A world apart, p.2
A World Apart, page 2
Silently the officers escorted her down linoleum-tiled corridors and through clanking metal doors to the Health Services Unit. There a nurse asked her to sit down, then told her that her son had just threatened to kill himself. He’d walked into her mother-in-law’s living room with a knife, she said. They needed her permission to have him admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
Pat was her little just-nine-year-old boy, and right then he was in the admitting room of a state-run psychiatric hospital up in Maine someplace, while she, his mother, was in the Health Services Unit of MCI-Framingham, flanked by guards, and hundreds of miles away. Someone passed her a phone, and she found herself speaking to a nurse up in Maine who tried to assure her that Pat would be well taken care of. Denise felt that she had no choice. She gave her permission for him to be admitted, handed the receiver back to the prison nurse, who had a few words with her counterpart in Maine, and then hung it back in its cradle. After that there was nothing to do. It was hard to fully conceive of, but there was nothing in the world Denise could do then to help her son. She felt like throwing up.
Time slowed after that. She no longer marched around the yard— even that much activity threw her impotence into glaring relief. Sometimes she held her breath. She called her mother. She called her father. Then she called her mother again, over and over, because it was a terrible place where they had Pat, she was discovering. The prison wouldn’t let her visit, of course, but they did allow her to call once a week, and Pat almost always came to the phone sobbing. He missed her. That was all, he said. And he worried about her and he’d even tried to come and find her, but they put him in restraints when he did that—in four-point restraints, he said.
The messages she got from her own parents didn’t help. Her mother went to visit and came back horrified; her father told her he thought it looked like a fine place. Neither was able to take Patrick in. They had both remarried and had their own lives to lead. Patrick’s father, Alan, was willing to have him, but Denise couldn’t even begin to think about the consequences of that. Alan was a lunatic—a self-styled Christian with a history of violence and manic depression. And besides, he’d moved to Hawaii the year before, and Denise would lose all contact with Patrick if he moved out there.
She took the pills that Psychiatric Services had prescribed and tried to sleep. But she’d known something like this would happen, that was the thing. She’d done her best to avert it. She’d set up her mother-in-law’s house as best she could with a TV, a VCR, and a brand-new Super Nintendo she’d bought for Pat with some of the proceeds of the furniture sale she’d held before “going away.” She’d even arranged his Beanie Baby collection, creature by creature, so he’d feel more or less at home in his new room. But what, really, could she do to make up for her sudden and disastrous absence? Pat was nine. His mother was in prison. His father was in Hawaii. He was, suddenly, unprotected. She took more pills.
THIS WAS THE nature of life in prison, Denise knew now, having to shut down whole parts of yourself, to compartmentalize. Over 60 percent of the women at Framingham were on some kind of psychotropic drug to help with this process. And though this internal division of the self into a series of solitary, isolated cells seemed like a further incarceration, it was, for some, the only way they could begin to tolerate their complete impotence in the world.
Most, it has to be said, had spent their lives reaching for medication at the first sign of discomfort. Across the nation more than nine out of ten incarcerated women are drug addicts, and a full half are actually drunk or high at the time of their arrest. The addicts in Framingham divide into two main camps, the crackheads and the smackheads, and there is very little difference in the way they detox in prison. Unless you’re pregnant, when the stress to the baby is deemed too dangerous, you go cold turkey. Framingham has two entire wards for women who come in high. Each year, nine hundred women use these twenty-nine beds to get clean. The rooms reek of the vomit and the green liquid feces they release in all-night convulsions, along with the last traces of drugs from their bodies. Residence in these wards is so dreaded, in fact, that women in the know do everything they can to avoid being placed in them, and there are often one or two inmates in the mainstream residential units detoxing on their own. Sometimes there are illegal drugs in Framingham too, but very rarely, nowhere near enough to sustain an addiction, and mostly the women are forced to make do with fermented Jell-O juice when they want to get high. Wine, they called it. Jell-O wine.
