Eileen

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.

Had that Tuesday at work been a typical Tuesday, I would have spent it idle at my desk, watching the clock, sketching out my escape from X-ville for the hundredth time. If I left the Dodge at a filling station in Rutland — at a gas pump even — and just walked away, my head covered with a scarf, and simply boarded the next train to New York from Rutland station without anyone noticing me, people in X-ville might suspect I’d been kidnapped by some modern-day highwayman, expect to find me headless somewhere across the country, dumped by the side of the road or in some gruesome cheap motel scene. “Poor Eileen,” my dad would sniffle. I imagined. I dreamed. But that Tuesday I wasn’t thinking of any of those things. Instead, I thought of Rebecca, whose arrival at Moorehead seemed like a sweet promise from God that my situation could improve. I was no longer alone. Finally, here was a friend I could admire and open up to, who could understand me, my plight, and help me rise above it. She was my ticket to a new life. And she was so clever and beautiful, I thought, the embodiment of all my fantasies for myself. I knew I couldn’t be her, but I could be with her, and that was enough to thrill me. When she arrived that Tuesday, bustling in from the frigid morning snowdrifts, she whirled off her coat as though in slow motion — this is how I remember it — and shook it like a bullfighter as she strode up the corridor toward me, hair rippling behind her, eyes like daggers shooting down straight through my heart to my guts. She was pure magic. Her coat was a crimson wool swing coat with a gray fur collar. It was the same kind of fur I’d seen on the magazine cover. I stood up nervously when she got closer, expectantly, as though I were her assistant, her secretary, her maidservant. She nodded politely to the old ladies in the office and caught my eye on her way back to the locker room, which is where I followed her.

I had dressed for the occasion. From my mother’s wardrobe I’d composed an ensemble I thought made me look more cosmopolitan — navy blue, of course. I even wore an old fake pearl necklace. I’d brushed my hair and applied my lipstick more carefully that morning, dabbing at the edges of my mouth with the pressed powder so it stayed in place. I remember this because, as I’ve said, I was obsessed with my looks. Ironically, despite my preoccupation, my appearance on most days was slovenly, offensive even. “Disgraceful,” said my father. I thought, though, that I looked much better that morning. “Fancy” was probably the word I would have used. In any case, I followed the sound of Rebecca’s delicate heels ticktocking across the linoleum floor, and in the locker room she turned to me, saying, “Can you help me open my locker again? I can’t seem to do it.” She held up her long hands and twiddled her fingers in her skin-tight dove-gray leather gloves. “All thumbs,” she said. This helplessness was some kind of flirtation, I think, a manipulation of roles to keep me at her service, though I couldn’t have understood that at the time. I was perfectly pleased to spin the dial with finesse, blushing as though my talent for opening a locker was a sign of great virtue.

“But how do you know my combination?” she asked.

The locker opened with a sharp clank. I stepped back with pride.

“All the combinations are the same,” I told her. “But don’t tell the old ladies. They’d all have strokes.”

“You’re funny,” said Rebecca, wrinkling her nose. She carried her briefcase and a small leather purse from which she transferred her cigarettes into the pocket of her sweater. Her sweater looked so soft — it must have been angora, cashmere — it seemed to float around her like cotton candy. That day, just the second time I’d seen her, she wore all different shades of purple — lavender, violet, mauve. If she’d been any other woman, I would have discounted her as a hussy since her dress was so formfitting, so elegant, completely inappropriate for work in a prison. This wasn’t some romantic evening, after all. But Rebecca was no hussy. She was divine. I gazed at the elegant bend in her arm as she hung her coat up in her locker.

“I know it’s wrong to wear fur,” she said, seeing me stare. “But I can’t help myself. Chinchilla.” She petted the collar of her coat inside the locker as though it were a cat.

“No, no,” I said. “I was just admiring your cigarette case.”

“Oh, thanks,” she said. “It was a gift. See, it has my initials.” She pulled it out from her pocket and showed me. It was a striated silver cigarette case, the size of a pack of cards. I wanted to ask, “A gift from whom?” but held my tongue. She opened it and offered me a cigarette. They were Pall Malls, thick and filterless and the harshest cigarettes I’ve ever smoked. I was on them for several years later in life, always rather moved by the unexpected beauty of the motto written across their logo — a shield between two lions—Per aspera ad astra. Through the thorns to the stars. That described my plight to a tee, I thought back then, though of course it didn’t. Rebecca lit my cigarette with a flourish of the wrist. That thrilled me. When she lit her own, she tilted her head like a thoughtful bird, sucking in her cheeks just slightly. I remember all this with precise acuity. I was infatuated with her, clearly. And I felt in a way that just by knowing her, I was graduating out of my misery. I was making some progress.

“I don’t usually smoke,” I said, choking a bit, though I had a pack of Salems in my purse.

“Nasty habit,” Rebecca said, “but that’s why I like it. Not very becoming of a lady, though. It turns your teeth yellow. See?” And she leaned in toward me, a finger hooked on her bottom lip, stretching her gums apart to show me the inside of her mouth. “See the discoloration? That’s coffee and cigarettes. And red wine.” But her teeth were perfect — small, and white as paper. Her gums were pink and glossy, and the skin on her face was miraculously smooth, like a baby’s, flawless and radiant and light. You see women like this from time to time — beautiful as children, unscathed, wide-eyed. Her cheeks were full but firm, buoyant. Her lips were pale pink and bow-shaped, but chapped. By that slight imperfection I felt subtly disappointed, and yet redeemed.

