Eileen

FRIDAY

Friday meant a noxious aroma of fish was wafting up from the basement cafeteria and through the cold quarters where the boys slept, down the linoleum halls and into the windowless office where I spent my days. It was a smell so pungent and punishing I could detect it even outside in the parking lot when I arrived at Moorehead that morning. I had built up the habit of locking my purse in the trunk of my car before I went in to work. There were lockers in the break room behind the office, but I didn’t trust the staff. My father had warned me when I’d started there at age twenty-one, naive beyond reproach, that the most dangerous individuals in a prison are not the criminals but the very people who work there. I can confirm this to be true. Those were perhaps the wisest words my father ever told me.

I’d packed a lunch consisting of two squares of Wonderbread, buttered and packaged in tinfoil, and a can of tuna fish. It was Friday and I didn’t want to go to hell, after all. I did my best to smile and nod at my coworkers, both awful middle-aged women with stiff hairdos who barely looked up from their romance novels unless the warden was around. Their desks were littered with yellow cellophane wrappers from caramel candies which they each kept in fake crystal bowls on the corners of their desks. As awful as they were, the office ladies ranked low on the list of despicable characters in my life over the years. Working day shifts in the office with them, I really didn’t have it so bad. Having a desk job meant I rarely had to interact with one of the four or five terrifying and pig-nosed correctional officers whose job it was to mend the wicked ways of Moorehead’s young residents. They were like army sergeants, rapping boys with batons on the backs of their legs as they shuffled around, restraining them in schoolyard-style choke holds. I tried to look the other way when things got hairy. Mostly I looked up at the clock.

The overnight guards would get off shift at eight, when I arrived, and I never knew them, though I remember their exhausted faces — one was a loping idiot and the other a balding veteran with tobacco-stained fingers. They’re not important. But one daytime guard was just wonderful looking. He had big hound-dog eyes, a strong profile still softened with youth and what I thought, of course, was some sort of magical sadness about him, and hair that gleamed in a high ducktail — Randy. I liked to watch him from my desk. He sat in the hallway that connected the office to the rest of the facility. He wore the standard starched gray uniform, well-oiled motorcycle boots, a heavy set of keys clipped to his belt loop. He had a way of sitting with one flank on the stool, one off, a foot hanging midair, a posture which presented his crotch as though on a platter for me to gaze at. I was not his type, and I knew so, and that pained me though I never would have admitted it. His type was pretty, long-legged, pouty, probably blond, I suspected. Still, I could dream. I spent many hours watching his biceps flick and pump as he turned each page of his comic book. When I imagine him now, I think of the way he’d swerve a toothpick around in his mouth. It was beautiful. It was poetry. I asked him once, nervous and ridiculous, whether he felt cold wearing just short sleeves in winter. He shrugged. Still waters ran deep, I thought, nearly swooning. It was pointless to fantasize, but I couldn’t help imagine one day he’d throw stones at my attic window, motorcycle steaming out in front of the house, melting the whole town to hell. I was not immune to that sort of thing.

Though I didn’t drink coffee — it made me dizzy — I walked to the corner where the coffee pot was because there was a mirror on the wall above it. Looking at my reflection really did soothe me, though I hated my face with a passion. Such is the life of the self-obsessed. The time I languished in the agony of not being beautiful was more than I care to admit even now. I rubbed a crumb of sleep from my eye and poured myself a cup of cream, sweetened it with sugar and Carnation malted milk, which I kept in my desk drawer. Nobody commented on this strange cocktail. Nobody paid any attention to me at all in that office. The office women were all so soured and flat and cliquish. I suspected at the time they were secretly homosexual for each other. Such persuasions were more and more on one’s mind back then, townsfolk ever watchful for the errant “latent homosexual” on the prowl. My suspicions about the office ladies weren’t necessarily disparaging. It helped me to have a little compassion when I imagined them going home at night to their disgusting husbands, so bitter, so lonely. On the other hand, to think of them with their blouses unbuttoned, hands in each other’s brassieres, legs spread, made me want to vomit.

There was a small section in a book I’d found in the public library that showed casts of faces taken of figures such as Lincoln, Beethoven, and Sir Isaac Newton after they’d died. If you’ve ever seen a real dead body you know that people never die with such complacent grins, such blankness. But I used their plaster casts as a guide and practiced very diligently in the mirror, relaxing my face while keeping an aura of benign resilience, such as I saw in those dead men’s faces. I mention it because it is the face I wore at work, my death mask. Being as young as I was, I was terribly sensitive, and determined never to show it. I steeled myself from the reality of the place, this Moorehead. I had to. Misery and shame surrounded me, but not once did I run to the bathroom crying. Later that morning, delivering mail to the warden’s office, which was within the complex of chambers where the boys studied and had recreational activities, I passed a corrections officer — Mulvaney or Mulroony or Mahoney, they all seemed the same — twisting a boy’s ear as he knelt down in front of him. “You think you’re special?” he asked. “See the dirt on the floor? You matter less than a speck of that dirt between those tiles.” He pushed the boy’s head down face first into his boots, big and steel-toed, hard enough to club someone to death. “Lick it,” said the officer. I watched the boy’s lips part, then I looked away.

