“Did I make the list?” I asked Glenna as we got into the shower together.

“Lucky you. You’re my date.”

“That Friday night I might be hanging out with my friend Todd.”

“Invite him,” she said, moving directly under the nozzle to wet her hair.

“Wouldn’t be his thing,” I said, standing outside the hot spray, shivering.

“You don’t want to come?”

“I do but—”

“But?”

“But I’m freezing here. Let me under the water.”

She made room for me and said, “You’re ashamed to be around my friends.”

“Why the hell should I be ashamed?” I replied, knowing the exact source of my shame: Glenna and her friends were en route to their medical degrees and a fortune, while I was profiling geeks at $30 apiece. It wasn’t a real job, which my father pointed out to me whenever I stopped by the house. And my writing fiction had been a complete bust. My stories came back from the literary journals and magazines almost as fast as I sent them out, and I’d felt too humiliated by the rejections to mention them to Glenna.

Picking up the bar of soap, she said, “I don’t know why you should be ashamed. Because you’re not the most famous writer in America? I’m proud of you.”

Of course, the problem was how I felt about me, and I would have explained that to her, except at the moment she was rubbing the soap on me in a manner that I suspect the chemists at Procter & Gamble had not intended.

“I’ll come,” I said.

“I’m counting on it,” Glenna said, then I shut my eyes and let the water wash away my shame.

Chapter 16

I HAD PROMISED MYSELF—AND Glenna—to drop by my classes to hang on to my 2-S. But driving to Brooklyn for poli sci and contemplating Professor Gould’s lecture on Rousseau forced me to smoke a J, and the munchies came on like an epileptic fit. After detouring to the Sugar Bowl for a burger and a chocolate malt, I was far too happy to hear a professor explain how an onerous society had corrupted my inborn goodness.

So off I went to pursue my favorite school activity—time traveling via old newspapers in the library stacks. And it was there, leafing through plastic-sheathed pages, that I discovered Madame Restell, a freethinking seamstress who escaped the savage poverty of the nineteenth century by becoming New York City’s preeminent abortionist.

Back then, birth control was considered an affront to God’s will, and abortion was outlawed. Still, great numbers of married and unmarried women sought to manage their own fate, and Madame Restell, along with her husband, opened for business in Greenwich Village. Their challenge was to inform the populace of Madame’s practice while dodging jail, and their solution was so clever that it reportedly made one robber baron weep with envy.

Advertisements were placed in newspapers proclaiming that Madame Restell specialized in concocting pills that cured the fairer sex of every disorder from a deranged stomach to a despondent spirit. The ads claimed the pills should never be used when ^____. Delicacy precluded the ads from filling in the blank, but everyone got the idea, and customers flocked to Madame Restell. When the pills, a compound of harmless powders, didn’t induce a miscarriage, Madame was ready with a pricier, foolproof alternative, using pliers and wire to pierce the amniotic sac.