by Terra Little
It doesn’t take me long to realize that Vicky isn’t as smart as I think she is, and it takes me even less time to come to the conclusion that we have made a big mistake. I don’t think Mama ever really forgave us for being so stupid, and I don’t even have to think about forgiving Vicky to know that I haven’t. Like a lamb to slaughter she led me, and she was supposed to know better.
Vicky’s arms surround me now and I smell her scent. It takes me back in time to a place I don’t want to go. It takes me back to the claustrophobic little house my grandmother lived in, to the depths of her bedroom, where she kept an endless supply of White Shoulders perfume on her dressing table. It was her signature scent, and now it is Vicky’s.
I catch myself before I open my mouth to tell her that her shoulders aren’t white and the scent makes me want to puke. Instead, I hug her back and say, “Hey.”
She pulls back and looks at me, sees that I don’t have a relaxer anymore, that I have lost weight and gained muscle mass, and bursts out crying. I lift my locks from my shoulders and feel air on the back of my neck, watch her and wait. I won’t hold her as she cries, won’t offer her even a little bit of comfort, because I don’t have it in me. She hasn’t come to visit me in eight years and I don’t know why. What I do know is that she wouldn’t be so shocked by the sight of me if she had.
“Eight years is such a damn long time,” she says when she can talk.
I catch her eyes and smile. “You know better than me. I owe you, what, about a million dollars and some change?” She put money on my books faithfully, kept me from having to beg, borrow or steal to survive.
We stare at each other. If I have changed, she hasn’t. She still wears her hair long and straight, relaxed to death and hanging down her back. Still plucks the hell out of her eyebrows and lines her lips with a dark pencil before filling them in with bright lipgloss. She still looks like a deer trapped in the glare of highbeams, poised to run for her life at the slightest provocation. I wonder if she is poised to run from me and everything I represent.
“You look good, Vicky,” I offer.
“You look . . .” She raises her hands, shakes her head and lets them drop. “Different. Damn, Lena. What do you press, a thousand pounds?”
She reaches out and squeezes my bicep lightly, looking awed. She is exaggerating, but I let it roll. I don’t look anything like those tennis star sisters and she knows it. Smooth and tight, maybe, but nowhere near as buff. I’m working on it though.
“Just a couple hundred,” I say. “Give or take. Can we get the hell out of here?”
My question catches her off guard, snaps her out of her thoughts and reminds her of where we are. “Oh! Um . . . yeah.” She looks at the envelope I’m holding. “Is this all your stuff?”
“Everything else belongs to the state.”
My eyes go everywhere at once as I follow her out to her car. She is driving a shiny red machine, something sporty and compact, and I like the look of it. I give the leather seats and complicated-looking dashboard cursory glances, and then I take my eyes back to the sky, where they really want to be.
I like the look of the sun even better, love the feel of fresh air on my skin. I can’t get over how much brighter the sun seems and how much lighter the air is on the outside. As we drive off and pick up speed on the interstate, I push a button to lower my window. I stick my head out and let the wind snatch my breath, stick my tongue out and taste freedom. Vicky is right; eight years is a long time.
Chapter Two
She catches me darting glances around her house and answers my question before I ask.
“She won’t be home until later,” Vicky says, referring to the person I most want to see and then again don’t really want to see at all. “Around seven or eight, I think she said.”
“She sets her own schedule?” I look around the room she shows me, in the rear of the basement, not far from the washer and dryer. Just outside the door is a carpeted sitting area, a big screen television and a treadmill. I look past her to the door, and see that it has a lock on it. I meet her eyes after it occurs to me that she hasn’t answered my question.
“She decided to hang out with a friend. Maybe stay for dinner.”
Vicky can’t look at me. She does things to make herself busy. She straightens the covers on the bed, smoothes a hand over a pillow, and then adjusts the rug on the floor with the toe of her shoe. I wait for her to break out in a song and dance routine to kill even more time, wondering if she really thinks she’s being subtle.