“I don’t drink coffee,” I said, “so I guess I should have perfect teeth. But they’re all rotted due to my propensity for sweets.” This word, propensity, was not in my day-to-day vocabulary back then, and it was awkward to say it, and I worried Rebecca would see through my attempt to sound smart and laugh at me. But what she said next made my heart nearly burst in ecstasy.

“Well, I wouldn’t think to look at you!” She smiled wide, putting her hands on her hips. “You’re positively tiny! I admire that so much, how petite you are.” That was heaven. And then she went on. “I’m thin, too, of course, but tall and thin. Being tall has its advantages, but most men are just too short for me. Have you noticed, or am I imagining, men these days are getting shorter and shorter?” I nodded, rolling my eyes in solidarity although I couldn’t possibly answer her question. She put her purse in the locker and shut it. “They’re like little boys. Hard to find a real man, or at least a man that looks like one. To tell you the truth,” she began — I held my breath—“I’ve forgotten my locker combination. But I won’t trouble you again. You have better things to do, I’m sure. I have it written down in my desk. Now to find my way back to that office they gave me yesterday. I won’t ask for help with that either. I should be able to follow my nose. The smell of ancient leather.” She paused. “There’s that old couch in Bradley’s office next door to mine, you know, the fainting couch. How Freudian,” she said, widening her eyes sarcastically. “How outdated, I mean.”

“Bradley?” I’d forgotten Dr. Frye’s replacement, Dr. Bradley Morris, with the bald head. Was he scrawny? Was he a real man by Rebecca’s standards? I had no idea. Was she involved with him somehow?

“The new headshrinker,” said Rebecca. “To tell you the truth”—there was that phrase again—“I don’t think his head’s been shrunk down quite enough, if you know what I mean.” It took me a moment to compute. Was this a comment on his proportions? I was like a pubescent boy, fumbling for words. Seeing my blank look, Rebecca said, almost apologetically, “Big headed, I mean. But I’m kidding. He seems like a perfectly nice person.”

I cursed myself for being so slow, so dense. I wanted to explain that I was intelligent, well-read, that I’d been to college, that I knew who Freud was, that I didn’t belong in that prison, that I was exceptional, I was cool, but it seemed petty to defend myself.

“I’ve never been inside that office,” I said instead. “Dr. Frye always kept it locked, and only the boys ever went in there.” I didn’t have a quick wit like she did. I was graceless, pedestrian and dull. Apart from my size, I couldn’t impress Rebecca at all. I should have asked her about herself, her plans at Moorehead, how she got interested in prison work, what her goals were, her dreams and ambitions, but my mind didn’t work that way back then. I had no manners. I didn’t know how to make friends.

“Come visit any time,” she said, nevertheless. “Unless, of course, the door is closed. Which means I’m with one of the boys.”

“Thank you,” I said. I meant to sound professional. “I’ll stop in next time I’m passing by.”

“Eileen,” she said, pointing her finger at my gut. “Right?”

I blushed deeply, and nodded.

“Call me Rebecca,” she said, winking, and ticktocked away.

I could have swooned with embarrassment and exhilaration. She’d remembered my name. That meant a great deal to me. I’d forgotten all about Leonard Polk’s file. Earlier that morning I’d hoped Rebecca would give it back in case Mrs. Stephens found it missing and questioned me about it. But what did I care now? I had a real friend — someone who knew me, wanted my company, someone I felt connected to. I would replay that conversation with Rebecca, and every other one I had with her, again and again for years afterward as I came to terms with what would happen in the days ahead. At that moment, I felt happy. Meeting Rebecca was like learning to dance, discovering jazz. It was like falling in love for the first time. I had always been waiting for my future to erupt around me in an avalanche of glory, and now I felt it was really happening. Rebecca was all it took. Per aspera ad astra.

I had to set aside my reflections on the brief exchange with Rebecca that morning since it was a day for visitors and I had to work. There was already a gaggle of tearful mothers and small children sitting impatiently on the chairs in the waiting room by the time I got back to my desk. I remember one of the mothers had come to see her twelve-year-old son who had burned down the family house. He was a short, full-cheeked, brown-haired boy with duck feet and the beginnings of a mustache on his upper lip. I paid close attention to those strange hairs growing there. His reminded me of my own upper lip. I used to pluck those hairs routinely with tweezers. All the time I wasted plucking my face at the bathroom mirror, I could have written a book. I could have learned to speak French. My eyebrows were always thin and weak, so I never had to pluck them. I’ve heard having weak brows is a sign of indecisiveness. I prefer to think it is the mark of an open heart, an appreciation of possibility. In that fashion magazine with the cat-fur hat, I’d read how some women draw their eyebrows with a pencil to be thick and dark. Ridiculous, I’d thought. Standing outside the visitation room, I tapped the bony points of my hips with the butt of my fist, a habit which assured me, somehow, of my superiority, my great strength.

When the little arsonist was seated across from his mother at the table, he did what all the younger boys did. They crossed their arms and faced the wall, steeled themselves, pouty and squinty, unreachably cool. But once they took one look at their mothers’ pained faces, they burst into tears. The arsonist burst into tears. His mother pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and handed it across the table. Randy bolted into the room, holding one firm open palm in front of the boy, blocking the mother’s extended hand with the other. “Sorry,” he said, monotonously. “That’s not allowed.”

