Eileen Page 3
Besides the Listerine in my locker, I always had a bottle of sweet vermouth and a package of mint chocolates. I stole the latter regularly from the drugstore in X-ville. I was a fabulous shoplifter, gifted in the fine art of snatching things and squirreling them up my sleeves. My death mask saved me from trouble many times by hiding my ecstasy and terror from clerks and shopkeepers who must have thought I looked very strange in my huge coat, trolling around the candies. Before visiting hours began at the prison, I’d take a long swig of vermouth and throw back a handful of mint chocolates. Even after several years, having to receive the pained mothers of the imprisoned boys made me nervous. Amongst my deadly boring duties, part of my job was to ask visitors to sign their names in a ledger and then tell them to sit down on molded orange plastic chairs in the hallway and wait. Moorehead had an insane rule that only one visit could take place at a time. Perhaps this was due to the small staff or Moorehead’s limited facilities. Either way, it created an atmosphere of interminable suffering as for several hours mothers sat and waited and wept and tapped their feet and blew their noses and complained. In an attempt to fend off my own hard feelings, I fashioned meaningless surveys and handed out the mimeographed forms on clipboards to the most antsy of the mothers. I thought having to fill them out would give the women a sense of importance, create the illusion that their lives and opinions were worthy of respect and curiosity. I had questions on there such as “How often do you fill your gas tank?” “How do you see yourself in ten years?” “Do you enjoy television? If so, what programs?” The mothers were usually pleased to have a task to handle, although they’d pretend to look impinged upon. If they asked what it was all about, I told them it was a “state questionnaire,” and that they might leave their names off of it if they preferred to remain anonymous. None of them did. They’d all write their names on these forms much more legibly than in the visitors’ ledger, and answered so ingenuously, it broke my heart: “Once every Friday.” “I will be healthy, happy, and my children will be successful.” “Jerry Lewis.”
It was my job to maintain a file cabinet full of reports and statements and other documents for each of the inmates. They stayed at Moorehead until their sentences ran out or they turned eighteen. The youngest boy I’d ever seen in my time at the prison was nine and a half. The warden liked to threaten to have the bigger boys—tall or fat or both—transferred to the men’s prison early, especially the ones who made trouble. “You think it’s rough here, young man?” he said. “One day in state would make any of you bleed for weeks.”
The boys at Moorehead actually seemed like nice people to me, considering their circumstances. Any of us would be ornery and disgruntled in their place. They were forbidden to do most things children ought to do—dance, sing, gesture, talk loud, listen to music, lie down unless they were given permission to. I never talked to any of them at all, but I knew all about them. I liked to read their files and the descriptions of their crimes, the police reports, their confessions. One had stabbed a taxi driver in the ear with a pen, I remember. Very few of them were from X-ville itself. They came to Moorehead from across our region, Massachusetts’ finest young thieves and vandals and rapists and kidnappers and arsonists and murderers. Many of them were orphans and runaways and were rough and tough and walked with swagger and aplomb. Others were from regular families and their demeanor was more domestic, more sensitive, and they walked like cowards. I liked the rough ones better. They were more attractive to me. And their crimes seemed far more normal. It was those privileged boys who committed the perverse, really twisted crimes—strangling their baby sisters or lighting a neighbor’s dog on fire, poisoning a priest. It was fascinating. After several years, however, it had all become old hat.