FOR THE FIRST few weeks Denise allowed herself to believe that the outside world was still her realm. Frantic in confinement, she somehow managed to stand for inmate count four times a day, to march through corridors at the appointed times for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and to sit down quietly on her bed as she was locked into her room every night. But somewhere deep down, she persisted in believing that this mindlessly repetitive and passive routine was only some kind of dream, or mistake, or bizarre experiment even, that would end soon, prompting everyone to step out of their roles and smile, perhaps just a little bit abashed by all they had subjected her to, before sending her on her way.
How could all the accumulated weight of adult life, the rent and the food-on-the-table, the work, the men—fending them off while keeping them keen—and the bills, mostly the bills, how could all that so suddenly disappear? Denise was the first to admit that she hadn’t been your typical Suzy Homemaker, of course. She’d been a crack addict, for a start, a relatively functioning, suburban one, unlike many of the women in Framingham who’d spent years living on the streets of Boston and Worcester, but a crack addict nonetheless. When she finally left Alan, she’d become a stripper too.
It hadn’t been an ideal life. No one’s in prison had. But she’d learned to enjoy dancing. Had been proud of the independence four hundred dollars a day so instantly brought her—the car she’d bought and the new furniture for the apartment she and Pat shared. She’d done okay by him, overall. Kept him fed and clothed and well taken care of the way a mother should. And now, suddenly, here she was, a child again herself, being fed huge, unappetizing meals three times a day, and locked into what she’d quickly learned to call her room, never her cell, at nine o’clock every night with nothing more pressing to do than watch bad TV, or stare, inanely, out the window.
THE PRISON SITS at the edge of town, and when it is dark out and the lights are on in the women’s rooms there is no place to undress in private. There are no window coverings of any kind at Framingham. The new director of security had demanded their removal recently, and most of the women complained bitterly about this. But Denise found a measure of relief in the space the clear window provided. She could see a residential street from her bunk, houses and cars and people coming home from work. For a time she’d enjoyed letting her mind drift through all that life to thoughts of her future and memories of her past. Now that Patrick was in the hospital, though, she was increasingly interrupted from these soft-focus reveries by images so sharp that they felt almost physical. She’d see him fishing on the beach, or playing soccer, or, once, staring calmly at her from across the emergency room, covered with bruises sustained at age three, at the hands of his father.
Alan had been abusive for years by then, hitting Denise and throwing things and leaving her and Pat for days at a time with no money at all. But that was the first time he’d ever hit Pat. The boy had marks from Alan’s hand imprinted on his neck in black and blue. Denise panicked. The bruises were identical to the ones Alan had left around her own neck when she’d first tried to leave him. She was determined to press charges, but the police persuaded her not to. She was a what? An exotic dancer? She’d be dragged through the courts herself, they told her. They’d take her son away for sure. So she took out a restraining order instead, and when Patrick’s bruises finally disappeared, she put the incident out of her mind and went back to work.
She felt pretty much fine, she thought, when she started dancing again for the daytime crowd at the club where she worked. When, on her second day back, an okay-looking guy with a lot of cash came in and asked her to sit with him, she did. He bought a bottle of Mumm’s for two hundred dollars, which meant a forty-dollar commission for Denise, for her “gracious company” they used to say, but this didn’t cheer her the way it normally would. Even when he ordered a bottle of Dom Pérignon (a sixty-dollar commission!) her mood didn’t lift. Next thing she knew, she was sitting there with this guy who called himself Bill and his half-empty bottle of Dom Pérignon, all dressed up in her thigh-length boots and her see-through black robe, sobbing. She felt terrible for that poor guy Bill—they wouldn’t even give him a refund, she remembered—but there was nothing she could do to stop crying. Even after her boss yelled for her to “get over here!” and then sent her home in a cab with five hundred dollars and strict instructions not to come back for a week, she couldn’t calm down. All she could think about was Pat (and Alan—she would never be free of him!).
