The Nix

It is April, 1968, and Faye, a teenager restless within the claustrophobic confines of rural Iowa, dreams of attending the newly-opened University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. Surrounded by girlfriends who dream only of marrying a local boy and then raising a family, Faye reads poetry, weeps at classical music, smokes on the sly, and dreams of broader horizons. She has already been awarded a scholarship. Her parents, however, scare her with stories of how campuses across the country were erupting in violent protests, her mother calls it “chaos in the streets” (260). Faye maintains a tepid relationship with Henry, a mild-mannered farm boy who dreams of being a veterinarian, but she is almost certain this relationship is hardly love. He also wants her not to go to the city—melodramatically he threatens to join the army if she leaves.

Prom night is a disaster. Henry and Faye dance awkwardly and afterwards, at a park along the Mississippi River, Henry awkwardly asks Faye to go steady with him. Faye finds him “adorable” (272) but is hardly swept up in the idea of committing to Henry. She tries to initiate sex, but Henry recoils. A frustrated Faye is crushed: “She is lightheaded suddenly, and hot and tingly and a little outside herself” (274). By the time Henry drops her off, Faye nearly blacks out. Faye feels the house alive with dark energy and retreats to the basement. Her father had told her once of how a ghost, called a nisse or a nix, comes to haunt a house, and there alone in the basement something she cannot entirely explain happens to her, a feeling that she makes contact with something paranormal. She shrieks, and her parents rush her to the hospital: “Every moment,” she decides, “has a moment like this, a trauma that breaks you into brand-new pieces” (285).

As graduation approaches, Faye thinks about what happened to her that night. The doctors decide she suffered a panic attack. Faye thinks it did not feel like panic: “It felt more like she was being forcibly and methodically deactivates all over” (298). A success in every endeavor in school, she feels nevertheless that she lacked the daring to be bold, to take risks. When she reads that Beat poet Allen Ginsberg will be a visiting lecturer at UI-CC, she knows she must go. As for Henry, she understands love is selfish, that we “love people because they love us” (309). When, even as spring explodes all around the Iowa countryside, Faye and Henry finally have sex, the act is something less than tectonic. Henry whimpers after they have finished, sure their reputations have been ruined. Faye thinks, “This cannot be what people mean when they talk about fate and romance and destiny” (313).

A few days later, Faye agrees to pick up some candies at the local pharmacy for a girlfriend. What she does not know is that the “candies” are in fact a prescription for medication to induce a spontaneous abortion. The druggist, of course, assume the drugs are for Faye and tells Faye’s father. Soon the town implodes over the rumor. Frank is furious, certain that his daughter is “knocked up” (325). In his rage, he summarily kicks her out of the house. Faye, in turn, heads to Chicago.