No raised voices
No arguments
No “horse play”
No loud laughing or boisterousness
Keep crying to a minimum
7
The road to Stanville prison is straight. It goes toward the mountains, which can be seen from the main yard on low-smog days. In winter their caps are dusted white. The snow is far away. It never falls on the valley floor where Stanville is. We see those caps of white through the baked layers of valley air. The snow is as remote to us as home.
Only people who should be on the road to Stanville are on that road. The morning of our arrival, no one was on it but us. The road was lined on both sides by almond orchards. I would not have known what was growing, or cared, except that Laura Lipp was awake and talking again, and she said what they package as almonds are not real almonds, but instead poisonous fruit seeds, did I know, and that one of her children had almost died from eating them.
“You ever split open a peach pit?” Laura Lipp said. “That’s where they come from. They aren’t actual almonds. They’re the poisonous part of a peach. A neighbor once gave my kid some without asking me first and if it weren’t for the paramedics she would have killed him.”
“You killed him,” a woman behind us said.
I felt a wave around me, people tsking in disgust.
White women in prison have two crimes, baby killer or drunk driving. Of course they have many more crimes, but those are the stereotypes, which help to impose an order among the women, the races.
“They don’t know what happened,” Laura Lipp said. “About him and what he did to me, what he did to us—to me and the baby. None of you has a right to judge me. You don’t know anything. Just like I don’t know anything about you.”
She turned to me, as if I were the one person she could reason with.
“Do you know who Medea is?”
“No,” I said. “You need to be quiet. I don’t know you and I don’t want to talk to you.”
“You want me to be quiet, but I’ll shut up when I’m finished and not before. I went to college, unlike the rest of you. Medea’s husband abandoned her and that’s what happened to me. He took everything from her, including her children. She had to put him in pain. So he could know her pain. It’s written into history. It’s real. You can’t do that to a person without damage. He tore her life apart, and so she found a way to do the same to him. That’s my only comfort. It’s very very very small. It’s so small I can’t see it most of the time.”
My eyes were closed. I was turned away. I was trapped with her but willing myself elsewhere. I pictured a woman on the landing of a hotel, picking up lint from ugly red carpeting to see if it was crack cocaine. Picking up a crumb, a match head, rug fluff. Inspecting the object between her fingers, smelling it, giving it a little taste, putting it down. Picking up another crumb, inspecting it the same way. She starts to cry, this woman, in her search, her endless search. It’s as sad as anything I’ve seen. I kept seeing it, though I did not want to, while Laura Lipp talked on and on.
The woman searching the carpet was Eva, I realized. I block certain things out. Everyone does. It’s healthy. But in trying to block the words coming from Laura Lipp I accidentally thought of something bad. Eva went in for coke, early on. Freebasing it, then shooting it, and, finally, crack was enough and it was the thing. Turned skinny, lost a tooth in a fight, had a limp from a car accident. But she was still Eva and I loved her.
When you see lights even higher than stadium lights, you are at prison.
They hustled us off the bus two at a time, yelling, Move it, Let’s go. I was trying not to trip. Conan, in front of me, was unhindered. He had a walk that was unaffected by the chains. I don’t know how he did it. He practically floated. He was dragging and smoothly syncopated. It was a walk that belonged on the streets of Compton, or in the parking lot of the Inglewood Forum, out at the Pomona car show, not in a line of shackled women headed into prison receiving.
The officers who greeted us were angry. Especially the women. It was a rude and aggressive welcome but it shut Laura Lipp up. The only person who got gentle treatment was the extra-large-sized lady who had slid off her bus seat. They let her lie quietly as we more able-bodied and conscious women were prodded down the aisle of the bus. The woman looked to be peacefully sleeping when I shuffled past her. The last passenger, she was moved off the vehicle in a stretcher, by medics who pronounced her dead and placed her on the floor of receiving with a tarp over her face.
The rest of us lined up for debugging and muumuus. The lieutenant was called Jones, a big Mack truck–shaped lady who was, I later came to understand, partly shaped like that on account of her stab-proof vest. The vests make the men look gym-pumped and the women look like packing crates.
We slathered ourselves with Lindane Lotion to kill lice and whatever else. It’s a poison; twice before I’d used it for scabies I’d contracted at the Mars Room and both times I started menstruating within hours. They wanted the girl, the fifteen-year-old who looked eight months pregnant, to use it as well. I told her not to. We were next to each other in the showers. They forced her, and she cried while applying her Lindane. If she were officially declared pregnant, she could be excused from certain procedures, but that designation had to be on her bed card, and none of us had bed cards yet. She would have to wait like the rest of us until her scheduled medical exam, and then for the requisite paperwork from her pregnancy test, which she had to have, even if you could practically see the baby kicking. Eventually she would be issued a CDC PREGNANT designation, with state clothing that announced it in enormous block letters on the back of her shirt and her state-property rain jacket. She’d be allowed no extra food, no prenatal exams, no vitamins, no counseling. All she would get was a bottom bunk, and extra time to go prone when the alarm sounded on the yard. That’s why the jacket said PREGNANT. It was like SWAT. It meant DON’T SHOOT (I’M SLOW).
Next was the strip search, which I was accustomed to from jail. The guards were yelling at us to spread wider, especially at women with thicker pubic hair. They shone their lights on us, as we bent over for them. Some of the girls were crying. Fernandez, who had yelled at the young pregnant girl to shut up when we first got on the bus, was yelling again at the girls who were crying about the strip search. The cops all knew her. “Fernandez, back again,” they kept saying, and she would either be friendly and joke or tell them to fuck off. The other girls seemed afraid of her.
They gave us one-size-fits-all polka-dot muumuus and three-sizes-fit-most canvas slippers. Even big and burly Conan with his jawline beard was forced to wear a muumuu. He threw his shoulders back to show the cops the muumuu was too small.
“I need pants and a shirt. I can’t wear this. It ain’t right, Sarge.”
He kept raising his arms. “It’s too tight in the shoulders.”
Jones said, “What are you planning to do in it, ma’am, conduct an orchestra? Shut up and put your arms down.”
The muumuus made me think of that expression lipstick on a pig. No woman should be compared to a pig nor made to wear the garment they gave us. And no Conan, either. The slippers were okay. They reminded me of winos, the shoes we wore growing up, which you could purchase at the army-navy place on Market Street. It was where I got my school gym uniforms as well. Later, I passed it as an adult, on my way to the Mars Room. Both were near the corner where the businessman getting in the Mercedes had promised money for a cab on a rainy night. San Francisco was like that, a city where the layers of my history all compressed together onto a single plane. Between the army-navy place and the Mars Room was Fascination, where Eva and I spent many hours as teenagers while Eva flirted with the cashier, before she was lost to the Tenderloin, north of Fascination, up in the boisterous and dirty hotels that formed the pearls on the chain of her bare life, barer even than mine.