We seem to think that things have always been the way they are now, that girls have always been strong, that they’ve always been valued and studied and written about. That they’ve always been treated with the respect that they deserve, on a level with the boys. That they’ve always had the opportunities that they have now.

We forget that the Pill has not always been available, that a girl couldn’t always just go to the doctor or a clinic and go “on it” if she wanted to.

We think that a girl has always had a choice, that abortion has always been available, if not legal, and that a girl could find a place to go to get one if she needed to, if it ever came to that.

We think that a girl would know about her own body. That she’d know what she needs to know about sex and reproduction, about the risks of pregnancy and disease.

We think that a girl would know when a man was taking advantage of her. That she would know who to tell, that she would know how to tell.

We think that if a girl went missing, somebody would try to find her. They’d put out an alert, they’d put up fliers, they’d put her face on a milk carton, she’d be in the computers, she’d be on television, somebody would look for her, if she disappeared.

We think that if a girl was killed, if she was found dead, the police would try to find her killer. Somebody would be arrested. Somebody would be charged. Somebody would pay.

We think that if a woman was married to a man who performed illegal abortions for money that paid for her house and her food and her clothes, she would feel some responsibility if one of those abortions ended in the death of a girl. We think that she would step forward and say something to somebody then. And we think that the people who knew this woman and her husband, those who were well aware of what he did and what he’d done, her family and her friends and the members of her church, we think that they’d come forward, too, and say something to somebody when what was left of the girl’s body was discovered four months later, hands and feet bound with rope.

We think that if a man preyed upon girls, if he drove his car around the neighborhoods looking for them, if he found one and invited her into his house and offered her money for sex, if he offered her a job at his brother-in-law’s strip club, if she was underage—somebody would know, somebody would stop him, somebody would put him in jail.

We think that if a black boy fell in love with a white girl, it would be okay, nobody would mind. We suppose the black girls would find a way to welcome this white girl into their circle of friends. We think they wouldn’t hate her for taking one of their boys. We think they wouldn’t want to see her dead. We think the white boys wouldn’t hate the black boy. We think they wouldn’t burn a cross in a black doctor’s front yard. We think they wouldn’t threaten him. We think they wouldn’t tie an unpopular girl’s dog to the back of their truck, set it on fire, drag it through the street, past her house.

We believe that if a girl dreamed of becoming a model, she could do that. We think she could set off on her own, leave town, go to modeling school, if that’s what she wanted to do. We think her friends would encourage her. We think her family would help her out. We think they’d loan her the money, they’d support her ambition, they wouldn’t think she was crazy to hope that she could be something other than what her sister was—married at eighteen to her high school boyfriend and already pregnant with his kid.

We think that by the time she’s eighteen, a girl is already a woman. We think that she can vote. We think that she’s not a minor, that she can sign a contract, that she can get a loan, that she can get a credit card, that she can get a job that pays more than the minimum wage.

But in 1970, none of this was true. In 1970, Feminism as we know it was only just beginning. Girls in college were still called co-eds. Few people knew who Gloria Steinem was. Ms. Magazine wasn’t published until 1971.

In 1970, you couldn’t get the Pill unless you were married, and abortion was illegal in every state except California and New York. The Catholic church had just decreed that anybody who assisted in providing a girl with an abortion, legal or not—by loaning money, by driving her to a clinic, by holding her hand, by giving her support—would be excommunicated from the church. Roe v. Wade didn’t legalize abortion until 1973.

Girls didn’t go to law school or to med school in 1970. Most girls didn’t even go to college then. Girls still took “home economics” classes in 1970. They learned how to cook and sew and keep house.

In 1970, girls learned about their bodies in “health class.” There they learned about menstruation and hygiene. They weren’t told about birth control. They weren’t supposed to want to have sex, and they were told not to have it until after they were married. They learned that if they did have sex, and they did get into trouble, that would be their own fault, because they had been warned.

In 1970, white girls didn’t go out with black boys, or if they did, they were treated like trash by both communities.

There were no computers in 1970. There was no internet with websites devoted to missing girls. There was no such thing as an “Amber Alert.”  There was no place like Kinko’s where you could go and make a hundred photocopies of a flyer with a missing girl’s face on it to staple to telephone poles around town. There were no pictures of missing girls on milk cartons in 1970. A missing girl was not news enough to make even a mention in the local paper or on the radio or TV.

There was no talk about pedophilia or incest or sexual abuse or battered wives in 1970.