I remember this particular Friday afternoon because a young woman came to visit her perpetrator—her rapist, I assumed. She was a pretty girl who had a tortured flamboyance, and at the time I thought all attractive women were loose, sex kittens, tramps, floozies. Such a visit was strictly forbidden, of course. Only close relatives were allowed visits with inmates. Kin was the word we used. I told the girl as much, but she demanded to see the boy. She was very calm at first, as though she’d been practicing what to say. I can’t believe my audacity when I asked, death mask on, whether she was demanding to become the boy’s kin. I said, “Do you mean to say you’re engaged to be married?” was my question. She seemed to lose her mind when I asked that, and turned to the weepy mothers with their clipboards and questionnaires and cursed them and threw the ledger to the floor. I don’t know why I was so cold to her. I suppose I may have been envious. No one had ever tried to rape me, after all. I’d always believed that my first time would be by force. Of course I hoped to be raped by only the most soulful, gentle, handsome of men, somebody who was secretly in love with me—Randy, ideally. Once the girl had left and I had a free moment, I pulled her rapist’s file. The photograph showed a pimpled, sleepy black boy. His rap sheet included stealing laundry off a neighbor’s line, smoking marijuana cigarettes, vandalizing a car. He didn’t seem so bad.
Another part of my job during visiting hours was to tell the guards which boys were being summoned for visits, one by one. The two guards I remember most clearly were Randy, of course, and James. I think James must have had brain damage or some sort of nervous condition. He was always agitated, sweated constantly, and seemed utterly uncomfortable in anyone’s company. The job became very difficult for him when he had to interact with the boys or appear in front of the weeping mothers. When he was alone he had an ominous kind of stillness, like a slingshot being pulled back too hard. He seemed to sit like that, rigid, about to explode, for hours at a time when it was his turn to guard the hallway. This was a ridiculous waste of man-hours in retrospect, since there was another guard farther down the hall who sat by the door to the residential facility, or whatever we called the place where the boys lived and slept and paced around and read the Bible, or whatever they were supposed to do.
What was also ridiculous—I’m just remembering this now—was how I was put in charge of administering the security test for the women visitors. Since there were no female guards or officers, I suppose, it was my duty to pat the mothers down, lazily tapping around their shoulders and hips, a small pat on the back. It was the most intimate moment of my day, tapping these sad women. Randy would be there, too, usually standing guard at the door of the visitation room, and sometimes as I touched those women I imagined it was Randy I was touching, Randy, who like those women, seemed to barely even notice me. I was just a pair of hands flashing nervously through the air. These were all very sad women, passive and remorseful, and never violent. Of course in all my pathetic pat-downs, I never once came across a concealed knife or gun or vial of poison in a skirt pocket of any of those sad mothers. The guards hardly seemed concerned either. Men rarely visited. Most likely that had to do with work schedules, but I think many of the boys in the prison lacked fathers, which was part of the problem, I suppose. It was all pretty grim.
The bright spot in the misery of visitation hours was the chance to be close to Randy. I remember the peculiar scent of his sweat. It was strong, but not offensive. A good-natured smell. People smelled better back then. I am certain this is true. My eyesight has deteriorated over the years, but my sense of smell is still quite keen. Nowadays I often have to leave a room or walk away when a person near to me smells bad. I don’t mean the smell of sweat and dirt, but a kind of artificial, caustic smell, usually from people who disguise themselves in creams and perfumes. These highly scented people are not to be trusted. They are predators. They are like the dogs who roll around in one another’s feces. It’s very disturbing. Although I was generally paranoid about how I smelled—if my sweat stank, if my breath was as bad as my mouth tasted—I never wore perfume, and I always preferred the scentless soaps and lotions. Nothing calls more attention to one’s odor than a fragrance meant to mask it. At home alone with my father, I was in charge of the laundry, a du
ty I inherited by default and which I rarely honored. But when I did, the aroma of his soiled garments was so distressing, I often gagged and coughed and dry-heaved when I sniffed them. It was the smell of something like soured milk, sweet and laced so strongly with the perfume of gin, it turns my stomach just to think of it now.
Randy smelled completely different—tart like the ocean, brawny, warm. He was very attractive. He smelled like an honest man. Mrs. Stephens had told me that the guards were all hired through the employment office of the county correctional facility. So they were all ex-convicts, I suppose. They all had tattoos. Even James had one. A swastika, I believe. Randy’s tattoo was a fuzzy portrait of a girl—his mother, I hoped. One early morning during my first months at Moorehead, when the office ladies were setting up the Easter crèche, I read Randy’s employee file, which included a list of his adolescent offenses—sexual misconduct, breaking and entering. He had been an inmate at Moorehead as a teenager, a fact which only endeared him to me more.