She is my daughter. The only child I have and the only one I will probably ever have. The one I spent seven hours of my life bringing into the world, and the one I haven’t seen in eight hellacious years. The one who doesn’t care that I am home. She doesn’t want to see me, or maybe she isn’t ready to see me. Either way, she isn’t here, and Vicky being unable to look me in my face tells me more than I want to hear. I am hurt, and the feeling comes at me from out of nowhere, surprises me because hurt is something that I haven’t felt in a long time. But I don’t let my face bear witness.
“I guess she has to eat,” I say.
“She wants to see you, Lena.”
“I know.”
“She just needs some time to adjust to you being home. It’s been—”
“Eight years. I know that too.” I point to the small closet across the room. The door is open, and inside I see boxes stacked against one wall. Three of them. My handwriting crisscrosses the cardboard like a crossword puzzle I designed when I was drunk. Letters are jumbled together, scratched out and connected by thick dashes, making it impossible to guess what’s inside. Might’ve been pots and pans at one time, and towels and sheets another time. Could be anything now.
“You saved my old moving boxes?”
“I saved your clothes,” she says, moving past me to drag a box from the closet to the middle of the floor. “I found the boxes in a closet in your apartment . . . after you were already gone.” She reaches inside and hands me a neatly folded nightgown that I immediately press to my nose, searching for a familiar scent. I find it and inhale deeply; my eyes close. “There’s another box somewhere with shoes in it. I’ll have to look for it.” A smile touches her lips. “I wore some of them.”
“The black slingbacks you always wanted?”
“Wore them.” We laugh.
“The red stilettos . . .”
“Wore the hell out of those too.”
“I think they were yours anyway.” I sit on the bed and slide the box closer, dig in and sigh as I find several pairs of panties and matching bras. I was prepared to wash the ones I have on every night and recycle them, until I can get my hands on the money to buy more. It doesn’t even matter that the ones I find in the box are a size too big or that my breasts could fit in the cups of the bras twice and still have room to breathe. “Thanks for saving this stuff. I need it like you wouldn’t believe.”
Vicky looks lost in thought for a moment. “All of your other stuff . . . we didn’t know what to do with it. I wanted to save it too, but—”
“Didn’t have much anyway,” I say, letting her off the hook on which she hangs herself. Another day I will ask her for specifics. Who got what and what happened to this or that thing, but today I can only handle so much. For now I’ll live with the lie.
I had furniture and household gadgets. A toaster and a blender that overheated and filled my apartment with the smell of burning rubber. I had a color television that I paid for over time and a VCR, which was high-tech back then. I had a stereo system with speakers almost as tall as I am, albums and cassette tapes, movies on VHS and a wicker basket where I kept spools of thread and needles for when I needed to replace a button or hem pants. I had books that I always swore I would die trying to save if a fire broke out. I had a top-of-the-line computer system that was like a second child to me.
I had a life and now I have nothing. Not even a daughter who cares enough to welcome me home.
Vicky asks me if I need
anything else and I tell her that I don’t. I watch her back out of what is now my room and pull the door closed behind her. After she is gone, I unpack the boxes and take stacks of clothes over to the armoire. I pull out drawers and spend endless minutes trying to decide what goes where. I used to have a system; now I can’t remember what that system was. Underwear and socks in the top drawers or the bottom ones? Shirts and sweaters mixed together in the same drawer or separately? Night clothes on the left or the right?
The dilemma stumps me, sweeps my mind clear of any and all thought. I can’t understand what my problem is, why my mind won’t cooperate and make things easy for me. I am not a dumb person, I remind myself. I have a degree in information technology, though I have no idea where it is at the moment, and this isn’t advanced calculus. Something this simple shouldn’t require this much thought. So what is my problem?
Disgusted with myself, I leave the clothes sitting on top of the armoire and push boxes out of my way with my feet. I drop to the floor and lay on my back with my arms crossed over my chest like I’m in a casket. Inside, I was number 1250TN and here on the outside, I am still number 1250TN. My mind has no problem remembering that.
