I wasn’t in the cell for more than fifteen minutes when one of them came in and stood before me. She thrust out her right hip and put her fisted hands to her waist. If I’d started reproducing at the onset of puberty she could have been my daughter. She was a slight girl with hundreds of braids coming from a middle part and falling to her shoulders, and skin that was naturally the burnished unreal color of a woman in a Coppertone ad.
“What’d you do?”
Dyshett had the uncanny ability to find out just what she wanted to know. I never did understand how or where she got her information, about forty percent of which was accurate, and I often imagined her reaching into the air and grabbing a handful, and then looking at it, at thin air, to learn the secrets. She was unlike so many of the girls who had no concept of life outside of their own neighborhood, who could not have said who the governor was, who assumed that everyone spent their lives living off welfare. Dyshett knew far more than the others, and furthermore she had a vocabulary to talk about what lay beyond her own horizon. When I didn’t answer her she smiled in a way that I nearly mistook as genuine. “How exactly do someone like you fuck a kid?” She smiled even wider. “I know about the birds and the bees but I just don’t get how someone like you do it. You got nothin’ to put in, far as I can see. What ch’you use, broom stick, flashlight, a big ole banana?”
I was surprised by her frankness. I tried to think quickly. I didn’t see much point in answering, but I knew that if I didn’t respond I’d be in trouble. Either way I guessed I was in trouble. “I’ve been accused of sexual abuse,” I said. “Is that what you mean?”
“Accused?” She nodded slowly as she studied me. “You nothin’ but a pervert.”
“Accused,” I repeated.
She reached out and twisted my braid around hard in one hand, so hard my eyes smarted. “You probably think I should be showing you some respec’, since you an old lady by now. But I don’t take too kind to people who mess wid others. You sit and wait, Granny,” she said, twisting harder. “You sit and wait for me.” She let go, sashaying into the day
room, singing out in a rich, clear voice, a number about coming into the promised land.
I remember Howard wondering on the first visiting day, in a muttering way, how I could be so sanguine. My attitude was to become a source of irritation to him as the summer wore on. Surely he knew me by now, knew that I was someone who did not thrive on danger, who could not live happily on the edge, who did not seek out risk. I had married him for plenty of reasons, but not least because I thought he offered safety. “I’m not really sanguine,” I had said, feeling that any explanation was futile.
I’m only trying to find the way, Howard, trying to figure out if I should shut down and play dead, or rise above, like a bony ascetic, waiting for grace
.
At the beginning I spent most of my time in my cell with Debbie Clark, who at eighteen had had the misfortune to bear twins in her mother’s car and then accidentally do away with them. She whimpered for most of the thirteen weeks we lived together. It was helpful to me, to be cooped up with someone who was so extravagantly sorry for herself. Not that she didn’t have good reason. She had been charged with the murder of her twin infants shortly after she delivered them, by herself, in her mother’s dusty blue 1985 Bonneville. She had never used birth control for fear her parents would discover the pills. Because she was a large girl and always wore oversize shirts no one realized her condition. She hadn’t been sure herself, although she had an idea that a change had occurred. There had been a thing inside of her, she said, punching at her heart. She was peculiarly unattractive, primarily because she had no eyelashes or eyebrows and because of an ailment which made her skin ooze and flake. She had the scruffy sick look of a neurotic zoo bird who’s lost interest in preening. It didn’t help matters that she grew heavier by the day in jail as she worked her way through bag after bag of Doritos from the vending machine. Although her lawyer told her not to talk to anyone about what had happened the night of the “accident,” she swore me to secrecy and told me everything she believed to be true.
It all started with Jesse O’Leary, the boyfriend, who had skin the color of milk chocolate from his Jamaican mother, and from his Irish father, pale green eyes, the beauty of which was not readily apparent behind his thick lenses. He worked for the electric company as a meter man. She had first seen him when she was fourteen. She had blocked his
way on the basement stairs, begging him to show her how to read the meter, as if she’d always had a burning interest in energy consumption. Sometimes I had the urge to shout at her, to tell her that she was the most magnificent human being I’d ever met, in her own terribly bungled, absolutely narrow and tortured way. In the first three meter checks that year she garnered his full name and the location of his barber—more than enough information to track him down. He lived on Quincy Boulevard in Racine, not too far from her home on Russet Street. She used to ride her bike to his apartment and sit on his doorstep waiting for him to finish work.