“You can hug him when you leave,” I chimed in, “but you can’t give him anything. It’s for security, to keep the children safe.” I had some practiced speech like that.

Of course, the rule wasn’t there to protect children from handkerchiefs. I knew what I’d said just wasn’t true. But I was young enough, and had been enslaved enough by my public school education and my father and his Catholicism, and was frightened enough of being punished or questioned or singled out, that I obeyed every rule there was at Moorehead. I followed every procedure. I clocked in and out every day on time. I was a shoplifter, a pervert, you might say, and a liar, of course, but nobody knew that. I would enforce the rules all the more, for didn’t that prove that I lived by a high moral code? That I was good? That I couldn’t possibly want to hike up my skirt and move my runny bowels all over the linoleum floor? I understood perfectly that the rule that prohibited parents from giving gifts to their children was to keep the boys in a state of desperation. The warden proselytized at every possible occasion. His logic was quite sound, I believed. Only a desperate soul would feel remorse for his sins, and if the remorse was deep enough, the boy would surrender and hence he’d be pliable, finally willing to be transformed, so the warden said. The last people on Earth I’d put in charge of transforming anyone were that warden and Dr. Frye, or Dr. Morris — though I never knew him — or, sorry to say, Rebecca. She may have been the worst of all. But I speak with hindsight. At first, yes, Rebecca was a dream to me, she was magic, she was powerful and everything I wanted to be. So no handkerchiefs. No toys, no comics or magazines or books. Let the children cry. No one was offering me any tenderness, after all. Why should any of those boys have any more or better than I had? I lowered my gaze down to Randy’s crotch as he walked back out of the visitation room. He just sucked his teeth and sighed.

“I’m fine,” said the little arsonist, wiping his face with the hem of his smock. His mother whimpered. I remember she wore a white scarf, and when the scarf fell away I saw that the skin on her neck was raised and welted in pink and yellow scars from burns. The visitation was over when the clock showed that seven minutes had passed — visits were seven minutes long and I suppose that had some religious significance — at which point I waved to James, who delivered the arsonist back to the rec room or wherever and brought in the next boy. Randy stood around in the doorway while I collected a final signature from the weepy mother on her way out. Her vitriol came through in her penmanship. While the earlier signature was clean, careful, the outgoing signature was violent, jagged, and rushed. It was always like that. Everybody was broken. Everybody suffered. Each of those sad mothers wore some kind of scar — a badge of hurt to attest to the heartbreak that her child, her own flesh and blood, was growing up in prison. I tried my best to ignore all that. I had to if I was going to act normal, maintain my flat composure. When I was very upset, hot and shaking, I had a particular way of controlling myself. I found an empty room and grit my teeth and pinched my nipples while kicking the air like a cancan dancer until I felt foolish and ashamed. That always did the trick.

Something struck me as I watched Randy scratch his elbow, then lean against the door frame of the visitation room: I was no longer in love with him. Looking at him with eyes now glazed over in my new affection for Rebecca, he seemed like a nobody, a face in a crowd, gray and meaningless like an old newspaper clipping of a story I’d read so many times, it no longer impressed me. Love can be like that. It can vanish in an instant. It’s happened since, too. A lover has left the warm rapture of my bed to get a glass of water and returned only to find me cold, uninterested, empty, a stranger. Love can reappear, too, but never again unscathed. The second round is inevitably accompanied by doubt, intention, self-disgust. But that is neither here nor there.

When James returned, the boy he was guiding up the hall was, to my great surprise, Leonard Polk. Leonard walked casually, almost jauntily with his hands cuffed behind his back. He was taller than I expected, and loose limbed with that awkward softness young men have before their bodies harden. There was a strange bounce in his step. His face was bright and relaxed, awake and serene in a way no other boy’s face had ever seemed, a loose reservedness which I found myself admiring. He looked pleased, impenetrable, and cold as though nothing could ever disturb him, and yet still as innocent as the silent creature I’d seen earlier touching himself absentmindedly on his cot in the cave. I searched for something in his face, anything his mask of contentment might betray, but there was nothing. He was a genius in that sense — a master. His was the best mask I’d ever seen.

James ushered him by the glass wall of the waiting area. When they passed Mrs. Polk on the other side, Leonard smiled. I imagined this boy in his parents’ darkened bedroom, standing over his sleeping father with a kitchen knife, moonlight flickering on the blade like lightning as he brought it down hard and fast, tearing across the man’s throat. Could this strange, supple creature have done such a thing? Randy took him into the visitation room, set him in the chair, undid his cuffs, and stood in the doorway.

“Mrs. Polk?” I called out.

The woman rose from her seat in the waiting area and came toward me. I remember this first vision of her with excellent clarity, though she was utterly unremarkable. She wore sharply creased black trousers, tight around her swollen thighs. Her sweater looked like an afghan blanket, the different colored squares lined up over her chest and large gut. She was repugnant, I thought, in her fat and dishevelment. She was not an obese woman, but she had quite a paunch and seemed bloated and tired and nervous. She walked stiffly, shifting from side to side with each step as some fat people do, and carried a brown coat over her arm, no purse. As she entered the room I noticed some white pieces of fluff stuck in the back of her frizzy hair, which was pulled tight into a bun. Her lipstick was a cheap and insincere fuchsia. I stared steadily at her face, trying to determine what sort of intelligence was there. Since she was overweight, I assumed she was an idiot — I still tend to judge those types as gluttons, fools — but her eyes were clear blue, sharp, with the same strange twist as her son’s. I saw the resemblance in the eyes, the freckles, the pouty lips. She looked nervous handing her coat to Randy as I patted her down. My palm landed with a thud on the small of her back, which was soft and wide. I stifled an odd impulse I had to embrace her, to try to comfort her a little. She seemed so dowdy, so pitiful, like a sow awaiting slaughter.