In 1970, a girl could be murdered, and her body could be dumped in the woods like so much garbage. The police could go about the business of trying to figure out what had happened to her, and when it was determined that she’d died of a botched abortion, that would be that. Even if the doctor who had performed the abortion was known to them. Even if the men who tied her up and threw her in the woods, left her there to bleed, to die of exposure and then rot away until she was just a skeleton, a carcass fed upon by rats and dogs, even if the men who did this to her were also known.

It would be as if it were the girl’s own fault, as if she had brought it on herself. Because she fell in love with a black boy. Because she let herself get pregnant by him. Because she went for an illegal abortion. Because she put herself into the hands of an evil man. As if by making these choices for herself, this girl had thrown away her own life and only got what she deserved.

Ours were the usual girlish crimes. We pocketed lipsticks from the Younkers cosmetic counter, 45′s from the record department in the basement of Sanford’s, cigarette lighters from Woolworth’s downtown. We wore our rubber flip-flops into Arlan’s Discount Mart and walked out with a brand new pair of high top black Converse sneakers on our feet. There was sex—in the back seat of a car, on a blanket in the woods, on the sofa in the basement, under the bleachers at school. There was smoking—Marlboro or Winston, unfiltered Camels and Lucky Strikes, Kool or Salem Menthol, handrolled Buglers for the purists, Gauloises and Gitanes for the worldly, baby pink Dunhills for the Mod chic. There was drinking—apple wine, three-percent beer, rum and Coke, sloe gin and 7-up. And there were drugs—cough syrup, tranquilizers, amphetamines, mescaline, marijuana, acid, MDA, PCP.  

Where I grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, trouble-making boys back then might end up in military school—Shattuck in Minnesota or Wentworth in Missouri—or the reform school at Eldora. The equivalent of this for incorrigible girls was the Iowa State Industrial School in Mitchellville. For me, it was boarding school in Virginia.

My own transgressions were mostly meek, all bravado without much real risk, but they were enough to raise red flags with the adults who knew me, like Mrs. Fox in the sixth grade, who told my mother in a conference that I was hanging out with the “wrong crowd” because my boyfriend was JW, a thirteen-year-old dreamboat who had already been held back twice. I railed against what seemed to me to be unfair restrictions—I was not allowed to go out on a weeknight. I was not allowed to go to the dances at the West Side Y or the concerts at Danceland. The Pavilion at Bever Park was forbidden after dark, when it was most fun, and I had to sneak away from choir practice if I wanted hang out with my friends in the parking lot at Henry’s Hamburgers. I threw tantrums, slammed doors, screamed obscenities, told my parents that I wished they both were dead. This last was enough to finally get their attention and motivate them to follow through on their threats—they were understandably tired, I had two older sisters, they’d already been through all this before—to send me away to boarding school if I didn’t shape up.

I came back from The Madeira School in Virginia that Christmas break smoking cigarettes and sporting groovy purple granny glasses, although my eyesight was just fine. I wore brown vinyl boots that came up over my knees to mid-thigh, a cream-colored miniskirt that was wider than it was long, a crushed velvet turtleneck, and an over-sized moth-eaten pea-coat from the Army-Navy Surplus store. I had a Mary Quant haircut, shorter on one side than the other. Big silver hoop earrings framed my face, and rings sat stacked on all my fingers like brass knuckles. Over my shoulder I carried a beaded and buckled fringed leather bag.

One girl—MG, one of those “good good girls” that I held in such contempt—sneered when she saw me, and I heard her murmur under her breath that I looked like a slut. But I figured she was just jealous, because I wasn’t a slut, I was a virgin just like her. JF and GB, CT and DE those were the real sluts, and everybody knew it. They were the girls who seemed to have sacrificed their reputations for their desires, not me. But I took some pleasure in being labeled one anyway, because it was so far off the mark and yet still gave me some sophistication, some worldliness, I thought. As if I’d been around.

I was the one who’d left home, after all. I was the one who had read Camus and Sartre and Ionesco. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. Vonnegut, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Richard Brautigan, Tom Wolfe. I’d seen Jimi Hendrix live in concert; I’d been to anti-war demonstrations in Washington, D.C. I went to school with girls whose fathers were senators or ambassadors, who worked high up in the State Department or the Pentagon, who owned national baseball teams and television networks. I knew girls whose mothers were movie stars, whose great-grandfathers had been famous industrialists, whose families owned half the oil in Texas. I’d picked pumpkins at Bobby Kennedy’s house and stayed at the Watergate Hotel. I was the wise-cracker, the smarty-pants, the know-it-all, the intellectual. Chewing my fingernails and smoking my cigarettes, drinking coffee and popping No-Doz so I could stay up all night reading books and writing stories of my own.

