The Lost Chapters

by Leslie Schwartz

  “You have a nicer bed than me,” I said. “So that’s good.”

  He looked at me with deep, searching eyes.

  “And toys.”

  He put his head down on my leg.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “One day you will be free.”

  I sat quietly for another hour or two alone out there with the dog before finally I was marched back to my cell. Tiffany said something to the deputy that got me locked back up. Something like, “She’s just faking it. She does it all the time.”

  “You’re a bitch, Tiffany,” I said. “Why can’t you mind your own damned business?”

  “I was just worried about you,” she said.

  “No you weren’t.”

  Her accusation stung. I was not a histrionic in jail; I was a stoic. That day, though, I was hurting beyond my usual ability to assuage it.

  The next day at program, I looked all over for Miss Brown. I saw some of her homegirls and approached them. One of the homegirls was holding a plastic bag that looked like it contained a nest or maybe some yarn. I couldn’t tell.

  “Where’s Miss Brown?” I asked.

  “She gone upstate this morning.”

  “Oh,” I said. My heart fell.

  Then I looked at the plastic bag the woman held and saw a red streak.

  “What the hell?” I said.

  “Oh, that’s Miss Brown’s wig. They wouldn’t let her take it, so I bought it.”

  “What’d you pay for it?”

  “Some stamps. And envelopes. That’s all she got to take with her.”

  I walked away. I wondered how bad it was for Miss Brown. How naked she felt without her wig. How hard it was for her to give up that one piece of dignity. I wondered how long her wig would stay in that plastic bag, doing nothing for no one. It was one of the few times in jail that I cried.

  * * *

  I chose one Victorian novel and one post-Victorian novel to read in jail, because, for me, reading relics like these is like watching movies. They arrived in the same batch, at the end of my time there. The first, A Tale of Two Cities, I selected out of guilt. When I’d read it in high school, I found it so inscrutable that I never finished it and looked it up somewhere—they didn’t have Google then but they had something like CliffsNotes—and bluffed my way through the paper I had to write. So I thought, in honor of my beloved AP English teacher Ms. Janowsky, I would finally read it.

  I still found it inscrutable. And one more time, I never finished it. It didn’t help that the book was some cheap-ass printing with no margins and a tiny font. The writing was so dense and, for me, unevocative (forgive me, Dickens) that I just decided I’d be cool with going to my grave not having ever read it. If I met Ms. Janowsky in the afterlife, I’m sure I’d hear all about it. I imagined our encounter in the clouds, Ms. Janowsky in her polyester slacks, her short hair, her big 1970s glasses. All we’d do is gab about books for eternity. Ah, heaven.

  I also wanted to read Ethan Frome, as I was a huge fan of Edith Wharton. Wharton was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize three times and won in 1920, the first woman ever to win the honor, and one of only 47, compared to 825 men, who’ve won since the prize’s inception. She was something of a literary hero to me, even though typically I was not a fan of the super-rich. She was a woman of means, who married well, but she had to fight tooth and claw to write and to educate herself. That her career thrived in the 1920s was a testament to her ability to rise above the confining social and cultural structures that caused most women to suffer back then.

  Wharton attempted to write her first novel at age eleven. At fifteen, she published her first translation of a German poem. Unfortunately, since upper-class women’s names were only published in relation to their engagements, their marriages, the birth of their children, and of course their deaths, she had to use a different name. The name she chose was a friend of her father’s, E. A. Washburn. Washburn eventually became an ordained minister who wrote Social Law of God and was a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson. She did earn fifty bucks for the publication. I always wonder what she did with the money, which in 1885 was a princely sum. (About $1,200 today.)

  In 1914, as World War I raged, Wharton opened a “workroom” for unemployed women in Paris, where the ladies were fed, clothed, and paid one franc a day. A fledgling sewing business of poor, destitute women began to thrive under her stewardship. After the Germans bombed Belgium, Wharton founded the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee and gave shelter and sanctuary to nine hundred refugees who fled their homes.

