“We did, sure, but after YOU, GIRL starts shipping. The sample gift bags are in and the ad guys have several really cool ideas for…”
She rattles on until I stop her. “Look, I’ll call you later. I’m a bit hung over.”
“No kidding.” Brooklyn giggles.
When I hang up I’ve already decided to check out Mr. Ponti’s.
Sofia
I am not allowed to be near children. Home care was my first job after I was paroled. It suited me because the lady I cared for was nice. Grateful, even, for my help. And I liked being away from noise and a lot of people. Decagon is loud, packed with mistreated women and take-no-shit guards. My first week in Brookhaven, before being moved to Decagon, I watched an inmate get smacked across the back of her head with a belt just because she knocked her plate of food on the floor. The guard made her get down on all fours and eat it. She tried but started vomiting, so they took her to the infirmary. The food wasn’t all that bad — corn pudding and Spam. I think she was probably sick with flu or something. Decagon is better than Brookhaven, where they loved to strip-search us at every exit and entrance, or just because. But still, at the second place there was always some prisoner-guard drama and when there wasn’t, when we worked at our jobs, the noise, quarrels, fights, laughter, shouts went on and on. Even lights out just toned it down from a roar to a bark. At least I thought so. Quiet is mostly what I liked about being a home-care helper. After one month, though, I had to quit because my patient’s grandchildren visited her on weekends. My parole officer found me something similar but without children — a nursing home that didn’t call itself a hospice but that is what it mostly was. At first I didn’t like being around so many people in another institution, especially ones I had to answer to. But I got used to it since my superiors were not menacing me even though they wore uniforms. Anything that looked or felt like prison gave me a bad attitude.
Somehow I survived those fifteen years. Had it not been for weekend basketball games and Julie, my cellmate and only friend, I wonder if I would have made it. For the first two years we two, sentenced for child abuse, were avoided in the cafeteria. We were cursed and spit on, and the guards tossed our cell every now and then. After a while they mostly forgot about us. We were at the bottom of the heap of murderers, arsonists, drug dealers, bomb-throwing revolutionaries and the mentally ill. Hurting little children was their idea of the lowest of the low — which is a hoot since the drug dealers could care less about who they poison or how old they were and the arsonists didn’t separate the children from the families they burned. And bomb throwers are not selective or known for precision. If anybody doubted their hatred of me and Julie all they had to do was notice how the love of children was posted everywhere — pictures of babies and kids were all over the cell walls. Anybody’s kid would do.
Julie was serving time for smothering her disabled daughter. The little girl’s photograph was posted on the wall above her bed. Molly. Big head, slack mouth, the loveliest blue eyes in the world. Julie whispered to Molly’s photo at night or whenever she could. Not asking for forgiveness, but telling her dead daughter stories — fairy tales, mostly, all about princesses. I never told her, but I liked those stories too — helped me sleep. We worked in the sewing shop, making uniforms for a medical company that paid us twelve cents an hour. When my fingers got too stiff to work the machine properly, I was moved to the kitchen where I dropped whatever food I didn’t scorch and was sent back to the sewing machines. But Julie wasn’t there. She was in the infirmary after trying to hang herself. She didn’t know how. A few of the cruelest inmates offered to show her. When she returned to population she was different — quiet, sad and not much company. I guess it was the gang rape by four women, then later the loving enslavement she was in with one of the elderly women — a husband called Lover whom no one trifled with. Nobody, guards or inmates, liked me enough to want more than a casual hookup. I was a fighter and too tall, I guess, almost a giant in that place. Fine, I thought — the less licking the better.
In all those years I received exactly two letters from Jack, my husband. The first was a Dear Honey letter that turned into complaints like “I’m being [blacked-out word] here.” Beaten? Fucked? Tortured? What other word would the prison mail censor deny? The second letter began, “What the hell were you thinking, bitch?” No blacked-out word there. I didn’t answer. My parents sent me packages at Christmas and on my birthday: nutritious candy bars, tampons, religious pamphlets and socks. But they never wrote, called or visited. I wasn’t surprised. They were always hard to please. The family Bible was placed on a stand right next to the piano, where my mother played hymns after supper. They never said so, but I suspect they were glad to be rid of me. In their world of God and Devil no innocent person is sentenced to prison.
I mostly did what I was told. And I read a lot. That was one good thing about Decagon — its library. Since real public libraries don’t need or want books anymore, they send them to prisons and old-folks’ homes. Anything other than religious tracts and the Bible were banned in my family’s home. As a teacher I thought I was well read although in college, as an education major, I was not required to read any literature. Until I was in prison I’d never read The Odyssey or Jane Austen. None of it taught me much, but concentrating on escapes, deceits, and who would marry whom was a welcome distraction.
In the taxicab on the first day of my parole I felt like a little kid seeing the world for the first time — houses surrounded by grass so green it hurt my eyes. The flowers seemed to be painted because I didn’t remember roses that shade of lavender or sunflowers so blindingly bright. Everything seemed not just remodeled but brand-new. When I rolled down the window to smell the fresh air, the wind caught my hair — whipping it backward and sideways. That’s when I knew I was free. Wind. Wind fingering, stroking, kissing my hair.
That same day one of the students who testified against me — all grown up now — knocked on the door. I was in a sleazy motel room desperate to eat and sleep in solitude for once. No petty arguments or sex grunts, loud sobs or snores from nearby cells. I don’t think many people appreciate silence or realize that it is as close to music as you can get. Quiet makes some folks fidget or feel too lonely. After fifteen years of noise I was hungry for silence more than food. So I gobbled everything, puked it up and was just about to get some deep solitude when I heard banging on the door.
I didn’t know who she was although something about her eyes seemed familiar. In another world her black skin would have been remarkable, but living all those years in Decagon it wasn’t. After fifteen years of wearing ugly flat shoes, I was more interested in her fashionable ones — alligator or snakeskin, pointy toes and heels so high they were like the stilts of circus clowns. She spoke as if we were friends but I didn’t know what she was talking about or what she wanted until she threw money at me. She was one of the students who testified against me, one of the ones who helped kill me, take my life away. How could she think cash would erase fifteen years of life as death? I blanked. My fists took over as I thought I was battling the Devil. Exactly the one my mother always talked about — seductive but evil. As soon as I threw her out and got rid of her Satan’s disguise, I curled up into a ball on the bed and waited for the police. Waited and waited. None came. If they had bashed in the door they would have seen a woman finally broken down after fifteen years of staying strong. For the first time after all those years, I cried. Cried and cried and cried until I fell asleep. When I woke up I reminded myself that freedom is never free. You have to fight for it. Work for it and make sure you are able to handle it.