The warden’s secretary was a woman so steely-eyed and fat she appeared never to be breathing, her heart never beating. Her death mask was impressive. The only sign of life she ever gave was when she lifted a finger to her mouth and a centimeter of pale lavender tongue came out to wet its tip. She leafed through the stack of envelopes I handed her robotically, then turned away. I lingered for a minute or two, pretending to count days on the calendar hanging on the wall by her desk. “Five days till Christmas,” I said, trying to sound cheerful.

“Praise God,” she replied.

I often think of Moorehead and its laughable credo, parens patriae, and cringe. The boys at Moorehead were all so young, just children. They frightened me at the time because I felt they didn’t like me, didn’t find me attractive. So I tried to cast them off as dunces and wild animals. Some of them were grown, tall and handsome. I was not immune to those boys either.

Back at my desk, there was plenty I could have pondered. It was 1964, so much on the horizon. In every direction something was getting torn down or built up, but I mostly pondered myself and my own misery while I arranged my pens in the cup, crossed off the day on my desk calendar. The second hand on the clock shook and bolted forward like someone at first terrified with anxiety, then, bolstered by desperation, jumping off a cliff only to get stuck in midair. My mind wandered. Randy, more than anywhere else, was where it liked to go. When my paycheck came that Friday, I folded it and slipped it into my bosom, which was hardly a bosom. Just small, hard mounds, really, which I hid beneath layers of cotton underthings, a blouse, a wool jacket. I still had that pubescent fear that when people looked at me, they could see through my clothes. I suspect nobody was fantasizing about my naked body, but I worried that when anyone’s eyes cast downward, they were investigating my nether regions and could somehow decipher the complex and nonsensical folds and caverns wrapped up so tightly down there between my legs. I was always very protective of my folds and caverns. I was still a virgin, of course.

I suppose my prudishness did its duty and saved me from a difficult life such as my sister’s. She was older than me and not a virgin at all and lived with a man who was not her husband a few towns over—“whore” is what our mother had called her. Joanie was perfectly nice, I suppose, but she had a dark, gluttonous streak beneath her buoyant, girlish exterior. She once told me how Cliff, her boyfriend, liked to “taste” her as she woke up in the mornings. She laughed as my face contorted in perplexity, then turned red and cold when I caught her drift. “Isn’t that funny? Isn’t that the most?” she tittered. I envied her plenty, sure, but I never let on. I didn’t really want what she had. Men, boys, the prospect of coupling with one of them seemed ridiculous. The most I desired was a wordless affair. But even that scared me. I had my crush on Randy and a few others, but they never went anywhere. Oh, those poor nether regions of mine, swaddled like a baby in a diaper in thick cotton underpants and my mother’s old strangulating girdle. I wore lipstick not to be fashionable, but because my bare lips were the same color as my nipples. At twenty-four I would give nothing to aid any imagining of my naked body. Meanwhile, it seemed, most young women were intent on doing the opposite.

There was a party at the prison that day. Dr. Frye was retiring. He’d been the very elderly man in charge of doling out gross amounts of sedatives to the boys for decades as the prison’s psychiatrist. He must have been in his eighties. I’m old now myself, but when I was young I really didn’t care for elderly people. I felt their very existence undermined me. I couldn’t have cared less that Dr. Frye was leaving. I signed the card when it crossed my desk with precise, schoolgirl cursive, wrist bent high in sarcasm: “So long.” I remember the image on the front was a black ink drawing of a cowboy riding off into the sunset. Good grief. Over the years at Moorehead, Dr. Frye would come occasionally to observe the family visits, which it was my duty to administrate on a daily basis, and I’d watched him stand at the open doorway to the visitation room, nodding and clacking his gums and hmming, and now and then interjecting with long, wobbling fingers to point for the child to sit up straight, answer the question, apologize, and so on. And he never once said “Hello,” or “How are you, Miss Dunlop?” I was invisible. I was furniture. After lunch — I think I left that can of tuna in my locker, uneaten — they called the staff to the cafeteria for cake and coffee to bid Dr. Frye adieu, and I declined to participate. I sat at my desk and did nothing, just stared at the clock. At some point I got an itch in my underwear, and since there was nobody to see me, I stuck my hand up my skirt to get at it. As swaddled as they were, my nether regions were difficult to scratch. So I had to dig my hand down the front of my skirt, under the girdle, inside the underwear, and when the itch had been relieved, I pulled my fingers out and smelled them. It’s a natural curiosity, I think, to smell one’s fingers. Later, when the day was done, these were the fingers I extended, still unwashed, to Dr. Frye when I wished him a happy retirement on his way out the door.

• • •

Working at Moorehead, I wouldn’t say I was sheltered, exactly. But I was isolated. I did not get out much at all. The town where I lived and had grown up — I’ll call it X-ville — had no tracks of which there could be a wrong side per se. There were grittier areas, however, for the blue-collar and troubled people, a bit closer to the ocean, and I’d driven past their ramshackle houses with yards littered with children’s toys and garbage only a few times. Seeing the people on the roads, so forlorn and angry and uninterested, delighted me and scared me and made me feel ashamed not to be so poor. But the streets in my neighborhood were all tree lined and orderly, houses loved and tended to with pride and affection and a sense of civic order that made me ashamed to be so messy, so broken, so bland. I didn’t know that there were others like me in the world, those who didn’t “fit in,” as people like to put it. Furthermore, as is typical for any isolated, intelligent young person, I thought I was the only one with any consciousness, any awareness of how odd it was to be alive, to be a creature on this strange planet Earth. I’ve seen episodes of The Twilight Zone which illustrate the kind of straight-faced derangement I felt in X-ville. It was very lonely.

