“Good morning,” I say.
She glares at me. “Why are you talking to me? I didn’t say you could talk to me.”
“Fine, thanks, and you?” I say.
“Stop talking to me. I didn’t give you permission to talk to me.”
I try my hardest not to laugh at her. Poor lady, I think.
She marches me down several seemingly interminable hallways, up and down elevators. It’s like a fucking maze. I don’t know how they don’t get lost, especially with such low average IQs.
When she dumps me off back where I started, she says, “See you back here again, real soon.”
“You betcha,” I say, giving her a thumbs-up.
Cunt.
They put me in a cell. I have to wait until they can confirm my ride and there’s some trouble. Greg isn’t picking up. I’m starting to panic. I call and call. All I can think is, I am at peace because I choose to be at peace. But this temporary snafu sets me back. I try to breathe. It catches, ragged. The image of me being escorted by Wolf Eyes back to my cell has lodged itself firmly into my well-being. Finally the deputy gets through to him. When I see him, I will kiss him. Then slug him.
Another woman arrives, another inmate being processed out. I compare processing in to processing out. The ratios in terms of numbers are comparable to birth and death rates. More come in than go out. I chew on that for a minute. The woman who arrives is very pretty, closer to my age, with a wide-open face and sparkly eyes. Eyes that are engaged in the world. Smart. The two of us know we are ancient relics in jail, but as such we get the most respect.
We are smiling. We both have rides. While we wait for our street clothes, we are transferred out of one holding cell into another holding cell. Inside my jail-issued duffel is my apple tree. I keep checking on it.
“I’m Serena,” the woman says.
“Hey.”
We exchange the usual Q&A: Why were you here, how long did you do, is this your release date or early? Then she says, “Every day, I was going to court with this bitch who was defending herself on a murder charge. She had all these legal books and legal pads. She killed her own mama.”
“Damn,” I say.
“She snitched on people. That was her thing. She put a lot of people in lockdown. That was one crazy bitch.”
As she’s telling me this, my mind is elsewhere. I am thinking about Starbucks and fresh fruit and pho and Thai food, and sitting at Happy Tom’s eating huevos rancheros with my kid, and eating plain Greek yogurt and Extreme Moose Tracks with chocolate syrup, and sex, and sex, and sex, and no peanut butter, no mushy apples, no hard-boiled eggs, no bread, no dildo hot dogs, no bologna, no plastic bags, no sound of plastic being removed from processed food. I am imagining a life where no one talks about their vaginas at the dinner table.
“So one day, this bitch goes and puts a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in her pants. But she takes the plastic wrapping off on account of the noise it makes.”
“Uh-huh.” I wonder why she’s smuggling PB&J into jail. That would be like smuggling more pain, suffering, and constipation in with her, when it already arrives daily in her plastic breakfast bag.
I spot the deputy from a long ways away, carrying our clothes in the plastic bags they were placed in after strip search that day forever ago. She is ever so slowly making her way to our holding cell.
“Schwartz,” the deputy calls out. She throws my clothes at me. She checks my wristband, cuts it. For the first time since I surrendered, I am no longer 4261531.
“Get changed,” the deputy says. She is all smiles. They are all smiles in receiving and releasing because that’s where the feds hang out watching them.
Serena and I start changing. As she takes off her jail-issued underwear, baring her pussy for the world to see, she finishes the story. She tells me that the woman who’d killed her mom, and snitched on her cellmates, forgot about the open sandwich in her pants. She says, “So we get back to jail and we walk to our dorm and that bitch is saying, ‘My pearly hurts. My pearly hurts.’”
I take off my blues, put on my underwear, my pants, my shirt, my coat, my socks, my shoes. Everything smells like me. Coconut lotion, shampoo. Fresh, sweet, wonderful.
Serena regales me with the story and I am suddenly exhausted from the diet of mundane and trivial gossip I’ve lived on for thirty-seven days. Evidently, the woman who killed her mom contracted some kind of burning, blistery infection from the peanut butter and jelly. I am dressed, waiting for them to let me out. I’m thinking how I ate that shit every day. If it could burn a vagina like that, no wonder my gut was on fire day in and day out.
