In the Slammer With Carol Smith (12 page)

Dora, whose fat fingers limit her at this work, hates the industrial documentaries but moons long over the mountain folk. ‘All starving people look alike.’ Then sighs. ‘So do fatties.’

I watch all the movies. I am not allowed to participate in the handiwork. They will only let me sort parts, classify the smallest in a drawer cadged from an old printing press, and hand these out as called for. I rock from one expert to the other, like a hairdresser’s assistant rhythmically handing out the rollers. Ever so often they order me out: ‘Carol—don’t you need to go?’ In the bathroom I fight off the undertow of doubt pushing at me. Do they know enough history to be making it? Or if simple passion is enough, do my giddy, often winsome friends have the right circumstance for it? They never argue what they’re doing here. Yet their tongues are so sharp.

When I said, joining up, that I wouldn’t want to hurt anybody, they closed arms round me beguilingly, eyes moist. ‘We’re after monuments, not persons.’ So I was satisfied; their ethic and mine was the same. But they only see persons psychologically; that’s their standard. ‘Of course Carol would say that—’ is their attitude. ‘She’s been hurt.’

So far, the bomb target is undeclared. Actually—undecided. On this their talk is quite free.

When I get back from the toilet, Laura is nimbly fitting in the tiny key-shaped metal piece I had last handed her. She’s a lefty. The engagement diamond on her fourth finger glitters oddly as she works. She catches me staring at the weird collage she’s making. ‘You’re not supposed to look too hard,’ she says, crosspatch. ‘We don’t want to incriminate you.’

‘She means—if we’re caught, you won’t know anything much,’ Carey says, her eyes as bright blue as the harbor she comes from.

‘Caught?’ Emmy says. The more dangerously thin she gets the more feisty. ‘Why do you always harp on that?’

‘Because she wants to be caught,’ Laura says. ‘So’s her relationship with Dadda will be complete.’

Carey says, ‘Lolly.’ That’s a Wasp nickname Laura loves to be called by. Carey’s face is too meek.… Like when her father forbade her to see
La Dolce Vita,
which was playing the island again. ‘I can’t speak for your friend here—’ he had said, so-o polite. My whole visit, he never addressed me by name.

‘Mmm, sweetie.’ Laura is now using a tweezer to insert a coil so hairline I’m just assuming it’s there. ‘Hand me that little tab, Carol. Over there, dammit. I can’t let go.’

I am about to hand her the tab when Carey says in the softest voice: ‘Laura—do you tell your analyst about the bomb?’

The word detonates. Laura has almost let go what she daren’t. ‘The installation’ is the term they normally use.

The boyfriend says, ‘You dumb bitches. I wish I had never. Maybe you better ask yourselves not where we’re to go, but when.’

Until then I had seen little of Minna. Minna was our labor unionist, already out of the City College, ‘Not a paying one like you gals.’ No clothes you’d notice, a dull accent; wherever she sits there’s like a space of gray. And grayish words. But there’s a crown on her head all can see. She’s done this kind of operation before.

Getting up, she comes around to Laura. ‘I’ll hold it for you. To do the rest.’

In slow motion, the hands interchange, then withdraw. I can hear us breathing.

Minna says: ‘So what are we waiting for?’ Like a bell has struck.

The boyfriend speaks. ‘I gotta phone my parents.’ It is his house.

The table stares at him.

‘Just to be sure they’re not coming in today.’ But he looks about to throw up.

Laura blows him a kiss. We wait. That thing on the table—while we wait it seems to grow.

When he hangs up he says, ‘Somebody on the street already phoned them. Noticing the blinds were drawn. They know we always leave it like it’s occupied.… You heard what I told my folks.’

We had. ‘I’ll go by and check,’ he’d said. As if he wasn’t calling from their own house.

Looking back, I recall the glance that the four of them: Laura, Doris, Emmy, even Carey, exchange. So that’s what you do when you join up in a lie. You smile.

I take no credit for not joining in. Clearly they find me wanting in tact. Or wanting in the ability to calculate ahead? Or do I want to be a no-show? It feels like that. Under their stern eyes I go to the bathroom on my own.

When I come back, I can feel the tenseness in the room. They are a team. Minna, in the background until now is smiling at me—‘why? ‘I’m starving—’ she says chummy to the others, ‘aren’t you all?’

I can still hear their chorus—the boyfriend’s bleat coming in last.

They want me to go for sandwiches.

