Old Enough to Vote

One day Gene said he was getting married.  His girlfriend had gotten pregnant.  She'd been pregnant for awhile, he said, but they'd kept it quiet.  She would have the baby around the time we graduated.  

I wasn't sure how this worked.  Would he be allowed to go to high school if he was married?  I mean, they pretended that things like sex didn't exist.  Were we to be allowed to walk about with a boy who could tell us about the intimate conjugal life?  Jesus Christ, I thought, life didn't get any less weird.  The beauty I saw and the heat I felt when his girlfriend touched me was probably the early stages of pregnancy.  Gene would go to work, have a wife who cooked bad meals and watched after a baby all day in some apartment or rented house.  He'd already taken an after school job.  He'd already made the change.  He was different.  

One day visiting my father in the hospital after school, I was told that he would be discharged soon.  He had been in the hospital for almost two months.  I guess I'd gotten used to it and half-consciously thought that this is how it would always be.  No, I hadn't thought that, but I hadn't thought otherwise, either.  

The day he was released, my aunt and uncle came to the hospital to pick him up.  My mother was there, too, which made me very uncomfortable.  They were divorced.  My mother was living with a merchant marine.  This was shit.  It was awful.  

But within minutes, they were all gone.  

Because of the tragedy, I guess, Tommy's mother had forgiven me for whatever she had blamed me for, and I was welcomed at the trailer once again.  But I had gotten away and she could not bring me back.  The life I was living was not the one I had lived, and though I visited from time to time, it was not the same.  For me or for them. 

One day Tommy looked sick.  His girlfriend, the one who had loved him no matter what, no matter that he wanted Adair, the one he'd had me stand in the shadows to watch get naked in her bedroom, had gotten pregnant.  Tommy did not look like a man who wanted to be a father.  

"What are you going to do?"  

"I don't know."  

Abortions had been legalized in New York.  There was that.  It was expensive, of course, but not as expensive as having the baby.  Tommy's eyes lit up, but he said Laura's mother wouldn't let her do that.  She was religious, a Seventh Day Adventist, and she was very conservative, too.  She'd always acted as if she was better than the life she lived and seemed distant and cold, and though she had been nice in caring for my father in the hospital, I could never warm up to her. She would not allow Laura to get an abortion, but it was not clear if she would let her get married to Tommy, either.  Tommy seemed alright with that.  

Somehow, in the middle of everything and without fanfare, I had turned eighteen.  A controversial new amendment to the United States Constitution said that I was old enough to vote.