She seemed happy at the prospect of the strange girl getting a bridge and a few crowns. I guess I laughed in disbelief at her pleasure. “Maybe she will, Alice,” I said.
The sky opened then and rain began to pour down, fresh cool rain falling in sheets. We walked on without worrying. The girls danced at our sides. We didn’t quicken our pace or try to cover up. The water struck our heads and flattened our hair and poured down our necks. When we got to the car we were drenched and cold. I turned on the heater full blast. There was a fire engine parked up the block, its revolving light showing red through the rain. It pulled out into traffic right before we did. Emma and Claire didn’t seem to notice or care about the general splendor of the equipment. It was in front of us until we reached the outskirts of Racine.
The fire trucks used to drive through the streets after a fire when I was a kid, ringing their bells to let everyone know that all was well. It was too bad they didn’t do that anymore. There used to be a collective sigh of relief when those trucks came past our houses, on the way to the station. I wondered if the firemen in front of us were history buffs, like me. Maybe they kept a metal bell in the truck, a relic from the old days, now with a few cracks along the side, and a broken clapper. I turned around to look at Alice. She was holding both girls in her lap in the back seat. She was resting her head against them, breathing heavily, as if their dirty hair and clothes, and the forced air of the heater, was fresh. Claire was sucking her own thumb and Emma was running her finger along the frayed edge of Alice’s shorts. I could almost hear the ring of celebration and homecoming from the fire engine in front of us, the ring of that bell’s damaged clang.
Alice
——
Chapter Seventeen
——
W
HEN
I
WAS OUT
on bail, Theresa, in her eternal optimism and breathless wonder, pronounced that I had learned to embrace fear. “Embrace?” I asked, laughing. “No, I don’t think so,” I said, “not embrace, nothing nearly as active as embrace. No,” I said again, “not embrace.”
But while I was away I did learn again to be quiet and wait. There were days when I felt little different in jail than I had when I was nine years old, up in my bedroom at home, with the tray of colored pencils and the sheaf of papers at my side, at work on my map of the world. All those years ago I used to curl up, secure in my own country, an old stoic in a young body, sure that if I feigned indifference out beyond my bedroom door, I would not be hurt. How many times had I advised Emma to ignore a taunt or an injury, knowing full well that the slightest insult to a five-year-old stings like salt in a wound? I remembered what resolve I’d had after my mother’s death, to remove myself to the tropical climate suggested by the green-colored pencil on my map. I was alone and yet never lonesome in a place I think now must have been distinguished from earth by an atmosphere made up of new elements—elements to breathe which filled the inhabitants with a sense of a safety.
I remembered having had such acute and chronic stomachaches
through adolescence that my Aunt Kate finally took me to the doctor to see if I had an ulcer. It was all in my head, Dr. Finnegan concluded after the exam. My father, irritated because my infirmity could not be resolved by surgery or medication, ordered me to be more sociable and then with-drew to his study.
As I got older I wondered how to get into the race while at the same time preserving what I thought of as my soul. I was moved to tears reading the ancient philosophers in my ethics class my freshman year in college. I understood that I had spent my entire young life standing guard, as if my body were a great walled fortress around the small thing, as fragile as a twig on its velvet pillow: my soul. It was a delicate, impossible balance—to see, to touch, to feel, and yet to have nothing penetrate to the inner realm, so as not to twist or crack or break the poor twig. At eighteen I was studious and quiet, staking out a carrel in the library and reading day after day until the light outdoors faded and my reflection stared back at me in the window. I’d fold my arms around my head and sleep sitting up, thinking, as I drifted off, that I could feel my pith growing stronger even without the aid of strangers and lovers. I would occasionally find myself out on cold starry nights, right by the railroad tracks, standing close to the trains as they streaked past. I wanted the cold to pierce me, wanted to feel the tremor of the earth under the train, wanted to stay awake in the snow until every part of me was aching with fatigue, and all so I’d know I was alive. Years later, with several experiments in sociability under my belt, Howard had come to me like some exotic remedy, that rare extract calibrated to produce sensation without harm.