‘But not to that usual place,’ says Dora, always dependable on food. ‘There’s that new dairy-deli over on Sixth. Bring me a pastrami.’

‘Club sandwich for me.’ Laura.

‘Deli’s don’t do club,’ Dora says. ‘Or don’t call it that. Ask for a double chicken, heavy on the mayo, and with tomato, on white.’

Emmy, on some elite diet of her own, says nothing.

Carey says slowly, ‘Nix on any of that for me.’ She leans toward me winsomely. ‘I have a yen for Chinese. Chow mein. Spring roll. In the next block after the deli, that place. Bring me some, hmm. And take your time, Carol.’

‘Thought you were all starving,’ I grumble. ‘And you know what—I’m sick of being the gofer. Why’nt one of you go?’ But in the end, I can’t resist Carey. ‘Okay-y. Join you in Chinese.’

They are so quiet. Like the bottom has fallen out of all conversation. Then I see that the table is bare. In a heap at the door, their backpacks. Under the table, the bundle stashed there is gone.

‘You’re moving the project on?’ I say. ‘Where?’

I am still on probation in that respect. They don’t trust my allegiance to the cause. Whatever their cause is. Although they’ve never told where they intend to plant that thing, I have heard talk. Laura is for the Empire State Building. Doris wants the Rainbow Room, as a symbol of the bourgeois. ‘Your bourgeoisie—’ Carey shot back. Carey is against the Hague and the U.N.—all diplomats. I have no idea what she is for.

The boyfriend speaks up. ‘We’re sunk, we don’t get out of here. Laura will tell you my mother checks the house top to bottom the minute she comes home. Just plant it pronto, will you. Wherever it’s meant to go.’

And they are not going to let me know where.

Minna gets up, stretching. ‘Off your butts, keeds. I’ve got a union meeting. Come on Carol, I’ll walk out with you. Here’s the dough.’ She is humming that tune she always does.… ‘The
In
-ter
national hmm
mm—shall
bee
the
hyoo-
man race.’ But when we get outside she gives me the high sign, and walks the other way.…

The bell has rung for intermission being over. Through the open doors, at the rear of the empty hall, the audience can be seen, still smoking and chatting outside.

But up there, on that blank stage, there’s no stopping me.

I am on my way back obediently loaded, chow mein whiffing in my nostrils from its cartons, sandwiches crackling in my arm. I have performed my errand well. Police cars and sirens sound, half a block away. I hear it, that city madrigal. With a rush of energy that carries me around the corner, I answer it.

How can a house-front, blown half-in, blast a mind? Or across the street, lace curtains, stirring through shattered glass, obscure life’s recall? In the cop’s arm, heavy on mine, is the destiny I require. He says, ‘Everybody got out. They got away. You come from there, eh?’

In the buckled façade the basement window is wide. They flee me. They have fled.

‘You the maid?’ the cop says. ‘That who you were?’

In the case record that weighed down Daisy Gold’s handbag is my answer, excavated first for authority—prison; then for me—hospital. Until now I myself could not recall it.

‘No, I’m one of them. I belong.’

… In the police precinct afterward, where I am made to sit for hours, I feed myself. The club sandwich that is Laura makes me gag, but I chew on. Ham-and-cheese on wheat—Doris, the Jewish girl who loves ham—that goes down easier. Carey’s chow mein I save for last. With each mouthful something in my head shuts down. Then a matron takes me to the john and I retch up, but only the food. The rest of me is gone.…

Nothing in the record mentioned that meal. Now I remember, on my own. Memory laps me, that bath in which the brain lives. Mind stretches, as elastic as anyone’s.

I
am responsible.

And intermission is over in this theater. I prefer not to see Alphonse, in whatever roles he will assume. I regret not seeing Martyn as Wall, but maybe we’ll reconnect. I can even imagine that. But first, as the SW’s kept telling me, I have to get my act together. That’s their style, why not adopt it? I’m so happy to be back that I don’t mind remembering everything—which is more than many in my case would say. Or even ordinary persons? Is it now my ambition to become one of those? That I can’t yet predict. Maybe that’s Act Three.

Whether I’m still ‘counter-culture’—as the program says of this play, or just prime obstinate, will have to evolve. I’m hopeful. Maybe I have just swallowed unawares the great big pill that most call reality.

As I stroll out of the theater, the rest of the crowd are just strolling in.

