Inside These Walls Page 8
So I kept talking to Ricky about the Spiral Jetty and how it was like an ancient petroglyph recreated in modern times, and how Smithson had reversed the spiral to symbolize eternity. I talked about how hard I had to squint in the intense sunlight, because the desert sky was big and clear and the rays from the sun felt absolutely direct, and the way the wind whipped at my mother’s silky scarf so that it rippled like a flag. I was painting this picture for him, I suppose, so that he would be imagining me as a ten-year-old child with her mother, and when we arrived at the beach he wouldn’t have the heart to do anything unseemly to me.
But when I stopped to take a breath, he said, “It’s covered now.” I asked, “What’s covered?” and he said, “Spiral Jetty. The water level rose, and it’s been covered for a decade now. The whole thing’s underwater, like Atlantis.”
I stopped talking then. I had no idea this childhood landmark of mine had vanished, and I felt bewildered and sort of sad to realize it. Ricky looked over at me—he was still driving then—and I guess he saw the look on my face, because he said, “Hey, it’s still there, though. Eventually there’ll be a drought again and it’ll be visible, like before. I think that was part of the artist’s point.”
“When do you think that will be?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But everything goes in cycles, right? And probably when it turns up again it’ll be all covered in salt from the lake, like those crystals you can grow in a jar.”
I was trying to picture all of Spiral Jetty under the water, preserved and silent, like a shipwreck. And while I was doing that, Ricky pulled into a parking space and I felt anxious all over again because I had been off my guard as far as setting up some kind of advance protection from what he might do. But it turned out he was very much a gentleman for things like that. He didn’t touch me unless he was certain I wanted him to. Ricky could be very intuitive and empathetic, which you may not realize. I think that’s why he was so good with my cats, and why he could unapologetically and without hesitation attack my stepbrother at the front door of my home. Yet his strong feelings could be too much for him at times, and sometimes he would get overwhelmed and shut it all down, like a shopkeeper dropping the metal grate across his storefront at the end of a day. That way of his could feel bewildering, but it never occurred to me how insidious it would become. When he liberated himself from compassion he was a very dangerous kind of free.
Well, my pencil lead has run down to a stub, and my new mechanical pencils aren’t ready yet. I will write again when the wood has softened.
Yours truthfully,
Clara Mattingly
* * *
The lockdown wears on through the next day, with our meals delivered by cart and pushed through the slot into our cells. The night before, Sergeant Schmidt came by my cell during night count and told me Janny’s arm was broken and they took her to the hospital to have it set and put in a cast, but I haven’t heard any more news since then. My heart aches to think of how disoriented she must be, shuffling from one place to the next without any awareness of the space around her, fearful of the unfamiliar voices. I never spoke to her before the fight that blinded her, but she was skittish and anxious long before she lost her sight. Others may not realize this, because years in prison had hardened her by the time she was attacked, but I know it is her nature because she shot her husband to death while he was sleeping. She wasn’t angry, she told me; she was just done. Tired of the way he behaved when he was awake. They arrested her outside the Greyhound station, with a child on each side of her and a cardboard sign balanced on the baby stroller in the middle, begging for bus fare to Mexico City.
To pass the time I read the ski lodge romance, I work on Intérieur, and I dance to a melody in my head, moving to a Cyndi Lauper song I’ve been thinking about since the day they took my cassettes away. It’s called Time After Time, and it was one of the songs on my mix tape from Ricky. I hadn’t listened to it in a very long time, because it was far too evocative; at the time they put me in here the song was at the height of its popularity and seemed to blare from every radio every hour of the day. Back then—when I felt so confused and so bereft, insanely hopeful that one morning a C.O. would unlock my cage and explain there had been a mistake, that none of this had ever happened—it drove me half-mad to hear it all the time, as if all my secret feelings were being projected outward to the entire prison. After a while, people in the world grew tired of it, it fell off the music charts and I rarely heard it anymore. The effect, when I did, was much like opening the drawer in which my father, while living, had kept his undershirts. Long after he had died, but before Garrison Brand, I went looking for a comb and in my haphazard search pulled his drawer open. Suddenly the ghost of my father seemed conjured before me, and I sank to my knees from the shock of it, breathing in the intense and living smell of this man who didn’t exist any longer. I didn’t like that feeling, because even before I went to prison I liked things to be clear and orderly. It made me a good Catholic, because in Catholicism everything runs in neat, up-and-down lines.
But two years later, when word came to me that Ricky had hung himself, I wanted that feeling. I dusted off the tape and listened to the song over and over again for several days. But then the music pulled me in two directions. I was drawn toward Ricky, remembering what he had been like at his best, and toward the potent memory of those first months in prison, when I faced the reckoning for loving him at his worst.
As I dance, I wish desperately that I had a pair of pointe shoes. Now and then, holding on to the bars or my bunk, I hesitantly try to rise onto my big toes; I believe I could do it, if only I had the right shoes. But for now I tie the loose legs of my blue pants tight against my ankles with string, and in the center of my cell I practice adagios, which are very difficult to do correctly. The guards walk past and cast long glances through my bars, probably wondering if I’ve lost my mind, but I’m suffering from nothing except a poignant song.