You know me. I spent many hours wondering who might have been the recipient of Randy’s sexual misconduct. I guessed some young teenage girl who got in trouble with her parents for breaking curfew or getting pregnant. Randy didn’t seem like the violent type to me, but I’d seen him use force in restraining the boys from time to time. He’d have been great in a fistfight, I imagined. One of my favorite daydreams went like this: Randy would wait for my shift to end and ask to escort me to my car. He would offer his arm as I stepped across the black slate of ice in the parking lot, but I would refuse it, and he would feel jilted and abashed. But then I would slip on the ice and be forced, despite my prudence, to take his thick arm in my gloved hands, and he would look deeply into my eyes, and maybe we would kiss. Or instead, he’d take hold of me by the shoulders and steer me up against the Dodge, press my face into the frosted window, reach up my skirt to rip my stockings, my underpants, then around my leg to feel my caverns and folds with his fingers as he pushed into me, his breath hot at my ear, saying nothing. In that fantasy, I wore no girdle.
This is not a love story. But just one last bit about Randy before the real star of my story appears. It’s funny how love can leap from one person to another, like a flea. Until Rebecca showed up a few days later, it was the constant thought of Randy that kept me afloat. I still remember his address, since on weekends I would drive past his apartment one town over and sit low in the Dodge trying to see whether or not he was home, alone, awake. I wanted to know what he was doing, what he was thinking, whether I ever even crossed his mind. A few times, without planning, I’d bumped into him in X-ville just walking down Main Street. Each time, I’d raised my gloved hand, opened my mouth to speak, but he just sauntered past me. My chest nearly caved in on itself. One day he would see me, the real me, and he’d fall in love, I told myself. Until then, I pined and moped and did whatever I could to understand his gestures and habits and expressions, as though a fluency in the language of his body would give me a leg up when it came time to please him. He wouldn’t have to say a word. I thought I’d do anything to make him happy. But I wasn’t a fool. I knew Randy had been with girls sexually. Still, I could not imagine him in the act of copulation, which is what I called it in my head at the time. I couldn’t even begin to picture his bare nether regions, despite having seen a picture of some in one of my father’s pornographic magazines. I could imagine, though, in a postcoital moment, Randy laughing casually across a mussed bed at an invisible female figure. I held him in such high esteem. Just a glance in my direction had my pulse quick for hours. But that’s enough of him. Good-bye for now, Randy, good-bye.
Here’s what I looked like that Friday: brittle, fake alligator loafers with thick, worn heels and chipping gold buckles; white stockings which made my thin legs look wooden, doll-like; large yellow bouclé skirt that hung past my knees; gray wool jacket with sharp shoulders over a white cotton blouse; small brass-colored cross; hairdo several days old by now; no earrings; lipstick of a shade the store called Irreparable Red. I must have looked nineteen going on sixty-five in that foppish approximation of decency, that adult costume. Other girls were married by my age, had children, settled. To say I didn’t want all that would be too generous. All that simply wasn’t available to me. It was beyond me. By all appearances I was a homebody—naive, disinterested. If you’d have asked me, I would have told you I believed that a person had to be in love to make love. I’d have said I thought anyone who does, and isn’t, is a whore.
In hindsight, I don’t think I was so off-base in my desire for Randy. A union wouldn’t have been completely preposterous. He was employed, in good health, and it wasn’t completely unfeasible, I don’t think, that he might date me. I was a live young woman in his vicinity, after all. Despite my paranoia, there wasn’t anything outright offensive about the way I looked back then. I was unattractive in temperament most of all, but many men don’t seem to care about things like that. Of course Randy must have had other women to turn to. I wouldn’t have known what to do with him if I’d actually snagged him anyhow. By the time I turned thirty I’d learned how to relax, wink in the mirror, fall charmingly into the arms of countless lovers. My twenty-four-year-old self would die from shock at the quick death of my prudence. And once I left X-ville and filled out a bit, bought some clothes that fit me right, you might have seen me walking down Broadway or Fourteenth Street and thought I was a graduate student or maybe the assistant to some famous artist, on my way to pick up his check from the gallery. What I mean to say is that I was not fundamentally unattractive. I was just invisible.
