Wonderland (71 page)

He does not see Shelley. Not your Shelley.

“This isn’t going to hurt,” he says, warning me, but I can’t lie still. Miss Goldie holds me down on the table. I am screaming. But he doesn’t stop: the thing in his hand keeps going in, going in.

Led back to Cell 5, I am giggled and gaped at. They all know what went on. Toddie winks at me and cracks her knuckles. She is singing a popular song under her breath, the same words over and over. Across the way a girl with the heavy brows of a boy, her face gleaming, glowing, yodels over at me, “Hiya, Honey! How was it, Honey!” She wears a pair of jeans and a boy’s shirt. She is in Clinton Street for beating up another girl and “resisting arrest,” this girl of fourteen, and Toddie has told me she gave a cop a broken nose before he knocked her hard on her ass—“That Jackie is one tough babe, I kid you not,” Toddie tells me.

Crooning. Mocking. All the girls sing out loud, their voices crisscrossing and interrupting one another. I sit in the corner of Cell 5 with my eyelids burning. They don’t close. I can’t sleep. I won’t lie on that filthy cot, no. Won’t sleep. I have been awake since Tuesday morning, when I walked out of the house. Wednesday on the Greyhound bus. Wednesday night: walking around crying. Big stupid baby, crying. The bus station. Those kids following me. Thursday morning in Toledo,
sick to my stomach out on the street. People gaping at me. A mailman in his little truck watching me. Where is Toledo? All day Thursday, a long day, walking fast around the city to keep people from following me, and Thursday night picked up by a squad car … and now it’s Friday night and I can’t sleep … I haven’t slept since Tuesday morning and I will never sleep again.…

“Honey,” says Toddie, “you better lay down and sleep before they lay you down personally.”

“What are you, stubborn child?” someone calls over to me. “Runaway or what? Not A & S, are you?” she giggles.

“She’s vagrancy,” Toddie says importantly.

There is a girl whose name I don’t know, with a long face and kinky blond hair, a smirking smile, lines on her forehead. She paces back and forth in her cell, light on her feet, grabbing hold of the bars and trying to shake them. “Hey,” she whispers over to Toddie and me, “hey, hey you two! Hey, what’cha doing there, you two? What’cha doing in there, black-and-white, huh?”

She is alone in her cell, pacing like an animal. They won’t put anyone else in with her.

“Go to hell,” Toddie cries. “Whatd’ya know about anything?”

“Black and white speckles, you two! Hey! I got something to tell you. Come closer. Come over by the bars,” the girl says, pressing herself against the bars of her cell, sliding her long thin arms through, stretching out her fingers. “Come closer! Here! C’mon!”

“Go to hell! Go to sleep!” Toddie shouts.

Other girls begin shouting: “Lay down and go to sleep! Shut up!”

The girl says mockingly: “I ain’t going to sleep at any nine-thirty at
night
, not me.…”

Toddie sits on the edge of her cot, furious or pretending to be furious.

“Don’t you listen to big mouth,” she says.

Eyeing my puffy face, my fear. With a raspy little laugh she chatters at me but I sit with my teeth gripped hard, trying not to shiver. She tells me about how she got in this place. “We was hauling stuff out of that store all night long before anybody got wise,” she says excitedly. “Got big boxes of Kleenex enough to blow your nose in the rest of your livelong days! All kinds of stuff—for our mothers, like Band-Aids and toothpaste—filled up a box with lipsticks, we figured we could sell
them—dumped a whole lot of pill bottles and stuff in a box, vitamins and cough drops, you know—My sister tells me one of my girl friends turned me in. I’m going to burn her ass when I get out of here. I got thirty days in this dump, what about you? They do a V.D. on you?”

Shelley shivers, remembering that cold piercing instrument. She shivers in spite of the heated-up look of her skin.

Toddie lies down to sleep. Shelley sits up all night, her head aching. She knows that she will remember Clinton Street all her life—the murmur of the girls’ sleep, their waking arguments and laughter, the boyish, flirtatious, sensuous noise of their personalities mixed together in the old jail. She has only to think of it to hear it again: like picking up a telephone receiver to hear the dial tone. Always there. Always there.
The past is always there, in your head
.

Near morning there is yelling from another part of the jail—the addicts’ wing—and Toddie jumps up, inclining her head that way, like an animal. “Jesus God!” she says with a sigh. “Listen to them poor dumb bitches over there, you think
we
got it bad!”

