Freedomland

by Richard Price

  “Hey,” they both said simultaneously, then smiled, Brenda’s smile the broader of the two. Jesse felt unnerved, felt that something was deeply, dangerously wrong with Brenda, nailing it quickly: she was too happy.

  Brenda crossed one leg over the other. She wore paper slippers with cardboard soles.

  “How are you doing?” Jesse asked automatically.

  “How am I doing?” Brenda repeated the question thoughtfully. “I’m OK,” she said slowly, seriously. Then, “Better than OK.”

  “Are they giving you a hard time in here?”

  Brenda shrugged. “I don’t care.”

  “OK.” Jesse nodded, vaguely alarmed. Then, as if to bring Brenda back to a more appropriate frame of mind, she asked, “Were you OK at the wake?”

  “I want to give you this.” Brenda ignored the question, handing Jesse four folded sheets of lined paper, the left vertical edges frilled from being torn out of a child’s composition book. “It’s a dream I had last night.”

  “OK,” Jesse said, accepting it, sliding the paper into her shoulder bag.

  “Because for you?” Brenda gestured to the steno pad. “Writing about this? You haven’t the words.”

  “Words, for…” Jesse let it hang, staring, demanding more, then catching herself, becoming confused, not sure if she was here to work or to talk.

  “For what it felt, feels like. ‘Were you OK at the wake…’” she quoted Jesse, with faint ridicule. “You just can’t…” She nodded to the notepad again. “You don’t have the words. You can’t possibly… just run the dream. Dreams are like, who you are. What really drives you, under all the bullshit. If people want to know about me? I don’t know.” Brenda looked off. “You should just run the dream or something.”

  “OK. I mean, it’s not my call, but…” Jesse trailed off, not knowing what else to say.

  “And I want to give you this,” Brenda said, handing over a fifth piece of paper. “This is for you in private. It’s a list of my favorite songs. I told you I’d make you a tape but I never did, so this is the best I can do now, you know, in here.”

  Jesse scanned the sheet, Brenda’s block writing large and school-girlish, the Ss scooped and curved like the necks of swans, the Is haloed instead of dotted, line after line written in a bold, frenetic hand:

  FOR YOUR PRECIOUS LOVE—Linda Jones

  HIGHER AND HIGHER—Jackie Wilson

  STEAL AWAY—Jimmy Hughes

  WHEN SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH MY BABY—Sam and Dave

  ANY DAY NOW—Chuck Jackson

  COME TO ME (DON’T YOU FEEL LIKE CRYING)—Solomon Burke

  CRY BABY—Garnett Mims

  YOUR GOOD THING IS ABOUT TO END—Mabel John

  WHEN MY LOVE COMES DOWN—Ruby Johnson

  I CAN’T STAND THE RAIN—Ann Peebles

  LITTLE BLUEBIRD—Johnny Taylor

  TRAMP—Otis and Carla

  THE GREATEST LOVE—-Judy Clay

  HAVE MERCY—Don Covay

  ARE YOU LONESOME FOR ME, BABY—Freddie Scott

  HELLO STRANGER—Barbara Lewis

  Beneath this hit parade of lamentation, Brenda had begun a second type of music listing but either had lost interest or was finished after only a few names:

  Joe Tex—THE HEALER

  Percy Sledge—THE CRY BABY

  Curtis Mayfield—SWEET PAIN

  Al Green—

  Aaron Neville—

  “Thank you,” Jesse said quietly, disturbed by this second gift coming on the heels of the written dream—Brenda giving away the store now. “Thanks.” They sat in silence for a moment, Jesse perusing the song titles in order to avoid Brenda’s eyes.

  “You know,” Brenda finally said, “I sit in there, the cell, and I’m, I get very still, inside, outside. I get… and I go back to places, you know, times, days that, I kind of forgot about but they were good. Certain people, certain moments…”

  Brenda went off, looked through Jesse, then came back brightly: “I want to tell you about this one day.”

  “OK,” Jesse said, bracing herself for another giveaway, for whatever intimacies were about to land in her lap. “Please.”

