exhaled into the phone. "Her dad said there was blood everywhere. He called the EMTs. They found an eight-pound baby, dead, in the toilet."
I could tell the lawyer believed this girl was not a murderer. Although I'd never heard anything like it before, I instinctively agreed.
In those days, I volunteered once a week at Planned Parenthood, talking teenagers through pregnancy tests and helping them identify options. I had not yet had my babies; had never even been pregnant. We sat in hard chairs at the table in the tiny yellow counseling room, staring at the future foretold in the plus or minus on their plastic pregnancy wands. Some girls brought their boyfriends with them, but most came alone. Pregnant or not, most girls wept.
I felt sorriest for the ones who didn't cry--those who were thirteen or fourteen and had little idea how a baby would shape their future. As often as not, they preened in pink-faced delight at their positive pregnancy tests, amazed at what their bodies had done and dreaming of the future they would share with their absent boyfriends, their babies' fathers. More than once, excited at learning they were pregnant, these girls looked up in concern and asked," Are you going to tell my parents?"
I collected their stories like souvenirs, fingering them in my mind as I rode the El train home to the dingy apartment my husband and I rented just north of the city. Unlike the girls I met, I had a pretty clear sense of the love and stability I expected to have in my life when I became a mother. What I didn't know was how I was going to get to motherhood from where I was, on the cusp of thirty. Nothing was going according to plan. My marriage was coming apart; I had no job security, an adjunct teacher's salary, and all my law school debt.
I should have been paying those Planned Parenthood girls for what they gave me. They looked at me across the counseling room table as though I had the answer--as though the decisions I'd made had come out all right, as though I was there already.
I told the lawyer from Will County I would try to find her an expert. A week later, she called back. She didn't need an expert to explain her client's actions after all. Her client had pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter.
"The prosecutor subpoenaed the boys from her 8th grade class," she said. "They told him they used to line up outside of her bedroom after school and take turns having sex with her. She didn't want to face them at trial, so she took the guilty plea the state offered her."
The judge sentenced her to probation and counseling, which, her lawyer said, probably was the best thing for her. The case was over. Although I wondered about the story...
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