Denise was usually good at controlling her emotions. But she had never felt so sad and angry and upset as she did those days after Alan first turned on Patrick. She wanted to die. There was nothing vague or hazy about the desire. She longed to stop existing, to disappear. Back in her apartment, she locked herself in her bedroom, sobbing. Pat grew scared and started banging on her door—all two and a half feet of him screaming and pushing and kicking. When she finally opened it he came rushing over to her, getting in her face with tissues and worry and questions until she screamed at him—my God, it was hard, remembering this—screamed at him really loud: “Get away! I hate you!” She would never forget the look on his face. Her three-year-old boy, beautiful and innocent and so hurt already, crumpling then into silence.
Denise didn’t sleep on nights like that. Even with the pills. Like most mothers at Framingham, she hadn’t seen her son once since coming to prison. Even if he weren’t locked up in the hospital, his grandmother would have found it impossible to make the long trek down to the prison from Maine. Surprisingly, though, she’d almost grown used to his physical absence. It was the spectral visitations she couldn’t handle, the memories. Night after night she’d force herself to stare out the window and see them (Pat running to her, laughing. Pat helping cut coupons. Pat losing it in the kitchen when Denise told him she’d be going away) until she began to suspect that torturing herself like this was foolish and masochistic, even selfish in a way.
BY THE MIDDLE of November, three months after she first arrived at Framingham, it seemed clear that Patrick would move out to Hawaii to live with his father. His insurance had run out, so the hospital couldn’t keep him, and Denise’s parents continued to insist that they couldn’t take him in. This left Alan or foster care, and from what everyone told Denise, anything was better than the foster-care system. At least Alan was family. And he’d been in a program, she kept telling herself. He was involved with the church again too, and he must be working because he had his own apartment, apparently, in a fancy condo complex called Gentle Bay. It was still tempting to dwell on the dangers that might lurk for Patrick there: on Alan’s mood swings, his drinking, his obsession with paid sex. But after a while Denise began to see that it did her son no good to drive herself crazy that way. Five years of it and she’d end up embittered and enraged and even less capable of caring for Patrick than she’d been when she was high on coke and taking her clothes off for a living.
She was beginning to see, all around her, examples of what happened if you allowed these strands of your old life to get tangled into knots of rage and despair. Some women would explode in rebellion, call a CO a woman-hating faggot who couldn’t make it in a men’s prison, or spit at him, or throw a fit and get themselves hauled off to solitary confinement in the Hole for a week or a month or more. Others turned the pain inward and mutilated themselves with blades extracted from razors. It was an old story. And a predictable one. When all else failed, when connections with family were severed, or when parents died, or children were adopted away, there was always the visible and finite certainty of a razor’s deep incursion into flesh. Wrists, arms, necks, legs. Over and over they cut themselves, until even Denise began to respond more with irritation than with sympathy: “Oh God, not again, not another interruption, another mess to clean up.”
No. In order to survive in prison you had to give way to it, Denise began to see, you had to engage. The trouble was that there was so little, in prison, to engage with. College-level courses weren’t available to women who didn’t already have sixteen credits, which Denise didn’t. She’d married before she’d even thought about college. She had graduated high school, so there was no point enrolling in GED classes. The manicuring course had a waiting list that stretched on for months, as did the computer class. There was a place available in construction arts, the prison’s only other job-training program, so Denise wound up keeping her mornings busy by climbing up and down ladders with a hard hat on, hammering and painting and fixing things up. She started going to church again too. It didn’t much matter which denomination—she found a measure of redemption in them all. And she spent hours reading the fashion magazines her mother sent her from home and compiling a collection of low-fat, high-nutrition recipes that she arranged in perfect alphabetical order in her room.
With the help of a check bouncer named Teresa who lived on her unit, Denise also learned how to prepare relatively wholesome, nutritionally balanced meals for herself out of ingredients available from Canteen, the prison store: tuna-and-peanut salad for protein, chicken broth for ease, anything to avoid the dining-hall meals, which consisted of rice and potatoes mostly, and were designed to subdue, she was convinced. All you had to do was look at the women who ate in the dining hall every day—at their slow, lumbering progress down the corridors, and their shortness of breath.