I start to do crunches, a hundred and twenty-five in sixty seconds. I flip over to my stomach and do just as many push-ups, wishing there was a bar bolted to the wall or free weights sitting around for me to use. I can lift a hundred pounds in one hand like it’s nothing, and before I got out, I was trying for a hundred and twenty-five.
When I feel beads of sweat popping out on my forehead, I sit up and lean back against the bed, and stare across the room at the clothes I don’t know what to do with. Then it comes to me slowly but surely. I realize I have encountered my first obstacle.
I have to learn how to make decisions for myself all over again.
They put me in a cell with a deranged-looking woman named Yolanda. She tells me to call her Yo-Yo, if I have to call her anything at all. She likes silence, she says, so could I please keep my mouth shut as much as possible? I look at the elaborately designed braids wrapped around her skull, the scar that stretches from her ear to the corner of her mouth, and wonder what she did to make someone do that to her. Then I decide I don’t care one way or the other as she trains deep-set brown eyes on me and stares like a heathen. There are dark circles around her eyes and they are slightly misaligned. I come to the conclusion that she is more than a little touched in the head, and the confines of our cell suddenly seem smaller.
“Yo’ ass got the top bunk.” She leans against the wall with her arms crossed over her chest, taking me in from head to toe. Matching purple prison scrubs and thin-soled cloth sneakers make us twins, but that’s where the similarities end. “That’s all you got in here, too. Squatter’s rights, girl. Don’t shit in here belong to you but that space up there.” She points at my bunk and then she uses the nail attached to the finger to pick her teeth. “Everything else in here belongs to me.”
I climb up to my bunk and stay there until Yo-Yo leaves. I don’t even let my legs dangle from the edge, I am so off balance and leery of her. One of her eyes has a tendency to wander away from the other one, and it rolls to the side of her face even when she gives me her profile. I’m not sure if she is staring at me, if she really is a mutant, or if she is simply unfortunate. The wandering eye follows me as she makes her way out of the cell and leaves the door open behind her.
I hop down and reach for the thing I have been staring at for the longest time—a stub of a pencil lying on the metal desk bolted to the opposite wall. The lead is dull and it’s barely an inch long, but it is long enough for me to do what I want to do with it. Back on my bunk, I use it to draw on the wall, right where my head will lay when the time comes for me to pretend I can sleep. I make the letters of the name I draw on the wall fat and juicy looking, color them in carefully and then lean back to assess my handiwork. I decide it’s my best work ever, and I toss the pencil across the cell, back to the desktop.
She pokes me in my back harder than she needs to and I realize that I have fallen asleep.
I jump like I’ve been electrocuted and roll over, meet her eyes and silently ask her what her problem is.
“Dinner,” Yo-Yo barks at me. She motions to the tray in her hand like it holds filet mignon instead of four piles of colorized mush. I see what I assume is my tray sitting on the desk and roll my eyes. She leans to the side and admires my artwork on the wall. “What the fuck is that? You got a thing for beige shit, like the chick in that movie? What was the name of it?”
Women of Brewster Place, I think. I remember that one of the lesbian characters in the movie had a thing for beige bras, but I don’t share my recollection with her. We are not in the process of making a love connection. “It’s not a color, it’s a name,” is all I say.
“Thought you said your name was Lena?” she asks, helping herself to the roll on my tray.
“You gonna eat this?”
I shake my head. “My daughter’s name is Beige.”
“You got babies?”
“One.”
“I got four of the little fuckers. Three boys and a girl, like stair steps. How old is yours?”
“Six,” I say, listening to her eat like she doesn’t know what food is.
“She with her daddy?”
Beige’s daddy is so far removed from my reality that it takes me several minutes to conjure up a clear image of his face in my mind. He was an affair gone wrong, someone else’s husband and someone I should’ve never looked at the first time, let alone twice. He doesn’t matter anymore. “With my sister.”
