“Adorable,” I said and nodded.
“I’m afraid I don’t give a damn about Christ,” she said, or something crass like that. “Kids like Christmas though, I think.” She strutted into the bathroom stall and continued to talk while she urinated. I listened and watched my face turn red in the mirror. I wiped my lipstick off. That new shade wasn’t any good on me — far too bright. My father had been right about it. It made me look like a child playing around with her mother’s makeup. “I was wondering what you’re up to Christmas Eve,” Rebecca went on, “seeing as we have time off.” She flushed the toilet and came out, slip exposed, hiking up her stockings. Her thighs were as thin as a twelve-year-old’s, and just as taut. “Would you be up for a drink tomorrow at my place? I think it’d be nice. That is, unless you have plans.”
“I don’t have plans,” I told her. I hadn’t celebrated Christmas in years.
Rebecca pulled up her sleeve and took a pen from her breast pocket. “We’ll do it like this. Write down your phone number. This way I won’t lose it, unless I take a shower, which I won’t,” she said. “Barring a visit to the doctor, or from a gentleman caller,” she laughed, “I barely shower. It’s too cold up here anyway. Don’t tell.” She lifted her arms and comically craned her neck back and forth between her armpits, then held a finger to her lips as though to hush me.
“Me too,” I said. “I like to stew in my own filth sometimes. Like a little secret under my clothes.” We were the same, she and I, I thought. Rebecca understood that. There was no reason to hide anything from her. She accepted me — liked me, even — just as I was. She handed me the pen and stuck her arm out for me to write on. I gripped the pale, narrow wrist and wrote my digits up her forearm on skin so clean and soft and firm I felt I was defiling something as pristine as a newborn baby. My own hands under the fluorescent lights were red and burnt from the cold and rough and swollen. I tucked them into the cuffs of my sweater.
“I’m leaving early today,” she said. “I’ll call you tomorrow. We’ll have fun.”
I pictured a lavish table spread with gourmet dishes, a tuxedoed butler pouring wine into crystal goblets. That was my fantasy.
By noon I was grateful to have to drive out to the nearest grocery store to buy my lunch. It meant I could hold the gun again, let the Dodge coast, feel the wind in my hair. My hunger that day was like no hunger I’d ever felt. I purchased a carton of milk and a box of cheese crackers. I ate them voraciously sitting in my car in the Moorehead parking lot — stink of vomit still strong — then gulped the milk like a football player. Nothing had ever tasted so delicious. The gun, a hard weight in my lap, seemed to have something to do with my appetite. At any moment I could have pointed it at someone and demanded his wallet, his coat, that he do something to please me, sing a song or dance or tell me I was beautiful and perfect. I could have made Randy kiss my feet. The Beach Boys came on the radio. I didn’t understand rock ’n’ roll back then — most rock songs made me want to slit my wrists, made me feel there was a wonderful party happening somewhere, and I was missing it — but I may have jiggled a little in my seat that day. I felt happy. I hardly felt like myself.
Out in the parking lot, I ground my heels into the rocky salt, took in the view of the whole of the children’s prison. It was an old, gray stone building which, from afar, reminded me of a rich person’s summer home. The carved stone details, the rolling sand dunes beyond the fenced gravel, might have looked beautiful under different circumstances. The place felt like it was meant to be restful, peaceful, to inspire contemplation, something like that. As I understood from the odd display case of historical drawings, maps and photographs in the front corridor, the place had been built more than a hundred years earlier, first as a temperance boardinghouse for seamen. Then it was expanded and converted to a military hospital. The sea breeze was refreshing, after all, good for the nerves. At some point it was used as a boarding school, I think, when that part of the state was prosperous, full of smart, wealthy people who preferred quiet lives outside the big city. Once there was a monument to Emerson out front, a circular drive, a fountain with an English garden, as I recall. Later the place turned into an orphanage, then a rehabilitation hospital for ailing veterans, then a school for boys, and finally, twenty-something years before I got there, it became the boys’ prison. If I’d been born a boy, I probably would have ended up there.
Leaning out the open window of my car, ears bright red from the cold, I powdered my nose in the side-view mirror and watched a corrections officer escort a young man out of the back of his cruiser and into the prison. I was especially excited when a new inmate arrived, which was only about once a week. There would be paperwork for me to process. There would be fingerprinting. There would be photographs to take.
The office ladies gave me the stink eye when I walked in late from lunch that day. My mood and health feeling much improved, I whirled my coat off onto my chair, used my teeth to pull off my useless gloves, fingered the sleep out of the corners of my eyes and rubbed my hands together. Mrs. Stephens chatted with the corrections officer while the new boy fidgeted with his handcuffs. He was a pudgy blond teenager with an upturned nose, large, fleshy hands, but small, girllike shoulders. I remember him. He squeezed his eyes shut in an effort not to cry, which touched me. He sat across from me, handcuffed and sedated. I asked his name and wrote it down, took his height, his weight, noted his eye color, checked for facial scars, handed him the starched blue uniform. I felt like a nurse, dry and caring and untortured. I talked to him quietly, took his picture. I remember the look on his face in the viewfinder, the strange passive mix of resignation and rage, the tender sadness. Like when I’d peek at that dead mouse in my glove box, the boy’s picture bolstered me. “Glad I’m not you,” was my sentiment. All the while the corrections officer stood behind the boy with crossed arms, waiting to witness his signature. Two guards milled around in case the boy tried to make a run for it or attack me, though none of them ever did. He couldn’t have been older than fourteen, as I recall. My heart went out to him, I guess, because I was in a good mood and he was rather short and plump for his age, and from his sorrow I gathered that, like me, he was an odd child, deeply pained by the hard world around him, tender, distrustful. When I put his file away in the cabinet I read his charge: infanticide by drowning.
When I was conducting these little intake exams, I felt normal, just a regular person going about her day. I enjoyed having a set of clean instructions, following protocol. It gave me a sense of purpose, an easiness. It was a brief vacation from the loud, rabid inner circuitry of my mind. I’m sure people found and still find me odd. I’ve changed considerably over the last fifty years, of course, but I can make some people very uncomfortable. Now it’s for entirely different reasons. These days I’m afraid I am too outspoken, too loving. I’m a sap, too passionate, too effusive, too much. Back then I was just an odd young woman. An awkward youngster. Angst wasn’t quite so mainstream back then. My old deadpan stare would terrify me if I saw it in the mirror today. Looking back I’d say I was barely civilized. There was a reason I worked at the prison, after all. I wasn’t exactly a pleasant person. I thought I would have preferred to be a teller in a bank, but no bank would have taken me. For the best, I suppose. I doubt it would have been long before I stole from the till. Prison was a safe place for me to work.
Visiting hours came and went. It delighted me to see the ugly brown leather purse now hanging by its worn strap from the back of my desk chair. If I or anyone jostled it, the gun inside the purse would clank against the chair’s hollow metal backing. What would Rebecca think, I wondered, if she knew I was thus armed? I had the vague notion that bearing arms was in poor taste. Unless you were terribly wealthy, hunting was for the brutish lower class, uncivilized country folk, primitive types, people who were dumb and callous and ugly. Violence was just another function of the body, no less unusual than sweating or vomiting. It sat on the same shelf as sexual intercourse. The two got mixed up quite often, it seemed.