“All set,” I told her. She took her coat back from Randy and sat across the table from Leonard, or Lee, as he was called. Mrs. Polk was shifty-eyed. The boy just smiled. I looked from mother to son. If Rebecca’s theory of Oedipus was correct, perhaps I had grossly misjudged what kind of women young men found attractive those days, because Mrs. Polk was nobody I could imagine anyone would kill for. Then again, maybe Lee Polk was out of his mind. It was impossible to tell what he might be thinking. His mask didn’t waver. It was not my stony, flat mask of death, nor was it the stiff, cheerful posturing popular among housewives and other sad and deranged women. It was not the cutthroat bad boy mask set to ward off potential threats with the promise of violence and hot rage. Neither was it the lily-sweet bashfulness of men who pretend they’re so weak, so sensitive, they would crumble if anyone ever challenged them even a little. Lee’s look of calm contentment was an odd mask, peculiar in its falseness as it hardly looked fake at all.

In an effort to keep from crying, it seemed, Mrs. Polk pinched her eyes shut and exhaled. After a moment she folded her hands and placed them on the table, opened her mouth to speak. But then, from down the hall, loud clicking footsteps made us all stop and turn. It was Rebecca. Here she came strutting toward us. She carried her notebook in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Mrs. Polk, Randy and I all froze as she approached, a wobbly silhouette at first, and then a vision in lavender, loose russet hair bouncing around her shoulders. When she got closer, she was serious, quiet, and I saw that her fingers clutched her notebook like the legs of a lizard grappling a rock. There was something tense about her. She tried to smile, her eyes nervous and glittering. She was human and neurotic underneath that beauty, after all. That was comforting. The coincidence of her timing struck me. Had she invited Mrs. Polk? What had Rebecca done with Leonard’s file? She nodded to me and Randy and stood between us in the open doorway, holding the notebook close to her body. As she watched mother and son sitting there, she wrote continuously without looking down at the paper, ashing her cigarette absentmindedly at the floor as it burned down to her fingers.

Mrs. Polk kept her nose in the air as she spoke. I don’t remember what she said to him, but it wasn’t much. Such and such about his cousins, maybe something about money. Nothing important. Her son remained silent. At some point Mrs. Polk sighed, frustrated, and stared off at the wall in exasperation. When I tried to peek under Rebecca’s hand to read what she’d been writing, it looked like chicken scratch. Since I’d never seen shorthand before, I assumed it was simply nonsense, lines on a paper she’d made so as to appear that she was taking notes. I didn’t understand it. Dr. Frye, when he’d come to observe the family visits, had never taken notes. I wondered, of course, why Rebecca was there at all. Dr. Bradley never made a single appearance.

After a minute of silence, the boy staring at his mother’s hands on the table between them, Mrs. Polk lifted her face, looked Lee straight in the eyes. Her wrinkles were long and saggy, as though her face had once been bigger, fuller, but had been deflated, leaving deep folds dug like trenches. She began to cry. If I heard what she said, I don’t remember it precisely, but I assumed the gist of it was, “How could you do this to me?” her voice plaintive and soft. Then she cleared her throat and grunted aloud. Her hands were small and red and cracked, I saw as she pulled out a tissue. She blew her nose into it, then balled it up like an angry child and stuffed it violently back in her pocket. In that moment, she reminded me of my mother and her quick switches, how one minute she’d be sunshine and singsong and the next she’d be cursing in the basement at the laundry, kicking at the walls. It was that kind of duplicity: talking one way but acting another. Rebecca had stopped scribbling and was leaning on one leg, twisting her opposite heel into the floor, stubbing out her cigarette. Randy looked at that arrant, flirtatious foot out of the corner of his eye, or at least I think he did. Rebecca had her pencil in her mouth, and when I turned to face her, I saw her tongue well up and a bubble of saliva burst as her teeth closed down on the pencil’s eraser tip. To see inside her open mouth like that, the mouth of a child, clean, pink, bubbling with youth and beauty, hurt me deeply. I burned with envy. Of course Randy would choose Rebecca over me. She was easy to love. I donned my death mask, bristling underneath with shame. When Lee’s seven minutes were up, I knocked on the door frame and Randy motioned to Rebecca to step aside so that Mrs. Polk could exit. But first Mrs. Polk made sure to let a few tears splat on the table, and then said, more to us than to her son, “I blame myself.” Lee looked up at the clock, unfazed.

I followed Mrs. Polk back out into the office, but turned to watch as Rebecca stepped into the visitation room and slid the mother’s now vacant chair up close to Lee’s. She spoke to him, and his grin faded. His head bowed as he listened. It looked like they had an intimate rapport, but when could that have developed? Rebecca had just arrived at Moorehead, and already she was leaning in close toward him, bending her face down below his, her eyebrows raised, eyes sparkling and searching up at his. I guided Mrs. Polk toward the counter, handed her a pen, and watched her sign her name: Rita P. Polk. It wasn’t an angry penmanship. It was casual, unconcerned — irrelevant. She didn’t look back at her son, just blinked heavily, sighed as though clocking out at work, then swung her coat up around her shoulders and walked back down the hall. I imagined her returning to her home to crochet another terrible sweater, swear and grind her teeth every time she missed a stitch. I felt sorry for her. I knew instinctively that the woman, this widow, had no other children.