When I lit up in front of my friend B, who had been my pal since nursery school, she was satisfyingly surprised and disapproving. We were at the Maid Rite on First Avenue, a run-down diner that is still famous around town for the fried pork tenderloins and loose meat sandwiches it serves. It was one of the places that my mother told me to stay out of, so of course it was one of the first stops I made when I was home. Pool tables, juke box, farmers in seed caps perched on stools at the bar, smell of beer and smoke and hot oil. This was a Friday night in December, at the beginning of Christmas break, and we knew that when the basketball games ended the place would be overrun with high school kids like us, that’s why we were there. To see and be seen.

 ∞

We’ve taken a table in the corner, positioned with a view of the door so that we’ll know when the boy that B has a crush on arrives, and I’m lighting another cigarette, shaking out the match, sipping at my vanilla Coke and picking at what’s left of the onion rings in our shared basket. I’m telling B about school—what it’s like to live in a dormitory with thirty other girls, how we break into the kitchen at night to steal food and have to climb up to the attic of Old Main if we ever want to sneak a smoke. How Julie G. keeps trying to get herself kicked out. How Alice P. has not one hair on her entire body, not even eyelashes, not even pubes, because of some disease, I can’t remember its name. She wears a wig and has to pencil in the eyebrows on her face. About a girl named Miriam who plays the harp and is nothing but skin and bone because she refuses to eat. She weighs less than eighty pounds and hasn’t had her period in over two years. And my friend Claudia G., whose mother lives in Paris, has been seeing a Harvard man who is almost twenty-three. I’m bragging about how I’ve been asked to join a secret club called The Brazen Hussies, a gang of girls who play pranks around campus, and I’m just getting to the part about how last year they put the gym teacher’s Volkswagen Beetle in the library, when there’s a ruckus at the door and in comes the triumphant basketball team. The cheerleaders and the jocks, the players and their girlfriends.

I see that Bob is still with Marilyn, Doug is with Kathy, and Roger is with Jane. Some things never change, except… and that’s when I see her: Paula Oberbroeckling, who transferred to Washington High from the Catholic school. Paula, with her long legs and straight blond hair. Paula, who has trumped my smoking, my stealing, my drinking, and my drugs by dating Robert, who is black.

What I didn’t know then was that some six months later Paula would go missing, and four months after that what little was left of her would be found.

In the middle of the river that separates Cedar Rapids, Iowa east from west, there’s a swirl of turbulent water that is known as the deep eddy.  “Stay away from the deep eddy,” my mother said, and for a long time I misheard and thought she was talking about a man, someone nicknamed Deep Eddie.  Maybe she knew him or maybe she didn’t, maybe he was real or maybe he was just a story, but he was someone to be feared, someone who knew her, or he knew me, he had his eye on us, he was just waiting for the right circumstance, when I was alone and not paying attention. If I let my guard down then he would seize that moment to show up. “What’s your name?” he’d ask. Me, an Alice in my red dress with the puffy sleeves and white eyelet pinafore, lacy anklets, black Mary Janes that looked to my eye like I was wearing beetles on my feet. Me, lost in a daydream, scuffing along the sidewalk in grass-stained sneakers and pink shorts. Or maybe it was winter and I was in my parka and my snowpants and my boots.

I wouldn’t tell him my name, but he would tell me his. “Eddie,” he’d say, with a smile that revealed the glimmer of his teeth. Edward. Ted.  Quick snicker of his tongue. He might be handsome, like Mr. Fawcett next door who knew how to laugh and had blue eyes and a deep cleft in his chin that made him look like a movie star.

Deep Eddie would be friendly, too. He’d seem to know just what to say to break the ice. He might have gum or ice cream or a flower or a toy. He would tell me that my mother had sent him to come and get me, that there’d been an accident, some kind of an emergency and I was to get into his car—”Right now!  Hurry!”  But I’d been warned, and I knew better. So I would ask him: “Who are you?” And he would smile, he would lean toward me, reach for my wrist and say: “Deep Eddie.” Who else?