Later, Denise made a deal with the diabetic woman in the room next door who qualified for a special diet. For $1.80 a week—about half a weekly wage in prison—Denise gave her three Diet Cokes in exchange for her extra mini cereal box, her small carton of milk, and her piece of fresh fruit every morning. Like everyone else, she still binged every now and then, Twix bars mostly, on the days Canteen items were delivered, but with the help of the regular power-walk routine she’d established for herself in the yard, she managed to keep in pretty good shape.
Except for her teeth. There was one small rectangle of polished stainless steel in her room that served as a mirror, and when she checked her appearance there each morning she couldn’t help noticing that her gums were beginning to recede. Trips to the dentist were not generally recommended, however. Like many prison employees, he was said to find women most interesting around the chest area, and dental-hygiene products were strangely unavailable at Framingham, even through Canteen.
Floss, for example, was strictly prohibited, though even after six months Denise still found it hard to discern exactly why. A kind of floss did circulate around the prison. It was made of nylon, which workers in the flag factory smuggled out for the purpose. Unlike almost everything else at Framingham, the smugglers gave it out, free, to anyone who wanted it. But the thread was harsh and unsanitary, and the one time Denise tried it, it had cut her gums and made them bleed. For a while she was so desperate that she thought about asking someone to smuggle some in to her through the mail, threaded through the page of a letter perhaps, or stuck in a book. But then she heard that Wendy, the upscale and rather beautiful brothel madam from Laurel Unit, had been caught, recently, doing the exact same thing and sent down to the Hole. Denise dropped the idea. The last place she ever wanted to be was the Hole.
Besides, she tried to console herself, what good was even the best kind of waxed floss when the only toothbrushes available were ridiculously small and so soft-bristled that they left your teeth feeling as furry and ridged as if they’d never been brushed at all? She went to her construction-arts classes and tried not to think about it. She prayed. She power-walked around the yard with a woman named Carol, a DWI who made her laugh, and started hanging out a little with Fly, a crazy Puerto Rican butch, who’d stood up for her one day when she’d wanted to watch Private Homes instead of Divorce Court on the dayroom TV.
Of course she still worried about Pat, sometimes to the point of hysteria. But with the telephone system the way it was—collect calls only and absolutely no connection to Hawaii, collect or otherwise— there was no way on earth she could speak to him. She did everything she could to change this: talked to her unit manager and wrote letters to her lawyers. She even submitted formal requests for a phone-system pass to the superintendent and to the newly arrived director of security (a small, fractious man who everyone said had been transferred to Framingham after being intimidated by his own officers in a medium-security men’s facility nearby), but nothing had come of any of it. So now, aside from writing to Pat all the time, and sending a video of herself reading to him through a program sponsored by the Catholic chaplain, she had trained herself to live with that gaping vortex of fear and guilt and was managing, pretty much, to keep focused on her much reduced present instead. Which is to say that she’d finally constructed a box around Pat too—everyone had to do it sooner or later, she understood now. If they didn’t, the pain drove them crazy, and every year one or two tried to kill themselves as a result, by hanging themselves with strips of twisted sheet in their rooms.
THEN CAME CHRISTMAS. Everything pales beside the agonies of Christmas in prison. All the holidays are bad: birthdays, New Year’s, Thanksgiving, and Easter, but Christmas is the worst. The administration did allow a party for the handful of kids who could make it, but for some reason it was held in November. Half-torn decorations remained up on the visiting-room walls for several weeks after that, but no decorations were allowed elsewhere in the facility. Women who received cards stuck them up with dabs of toothpaste, which froze like glue against the section of painted frieze block where such things were allowed, and that felt nice and new and hopeful. But there were no other concessions to the holidays, none. The guards, who always seemed so distant and unapproachable to Denise, were sullen, worse than usual. Even the food was unchanged—chicken burrito this year, and beans.
