“They do it every year.”
“I’d call that cruel and unusual punishment,” she replied. She flung a fuzzy mohair shawl over her shoulders, untucked her hair. I felt I had utterly failed to impress her. I resolved to say more, be cooler, more charming, smarter, funnier, more alive the next time we talked. “Well, see you in the morning,” she said, and ticktocked down the hall to the blustery evening outside.
On the way home that night, I stocked up on alcohol for my father at Lardner’s, then stopped in a drugstore for violet mints and a pack of cigarettes for myself. I rarely smoked, but when something had me riled up I did enjoy a cigarette or two. I tried to put Leonard Polk out of my mind, though the image of him touching himself in the cave had excited me. It was what I’d always hoped to see in all my spying on Randy, just a little glimpse of him being obscene. I shook my head gruffly, as though the image of the boy would get dislodged from my brain, scuttle out my ears, and leave me alone. I wasn’t a pedophile — a word I remembered from Latin class years earlier. Browsing the cosmetics aisle, I found a new shade of lipstick — a glossy, blood red: Passionate Lover. I slipped it into my pocket. The sleeves of my coat — it had been my mother’s — were long and wide at the cuffs, so I could easily lift almost anything. I’ve been good at stealing all my life. I still pinch things from the grocery store from time to time — dental floss, a head of garlic, a pack of gum. I don’t see the great harm in it. I figure I’ve given away or lost enough over my lifetime to even out my debts.
That night I did pay for, along with a humiliating package of sanitary napkins, a small compact of pressed powder, the lightest shade they had: Snow Queen. A fashion magazine on the rack at the checkout counter caught my eye, too. The cover showed a bony, melancholy woman pouting in a gray fur hat, looking upward as though at some disapproving statesman. “Isn’t it romantic…” it said on the cover. The fur, I thought, looked like a house cat. I plunked down the money. The salesgirl handled my package of sanitary napkins as though they were already soiled, pushing it with her fingertips into the paper bag she propped open, cavelike on the counter. She slipped the magazine into its own flat paper bag, which I liked. Back inside the Dodge, I arranged all the brown paper packages on the passenger seat. The bottles of booze, the napkins, the magazine. I took the lipstick from my pocket and applied it liberally over my mouth, blind. When I got home my father said, “Whose rosy ass have you been kissing?” Then he plucked the bottles from under my arm. “Not your color,” he sneered, padding back to the kitchen. Like Leonard Polk, I didn’t say a word.
TUESDAY
A grown woman is like a coyote — she can get by on very little. Men are more like house cats. Leave them alone for too long and they’ll die of sadness. Over the years I’ve grown to love men for this weakness. I’ve tried to respect them as people, full of feelings, fluctuating and beautiful from day to day. I have listened, soothed, wiped the tears away. But as a young woman in X-ville, I had no idea that other people — men or women — felt things as deeply as I did. I had no compassion for anyone unless his suffering allowed me to indulge in my own. My development was very stunted in this regard. Did I know that the boys at Moorehead — like prisoners around the world, so it seems — might be being pressured by guards to fight one another for sport at night, that they were made to defecate in their pillowcases, routinely forced to strip by the corrections officers who spat on them, beat them up, tied them down, humiliated and abused them? Rumors surfaced, but their implications didn’t register. I barely even noticed that the boys were handcuffed by the guards when they were escorted to and from the visitation room. Why should my heart ache for anyone but myself? If anyone was trapped and suffering and abused, it was me. I was the only one whose pain was real. Mine.
Had that Tuesday at work been a typical Tuesday, I would have spent it idle at my desk, watching the clock, sketching out my escape from X-ville for the hundredth time. If I left the Dodge at a filling station in Rutland — at a gas pump even — and just walked away, my head covered with a scarf, and simply boarded the next train to New York from Rutland station without anyone noticing me, people in X-ville might suspect I’d been kidnapped by some modern-day highwayman, expect to find me headless somewhere across the country, dumped by the side of the road or in some gruesome cheap motel scene. “Poor Eileen,” my dad would sniffle. I imagined. I dreamed. But that Tuesday I wasn’t thinking of any of those things. Instead, I thought of Rebecca, whose arrival at Moorehead seemed like a sweet promise from God that my situation could improve. I was no longer alone. Finally, here was a friend I could admire and open up to, who could understand me, my plight, and help me rise above it. She was my ticket to a new life. And she was so clever and beautiful, I thought, the embodiment of all my fantasies for myself. I knew I couldn’t be her, but I could be with her, and that was enough to thrill me. When she arrived that Tuesday, bustling in from the frigid morning snowdrifts, she whirled off her coat as though in slow motion — this is how I remember it — and shook it like a bullfighter as she strode up the corridor toward me, hair rippling behind her, eyes like daggers shooting down straight through my heart to my guts. She was pure magic. Her coat was a crimson wool swing coat with a gray fur collar. It was the same kind of fur I’d seen on the magazine cover. I stood up nervously when she got closer, expectantly, as though I were her assistant, her secretary, her maidservant. She nodded politely to the old ladies in the office and caught my eye on her way back to the locker room, which is where I followed her.
I had dressed for the occasion. From my mother’s wardrobe I’d composed an ensemble I thought made me look more cosmopolitan — navy blue, of course. I even wore an old fake pearl necklace. I’d brushed my hair and applied my lipstick more carefully that morning, dabbing at the edges of my mouth with the pressed powder so it stayed in place. I remember this because, as I’ve said, I was obsessed with my looks. Ironically, despite my preoccupation, my appearance on most days was slovenly, offensive even. “Disgraceful,” said my father. I thought, though, that I looked much better that morning. “Fancy” was probably the word I would have used. In any case, I followed the sound of Rebecca’s delicate heels ticktocking across the linoleum floor, and in the locker room she turned to me, saying, “Can you help me open my locker again? I can’t seem to do it.” She held up her long hands and twiddled her fingers in her skin-tight dove-gray leather gloves. “All thumbs,” she said. This helplessness was some kind of flirtation, I think, a manipulation of roles to keep me at her service, though I couldn’t have understood that at the time. I was perfectly pleased to spin the dial with finesse, blushing as though my talent for opening a locker was a sign of great virtue.
“But how do you know my combination?” she asked.
The locker opened with a sharp clank. I stepped back with pride.
“All the combinations are the same,” I told her. “But don’t tell the old ladies. They’d all have strokes.”
“You’re funny,” said Rebecca, wrinkling her nose. She carried her briefcase and a small leather purse from which she transferred her cigarettes into the pocket of her sweater. Her sweater looked so soft — it must have been angora, cashmere — it seemed to float around her like cotton candy. That day, just the second time I’d seen her, she wore all different shades of purple — lavender, violet, mauve. If she’d been any other woman, I would have discounted her as a hussy since her dress was so formfitting, so elegant, completely inappropriate for work in a prison. This wasn’t some romantic evening, after all. But Rebecca was no hussy. She was divine. I gazed at the elegant bend in her arm as she hung her coat up in her locker.