Deep Eddie was the man our mothers warned us about, the one who drove around in his big finned car with candy in his pockets, the one who rolled down his window to ask for directions, who lurked in the shadows of the alley, who leered from a bus bench, who was naked under his overcoat, who grabbed little girls and carried them away and… what?  Ate them?

Then, maybe it was when I was still just a kid, or maybe it was years later, I was told or I began to understand that the deep eddy wasn’t a man at all, it was just this place at the bottom of the river, a swirl of water that was sucked by gravity down into a pelvic hollow in the limestone foundation that is the bony substructure underlying the famous corn-growing Iowa loam. Unpredictable and dangerous and strong, the deep eddy could wrap its icy fingers around your ankles, pull you under, drag you down. Missing, lost, gone forever, drowned.

Later still I would connect that same vortex with insanity and higher consciousness and LSD. There was that bloody drain at the base of the bathtub in the “Psycho” shower. There was the swirling spiral of chaos in “Repulsion.” The rabbit hole entry into Wonderland. And the brain-boggling psychedelic light show of an intergalactic whirlpool at the end of “2001, A Space Odyssey,” in the mind-bending outer reaches of Jupiter that allowed the astronaut to evolve to a new level of consciousness, from bone-throwing ape to lead-footed spaceman, from star-seeker to divine human, a higher form of  being—a baby born with its eyes wide open! Get it? Open, its eyes are open! Where then we saw through a glass darkly, now we see face to face…  Now our eyes are open! Far fucking out!

The first time I took acid was in the dead of winter, 1970, on the south side of  Chicago where I was in my freshman year of college, and we’d trooped through snowdrifts to an apartment in one of the famous old Gothic buildings on the Midway. I don’t know who lived there, just that there were seven or eight of us together that night, and we were drinking orange juice—because the vitamin C was supposed to further enhance the hallucinations—and we were all of us smoking cigarettes, nervously, as we waited for the trip to come on. On the floor in the middle of the room there was an old film can that we were using as an ashtray, and as the hours wore on, it filled up with butts, and then someone said, “That’s God’s butt!”  Which was hilarious. And then someone else said, “No, it’s God’s belly button!” Which was profound. I tried to explain. God’s belly button was the deep eddy. It was that swirl of ice and of fog at the end of the world in Poe’s “Pym.”  It was the eye of a cyclone, the innards of the very same tornado that sucked Dorothy up out of Kansas, into the ether, and then dropped her back down again in the trippy far out Technicolor world of wondrous Oz.  Oz, the acid king. Awes. The awe…  Face to face with the divine.

Your brain short circuits. Your self burns up. Your body explodes. It’s just too huge, too awesome, it blinds you, it kills you, it completely and forever blows your mind.  Or so they say.

“Stay away from the deep eddy,” my mother said, but there I am again. This time it’s summer, July 1970, and I’m fully dosed on Sunshine.  I’m sitting on a bus bench and I’m laughing, though I can’t remember why. I have one hand on my face, palm to cheek, and my mouth is open, I’m howling, this is SO funny! It gets me in the gut. I want to share it, “Did you hear that?  Do you get it?” But I can’t talk because my mouth is already open and I can’t close it, it’s open and opening, wider and wider, a yawn and then that gap between what is my hand and what is my face, the boundary between them is gone and they are one and they are all and I am one and all. I am the whole, the hole, the deep eddy, and it is into this, myself, that I am feeling myself fall.

First I thought that I was going to die. And then I thought that I was already dead. “I’m dying!  I’m dead!  Am I dead?” But there were people there with me, my sister, my boyfriend, and they held me and they talked to me and they convinced me otherwise, so I didn’t, and I wasn’t, and I’m not.

∞

Almost thirty years later, in the early winter of 1999, my mother bends to pick up the newspaper, loses her balance, falls and breaks her hip. My sister calls me, and I get a seat on the next plane home. Mom has been taken to Mercy Hospital, which is down on 10th Street and 8th Avenue, adjacent to the neighborhood that was called, when I lived in Cedar Rapids, “N____town.” Or Colored Town, if you were being polite about it. Or The Ghetto if you were a cop. Or Oak Hill if you wanted to get technical. About ten square blocks of dilapidated shantytown contained within sharply defined boundaries on all four sides—the sprawl of the hospital, two cemeteries, the railroad tracks, and the dense woods of Van Vecheten park.

