Insiders

by Olivia Goldsmith

  She opened her eyes. She couldn’t really imagine anything but this room, her freezing feet, the unbearable light and the hunger gnawing at her belly. She tried to remind herself that she was the hero of the Vareen takeover and the heavy lifter in the Cooper Corp. scenario, but she hadn’t been cold and wet and humiliated then. Jennifer may have managed not to drink and not to use the ladies’ room, but if she had had to pee then, she wouldn’t have had to do it in front of a dozen pairs of eyes.

  She felt her eyes begin to get wet and forced herself to stand up. Just then a noise outside the cell brought her to the front. Another guard was wheeling a trolley down the corridor. When he reached her, he didn’t even look up. He merely bent toward her, his face forward, and slipped a plastic tray through the slot. It almost looked like an airplane meal.

  ‘No,’ she told herself firmly one more time. But her cold feet walked, without her permission, over to the tray. She bent and picked it up. Something green. Something brown. And something that looked like it had tomato sauce on it. Whatever it was, she took it to the bed, sat down crosslegged on the filthy mattress, and ravenously wolfed it down.

  7

  Maggie Rafferty

  I was a prisoner long before I was an inmate.

  Bonnie Foreshaw, inmate. Andi Rierden, The Farm

  I know that it will seem a truism, but I must say that shooting your husband, accidentally or otherwise – and even more – having him die from the bullet wound, totally changes your life. The chief benefit is, of course, that he is gone, but there are other benefits, which I’ll get to later. The main drawback, however, is that in most cases you’re deprived of your liberty and might have to live in a place with a library that has only one hundred and sixteen books. That is the exact number of books in the library here at Jennings.

  But back to my husband. He could have lived; he died just to spite me. The bullet only grazed his aorta. Serious? Yes – but with his will power, he might have lingered long enough for the paramedics to stabilize him. But no. He always had to get his way in the end. He could turn any situation to his advantage. This was, of course, only one of the many reasons why I hated him so fully and completely, and why the gun I was holding went off while it was pointed in his direction. At the time, I had meant to kill myself. How foolish of me.

  My husband was the famous Richard Rafferty, Riff to his friends. At the very minute the bullet was nicking his deceitful heart, his latest book, The Life of the Heart, was being talked about on the six o’clock news. A book? On the evening news? How can that be? Easy. Richard was sleeping with the woman who produced the show.

  And speaking of the evening news, I understand that the new arrival, this Miss Jennifer Spencer, is up in observation hell. She’s certainly been news. I’ve been following her story with some interest, since one needs such pastimes in prison, and because both of my sons are in the same type of business as she is … or was. From the beginning I could see that she was taking the fall for someone else, probably a man. The only question that remained in my mind was, did she know what was going on? Was she complicitous? I was actually looking forward to seeing her in person, because then I would know.

  How would I know? Well, let me explain another result of happening to murder your husband: It turns your brain inside out. Although this is terribly painful at the time and for a long while afterward, in the end it is a good thing. I know this sounds totally insane, but I am a better person for having killed my husband. For instance, I’ve become nearly as good as a dog at reading people.

  Lest anyone think that I am advocating murder as a method of self-improvement, let me correct that impression at once. Yes, I am a better person, but I was a good enough person before. Riff wasn’t; he wasn’t worth dirtying my hands for. What he deserved from me was the indifference that I only now feel toward him. Trading life and liberty for well-deserved revenge and an enlightened mind is a very hard deal to accept. Jennings, have I said it before, is a kind of hell.

  When I arrived here, I fell into despair at once. The trial, Grand Guignol though it had been, was a reason to get up, get dressed, and perform. Here there was nothing. I wanted to die. Imagine. I had been headmistress of one of the most prestigious private girls’ schools on the East Coast, and had lived among the very rich and instructed their daughters. On my first day at Jennings, I was told to ‘get my fuckin’ ass movin’.’ I had been in Who’s Who In American Education. Here I was referred to as ‘the old bitch’.

