by Susan Wilson
“I’d like to meet this young man. Mr. Uber.”
And that’s when I thought that maybe it was time. I was beginning to think, maybe even hope, that maybe Charles and I were a couple. The stop/start of his early courtship had settled into a rhythm of daily contact. We’d slept together. I hadn’t left a toothbrush at his place in the South End, but I had one in my purse.
* * *
Just after the server had removed the dinner plates and set the dessert menu in front of us, I asked the question: “Would you like to come to my parents’ house on Sunday for dinner?” I tossed this out casually, as if it had just occurred to me. “They’d like to meet you.”
Charles had his wineglass lifted to his lips. A very expensive merlot, as I recall. His face was unreadable behind the balloon glass. He didn’t answer right away, and I took that as a negative and then instantly worried that I’d pushed some off button on the relationship by being presumptuous. “At their home?”
“Yes. My parents’ house.” Perhaps he thought Sunday dinners were restaurant meals.
“Aren’t they on the Somerville line?”
“Close.” Weird questioning, but I was just happy that he hadn’t rejected the idea out of hand. “East of the community college.” Where I might have gone had I not been encouraged by my favorite teacher to expand my horizons.
And then he set his glass on the fine white tablecloth and smiled. “That would be very nice.”
* * *
I was as nervous as a squirrel in a roomful of hounds that first meeting—one of only three—between Charles and my parents. I was afraid that my father would make some inappropriate remark that normally we’d just laugh off, something racist, off-color, or, worse, some crack about rich Republicans. He did.
I worried that my mother would make a big deal out of Charles’s hostess gift of a bottle of expensive, to her, wine. I knew my mother. She was certain to say something about saving it for later. She did.
I was hyperaware of all the flaws in my family’s grammar and table manners and the way the crucified Christ hung on our living room wall. The minute we walked into the house where I had grown up, with its threadbare rug and Bob’s Discount Furniture living room set, I was convinced that this was the baddest idea in a world of bad ideas. All the sophisticated veneer I had developed in college was exposed as a façade by my beloved family. I just knew that Charles would bolt.
He didn’t.
It was sometime after that first visit when Charles began making plans for us every weekend. He started bringing me silly little things, like a new lipstick he said would be a better color for me, and a tight little bolero sweater he said would make me look even more slender. Why didn’t I consider a new hairstylist? I kidded him about being such a metrosexual and he only smiled, his eyes brighter than usual, as if I’d touched a pleasant nerve. He made an appointment for me at a place on Newbury Street, where a simple haircut could run into the hundreds. “My treat,” he said. “My treat.” He advised the stylist, and I came out of the shop looking like the million bucks Charles said I was worth. I worried out loud that I would never be able to keep up with the style, bluntly letting him know that I could never afford a Newbury Street look on my own. Again, his eyes brightened and he smiled. “You won’t have to.”
I look back on this and I wonder at my naïveté, or maybe it’s the 20/20 hindsight of finally recognizing what a subtle monster control is. What can look like kindness and affection is far more sinister. The kindness and affection weren’t meant for me; they were meant for this figment, a miniature living golem. Charles wanted to mold what he saw as raw material into something of his own creation. It just took me a long time to figure out what he was doing. Who doesn’t like being treated to spa days and facials? Who wouldn’t want to be escorted to invitation-only trunk shows and be handed a credit card? I began to amass a closet full of clothes worth more than my college tuition—a loan I was no closer to paying off than I had been when I first met Charles.
On one of my increasingly rare nights out without Charles, my high school bestie, Brenda Brathwaite, patiently listened as I extolled the generosity of my new boyfriend, doing a little humble bragging about the trouble I was having finding room in my closet.
“How come you never post anything about him on Facebook?”
“He’s very private. He told me right from the start that he didn’t want to be on my page or anyone else’s.”
“Does he have one?”
“No. Just the page for his company. All very professional.”