“Mine in foster homes.”
“You miss them?”
Yo-Yo doesn’t answer me for a long time and I wonder if she will. She eats her way through dinner until I hear the spoon scraping the tray, and then she tosses the tray up on the desk noisily. A few minutes later her voice comes at me from below. It hits the back of my head and I know she is stretched out on her back, looking up at me with the one eye that doesn’t wander. She utters a loud belch and then farts.
“It don’t pay to let yourself miss too much of shit in here,” she says. “Heard tell you got a nickel.” A nickel means five years, and I tell her she heard right. “Let me give you a piece of advice then, sweetstuff. Keep your head on straight and do your time. Don’t be getting all caught up in fairytale land, ’cause that shit will get you killed in here. These hoes can sniff weakness like a dog can smell pussy. You don’t need to be pining over no kid, ’cause believe me, she’s way better off than you.”
“You’re saying you don’t think about your kids at all?” My eyebrows climb my forehead in shock. I roll over and look down into her face, searching for the truth, one mother to another.
“I’m saying ain’t nothing I can do for my kids in here and ain’t nothing you can do for yours. You think these motherfuckers give a fuck about you missing your kid? Hell no. Go out there and tell them you miss your kid and they’ll tell you, you should’ve thought about that shit before you did what you did.” Both eyes catch mine and hold on. “Shit, give your kid a few more years and she’ll tell you the same damn thing. So you need to do what you need to do for yourself. In here, you ain’t no mama, you an animal. And roll over and stop staring at me, too. I don’t like that shit.”
I do as I’m told and take my eyes to the wall, to my daughter’s name. Beige. Like the color, but not like the color. Once, I called an 800 number and ordered something I saw on television. Had my order taken by a woman named Beige and fell in love with the name right then and there.
I fall asleep staring at my baby’s name and wake up with it on the tip of my tongue a few hours later. I watch my feet kicking air at the other end of my bunk and see my life flash before my eyes. I pull at the rope around my neck and struggle to breathe, my eyes about to pop out of my head. I’m convinced that my first night in prison will be my last.
Yo-Yo controls the rope and her face looms over mine in the darkness. Her breath leaves
her mouth and seeps into mine, a cloud of foul air that singes the back of my throat. “See what I’m saying, sweetstuff?” she whispers to me. “Caught you tripping, didn’t I? You better snap the hell out of it and real quick, too.” I pull at the rope and scratch my own neck, feel my nails digging into my skin. She smiles. “Told you, everything in here belongs to me. You write on my walls again and I’m cutting your goddamn throat.”
And just like that, she is gone, leaving me gasping for air and feeling like committing murder for the second time in my life. I wonder exactly when the transformation from human being to animal occurs, how it starts, and if I will realize it is happening to me. Then I realize it is probably not a matter of if, but when, and I pray like I have never prayed before. I am scared to death of turning into Yo-Yo.
I don’t even think about what I do two weeks later. What I do think about is the feel of her breath in my mouth the night she strangled me. I think about the smirk that has been on her ugly face ever since, and it is what motivates me to strike back. After she is crazy enough to take me for granted and fall asleep in my presence.
I drop to the floor on the tips of my toes and have my pillow over her face in the blink of an eye. She fights like a jackal, but I come at her like a hyena, pressing my knee into the pillow over her face. She has fucked with the wrong one and I want her to know that. She pushes me off of her, and I go flying across the cell. My back meets the desk and my mouth screams in pain. We fight and fight and fight. Fists fly, hair is pulled, nails dig, and our cell is filled with the sound of heavy breathing and ferocious grunts and groans. She tries to kill me, and I try to convey the message that death is not a part of my plan.
Lights slam on and guards rush into our cell to wrestle us apart. I run my tongue around my teeth, make sure they are all still there, and smile. I don’t even feel the billy club wedged under my chin, pinning me to the wall. I give Yo-Yo my shittiest grin and say, “Caught you tripping, didn’t I?”