  I had never read Ethan Frome. When it arrived, like A Tale of Two Cities, the poorly bound paperback was flimsy and the font size so minuscule I almost broke an eyeball reading it. But I loved the book. If you ever feel like crap about your own life, this is the book to read. Everything will look better afterward.

  I did not read this book to analyze it. I read it for pure entertainment, the way people read Fifty Shades of Grey and the Twilight series. Here’s the Hollywood synopsis version of the story: In the novel, the title character, Ethan Frome, is married to a woman named Zeena. He falls in love with Zeena’s cousin, a young, penniless girl named Mattie. Zeena, who is always sick (read: bitter malingerer), brings Mattie into the house to live with them in exchange for doing the housework. One day, Zeena wakes up in one of her scary sick moods. She announces she is going overnight to a new doctor. She leaves Ethan and Mattie alone and the two lovebirds share a romantic dinner. But the cat breaks the pickle dish. I love this detail. Of all things, a pickle dish. Of course it was a wedding gift. (Wharton and novelists of that era in general weren’t known for their subtlety.)

  When Zeena returns home and finds the pickle dish in pieces, she convulses into a tantrum. Ethan explains that the pickle dish was broken by the cat, but Zeena doesn’t believe it. She’s no dummy. She’s figured out that her husband has a thing for Mattie, so she announces that Mattie will be leaving the following day. At first, Ethan thinks he’ll run away with Mattie. But then he chickens out, blaming money and guilt for not allowing him to follow his heart. As Ethan drives Mattie to the train, they decide to sled down the infamous hill where, at the bottom is the “death” tree, a giant elm that could kill the careless sledder. The idea is that since they can’t have each other, they might as well kill themselves.

  Mattie whispers hotly into Ethan’s ear, “Right into the big elm. You said you could. So ’t we’d never have to leave each other any more.”

  When I read this I thought of punk rocker Sid Vicious and his lover, Nancy Spungen, whose codependent relationship ended in her death and eventually his death by overdose in the claustrophobic Chelsea Hotel in New York City. I saw Mattie and Ethan as the 1920s New England equivalent—albeit without the vomiting, the heroin, and the knives. They had that desperate passion and the same kind of death wish. The “if I can’t have you, I’ll kill you” sort of thing.

  Ethan responds to her idea with: “Why, what are you talking of? You’re crazy!” He groans. The words are “like fragments torn from his heart.” But she convinces him that if he doesn’t do it, she will be destitute and alone. He insists that she sit behind him even if it means he won’t be able to steer.

  “Because I want to feel you holding me,” he says, a little creepily.

  They take off, faster and faster until they smash into the elm but then the unthinkable happens. They don’t die. They would have been better off throwing themselves into an oncoming train. Mattie is permanently brain damaged, and Ethan has destroyed his spine. Zeena gets herself together enough to take on the lifelong task of caring for both of them. In punishing irony, Ethan’s dream did come true—he spent the rest of his days with his forbidden love, but unfortunately she was crazy and his mean old wife was a constant presence between them.

  The moral of the story: that’s what you get for not following your heart.

  Though Ethan and Mattie never c
onsummated their love, I might argue that the whole sleigh ride thing was a giant metaphor for passionate sex. The language is feverish and lusty. “Her breath on his neck set him shuddering.” “There was a sudden drop, then a rise, and after that another long delirious descent.” “They were flying indeed, flying far up into the cloudy night.”

  As they near the final moment—that shattering orgasmic deathly moment—“her blood seemed to be in his veins.” Finally, “There was a last instant when the air shot past him like millions of fiery wires; and then the elm . . .”

  It seemed like “elm” was code for “orgasm,” I remember thinking. But was I reading this like a sex scene—and a pretty spicy one at that—because I was locked up with a bunch of vaginas and I hadn’t had sex in weeks? How could the most depressing story in the entire world make me think of Greg? How I missed him in that moment as those two crazy kids smashed themselves so lovingly into a tree.