Boston in all its brick and ivy gave me hope that there was intelligent life out there, young people living as they pleased. Freedom was not so far away. I’d gone there only once, a trip I took with my mother to see a doctor when she was dying, a doctor who couldn’t cure her but who did prescribe medicine that would make her “comfortable,” as he called it. Such an excursion felt glamorous to me back then. It’s true that I was twenty-four. I was an adult. You’d think I could have driven anywhere I wished. Indeed, my last summer in X-ville, toward the end of one of my father’s longer benders, I took a trip down the coast. My car ran out of gas and I was stranded on a country road just an hour from home until an older woman stopped and gave me a dollar and a ride to the filling station and told me to “plan ahead next time.” I remember the wise woggle of her double chin as she steered the car. She was a country woman, and I respected her. That was when I began to fantasize about my disappearance, convincing myself bit by bit that the solution to my problem — the problem being my life in X-ville — was in New York City.

It was a cliché then and it’s a cliché now, but having heard “Hello, Dolly!” on the radio, it seemed wholly possible for me to show up in Manhattan with money for a room in a boardinghouse and have my future roll out automatically, without my having to think too hard about it. It was just a daydream, but I fed it as best I could. I started saving my own money in cash hidden in the attic. It was my responsibility to deposit my father’s pension checks, which the X-ville police department sent at the beginning of each month, at the X-ville Bank, where the tellers called me Mrs. Dunlop, my mother’s name, and, I thought, would have no problem emptying the account and handing me an envelope of hundred-dollar bills from the Dunlops’ savings if I lied and said I was buying a new car.

I never once discussed my desire to leave X-ville with another person. But a few times, during my darkest hours — I was so moody — when I felt impelled to drive off a bridge or, one particular morning, had a compulsion to slam my hand in the car door, I imagined what relief I might feel if I could lie on Dr. Frye’s couch just once and confess like some sort of fallen hero that my life was simply intolerable. But, in fact, it was tolerable. I’d been tolerating it, after all. Anyway, that young Eileen would never lie down in the company of a man who was not her father. It would be impossible to keep her little breasts from sticking up. Although I was small and wiry then, I believed that I was fat, that my flesh was unwieldy. I could feel my breasts and thighs swinging sensuously to and fro as I walked down the hall. I thought everything about me was so huge and disgusting. I was crazy in that way. My delusion caused me much pain and confusion. I chuckle at it now, but back then I was the bearer of great woes.

Of course nobody in the prison office had any interest in me and my woes, or my breasts. When my mother died and I’d gone to work at Moorehead, Mrs. Stephens and Mrs. Murray had kept their distance. No condolences, no kind or even pitying looks. They were the least maternal women I’ve ever met, and so they were very well suited for the positions they held at the prison. They weren’t severe or strict as you’d imagine. They were lazy, uncultured, total slobs. I imagine they were as bored as I was, but they indulged themselves in sugar and dime-store paperbacks and had no problem licking their fingers after a donut, or burping, or sighing or groaning. I can still remember my mental pictures of them in sexual positions, faces poised at each other’s private parts, sneering at the smell as they extended their caramel-stained tongues. It gave me some satisfaction to imagine that. Perhaps it made me feel dignified in comparison. When they answered the phones, they would literally pinch their noses shut and speak in high-pitched whines. Perhaps they did this to entertain themselves, or perhaps I’m misremembering it. Either way, they had no manners.

“Eileen, get me that new boy’s file, that brat, what’s his name,” said Mrs. Murray.

“The one with the scabs?” Mrs. Stephens clanked her caramel, spat as she spoke. “Brown, Todd. I swear they get uglier and dumber every year.”

“Be careful what you say, Norris. Eileen’s likely to marry one of them someday.”

“That true, Eileen? Your clock ticking?”

Mrs. Stephens was always bragging about her daughter, a tall, thin-lipped girl I’d gone to school with. She’d married some high school baseball coach and moved to Baltimore.

“One day you’ll be old like us,” Mrs. Stephens said.

“Your sweater’s on backwards, Eileen,” said Mrs. Murray. I pulled up my collar to check. “Or maybe not. You’re just so flat, I don’t know what side I’m looking at — front or back.” They went on and on like that. It was awful.