I don’t want to listen to Serena anymore. I don’t want to talk about vaginas and infections and women who kill their mothers. I want to see my husband. I want to kiss my daughter. I want to sleep on a mattress and not a metal slab. I want so many things. The deputy is coming.
“Schwartz, your ride is here,” she says. “See you back here again real soon.”
They think they are so funny. I turn to Serena. “Good luck,” I say. I notice that once again, but for the last time, I am first to leave a cell.
She’s still laughing. “That stupid bitch,” she says. “She got her pearly all burnt up by peanut butter and jelly. That’s what she get for icing her mama.”
* * *
A few days before my release, I had asked Greg while on our daily call if he could please bring me a peach when he picked me up. Peaches were my favorite fruit. I was salivating for a peach.
When I see him, we hug and kiss. He’s real, it turns out. There’s his body, his gorgeous smell, his ratty T-shirt, his black knit cap, the hair beneath it maybe just a little grayer and finer than before all this happened, and those blue eyes that genuinely still make me blush when he gazes at me that way. Those are his lips. That’s his hand in mine.
Before we leave, I put money on Duckie’s account. She will be leaving in a week, and I promised her (she didn’t ask) that I would help her with her transition out. I have her children’s phone numbers, and in a few days, I will call her daughter. I have Qaneak’s booking number. Though I vow I will never go back to that place again, in two weeks I am back, visiting her, and I do so for two and a half more years until she is sentenced to fifteen years to life and transferred upstate to the California women’s prison.
As for Wynell, I do see her once. She is eight months’ pregnant, homeless, alone. She contacted me through Facebook. I let her sleep on my couch for a couple days. She tells me she wants to give birth out of state so she can have and keep her baby. If she has it here, she tells me, DCFS will take her daughter. I give her $150 for the bus ride, though in my heart of hearts, I know she isn’t going to Vegas, that it’s just her way of asking for money by pretending it’s for the Greyhound. On the outside, she is different. Colder, sadder, rougher. We talk about Lynwood. She remembers the day I moved from Exit Dorm.
“That was a bad day,” she says.
“Yeah, it was.”
Her memory of things seems dampened. She looks exactly like someone who is eight months’ pregnant, living without much in the way of shelter or medical help or healthy food, would look. When we say good-bye, she is crying hard.
“I love you,” I say.
“I love you, too,” she says.
* * *
Greg and I leave the jail. The air is real, with its briney ocean scent. The beach, I had forgotten, was only a few miles west the entire time. We get in the car. It is still filthy, as always. The sun is just peeking over the mountains. So I have confirmation that the sun still exists. So do the mountains for that matter. And on the dashboard is the peach. I am filled with so much joy it spills over into laughter.
“Oh my God, look at that peach,” I say. I glance at him. I feel shy. He leans over, and my heart flips, like it always does. We kiss, and in that private moment where we linger, our brea
th, our eyes, our body, I find home.
“Hi,” he says.
“Thanks for the peach,” I say.
His smile is golden.
I look at the peach. I am torn. Should I eat it? Or should I find a way to preserve it and put it on my altar of precious things at home? Maybe, I think, it is not a good idea to taste too greedily of that bite of freedom.
What I don’t know is this: three years later, my daughter will tell me about her friend’s father, dying of alcoholism. He refuses to find recovery, she will say, because of the “God thing.” Because he doesn’t want people to know he is sick with addiction. Because, even while he is jaundiced, turning yellow, he says he “has it under control.” His pride, like all pride, is the most dangerous weapon on Earth. His will destroy him. I know this from personal experience.
I will tell her that most addicts would rather die than admit they are sick, or get spiritually real about the emptiness within them. Most addicts would rather keep their secrets, believing their disease is shameful, and use themselves up with substances than walk the hard road to freedom. I have been to enough funerals to know this.
“You almost went that way yourself,” she says.
