Unwanted Donation (Part One)

Edith Yarn was what people of 1931 would have called a “floozy.” A short glimpse of her rebel exterior was enough to make any proper lady gasp with appall, even though at night they were having dreams of doing the same exciting things that she was. Edith’s bobbed hair, turned down stockings and powdered knees was one that many girls her age had back then. But while many girls her age looked like Edith, none of them incarnated the rebellious and even dangerous lifestyle as abundantly as she already had at nineteen.

By the sixth grade, Edith had smoked her first cigarette and been fingered by classmate Tommy Gibbons, all in the same day. She stole several classmates’ personal items and was found masturbating in the boys’ lavatory on several occasions during her primary education. During her sophomore year at East Boston High School she was sent home a total of fourteen times due to “unacceptable behavior in the classroom.”  It got to the point where Edith just stopped going to class, and the teachers no longer reported it to her parents because they didn’t want her there anyway.

After dropping out of high school one year before graduation Edith moved into a rundown studio apartment next to Fenway Park where she paid her rent by lying down four times a week with her landlord, Earl, a fifty-three year old bookie from the Bronx. She got a job as a cabaret dancer and worked six nights a week at The Meow Lounge, a small nightclub on Judge Street where the enforcement of prohibition was nonexistent. It was one of Boston’s most popular speakeasies because of its owner, Willie “Skinny Legs” Jacopo’s close relationship with the chief of police who allowed him to own one of the only speakeasies in town that didn’t have to serve its bootleg alcoholic drinks out of tea cups.

It wasn’t an unusual event to see Edith going home from work with at least one John a night. She was the loosest of all the dancers at The Meow Lounge and lived closest to the club, making it convenient for men to walk back to it after they were done with her to have another drink before heading home to their wives.

It was nearly midnight and Edith had just finished cleaning up after her act and had a seat at the bar.

“Dry martini, two olives, Dan,” she said to the dwarf bartender who stood on several gin boxes behind the bar.

“I’ve got it,” said a thin man in a blue and red suit as he threw some cash onto the bar and began walking towards her. He made himself comfortable in the seat next to her and began stroking her hair.

“You were pretty damn good up there tonight. You’ve got moves I’ve never seen on any of the other dames in here.”

“Thanks,” she said.

Dan had set a martini glass in front of her and she stuck her fingers in deep to dig out the two olives at the bottom.

“That’s because all of the other dames in here are old birds. Milicent over there,” she pointed at an overweight blonde woman on stage. “She’s been working here since 1924. Willie says he just keeps her around because she’s a friend of his ma’s and he owes her a favor. And Lucy’s only here because Willie’s carried a torch for her for almost two years now and still hasn’t gotten the nerve to ask her for a date.”

“I knew I hadn’t seen you before. I come down here from Augusta for business about once every eight months. I didn’t see you the last time I was down here.”

“I was still in high school,” Edith smirked.

“Really?” The man swallowed down his sip hard.  “So, what you say you and I get outta here?”

“I live just down the street.”

Edith grinned and downed her drink. She and the man in the blue and red suit stood up and left the bar.

The next morning Edith woke up to the sound of someone entering her apartment. She slowly opened her crusted eyes and saw that it was Earl. He walked over to her cot and pulling the tattered blanket off of her thin frame began shouting at the top of his lungs.

“Twenty-five! He was number twenty-five!” he yelled as Edith stood sharply.

“What the hell do ya think yer doin’?” she said as she grabbed the blanket back from him.

“That’s it. I want my rent money starting now!”

Earl’s face was red as a tomato and though his shouting was loud, his frail and aging body was not one to be intimidated by.

“What? Why?” Edith screamed back.

“You think I don’t see all the men you bring up here? You think I don’t hear what you do with them? That’s it! I’m not giving you free rent for a used and stretched out old Jane like you? No more! I want my money! Five dollars by Friday!”

He stormed out of the apartment, slamming the door whose hinges had given out and fallen on the floor.

Paying her rent was almost impossible since she spent the majority of her five dollars a week salary on her newfound heroin addiction. She begged Earl to let her continue paying him the way that she had been but was rejected with a hard slap and the front door slammed in her face.

Edith showed up at her parents’ doorstep looking for cash after not having spoken a word with them since moving out one year prior. Her mother cried and her father yelled while she sat at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. They gave her all that they could, eleven dollars and sixteen cents, and begged her not to use it on drugs or booze. She promised and headed out the door without saying thank you or goodbye.

Edith returned home and paid Earl the five dollars for her August rent, then headed down to Hill Street intending to go back on her promise and spend the other six dollars on enough heroin to last her through the week. Her dealer crawled out of the shadows of the alleyway and brushed himself against her skeletal frame. She pulled the six dollars from her pocket and showed it to him. He shook his head, taking it from her hand then put one hand over her mouth and one under her shirt. He raped her twice before leaving her lying in the alley with no money and no drugs.

After gaining consciousness Edith began to walk back home and had to stop three times to vomit on her way. She had been feeling oddly ill for almost two weeks now. Without an ounce of doubt in her mind, she knew she was pregnant and that the father could have been one of dozens.

The stress of poverty, heroin withdrawals and an unwanted pregnancy began to take their toll on Edith’s state of mind. She was fired after missing two nights in a row at The Meow Lounge and was told never to set foot in the club again. She wasn’t able to pay for anything and was no longer desired by anyone, not even Vinnie the dwarf. She had become completely useless to the world.

Edith sat on the vomit speckled toilet of her bathroom with a rusty knife in her hands. Her hair had not been washed in days and small pockets of white inhabited the corners of her mouth. Her pregnant belly had started to show. She stared at the wall in silence. She lifted the knife and closed her eyes. She stabbed herself four times in the stomach and drowned in her own blood, slumping onto the floor with a loud thump. Her body was found by Earl who showed a tiny amount of humanity by phoning her parents and letting them know that they needed to pick up her body. Edith was buried six days later at Hope Cemetery on Oakley Road at the young age of nineteen.

She rest there for only two days before grave robbers dug her body up and carried her to Boston University where she was illegally sold to the medical sciences department for a mere forty dollars.