Eileen, page 10
The play went on, Joseph and Mary reciting lines sometimes stiffly, sometimes with tongue-in-cheek bravado. More children in multicolored robes appeared, heads bowed in embarrassment or boredom. Their voices were barely audible through the taunts and laughter from the boys in the crowd. One of the players, a younger child, began to cry, chin wobbling, jaw gritted. That was when Rebecca stood up, scowling, and trudged back up the aisle, her pendant bouncing between her small bosoms as she strode. I watched her. Her body was very beautiful, slender as a ballerina and just as tense. She noticed me when she reached the back of the chapel, then waved and shook her head in disbelief, mouthed something I couldn’t decipher, and walked out. I remember thinking, “We are united now, us against them.” I would adopt her rage, or pretend to at least, if it meant I could be on her side. That’s what it felt like.
• • •
It wasn’t that I didn’t care at all about the boys. It was just that I was young and miserable and had no way of helping them. I felt, in fact, that I was one of them. I was no worse or better. I was only six years older than the oldest of the boys in there. Some of them looked like men already—tall, lanky with beards and mustaches coming in and big, thick hands, low voices. They were mostly white from blue-collar families, but there were quite a few black boys, too. I liked those boys the best. I sensed they understood something the others didn’t. They seemed to be more relaxed, to breathe slightly more deeply, to wear perfect death masks while the other boys winced and frowned and spat and chided one another like little children, brats in a schoolyard. I often wondered what they all thought of me when they saw me standing outside the door during visitations, if they even noticed me at all. They rarely looked my way, never once lifted their grainy, warm slow eyes to mine in recognition. I thought perhaps they couldn’t identify me from one day to the next, as though my role were played by innumerable similar-looking young women. Or maybe they sat with their mothers during visitation and called me “that bitch,” and motioned with their chins when my head was turned and I was thinking of Randy and not listening. Or maybe they said, “She’s the only one I don’t hate.” Or maybe they thought I was crazy. I certainly could have passed for crazy on days when I’d not slept and showed up unkempt and hungover, rolling my eyes at every noise and gnashing my teeth at every flicker of light. In my childish self-centeredness, I fantasized that this was what the black boys talked about with their mothers: how much pain Eileen is in, how Eileen seems to need a friend, how Eileen deserves better. I hoped they saw right through my death mask to my sad and fiery soul, though I doubt they saw me at all.
I wouldn’t be the first to admit that working as a young woman in an all-male institution had its perks. This is not to say that my position at Moorehead gave me any sense of my power as a female, nor did it bring me closer to realizing any imagined romantic encounters—none of that nonsense. But working at Moorehead did give me a sneak peek into the male disposition. I could, at times, stand quietly and observe the boys like animals in a zoo—how they moved, breathed, all the nuanced gestures and attitudes that made each of them seem special. It was through studying the comportment of imprisoned youngsters that I developed my understanding of the strange spectrum of male emotions. Shrugging meant “I’ll punch you later.” Smiling was a promise of undying love and affection or severe hatred, cutthroat fury. Did I derive erotic pleasure from looking at these boys? Only a little, honestly, since I didn’t get to observe them on a regular basis, and never in their natural state. I only watched them filing in and out of assembly meetings or the cafeteria, and during their visits with their mothers. I wasn’t in a position to observe them at rest in their bunks, at work in the rec room, or playing in the yard, where I imagine they were more at ease, more animated, and expressed more subtlety, more vulnerability, humor, spontaneity. In any case, I liked their fluctuating, miserable faces. The best was when I could see the hard face of a cold-hearted killer breaking through the chubby cheeks and callow softness of youth. That thrilled me.