Sometimes I couldn’t think exactly why I was in jail; I’d lose track of the reason. I was locked away, I’d think, to test my liberal upbringing, to measure just how deep my muddled convictions went. When I was in high school Aunt Kate used to read aloud from her holy books, from E. M. Forster’s novels, over our oatmeal and stewed prunes. Where Aunt Kate professed that despite our differences we are one, my father meant me to understand that other people, not our sort, are the ones who starve, who suffer indignities.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to see a piece of playground equipment rising up from the cement at the park or the zoo without my heart
convulsing at speeds that are not recommended on exercise pulse charts. In our living unit at the jail there were two steel tables that had been cast into concrete and looked to be growing out of the floor. While I was locked up I cleaned my plate and changed one pair of tube socks for another without having tremors. When I was out I could not abide the sight or smell of American cheese between two pieces of soft white bread, scalloped potatoes, fried chicken, Tater Tots, fruit cocktail, and canned peas. I bought expensive cotton socks with textured flowers in bold colors.
Emma asked me repeatedly what the jail was like. Should I compare it to a day at the baby-sitter’s, I wondered. Or to the cow comfort stalls Howard had built for the Guernseys with staggering results in milk output? In their new quarters the cows had remained cleaner and spent two hours more a day lying down and ruminating. In jail I had been leagues away from the air and the sky, so perhaps it was like spending months near the ocean floor in a submarine. “It was like being one of a large litter of hamsters in a small metal cage, Emma,” I said at last.
“Really?” She looked out the window for a while, surely imagining living flat up against everyone else’s wet hairless skin. No privacy for the most basic, the most intimate functions. Finally she turned to me and said, “You mean you had one of those wheels to run on?”
“What’s so funny?” Howard said, coming into the living room where I was huddled into the sofa, clutching my stomach. Before I could explain, Emma said sternly, “It’s a joke I have with Mom.”
He raised his eyebrows and backed off. “Wouldn’t ever want to get between a private joke.”
She came to me and whispered in my ear. “Did you have a water tube, and the green pellets to eat, and sawdust on the floor?” To gratify her, to keep her beside me, I spun out my laughter, trying to keep it even and continuous, relishing our first little confidence.
I had wittingly hid from the terrors of the world in the bosom of our farm. I had been grateful not to worry about crossfire on my way to the grocery store, grateful about not having to lock our doors, grateful there weren’t yet signs of gang activity in the high school. I had known that a person’s place in society was precarious, that an ill wind could push you across to the other, the wrong, side. Theresa carried on at length in her letters about how difficult it must be for someone such as I to deal with
the horrors of jail. She meant well, I know. And while jail is a shock to a middle-class person—more so than for the drug addicts and prostitutes who regularly come in off the street, I came to think that for the common good everyone should spend a little time reduced to a hamster, that incarceration should be mandatory, like jury duty. Lynelle, a prisoner who was dying from AIDS, said, “Bein’ cooped up make a person feel, I don’t know, real churchlike after a while. Your big old body ain’t nothin’ but shit, so it make you think about whatever else is kickin’ around. I sees visions, I hears words. And then, when you gets out, don’t the air smell good? Damn, even the cold smell good.”
Howard, like Emma, curious about places he’d never been, at first seemed to have an urgent need to know all about my experience. I understood that he wanted to relieve me of the burden of it, to feel as if he had somehow shared in my misery. I think he must have thought I was bent on denying him the opportunity, that I was holding my trials close to my chest as I made my way to martyrdom. For the longest time I couldn’t speak of what it had been like to be locked away, partly because it was only afterward that I registered fear. I’d start thinking back and break out into a sweat. I sensed that what he really wanted was a neat package, a summary which concluded with the assertion that I was well. It wasn’t as simple as telling the family a narrative about a trip downtown. Jail is one of the last holdouts on earth, a place where there is still an oral tradition. Sometimes I think the inmates made trouble not only so there’d be a story to tell, but so there’d be five stories to tell, each rendition becoming funnier or more grotesque or outlandish. There were stories to tell, certainly, but there were also stories to tell about the telling of the stories. Although I long ago lost faith in the idea of Truth, I knew that once I spoke, the stories would take on their own shape, their own truth. In my darkest hour I doubted that there was even a lesson to take from that rubble of time. But whatever the moral was, I knew I needed to fashion the pieces together, and to myself, before all of it came tumbling out, the essence drifting heavenward, gone before I understood what it was.