Following protocol, I signaled to James to prepare for the next boy’s visit. But Rebecca was still talking with Lee. Lee had turned away from her and laid his hands across the table. I walked into the room to tell them to clear out, suddenly full of courage. I saw clearly then the word tattooed on Lee’s fingers. It was “LOVE.” That disturbed me deeply. I said nothing, but watched as the boy sniffed, and gruffly swept a tear off his cheek with the butt of his hand. Rebecca put her hand on his shoulder. And then she put another hand on his knee below the table. This, in plain sight, and with me standing there, she dared get so close to the boy, touching him like that, leaning over enough that he might simply lift his gaze to peer down the front of her blouse, that he could easily raise his chin to meet his lips with hers. I stared disbelievingly. Did they really not see me? How was it that the boy didn’t fidget and squirm? He seemed quite comfortable, really. How could I interrupt them? I stared at the floor. When James returned with the next child, he knocked lightly on the door frame.

“I’m sorry,” I managed to say, “but we need the room.”

“Of course,” said Rebecca. Then she spoke quietly to Lee. “We can talk more in my office. You want a Coke?” Lee nodded. “I’ll get you a Coke,” she said. As they got up, Randy came in with handcuffs. “Oh no,” Rebecca said. “That isn’t necessary.” And she took Lee by the arm back down the hall, leaving James stunned and blushing until I cleared my throat, pointed at the new boy at his side. I watched Lee’s now tepid gait as they walked away. It was so very odd, and it angered me because I couldn’t understand what had happened and because Rebecca seemed to care more for this Lee Polk than she did for me.

For the remaining visiting hours, I replayed the scene again and again: Rebecca leaning so close to the boy, her hair spilling across her back and shoulders, so near that surely he could smell the scent of her shampoo, her perfume, her breath, her sweat. And she must have felt him responding to her, the tension in his shoulder building under her hand, chest rising and falling with every breath, the heat coming off of him. But then to put her hand on his knee, I couldn’t imagine what that could mean. If I hadn’t been there, if they’d been alone, would her hand have begun to knead the boy’s thigh, travel up along his inseam, gently cup his private parts? Would he have swept Rebecca’s hair away and would his lips have parted as he inhaled the scent of her neck? Would he have kissed her neck, held her face between his almost manly hands, run his fingers, LOVE, over her slender wrists and up her arms to her breasts, kissing her, pulling her toward him, feeling all of her, warm and soft and all there in his arms? Would they have done all that?

I fantasized as best I could, jealous first of Rebecca, then of Lee, and switching back and forth as I considered their roles and how they’d betrayed me, since already I’d decided that Rebecca was mine. She was my consolation prize. She was my ticket out. Her behavior with this boy really threatened all that. Was this what they’d taught Rebecca to do at Harvard — to win these boys over with charm and affection, then educate them? Perhaps this was some new way, I tried to think, some kind of liberated thinking. But the more I considered it, the crazier it seemed. What was she saying to him? How close could they have become in a matter of days? What had Rebecca done or said to earn Lee’s trust? I imagined the scene back in Rebecca’s office. I wanted to know what was happening. Visitors came and went. I felt sick with abandonment. I was so very dramatic. I figured I ought to leave then and there, to spare myself any more misery. Once again I imagined driving my Dodge off the cliffs and down onto the rocks by the ocean. Wouldn’t that be thrilling? Wouldn’t that be the way to show them all that I was brave, that I was tired of following their rules? I would rather die than stand around, be among them, drive on their nice streets, or sit in their nice prison — no, not me. I nearly cried standing there. Even Randy, beautiful and smelling of smoke and polished leather, couldn’t cheer me.

But then I saw it — the notebook. Rebecca had left it on the ledge of the window behind the table. And so when the last visitor left, I snatched it and walked down through the corridors toward Rebecca’s office, quite pleased that I’d found such a good excuse to poke my nose in. I hoped that Lee was still in there with her and I could catch the two of them red-handed. I don’t know what I was expecting to find, but I put my ear to the door, straining to hear sighs and moans, or whatever people sounded like when they made love. I’d never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons. I heard, felt nothing. I knocked on Rebecca’s office door.

“Oh, Eileen,” she chirped when she opened it. “Are you all right?”

I took a step back, feeling like a child, a nuisance. I extended the notebook toward her. She took it, thanked me, said she hoped I hadn’t read it.

“Of course I didn’t,” I told her. I couldn’t have, anyway — that chicken scratch was indecipherable.

“I’m only teasing,” she laughed. “My book of secrets.” She clutched the notebook to her chest. She had a way of laughing, head thrown back, jaw cut so smooth and white and hard, as if it were rimmed in porcelain, eyes first pinched in ecstasy, then wide and wild — devilish eyes, beautiful eyes — then face lowered, beaming with affection or derision, I couldn’t tell. I turned to leave, but she stopped me by laying a hand on my shoulder. This sent chills down my spine. Nobody had touched me like that in years. I forgave her instantly for betraying me with the boy. I could hear him inside clearing his throat.

