In November, I came to class one day to find a winter coat, brand-new, pink nylon with a pale-pink lining, hanging from the back of my chair. “I bought it for my sister, but she didn’t like it. On sale, so it can’t go back. Can you use it?” David asked. Later, I learned that he didn’t have a sister. He’d seen me shivering in the parking lot wearing both of my sweaters at once, and had guessed, correctly, that I didn’t have a coat.

It took him weeks to earn my trust, weeks of treats and compliments: a waxed paper bag of doughnuts waiting on my chair, a coupon for buy-one-get-one-free pizza from the shop in town tucked into my Ten Monologues book, a sweater that he told me he’d shrunk in the wash. Later, he said that getting me to talk was like coaxing a feral cat in from the cold. Little Cat, he called me, and he told me that he’d loved me the first time he’d seen me, all legs and big eyes, “and those tights you had, remember them? The ones with the hole in the knee.”

He never touched me for all that time, except for a light hand on my wrist or the small of my back when he was directing a scene. . but, the way he looked at me, I knew there were possibilities. I had just turned eighteen, had only had a few boyfriends, and was still learning my own power, the way boys would follow me with their eyes, the things I could get them to do. Now I was starting to wonder whether a man might be the answer to my problems.

One night at the end of November, when it was getting dark by four-thirty p.m. and the nights were getting cold, I walked to David’s classroom and leaned against the door. I wore a thin white blouse, my ripped black tights, a black Spandex skirt that ended at the tops of my thighs, the Doc Martens I’d convinced Yaya to buy me the year before. He looked at me and his face lit up, and I knew that the thing I wanted — a warm place to sleep, an actual bed — was mine for the taking.

So I stood in the classroom doorway, each rib visible underneath my skin and my nipples poking out against my shirt, and I let him take me to his place, an apartment that took up the whole second floor of an old Victorian downtown. There, I let him give me half a glass of tart red wine and then, by the flickering light of a half-dozen candles, I undressed myself while he stared up at me from his bed and lay on top of him and kissed him until he groaned and rolled on top of me, taking me in his arms. Three weeks after the first time we’d slept together, he resigned from the school. No big deal, he told me; he had a little family money. The next day we drove to a justice of the peace after school on the Friday afternoon before Christmas, and became man and wife.

I finished school, at David’s insistence, and it wasn’t half the scandal you might imagine. For a week I was the subject of scrutiny and jokes — my history teacher, I remember, took great delight in addressing me as Mrs. Carter, and the girls all wanted to see my ring — a tiny solitaire on a band of gold — but there were two girls who were pregnant in my class, plus a boy widely suspected of being gay, and it wasn’t long before people lost interest in the oddity of a married woman attending high school, especially once it was clear that I wasn’t pregnant.

Another teacher was hired; and David got a job at a small theater in Hartford, as part of the company, and teaching drama to little kids on Saturday. After classes I’d walk to our apartment, stopping at the grocery store with the list David had given me in the morning to pick up whatever he needed for dinner, and the money he’d given me to buy it. Upstairs, I’d lock the door behind me and pour a glass of wine — an adult pleasure that I’d quickly adopted — and settle on the green velvet couch with my homework, or one of the novels or plays from David’s shelves. The nights he didn’t have shows, he’d be home by five-thirty. “My child bride,” he’d say, gathering me into his arms. I’d pour him his own wine, and sometimes we’d go right to bed and make love, but, more often, he’d go to the kitchen to cook. I’d perch on the counter and watch him chop onions, sauté garlic, swirl a melting knob of butter into the pan. “I’ve got to fatten you up,” he would say. He’d scoop pasta into my bowl, grating drifts of Parmesan on top, and keep jars of olives and wedges of cheese around for me to nibble at.

We’d eat, then read together or listen to music from David’s collection of classical and opera albums. On Saturday afternoons, we’d go to the library, filling bags with books and compact discs. On Monday nights, when the theater was dark, we’d go out to dinner and then to a movie, and on Sunday mornings we’d buy the New York Times, take our clothes to the Laundromat, buy doughnuts and coffee, and sit in the molded plastic chairs attached to the wall, reading the paper, snacking, then folding our fresh, dried sheets and pillowcases together. Maybe it was an oddly sedate life for a teenager — most of my peers back in Toledo, I knew, were spending their Saturdays at parties in fields or parks or in houses where the parents weren’t home, and I could only assume that my classmates in New London were doing the same things — but, after all those years with my exhausted, emotionless grandparents, after being rejected by my mother and spending all those cold nights in my car, our routines and traditions were comforting.

