The minute the door had closed behind her Dyshett shuddered. “That nigger,” she said, “give me the creeps.”
I remember clearly when Dyshett got out of solitary confinement the first time, after she beat up Debbie. She came waltzing into my cell while Debbie was taking a shower. “Come on in,” I said, after she was already well into the middle of the room, right on Debbie’s pillow with her dirty shoes. She assumed her characteristic pose, one hip out, her fists at her waist. “You some kind of smart-ass professor, always readin’ like you the Queen?”
“I read about other things besides horses and dogs,” I said. “So who’s next? Do you systematically work your way through everyone here? I’ve never been in before and it would be nice to be able to plan. Are you going to go from cell to cell and insult us and then beat us up?”
“Oh my,” she said, her eyes wide, her nose in the air, her lovely long neck extended. “If she ain’t going to figure me out, mother fuckin’ an-a-lyze me.” She called out across the day room, “Hey, Sherry—she one
of them mind doctors, tell me your problems, your dreams, all that shit.” She turned to me, coming closer, squinting at me so that I couldn’t see the least shine of her eyes. “It kill me, you know that?” She spoke in the most dulcet of tones. “It just drive me crazy, how you can’t tell nothin’ by looking at it. I’d walk down the street past you, think you was the perfect person, you know, wid the house, the two-car garage, the country club, the maid to wipe your ass. I see people like that and part of me is saying, ‘I hate that bitch.’ Another part says, ‘How come I can’t be her?’ And now come to find out you nothin’ but a pervert.” She shook her head once, back and forth, her right nostril hiked up in a sneer. “That make me crazy, when things turn out so different from what I see.”
I regret that I didn’t have the sense to realize that she was speaking as much about herself as she was about me.
“You look like a princess wid your pretty braids, and deep down you a creepy little man after some pussy. That all you thinking about. You got the idea you sit in here and keep your mouth shut, ain’t nothin’ going to happen to you, but you got that wrong. The stink a you is flowing out and getting in my face. You jus’ got to sit there and your stink come and get us, make me want to stab somethin’.”
I was relieved of her because someone new came into the pod, someone whose life history was surely already on the tip of her tongue. I knew from the talk that went on most of the day and night that Dyshett had moved up from Illinois with a cousin and the cousin’s boyfriend, in search of a better life, but bringing along with them their drug connections, reinforcing one of the many crack spokes that fanned out of Chicago. I had heard her brag that she didn’t have children yet because she’d had the brains to get Norplant. She wasn’t going to be a welfare mother with ten kids in a project and she wasn’t going to die from any virus. She was everything the others thought they wanted to be: She had knowledge, and strength that went beyond theirs, and she had beauty. She had the singing voice that was as potent as love. In addition to her natural gifts she was rich. She spent a major part of each day cataloging her possessions. She had furs, TVs, diamonds, shoes, earrings, silk underwear, alligator purses. Any item mentioned at table would trigger her memory of her wealth at home. When Sherry said she loved toast, Dyshett put both hands to her head and said, “I got me a toaster in every room. I jus’ love toast too.”
It was those scores of toasters that made me start to think that there might be common ground for us. She was still a child at heart, dreaming up her house, believing in it, committing to it as it became more and more fantastical, with a toaster at every turn. She was all nerve, so energized by rage she had a hard time sorting out what she most hated. I understood right off, after she’d left my cell, that I’d missed my chance with her, that if I’d been quick enough, smart enough, I might have been able to begin to know her. Perhaps it was odd, that it mattered to me. I wanted her to realize that if she could channel her energy she could actually make a path for herself. I often had the sensation that nothing else was real but the confines of the jail and the enraged and hopeless girls who passed through. My family existed only in a dream. I came to think that it was there, in the jail, that action counted for something. And although Dyshett was far stronger than I would ever be, I understood finally that in many ways we weren’t so far apart. When she had stood on Debbie’s mat I hadn’t been able to listen to anything but the drone of myself, in order to remain steady and fearless. For a good part of my stay I tried to think how to get back to the conversation that would reveal and instruct.