“Say,” she began. “Would you be up for a drink after work tonight? I don’t know anyone in this darn town, and I would love to treat you to a cocktail, if you’re game.”

The way she talked was so canned, so scripted, it inspired me to be just as canned. “Say.” People didn’t really talk like that. “A cocktail.” If she seems insincere, she was. She was terribly pretentious, and later, in hindsight, I felt she’d insulted my intelligence by selling me her scripted bunk. “Darn it all.” But at the time I felt I was being invited into an elite world of beautiful people. I was flattered. And I was flustered. I had never received such an invitation in my life, so this was as thrilling and terrifying as hearing someone tell me, “I love you.” I was full of gratitude. I didn’t think of my father, my evening duties, any of that. I just said, “OK.”

“OK? I’ve twisted your arm?” Rebecca joked. She let the door swing open a bit. I could see Lee Polk sitting in a chair in front of her desk, looking through a large book of pictures. When he saw me he held the book up to hide his face.

“Sure,” I said. “How about O’Hara’s around seven?” I was shocked by how easily the words came out of my mouth. I hoped my death mask had not betrayed me, prayed I sounded cool. O’Hara’s was just a dark dive with hard wooden booths, a place working-class locals went. The usual clientele were cops and firefighters and men from the shipyard who stank powerfully of sweat and salt. Two single women alone at a place like O’Hara’s would inspire strange looks, or worse. But I was game. I was a peon and I was a child, but I was not a coward. “It’s the only bar in town,” I added.

“Sounds perfect,” Rebecca whispered. She made a playful, conniving face. “I’ll see you there. With bells on! Is that the expression?” She shut the door.

So that was something. You have to remember I was what you’d call a loser, a square, a ding-a-ling. I was a wet blanket. I had never gone out at night. Even in college, the dances were chaperoned, and among the girls in my dorm was the sense that to stray from the flock meant you were a floozy, a prostitute, a sinner, greedy, disgraceful, a threat to civilization, bad. Setting foot in a place like O’Hara’s would have been frowned upon. But if Rebecca was doing it, I would do it, too. What did I have to lose? I left work early to give myself time to go home and change. I figured I had to put on a dress, do my makeup, find my mother’s perfume. Getting dolled up was completely silly, of course. You can always tell something when a woman is overdressed — either she’s an outsider, or she’s insane.

I wasn’t a stranger at O’Hara’s. Sandy, the bartender, was a thick and slow-moving man with deep acne scars and a gold cross, a flirt. I’d been there plenty of times, first as a young girl sent in to fetch my father from an extended after-work beer with his fellow cops while my mother waited in the car, and later as a sober escort when he’d get drunk and refuse to accept a ride home. I remember one autumn evening in particular when I was home from college for the weekend, my mother sent me to the bar to pick up my dad. Driving home along the moonlit streets, he laid his head on my shoulder, told me I was a good girl, that he loved me, that he was sorry he couldn’t be better, that he knew I deserved a real father. It moved me at first, but then his hand went to my breast. I beat him off easily. “Quit fussing, Joanie,” he said, slumping back in his seat. I never mentioned it to anyone.

Before I left Moorehead that day, I finished the vermouth in my locker, and then I drove to the liquor store for more gin and beer for my father and another bottle of vermouth for me. I’d need a drink before meeting Rebecca at O’Hara’s, I was that nervous. At home, I set the bag of booze down next to my father, who was sleeping in his recliner with his face smushed against the cushion, eyebrows raised, forehead clenched, body twisted and clunky under the flannel robe. I ran up into the shower as silently as I could. Let me be clear about this: I was not a lesbian. But I was attracted to Rebecca, yearned for her attention and approval, and I admired her. You could call it a crush. Rebecca might as well have been Marlon Brando, James Dean. Elvis. Marilyn Monroe. In such company, any normal person would want to look right, smell good. I worried what might happen if Rebecca wanted to lean in close to me the way she did with Lee. What if she could smell that I was menstruating, and that I hadn’t washed? What if she smelled it clear as day but didn’t say anything? How, then, would I know whether or not she’d smelled it, and how ought I act to pretend I didn’t know Rebecca smelled it? My poor nether regions. My body’s readiness to bear a child seemed classless and vulgar to me, and I felt that if Rebecca had any idea that I was menstruating, I would be humiliated. I would die. These were my thoughts as I scrubbed.

Once I got out of the shower, I put my hair up in a towel and listened for the sound of my father fussing downstairs, hoping I could sneak out without having to talk to him. The prettiest song I’d ever heard was the silence of the house that night, just the pipes gently clanging, the wind howling outside. I dressed per usual from my mother’s closet, choosing what I thought would look nice — a black wool dress with a high neck, a golden broach of leaves in a circle. I brushed my hair, which was still wet, put on my new shade of lipstick, pulled on a fresh pair of stolen stockings, then stood perplexed at my mother’s closet full of shoes, which were all one-half size too big. I didn’t own any shoes besides my beat-up loafers and my snow boots, so I wore the snow boots. They made me feel oafish and silly, but it was winter, after all. I chose a black cape from my mother’s collection of winter coats, grabbed my purse, shut the door softly, and ran out to the car. It was so cold that by the time I was out of the driveway, my hair had frozen in strips. They rattled like dead insects by my ears while I drove with the windows up, holding my breath. I parked under a broken streetlamp across from O’Hara’s, reapplied my lipstick in the rearview mirror and skidded over the ice to the bar.