Brenda ran a finger along the rim of her margarita glass. We were in a little Downtown Crossing Mexican place. “Have you met his parents yet?”
“Not yet. Charles says that he’s really too busy right now; he wants to make it an occasion. And it’s just his mother. She’s very busy in New York with her charity work. We’ll probably meet over the holidays.” Holidays that were months away.
Brenda has known me all my life and so she has no filter when it comes to saying what’s on her mind when it pertains to me. “Sounds like you’re the ‘other’ woman.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, Rosie. He spoils you with stuff, but he never takes you home to Mom. He comes and goes in your life according to his schedule. He claims there’s no position open in his firm. I took a look. There’re a couple of entry-level marketing positions open in Wright, Melrose & Foster that’d be just perfect for someone like you.”
“You’re full of it. He’s being sensitive about nepotism.”
“You’re not related.”
I waggled my eyebrows to suggest that there was a yet.
“He’s probably worried about having you around when he decides to go back to his wife, or breaks it off out of guilt.”
“Brenda, he’s not married. I would know.”
“Googled him?”
Now it was my turn to smile. “Yes. Of course. One broken engagement, but never married.”
“Okay, my bad. You just keep having fun, and feel free to give me your select hand-me-downs when you’re closet is too full.”
“Look, you’re being kind of unfair to Charles. Let’s go out on a double date, you and Leon, and me and Charles. You’ll get to know Charles and he’ll see that my friends are the best.”
“You’re on.”
Except that Charles hated the idea. His capacity for finding reasons not to double-date with my friends was limitless. Neither did we ever go out with his friends. The closest we came was bumping into one of the principals in the firm, Laurence Wright, and his wife at Rialto, in the Charles Hotel. Although Mr. Wright politely suggested we join them, Charles declined and we took the table for two he’d reserved. It wasn’t until later that night, as we snuggled under the covers in our “weekend away” room at the hotel, that I realized Charles had never introduced me by name to Mr. and Mrs. Wright. An unusual lapse of manners, for which I chided him, but he only laughed and told me I was being a child. Of course he’d introduced me. But he hadn’t.
* * *
I was sorry that Charles died, of course. Before the trial, I grieved for him in a way, and flashes of his easier side would come to me, forcing on me a heavy guilt; but the truth was, I was relieved to be free of him. Of his oppressive nature. After the trial, I realized that his style of oppression had only been transferred to the more overt oppression of prison. If he’d kept me imprisoned by his jealous, controlling nature, now I was in a real prison, and no guard here cared the least for my emotional state. They weren’t guarding me jealously; they were guarding the world from me.
* * *
By my second year at Mid-State, I had “adjusted” to my circumstances, meaning that I went about my day no longer crying. I’d found the limited library. I went to my laundry job. I ate and walked the yard and didn’t cry. I listened to my mother’s unanswered phone and didn’t cry. I got used to my fellow inmates, even growing to like some of them, especially LaShonda. Once I had a dream that she and
I were sitting opposite each other in a restaurant. She wore a fascinator and I wore a hijab. The waiter came to take our orders, and it was Charles. In the dream, LaShonda looked at me and said, “He’s nothing.” I woke up in a sweat.
By my fourth year of incarceration, I was in the law library, trying to fathom some legal precedent that would free me. I had stopped calling home. Like a rising senior, I had learned the ropes and I handled the four-times-a-day head count. I passed down the corridor with very little interference from inmates or guards.
Nearly four years in and I no longer felt like the fearful young woman, innocent of the crime and innocent of the ways of the gray world of prison. I saw them arrive, those youthful ghosts of me. Trembling, weeping, calling for their mothers. I felt for them, but I wasn’t kind to them. Kindness slows the hardening of the carapace you need in prison. Now I felt fully armored by my certainty that my life was fixed in the amber of prison rules, mores, and constant sense of threat—from fellow inmates, from randy guards. Some inmates got through by talking about what they would do when they got out, who they would see, what foods they would enjoy. Not me. By my fourth year, I had accepted this joyless, soul-dead life.