I suppose my manners were just as bad as theirs. I was terribly grim and unaffected, unfriendly. Or else I was strained and chipper and awkward, grating. “Ha-ha,” I said. “Coming or going, that’s me — flat.” I’d never learned how to relate to people, much less how to speak up for myself. I preferred to sit and rage quietly. I’d been a silent child, the kind to suck my thumb long enough to buck out my front teeth. I was lucky they did not buck out too far. Still, of course, I felt my mouth was horselike and ugly, and so I barely smiled. When I did smile, I worked very hard to keep my top lip from riding up, something that required great restraint, self-awareness and self-control. The time I spent disciplining that lip, you would not believe. I truly felt that the inside of my mouth was such a private area, caverns and folds of wet parting flesh, that letting anyone see into it was just as bad as spreading my legs. People did not chew gum as regularly then as we do now. That was considered very childish. So I kept a bottle of Listerine in my locker and swished it often, and sometimes swallowed it if I didn’t think I could get to the ladies’ room sink without having to open my mouth to speak. I didn’t want anyone to think I was susceptible to bad breath, or that there were any organic processes occurring inside my body at all. Having to breathe was an embarrassment in itself. This was the kind of girl I was.

Besides the Listerine in my locker, I always had a bottle of sweet vermouth and a package of mint chocolates. I stole the latter regularly from the drugstore in X-ville. I was a fabulous shoplifter, gifted in the fine art of snatching things and squirreling them up my sleeves. My death mask saved me from trouble many times by hiding my ecstasy and terror from clerks and shopkeepers who must have thought I looked very strange in my huge coat, trolling around the candies. Before visiting hours began at the prison, I’d take a long swig of vermouth and throw back a handful of mint chocolates. Even after several years, having to receive the pained mothers of the imprisoned boys made me nervous. Amongst my deadly boring duties, part of my job was to ask visitors to sign their names in a ledger and then tell them to sit down on molded orange plastic chairs in the hallway and wait. Moorehead had an insane rule that only one visit could take place at a time. Perhaps this was due to the small staff or Moorehead’s limited facilities. Either way, it created an atmosphere of interminable suffering as for several hours mothers sat and waited and wept and tapped their feet and blew their noses and complained. In an attempt to fend off my own hard feelings, I fashioned meaningless surveys and handed out the mimeographed forms on clipboards to the most antsy of the mothers. I thought having to fill them out would give the women a sense of importance, create the illusion that their lives and opinions were worthy of respect and curiosity. I had questions on there such as “How often do you fill your gas tank?” “How do you see yourself in ten years?” “Do you enjoy television? If so, what programs?” The mothers were usually pleased to have a task to handle, although they’d pretend to look impinged upon. If they asked what it was all about, I told them it was a “state questionnaire,” and that they might leave their names off of it if they preferred to remain anonymous. None of them did. They’d all write their names on these forms much more legibly than in the visitors’ ledger, and answered so ingenuously, it broke my heart: “Once every Friday.” “I will be healthy, happy, and my children will be successful.” “Jerry Lewis.”

It was my job to maintain a file cabinet full of reports and statements and other documents for each of the inmates. They stayed at Moorehead until their sentences ran out or they turned eighteen. The youngest boy I’d ever seen in my time at the prison was nine and a half. The warden liked to threaten to have the bigger boys — tall or fat or both — transferred to the men’s prison early, especially the ones who made trouble. “You think it’s rough here, young man?” he said. “One day in state would make any of you bleed for weeks.”

The boys at Moorehead actually seemed like nice people to me, considering their circumstances. Any of us would be ornery and disgruntled in their place. They were forbidden to do most things children ought to do — dance, sing, gesture, talk loud, listen to music, lie down unless they were given permission to. I never talked to any of them at all, but I knew all about them. I liked to read their files and the descriptions of their crimes, the police reports, their confessions. One had stabbed a taxi driver in the ear with a pen, I remember. Very few of them were from X-ville itself. They came to Moorehead from across our region, Massachusetts’ finest young thieves and vandals and rapists and kidnappers and arsonists and murderers. Many of them were orphans and runaways and were rough and tough and walked with swagger and aplomb. Others were from regular families and their demeanor was more domestic, more sensitive, and they walked like cowards. I liked the rough ones better. They were more attractive to me. And their crimes seemed far more normal. It was those privileged boys who committed the perverse, really twisted crimes — strangling their baby sisters or lighting a neighbor’s dog on fire, poisoning a priest. It was fascinating. After several years, however, it had all become old hat.

I remember this particular Friday afternoon because a young woman came to visit her perpetrator — her rapist, I assumed. She was a pretty girl who had a tortured flamboyance, and at the time I thought all attractive women were loose, sex kittens, tramps, floozies. Such a visit was strictly forbidden, of course. Only close relatives were allowed visits with inmates. Kin was the word we used. I told the girl as much, but she demanded to see the boy. She was very calm at first, as though she’d been practicing what to say. I can’t believe my audacity when I asked, death mask on, whether she was demanding to become the boy’s kin. I said, “Do you mean to say you’re engaged to be married?” was my question. She seemed to lose her mind when I asked that, and turned to the weepy mothers with their clipboards and questionnaires and cursed them and threw the ledger to the floor. I don’t know why I was so cold to her. I suppose I may have been envious. No one had ever tried to rape me, after all. I’d always believed that my first time would be by force. Of course I hoped to be raped by only the most soulful, gentle, handsome of men, somebody who was secretly in love with me — Randy, ideally. Once the girl had left and I had a free moment, I pulled her rapist’s file. The photograph showed a pimpled, sleepy black boy. His rap sheet included stealing laundry off a neighbor’s line, smoking marijuana cigarettes, vandalizing a car. He didn’t seem so bad.