When I finally was able to tell her story to Howard he said he found it unlikely. But I have come to believe in all manner of things, natural as well as supernatural. It was astonishing, Howard, yes and true, that an ungainly fifteen-year-old with the nervous habit of plucking her own eyelashes and eyebrows, had had the confidence to sit on Jesse O’Leary’s welcome mat. Who can say anymore what is unlikely? It was nothing short of a miracle that he eventually returned her affection. That he had forsaken her was certainly the most credible aspect of the romance, but ultimately the least important.
At any rate, she hadn’t meant to leave the babies under the viaduct in a grocery bag. It had nearly killed her, giving birth, not to one but to two extremely scrawny brown babies. When she was pushing she prayed that she was just passing kidney stones. She continued to pray even after she heard what sounded like snorting. What overtook her next was the deep and terrifying anxiety of a child: What would happen when her mother found out? The shock of one white baby would have been enough to give her mother palpitations. Consider then, the shock of two—and brown! As far as she could tell under the viaduct and by the dome light in the car, which she turned on and immediately switched off, they were the color of horse chestnuts. They had big round eyes like chimps. There was the terrific mess in the back of the Bonneville to consider as well, the car Debbie wasn’t even allowed to drive. She had set out along the highway when she couldn’t stand the pain. She said driving always made her feel better, although that time proved to be the exception. She meant only to leave the babies by the interstate for a little while; she had planned to come back for them after she’d gone to the Stop & Shop for diapers and
T-shirts. But she was so tired and needed to rest, and she knew for a fact that Linda Brewster’s parents never locked their basement door. It didn’t take long for Mrs. Brewster to put two and two together. There was an inordinate amount of blood in the basement bathroom, a solid line across the laundry room to the storage room, the phone call from Debbie’s mother—she was wondering if anyone had seen the car or her daughter—and the news reports on television concerning the dead twins. When I mentioned to Debbie that coping with post-natal blues was bad enough, she continued to produce her seemingly endless supply of tears. “I know,” she sobbed. “I wish there was something here I could kill myself with.”
She used to kneel on her mat with her hands clasped, and rocking up and down on her heels, she’d keen: “Jesse! Jesse! How could you do it? How could you do it to me?”
I had my own sorrows but hers were so noisy and continuous that her specific grief was contagious. I used to sit on the floor and hold her. I found myself crying easily for the babies, and for Debbie. At eighteen she should have felt that the possibilities for her future were before her in a stunning array. She probably would never again have much expectation or hope. I didn’t assure her that she wasn’t going to die for decades, that the present misery would probably change through the years and deepen, that the grief would always be with her, like some unwanted person holding her at her elbow, guiding her down paths she hadn’t planned to take. She never wondered why she didn’t love the babies, but given time she might ask herself who they had been and what they meant to her. I think she believed that they were still out by the freeway, somehow warm and taken care of, waiting for their shirts and diapers.
She never did heave up out of her own mire to ask after my particular brand of trouble. She assumed that I had been set down in jail for the sole purpose of listening, again and again, to the fairly consistent versions of the same sad story. We were all shut off from the world, but she was especially so because she couldn’t get beyond the horrifying details of that night; she couldn’t begin to be quiet and think about the nature of her own calamity. If there was one lesson she might have learned, it was that each of our stories was singular and so riddled with pain many of us became dull.
There were several others in our living unit who were in for at least three months. Dyshett had been charged with scratching a police officer while she was being booked for possession of cocaine. Sherry had been an accomplice in an armed robbery. Janet, a large white girl with curly blond hair that came down in front to the end of her nose, and a mouth that hung open, had charges too numerous to count. There were up to sixteen at any time, some in for an hour or two while their bond was being paid, some for a day or a week while they awaited their transfer or a hearing. When anyone new came in Dyshett, if she didn’t already know, bullied their charge from them and then she sang out into the day room, as if the felon were a beauty queen coming down the ramp, “Here she is, Debbie Clark, she do in her little tiny hepless twin girls under the viaduc’.” She often pointed out our cell to a newcomer. She’d say, “Don’t you get too close. The baby killers, they sleep in there.”