  Somehow I got used to the vulgarity. It was the deprivation of every sensory pleasure that was the hardest thing for me to bear. My marriage had not been happy, but I had lived in a beautiful home, traveled to Paris and London nearly every year, spent summers in Tuscany, was a connoisseur of wines and fine foods, collected rare books and Herend, drove an immaculate ‘62 Mercedes Gullwing, subscribed to the ballet, shopped at Neiman Marcus.

  And suddenly I was confined to one of the ugliest places on the face of the earth, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I assure you, no bleaker, duller, more visually offensive place can exist. I’d rather be in Craigmore Prison, dank dark dungeon that it is. It at least has some architecture to boast of. Jennings is the kind of dull, featureless maze they put rats into when they’re trying to see if they can stunt their brain development. Even crumbling ceilings or walls would add interest, but here there is no crumbling, just ugly, 1960s efficiency. Jennings was built when there was a soul-sickness plaguing the earth, probably an aftereffect of the war. Buildings were built to last, but beauty in architecture was eschewed. The style could be called ‘Plainness with a Vengeance’, ‘Ugly is Fine’, or ‘Death in Life’. And I have to stay here for the rest of mine. There are no aesthetic pardons.

  So I wondered how Jennifer Spencer was faring in Observation. She had a lower-middle-class youth, upper-middle-class adulthood. A transition to Jennings wasn’t going to be easy for her, to say the least. But my interest in the fate and character of Jennifer Spencer was going to be limited compared to the keen interest I have in women like Movita Watson and her ‘sidekick’, Cher. I had never met women like them before my incarceration and I am fascinated by their unschooled intelligence.

  Movita, for example, is someone I pegged as decent the minute I saw her despite her hellfire exterior. She plays tough, and sometimes dumb, but she’s generous and clever, too, and has her own eye for ‘attitude’ in others. She will tell you that when she entered Jennings, I had no ‘attitude’ at all. This was why we became friends fairly quickly. She was, in her words, ‘curious ‘bout that weird ol’ bitch’. Well, attitude is one of the petty attributes that I lost as a result of my husband dying at my hands, or more literally, at my feet. When I came in, I’ve been told by Movita, I had the look of a ‘schoolteacher who’d been wiped out by a nuclear bomb’. Change ‘schoolteacher’ to ‘schoolmistress’ and her assessment was pretty much accurate.

  But those credentials as a schoolteacher secured my position as the prison librarian. And since that time I have been preoccupied with thinking of ways to acquire more books. Books were always important to me. Well, they are my life’s blood really. Before and after my crime.

  The Life of the Heart (of which, ironically, we had two copies in the library) was Richard’s sixth book. It was supposed to be about the stunning and liberated life that can be ours if we give in to our feelings of love. He’d put me and my two sons through hell while he was trying to write it, just as he had, come to think of it, when he wrote his fourth and fifth. The children were ‘distractions’. Somehow I was always doing something ‘stupid’. He once accused me of turning pages too loudly. Bryce and Tyler, despite their initial business success, were ‘disappointments’ to him. But that I could understand. How disappointing it must be for a false, humorless, and arrogant man to have two sons who could see through him and laugh. I, on the other hand – raised to be a right-minded woman – supported the bastard throughout. I fed him, excused him, pampered him, read his drafts, corrected his grammar,
gave him ideas, typed his corrections, and hated his editor with him. I did it for thirty-four years. Why stop now, when he needed me more than ever?

  It is only now, seven years later, that I can look back at the situation without anger. As I said above, I am a better person now.

  I knew that Jennifer Spencer would be given the orientation that included a tour of the facility, a bed assignment, and a work detail. I know what’s what here on my own, though I do appreciate the heads up I get when Frances delivers the ice with kites. I had to chuckle at the ‘kites on ice’. There is no work here in the library. The prison population consists of very few readers and what they would read doesn’t exist in the library. Needless to say, I would welcome Miss Spencer to Jennings when she came by later in the day. Lest you think otherwise, this would not be some warmhearted Shawshank Redemption nonsense where I take the girl under my wing. If I had wings, I assure you I’d fly the fuck out of here. Besides, I already have two sons – I don’t need a daughter. After a quarter century of girls’ schools, I know how much trouble they are.