  “Five years ago December,” Brenda began. “That fall? I got a job teaching ESL, English as a Second Language, at this community college in New York. This school, the students, they were from all over the map. And, at the time I was living at home. I had been through this therapy in New York, moved back to New Jersey, and at this point I was like on the tail end of a cocaine… I was still doing it, but I was getting, you know, I couldn’t stand myself. I mean, a cokehead living at home with her mother, so…” She leaned forward, hugging herself. “I got this job. They called it adjunct instructor. It was bullshit. I had one year of college but I told them I was going for a master’s somewhere or other and they didn’t bother to check. They were desperate for teachers. It wasn’t even, I mean, you got paid by the hour like a baby-sitter. Anyways, they gave me this class, five mornings a week, eight in the morning. And at first, I’d show up, just, I’d just throw on some clothes, stagger out of the house, take the PATH into the city, get in there, and, this class, the smell of this class…”

  Jesse began writing.

  “Just listen to me, OK?” Brenda put out a hand, and Jesse stopped.

  “The smell—you walk in, these people, my students, it would be like, cologne, makeup, perfume, hair spray, suits, skirts. It was like walking into a nightclub first thing in the morning, everybody dressed to kill. But, they’d be there, wanting it, you know, Teach me. Very serious, like, focused, hungry for knowledge, for, for, betterment. I mean, we were all the same age, me and them, twenties, early thirties, and they had, you know, families, children, jobs, and still they were coming in 8:00 A.M. on the dime five days a week for me. Me. And, honestly, I didn’t have shit. I didn’t have, I had no idea what I was doing there, I had no idea what I was doing anywhere.

  “I was like, like egg yolk. I was a live-at-home, cokehead, fuckup fuck-all. And so like the term starts, and I’d stumble into class five minutes late, ten minutes, half asleep, open this color-by-numbers textbook the ESL department gave me, and I couldn’t diagram a sentence if you paid me, and, well, that’s what they were doing, paying me, but I was, I’d just wing it—vocabulary words, the difference between T-O, T-O-O, T-W-O, whatever.

  “And, at the end of the first week, this Puerto Rican guy in the class comes up to me, my age, a little older, says to me, ‘Do you want us to respect you?’ And what do you say. ‘Sure. Yes.’ And, he like, flicks the bottom of my shirt, like…” Brenda reached across to Jesse’s midriff and soundlessly snapped her fingers as if trying to remove something odious from the tips. He says to me, ‘Then you start respecting us…’

  “He walks out and I’m freaked. I know what he’s talking about, but it’s even worse. I look down to where he touched my shirt? And I see that I came into school that day still wearing my pajama top. I was so ashamed, I just…

  “OK. The next Monday, I come in on time, I’m dressed decent, I hadn’t done coke over the weekend, I still don’t know how to teach this class, but I’m, I want to try. The guy? He’s not there. He’s gone. I find out he requested a transfer to another ESL section.

  “OK. So I started to try to teach. I start—subject, predicate, objective clause, unobjective clause—who gives a shit. But I come onto something. We were talking in class, and, I don’t know how it came up but we were talking about abortion, something in the paper that day, and the students went nuts, arguing, mostly against abortion, but not all. But I noticed that if they got, hot about something they somehow found the words they needed. So that’s what I did; every week I’d write something on the blackboard to make them go crazy, some issue like welfare, curse or cure; death penalty, yes or no; school prayer, castration for rapists, whatever. And on Mondays? We’d just talk, yell, argue, get it all out. On Tuesdays they’d write down their arguments—first draft—I’d read it, make notes to them. Wednesday second draft—I’d r
ead it, make notes. Thursday final draft. Friday you read your stuff out loud to the class. It was, it was definitely engaging.

  “They still, I mean, after two months of being in my class, this woman leaves me this note: ‘I am please to be excuse for tomorrow I am to be a doctors appointment.’ So there’s that…

  “And on the home front? Me? By, say, early October? I had pretty much cleaned up on coke, managed to move out of the house again, got a one-room on the Lower East Side, walk to work, and, the class is fun. I’m never late, I’m not coming in like a pig. Then in mid-October? I run into that guy who transferred out on me. I see him in a coffee shop across from the school, and I can tell, just the way he’s looking at me, smiling at me, that he knows. He knows what I’ve been through, the changes I made, and his eyes, it’s like, ‘Good for you. Bravo,’ and I started to cry.”