Another part of my job during visiting hours was to tell the guards which boys were being summoned for visits, one by one. The two guards I remember most clearly were Randy, of course, and James. I think James must have had brain damage or some sort of nervous condition. He was always agitated, sweated constantly, and seemed utterly uncomfortable in anyone’s company. The job became very difficult for him when he had to interact with the boys or appear in front of the weeping mothers. When he was alone he had an ominous kind of stillness, like a slingshot being pulled back too hard. He seemed to sit like that, rigid, about to explode, for hours at a time when it was his turn to guard the hallway. This was a ridiculous waste of man-hours in retrospect, since there was another guard farther down the hall who sat by the door to the residential facility, or whatever we called the place where the boys lived and slept and paced around and read the Bible, or whatever they were supposed to do.

What was also ridiculous — I’m just remembering this now — was how I was put in charge of administering the security test for the women visitors. Since there were no female guards or officers, I suppose, it was my duty to pat the mothers down, lazily tapping around their shoulders and hips, a small pat on the back. It was the most intimate moment of my day, tapping these sad women. Randy would be there, too, usually standing guard at the door of the visitation room, and sometimes as I touched those women I imagined it was Randy I was touching, Randy, who like those women, seemed to barely even notice me. I was just a pair of hands flashing nervously through the air. These were all very sad women, passive and remorseful, and never violent. Of course in all my pathetic pat-downs, I never once came across a concealed knife or gun or vial of poison in a skirt pocket of any of those sad mothers. The guards hardly seemed concerned either. Men rarely visited. Most likely that had to do with work schedules, but I think many of the boys in the prison lacked fathers, which was part of the problem, I suppose. It was all pretty grim.

The bright spot in the misery of visitation hours was the chance to be close to Randy. I remember the peculiar scent of his sweat. It was strong, but not offensive. A good-natured smell. People smelled better back then. I am certain this is true. My eyesight has deteriorated over the years, but my sense of smell is still quite keen. Nowadays I often have to leave a room or walk away when a person near to me smells bad. I don’t mean the smell of sweat and dirt, but a kind of artificial, caustic smell, usually from people who disguise themselves in creams and perfumes. These highly scented people are not to be trusted. They are predators. They are like the dogs who roll around in one another’s feces. It’s very disturbing. Although I was generally paranoid about how I smelled — if my sweat stank, if my breath was as bad as my mouth tasted — I never wore perfume, and I always preferred the scentless soaps and lotions. Nothing calls more attention to one’s odor than a fragrance meant to mask it. At home alone with my father, I was in charge of the laundry, a duty I inherited by default and which I rarely honored. But when I did, the aroma of his soiled garments was so distressing, I often gagged and coughed and dry-heaved when I sniffed them. It was the smell of something like soured milk, sweet and laced so strongly with the perfume of gin, it turns my stomach just to think of it now.

Randy smelled completely different — tart like the ocean, brawny, warm. He was very attractive. He smelled like an honest man. Mrs. Stephens had told me that the guards were all hired through the employment office of the county correctional facility. So they were all ex-convicts, I suppose. They all had tattoos. Even James had one. A swastika, I believe. Randy’s tattoo was a fuzzy portrait of a girl — his mother, I hoped. One early morning during my first months at Moorehead, when the office ladies were setting up the Easter crèche, I read Randy’s employee file, which included a list of his adolescent offenses — sexual misconduct, breaking and entering. He had been an inmate at Moorehead as a teenager, a fact which only endeared him to me more.

You know me. I spent many hours wondering who might have been the recipient of Randy’s sexual misconduct. I guessed some young teenage girl who got in trouble with her parents for breaking curfew or getting pregnant. Randy didn’t seem like the violent type to me, but I’d seen him use force in restraining the boys from time to time. He’d have been great in a fistfight, I imagined. One of my favorite daydreams went like this: Randy would wait for my shift to end and ask to escort me to my car. He would offer his arm as I stepped across the black slate of ice in the parking lot, but I would refuse it, and he would feel jilted and abashed. But then I would slip on the ice and be forced, despite my prudence, to take his thick arm in my gloved hands, and he would look deeply into my eyes, and maybe we would kiss. Or instead, he’d take hold of me by the shoulders and steer me up against the Dodge, press my face into the frosted window, reach up my skirt to rip my stockings, my underpants, then around my leg to feel my caverns and folds with his fingers as he pushed into me, his breath hot at my ear, saying nothing. In that fantasy, I wore no girdle.

