A Map of the World (42 page)

“Your mama know your daddy visit in the night?” Dyshett asked. She was still leaning forward over the table so that the applesauce, which seemed to effortlessly issue forth from Debbie’s mouth in a single clot, went right into Dyshett’s eye. Sherry was so astounded she laughed. It took Dyshett a moment to register the enormity of Debbie’s reflex action. She blinked, putting her fingertips to the substance dripping down her cheek. Debbie herself looked right and left, unsure that she’d done what she was afraid she’d done, hoping that she dreamed it, that she could slip away. She let out a high-pitched whine as she cowered, sinking down and down into her stomach. Dyshett licked her lips slowly, luxuriously, as the grainy yellow sauce came toward her mouth. She stuck her tongue out, trying to reach her cheek. She made a smacking sound. Only when Debbie glanced up, wondering if, by any chance, the worst had passed, did Dyshett dive on the table; she slid across it on her stomach, upsetting our trays and our milk cartons. “YOU MOTHERFUCKING FAT ASS WHITE PIECE OF RATSHIT, YOU—” She struck Debbie and pulled her along onto the floor.

“My boyfriend, he’s black like you,” I heard Debbie scream from under Dyshett. Sherry grabbed my shoulder, “What she say?”

“I didn’t hear,” I replied, certain that the news of Jesse O’Leary’s racial composition was not going to provide the sudden spark of camaraderie and affection Debbie hoped for, that Dyshett wasn’t going to make peace because they liked the same sort of man. I slipped to the window of our pod and beat on it, so that the guards, a hall and a window away in their control room, who were standing with their backs to me, might come and rescue my white sister. Two of them came running in a flat-footed vertical way that didn’t gather much speed. By the time they opened the door another girl, Rita, was on the pile, all of them grunting and clawing. The fight was broken up and the girls were handcuffed and taken off to solitary confinement. Debbie’s nose was bleeding and we were given surgical gloves and towels and told to wipe up her trail.

Sherry turned to me as we swabbed the floor. “How much time we got without Dyshett?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“That’s how much time we got to breathe easy. Any time without that girl is easy time.”

We were more like rats, than hamsters, to tell the truth. Sometimes I don’t think it would have much mattered who we were; we would have fought in the end because we, unlike the cows, did not have comfort stalls. At 6
A.M
. the cell doors were opened and the lights were turned up in the day room. The guard, from her panel of switches in the control room, also turned on the television to the channel of her choice. We never knew if we were going to wake up to the CBS morning news, or “To Life! Yoga with Priscilla,” or “Woody Woodpecker.” There was always noise and sickness, and always light, so that it was impossible to sleep deeply. We stumbled about as if we were perpetually hung over. Because the jail had not been remodeled to accommodate the multitudes of unoccupied and dangerous citizens of Racine county, we did not have double bunks. I slept on my mat, which was on top of a cement block, and Debbie had her mat on the floor of our cell. When there were more people than cells they slapped down mats out in the day room.

I tried at first to find some sort of routine so I wouldn’t so easily lose track of time. It seemed of the utmost importance to mark time, to keep my place so I’d know where I was when, like a shade, I came back to the world. I did sit-ups on my mat first thing every morning. There was no
outside courtyard for fresh air, no exercise room, no place except the day room to run in small circles. I read after breakfast and wrote letters after lunch, like a scholar might. I read the books I’d brought along with me. I had thought in those moments while the officer stood by in our living room that I’d need books I loved, books to keep my mind alive, books to let me escape and not think, books I’d always wanted to read. I had handed my full bag to the police that Tuesday morning when they came to the farm, imagining the quiescence and time before me like a wide road that narrows and narrows until it is nothing but a dot forever going into the distance.