“Mattingly.”
I’m jarred back to reality and I come to the bars, where Officer Parker is standing with his thumbs in his belt. “They’re going to keep Hernandez in the clinic for a couple of days,” he says.
“Why? Is something wrong besides a broken arm?”
“I can’t tell you that. Privacy laws.”
I press my forehead against the cold steel bars in frustration. “Can you have her dictate a note to me? Or could I visit her? At least let me send down some of her things. Her special toothpaste and her rosary—”
“Sure, I’ll give ’em to her.”
Hastily, I gather up Janny’s favorite items and stuff them into her quilted bag, which she can identify by touch without any trouble. I reach for the romance novel, then realize nobody there will read it to her. The thought makes me feel a little desolate, and not only for Janny’s sake. It’s truly lonesome without her here. For eight years she has been beside me, and her absence calls to mind the sick feeling from my first long months of incarceration, when they kept me in administrative and then medical segregation because of my pregnancy. Without someone whose needs I can focus on, in the vacuum of human interaction, all I can think about is how terrible it is to be lonely.
Late in the evening they dim the lights. I sigh and put away my dancing socks, smoothing down the edges of moleskin that are peeling from the knit fabric. Before I crawl into bed, I pour the water from the Gatorade bottle into the sink above my toilet and peel the saturated wood pulp from the pencils. With all of the graphite safely stowed—we probably won’t have another contraband check for a while, and the grab was arbitrary in the first place—I say my last prayer of the day and pull the blanket up almost to my eyes.
I can’t stop thinking about him.
For years I forced myself not to think. When all arousing thoughts are terrible, forbidden for their awfulness or else for the yearning they bring, it’s better to make the mind a sheet of white paper, an empty screen, and the act of releasing tension as perfunctory any other bodily functi
on. If the guards catch you, it’s thirty days in solitary. Be careful.
But to remember Ricky is to remember all things about Ricky. The dogbeat kid behind the register at the Circle K, the young man clowning on the beach, the impish boy with one of my kittens in his arms, the bare-skinned lover and, yes, the raging, dirty wanted man with nothing left to lose. Clear as any other memory is the sight of him pacing the kitchen with the phone pressed to his ear, his damp floppy bangs grasped in his hand, grit caught in the sweat that shone on his arms. The weight of his body amplified itself in his heavy footsteps, and his voice was a hoarse and ragged edge of what it had once been. I’ll talk to Clinton Brand, he half-shouted, over and over. You want to talk to me, send him in. Send him right here. Clinton Brand.
I scroll back. Picture the one before. The second-to-last Ricky.
Sometimes, when he had worked the graveyard shift at the Circle K, I would come to the house after work and find him fast asleep on his mattress on the floor. I’d slip beneath the covers and find him already nude, because he had known I was coming. After hours asleep, the space under the covers was as heated as an animal’s den. I would run my hands all over his buttery skin, drinking in the scent of him: warm and alive and male, a body that my own body wanted to pull close, hold tightly. Not cologne or shampoo or soap—I loved the smell that ran beneath all those things. The one that completed a circuit in my brain, made a tingle of electricity dance down my spine.
Soon enough he would awaken and turn to me. Unbutton my blouse, run a warm, clay-roughened hand down my belly. Roll onto his back and relax into my touch along the sparse hair of his chest and simple flat plane of his stomach, and then the part of him I’d first feared, then loved. When I wrapped my hand around him he purred deep in his throat like one of our cats.
It’s what I miss hopelessly. How perfect the fit of his body into mine. The way he moved as we both grappled for what was just out of reach, his arousal built to feed and vanquish mine, and mine his. We could make each other desperate for what we alone had created, and then destroy it together.
There is no substitute, not inside nor outside these walls, for a lover who wants you.
I roll onto my stomach and keep it as quiet as I can.
* * *
In the morning the regular wakeup call sounds, and we all rise and head back to work. I return to the drawing of Guernica with intense focus, and Shirley even bestows a compliment for the speed and quality of my work. The hours seem to vanish behind me, and before I know it I’m back in the yard, squinting in the sunlight for the first time in days.
I walk the edge of the fence, clicking my tongue, looking for Clementine. The other inmates, gang members sitting at the picnic tables, watch me the way patrons of a café watch a homeless person mumbling down the sidewalk. The other inmates here have never been fond of my indifference to making friends. Even on the outside it was always difficult for me, and in here it’s all the more perilous. People snitch about petty violations, they get transferred to other prisons, they get released. An alliance that was very valuable can become a liability if the other person is unceremoniously taken away. There’s a rule that we can’t receive mail or visits from anyone who was released in the past year, so friendships, even the most carefully cultivated ones, die. But it’s just as well. If I were spontaneously pardoned for my crimes, I’d walk away from all this and never look back. Except for Janny, whom I would never abandon, I wouldn’t maintain my loyalty to friends on the inside or cling to my identity as a former inmate. I’d shed it like a dirty snakeskin and try never to think of it again.