The hardest part was seeing Raine around town. I glimpsed her once at the supermarket, a different one from the one where she worked. She looked tired and frail in her winter coat, snapping as Sophie and Emma tried to sneak a box of Lucky Charms into the shopping cart, and I’d hidden behind a stand-up display of Entenmann’s cookies until they passed. Once, coming back from the Laundromat with a basket of clean clothes, I saw her and Phil and the girls on their way into church. That time there’d been nowhere to hide. The girls hadn’t seen me, but Raine did, and she looked at me like I was a babysitter whose name she couldn’t quite remember, a sitter she’d used once and never intended to hire again.

I graduated in June. David didn’t attend the ceremony, but he was there, waiting for me outside the high school in his car, which was an immaculately kept baby-blue 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible that he’d inherited from his father and kept in a garage, dressed in a custom-made zippered canvas cover. We went home. He made pasta. We made love, which, while not the rapture the movies and novels had taught me to expect, was at least pleasant enough. In September I planned to start taking classes at UConn. I would study theater and art history, like David had. In August, I found out I was pregnant.

To this day, I can remember the feeling of it, the sundress I’d been wearing, the taste of milk and Cheerios still in my mouth. I can feel the black-and-white tiles of the bathroom floor cool under my feet, and I can see the claw-footed tub with the rust stain around the drain in front of me, the pregnancy test, with its pink plus sign, jiggling up and down in my shaking hand. We’d been using condoms… except a few times, when David would slip inside me for a few strokes without one. This is the end, I thought. The end of everything. Marriage was one thing, but if I had a baby, I’d be stuck in New London for the rest of my life. Even though I had no particular ambition, no idea of where else I’d want to go, what else I’d want to do, I knew I couldn’t stay there forever. David had been an escape hatch, not a lifetime plan, and a baby wasn’t part of my plan at all.

I waited until he went to work the next day to make the appointment at the Planned Parenthood in New Haven, an hour’s drive away. I took money out of the bank — and, I’m ashamed to say, out of his wallet. I drove the Tercel my mother had given me to the clinic, and, when it was over, I bought a bottle of Advil and a bottle of water and just kept driving west. As the miles slid by, the year that I’d endured — my grandfather’s stroke, my trip from Toledo to New London, my brief time with Raine, then the car, then David, had all started to feel like it had happened to someone else. Someone else had slept in the cramped backseat of the car; someone else had gotten married in front of a justice of the peace with bad breath and a wandering eye; someone else had gotten that abortion and woken up alone, a curly-haired, kind-eyed nurse handing her a sanitary pad and asking whether there was anyone waiting to take her home.

In Los Angeles, I bought a driver’s license with a fake name and a birthday that made me twenty-one. Eventually, I lived so long as that girl, India Bishop, that I almost forgot I’d ever been anyone else; a girl whose mother hadn’t wanted her, a girl who’d stolen food and slept in a car, a girl who’d left a husband behind.


My plane landed in LaGuardia just as night was falling. I bought a new cell phone and spent the night in a hotel. In the morning I cabbed it to Grand Central and bought a ticket for the train that would take me to New London for the first time since I’d left David, all those years ago. The trip was only a few hours, through the soupy, humid August air. Kids had opened a fire hydrant on the corner and it was dribbling water into the gutter. In the park in the center of town, teenage girls in bikinis lay on towels, and mothers with babies pushed strollers back and forth in the shade.

David’s apartment was an easy walk from the station. The front door to the old Victorian, long since divided into one-and two-bedroom flats, was supposed to be locked, but it hadn’t been when I’d known him, and it wasn’t now. The stairs had been stripped of the green carpet I remembered, and now the wood of the walls had a mellow gleam. The banister had been refinished, and the walls were painted a pretty cream color, and the ceramic Virgin was where I remembered her, in the little nook at the top of the stairs.