All the kids eyed it grimly as we passed. We could be there, behind that razor wire. We were silent as death when we went by the California Institution for Men, set way back from the road in the middle of a field. Finally, we turned onto a fresh blacktopped road, past a little market, case of Bud $5.99. I wanted to remember it all. The kids got their bags, their backpacks. Now I could see the prison—a steam stack, a water tower, the guard tower. It was aluminum-sided, like Starr’s trailer. Frontera wasn’t at all as I had imagined. I’d been picturing Birdman of Alcatraz, or I Want to Live! with my mother as Susan Hayward. Its low brick buildings were widely spaced and landscaped with trees and roses and acres of green lawn. It was more like a suburban high school than a prison. Except for the guard towers, the razor wire.
Crows squawked raucously in the trees. It sounded like they were tearing something apart, something they didn’t even want, just for the fun of destroying it. We filed through the guard tower, signed in. They searched our backpacks and passed us through the metal detector. They took a package away from one girl. No gifts. You had to mail them, a package from family was allowed four times a year. The slam of the gate behind us made us jump. We were locked in.
They told me to wait at an orange picnic table under a tree. I was nervous and sick from the ride. I didn’t even know if I’d recognize her. I shivered, wishing I’d brought a sweater. And what would she think of me, in my bra and high heels?
Women milled around behind the covered area of the visiting yard. Prisoners, their faces like masks. They jeered at us. One woman whistled at me and licked between her fingers, and the others laughed. They kept laughing, they wouldn’t stop. They sounded like the crows.
The mothers started coming in from the prison through a different gate. They wore jeans and T-shirts, gray sweaters, sweatsuits. I saw my mother waiting for the woman guard to bring her through. She wore a plain denim dress, button front, but on her the blue was a color, like a song. Her white blond hair had been hacked off at the neck by someone who had no feeling for the work, but her blue eyes were as clear as a high note on a violin. She had never looked more beautiful. I stood up and then I couldn’t move, I waited trembling as she came over and hugged me to her.
Just to feel her touch, to hold her, after all those months! I put my head on her chest and she kissed me, smelled my hair, she didn’t smell of violets anymore, only the smell of detergent on denim. She lifted my face in her hands and kissed me all over, wiped my tears with her strong thumbs. She pulled me to sit down next to her.
I was thirsty for the way she felt, the way she looked, the sound of her voice, the way her front teeth were square but her second teeth turned slightly, her one dimple, left side, her half-smile, her wonderfully blue eyes flecked with white, like new galaxies, the firm intact planes of her face. She didn’t even look like she should be in prison, she looked like she could have just walked off the Venice boardwalk with a book under her arm, ready to settle in at an oceanside cafe.
She pulled me down to sit next to her at the picnic table, whispered to me, “Don’t cry. We’re not like that. We’re the Vikings, remember?”
I nodded, but my tears dripped on the orange vinyl table. Lois, someone had scratched into it. 18th Street. Cunt.
One of the women in the concrete courtyard behind the visitors covered area whistled and shouted out, something about my mother or me. My mother looked up and the woman caught her gaze full in the face like a punch. It stopped her cold. She turned away quickly, like it wasn’t she who’d said it.
“You’re so beautiful,” I said, touching her hair, her collar, her cheek. Not pliable at all.
“Prison agrees with me,” she said. “There’s no hypocrisy here. Kill or be killed, and everybody knows it.”
“I missed you so much,” I whispered.
She put her arm around me, her head right next to mine. She pressed my forehead with her hand, her lips against my temple. “I won’t be here forever. It’ll take more than this to keep me behind bars. I promise you. I will get out, one way or another. One day you’ll look out your window and I’ll be there.”
I looked into her determined face, cheekbones like razors, her eyes making me believe. “I was afraid you’d be mad at me.”
She stretched me out at arm’s length to look at me, her hands gripping my shoulders. “Why would you think that?”
Because I couldn’t lie well enough. But I couldn’t say it. She hugged me again. Those arms around me made me want to stay there forever. I’d rob a bank and get convicted so we could always be together. I wanted to curl up in her lap, I wanted to disappear into her body, I wanted to be one of her eyelashes, or a blood vessel in her thigh, a mole on her neck. “Is it terrible here? Do they hurt you?”
“Not as much as I hurt them,” she said, and I knew she was smiling, though all I could see was the denim of her sleeve and her arm, still lightly tanned. I had to pull away a little to see her. Yes, she was smiling, her half-smile, the little comma-shaped curve at the corner of her mouth. I touched her mouth. She kissed my fingers.
“They assigned me to office work. I told them I’d rather clean toilets than type their bureaucratic vomit. Oh, they don’t much care for me. I’m on grounds crew. I sweep, pull weeds, though of course only inside the wire. I’m considered a poor security risk. Imagine. I won’t tutor their illiterates, teach writing classes, or otherwise feed the machine. I will not serve.” She stuck her nose in my hair, she was smelling me. “Your hair smells of bread. Clover and nutmeg. I want to remember you just like this, in that sadly hopeful pink dress, and those bridesmaid, promise-of-prom-night pumps. Your foster mother’s, no doubt. Pink being the ultimate cliché.”
I told her about Starr and Uncle Ray, the other kids, dirt bikes and paloverde and ironwood, the colors of the boulders in the wash, the mountain and the hawks. I told her about the sin virus. I loved the sound of her laughter.
“You must send me drawings,” she said. “You always drew better than you wrote. I can’t think of any other reason you haven’t written.”
I could write? “You never did.”
“You haven’t been getting my letters?” she said. And her smile was gone, her face deflated, masklike, like the women behind the fence. “Give me your address. I’ll write you directly. And you write to me, don’t go through your social worker. My mistake. Oh, we’ll learn.” And the vigor returned to her eyes. “We’re smarter than they are, ma petite.”
I didn’t know my address, but she told me hers, had me repeat it over and over so I would remember. My mind rebelled against my mother’s address. Ingrid Magnussen, Inmate W99235, California Institution for Women, Corona-Frontera.
“Wherever you go, write to me. Write at least once a week. Or send drawings, God knows the visual stimulation in this place leaves something to be desired. I especially want to see the ex-topless dancer and Uncle Ernie, the clumsy carpenter.”
It hurt my feelings. Uncle Ray had been there when I needed him. She didn’t even know him. “It’s Ray, and he’s nice.”
“Oh,” she said. “You stay away from Uncle Ray, especially if he’s oh so nice.”
But she was in here, and I was out there. I had a friend. She wasn’t going to take him away from me.
“I think of you all the time,” she said. “Especially at night. I imagine where you are. When the prison’s still and everyone’s asleep, I imagine I can see you. I try to contact you. Have you ever heard me calling, felt my presence in your room?” She stroked a strand of my hair between her fingers, stretched it to see how long it was against my arm. It came to my elbow.