She told different versions of a particular incident, as if it were a favorite bedtime story. She used to tell it to whomever was currently sharing her cell, and so I heard it several times over that summer. It was about the time she was raped, depending on her mood, by an uncle, a stranger, a half-brother, an old boyfriend. In some of the tellings she pulled out a knife she happened to have in her shirt and stabbed him as the rape was in progress. She waited for the perfect moment so that he would “be dyin’ and comin’ at the exac’ same tahm.” When she first said that line it naturally got a big response and so she included it in the following versions, repeating it several times in the course of one telling. Sometimes she’d weave Debbie’s story into hers, telling her captive audience that Debbie hadn’t been so fortunate. “That girl, she couldn’t kill her daddy now, could she? And how could she take the poor little babies home to her mama when they look jus’ like her ole man? That night I kill my Sidney I stole all a his diamond rings off a his hands. Poor Debbie, poor, poor Debbie, she didn’t get lucky and kill her dirty ole pappy. The police, they can’t never get me now because of the statue of limitations.”
It was Sherry who told me what I took to be true stories about
Dyshett, about her being passed from foster home to foster home because her mother was a heroin addict, about how Dyshett had been abused by relatives, sent to the Audi home as a teenager, sent to a group home, waived into adult court, booted out into the world. “I keep tellin’ her,” Sherry said, “I say, ‘You be one maaaad Sistah,’ and she jus’ look at me, real proud, tossin’ them braids. She give me that superior look—you know the one—she say, ‘Don’t no one mess wid Dyshett. Don’t no one ever mess wid me.’ ”
Every day I waited. On Sundays I waited for the afternoon visit with Howard. I waited always for Rafferty to either save me or send me to my doom, and I waited, hour by hour, for the impending explosion. I thought of Job and how what he feared most came upon him. I had never thought to be afraid of any of the things that happened to us during that summer. Through my life I had trembled before the prospect of numerous dangers and potential disasters. Never before last year had I even vaguely considered the misfortunes that sometimes seemed to be of biblical proportions and at other times seemed like the sort of thing that could easily happen to anyone, as ordinary and expected as a leaky pipe or a stalled car. There was no sound in the large institutional electric clock in our pod, but I watched it occasionally, sure that I could hear the ancient ticktock, ticktock, the useless noise of time passing. I often felt like an old woman at the end of my life, sitting on a strange bed in a nursing home. I used to close my eyes and think of the beauty of Emma’s long, smooth limbs. I think when I am old I will dream of the pond more than anything else. In my sleep I used to see the sun shining down through the warm green water, shining on Emma’s creamy, wrinkled hands and feet as she paddled in her inner tube. Even in sleep I couldn’t consider such a scene for long before the waves came up, dark skies, forty-foot breakers, gray bodies drifting like sacks to shore, their gauzy souls sailing up over the water, up and up.
I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to tell anyone much about the day that started as every one of the others had started, with the lights coming on and the click of our cell locks, the bright chat of the television. Although I had managed to keep my distance from Dyshett, staying in my cell and watching where I tread, I was sure I was not afraid of her. I remember
Howard asking me in the visiting room once if I would let strangers into the yard, if I would stand by while they pummeled the girls. “No,” I had said, “of course not.” He was implying that I was doing just that, by lamely sitting in my cell. I didn’t know how to tell him that I hadn’t lost the instinct to survive and yet at the same time I didn’t feel much need for self-preservation, that somehow there was a distinction between the two.
That nameless day I sat up on my mat and began my exercises. Despite my efforts I had lost both weight and strength. After fifteen sit-ups that left me exhausted, and a few idle stretches, I rolled over and began pawing through my books, trying to determine my appetite. There was nothing exceptional about the morning. Janet, the hulking white girl, had joined us the week before. “You,” she used to boom across the room, “what ch’you—” She rarely had to say more because the offender abruptly dropped whatever she was doing and scuttled away. Janet, like so many of the others, had already spent half her life in juvenile detention centers or prison. That morning she and Dyshett were playing cards at one of the tables, shouting at each other when their luck turned. Debbie sat on the floor eating Doritos and watching television. Sherry slept. I read
Franny & Zooey
, and then I brushed my teeth for a long time, thinking about the Buddhists, trying to enter the moment, entering the pleasure of Mint Crest toothpaste, and knowing it, and experiencing it fully. Next I took a short nap. In fact, I slept through lunch. When I came to I wrote a letter to Emma and Claire, dredging up yet another episode of the life we had lived together. As usual, at three o’clock, I went out to the day room for my program.