The first trouble took place not more than a few days after I began my stay. I tried very hard to think breezily of my term there as “a stay,” as if it were a nineteenth-century trip to the sanitarium up in the mountains, a little room from which I would emerge cured. We were eating lunch off of the yellow sculpted trays which were plate and tray in one. A slice of American cheese between two pieces of white bread, yellow applesauce, two flabby carrot sticks, and one chocolate chip cookie. Despite the fact that we had many of the major food groups, everything was of the same doughy texture. Dyshett came to the table wrapped up in her blanket and sat hunched over her tray. “What this shit?” she said. Without looking up, she said, “Did you know you was about to have them twins?”
When Debbie tried to whimper and eat at the same time there were often disastrous results. She choked regularly, even on soft foods, donuts and Jell-O, so that I, or later Sherry, would have to pound her on the back until the chunk went down.
“Hey, girl,” Dyshett said, reaching over and prodding Debbie on the chest with the flat of her hand. “I be talkin’ to you.” When she was frightened, Debbie’s bald eyes glazed over and she breathed through her mouth like a snorer.
“You such a fat girl. Was you so ass fat all the tahm you can’t tell what’s what? You thought them kicks was your stomach grumbling? You
got so much flab in them juicy pink thaghs, in your sweet little ole stomach, pink as a pig. Ain’t she jus’ pink, Sherry? What you give to be fine and sweet and pink?”
For a small, thin person, Dyshett had a surprisingly deep laugh. She sang in the shower, couldn’t help it. We used to stop to listen, stunned by the beauty of her voice. She sang old Motown hits, songs that were on the charts long before she was born. We were determined to listen, determined not to let on that we knew she could charm us. I used to imagine that all of us shared the secret of Dyshett’s true power, possibly the one thing she herself didn’t know.
Sherry was six feet tall, with a large frizzy orange ponytail, and skin that was a deep, glistening black. She said to Debbie, “I bet your man thinks you one choice cut. He a fatso like you?”
“Oh, oh,” Dyshett moaned, “oh, my blubbery little ole elephant, you got such a sweet, greasy, tight pussy for a fat girl. What can I do to make you satisfy?”
I ate. It was difficult to concentrate on my sandwich in the midst of so much gaiety and mirth. I wished Debbie would finish her lunch and leave them to pick on someone else. Her head was bowed so low she was in danger of thunking over onto the table.
“You makin’ her cry, Dyshett,” Sherry said, when she’d recovered herself. “Poor baby, she ain’t ready to get took from her mama yet.” She reached over and pinched Debbie’s arm. “We your friends, honey bun. We here to teach you about all the big do-do that goes on in the world, so you be ready.”
“We want to know more about Mr. Dick, Your Man,” Dyshett said. “He handsome and strong? You always available?—like, ‘Over here, Mr. Dick. Yoo-hoo, right here,’ wavin’ your arms? He a nice white boy, goin’ off to some hot shit college? You get outta here, you come to Dyshett for a little somethin’ to ruin his career.”
Debbie was under the impression, short-lived to be sure, that crying was a kind of defense. The more Dyshett talked the harder she cried.
“You!” Sherry said, turning to me. “How come you don’t stick up for your sistah? Here we teasin’ her to kingdom come and you jus’ sit there like she ain’t no relation. What’s matter w’chyou?”
Dyshett only glanced at me, muttering “pervert,” and then she leaned
down under so she could see Debbie’s face. So softly she said, “Or is it your daddy did it to you? Hmmmm? Your daddy visit you in the night?”
Debbie’s mouth opened to its astonishing limit by degrees. It took her several seconds to understand what Dyshett was saying. “No!” she cried at last, in horror.
“Whoa, we thought it was a whale comin’ up out of the ocean there for a minute,” Dyshett said, sniggering.
“You awake now, girl, that’s for sure!” Sherry bellowed.
At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d try to think of all of us in some larger context, in allegorical terms. It was Howard who taught me to look at a patch of ground, a terrible day, the befuddled irrigation rig, our Holy Roller neighbor, as something more than just the sum of its parts, so that a thing at once is curiously both diminished and enlarged. Dyshett had so many qualities it was hard to pin her down; she was Joy and Beauty, Rage and Cruelty. I finally settled on Nature. The rest came readily: Lynelle was Wisdom. Sherry proved to be Compassion. Janet was Stupidity. Debbie was Shame.