Then it is morning.

Everyone has survived the night and looks from face to face, alert and ready for news. Good news? Bad news? Only the heavy-browed girl stays in her cell, doesn’t want to move. The matron shakes her. To the washroom, a bunch of us, I walk along in a daze, slowed-down with exhaustion while the other girls are ready to run, hopped up with a strange energy, grinning and teasing one another so that their teeth flash happily in the spotted mirrors. “Who you think you are, fat-mouthin’ me?” one of the girls laughs. Someone shoves someone else, playfully. The stinking hygienic white of the washroom doesn’t depress them. Two short stocky girls, like twins, are washing fast and dripping all over. One of them is telling the other a story in a guttural, rising and falling, lyric voice: “He told me he had all these other women, a lot older than me, he said, and he didn’t need me; he kept pushing me, you know, and I told him the hell, I wasn’t scared, it was just if it was a Saturday night, you know, when it can get rough. I was out there standing and some guys drove by and tried to get me in the car, and him and his friends was in a bar, and they came out, and all hell broke loose … and the cruiser came by without no siren or warning or anything and that one cop, he had my number, he was always giving me
the eye, and so we all got out of there and ran like hell, but they picked me up later at home … because that cop had my number and wanted to get rough with me. My mother yelled at him not to lay no hands on me, but a hell of a lot of good that did.…”

Breakfast. Long dark nicked tables, tin trays with breakfast food in their hollows, Shelley sickened by the odor of the food and the other girls growling and laughing over their food. I want to shrink away from them, their strange happiness in this place. I want to shrink inside myself. At the farther tables are older girls, women, their voices hoarse and jocular. Some of them look crazy. Slack-faced, smiling too much. Maybe they are retarded. Sick. Right beside me a girl with hair the same color as mine, but fuzzy and ugly, and a huge belly, sits eating and staring down at her food. Her eyebrows move up and down as if in a silent, pleasant conversation with her plate, which she wipes with a piece of bread. “How soon are you?” someone asks the girl, but she doesn’t glance up, though her face shows comprehension and a kind of conversational pleasure. She is about fifteen. The bread on her plate makes a faint squeaking sound.

Father, I want to fall asleep in your arms
.

“Hey, why’d you leave home?” a girl is asking me.

She is looking right at me.

“Which one of them was it?” she says.

I shake my head—I don’t understand.

“Which one of them—mother or father?”

I can’t answer. I stare at her, feeling the tears in my eyes.

The girl doesn’t want to release me. She says with a laugh, “With me it was my mother—
she
turned me in, how d’ya like that! What about you?”

But I can’t answer.

“Leave her alone,” says Toddie.

“She think she’s too good to talk to me?” cries the girl.

Afterward they all go to the laundry room to work.
You are waiting for me
. The matron gets me ready, scolds me for being so slow and clumsy, she isn’t nice like Miss Goldie because she says: “You’re a lucky little girl to have your father come pick you up. Some of these sad little mutts, their fathers don’t give a damn about them.”

I don’t want to leave Cell 5. But I am dressed in my jeans and my
filthy cashmere sweater, trembling, shuddering, all ready to be presented to my father. I don’t want to leave. I start to cry. The matron makes a disgusted noise.

What must I do to stay here?

But it is too late. I am expertly handled: walked briskly along the corridor. I am being steered by a two-hundred-pound woman who knows how to handle little girls.

There you are, waiting for me—

There you are, with your face that glares at me, your tired eyes, your staring, staring eyes—

So you brought me back home again, home from Toledo one rainy September noon.

That fall and winter he lay sick and unable to sleep. He began to wander through the house—staying away from his study, his desk, because he couldn’t have been able to concentrate anyway—and he walked with his head slightly lowered, as if in a baffled blind rage, like an animal, narrowing his eyes so that he might smell his prey better. He seemed not to want to see, not clearly. And his hearing was too sensitive, it pained him to hear clearly, to be forced to hear everything.

Why did you do it? Run away?
he had asked her.

I don’t know
.

Her face pale with fatigue, her eyes pocketed with shadows like bruises, Shelley sitting beside him in the car, pushed over against the door.… He had driven from Toledo to Chicago with her sitting like that, her breathing raspy as a child’s, almost panting, as if she were terrified. He remembered a dog of his: that dog, the black dog. Yes. The black dog. What was its name …? Duke. That dog had panted too, in terror. A deep panting, deep into the chest, the lungs, the sound of terror.