In the jail I was often so tired I’d fall asleep mid-sentence and then wake up feeling drugged and wrenched. I read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books again, for solace, for the company of old friends. When the good dog Jack was left behind, across the swelling Missouri River, I threw myself under my blanket and sobbed. I knew I was crying out of proportion to the dog’s bad fortune and ill treatment and yet I couldn’t stop. The tears kept coming even as I beat my fists on my mat. I was still hitting the mat when I realized I was asking a question: It had nothing to do with the dog, not at all. It was Howard; it was about Howard. Why hadn’t he come after me at Lizzy’s funeral? I hadn’t ever wondered before, and I had to sit up with the asking. Why hadn’t he tripped through the crowds and tried to help me? It had seemed, in the aftermath of the funeral, noble of him to remain and cover for my inexcusable blunder. It was a difficult job, a terrible position to be in, but he had risen to the occasion admirably. I had mortified Howard. I was far too much for him, like a daily dose of strong medicine that makes a person sputter and gag. He had had to stand in line at church, shamed, while everyone stared at him. How like him to take the blows without batting an eyelash. But if he had come after me—if he had caught up with me, and if we had climbed into the woods and lain in the dry earth together, disregarding the community that was set to pillory us; if he had been able to apologize for the thousands of times he had unthinkingly belittled me, made me feel that he knew best, that I was just off center, just enough to the left to be—and he never would have said, but he had thought it—unreliable: How different the summer would have been! He had thought I was one way when we first met, and I had gone and surprised him by being someone altogether different. He had
luck on his side, however, because by the merest chance I turned out to be exactly what he wanted, someone who would show him his own strength and honor that strength. I was increasingly sure, as I sat and clutched my pillow, that the rest of our lives would have been transformed if we’d held each other and wept, if he’d been able to make some sort of offering, some token, a chink from his armor, a word, a shoring up. He was so methodical and even-tempered and in his shadow anyone would have been erratic and moody. There was nothing for me to do in his presence but sit and yap at the moon, go mad periodically, run around with a sock in my mouth, jump on him, naughty, knowing better, but feeling it was worth it if I could once or twice actually lick his face. He had been betraying me all those years, in small insidious ways, leeching from me what was my strength.

“Do you think I should call him?” I didn’t have to look to know it was Debbie, back from her self-esteem class. She was oblivious to the fact that I was under my blanket. “Officer Stephans says we have to take responsibility for our actions. Does that mean I should call him instead of waiting? Jesse said he didn’t want to hear from me again, but if I don’t call I’m not taking responsibility for my own feelings.”

“It means you’re alone,” I said without moving. “It means you go on without Jesse.” It was the harshest thing I’d say to her.

“Oh God,” she cried. “Don’t. Don’t tell me that.”

“It just means that it can’t be different,” I said. “It means that until you’re forgiven the trouble is yours. It means you have to hope for exact justice, which is probably the most merciful.”

“Stop,” she moaned. “Don’t talk to me!”

I hardly knew what I had said, or if it was true. I was confused and enlivened with the kind of pure rage Emma showered upon us on a daily basis. Howard could never have come after me at the funeral; it wasn’t in his constitution. He had had to make excuses for me ever since we’d met, and standing in line, representing the family, was no different from any other day. He seemed never to have forgiven me for myself; he had led me to believe that I was unforgivable, that there was no hope for change. I had thought all along that it wasn’t in his nature to judge, and yet in his silence he was judging continuously, always standing back with his arms folded, looking askance. It was so convenient to be quiet, to let others fill
in what they wanted about you while you stood mum. I was sprawled upon our life, gibbering like a monkey, spilling myself out like oil from a troublesome bottle that doesn’t have the right lid.

I did one hundred sit-ups and stretched my limbs on my bed, stood and touched my toes, did forty jumping jacks, jumped up and down, did an abbreviated version of a Rumanian dance I’d held on to through the years, and lay down. I suddenly felt weak with too much inactivity and self-pity and the aftershock of hatred. I remembered Howard cutting a rope that was wound around a tree, setting the strange dog free. He had made us climb a cherry tree first, in case the dog was rabid or fierce. I had loved that in him, that instinctual man-force, protecting us, taking the fire. I wondered how he was faring, what measures he was taking to feel that he was still protecting what was out of his range.

The television was on all day and into the night, and it was by osmosis that I partook of endless reruns of “Cheers,” the “Bob Newhart Show,” “M*A*S*H,” “Dobie Gillis” and “Star Trek.” The one happy constant in my life, however, was the “Oprah” show at three o’clock every weekday afternoon. Lynelle, a twenty-two-year-old hooker, used to say, “Oprah, she the fairy godmother, don’t take crap from nobody.” Although I have trouble now, remembering the sequence of my jail highlights, Lynelle must have come in during the fourth or fifth week of my stay. Ordinarily she lived on the streets of Chicago or very occasionally in the county hospital where she was treated for AIDS-related symptoms. She had somehow landed in Racine, in the company of a brother, or a pimp, who’d been up to no good and dragged her down along with him. “You real lucky to be in a place as fine as this,” she said of our jail, which had been built about ten years before. “You come to Chicago, they don’t give you no clothes to wear.”

