Marry or Burn (2 page)

The rumor was that Paloma had been a hooker. How could that be—a prison guard? But the rumor that she had been on the
street, the vague word of that, put to rest but always resurfacing, enhanced their liking.

“So, what would you be doing in there?” she would call into the cell.

“I would be braiding my sheet to make a rope. How the hell do they do that anyway?”

Paloma attended Gather in the Spirit, though a guard was not required there. She didn't say anything when Dale broke the rules. Dale liked a table in the middle of the circle with a candle burning, but the aluminum tray tables had been taken out when somebody stomped one of them, and candles were not allowed. She lit one anyway and set it on the floor.

Dale had come around behind Francie.

“Twenty-five years old,” she said in a marveling voice.

“Francie a baby,” somebody said.

“Not your baby,” somebody else said.

During prayers Dale liked to move around and do her deep breathing. She was walking behind the circle of chairs now, with a smile you could hear in her voice even if you had your eyes closed, as if she might be getting some answer in an earphone. She wasn't supposed to touch them but she would lay her hand lightly on the shoulder of one or another of them.

“Man, this is like that game,” Maxine said. “That game we played. What did they call that? Where they would drop the Kleenex behind you. They was It. You would run. If you'd catch them, you was It.”

“Flying Dutchman,” somebody said.

“You mighta called it that, that's not what
we
called it,” Maxine said.

This was what Dale wanted, to hear what they said, to accompany them on the journey they were on, of making amends. The
adventure. That was not the best choice of words. It took them a while to get past saying “the adventure of laundry duty,” or “the adventure of taking a shit in the new john.” Dale put up with that. She said she wasn't there to find fault with them but neither was she there to provide forgiveness. She didn't bring the Eucharist in a gold compact the way the other volunteer, Ellen, did every week. As a Catholic Francie was allowed to receive the sacrament from Ellen, and she did it as a time thing, time out of the cell. “What's that new group?” she had asked Ellen.

“Dale Bowie,” Ellen said. “Goodness—the Bowies. Dale and Father Patrick. They're not charismatics but they're close. If that kind of thing interests you, well, by all means.”

One day when she had been in Dale's group for a while Francie raised her hand—sooner or later, they all took a turn—and said, “So tell me this. You just did it. Your crime. What got you in that room where you did it? Not what made you do it. I mean were you going to get in that room from the day you were born?”

“What do you think?” Dale asked the group.

“You done it, you done wrong,” said Maxine, with a down-turned mouth like someone wiping up after a child. Nobody objected that that was not an answer to the question. Thirty years before, Maxine had come up behind a man in her building and pushed him down a flight of cement steps. Everyone mentioned the cement, though no word was ever said about how or why this happened. Her lawyer wanted manslaughter. Slaughter of a man. You'd think a crime with
slaughter
in it would be the worst. But murder was worse, and that's what she got. First degree murder, because it had been in Maxine's mind long before she did it. How did the lawyers know that? She told them. She and Francie were the only ones there, at that time, who had killed anybody on purpose. “Done wrong, you say I'm sorry, you take your punishment, and you get on with it.”

“With what?” said Francie.

“With life.”

“So what is life?” said Francie. “Is this it?”

“That's a very good question,” said Dale. “What is life?” When nobody answered she said, in the way she had of salting prayers into the talk, “Lord, that you would help us see that life we can lead. Each of us. That life that is out there for each one of us. We pray to the Lord.”

To differentiate their group from others that were in the prisons by then, encounter groups, the Catholics were encouraged to reply, “Lord, hear our prayer.” Francie had grown up with that but she didn't say it.

“And why don't we visualize that life right here and now,” said Dale. “Let's close our eyes.” Francie never did that either. “Simone,” Dale said. Simone was from Barbados and she was shy, despite being down for accessory to an ATM robbery in which a man had been run over and dragged half a block. “What do you see?”

“Oh mon, I see a big house, got carpet, sofas. Big pen of chickens.”

“There's a big house all right and this is it,” said Maxine.

“Now close your eyes, Maxine,” said Dale.

“I gotta get home,” said Rhonda, who was new. “I got a boy at home, slow. They don't know how to watch him. Let him play with the scissors. Let him go and cut the ear off the cat.”

A silence followed while a weight came down on them like the mangle in the laundry.

“Home is our first thought,” said Dale. “Lord, that you would be with Rhonda's son. Her family.” She let them sit there a minute in the cold state to which she gave the name silent prayer. “What we imagine, really imagine for ourselves becomes real. That each one here today would have that experience. We pray to the Lord.”

“Lord, hear our prayer.”

“So can you think about the sun and look straight at the thought of it and go blind?” said Francie. She looked around. “Hey, I can ask a question. I mean isn't that what she said?”

“You hush,” said Maxine. “Talking about pray to the
Lord.
Girl, you got a lot to learn.”

 

ONE DAY DALE had a rubber band around her wrist. “What's that?” Francie asked her.

“That's to remind me to pick up my son's immunization records today. He's starting first grade.”

Dale had a son in first grade? Dale, whose ironed blue shirt hid a body like an ironing board? Whose perm had gray in it? Who almost never referred to a husband? What was this, now that they had fallen into the habit of opening up their lives to Dale's examination every week like laundry bags? Where had this child been hiding?

Thomas.
Dale drew one of her deep breaths. Thomas was six years old. He was an independent child
.
You could tell that she meant something else by independent. Something better, not worse. At five, instead of going to kindergarten, Thomas had made the choice to go with Patrick in his truck to projects in the parish. Patrick did this work because although he had left the priesthood and married, he had been partially received back, encouraged to offer his skills to the archdiocese. Before applying to seminary he had been a builder. So while Dale was in her program and Patrick worked on the renovation of church kitchens and tore out old confessionals, Thomas sat in the sawdust building things out of Legos.