Meghan
Meghan Custer tipped the vial of pills into her hand. Only three left; no matter how many times she checked the bottle, there were always only three magic bullets. She didn’t miss the fact that she thought of them as magic bullets. Over the past few weeks, as she entered her third year of this version of herself, the crippled version, the idea of a real bullet had begun to have some traction. She knew where her father kept his guns. She certainly knew how to use one. Idly, she wondered if it was possible to miss the weight of a rifle, its doglike constant companionship and protection. Meghan had been very good with her service weapon. When that politician did the blindfold assembly of his rifle as some kind of political statement, she’d laughed out loud. Easy peasy. Who couldn’t do that? What did that prove except that the United States military schooled its soldiers very, very well?
Only three pills left in a prescription that was supposed to last until the end of next week. If she’d had any independence at all, she would have found another doctor to write her another script. Too bad docs no longer made house calls. The bigger problem was that her mother wasn’t blind to Meghan’s opioid use. The scourge of mankind, according to the press. It seemed sometimes that the opioid epidemic had come along at exactly the wrong time for Meghan. A few years ago, the physicians would have been more than happy to keep her supplied, but now, not so much. They suggested alternative therapies, like yoga, for God’s sake. Meghan clutched the three little pills in her fist, then placed them, one by one, back in the vial.
“Mom!” Meghan took a little satisfaction in the sound of the dishwasher being slammed maybe a titch more energetically than it needed. Her mother was a saint. Everyone said so. Forced back into motherhood, the physically demanding motherhood of dressing her daughter; the emotionally challenging one of having a thirty-six-year-old daughter with the mood swings of an adolescent, the unkindness of a teenager, the self-pitying funk of a preteen. Meghan wasn’t unaware of having become a difficult person, but she couldn’t find a way out of it. “Mom!”
“What is it, honey?” Her mother leaned into the bedroom doorway. She didn’t look like someone whose every activity was vulnerable to interruption. She looked, as always, ready to help. It pissed Meghan off no end, this eternal patience.
“I dropped my phone.”
Evelyn Custer knelt to retrieve the wayward phone from under the bed, where it had bounced. She handed the phone to Meghan and then straightened the unkempt bed. The bed, a high-tech multiposition one, wasn’t supposed to be called a hospital bed, but, for all intents and purposes, it was, and it was hard to keep it neat. “Would you like to have grilled cheese for lunch?”
“Yeah, sure. Fine.” Meghan opened Facebook and scrolled down, looking for something interesting.
“Whenever you’re ready.”
“This is getting old, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Me. This.” Meghan swept her hand across her lap.
“Of course not.”
“Don’t be a martyr.” Meghan didn’t look up to see if her rottenness had had any effect. It was as if she was trying to be a bitch. And her mother just kept turning that other cheek.
“Meghan?”
“What?”
“Yeah, I am. Tired of it. Tired of being the mom with the wounded warrior feeling sorry for herself.”
Meghan kept her face away from her mother. She never cried, not once, except for the men who were lost that day. Not once for herself. Now the tears that stung still weren’t for herself, but for her mother. She withheld the tears that just might be in regret for the bitch she knew that she’d become.
“But, Meghan, I don’t consider it martyrdom. It’s a challenge, yes. Pleasant? Not so much. But I love you and I’m so grateful that you are a grump instead of a memory.”
“Sorry. I don’t know what gets into me.” She maneuvered her chair to face her mother.
“You need a break.”
“We both do.”
Later, Meghan found her mother in the laundry room, folding a basketful of towels. She grabbed a lapful and got busy. As simple a task as folding still-warm towels from the dryer made her feel a little more useful. A little less of a child. Less of a burden. Her mother had been right; she needed a break. A break from being dependent. As well-meaning as her parents, especially her mother, were, in some ways Meghan felt as though they were contributing to her dependency on them. It wasn’t being ungrateful, no. It was a growing suspicion that she was being coddled. She, who had endured the untold discomfort of boot camp, who had once been able to carry more than half her weight in body armor and equipment, now had a parent practically wiping her bum for her. She desperately wished that they all could take a break from this.