We will lie there on my daughter’s bed, her head resting on my shoulder. Outside the sunlight sparkles through the giant eucalyptus trees and I smell the bracing, lemony scent of their leaves. My daughter will be more beautiful than ever, smart, athletic, and, notably, a kind and contemplative person. She will sing all the time, in the shower, in her room, while walking the dog, or wandering around and staring, the way teenagers do, into the fridge. She will be, to my joy and Greg’s, a happy kid.
“It’s so weird, Mom,” she will say that day, her eyes wandering to the trees, the light, the blue sky, “but I have the family that everyone wants. I am so lucky. I never thought I’d say this, but you’re the only mom I’d ever want.”
Now, though, I sit in the car with Greg. The jail is a monolith of concrete and wire and sorrow to my right. As I look at it, I fully reject then, and forever forward, its phony attempt to shame me, to try and tell me I am bad or somehow defective. I realize the world has it wrong. It is the jail, with its cruelty and false sense of power, and the jailers within, empowered by a culture of abuse, that is shameful. What I know, without anyone having to tell me, is that I am enough. I am a good and lovely woman.
“Get me the fuck out of here,” I say, holding the aromatic peach to my nose. I will save it, I think. No, I will eat it right fucking now.
Breathe in, breathe out.
He zooms the car. We turn left. We enter the freeway, the one I saw every day and every night from my tiny window in the cell I shared with Tiffany. I head toward home, toward my daughter, my dog, my garden, my friends, my life.
Released.
Remember that every prison has a chapel. Travel through the corridors of your own dark stillness until you come to a little room. Inside that room is a tiny spark that never goes out. If you blow on the spark with your full attention you will be able to make a flame. Then light a torch. Examine the walls. See how fragile they are. Look at the face of the jailer.
You are the jailer.
—Tolbert McCarroll, Notes from the Song of Life
Acknowledgments
I handed my editors an infant; they made it a grown-up. Thank you to Becky Cole, for acquiring my story; Kathleen Napolitano, who reminded me all the time how much she loved it; and John Parsley, who is so smart and most assuredly brought this book to its best incarnation. Katie Zaborsky also placed her keen eye and brilliant objectivity directly on the page. Thank you all for your diligence and care.
Much gratitude for Elizabeth Kaplan, who probably never had to wait for a writer to get out of jail before the real work could begin. It should be stated unequivocally how trustworthy and supportive you are and how much I appreciate your wisdom, your business savvy, and your kindness.
My readers: Erika Hayasaki and Luba Dean, thank you both for the many years and massive patience. For reading and editing the bits and pieces here and there: Noel Alumit, Essie Chambers, Anna Vodicka, Hope Edelman, Leslie Lehr, and Greg Littlewood. It takes time, and you gave that gift to me. I am indebted to you.
For time and space: Vermont Studio Center, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, and Playa at Summer Lake. (Thanks for the ice skates, Michael.)
Thank you, Anadel, for being there every single day for me, including while I struggled with these pages. Same goes for Kim, the Empress of Hugs. I also appreciate the people who would not allow me to let this book take over my life—Dennis: Happy Bob’s Day, and thank you for my Sunday texts; and Kathryn McDaniel: your friendship always shines a light on our astonishing journey. Thank you for listening to my story.
Thanks to those people, places, and things that helped me deal with the pain—physical, emotional, and otherwise—especially while writing this book: Dr. Arek Jibillian—“gratitude” is too paltry a word; and “magic hands” Lisa Schwarz. Without you both, the pain of sitting to write this book would have been sheer hell. Thank you, Paul Langlotz, for talking me through the worst of it, but mostly for listening. Jewish Women’s Theatre at the Braid gave me back my career, and because of Tropical, Pathfinders, and H.P., I was restored.
About the Author
Leslie Schwartz is the author of two novels, Jumping the Green and Angels Crest. Her books have been translated into thirteen languages, and Angels Crest, the movie, was released in 2011. Schwartz has an MFA in creative writing, is the recipient of many awards, grants, and fellowships, and has been teaching writing for more than twenty years. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.
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The Lost Chapters Page 19