This is not a love story. But just one last bit about Randy before the real star of my story appears. It’s funny how love can leap from one person to another, like a flea. Until Rebecca showed up a few days later, it was the constant thought of Randy that kept me afloat. I still remember his address, since on weekends I would drive past his apartment one town over and sit low in the Dodge trying to see whether or not he was home, alone, awake. I wanted to know what he was doing, what he was thinking, whether I ever even crossed his mind. A few times, without planning, I’d bumped into him in X-ville just walking down Main Street. Each time, I’d raised my gloved hand, opened my mouth to speak, but he just sauntered past me. My chest nearly caved in on itself. One day he would see me, the real me, and he’d fall in love, I told myself. Until then, I pined and moped and did whatever I could to understand his gestures and habits and expressions, as though a fluency in the language of his body would give me a leg up when it came time to please him. He wouldn’t have to say a word. I thought I’d do anything to make him happy. But I wasn’t a fool. I knew Randy had been with girls sexually. Still, I could not imagine him in the act of copulation, which is what I called it in my head at the time. I couldn’t even begin to picture his bare nether regions, despite having seen a picture of some in one of my father’s pornographic magazines. I could imagine, though, in a postcoital moment, Randy laughing casually across a mussed bed at an invisible female figure. I held him in such high esteem. Just a glance in my direction had my pulse quick for hours. But that’s enough of him. Good-bye for now, Randy, good-bye.

Here’s what I looked like that Friday: brittle, fake alligator loafers with thick, worn heels and chipping gold buckles; white stockings which made my thin legs look wooden, doll-like; large yellow bouclé skirt that hung past my knees; gray wool jacket with sharp shoulders over a white cotton blouse; small brass-colored cross; hairdo several days old by now; no earrings; lipstick of a shade the store called Irreparable Red. I must have looked nineteen going on sixty-five in that foppish approximation of decency, that adult costume. Other girls were married by my age, had children, settled. To say I didn’t want all that would be too generous. All that simply wasn’t available to me. It was beyond me. By all appearances I was a homebody — naive, disinterested. If you’d have asked me, I would have told you I believed that a person had to be in love to make love. I’d have said I thought anyone who does, and isn’t, is a whore.

In hindsight, I don’t think I was so off-base in my desire for Randy. A union wouldn’t have been completely preposterous. He was employed, in good health, and it wasn’t completely unfeasible, I don’t think, that he might date me. I was a live young woman in his vicinity, after all. Despite my paranoia, there wasn’t anything outright offensive about the way I looked back then. I was unattractive in temperament most of all, but many men don’t seem to care about things like that. Of course Randy must have had other women to turn to. I wouldn’t have known what to do with him if I’d actually snagged him anyhow. By the time I turned thirty I’d learned how to relax, wink in the mirror, fall charmingly into the arms of countless lovers. My twenty-four-year-old self would die from shock at the quick death of my prudence. And once I left X-ville and filled out a bit, bought some clothes that fit me right, you might have seen me walking down Broadway or Fourteenth Street and thought I was a graduate student or maybe the assistant to some famous artist, on my way to pick up his check from the gallery. What I mean to say is that I was not fundamentally unattractive. I was just invisible.

That afternoon the mothers came and went. Sheaves of completed questionnaires got tossed in the trash along with glittering piles of caramel candy wrappers like heaps of dead insects. “Do you believe there is life on Mars? What qualities do you value most in your state officials?” Every day I picked up a dozen snot-filled tissues marked with lipstick like fat, dead, pink-tipped carnations. “Can you speak a foreign language? Do you prefer canned peas or canned carrots? Do you smoke?” A bell rang to signify that someone, one of the boys, had done something that would result in heavy punishment. James got up off his stool and mechanically walked down the corridor, wringing his hands. I squeezed the used tissues in my fists, added them to the papers and wrappers in the garbage.

“Take out that trash, Eileen,” said Mrs. Stephens, looking up at me from behind her armpit as she reached down to her desk drawer to retrieve a fresh box of candies.

“If there was life on Mars, it’s dead now,” one mother wrote.

“A man should be broad-shouldered and have a mustache.”

“A little French.”

“Peas.”

“Six packs a week. Sometimes more.”

• • •

Before I left Moorehead that Friday, Mrs. Stephens asked me to decorate the Christmas tree which the janitor had dragged into the prison waiting room, empty now that visiting hours were over. I remember it was a voluptuous pine and the needles were thick and waxy and its sap filled the air with a stunning tang. There was a storage closet where all the seasonal decorations were kept — Easter cutouts of bunnies and golden eggs, Independence Day flags, Labor and Memorial Day banners, Thanksgiving turkeys and pumpkins. One Halloween we hung garlands of garlic over the office doorway, and in an assembly after lunch the warden gave a ghoulish recitation of the Lord’s abominations in Deuteronomy. It was ridiculous.

The Christmas tree ornaments were just as I’d left them the year before, haphazardly packed back into their sagging cardboard box. The metal balls encrusted with glitter and gold were chipping and fading, each year fewer of them to stuff back into the nests of old newspaper, but they were charming and filled me with longing. I had hard feelings around the holidays, the one time of year I couldn’t help but fall prey to the canned self-pity Christmas prescribes. I’d mourn the lack of love and warmth in my life, wish upon stars for angels to come and pluck me from my misery and plunk me down into a whole new life, like in the movies. I was a sucker for the spirit of Christmas, as it was called. Growing up, I learned I’d be praised and rewarded for my suffering, for my strong efforts to be good, but every year God smote me. No presents, no miracles, no holy night. I pitied myself for that, too. I tried to keep a straight face as I unpacked the decorations. There were garlands of holly made of shiny plastic that smelled like strong antiseptic chemicals, which I liked. And at the bottom of the box there were tinsel and old paper snowflakes the boys had snipped from white construction paper many Christmases ago, some as old as twenty years, probably. When I unfolded them, they were disturbed and angry geometries, little acts of violence, but the names written in the corners were in controlled, regular penmanship in pale silver pencil. I remember names like Cheyney Morris, age 17. Roger Jones, 14. I was supposed to stick them on the painted brick wall in the waiting area, but I’d used up all my Scotch tape fixing the hem of my coat when the stitching had unraveled the week before, so I stuffed the snowflakes deep between the branches of the tree. They looked like snow there. I liked methodical work like hanging ornaments and so I lost myself in the task quite easily. That was good. I felt wistful. I saved a portion of the decorations for the top third of the tree, which was too high for me to reach without extending my arms above my head. If I did that, anyone would be able to see the darkened stains of sweat beneath my arms. Heaven forbid.