  Brenda broke it off, a trembling finger sliding along her cheekbone.

  “I’m sitting there crying, he comes over, sits down, and, what can I say. By mid-November? I’m pregnant. This is Ulysses I’m telling you about, this ex-student of mine. I go in to teach every day, I never had morning sickness, I don’t know why not, and I don’t tell him.

  “I don’t tell anybody. I’m thinking, Should I abort? Should I keep the baby? Should I keep the baby and lose Ulysses? But he’s the father. Should I abort, then adopt, so I’d be free of any kind of marriage? I even have this fantasy of opening it up to the class—you know, hot-button topic for the week—although this class, my students, they’re like the most conservative people I ever met in my life, you know, coming over here, starting from the bottom, climbing up, up. So, I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.

  “But so the last week of school? December 15. Ten to eight in the morning. I’m walking to class: Should I have an abortion—yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. I’m losing my mind.” I’m walking, and all of a sudden Ulysses has a hand on my arm and he pulls me into a stairwell. He’s got something to tell me. Very solemn, very, he’s truly sorry, but he’s decided to go back to Puerto Rico. He got a good job offer down there. Ever so sorry. So he goes, and I never told him, I never, I’m like, thank you, God. I go into class that day, Monday, I’m feeling great, and I tell the class, I say, this coming Friday? The last day of school? The hell with it. Let’s just have a little Christmas party. Let’s just have a party in class, it’s been a tough semester, blah, blah…

  “OK. So, I come in that Friday, ten to eight in the morning, the entire class is in there waiting for me and like, they had showed up, for a party. I just meant we’ll all have coffee and cake, salute each other, but, no. They showed up, like, suits, dresses, hairdos, wine, a boom box, music, popcorn, pretzels, cousins, children, parents. I mean, they wanted to celebrate. They had, I mean for them it was—coming through this class—it was an accomplishment, a watermark, their first term as a college student and they…”

  Brenda leaned forward, touched Jesse’s hand.

  “Jesse, I had no idea. Anyways, we were dancing, I posed for pictures shaking their hands, shaking their cousins’ hands, holding their babies, we’re all laughing, hugging, kissing, we’re all teary and at some point near the end, they stopped the music and they presented me with a wristwatch. Like a thank you present for being their teacher—you know, To Sir with Love. And, I remember accepting that watch and I had no illusions about being a good teacher, but thinking, Today I’m a teacher.

  “And not only that, but my family? At least the Italian side, my mother’s side? They were the students in here, in a class like this, what, seventy years ago? Eighty years ago?

  “And here I am, and I’m, I’ve brought my own family full circle, I’ve brought us around the room to the teacher’s desk. And my students? Now it, it’s their turn to start up the generations. And I just remember standing there, taking that wristwatch, and feeling so—I knew who I was, I knew where I was, I had my baby inside me, my students around me, it was Christmas….”

  A silence came over the room. Jesse looked at her hands, absorbing the fullness of the picture Brenda was painting, getting lost in it, and was a while in becoming aware that the silence enveloping them was false, not a silence at all. And when she looked up, she saw that Brenda was streaming tears, hand to forehead, her mouth locked open in a yawning, soundless gawp. Jesse had no idea what to do, how to help, so she just sat there until Brenda regained control of herself, palming the look of suffocating grief from her face as if by a parlor trick.

  “How long did you teach there, Brenda?” Jesse asked calmly.

  “That was it,” she said. “I wasn’t rehired.” She looked away, shrugged. “You can’t fool everybody.”

  One of the guards coughed, startling Jesse, who realized that she had been oblivious to their presence, three of them standing there in plain sight against the walls.

  “Jesse,” Brenda said, almost brightly, “You know who comes to see me?” Jesse waited. “My mother. She comes…” Brenda looked off before continuing in a comic huff. “Now she comes.”

  Jesse gave it a small smile, disturbed by how quickly Brenda was able to lighten her tone.

  “But I’m glad to see her. I never thought I would say this, but I’m glad to see her.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She’s my mother. You got to have somebody in your corner, right?”

