Read Online A Round-Heeled Woman by Jane Juska - Free Book Online Page A

what happened to one of my friends who returned from Europe pregnant by her Italian lover. She found an abortionist in New York and, sure enough, developed an infection that put her in the hospital. Her mother visited her there, looked down at her daughter, and said, “We will never speak of this again.” I knew this was exactly what my mother would do.
    Another friend, finding herself pregnant by her married boyfriend, journeyed to Mexico. She returned infected physically and emotionally. I spent long nights listening to her describe the horrors of the dirty table in the dirty room, of the pain with no anesthesia, of the humiliation when the abortionist held up the fetus and ordered her to “Look! Shame!” It was a boy, my friend said, before she killed it.
    So, for better or for worse, babies and sex went together. Unless there were other ways of doing it. In the novel, Dottie’s doctor—a woman!—tells Dottie, “Any techniques that give both partners pleasure are perfectly allowable and natural. There are no practices, oral or manual, that are wrong in lovemaking, as long as both partners enjoy them.” My skin crawled. Could this doctor mean that oral sex, which I knew I had practiced on Jack, went both ways—that a man might “go down” on me? God, no. I would never put a man through that. Think of the smell.
    I didn’t go to the doctor. I did not get fitted with a diaphragm. I just couldn’t. If I had taken such a bold step I would have had to face the fact that I was having illicit sex, that I was enjoying it, and that I was a whore without the money. I was getting so good at pretending—most of the time I believed Jack was in love with me—that facing Science in the person of a doctor would blow my cover. Not far below the surface of my pretending was my guilty secret that if I did get pregnant, Jack would have to marry me. And way below even that lay my desire to get pregnant, to do the very thing my mother had warned me most fiercely about. Revenge, how sweet.
    Besides, I knew from my reading that I would have to have a pelvic examination. I had never had one, but I had seen one happen. The summer of my sophomore year in college, I worked in my father’s office as a receptionist for him and the two other doctors who made up his practice. One afternoon, Jeanine Monroe, a girl two years ahead of me in high school, came in for her pregnancy checkup. I did not know the law mandated that someone in addition to the doctor be present during a pelvic exam. My father did not explain this to me. He said, from the examining room, “Come in here.” I do not remember my demur, but there must have been one because he said loudly, “Get in here and behave like an adult.”
    Jeanine Monroe used to sit in the back booth of the City Drugstore and smoke cigarettes—in high school! The boys would come in after basketball practice and stand around while Jeanine blew smoke rings and drank the cherry Cokes they bought her. She would look up from under her long eyelashes, through the veil of smoke, and sometimes she would smile at the boys, sometimes she just looked back at them. I admired her tremendously. The boys on the team—Babe and Paul and Guy and Roger, the crushes of every girl in school including me—rocked back and forth on their heels and punched each other out of the way so they could squeeze into the booth with Jeanine.
    Pretty soon something would happen, like Rutheda Dimke, wearing something see-through and flimsy and tacky, would come in—she was secretary at the ladder factory—and buy something from Ray Klopfenstein, the owner of the store and father of the adopted boy who could dance, Johnny. All conversation in the store would stop, the boys would shush each other, and Jeanine would pause in her smoking while we listened to hear what Rutheda would order. If she asked Ray for a box of Kotex, it meant that she had her