  Jennifer finally came to the library, with that Officer Camry, at about three-thirty, the time I usually fade out, having worked in schools all my life. She had the air of a young woman who was in trouble, there was no mistaking that. Her face was pale and drawn, her eyelids were swollen, and the eyes peering out from between them looked as if they’d glimpsed something horrific, but at the same time she still looked like someone whose car and driver were waiting for her. She had heavy attitude, Movita would say. But I could see right through that. The press, as usual, had gotten it wrong: Thanks to my twenty-seven years of working with schoolgirls, I could see that Jennifer had been a scholarship student. Determination to overcome obstacles was written all over her, so there had to have been obstacles. I could see that she had real strength to her, and that when the realization that she was going to be in here for some real time hit her, she would survive the shock.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’m Maggie.’ I sounded ridiculous to myself, as if we were in some kind of meeting.

  ‘Hi,’ she answered. She was so not present that I was driven to speak to her again. ‘This is our library, such as it is.’

  She blinked at me, as if she didn’t understand why I was talking to her. ‘We have the space,’ I went on, ‘but we have very few books.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter to me. Don’t worry about it,’ she said, a little sharply. Then her expression changed. She was looking at me, wondering who I was, I expect. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said then. ‘I don’t mean to be rude. It’s just that I’m not going to be living here. But this guard has been very nice.’ I saw Officer Camry stiffen. It’s funny about how prison guards refuse to be called prison guards.

  ‘He’s an officer, dear,’ I said in a voice drier than the paper of my books. ‘Not a guard. You call them officers or COs.’

  ‘Correction officer,’ Camry the fool added. He was harmless enough and I nodded at him.

  ‘Oh. Thank you,’ the girl said.

  Jennifer Spencer surprised me in one way. I, who have met such a wide cross section of women when you consider both my students, my social circle, and my present comrades, could not tell if the girl was essentially good or bad. It’s the kind of thing I almost always know at a glance yet I didn’t know it then, although I do now. I could see that she was honest.

  8

  Jennifer Spencer

  With keen, discriminating sight, Black’s not so black, – nor white so very white.

  George Canning, New Morality

  After the night in Observation, Jennifer was ready for assignment to a cell. Though it was the relatively benign Officer Camry, rather than the brutal Byrd, who came to take her away, the relentless gloom of the institution put Jennifer into a state bordering on catatonia. If Observation had been hell for her, it was clear that the rest of the place was purgatory. It was all so grim that it was appalling to imagine that women actually lived in this hopeless drabness day after day.

  ‘I need to make a phone call,’ she managed to say to Officer Camry. Her head was pounding and she desperately needed some Tylenol – and maybe a Valium – but calling Tom was the most important thing to do right now. ‘I have to make a call,’ she said again. ‘Is there a phone near here?’

  Camry stepped back and looked at her intently. ‘If there was, you couldn’t use it,’ he told her. ‘I’m scheduled to give you your house assignment. You can only make calls on your own time.’

  Jennifer clenched her jaw and the headache intensified. She wasn’t prepared for any of this. She admitted that now. How could Donald and Tom abandon her to this experience? She couldn’t imagine the elegant Mr Michaels in a jumpsuit, or Ivy League Tom in the filthy hole. But that didn’t matter. She squared her shoulders behind Camry’s rounded ones and followed as she was instructed. She would not cry nor would she fuss. This whole ordeal was a punishment; not for the nonsense with the SEC, but for the terrible error in judgment that she had made.

  ‘Right this way,’ Camry said, leading her down a long narrow corridor. Then he stopped abruptly and opened a door. ‘While we’re here, this is the athletic facility,’ he said.