  It was perhaps the perversion of being locked up that brought on my desire to make love to my husband at that moment, but it was no less a response that came from the true, subaqueous, down-reaching love that Greg and I had for each other. I remembered the day we met. The story sounds like it could come from the pages of a Victorian novel so I won’t write it down. But there were gazes across the room, the sense of light, the magnetic drawing together. He was the nicest man I’d ever met. And he stayed that way, throughout everything. He never left me, and though in the deepest, darkest days of my addiction he had no choice but to take our daughter and leave the house—an act of courage that only broadened and deepened my respect for him—he never, ever, ever left me.

  Now I was stuck in a twenty-five-hundred-woman jail (about a thousand over capacity) with a bunch of horny women. Heterosexual, gay, both, neither. Some women were sleeping with the male deputies—I remember one inmate’s blatant affair with this bald, skinny, five-foot-nothing deputy. I remember he had really small hands. Those two didn’t even try to hide it when they disappeared into the bathroom. Though this woman wasn’t in it for the drugs, either.

  Sex really was everywhere. I remember one time in church, two women started macking on each other. The minister practically hemorrhaged with shock. She started preaching, the way you’ve seen it on TV, about how gays were going to hell. The minister knew the verses by heart, and she started expulsing them, droplets of spit showering the front-row faithful. I could not stop laughing. It was one of the bravest acts of defiance I had ever seen.

  But by the end, I wouldn’t care if I never saw another vagina again. Or talked about vaginas. Or heard about vaginas. One thing jail taught me was the myriad names we have for our golden pearls.

  Culo

  Chuff

  Flower

  Pucha

  Vajayjay

  Cooch

  V

  Puss

  Concha

  Snatch

  Gash

  Mi culo

  I remember one night at dinner, a random group of us had gathered at a table: LaRue; Miss Brown; Veronica (“Mi culo be lonely”) Vegera; JaQuanda, whose thighs were bigger than my entire body; Straight Crazy Wanda and her lesbian bunkie, Carl (short for Carla); and two women from 18th Street gang, covered in tats of La Virgen and the names of their baby daddies, and their babies, and their other baby daddies, and their other babies. And their homies who were killed in the “war” and their abuelas who raised them, and maybe a teardrop, if they were old enough because that was so nineties.

  Tiffany was saying, “I just discovered that Keefe coffee makes for a great foundation base!”

  It was hot dog night. I don’t eat pig, so I put mine up for grabs.

  “Who wants this?”

  Practically all of them dove on top of me. Everyone had to eat their feelings as much as possible, so primo handouts like meat were golden.

  Carl won.

  “Thanks,” she said. Waving the hot dog I gave her around in the air, without its bun, she said, “One to eat, and one to feed my snatch with later.”

  * * *

  Now, counting down for my release date . . . eight days, seven days, six, five . . . I was viewing Ethan and Mattie’s suicide love pact as one of the most erotic sex scenes I’d ever read. Contorted, twisted jail. How I missed my husband. I would have given anything at that moment to touch his face. Or his hands. Greg has the most beautiful hands. I would have given anything to get out of a place where every single woman of age menstruated at the same time. Where vaginas were meal topics, and hot dogs substitutes for vibrators.

  “I miss Greg,” I said to Tiffany.

  This was a mistake. Because any time you said anything to Tiffany, it inevitably became about her. Within moments she was talking about her boyfriend in Texas who was going to send her money.

  I picked the book back up and finished it as she blabbed on. One of my favorite quirks of the book was the copious number of ellipses Wharton used. There are fifty in the prologue (yes, I counted them, because in jail you count everything). At the end of Chapter 9, I counted forty-three of them. I can’t be sure if these counts are accurate given that I didn’t really trust my printing of the book, but the point is, there were a lot of ellipses.

  What I love about ellipses is they indicate the thing that’s been left out. In the story, the most important parts are left out, just like they were in Kingston’s chapter “No Name Woman.” We don’t really know Zeena’s story, and we don’t really know Mattie’s either. The only relevant points—and this was clearly intentional on Wharton’s part—were how financially destitute most women were and how few opportunities, if any other than marriage, there were for women of their time.

