The Shining Girls

Margot ^{5 DECEMBER 1972}

Natch, Margot has spotted the guy following them. All the way from the 103rd Street station, five blocks away. That’s one block too far to be a coincidence, if you ask her. And okay, maybe she’s over-cautious because she’s Jane-ing today. Or maybe it’s being in Roseland at this time of night that sets her nerves twanging like a banjo. But there’s no way she’s going to let Jemmie go home alone in her condition. They try to make it easy on the women. But it still hurts and it’s still scary and it’s still illegal.

She supposes that it’s possible that the guy could, perfectly reasonably, just happen to be strolling along the exact same route at this exact same time of the evening in the pouring rain, tra-la-la-la-la.

Gangster-Pervert-Undercover-Gangster-Pervert-Undercover she sings in her head, running through the options in time to Jemmie’s steps. Shuffle-shuffle like an old lady, leaning heavily on her arm and holding her stomach. Long sportscoat could mean cop. Or pervert. But he’s been in a fight, which probably means pervert or mobster. The Outfit seem to have finally cottoned on that Jane don’t make money. Not like the ‘respectable’ doctors who charge $500 and more to have someone pick you up on the street corner and blindfold you so you can’t identify them, and scrape your womb out and dump you back after it’s done without so much as a how-do-you-do-ma’am-have-a-nice-day. Or maybe he’s just some guy. Some pie-in-the-sky kinda guy.

‘Say again?’ Jemmie’s breath catches from the pain.

‘Oh jeez, sorry, thinking out loud. Don’t pay me any mind, Jemmie. Oh, hey, see, we’re nearly home.’

‘He wasn’t, you know.’

‘Wasn’t what?’ Margot is only half-listening. The man has picked up his pace, skip-running across the street against the light to keep up with them. He steps ankle-deep into a puddle, curses and shakes out his shoes, then shoots her a goofy smile that’s meant to be disarming.

Jemmie is angry with her. ‘Some pie-in-the-sky, like you was suggestin’. We engaged. Gonna get married when he gets back. Soon as I turn sixteen.’

‘That’s swell,’ Margot says. She is not on top form. Normally she would have called Jemmie on this, a grown man shacking up with a minor before he ships off to Vietnam, promising her the world when he can’t even manage to put on a rubber. Fourteen years old. Only slightly bigger than the kids she subs at Thurgood Marshall Middle School. It makes her heart hurt, man. But she is distracted from going into full lecture mode, because she is turning the uncomfortable thought over in her head that this guy dogging their steps looks familiar. Which brings her back to her litany. Gangster-pervert-undercover-cop. Or worse. Her stomach flip-flops. A disgruntled partner. They’ve had them before. Isabel Sterritt’s husband who bust up her face and broke her arm when he found out what she’d done. Which was exactly the reason she didn’t want to have another baby with him.

Oh please, let it not be a maniac partner.

‘Can we… can we stop for a moment?’ Jemmie has gone the color of stale chocolate that’s melted in your purse. Sweat and rain shine on her forehead through the acne. Broken-down car. No umbrella. Could this day get worse?

‘We’re nearly there, okay? You’re doing so well. Keep it up. Just one more block. Can you do that?’

Jemmie reluctantly lets her tug her along. ‘Are you going to come in with me?’

‘Won’t your mom think it’s weird? A white girl bringing you home with stomach cramps?’

Margot is memorable. It’s her height. Six foot tall with strawberry-blonde hair parted down the middle. She played basketball in high school, but she was too laid back to take it seriously.

‘But can’t you come in anyway?’

‘If you want me to, I will,’ she says, trying to find some enthusiasm. Explaining to family members doesn’t always go down well. ‘Let’s see how we do, okay?’

She wishes Jemmie had found them earlier. The service is listed in the phone book, under ‘Jane How’, but how would you know if you didn’t? Ditto the ads in the alternative newspapers or pasted up at the laundromat. There’s no way for a girl like Jemmie to find them except by personal referral, and that took three and a half months and a replacement social worker who was sympathetic to the cause. Sometimes she thinks it’s the substitutes who make the real difference. Substitute teachers and social workers and doctors. Fresh eyes. Big picture. Stepping up. Even if it’s only temporary. Sometimes temporary is all you need.

Fifteen weeks is borderline. You just can’t take a chance. Twenty women a day and they haven’t lost one yet. Unless you count the girl they turned away because she had a terrible infection, telling her to go see a doctor, to come back when it cleared up. They found out later she died in the hospital. If only they’d seen her sooner. Like Jemmie.

Jemmie’s was one of the last cards to get claimed. The easy cases go fast, all the volunteers sitting in Big Jane’s cozy living room in Hyde Park with the photographs of her kids on the bookshelf and ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ on the record player, drinking tea and haggling over which patients to take, like they’re trading horses.