Clementine is nowhere to be found. Dejected, I walk back to the other side of the yard, then pace back and forth near the C.O.s for a while to work the days of laziness out of my muscles. It’s a very hot day, and I suppose the cat must have been smart enough to find shelter. Sweat trickles down my temples and catches in the wispy bits of my hair flying out from my ponytail.
Several days’ worth of mail awaits me when I return to my cell. There is a letter from Emory Pugh, my copy of the Magnificat and a package. I set the other items aside and pull apart the cardboard tabs with the excitement of a child on Christmas morning. I can’t remember the last time I got a package, and this one bears Annemarie’s name in the upper left corner. Inside, a folded note sticks up alongside a pink notepad printed with cupcakes, a set of drawing pencils, a jar of coffee and a little bag of cat treats. There is also a bar of German chocolate and a postcard of a beach scene. With shaking hands I unfold the note, and read.
Hello,
It was lovely to see you the other day. I found out I can send a package but the rules are just—wow. No stickers, no stamps, books have to come straight from the vendor, etc. I hope this stuff gets through. You might not like chocolate or coffee, but personally I can’t imagine being stuck anywhere without them. I sent the beach postcard because you said you hadn’t seen the beach in a long time. A postcard is kind of a lame substitute, but it beats that mural on the visiting room wall, at any rate. Hope to have a chance to visit again soon.
Fondly,
Annemarie
I unpack each of the items and line them up on my little desk. She remembered everything I told her. About Clementine and my drawing and how I love the sea. It’s the sort of package I would have put together for my own mother, had my mother lived a terrible life.
The pink notepad has a message scribbled on the back. I bring it toward my face and look above my glasses to read it. This is one of the items I designed. Couldn’t send stickers or a poster, but wanted to show you. -A. Rounded little cupcakes dance along the border, festooned with sprinkles in between. It’s hard to tell how much creativity she was allowed in the design, but her handwriting is angular and stylized, consistent among the letters as if it’s a font she’s created. Her father’s was like that, too— not the same in its lines and loops, but holding a similar confident swagger, as if he knew it was beautiful and that it reflected on him. I wondered if she already knew Ricky had been an artist, and if it made her all the more suspicious that she was his.
But I have an answer for that. Maybe, if I phrase what I say just right, she will come to the conclusion on her own and not need for me to lie at all. If we’re both lucky she will hear what she hopes to hear, because I am certain she hopes not to hear Ricky’s name. I saw it in the wince in her expression when she first asked me. And I don’t want to see it again.
Chapter Six
An entire day passes before I even remember the letter from Emory Pugh. A photo falls out of the envelope when I turn it sideways— an image of him standing in a white-paneled kitchen with his arm around the shoulders of a petite teenage girl, his mustache and goatee neatly trimmed, hair slicked back. He looks very serious, although the girl offers a tentative smile.
Dear Clara,
I’m hurt that I sent you the pictures you asked for and you still haven’t wrote back to me. I thought it was funny you asked for pictures of Ricky but I sent them anyway. Now I wonder if you’re still hung up on him.
I’m sending a photo of me and my daughter so you will have one of me as well as him to remind you who loves you now. Not saying anything bad against Ricky though he was convicted of murder but the fact is that he is no longer with us and I am right here and save all my love for you. You are very special in my life and I hope you don’t forget about me just because of distance separates us. In AA they say EXPECT MIRACLES and it’s true you never know.
With love & also hoping,
Emory Pugh
I sit down right away and scribble off a letter in return. Emory Pugh, for all his guileless assurance that we belong together, is a good human being, and I don’t want to hurt his feelings.
Once the letter is written I turn my thoughts back to Annemarie. From the shelf above my books I take down a long rectangle of pink crochet, doubled over and sewn together on two sides. This is my completed project. Long thin braids of yarn trail from two corners. I make a fist and fit my cre
ation around it, as if my hand is a newborn’s round little head. The strings of the bonnet fall evenly on each side of my wrist. It’s just about right.
I run a cupful of water into my coffee machine, put in a filter, and sprinkle on a little of the coffee Annemarie sent. Once it’s prepared, I press the crocheted hat down into the mug and leave it there for a few minutes. Then I take it out and rinse it a bit with some cold water, squeeze it over the sink, and lay it out on the shelf to dry.
The next morning, after they count us, I check my project and find it’s dried nicely. The coffee has muted the bright bubblegum color with a sepia tinge. I wrap it in a triple layer of Kleenex and tie it with an extra piece of yarn I’ve salvaged, set it on my shelf until she calls for me again, and then begin another letter.
Dear Ms. Shepard,
I apologize for the delay in answering your questions. Obviously I have the time to respond, but I have gone nearly twenty-five years thinking about all of this as little as possible, and I find it overwhelming to remember too much at once. It can easily take over my mind, and it becomes deeply depressing when I consider that my entire lifetime—the only one I will ever have—is defined so entirely by those few days when I was twenty-three years old. This leads to unproductive thinking, such as considering that I would be better off had I never met Ricky— but then I believe if I had never met Ricky I would probably be even more miserable free and out in the world than I am confined. I’m not sure how to reconcile that.