That afternoon the mothers came and went. Sheaves of completed questionnaires got tossed in the trash along with glittering piles of caramel candy wrappers like heaps of dead insects. “Do you believe there is life on Mars? What qualities do you value most in your state officials?” Every day I picked up a dozen snot-filled tissues marked with lipstick like fat, dead, pink-tipped carnations. “Can you speak a foreign language? Do you prefer canned peas or canned carrots? Do you smoke?” A bell rang to signify that someone, one of the boys, had done something that would result in heavy punishment. James got up off his stool and mechanically walked down the corridor, wringing his hands. I squeezed the used tissues in my fists, added them to the papers and wrappers in the garbage.
“Take out that trash, Eileen,” said Mrs. Stephens, looking up at me from behind her armpit as she reached down to her desk drawer to retrieve a fresh box of candies.
“If there was life on Mars, it’s dead now,” one mother wrote.
“A man should be broad-shouldered and have a mustache.”
“A little French.”
“Peas.”
“Six packs a week. Sometimes more.”
• • •
Before I left Moorehead that Friday, Mrs. Stephens asked me to decorate the Christmas tree which the janitor had dragged into the prison waiting room, empty now that visiting hours were over. I remember it was a voluptuous pine and the needles were thick and waxy and its sap filled the air with a stunning tang. There was a storage closet where all the seasonal decorations were kept—Easter cutouts of bunnies and golden eggs, Independence Day flags, Labor and Memorial Day banners, Thanksgiving turkeys and pumpkins. One Halloween we hung garlands of garlic over the office doorway, and in an assembly after lunch the warden gave a ghoulish recitation of the Lord’s abominations in Deuteronomy. It was ridiculous.
The Christmas tree ornaments were just as I’d left them the year before, haphazardly packed back into their sagging cardboard box. The metal balls encrusted with glitter and gold were chipping and fading, each year fewer of them to stuff back into the nests of old newspaper, but they were charming and filled me with longing. I had hard feelings around the holidays, the one time of year I couldn’t help but fall prey to the canned self-pity Christmas prescribes. I’d mourn the lack of love and warmth in my life, wish upon stars for angels to come and pluck me from my misery and plunk me down into
a whole new life, like in the movies. I was a sucker for the spirit of Christmas, as it was called. Growing up, I learned I’d be praised and rewarded for my suffering, for my strong efforts to be good, but every year God smote me. No presents, no miracles, no holy night. I pitied myself for that, too. I tried to keep a straight face as I unpacked the decorations. There were garlands of holly made of shiny plastic that smelled like strong antiseptic chemicals, which I liked. And at the bottom of the box there were tinsel and old paper snowflakes the boys had snipped from white construction paper many Christmases ago, some as old as twenty years, probably. When I unfolded them, they were disturbed and angry geometries, little acts of violence, but the names written in the corners were in controlled, regular penmanship in pale silver pencil. I remember names like Cheyney Morris, age 17. Roger Jones, 14. I was supposed to stick them on the painted brick wall in the waiting area, but I’d used up all my Scotch tape fixing the hem of my coat when the stitching had unraveled the week before, so I stuffed the snowflakes deep between the branches of the tree. They looked like snow there. I liked methodical work like hanging ornaments and so I lost myself in the task quite easily. That was good. I felt wistful. I saved a portion of the decorations for the top third of the tree, which was too high for me to reach without extending my arms above my head. If I did that, anyone would be able to see the darkened stains of sweat beneath my arms. Heaven forbid.