Thomas, it had turned out, was exceptional. At four he could read the Lego instructions, by five he had discarded them. His
castle won a prize at the state fair and remained on exhibit in the center court of a mall.

When he was little more than a baby, fifteen months to be exact, Thomas had begun to ask questions. “Where moon?” “What him?”—pointing at the crucifix Dale wore. Other than that, there was no mention of God in this life of Thomas. Dale did not call on God to approve her account of her son, which she seemed in fairness to recognize was bragging.

That a fifteen-month-old might have an idea of the word
where
did not seem like a miracle to Francie. How was one word any different from another?
Who, what, when, where, why
. She had written them down, sitting behind her boyfriend, the one who was going to jump into the lake. It was a remedial class because they had both skipped so much school.

The story went on. Thomas had a particular liking for buildings—already he had gone beyond Legos to wood and nails—but he didn't like the ones he was told were schools. Why did people have to go to school if they didn't want to? “I had to say I honestly don't know,” Dale said. It didn't matter; in a year Thomas had made the decision on his own that he would, after all, go to school.

Francie looked at the other faces in disbelief. Nobody was sneering at the thought of Dale's show-off kid. “Paloma?” said Dale. By the door where she lurked, Paloma had raised her hand. She said Child Protection had taken her baby Rafael away because of her girlfriend. She had him back now, but she had to live by herself.

Nobody said, “What does that have to do with it?” This was one of the things that had come gradually to Francie's notice. Nobody ever worried about what the subject was, they all went with whatever you put in front of them.

Everyone comforted Paloma. More than half of them had children.
“My kids.”
They said that all the time.
“My kids.”
For years Francie had been hearing about, even seeing, their children. If you woke up at night after a visiting day, you heard the moans and sobs, the aftermath.

 

HER MOTHER WENT into the hospital. She went by ambulance to the county hospital, the same one where they had taken Sharla's little girl, and there she too died. Francie did not learn of this for three days, until her brother, who had joined the army, made a sobbing phone call from the base. No use in trying to get a pass because there wasn't going to be a funeral. Their father had seen to that. She was already in the ground.

“I don't know, I don't know, Francie,” her brother kept saying after he broke the news. He kept covering the phone with his hand because his buddies were talking to him, trying to settle him down. “He never said she was sick. He never said.”

“Never told me neither,” Francie said. She had not heard her father's voice in eight years. “But I figured she might be.”

Around then the warden had her see the counselor. Not because she kept having the same dream; the warden didn't know that. She sent her because of fainting, from holding her breath in the cell. The warden said that was what she was up to.

The dream would wake her in the flicker of the tube lights that stayed on, a dream of a baby—or a kind of abbreviated baby, the weight of a cat in her arms. But it had a flat-out helplessness a cat would never give off. It had to be hidden, in a curved hollow not unlike the eggshell ornaments her mother had made for the nurses' tree when she was a transporter at the hospital. Francie had to be in the hollow with it, where despite its lack of any muscles, gradually it would begin to thrash like a maggot until she couldn't hold on to it. Things would go on from there.

Francie didn't believe in broadcasting what showed up in your dreams or visited your mind in a cell, but the counselor got the story out of her by asking for two positive memories. Her first thought was of Sharla—in the mirror, with her black bangs and her mascara, her smiling cheeks in a coat of her special foundation. Francie could almost smell the ammonia as the plump fingers snapped the roller. She had to shut her mind against those fingers, some with Band-Aids on them for a rash, dabbing to get an endpaper off the stack. She got away from that and told about Sharla's refusal to testify for the prosecution. Then, because the counselor just sat there waiting for the second positive memory, she came up with the egg ornaments.

First you edged half a shell with rickrack, and then—Francie was eight and did this part—you glued in green felt, and onto that a plastic lamb, or a donkey, or a baby. Between them she and her mother had ruined a lot of eggs. It was a day when nothing they did had any consequences. Her father was doing a week in the county jail. Her mother could drink a bottle of Almadén and open the next one, they could smash so many eggs they had to go out and buy more, they could laugh so hard at the kitchen table, with the cat sitting on the green felt, that her mother tipped over in the chair and didn't hurt herself. The day had a soundtrack of her mother's high wandering laugh and her voice saying, “OK don't get mad at me, Francie”—because when her mother was drunk Francie could get just as mad at her as her father did—“but there went another one!”

The counselor had a lot of questions about Francie's mother. She explained that the enclosure where Francie saw herself holding her “baby” in the dream was not a tree ornament but a jail cell.

“Of course you know, Frances, that you could not keep a baby with you for very long, here,” she warned Francie, who rarely had
a visitor, let alone somebody she could have had sex with during a supervised encounter.

“It's not Frances,” Francie said.

Sometimes the baby was even smaller than a cat. Awake, she wondered what was normal. Exactly how heavy was a baby? Better not to stir up anybody on that subject. Sometimes the dream took a turn in which, to her horror, she had left the baby somewhere and time ticked away while she slogged over footbridges or through sewage.

This was a common dream. Among new mothers, the counselor told her, practically a universal.

Francie didn't argue that she was not a mother and that every day she was leaving the chance of that behind. She didn't come out with any of her usual remarks.

Dale had a different attitude. No commenting in a disrespectful way on what anybody saw fit to bring up, no matter how stupid, boring, or plainly untrue.
Just what you'd expect
, Francie thought. Dale didn't laugh. She smiled. A smile could be the opposite of a sense of humor. No room for humor, in Dale's job of praying over their problems—which didn't have to solve anything, because if you received a solution you wouldn't need to pray any more. But on the other hand neither would Dale say “practically a universal.”