  Jesse fought the urge to say, “What about me?” She had decided that this was no longer an interview.

  “Listen. That detective, Lorenzo? Do you ever see him?” Brenda’s slipper flapped against her heel as she nervously flexed her crossed leg.

  “Sure,” Jesse said. “Can I help you with something, Brenda?”

  “When you see him? Tell him, tell him that I thought he was very patient with me. He was, he saw right through me, but he was so patient. He didn’t have to be that way. He didn’t… tell him…” Brenda’s eyes shone with a bright, trembling sadness, an oddly buoyant despair. “Tell him, tell him I love him.” Her voice became feathery, broken. “I love him for how he dealt with me.”

  “Brenda,” Jesse half whispered, having no idea what to say beyond her name but reaching out, touching her knee.

  “And I need for you to tell him I’m sorry.” Brenda forged on, then added in a husky whisper, “and that I’m ashamed.” A farewell speech. “And Jesse,” she said, “there’s something I need to tell you.” She gripped Jesse’s wrist, her fingers cold, slightly damp, her touch unbearable. “I was thinking about you telling me—you know—lying to me about having a child?”

  “Yes.” Jesse said it as both a question and a confession.

  “I just wanted to tell you that I don’t, I know you had a job to do so, I mean, I don’t even remember how it came up. I mean, I don’t remember a lot of things but I just, it came about. It just came about, and I don’t think of you as a ruthless individual or anything, and I think you feel bad about it, and, don’t. It’s OK.”

  Another farewell speech, another parting gift. Jesse eased her hand free. “Brenda, are you going somewhere?”

  “What?” She cocked her head, an alert half smile on her face.

  “What…” Jesse challenged her, leaned forward.

  Brenda’s eyes fixed on Jesse’s hands. Her smile expanded meaninglessly. Jesse hunched forward even further, lowered her voice. “Read my mind, Brenda. What am I thinking…”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Brenda said, her voice dropping to Jesse’s murmurous level. “They’re way ahead of you.” She nodded in the direction of the guards. “That’s why they call it suicide watch.”

  Jesse sat in Ben’s car and read Brenda’s dream.

  Unlike the bold, almost juvenile hand that had block printed the list of favorite songs, Brenda’s script was cramped low to the line and uniform, charging across the page like an army of ants.

  I’m in bed with a man and this man, while asleep, is shoving me off the bed in a dream-induced impersonal fit of revulsion and I am overcome with a wave of sadness and abandonment.


  My tears, soft and visible only to me.

  Then, still in his sleep the man changes course and lifts me back up to the bed. Then he wakes up and holds me in full and conscious tenderness and I am filled with this feeling of cloudlike happiness and love.

  I say “I love you” in a soft voice that is strange to me in its conviction. Then we both sink into this grateful tenderness with each other. Its joy for now and ever after.

  Then I hear a child calling out from another room. “It’s dark.”

  I say to the man, still in that strange soft voice, “I’ll get him.”

  I go to this child who is laying in his pajamas on a couch in a living room, who I thought was my own son but is not, who is a child that Ulysses has had with another woman. But they must have lost or abandoned him because I know that he’s parentless now, this boy in front of me, but then I think, at least he’s got me (even though I am not a blood relation let alone his birth mother), and I tenderly bring this boy into bed with us and I say to him “Do you like him?” meaning the man.

  The boy says “I like him.”

  I say “Would you like him to be your new daddy if I marry him?”

  The boy says “Oh yes!” in this Candyland voice, but sincere.

  “It’s our secret but we’re going to be a family,” I say.

  This boy is beside himself with heart-joy as am I, as is the man.

  Then we are mounting an elephant. The three of us are high up wrapped in elephant skin, elephant ears, and we are so together, so whole, that the air is singing and then it hits me—if I have a baby with this new man of mine, this child right here, so recently inducted into our “whole love,” will go crazy with fear of it all being jeopardized; the balance of things, and this new family could even turn dangerous to him, terrorize him with loss-fear

  But then I think he’s got nine months to get more secure with our family, so maybe he’ll be on more solid ground by then. At least nine months because I haven’t had sex yet, haven’t made love to this man yet, this dream of a man.