  Jennifer looked in to see a small room with a couple of flabby volleyballs and a few exercise mats that were so soiled that she had to avert her eyes. So this was the gym. She almost laughed. It was nothing at all like the Vertical Club where she and Tom worked out. Well, she’d be out of there before she needed to go to the gym. But what about the women who had to use the place? God almighty.

  ‘You can use the athletic facility in your free time, but not during lockdown or after eight p.m.,’ Camry told her.

  Jennifer sighed. As if. Once again she turned to Camry and said with great urgency, ‘Are you certain I can’t use a phone? It is imperative that I get in touch with my lawyer.’

  Camry lifted his eyebrows and looked up at the ceiling. He shook his head as if to say, No, you crazy bitch, no!

  Jennifer knew then that she had made a terrible error. For the first time in her life she had been so confident that she knew everything that she needed to know that she had gone into a test completely unprepared. Prison wasn’t like life on the Outside. In here, there was no multiple choice to guess at, and there was no essay that she could bluff her way through. This was all true or false – black and white. This was the test of her life, and she’d willingly come into it unprepared and ignorant.

  Tom and Donald had told her that it would be easy. She didn’t know why she had believed them – except that they’d never lied to her before. Christ, there was no way this could’ve been easy. She should’ve known that. Life had taught her that nothing came easy – it all took work, it all took discipline, and above everything else, it all took a willful determination not to fail. She knew that. She had always been prepared, always one step ahead of the rest.

  Jennifer hung her head and looked at the orange jumpsuit that she was wearing. When she was a kid she used to lay out her school clothes before going to bed. She hated uniforms so much that she spent hours figuring out ways to make a plaid jumper and a navy blazer look like something out of Vogue. But she did it. She stood out from all the rest.

  It was that kind of preparation and thinking ahead that were the big secrets to her success. She got into State on scholarship, and her grades there earned her a free ride into the MBA program at Wharton. When it was time to go out and get a job, Jennifer’s research landed her an interview with the already legendary Donald J. Michaels. She walked into his office, clearly a girl from the working class, and she started to talk about his Gulbenkian porcelain. Donald lifted his eyebrows. He knew she was faking it, but he also knew she was really good at faking it. Preparation and a poker face were exactly what she needed to succeed in his Wall Street firm. Donald Michaels not only hired Jennifer on the spot, he put her on his own team. They were known as the smartest and the most aggressive of all the Wall Street shark pool. They specialized in the highest-risk/ highest-rewar
d IPOs and some very leveraged buyouts. They didn’t miss a trick. They were invincible.

  ‘We go down from here,’ Camry told her, and Jennifer preceded him down the stairs. She was glad she wasn’t with Byrd as they made their way down the dark and damp stairwell.

  The trek seemed to take forever, and through it all Jennifer mentally beat herself up. From the first moment she had gotten into the van, things had been out of her control. She tried to control the rising tide of panic that was threatening to overtake her. Why didn’t the Warden know who she was? If Tom had called, whom did he talk to? And if she didn’t find out, how would she be cushioned and protected from this nightmare? Who was the Warden’s boss? Could she go over the stolid Warden Harding’s head? She would just have to wait until this ridiculous process was over. Then she would call Tom. Or Don. Or both of them.

  At long last, she and Camry entered the cellblock, and Jennifer was taken to her cell. She thought she’d seen the worst of Jennings, but no – they had saved the worst for last.

  ‘This is your house assignment,’ Camry told her.

  House? This wasn’t a house; it wasn’t even a dormitory – and it most certainly was not a country club. It was a prison cell, plain and simple. The concrete walls were painted a color that a decorator might claim to be Dusty Rose, but to Jennifer’s eyes it was a hideous Battleship Pink. The beds – four of them – were bunked and bolted against the side walls with only about ten square feet of floor space in between. There was no furniture except a tiny desk that was suspended from the wall, and, beneath it, a single chair. Jennifer wondered if she would have three cellmates, and if the four of them were supposed to share that chair.