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"Your grandmother was not as forthcoming. We never had talks like this. She was old school, embarrassed by any references to sex or her own body. How she and her generation expected us to learn everything properly is a mystery. They simply had blind faith, which we know does not work. There have already been four teenage pregnancies in our township," she said, and my eyes nearly popped.
"Four? In our school?"
"I can't tell you any more about it than that. It's privileged medical information."
"How can they keep it a secret?"
"Some women don't show until their fourth or fifth month. I didn't show with you until almost my sixth. Unless you're a bad girl, you don't have to think about it, the symptoms, I mean. There are other problems, however, like sexually transmitted diseases. I don't want to make it all sound unpleasant. It's not, but it only takes a little carelessness to make it so. Understand?"
"Yes," I said. I was still uncomfortable talking about it. I hadn't even been out on a formal date. I felt as if I were being inoculated against a disease that didn't exist.
"Don't bury your head in the sand, Zipporah," she warned. "That's the way you get into trouble."
"I'm not! I said I understand!"
"Okay, okay." She thought a moment and then leaned toward me. "There's no chance Karen's already been with a boy like that, is there, Zipporah? No chance she's done something she now regrets, is there?"
"No," I said, but not with enough confidence to satisfy myself, much less her.
"All right. If you need anything, let me know," she said. I knew she meant if Karen needed anything.
I nodded, and she smiled and rose.
"I love my sitting room," she said, looking around. "It feels cozy, doesn't it?"
"Yes."
"We all need our special places," she said, running her hand over my hair. "You're going to be a pretty young woman. Don't you worry. They'll be taking numbers at the door just like at the bakery."
"Oh, Mama," I said.
She laughed and returned to the kitchen to prepare dinner. I ran upstairs to my room to think about everything she had told me. I was okay with it for myself, but she really put the worries in me when it came to Karen. I was the one who had the mother who was a nurse. I had an obligation to share my good fortune, I thought. Surely, she would appreciate it.
And it would be a good way to get her to tell me what was bothering her and what secret things had happened.
It was early enough for me to get on my bike, ride into town, see Karen, and come home before dinner. I was bursting with the need to tell her some of this, to warn her. I charged down the stairs.
"I'll be back in a while," I called out, and before my mother could object, I was out the door.
Karen and her mother had moved into Karen's stepfather's house soon after the wedding. She had told me how her stepfather's mother resented them so much she would keep herself in her own little apartment at the rear of the house and wouldn't take meals with them. She did practically nothing with them as a family.
"We really didn't see much of a change after she had her stroke and died," Karen had told me. "It was as if she wasn't there before, anyway. Harry still hasn't gotten rid of all her things. My mother tells him to give them to the Angel View Thrift Store that sells stuff for charity. He says he will, but he hasn't. H
e hasn't done much with the apartment, either, even though he said he would fix it up and rent it out someday."
The Pearson house was one of the few brickfronted homes in Sandburg. It had a pretty lawn with waist- high hedges and a sidewalk that curved up to the stone steps in front and the veranda. Druggists, it seemed, were only a few levels down from doctors when it came to making money. Pearson's Pharmacy was the only drugstore in the village, and people who lived in the outlying areas came to it rather than travel another five miles or so to another drugstore. They also sold toys, candy, and ice cream, but they didn't have as big a fountain as George's, and the ice cream was prepackaged and not nearly as good.
Like me, Karen had her own room upstairs. From the way she talked, once she got home, if she didn't have any chores to do, she went to her room and remained there. Unlike me, she didn't spend much time with her mother and stepfather watching television or even just talking, and she had no brother or sister to talk to or write to. She was alone much more than I was or would ever be, I thought.
Her mother had continued to work at the drugstore after she married Harry and was gone most of the day. Harry was the only pharmacist, so he had to be there almost all the time. They rarely had dinner together, because Harry always had to stay behind to close up or do inventory or prepare prescriptions for the morning. Because her mother waited for him, Karen usually ate by herself. Sometimes she even ate in her room. I felt sorry for her and wished Harry were more considerate.
Karen told me he was strict about the hours the store opened and closed. If someone needed a prescription after seven p.m., he or she would have to travel twenty miles. Occasionally, Karen said, the doctors would plead with Harry to go back and prepare a prescription, but he was never happy about it and always made it clear he was doing someone a big favor. That surprised me, because in his drugstore, Mr. Pearson was always quite pleasant and seemingly concerned about the illnesses his customers had. At least to the public, he was a jovial man with a soft round face my mother said looked like a bowl of vanilla pudding with two plums for eyes, a walnut for a nose, and a banana for a mouth. He was stout, with all of his weight going to his upper torso. Karen revealed that his legs were bony and hairy.
"They look like they had stopped growing years before the rest of him," she told me once after we had left the drugstore together.
Later, in the attic, when I asked her why her mother had married him, she told me her mother had decided to choose security over romance:
"Besides," she added, "my mother said she made love only in the dark so she could imagine him to be anyone she wanted."