It may not have been at that particular Christmas assembly performance, but I remember a boy who played Mary ripping out the pillow from under his costume and throwing it on the ground and sitting on it. A wise man mimed a strip tease once. So the boys were charming in a way. Would I miss them once I was gone? Of course I wouldn’t, and I didn’t miss them, though I wondered, staring at the backs of their heads in the chapel that day, if I’d remember any of their faces, if I’d be sorry if any of them died. Would I have helped them if I could have? Would I have sacrificed anything for their benefit? The answer was a shame-faced but honest no. I was selfish, solely concerned with my own wants and needs. I remember watching Randy standing there in the dark of the auditorium. I wondered if his nether regions were squashed inside his pants. I imagined he must have kept them to one side to accommodate the way the pants were made. They were tight. I can’t bring back the precise image right now, but I regularly studied the arrangement of folds in the groin area that would have suggested which side he preferred. I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the male parts. I don’t actually remember seeing any male parts in my father’s dirty magazines, now that I think of it, though they were inferred, I guess. My knowledge was limited to anatomical drawings. I’d sat through health class sophomore year of high school, after all. Sweating behind that hot spotlight, I worried that my inexperience with men would make Rebecca think I was childish and pathetic. If she found out I’d never had a boyfriend, she would dismiss me, I feared.
Once the drama onstage had unraveled, the warden reappeared and started a long soliloquy on the nature of sin. I abandoned my post behind the spotlight and left the chapel to stroll down the prison halls, hoping to run into Rebecca. The rec room and offices were empty. The library, which held mostly religious tracts and encyclopedias, the dining hall with its long steel tables strewn with dirty plastic cutlery—all was quiet. The boys’ sleeping quarters were in the far back. The small windows there looked out on the rolling, snow-filled dunes. The ocean beyond like a canyon of woe, tumbling and icy all day and night, was so thunderous, I pictured God himself emerging from the water, laughing at us all in spite. It was easy to imagine the depressive thoughts that view must have inspired in those little boys. The windows were at such a height from the floor that one had to either stoop down or kneel to get a good look out there. I listened to the waves rumbling in the empty room for a moment. Bunk beds lined the circumference of the room, which was bell-shaped and had lines painted on the floor in guiding paths that showed where to stand during morning announcements, where to kneel at night to pray, which way to walk to the showers, which way to the cafeteria. The baby-blue laminate squeaked under my feet so loudly on my way out, I thought I’d stepped on a mouse.
I remember scurrying back up to the kitchen and stealing a carton of milk from the vacant cafeteria line. It was a very impressive kitchen, all gray steel, heavy machinery. When the boys were being punished for bad behavior, they were made to do double duty washing pots and pans and forced to sleep in a room that had been the old meat locker behind the kitchen—solitary confinement. They called that room “the cave.” A boy sent to the cave would not be allowed out except to use the shower and wash more dishes. He’d eat his meals in there, use a bucket as a toilet. I remember that bucket was of great interest to me. As one might guess, I was easily roused by the grosser habits of the human body—toilet business not least of all. The very fact that other people moved their bowels filled me with awe. Any function of the body that one hid behind closed doors titillated me. I recall one of my early relationships—not a heavy love affair, just a light one—was with a Russian man with a wonderful sense of humor who permitted me to squeeze the pus from his pimples on his back and shoulders. To me, this was the greatest intimacy. Before that, still young and neurotic, just allowing a man to listen to me urinate was utter humiliation, torture, and therefore, I thought, proof of profound love and trust.