To Lynelle the week in the lockup was a welcome respite, three square meals a day, medical care, a bed with sheets, a pillow, and a blanket. She was wise beyond her years, and I sorely regretted that whatever she’d done required only a week’s stay. “I like Oprah,” she’d say. “Much better than them others. Oprah, she could be me. I could be her. She start with nothin’ and work her way to the top. She over the top, Oprah is. She out in the atmosphere, ain’t nobody can ever reach up to
touch her. She done fine for herself and I enjoy that. I look right at her, then I close my eye, and it seem like it don’t take nothin’ to be her. Poof, I be Oprah, jus’ like that. Sometimes it seem like her—success, you know what I be sayin’? Her success is my success. I tell that to anybody else they get they mouf right up to my face, open it wide, and they laugh half a day. But you know what I mean, you sure do. Oprah, she got fancy things, but I know if she could, if she could do it, she reach out her hand and pull me up too. She can’t because she ain’t God, no sir, not yet! But you know, if she could do it, jus’ reach out and pull me up, she would. She want to do that but no people is strong enough to take the weight. She want to and she would if she could, yes Ma’am, uh huh, she sure would.”

I sometimes could not keep from staring full on at Lynelle as she spoke. She was nothing but hollows and joints, her few long teeth spaced apart, looking, set in her translucent pink gums, as if they were about to fall out. The others knew that she was untouchable and wouldn’t have thought to strike up conversation or sit close. I tried to believe that it wasn’t her illness but her mantle of wisdom that made them stay away. Whenever I began to ask Lynelle about herself, her circumstances, she’d say, “What ch’you bother for? I be dead before too long. I be dead before Christmas.” She said so, not in a self-pitying way, but as a fact. If I pressed her, she’d wave her hand in front of her face, slowly. “There more to us than our bodies,” she’d say. “It just the husk for something that—
fffzzzt
, fly into the air the minute my heart stop. Oprah, she outlive all of us, she my shining star.”

I used to think that I would go and find Lynelle on the streets of Chicago, and take her to see the “Oprah” show. I still dream of her sitting on the set, smiling, those long teeth flashing at us in the light, telling the millions across America, “Your big old body, it ain’t nothin’ but shit.” I used to wake up in the night, my heart racing, wondering just how long I’d have to walk before I found her.

“Let Oprah be the judge,” I said to Rafferty at one of our meetings. “Let Robbie and me, Mrs. Mackessy, Howard, Theresa, Dan, Mrs. Glevitch—let all of us come before Oprah. Let the studio audience decide. They’re nice suburban women, many of them, dressed for a lark. They have common sense and speak their minds.” I remember how he looked at me, as if I’d found a new voice, as if I had been altered more than he’d
thought by serving time. Although I didn’t know Lynelle for long, she raised me up. I often wanted to wake her, in that short week she was with us, to sit by her side, but she seemed to want to keep to herself. She sat, day after day, on her mat with her bony knees bent, nearly up to her ears, mumbling to herself. I waited for three o’clock when together we got lost in what seemed the simple problems of the estranged daughters, the celebrities after privacy, the sexually wayward, the overweight, the underweight, the shoplifters, the cross-dressers, the sick in body, the sick at heart.

When someone down in Chicago paid Lynelle’s bond and she was getting ready to leave I went and stood by her cell. I started stuttering things such as, “You take care.” She was trying to fit her long feet into her tight jail shoes, her Keds, so that she could go to the holding room and put on her street clothes. She looked up. “What you say your name was?” She waved her hand in front of her face in that particular fanlike way she had. “Oh, it don’t bother. You keep the faith.” She handed me a worn bookmark, with the words of the Twenty-third Psalm typed in a column. At the bottom it said, Presented to Lynelle Duchamps, November 12, 1974. First Baptist Church, Chicago, Illinois. “You keep the faith, you hear?”