Since the Recession of the mid-80′s the innards of Oak Hill have spilled out into the surrounding neighborhoods, and those tidy borders have been blurred.  The small Episcopal church, St. John’s—where my parents were married and my grandparents were eulogized, where I was christened and later confirmed and, later still, married—has been sold off to some other congregation because, my mother explains, the ladies of St. John’s are afraid to go alone into that part of town any more. Even on a Sunday morning, in the bright light of day. There have been gang shootings and drug arrests there. Murders and muggings and robberies and fires. My aunt tells me she drives the long way around when she has to go downtown. My mother warns me, don’t drive down 4th Avenue, it’s not like it used to be, it isn’t safe. But from the window of this hospital room I can see the whole area, and although some of the houses are shabby and many of the front lawns are a mess, still the streets are empty and quiet, and it looks peaceful enough to me.

They can’t replace my mother’s broken hip because she has emphysema, and surgery would be dangerous. So they’ve put a steel pin in it instead, and now she’s here in bed, hooked up to oxygen, afraid to even try to get up again.

This is February, and it’s bitter cold outside. Still, the hospital room is so small and close—my mother is sleeping and the woman in the next bed has been moaning all afternoon—so I go outside for fresh air. At the top of the hill across the street from where I’m standing sits McKinley Junior High school—a blocky brick and mortar building that is an identical twin to Franklin Junior High, where I went, on the other side of First Avenue, the northeast side of town.

There, on the street just below McKinley, a small white building is being bulldozed to the ground. The battered marquee has already been dismantled and thrown into a pile of other junk near a chain link fence: “RAMZA’S.” Stamping my feet and hugging myself in the cold, I watch as the roof collapses, the windows shatter, the walls tilt and fall slowly inward on themselves.

Back up in the room my mother is awake, but she’s cranky and who can blame her. Her face is grey, her eyes dull. She asks me where I’ve been. “Just outside for a bit.” Which makes her frown and scold—”It’s too cold to be outside, why would you go outside at a time like this?” I tell her I was watching a building being demolished, and just to make conversation, to direct her attention away from me, or from herself, or from the situation, I go on: “Remember that old beauty shop over there?  They’ve torn it down.”

“It was an eyesore anyway.”

We both know the story. Ramza Abodeely was married to a chiropractor, Dr. Thomas Sturgeon, and her cousin was Joe Abodeely, the jazz drummer, the night club owner, the abortionist. He owned The Tender Trap, the Sip’n'Stir, and the Unique Motel.

“Your father used to go to those places. Prostitutes and strippers.” If not for that tube feeding oxygen into her nose, she would have snorted her disgust. “And remember that girl, what was her name?  She was in your class, I think.”

“Paula. She was a year behind me. In Lloyd’s class.”

“She was murdered.”

I know this story, too. Paula Oberbroeckling, the leggy girl with the long blond  hair. The girl who went missing when she was 18, in the summer of 1970.  The one whose body was dumped down near the deep eddy and whose carcass was found five months later, by a pair of brothers out for an afternoon walk.

“Now that’s a story you could write,” my mother, my best reader, tells me. She’s smiling now. Her eyes brighten, lit with expectation as she imagines the pages I’ll create for her. “A real mystery. Yes, now that’s a story that would get me up out of bed.”

∞

In 2005, my mother succumbed to her emphysema, but I still had not written that novel, hadn’t even tried. Because once I’d read the police file, I didn’t see the point. Why further confabulate a brutally true story that’s already flush with nuance and detail?  Why force fictional certainty into a reality that in all its contradictions and complexity remains so maddeningly unresolved? Instead, I would spend the next ten years poring over the file, putting it away and coming back to it again, clipping old newspaper articles, discussing it with anyone who would listen, talking to Paula’s family and friends, interviewing detectives, drawing maps,  generating timelines, collecting related paraphernalia, creating scrapbooks and notebooks, writing letters and emails, concocting scenarios and building storyboards, ultimately packing a closet full of boxes and files, always believing that if I could just get my hands on that one last magical piece of the story, then everything else would, with beautiful simplicity, fall naturally into place.

Plenty of the people that I talked to thought they knew what had happened to Paula Oberbroeckling, but really all they knew for sure was what they’d heard and mostly all they’d heard was rumor and gossip, stories spread through casual conversations, and so the more I read, the more I listened, and the more I tried to put the pieces of the puzzle together, the more puzzling it all became. Every answer seemed to only raise another question, challenging all logic and common sense, obscuring what should have been a straightforward story in such clouds of uncertainty and doubt that everyone involved—the boyfriends, the roommate, the sister, the mother, even Paula herself—came to seem suspect in some way.