A flicker of memory teased at her, a vague taste of an old desire. She suddenly remembered how it felt in those long-ago days when she was aching to leave the family home and strike out into her adult life. It felt like this, like this stage of her life must soon come to an end. In high school, she could see the way out each time she filled out a college application. There was no such scripted way out of this stage unless she could regain her independence.
Meghan handed her mother the short pile of folded towels and reversed her chair out of the laundry room.
Rosie
Far too early in my twenty-year sentence to apply for parole, I’d just been denied a retrial, which was, in my view, my only way out before menopause. Even though I hadn’t honestly expected the courts to take my request seriously, I was bitterly disappointed. One thing that you have plenty of time to do in prison is reflect on the past. The endless “time-out.” Just sit there, young lady, and think about what you’ve done. So I was trying to figure out where my life had so egregiously gone off the rails, when the prison counselor suggested that I start writing my life down, like a memoir. “Sometimes seeing the words written down inspires an understanding of events.” She was full of wisdom, that one. So, I did. I was so bored, mostly spending my free time lying on my bunk and picking at my cuticles until my fingers bled. Otherwise, I wandered through the days in a funk, a cloud of despair the size of an island surrounding me. The writing may have used up some time, but it did nothing to dispel that funk; on the contrary, the more I examined my life, the deeper the funk became. It was hard some days to tell if it was fear, or grief, or anger, or regret that ruled my outlook. Some blend of each, I suppose. A perfect fusion of the dark emotions. And I was one of the lucky ones. Too many of my comrades were suffering from not just the loss of their freedom, whether through drugs or crime or bad boyfriends, but the wrenching loss of their children. When I first arrived, I dwelled upon the rift that had separated me from my family; but, almost four years in, I had come to understand that the separation from one’s child was far worse
. They suddenly had no control over where their kids were, or with whom. The visiting hours were fraught with tears and acting out. Or silence as a child who has never lived with his mother treats her as a stranger.
My sixth roommate, Darla, was typical of the women I knew. Convicted of a nonviolent drug crime. In her case, as she put it, convicted of stupidity. She’d opened her home up to a brother who was a drug dealer. Of course, she told me, she had no idea he was a dealer, although she did know he was a user. When the police came and raided her house, she was swept up into the bust. Her children, a baby boy and a two-year-old girl, were absorbed into the foster-care system and she had been fighting to get them back ever since. Mandatory sentencing meant that she would not have her own children back until they were in middle school, and only then if the authorities released them to her—and there were no guarantees of that.
Some of the mommies were luckier, and their mothers or their aunts had their kids. Darla had no one and so hadn’t seen her babies since the day the Child Protective Services people wrested them from her arms.
Darla’s nocturnal weeping had kept me awake all night, so I was in a particularly black humor at work in the laundry. I was in no mood to chat, to laugh at the jokes that the other inmates got from their Wednesday-afternoon visitors. To hear the gossip about the creepy guard who liked to do pat-downs, who also traded bubble gum for hand jobs during count.
“You see this?” LaShonda handed me a flyer with its photo of a happy, panting Labrador retriever and bold lettering: Be a part of a new program. Learn how to train therapy dogs while serving your time.
“No. Where’d you get it?”
“That new counselor has ’em in her office. She thought I might like to try.”
The flyer gave very few details, only that candidates must have an impeccable record for two consecutive years to be considered. Well, I had that. In spades. In the forty-two months that I had been inside, I had accrued not one demerit. Never sent to segregation. Not one hair-pulling, screaming fight. Part of that was because I kept my head down and my mouth shut. The other was that I had no ambition. I stood my ground, but I didn’t challenge anyone’s authority, guard or inmate.