The Girls From Corona Del Mar Read Online Free PDF

For a week now, they’d been having this same conversation every evening, and each time her mother had arrived at a different conclusion. One night, Lorrie Ann should keep the baby and marry Jim. Another night, Lorrie Ann should get rid of the baby and go to Berkeley. It was all terribly unclear. Part of what was making it unclear was Berkeley: the scholarship, the lure of San Francisco, the feeling of escape from Corona del Mar.
    “I guess I’m just saying: he’s a good guy, he loves me, he’s willing to marry me. And that’s a very different situation than if it were some one-night stand.” Lorrie Ann scraped her teeth along her orange Popsicle, making infinitesimal amounts of shaved ice in her mouth.
    “That’s true,” her mother said.
    “And when Mia got her abortion,” I imagine her saying, though of course she would not report this part of the conversation to me, and perhaps it never even happened, “I don’t know. I always felt like she regretted it. I don’t want to have any regrets.”
    Did I have any regrets?
    I dislike talking about this, and I lied even to Franklin when he asked me about it. I lied right to his face as we lay in bed, glutted and woozy from too many banana pancakes on a Sunday morning in our apartment in Istanbul: “It was the best decision I ever made.”
    “No regrets?” he asked.
    “None,” I said, running a finger over the skin of Franklin’s upper arm, marveling at the intricate mesh of his orange freckles, which covered his skin from head to toe. From across a room, he just looked faintly orange, but up close, the freckles were a world of pixelated detail that made me dizzy. I thought of the freckles as some kind of armor, fortifying him, protecting him from the world, a weightless and shimmering barrier, an enchantment.
    But I lied to him all the same.
    Did I feel the wrongness, the terrible violation of an ancient edict, when I lost that quickening inside me? Did I cry over the death of the child, whom I imagined would have been a girl, a daughter of the moon, like me, like Inanna? Of course I did.
    Did I spend my time at Yale, yes, at fucking Yale, getting As in all my coursework, falling in love with dead languages, learning to become myself and the woman I had every right to be, did I spend this time mourning and regretting my decision? Of course not.
    I labored for years to get into Yale. I was the president of the French Club and humiliated myself by wearing a beret that did not suit me at all. I lettered in volleyball, basketball, and softball even though I was short and not naturally athletic or even coordinated. I studied diligently for tests that were painfully, moronically stupid.
    And they took me. They took me and I became who I became and the cost of it was a baby that never got to be born. That was the price and I paid it.
    And yet when Lorrie Ann decided to keep the baby and marry Jim, everyone was deeply surprised. It was such a patently stupid thing to do. And Lorrie Ann was not a stupid girl.
    As for why Lorrie Ann did ultimately marry Jim, her thinking pretty much ran like this:
    The question was not, Would marrying Jim make her happy? But, Should one kill an unborn child? Or, more important, Should one killan unborn child just because one has dreams of being a beatnik in San Francisco?
    She decided early on that one probably ought not to do that. She felt instinctively that if she killed an unborn child in order to go have fun in San Francisco, horrible, horrible things might happen to her in retribution. After all, her father had been taken from her just because she had eaten pepperoni and laughed at poor Brittany Slane’s downy hair. So then, if one couldn’t kill the baby, should one give up the baby for adoption, or should one raise it oneself?
    This was the main sticking point for Lorrie Ann. As she had been considering all this, she had looked up “children for adoption” online. There were hundreds of them, all black little boys. She showed