Plenty has been recorded about the violence, the foulness, the utter uselessness of jail life. A great deal more will be said as the years wear on, with the present trend of sentencing criminals without the opportunity for parole. The Racine Jail was a relatively mild place and I should count
myself lucky that I wasn’t part of a larger, poorer system. It is marvelous how few details there are in jail; it is a feat, that in a world so various men can pare a place down to hard steel and dull, ungiving concrete, a few thin blue blankets. The grease ant has more color and variation than did our pod on the fourth floor. Everyone wore the same Day-Glo orange shirts and pants. Everyone ate the same food, and had the same space under the unrelenting sameness of the fluorescent lights. It was the small things I sometimes let myself mourn for: sunshine; shadow; the dark of a country night; the thick, hot air of summer. We could never get away from our own smell, or anyone else’s smell, or the noise of the television or the noise of angry talk. So that after a short time we began to hold like fury to ourselves, because our very distinctness seemed endangered. In that struggle some of us took ourselves to extremes; we became caricatures, shrill and distorted.
I had felt, from the first mention of Robbie Mackessy, that the mess was so much bigger than all of us put together. Not long after my arrest I woke up knowing that I couldn’t fight. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the strength. Howard, white with fear, tried to feed my anger, so that I’d be fighting mad. I couldn’t explain to him that it was beyond fighting, beyond requiring strength. He thought I had given up, but that wasn’t right. The die was cast; that’s what I knew. It wasn’t a matter of hoping or praying, or even deliberately working hard in order that justice could prevail, because already each of us, Howard and I, Emma and Claire, had lost so much. I came to know that Robbie would suffer most from the process. It was he more than anyone else who gave me the face of resignation. I did not want to lose the case, and yet winning would be a somber victory, no grounds for rejoicing. I told Rafferty that I thought the stocks were a good idea after all, that I wouldn’t have minded people coming and hurling things at me for a limited time. Howard, in many of his history lessons, had once told me that in the American colonies women used to be punished if they were considered “common scolds.” Surely that was my crime. I could have easily granted anyone who wanted a few pitches of a tomato, a rotten egg, a small pebble below the waist. Everyone would feel better and then we could go home.
“How did you spend your days?” Howard wanted to know. He asked me in letters, he asked me on our Sunday afternoon visits, and he asked
me after I got out. In my blackest moods I might have told him that our mission in life is not to discover our fate as we go along, or even procreate, but rather to fill up the endless gray void that is time. “I didn’t do much,” I used to say. “Read. Take naps.” He thought I was responding like a petulant teenager. I couldn’t explain that I was in a way being honest and yet there was a—texture, I’d say it was, beyond activity, that preoccupied us even as we slept.
Our existence was pared down to three meals a day and a shower. And it wasn’t so much a question of what did we do all day, but how did we pass the night as well. Because there wasn’t much difference between the two. At 10
P.M
. we were locked in our cells and the day-room lights were dimmed. But it was never dark and the fighting didn’t stop. I have heard enough racial insults to tide me over well into the next life, where I have no doubt the battle will wage on. The only thing I told Howard right off was the amusing dream I’d had my first night home, the waking dream that our pod had become a miracle of harmony, that I was like Anne Sullivan, heroic after all, giving the girls new words in their own hands.
When I was brought into the pod for the first time, the five or six women were milling around, looking at TV, playing cards; one was lying on the floor of her cell shaking uncontrollably. They stopped their games and even the sick girl raised her head. They stared at me with what seemed at the time to be identical expressions; the narrowed eyes, set in their faces, it seemed to me, for the sole purpose of expressing hate. They watched as I walked across the room. They were poised, perfectly still, as if they might spring when I made a false move. I was white, weaned on the stuff of Western Civilization, and to them old, someone they figured who would topple over if they as much as spit in my direction. My skin had turned from a healthy brown to a light shade of gray in the previous weeks and the pockets around my bloodshot eyes were sagging and mottled. I knew that people were raped, knifed, driven mad in jails. I tried to swallow, tried to choke down what I knew was the fully substantive thing called fear. While I was in my cell fussing with my bag of books they began to talk quietly among themselves, trying, I assumed, to think what to call someone as improbable as I was. I lay down on my mat and covered myself with my blanket. If I was going to be like the old hen in the yard,
the bird that the others try to peck to death, then I was going to need some rest.