There was a boy who’d been in the cave for several weeks. I went around back and found the old meat locker whose original stainless steel door had been replaced by a heavy iron one with a small window, and padlocked. The Polk boy was inside, sitting on his cot, staring at the wall. I recognized him as the Polk boy from the day he’d arrived at Moorehead a few weeks earlier. My father had been following stories about him in the Post. During the intake procedure, the boy had been silent and withdrawn. He hadn’t struck me at first as particularly attractive or special. He had a stiff posture, I remember, and was thin but had broad shoulders—the awkward confluence of a young boy’s ease and a man’s imposing heft and brutishness. There were newly tattooed letters on the knuckles of his right hand but I couldn’t make them out clearly. I watched as he lifted his gaze as though reading something written on the ceiling. His eyes were light, skin olive, and his hair shorn and brown. He seemed contemplative, wistful, sad. The saddest boys at Moorehead were the runaways locked up for vagrancy or prostitution. How much, I wondered as I watched through the window, would it cost to defile a young boy like this one? He had intelligent eyes, I thought, long elegant limbs, a pensive tilt to his head. I hoped he’d charged a lot, whatever he’d done. Back then I still pictured male prostitutes working in service to wealthy housewives, entertaining them while their husbands were away on business—I was that naive. I watched as the boy bent his neck this way and that, sensually, as though to relax himself. He yawned. I don’t think he saw me through the window. To this day, I don’t know that he ever even knew my name. I watched as he lay down on the cot, turned on his side, closed his eyes and stretched. For a minute he seemed to be falling asleep. Then his fingers, mindlessly it seemed, fell to his groin area. I held my breath as I watched him cup his genitals under his uniform. His body curled up like a small animal. In my effort to understand the movements of his hand, I pressed my face to the window. My tongue, cold from the milk, met the surface of the glass. I watched for a minute or two, rapt, stunned, mystified until noise from the hall made me jump and scurry back up to the office. I really don’t think the boy saw me. I learned later on he was only fourteen. He could have passed for nineteen, twenty. I wasn’t immune to him either.
• • •
That afternoon, as Mrs. Stephens was putting on her coat to leave for the day, I deigned to ask her what the boy had done to get put into solitary.
“Polk,” she said in a huff, double-chinned. She pulled linty woolen mittens over her fat, chapped hands. “Troublemaker,” she said. “Nasty boy.” It strikes me now that I was relentlessly unforgiving of Mrs. Stephens. Everything she did I interpreted as a personal affront, as a direct attack of some kind. Though I never retaliated, I considered her my enemy. It’s true she wasn’t warm or even pleasant, but she never really harmed me. She was just endlessly crabby. Once she was gone, and the other office ladies had left for the day, I found the Polk file, the papers slightly yellowed inside the folder. “Crime: patricide.” The file was thick with Dr. Frye’s notes, mostly dates and times and incomprehensible Latinate scribbles. In a newspaper clipping affixed to the short rap sheet, I read that Leonard “Lee” Polk had slit his father’s throat while he was asleep in bed. The boy had no history of violent behavior, the report said, and neighbors had called him a “quiet child, well mannered, nothing special.” Something like that. His face in his mug shot was surly, with tight, down-turning lips and unfocused, exhausted eyes. In his file, under “comments,” it read “mute since day of crime” in my own messy schoolgirl cursive.
Just then, like birdsong at midnight, a magic, melodic voice rang out from down the dim hallway. It was Rebecca saying good night to James. I tried to collect myself, listening as the ticktock of her heels got louder. After a moment, she stood before me in a long black coat, briefcase in hand. Hours had now passed since the ridiculous Christmas pageant. I tried to smile, fumbling to put Leonard Polk’s file back in order, but I lost my grasp on the folder and its contents spilled out, pages flapping onto the dirty linoleum.
“Uh-oh,” I said like a fool. Rebecca came behind the office counter to help me pick up the papers. I watched her from behind as she squatted down to reach under Mrs. Stephens’s desk. She gathered the fabric of her skirt up so that it wouldn’t drag on the floor, revealing her calves—refined, gentle curves, nothing like mine, which were spindly and childish. “My goodness,” she said, reading the document in her hands. “Can you imagine killing your own father?” She handed the paper back to me, eying me knowingly, I thought.
“Thank you,” I said, blushing.
“It’s a story for the ages, of course. Kill your father, sleep with your mother,” Rebecca went on. “The male instinct can be terribly predictable.” She leaned over my shoulder, squinting at the photograph of the boy. Her hair fell like a curtain between us. She swept it back and strands fluttered against my cheek like feathers. She bit her lip. “Leonard Polk,” she read aloud. I could smell cigarettes on her breath, and violet candies.
“He’s been in solitary,” I told her. “I’ve never seen him out here at all. No visitors.”
“Now that’s a shame,” said Rebecca. “May I?” She spread her palms open before me. I handed her the folder.