When I opened the door to the dark, warm din, there was Rebecca, legs crossed high on a bar stool, facing a booth full of scruffy young men. They all seemed to be sweating a little, smiling, nervous as kittens and swirling their beers. Each wore the customary heavy wool jacket in blue, gray, or red plaid, and a hat — either a tight-fitting knit cap or the kind with the flaps that come down over the ears — and their faces were red and chapped from windburn and sunburn and cold. The four of them listened as Rebecca went on about something I couldn’t hear.

“Oh, Eileen!” she exclaimed, interrupting herself. Her voice sang through the smoke and Christmas carols playing on the jukebox — Perry Como or Frank Sinatra, I couldn’t tell the difference. The booth of men fell still, all eyes on Rebecca and none on me as I walked toward her. Nevertheless, I felt important, like a celebrity, even. Rebecca swirled around on her bar stool, ignoring her audience of admirers, and waved to me as though we were good friends coming together again after a dramatic period of separation, as though she were leaning over the rail of some romantic ocean liner, me a sight for sore eyes, so much to talk about. She was drinking a martini, and I studied the way she held the glass, which fingers she used, pointer and pinky raised in the air like at an elegant soiree. She was utterly out of place at O’Hara’s. She wore her same outfit from work, but she had tied her hair back into a braid. Her coat lay across the seat of the stool next to her. As I approached her, she turned and pulled the coat off and added it to the pile of fur hat and leather gloves on the seat to her left. “I was saving both these seats,” she said, “in case someone tried to sit down, know what I mean? Well, have a seat. What’ll you have?”

“I’ll have a beer, I guess,” I said.

“A beer, how neat,” said Rebecca. This was quaint to her, this beer. It was clear that she was from what you’d call an affluent family, so affluent that she seemed to care not at all what anybody made of her. She was motivated by something other than money — personal values, I suppose. But while she had the unmistakable ease and refinement of someone from the upper class, or at least a good deal higher in class than me and the fine patrons of O’Hara’s, there was also something earthy about her. Her hair, especially in its red color, its roughness, its wild beauty, kept her from seeming like a snob. Sandy walked toward us, drying his hands with a rag. He slapped it over his shoulder, put his elbow down on the bar, and leaned in toward Rebecca.

“So what’s next, sweetheart?” he said, ignoring me. Rebecca barely looked at him. To my surprise, she put her hand over mine. Hers was hot and light.

“Oh, my stars, you’re absolutely frozen,” she said. “And your hair is wet.” She turned to Sandy. “One beer, please, and maybe also a little whiskey to warm up my girl. What say, huh?” She looked at me and smiled. “I’m so glad you made it out.” She gave my hand a squeeze and leaned back as though to survey me, a funny look on her face. As I unwrapped my cape, she said something like, “Oh my, you look very glamorous.”

I blushed. I was not glamorous. She was being kind, and that embarrassed me. I drank my whiskey. “I thought I’d have a hard time finding the place, but here it is,” she sang, pointing out the stuffed hammerhead on the wall. “Isn’t it funny? It’s sort of sad, actually. Well, not so sad.” She was babbling. The men kept standing up and leaning on the bar next to her, but she didn’t seem to notice them. Somebody played “Mr. Lonely” on the jukebox, the Bobby Vinton song. I always hated that song. I drank my beer in small quick sips as Rebecca complained about the cold, the icy roads, the New England winters. I was grateful just to sit there and be with her and listen to her talk.

After a minute or two, her eyes darted around my face. “You feel all right?”

“Oh yeah, I’m fine,” I said. Rebecca looked at me expectantly, so I thought of anything I could tell her. “There’s something wrong with my car,” is all I came up with in the moment. “So I have to drive with the windows down or else it fills with smoke.”

“That sounds positively awful. Have another whiskey. I insist.” She motioned to Sandy, gestured at our empty glasses. “Can’t your husband get that fixed for you?”

“Oh, I’m not married,” I told her, embarrassed that Sandy could hear me. But of course I wasn’t married. She was teasing me.

“I don’t want to assume. Some people are funny about bachelorettes.” She spoke carefully. “Personally, I don’t see what the big deal is. I’m single myself.” She tickled the stem of her glass with her nails. “I’m just not interested in marriage.”

“Don’t tell that to those guys,” I said, impressed by my own wit. I’d been keeping an eye on the men in the booth as they mumbled secretively to one another, seeming to be weighing their options, planning something. They all looked familiar — they could have been friends of Joanie’s — but I didn’t know their names.

“You’re funny, you know that?” Rebecca went on. “I’ve always been single. And when I have a guy around me, it’s just for fun, and it’s brief. I don’t stay long anywhere, with anything. It’s sort of my modus vivendi, or my pathology — depending on who I’m talking to.” She paused, looked at me. “Who am I talking to? Who am I babbling at?” she widened her eyes comically.

“Eileen,” I answered innocently, then blushed as I realized she’d only been making a joke of my reticence.

I was glad Rebecca wasn’t married or just out to find a husband. That’s what girls did back then — hunted for husbands. I wonder if she ever did get married. I like imagining her with a short, nebbish sort of husband — a Jew most likely — because I think that’s what she’d need, someone intelligent and serious and neurotic, unimpressed by her gregariousness and sparkling repartee. Someone controlling. Sandy set new drinks down in front of me.