Outside the hall, at the dingy entrance serving as lobby and stage door, there’s a solitary bench. I sit on it in the ebbing day. Down these old commercial blocks the hairy air is lion-colored, with tinsel sparks at the warehouse cornices. This is that other sunset the city gets no credit for. One the skyscrapers will never see. A slanting magic, folk art comfortable. Like I’m in the bowl of a worn but gilded spoon.

Now to the night’s conundrum. Where to bed down?

—‘If that’s freedom of choice, Carol,’ the last doctor I was with said, after the hospital finally agreed to release me to no permanent address
—
‘isn’t that a dead-end form of it?’ I liked Dr. Camacho, whom the patients called ‘Dr. Cee.’ He looked like the governor of a zoo who had chosen to sit with the animals. At least part of the time.

Dead-end? ‘Not if you’re in a hospital.’

Or worse, the halfway house. Where at night you lie in bed—very good beds they have, far too suitable for dreams; and think—I’m halfway to what? Gender? The road not taken? Some forever home it will take an anti-choking maneuver to haul me out of?—So you lie there, neither fish nor fowl, or like the riddle says: Are you half empty or half full?

‘What’s it like for you, Carol, on what you call the “outside?”’

Most doctors in his line have one tone for when they state something, another for when they ask, but Dr. Cee’s tone is always the same.

‘In summer, it can be more—like playful. You’re making your own moves. Like the men at chess in that little den of a house in the park. You can brood.’

He says something under his breath I don’t catch. And in winter?’

‘In winter, to be outside is a moral obligation.’ Thinking of it, I stand straighter. ‘To hang on with those who … who are in the wrong.’

‘Like how? You mean—with the law?’

Not always. Not only. ‘Like—they’re on the wrong side of things generally. Like they have more of nothing. And more coming.’

He doesn’t say anything. Like they do.

‘Yet who am I to side with them, Dr. Cee? A person who inherited. A girl with a trust.’

‘If it’s any satisfaction, the trust is about exhausted.’

It’s neither one way or the other to me. All the money goes to the hospital. Perhaps that’s partly why they’re now letting me go. So much is ‘partly,’ in a mental hospital. I don’t blame him.

‘I worry about you,’ he says. ‘Because physically you’re strong enough now. But ten years from now, five, what’ll you be? Like we see them get to be? Broken down, toothless. A hag. Or worse.’

I’ve seen them. But he doesn’t understand. They’re not them. They’re us.

‘There’s other ways of—of living,’ he says. ‘Than just to—to signify. And don’t tell me Jesus did just that.’

When I say, ‘Who?’—like I don’t know who that is—he laughs. ‘Just another activist.’

I trusted Dr. Camacho. He never urged me to have more tact.

‘I know why you all give us pills,’ I lashed out at him once. ‘It’s so you won’t have to listen that much to what we say.’

‘Not all day—’ he’d said, nodding. ‘It’s not bearable. Because it may be the truth.’

After that he let me come to him without the day’s medication. Which was hard, because there’s more of yourself to give pain. But when I referred to myself as schizzy he got sore. ‘You have empathy. For whom is after all your business. Not ours. You’re not disoriented. Rather, you suffer from a constant, even exquisite sense of where you in fact are. Which may give you philosophical trouble. That’s after all not our concern.’ This small dark-haired man with a nervous moustache, he’s never talked to me before on this level. And the next thing he says to me, his tone does change. ‘You don’t hear voices, Carol. Not even your own.’

And when that has sunk in he says those words that clang like an echo I’d always been hearing.

‘It’s like you weren’t sure of having been born,’ Dr. Cee said.

No anecdotes of my babyhood exist. Nor pictures—for who was to be sent them? The aunts showed us three off sufficiently at the bay window. End of my schoolyear, on prize day, they came, blushing seasonally over my good grades. On the streets I went to and fro, instructed not to mingle. Rarely visited, we did not reciprocate. It was as if we had made a pact with the town.

‘And that blast you were barred from made you even less sure, eh? Better to remove yourself.’

Then why does he so love my aliases?

‘Who cares how personality breaks out, Carol. It’s like you’re asking us to share a joke—that you do exist.’

I want to laugh with him now, wishing I could share this hour with him, and the hours to follow. How after ten blocks or so one begins to tingle with the walking pleasure, not all of it in the feet—or in the body alone. So many secret haunts for our sort in this city, on all levels of secrecy, of course: in some you will find company, if never quite of your own kind. Which nobody expects. Meanwhile, people have rosters of places known only to themselves, confided only if buddyship briefly strikes, or drugs or drink.