It was a cliché then and it’s a cliché now, but having heard “Hello, Dolly!” on the radio, it seemed wholly possible for me to show up in Manhattan with money for a room in a boardinghouse and have my future roll out automatically, without my having to think too hard about it. It was just a daydream, but I fed it as best I could. I started saving my own money in cash hidden in the attic. It was my responsibility to deposit my father’s pension checks, which the X-ville police department sent at the beginning of each month, at the X-ville Bank, where the tellers called me Mrs. Dunlop, my mother’s name, and, I thought, would have no problem emptying the account and handing me an envelope of hundred-dollar bills from the Dunlops’ savings if I lied and said I was buying a new car.
I never once discussed my desire to leave X-ville with another person. But a few times, during my darkest hours — I was so moody — when I felt impelled to drive off a bridge or, one particular morning, had a compulsion to slam my hand in the car door, I imagined what relief I might feel if I could lie on Dr. Frye’s couch just once and confess like some sort of fallen hero that my life was simply intolerable. But, in fact, it was tolerable. I’d been tolerating it, after all. Anyway, that young Eileen would never lie down in the company of a man who was not her father. It would be impossible to keep her little breasts from sticking up. Although I was small and wiry then, I believed that I was fat, that my flesh was unwieldy. I could feel my breasts and thighs swinging sensuously to and fro as I walked down the hall. I thought everything about me was so huge and disgusting. I was crazy in that way. My delusion caused me much pain and confusion. I chuckle at it now, but back then I was the bearer of great woes.
Of course nobody in the prison office had any interest in me and my woes, or my breasts. When my mother died and I’d gone to work at Moorehead, Mrs. Stephens and Mrs. Murray had kept their distance. No condolences, no kind or even pitying looks. They were the least maternal women I’ve ever met, and so they were very well suited for the positions they held at the prison. They weren’t severe or strict as you’d imagine. They were lazy, uncultured, total slobs. I imagine they were as bored as I was, but they indulged themselves in sugar and dime-store paperbacks and had no problem licking their fingers after a donut, or burping, or sighing or groaning. I can still remember my mental pictures of them in sexual positions, faces poised at each other’s private parts, sneering at the smell as they extended their caramel-stained tongues. It gave me some satisfaction to imagine that. Perhaps it made me feel dignified in comparison. When they answered the phones, they would literally pinch their noses shut and speak in high-pitched whines. Perhaps they did this to entertain themselves, or perhaps I’m misremembering it. Either way, they had no manners.
“Eileen, get me that new boy’s file, that brat, what’s his name,” said Mrs. Murray.
“The one with the scabs?” Mrs. Stephens clanked her caramel, spat as she spoke. “Brown, Todd. I swear they get uglier and dumber every year.”
“Be careful what you say, Norris. Eileen’s likely to marry one of them someday.”
“That true, Eileen? Your clock ticking?”
Mrs. Stephens was always bragging about her daughter, a tall, thin-lipped girl I’d gone to school with. She’d married some high school baseball coach and moved to Baltimore.
“One day you’ll be old like us,” Mrs. Stephens said.
“Your sweater’s on backwards, Eileen,” said Mrs. Murray. I pulled up my collar to check. “Or maybe not. You’re just so flat, I don’t know what side I’m looking at — front or back.” They went on and on like that. It was awful.
I suppose my manners were just as bad as theirs. I was terribly grim and unaffected, unfriendly. Or else I was strained and chipper and awkward, grating. “Ha-ha,” I said. “Coming or going, that’s me — flat.” I’d never learned how to relate to people, much less how to speak up for myself. I preferred to sit and rage quietly. I’d been a silent child, the kind to suck my thumb long enough to buck out my front teeth. I was lucky they did not buck out too far. Still, of course, I felt my mouth was horselike and ugly, and so I barely smiled. When I did smile, I worked very hard to keep my top lip from riding up, something that required great restraint, self-awareness and self-control. The time I spent disciplining that lip, you would not believe. I truly felt that the inside of my mouth was such a private area, caverns and folds of wet parting flesh, that letting anyone see into it was just as bad as spreading my legs. People did not chew gum as regularly then as we do now. That was considered very childish. So I kept a bottle of Listerine in my locker and swished it often, and sometimes swallowed it if I didn’t think I could get to the ladies’ room sink without having to open my mouth to speak. I didn’t want anyone to think I was susceptible to bad breath, or that there were any organic processes occurring inside my body at all. Having to breathe was an embarrassment in itself. This was the kind of girl I was.
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.”