Twenty-year-old co-ed, five weeks along, lives in Lake Bluff burbs? That 3×5 card is snapped up in the first go-around. But the forty-eight-year-old housewife worn down by seven kids who just can’t go through it again? The farm manager whose twenty-two-week old baby is so deformed the doctor says he (or she) won’t live more than an hour after birth, but insists she carry it to term? The fourteen-year-old from the West Side who rocks up with a jar full of pennies because that’s all she has and begs you not to tell her ma? Those cards come up again and again until Big Jane growls in exasperation, ‘Well somebody has to take it.’ And in the meantime, the messages are still coming in on the answering machine, still being transcribed onto new cards for tomorrow and the day after. Leave your name and a number we can reach you on. We can help you. We’ll call you back.

How many has Margot facilitated now? Sixty? A hundred? She doesn’t do the actual D&C. She’s clumsy at the best of times. It’s her size. The world wasn’t built to fit her, and she doesn’t trust herself with a dainty curette. But she’s real good at holding hands and explaining what’s happening. Knowing helps. What’s being done to you and why. Name that pain, she jokes. She gives the women a scale of reference. Is it better or worse than stubbing your toe? And compared to finding out that your crush is unrequited? A paper cut? Breaking up with your best friend? How about realizing you’re turning into your mother? She gets actual laughs.

Most of the women cry afterwards, though. Sometimes because they’re sorry or guilty or scared. Even the most certain ones have doubts. Inhuman not to. But mainly it’s out of sheer relief. Because it’s hard and terrible, but now it’s over and now they can get on with their lives.

It’s getting tougher. Not just the mafia goons muscling in or the cops who’ve been coming down heavy since Yvette Coulis’s self-righteous sister was so outraged that they dared give her an abortion, that she’s been writing letters to the city council and generally sticking a bee up everyone’s butt. The worst part was that she started hanging around at the Front, harassing the friends or husbands or boyfriends or moms and sometimes dads who the women brought along to support them. They had to move the Front to another apartment to get rid of her. The cops started sniffing around after that. The tallest men you ever saw, like that was a qualification to get into the homicide unit, in matchy-match trenchcoats and grumpy expressions that said this was a waste of their time.

But that’s not even the biggest problem – which is that it’s legal in New York now. Which should be a good thing, and maybe Illinois will follow, right? But it means that girls with money hop on a train or a bus or a plane and the ones who come to Jane are really desperate – the poor, the young, the old, the far-along.

Those are the ones she struggles with the most. Even the most hard-line Janes do. For sure. Wrap up your first fetus in an old T-shirt for a burial shroud and toss it in a dumpster three miles from the Place and see how you like it. No one said it would be pretty, yanking despair out of a woman.

And then the man takes her by the arm. ‘Excuse me, ma’am. I think you dropped this,’ he says, offering her something in his hand. She has no idea how he caught up with them so suddenly. And she’s certain she knows that lopsided smile.

‘Margot?’ Jemmie is frightened.

‘You go along home, Jemmie,’ Margot says in her best, most authoritative school-marm voice, which is not particularly either, considering she’s only twenty-five. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’

There shouldn’t be any complications now. But if she does have to go to hospital, the doctors won’t give her any trouble. Jane have started using Leunbach’s paste. No pain, no blood, no problems, no way of proving the miscarriage was induced. She’ll be just fine.

She checks to make sure that Jemmie is moving away and turns to face him, pulling back her shoulders and straightening up so she can look him direct in the eye.

‘Can I help you, sir?’

‘I’ve been looking all over for you, sweetheart, I wanted to return this.’

She finally looks at the object he’s shoving in her face. A protest button, home-made. She knows this because she drew it herself. A pig with wings. ‘Pigasus for President’ it reads in her block capitals, sloping up, unevenly to the right. The Yippies’ official candidate in ’68 because a pig could hardly be worse than the real politicians.

‘Do you recognize this? Can you tell me when you last saw it? Do you remember me? You must remember me.’ He asks it with terrible intensity.

‘Yes,’ she gasps. ‘The Democratic Convention.’ It comes rushing back like a slap. The scene outside the Hilton, because their leader, Tom Hayden, had told them to get the hell out of the park as the police started laying into people, pulling them down off the statues they’d climbed up.

If they were going to be tear-gassed, the whole city would be teargassed, he was shouting. If blood was spilled in Grant Park, it would be spilled all over Chicago! Seven thousand people surging into the streets against the cops pushing back. Still angry about Martin Luther King, the whole of the West Side burning. The feeling of the concrete brick flying out of her hand like it was yanked on a string. She was aware of the cop barging into her, the baton glancing off her side, but she didn’t feel any pain until afterwards, in the shower when she saw the bruising.