Why did you do it?

Shelley’s frightened silence.

He was sick with anguish for her. He thought about her constantly.
At the clinic, there was the image of Dr. Vogel moving restlessly about, like a shadow jerking across the wall of his office or along the corridor or even in the operating room, the panicked Dr. Vogel who could think of only one thing: his daughter. The other Dr. Vogel did his work slowly and methodically; he found it difficult to concentrate but he did his work, he got it done always, but he was aware of the shadow-self, pacing restlessly about, trying to disrupt his life. That other Dr. Vogel, who worried so much about his daughter, wanted to draw him into a deeper anguish and destroy him.

This other self had sprung out of him on that ride home from Toledo. It had taken hold of Shelley and shaken her violently, knocking her head from side to side.
Why did you leave home! Why! Tell me why!
But Jesse himself kept on driving, forced himself to concentrate on his driving and to show no agitation. He did not want to frighten her any more. He did not want to punish her. Enough that she was breathing so hoarsely, that she had spent the night in a county jail, brought to him by a big, tough-looking matron with a man’s nose and jaw—

But why did you run away from me?
he wanted to ask.

Back in Winnetka, he checked her into a hospital where an acquaintance of his could examine her. She had not protested. She seemed to fling her body along as they walked up the sidewalk, throwing herself forward. She had taken off the old clothes she’d been wearing for days and wore now a dress, stockings, shoes with small wooden heels. Jesse had stared at these shoes, charmed by them. He had forgotten momentarily where he and Shelley were, what they were doing—he thought his daughter’s shoes were very attractive and wondered why he had never noticed them before—

“Your shoes are very pretty,” he had said.

“Thank you,” Shelley had said, startled.

When he lay in bed beside Helene he felt the agitation of that other Dr. Vogel who prowled the house in the dark. He had to get up to join him. The other self, the ghost self, tugged at him and insisted that he get out of bed and come downstairs, where he could sit in the dark of the large, long living room, thinking of the night and of his daughter, sleeping upstairs, in a room almost directly above him.

His hearing was too sensitive, especially at night. He could hear everything. Tires screeching on a street far away … the ticking of the
clocks of the house, of his own wrist watch … the whipping fall of sleet in late November … the first sounds of morning, Helene’s footsteps overhead. Helene would try to comfort him. She was always saying of Shelley: “She’s much better now. She’s changed. She’s much more mature.” When Jesse called his wife from the clinic, urged by that other Dr. Vogel to telephone—something might have happened in his absence—Helene told him gently, surely, “Nothing is wrong, Jesse. Nothing. Shelley came directly home from school. She’s in her room right now. She’s much better, she’s changed a great deal … she and Jeanne never fight anymore.… She doesn’t mind going to bed early. And she really goes to bed; I’ve checked. And her grades will improve, I’m sure. Why do you worry so much?”

He could not believe that his daughter had run away from home.
Runaway
, the police had termed her.
Runaway
. The police were efficient and indifferent and courteous. Jesse’s shame could have been any father’s shame, not Dr. Vogel’s. They did not know him. They did not know Shelley. The police matron who had dragged Shelley into the reception room had not known her.

He could not sleep. His brain ached. He wandered through the strange rooms of this big house. Where was he? In a large brick home that was evidently his own home now. Why was he pacing like this, pressing himself on from room to room? Because he had to hunt out something. Had to find out some truth. Why was his head lowered, his hair shaggy with the night? Because he had to figure something out, had to make sense out of something.…

In late 1969 he opened the front door one night and watched the snow fall for some time. It was nearing Christmas. The street lights of Kennilworth Drive were faint, distant from one another and from his front door. Everything was silent. He felt a sudden urge, an almost violent urge, to go outside, to get out of this house … to get into the falling snow and walk fast, fast, before it was too late, before he exploded.… So he walked down the front walk to the street, already breathing hard, his head lowered with the beginning of a headache, the vapor shaping and dissolving about his mouth like angry unspoken words, shouts.
Why did you leave me.…
? He walked down the middle of the winding street. If he glanced over his shoulder he saw only his own footsteps in the snow, the fine falling of snow, snow beginning to drift.
His footsteps covered over gently. Scuffed, scanty footsteps, becoming invisible. No one could follow him. He walked faster, wanting to run. His heart urged him to run. That other Dr. Vogel, anxious to get into the fresh, freezing air, tried to climb out of him and run.…