The play went on, Joseph and Mary reciting lines sometimes stiffly, sometimes with tongue-in-cheek bravado. More children in multicolored robes appeared, heads bowed in embarrassment or boredom. Their voices were barely audible through the taunts and laughter from the boys in the crowd. One of the players, a younger child, began to cry, chin wobbling, jaw gritted. That was when Rebecca stood up, scowling, and trudged back up the aisle, her pendant bouncing between her small bosoms as she strode. I watched her. Her body was very beautiful, slender as a ballerina and just as tense. She noticed me when she reached the back of the chapel, then waved and shook her head in disbelief, mouthed something I couldn’t decipher, and walked out. I remember thinking, “We are united now, us against them.” I would adopt her rage, or pretend to at least, if it meant I could be on her side. That’s what it felt like.
• • •
It wasn’t that I didn’t care at all about the boys. It was just that I was young and miserable and had no way of helping them. I felt, in fact, that I was one of them. I was no worse or better. I was only six years older than the oldest of the boys in there. Some of them looked like men already — tall, lanky with beards and mustaches coming in and big, thick hands, low voices. They were mostly white from blue-collar families, but there were quite a few black boys, too. I liked those boys the best. I sensed they understood something the others didn’t. They seemed to be more relaxed, to breathe slightly more deeply, to wear perfect death masks while the other boys winced and frowned and spat and chided one another like little children, brats in a schoolyard. I often wondered what they all thought of me when they saw me standing outside the door during visitations, if they even noticed me at all. They rarely looked my way, never once lifted their grainy, warm slow eyes to mine in recognition. I thought perhaps they couldn’t identify me from one day to the next, as though my role were played by innumerable similar-looking young women. Or maybe they sat with their mothers during visitation and called me “that bitch,” and motioned with their chins when my head was turned and I was thinking of Randy and not listening. Or maybe they said, “She’s the only one I don’t hate.” Or maybe they thought I was crazy. I certainly could have passed for crazy on days when I’d not slept and showed up unkempt and hungover, rolling my eyes at every noise and gnashing my teeth at every flicker of light. In my childish self-centeredness, I fantasized that this was what the black boys talked about with their mothers: how much pain Eileen is in, how Eileen seems to need a friend, how Eileen deserves better. I hoped they saw right through my death mask to my sad and fiery soul, though I doubt they saw me at all.
I wouldn’t be the first to admit that working as a young woman in an all-male institution had its perks. This is not to say that my position at Moorehead gave me any sense of my power as a female, nor did it bring me closer to realizing any imagined romantic encounters — none of that nonsense. But working at Moorehead did give me a sneak peek into the male disposition. I could, at times, stand quietly and observe the boys like animals in a zoo — how they moved, breathed, all the nuanced gestures and attitudes that made each of them seem special. It was through studying the comportment of imprisoned youngsters that I developed my understanding of the strange spectrum of male emotions. Shrugging meant “I’ll punch you later.” Smiling was a promise of undying love and affection or severe hatred, cutthroat fury. Did I derive erotic pleasure from looking at these boys? Only a little, honestly, since I didn’t get to observe them on a regular basis, and never in their natural state. I only watched them filing in and out of assembly meetings or the cafeteria, and during their visits with their mothers. I wasn’t in a position to observe them at rest in their bunks, at work in the rec room, or playing in the yard, where I imagine they were more at ease, more animated, and expressed more subtlety, more vulnerability, humor, spontaneity. In any case, I liked their fluctuating, miserable faces. The best was when I could see the hard face of a cold-hearted killer breaking through the chubby cheeks and callow softness of youth. That thrilled me.
It may not have been at that particular Christmas assembly performance, but I remember a boy who played Mary ripping out the pillow from under his costume and throwing it on the ground and sitting on it. A wise man mimed a strip tease once. So the boys were charming in a way. Would I miss them once I was gone? Of course I wouldn’t, and I didn’t miss them, though I wondered, staring at the backs of their heads in the chapel that day, if I’d remember any of their faces, if I’d be sorry if any of them died. Would I have helped them if I could have? Would I have sacrificed anything for their benefit? The answer was a shame-faced but honest no. I was selfish, solely concerned with my own wants and needs. I remember watching Randy standing there in the dark of the auditorium. I wondered if his nether regions were squashed inside his pants. I imagined he must have kept them to one side to accommodate the way the pants were made. They were tight. I can’t bring back the precise image right now, but I regularly studied the arrangement of folds in the groin area that would have suggested which side he preferred. I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the male parts. I don’t actually remember seeing any male parts in my father’s dirty magazines, now that I think of it, though they were inferred, I guess. My knowledge was limited to anatomical drawings. I’d sat through health class sophomore year of high school, after all. Sweating behind that hot spotlight, I worried that my inexperience with men would make Rebecca think I was childish and pathetic. If she found out I’d never had a boyfriend, she would dismiss me, I feared.
Once the drama onstage had unraveled, the warden reappeared and started a long soliloquy on the nature of sin. I abandoned my post behind the spotlight and left the chapel to stroll down the prison halls, hoping to run into Rebecca. The rec room and offices were empty. The library, which held mostly religious tracts and encyclopedias, the dining hall with its long steel tables strewn with dirty plastic cutlery — all was quiet. The boys’ sleeping quarters were in the far back. The small windows there looked out on the rolling, snow-filled dunes. The ocean beyond like a canyon of woe, tumbling and icy all day and night, was so thunderous, I pictured God himself emerging from the water, laughing at us all in spite. It was easy to imagine the depressive thoughts that view must have inspired in those little boys. The windows were at such a height from the floor that one had to either stoop down or kneel to get a good look out there. I listened to the waves rumbling in the empty room for a moment. Bunk beds lined the circumference of the room, which was bell-shaped and had lines painted on the floor in guiding paths that showed where to stand during morning announcements, where to kneel at night to pray, which way to walk to the showers, which way to the cafeteria. The baby-blue laminate squeaked under my feet so loudly on my way out, I thought I’d stepped on a mouse.