  The ellipses were a brilliant literary choice. At first, I had to ask why, if Wharton was such a true feminist and badass social activist, she would leave out pressing details about the women. But then, of course, this is the genius of Wharton, who wanted to draw attention to the fact that women’s stories are always left out. Even in the end, we actually don’t learn perhaps one of the most crucial details of the story. We learn about the sledding “accident” from Ruth, who is in the story from beginning to end. Ruth is a fairly reliable character. She was friends with Mattie and knew the story all too well. She explains what happened after Mattie was taken in.

  They gave her things to quiet her, and she didn’t know much till to’rd morning, then all of a sudden she woke up just like herself, and looked straight at me out of her big eyes and said . . .

  But we never find out what she said. I almost threw the book across the cell when I read that sentence. But again, it was a brilliant move. All we know is that Ruth was frightened by what Mattie said and wouldn’t repeat it. And isn’t this just the story of women’s lives even now? So many scandalous, shameful, unmentionable secrets: the beatings, the rapes, the incest.

  What did she say to Ruth? Sitting in my cell, I tried to imagine. Maybe she said she was pregnant. Or that they’d had sex. Maybe she told Ruth the truth—they’d flown into that elm tree on purpose. Or that she yearned for God, or that she wished she could work, or how she wanted to write a book before she died, or that she dreamed of living alone unencumbered by marriage, or together with a woman. Maybe that she thought she was beautiful.

  In the end, Ruth says, “I don’t see’s there’s much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; ’cept that down there they’re all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues.”

  What the heck? What in the world did Wharton mean by that? Did she mean that it’s a shame that women always have to hold their tongues? Or did she mean thank God for the grave so women will finally keep their mouths shut? I think she meant that women’s lives are so devalued—in jail, so overprosecuted; out there, so hobbled by isolation and dependency—that they have internalized their status in the world to the point of acting counter to their own best i
nterests. Just like Mattie, who thought the best solution was to bash herself into a tree.

  Zeena was bitter and jealous. The pool of dependency was shallow and the pickings slender. There weren’t enough men to go around. But Wharton literally “crippled” Mattie, making her a raging bitch in illness and frustration. She seemed to be saying that in a world of oppression even the hopeful end up bitter when resources are scarce and a woman’s worth is constantly belittled and scorned.

  The secrets of chronic abuse, of chronic misogyny, of being chronically underpaid, of being chronically raped, sexualized, and brutalized—these secrets kill us. The shame blisters, flames, and burns. Sometimes the only way to deal with that—for some women at least, for the saddest ones like those who would vote against their own interests, for example—is to adopt the prevailing culture’s abuse, and incarcerate their own self-worth and ram themselves into their own metaphorical elm tree on their way down the icy path.

  * * *

  The women in jail had their secrets. Wynell told me hers. So did Duckie. But one thing I celebrated was that few of the women there kept their mouths shut. Even if in a general way, across the board, Lynwood was a sad campus of self-loathing, I knew that there was also a vivid celebration of outrage, of joy, raunchy, muscular, and brave.

  Many of the women were there behind their men. Domestic abuse, for instance. I saw one woman come in with the most hideous beat-up face, to the point that she would probably be blind in one eye for the rest of her life. Her man had beaten her up. She told me he’d gone to jail, too, but he was already out. They were charging her, not him, with domestic violence. I had met some women who said they were locked up for selling drugs for their men. And one woman had written a fake prescription so she and her man could get high on oxy. “I took the risk,” she said. “I didn’t want him to beat the shit out of me again.”

  My fellow inmates were not silent women. These were women who knew how to get what they wanted, even if it meant manipulating the system. Unlike Ethan Frome’s women, with their secrets, those I met in jail were open books. After I was released, I often wished that there was some way to take the whole lot of us, educate us, gives us something to eat other than McDonald’s, free us from the bondage of drugs and alcohol, provide us with jobs, and then see what would happen for women’s rights on the outs.