“How come you always watching Oprah?” Dyshett called from her cell. “I got my eye on you.” She snapped her fingers, swaying to her own music as she moved toward me. “You always waiting for the magic hour. You put them books away and hop out here like some little ole bunny rabbit, your bushy tail all quivery.” To demonstrate, she bent her knees and wiggled her behind. “You think,” she made her voice go higher, ‘I’m not a racist, no sir, because I sure do like Oprah.’ She make you feel real tolerant, don’t she, like a do-gooder pervert. Now, Debbie, I understand her likin’ Oprah because they both the same size. What you got going wid her? Who she have on today, some queen about to die? Oh, oh, I know, you hoping Oprah announce at the end of the show, you hoping she say,
‘Any white trash out there in TV land who do the nasty wid boys behind the bushes, anyone like that want to come on my show?’ You could go on there, looking so fine, so in-tea-llectual—‘I read books, but I don’t know shit about real life.’ The psychiatrist lady on there will say, ‘How long you had this problem?’ ”
I knew all of a sudden that I wasn’t feeling right. It wasn’t anything specific, wasn’t nausea or hot flashes, wasn’t prickling skin, nothing even close to boiling anger or clutching fear. The room was closing in on me, getting smaller, all of them getting closer, everything slowly coming nearer and nearer.
“You get teary, wipe your eye on a hanky, tell her when you was a chile someone hauled you out by the braids, laid you out on the fence—”
She would go on for the rest of the afternoon by herself, and to stop that I said, “One of the reasons I like you so much, Dyshett, is the fact that you do all the talking. It’s very restful.”
Of course she wouldn’t like me saying that. I saw her and Janet coming for me, and that’s when the room got so close it started to go around and around, inch by inch at first and then faster, faster, the walls, the orange of our clothes, the table, spinning and spinning. It was like the old movie technique to take the viewer back in time, the frames whirling around into a kind of vortex before everything firms up again in the peaceful days long gone. I was trying both to think and to keep from reeling; I was saying to myself, I guess I’m going to let this girl hurt me, if that’s what she wants to do. It was the queerest thing, how I felt my head come down hard on the steel table and all I could think was this: It’s important for Dyshett to understand that it doesn’t hurt me.
When I felt the heat on my face I was sure at first that I was lying in the sun by the pond. It was summer, I knew, and so there was every reason to be stretched on the sand in the nearly fragrant warmth of the sun. I opened my eyes and I saw before me windows, and through them the golden light of the evening. Even before I realized that I was in a hospital it came to me fully, that last waking moment. I had sat on my stool at the metal table watching Dyshett rush at me with her teeth bared. She had done something to me, beaten me, maybe, cracked my head down on the table. I had let her do that, sitting serenely on my stool. As I woke I
panicked right away, trying to think what it was we had fought over. Never mind the name of this new place or who had taken me away. I would have to know about the fight so that I could explain it to Howard. I had enough clarity of mind to know that the reasons were myriad, that he of all people could trace our conflict back to at least slave time, that he could speak of impersonal forces, of Manifest Destiny, the industrialization of the North, the cotton economy of the South, the balance of power, supply and demand. Theresa, on the other hand, might say simply that our struggle was as old as cats and dogs. I would have to explain to Howard why I had let Dyshett beat me, why I hadn’t at least screamed for help. I would argue in vain that I did have the survival instinct, but that unlike Napoleon I had chosen not to fight back. Theresa was the only one, I thought, who would understand, who would know that I had begun by good measure to pay my pound of flesh for Lizzy.
Chapter Eighteen
——
I
CAME BACK INTO
the fold four days after the struggle and they still had not settled on the authentic version. The contest was recounted to me plenty of times with more fire and detail than I’m sure there actually was. Debbie said I threw up before I passed out. The next time Rita told the story I was vomiting blood and then bile. When I questioned her she said, “What do you know? You wasn’t even there!” Hilda, a woman who passed through briefly, spoke with a certain authority because she had two bullet wounds on her thigh. “You didn’t hear Blondy moanin’?” she’d say. She was incredulous at the group’s poor observational skills.