“I was just doing some filing,” I told her stupidly, hoping she wouldn’t suspect me of snooping.
Rebecca flipped through the papers in the folder. I pretended to look busy, rearranging things on my desk, scanning an old questionnaire. “Name your favorite celebrity. What time do you go to bed at night?”
“I’ll just borrow this,” Rebecca said, slipping the Polk file into her briefcase. “Fun bedtime reading,” she quipped. I sat back down at my desk, anxious and awkward, while she buttoned her coat. “Some show today.”
“They do it every year.”
“I’d call that cruel and unusual punishment,” she replied. She flung a fuzzy mohair shawl over her shoulders, untucked her hair. I felt I had utterly failed to impress her. I resolved to say more, be cooler, more charming, smarter, funnier, more alive the next time we talked. “Well, see you in the morning,” she said, and ticktocked down the hall to the blustery evening outside.
On the way home that night, I stocked up on alcohol for my father at Lardner’s, then stopped in a drugstore for violet mints and a pack of cigarettes for myself. I rarely smoked, but when something had me riled up I did enjoy a cigarette or two. I tried to put Leonard Polk out of my mind, though the image of him touching himself in the cave had excited me. It was what I’d always hoped to see in all my spying on Randy, just a little glimpse of him being obscene. I shook my head gruffly, as though the image of the boy would get dislodged from my brain, scuttle out my ears, and leave me alone. I wasn’t a pedophile—a word I remembered from Latin class years earlier. Browsing the cosmetics aisle, I found a new shade of lipstick—a glossy, blood red: Passionate Lover. I slipped it into my pocket. The sleeves of my coat—it had been my mother’s—were long and wide at the cuffs, so I could easily lift almost anything. I’ve been good at stealing all my life. I still pinch things from the grocery store from time to time—dental floss, a head of garlic, a pack of gum. I don’t see the great harm in it. I figure I’ve given away or lost enough over my lifetime to even out my debts.
That night I did pay for, along with a humiliating package of sanitary napkins, a small compact of pressed powder, the lightest shade they had: Snow Queen. A fashion magazine on the rack at the checkout counter caught my eye, too. The cover showed a bony, melancholy woman pouting in a gray fur hat, looking upward as though at some disapproving statesman. “Isn’t it romantic . . .” it said on the cover. The fur, I thought, looked like a house cat. I plunked down the money. The salesgirl handled my package of sanitary napkins as though they were already soiled, pushing it with her fingertips into the paper bag she propped open, cavelike on the counter. She slipped the magazine into its own flat paper bag, which I liked. Back inside the Dodge, I arranged all the brown paper packages on the passenger seat. The bottles of booze, the napkins, the magazine. I took the lipstick from my pocket and applied it liberally over my mouth, blind. When I got home my father said, “Whose rosy ass have you been kissing?” Then he plucked the bottles from under my arm. “Not your color,” he sneered, padding back to the kitchen. Like Leonard Polk, I didn’t say a word.
TUESDAY
A grown woman is like a coyote—she can get by on very little. Men are more like house cats. Leave them alone for too long and they’ll die of sadness. Over the years I’ve grown to love men for this weakness. I’ve tried to respect them as people, full of feelings, fluctuating and beautiful from day to day. I have listened, soothed, wiped the tears away. But as a young woman in X-ville, I had no idea that other people—men or women—felt things as deeply as I did. I had no compassion for anyone unless his suffering allowed me to indulge in my own. My development was very stunted in this regard. Did I know that the boys at Moorehead—like prisoners around the world, so it seems—might be being pressured by guards to fight one another for sport at night, that they were made to defecate in their pillowcases, routinely forced to strip by the corrections officers who spat on them, beat them up, tied them down, humiliated and abused them? Rumors surfaced, but their implications didn’t register. I barely even noticed that the boys were handcuffed by the guards when they were escorted to and from the visitation room. Why should my heart ache for anyone but myself? If anyone was trapped and suffering and abused, it was me. I was the only one whose pain was real. Mine.