“Can you bring a ladder?” I asked James when he returned to his post.

I remember the smell of his pomade — a sad, lanolin smell — from when he placed the ladder gingerly beside the tree and held it for me while I climbed it, drops of sweat sitting like dew on his balding forehead.

“Don’t look,” I said, although I knew he would never dare glance up my skirt. He nodded. I so rarely got to act important, I relished that exchange.

When I had finished with the ornaments and put the empty cardboard box back in the storage closet, Mrs. Stephens looked up from her paperwork. The tree looked beautiful — I was proud of it — but she hardly noticed. She had powdered sugar on her nose and a smear of raspberry jelly on her sweater, no sense of decorum, seemed to care nothing what people thought of her. She’d been the office manager at Moorehead for decades.

“Eileen,” she said. Her voice was a vicious monotone. “You’ll work the lights Monday at the pageant. I can’t do the lights anymore. I don’t want to.”

“Fine,” I said.

One day I’d be gone, I hoped, never to have to look at her or think of her again, so I tried to hate her with all my might, squeeze our encounters for every last drop of disgust she could ever inspire in me. I knew better than to mouth off or cause any fuss, but I tried to send her violent messages with my mind. She’d hired me as a favor to my father. To my great embarrassment, on occasion I had mistakenly called her “Mom.” Mrs. Stephens rolled her eyes then and chimed sarcastically — gums glistening, bubbles of saliva popping in a broad grin, that damn caramel candy clanking against her back teeth—“Of course, dear, whatever makes you happy.”

I’d laughed and cleared my throat and corrected myself. “Missus Stephens.”

I doubt she deserved the amount of hatred I directed at her, but I loathed just about everybody back then. I recall driving home that night, imagining what her body looked like under all that paisley print and gray wool. I pictured the flesh hanging from her bones like cold flanks of pork swinging from hooks at a butcher shop — thick, clammy, orange-hued fat, meat tough and bloodless and cold when the knife hacked through it.

I can still see the twenty-minute drive from Moorehead to X-ville. The long expanse of snow-filled pastures, the dark forest and narrow dirt roads, and then houses, first sparse, homesteads, then smaller and closer together, some with white picket fences or black iron posts, then the town with the ocean glinting on the horizon from atop the hill, then home. There was, of course, a sense of comfort in X-ville. Imagine an old man walking a golden retriever, a woman lifting a bag of groceries from her car. There was really nothing so very wrong with the place. If you were passing through, you’d think that everything was fine there. Everything was wonderful. Even my car with the broken exhaust and the biting cold at my ears was fine and wonderful. I hated it, and I loved it. Our house sat one block from an intersection where a crossing guard directed traffic in the mornings and afternoons for the children who went to the elementary school up the block. Oftentimes stray mittens or scarves were placed on the spokes of the neighbors’ fences, or in winter spread out on the high banks of snow like a lost-and-found. That night there was a boy’s knit wool hat on the snow by our driveway. I inspected it under the lamplight and tried it on. It was tight enough to make a seal around my ears. I tried saying something, “Randy,” and my voice vibrated, an echo inside of me. It was weirdly peaceful there inside my head. A car passed silently through the slush.

As I walked up the narrow path to the front porch, a car door opened across the street and a uniformed cop crossed the murky ice toward me. The wind was strangely still, a storm brewing. A light went on inside the house, and so the cop stopped in the middle of the road.

“Miss Dunlop,” he said, and motioned for me to come near. This was not out of the ordinary. I knew most cops in X-ville. My father did his best to prompt their visits. That night Officer Laffey told me the school had called to complain that my father was lobbing snowballs at children from our front porch. He handed me a letter of warning, bowed his head, and walked back to his car.

“You can come inside,” I said, voice booming between my ears. “Talk to him?” I held the letter out.

“It’s late,” he said, and got back in his car and on his radio.

Those icicles hanging above the front door must have grown by several inches while I’d been gone, since I remember reaching up and touching the tip of one and being disappointed by its bluntness. I could have swung my purse up and broken them all off if I’d wanted to. But I just shut the door gently and kicked off my shoes.