The news cameras and the lights on the steps of the hotel, chanting with the crowd at the top of her lungs, ‘The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!’ until the cops sprayed the entire crowd with mace. Yippies. Bystanders. Reporters. Everybody. She thought she heard Rob croaking, ‘The pigs are whores,’ but she couldn’t find him in the crush of people crying and shoving, the spotlights glancing off the blue police helmets that were everywhere, batons slamming down mechanically.

Margot was leaning on the hood of a car on Balboa, her head down, spitting up saliva and rubbing her eyes with the hem of her T-shirt, which only made it worse. Something made her look up to see him, limping straight towards her, a tall man full of such ferocious intent. Like a brick on a string.

He stopped in front of her and gave her a skew smile. Inoffensive. Charming even. It was so out of place in this chaos that she moaned and tried to shove him away, suddenly terrified the way she hadn’t been of the cops or the crowd or the burning that had threatened to collapse her chest.

He caught her wrists. ‘We’ve met before. But you won’t remember.’ Such a weird thing to say, it stuck with her.

‘Here,’ he grabbed hold of her lapel, as if to pull her to her feet, but instead he yanked off her button. ‘This is it.’ He let go so abruptly that she fell onto the car, sobbing in outrage and shock.

She staggered home, looking forward to showering for an hour before sinking onto the couch and smoking a jay to calm down. But when she unlocked the door and pushed past the beaded curtain, it was to find Rob in the middle of fucking some girl in their bed. ‘Oh hey, baby, this is Glenda,’ he said, not even pausing mid-thrust. ‘Want to join us?’ She used her lipstick to write ‘asshole’ on the mirror, pressing down so hard that she broke it in half.

They fought for five and a half hours after Glenda finally got the hint and took off. Made up. Had make-up sex that didn’t turn out so well. (Turned out Glenda had crabs.) Broke up a week later. And then Rob slunk off to Toronto to avoid being drafted and she finished college and got into teaching because they hadn’t managed to change the world, and she was disillusioned. Until she found Jane.

And the thing with the scary limping guy who so admired her button that he stole it in the middle of a riot became a funny anecdote she could break out at dinner parties or meetings, but then she got better stories, ones that actually went somewhere. She hadn’t thought about any of that for ages. Until now.

He takes advantage of her shock. Slings his arm around her, pulling her close and slides the knife into her stomach. Right there, in the middle of the street in the rain. She can’t believe it. She opens her mouth to scream, but only manages to gag as he twists the knife. A cab drives past, the light on, water spraying up from the tires, splashing against Margot’s red pants, even as the blood starts welling up over her waistband, soaking into the ridges of corduroy, obscenely warm. She looks for Jemmie, but she’s already disappeared round the corner. Safe.

‘Tell me the future,’ he whispers, his breath warm against her ear. ‘Don’t make me read it in your entrails.’

‘Screw you,’ she gasps, less strident than she imagined it in her head, and she tries to push him away. But all the strength has gone out of her arms and he has learned. Worse. He knows he is invincible. ‘Have it your way,’ he shrugs, still smiling. He wrenches her thumb backwards – it’s unbearable – and uses it to shepherd her away to a construction site.

He pushes her down into the mud of the foundation pit and binds her up with wire and gags her and takes his time with the killing. When he is done, he tosses the tennis ball in after her.

He doesn’t intend that she shouldn’t be found. But the man operating the digger pushing the rubble into the pit next morning catches only a glimpse of reddish-blonde hair in the mud and manages to convince himself that it’s a dead cat, even though he sometimes lies awake at night and thinks it wasn’t.

Her murderer takes the object he needs and then tosses her purse into an empty lot. The contents are picked over by various petty opportunists until a good citizen turns in the bag at the police station. But by that time all the useful stuff is gone. The cops can’t identify someone from the cassette recordings she made. Copies of the music playing on Big Jane’s player in that Hyde Park apartment, crackly and low-fi from the jerry-rigged connection of tapedeck to LP. The Mamas and Papas, Dusty Springfield, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Peter, Paul & Mary, Janis Joplin.

Jemmie goes to bed early the night of her illegal abortion, complaining about something nasty she ate. Her parents don’t question her, never find out the truth. Her guy does not come back from Vietnam, or maybe he does, but not to her. She gets good grades in school, goes to community college, but drops out to get married at twenty-one. She has three children, no complications. Goes back to school at thirty-four and ends up working for City Parks.

The women of Jane worry themselves sick, but there is nothing to show that Margot didn’t just get tired and pack it all in, maybe to join that ex-boyfriend in Canada. And besides, they’re preoccupied with their own troubles. A year later, Jane is raided. Eight women are arrested. Their lawyer keeps delaying the case for months and months, awaiting the outcome of a big trial that she says will change women’s rights to be in control of their own bodies, forever.