Here’s the house. The front hall was wallpapered in dark green and blue stripes and had golden wood moldings. The stairs were bare because I’d broken the vacuum cleaner that summer, then ripped out all the rugs. It was too dark in the house to see the layer of dust over everything. The lights in the front hall and the living room had burned out. Every once in a while I collected my father’s cans and bottles, his disordered newspapers which he read, or pretended to read, at the top of the stairs, letting page after page sail over the banister and drift down into the front hall. That night I snatched up a few pages — we got the Post—crushed them into tight balls, and threw them at his back while he stood at the sink.

“Hi, Dad,” I said.

“Smart ass,” he said and turned and kicked the crumpled newspaper across the floor. In all my twenty-four years of knowing him, I don’t think he ever said “Hello” or asked how I was. But some nights when I looked particularly tired he might have asked me, “How are your boyfriends? How are all your boys?” I really only ever sat down at the kitchen table long enough to eat some peanuts and listen to him complain. We ate a lot of peanuts, Dad and I. I warmed my hands on the stove. I remember I wore these thin black gloves with green flowers stitched along the fingers. In my ridiculous self-denial I did not buy proper winter gloves for myself. But I liked those black ones with the flowers. Women still wore gloves then. I didn’t mind the custom. My hands were thin-skinned, sensitive, and always ice-cold anyway, and I didn’t like touching things.

“Anyone new they drag in?” Dad asked that night. “Polk’s boy faring all right?” Polk had been in the news recently, an X-ville cop killed by his own son. My father had known him. They’d been on the force together.

“Paying for his sins,” I replied.

“Good riddance,” said my father, wiping his hands on his robe.

The mail sat in a pile on the counter by the stove. The National Geographic was rather lackluster that month. Several years ago I found that same issue in a used book store — December 1964—and have it here somewhere between all my books and papers. I doubt a thing like that is valuable fifty years later, but to me that magazine feels sacred, a snapshot of the world before everything in it changed for me. It was nothing special. The cover shows two ugly white birds, doves maybe, sitting on a cast-iron fence. A holy cross looms out of focus above them. The issue includes profiles of Washington, D.C., and some exotic vacation destinations in Mexico and the Middle East. That night, when it was new and still smelled of glue and ink, I opened it briefly to a picture of a palm tree against a pink sunset, then slapped it down on the kitchen table, disappointed. I preferred to read about places like India, Belarus, the slums of Brazil, the starving children in Africa.

I handed my father the letter of warning from Officer Laffey and sat down for a few peanuts. He waved the letter in front of his eyes and tossed it in the trash. “Just for show,” he said. The delusions he suffered from were the most effective kind — everyone played a role in his conspiracy theories. Nothing was as it appeared. He was haunted by visions, dark figures— “hoodlums,” he called them — that moved so fast, he said, he could only see their shadows. They’d duck under porches and hide in dark spots and in bushes and up in trees, and they watched him and taunted him, he said. He’d thrown some snowballs out the window that day just to let on that he knew what they were up to, he explained. The police had to admonish him to make it look like there was nothing fishy going on — just an old man losing his mind.

“They’re in here, too,” he said about the hoodlums, waving his finger around at the house. “Must be getting in through the basement. Walk around like they own the place. I’ve heard them. Maybe they’re living in the walls, like rats,” he said. “They sound just like rats, in fact. Black ghosts.” He was tortured by them day and night, so his only recourse was to drink, naturally. He sat down at the kitchen table. “It’s the mob who’s sent them,” of course. “Why do you think the cops are always here? They’re here to protect me. After everything I’ve done for this town?”

“You’re drunk,” I said flatly.

“I haven’t been drunk in years, Eileen. This,” he held up his can of beer, “is to calm my nerves.”

I opened a beer for myself, ate a few more peanuts. When I looked up I asked, “What’s so funny?” because he was laughing. He could do that — turn on a dime from terrorized to cruelly hysterical.

“Your face,” he replied. “You have nothing to worry about, Eileen. Nobody’s going to bother you with a face like that one.”

That’s it. To hell with him. I recall catching my reflection in the dark glass windows of the living room later that evening. I looked like a grown-up. My father had no right to bully me. Joanie stopped by that night wearing a white faux-fur jacket and a miniskirt and snow boots, her hair coiffed and bouncy, eyes lined in thick black liner. She was a blonde, pouty and lighthearted, back then at least. My guess is she went on to be soured — that pout was on its way somewhere, after all — but I hope she’s healthy and happy and with someone who loves her. Here’s to hoping. She was a special kind of girl. When she moved, she seemed to throw her flesh around as though it were a fur coat, so relaxed and comfortable, I couldn’t understand her. She was charming, I suppose, but so critical, always with this naive way of asking me things like, “You don’t feel funny wearing your dead mother’s sweater?” And sometimes it was more sisterly, such as “Why is your face like that? What’s your problem now?”

That night I just shook my head, made a ham sandwich. Bread, butter, ham. Joanie clapped her compact shut and came up from behind to poke me in the ribs. “Sack of bones,” she said, grabbing my sandwich off the plate. “I’ll see you,” she said, kissing Dad in his chair. I never saw her again.

I went up to the attic to lie on my cot with my magazine. Would I miss my sister if she died? I wondered. We’d grown up side by side, but I barely knew her. And she certainly didn’t know me. I pulled chocolates from a tin and chewed and spat them out one by one into the crinkly brown paper they came in. I turned another page.