“This is all on my tab,” Rebecca said, circling her finger at my glasses.

“It’s on theirs,” said Sandy, nodding toward the table of men.

“Oh, God, no,” said Rebecca. “That won’t do. Here, as a retainer.” She slid a twenty-dollar bill across the counter. Sandy let it sit there and made her another martini, probably the second martini he’d made in his life. I remember these scenes very clearly, and I recount them because I think it says something of how Rebecca appealed to me as a young woman, how she managed to gain my trust. First she solicited my envy, then she worked to extinguish it. By completely dismissing the men at the bar, and then men in general, she put to rest my earlier suspicions about her relationship with Lee Polk, and tempered my fear that she might steal Randy away from me. She sipped her drink, poked at the twenty-dollar bill she’d put down on the bar. “Men and their money.” She knew just what to say. “But enough about me,” she said. “Tell me about you. How long have you worked at Moorehead?”

“Three, four years?” I could barely count. My past seemed to flatten down into nothing in Rebecca’s presence. “It was only going to be temporary, while I moved back here for a bit when my mother was sick,” I explained. “And then she died and I just stayed on at the prison. And time’s just flown by,” I said, escalating my voice to sound chipper, funny.

“Oh no. Oh dear,” Rebecca shook her head. “That sounds absolutely awful. Prison is no place for time to fly. Jeez Louise. And your mother dying. You must be eager to get out of here. Are you?”

“I’m happy here,” I lied, sipping my beer.

“You know, I’m an orphan, too,” said Rebecca. I didn’t bother to correct her, tell her my father was still alive. “My parents both died when I was young. Drowned,” she said. “My uncle raised me out west, where the sun shines. I’ll never understand how you all do it up here winter after winter. Positively creepy, all the darkness, and so cold. It just about drives me mad.” She talked about the ocean, how she loved the beach. Growing up she’d play for hours in the sun and sand, and so on. And then she spoke about her move to Cambridge, how she and her girlfriends rowed boats on the Charles. She praised the foliage, the history, mocked the intellectuals—“the stiffs”—said she was in a “strange love affair with New England.” She never mentioned her studies at Harvard. She said nothing about her professional life at all. “Things feel very real out here, don’t they? There’s simply no fantasy. And no sentimentality. That’s what fascinates me. There is history and pride, but very little imagination here.”

I just listened. I had my whiskey and beer and Rebecca, and I hardly cared to disagree with her assessment of the place, my homeland. I just nodded. But of course she was dead wrong. We New Englanders are uptight for sure, but we have strong minds. We use our imaginations effectively. We don’t waste our brains on magical notions or useless frills, but we do have the ability to fantasize. I could name countless thinkers and writers and artists as examples. And there was me, after all. I was there. But I didn’t say much. I just sat there dumb, twisting my foot to the music. After a while she said, “I’m sorry. I’ve had too much to drink. I tend to talk too much when I drink.”

“That’s all right,” I said, shrugging.

“Better than talking too little,” she said, winking at me. “Only teasing.” She swiveled on her bar stool, jostling my legs before I had a chance to feel offended. “The real silent one is that Leonard Polk. You saw him today?”

I nodded. The coincidence of Rebecca’s new interest in Lee Polk with his mother’s sudden appearance at Moorehead still struck me as odd, but I didn’t feel it was my place to ask questions. I was just a secretary, after all.

“What did you make of that scene with his mother?” Rebecca asked. “Strange,” she squinted at me, “didn’t you think so?”

I shrugged. I suppose I still felt ashamed that I’d spied on the boy in the cave. Even just remembering the look of him through that little window made my heart beat faster — the hands moving under his uniform, his eyes hooded and sleepy. It excited me even then. The shame of arousal, the arousal of shame. “I don’t know,” I began. “Maybe he stopped talking because he had nothing nice to say. You know what they say to children — if you can’t think of anything nice to say, say nothing.”

“They say that to children?” Rebecca’s face grimaced in disgust. “Well, I wondered whether Lee might have something to hide, or whether he’d taken his vow of silence to protest his incarceration. Or was it just to torture his mother, be the thorn in her side since he hadn’t had the chance to slit her throat, too? I read his whole file, you know.”

“I guess that makes sense,” I said. “There’s nothing worse than when someone won’t talk to you. Drives me crazy, at least.” I didn’t tell her how my father would go silent for days, ignoring me, eyes glazed over as though I were invisible, saying nothing no matter how much I begged him to answer me. “What have I done wrong? Please tell me.” Rebecca didn’t press me for details.

“But did she seem angry to you, Mrs. Polk?” she asked.

“She seemed upset. They’re always upset, those mothers,” I told her. I wasn’t sure what Rebecca was getting at.

“Perhaps his silence is for her benefit. His silence could be charitable, know what I mean?” She cocked her head thoughtfully, searched my face for a response. I hadn’t followed her reasoning, but I nodded, tried to smile. “Secrets and lies?” she said, dipping her finger into her drink and sucking it. “I tell you, doll,” she said. I blushed. “Some families are so sick, so twisted, the only way out is for someone to die.”

“Boys will be boys,” is all I could think to say. Rebecca just laughed.

“The warden said the same thing this afternoon when I asked him about Leonard.” This surprised me. She finished her martini, then swung around on her bar stool, again facing the table of men. Lighting a cigarette, her posture now became angular and seductive. She blew the smoke in a tall plume up at the low ceiling. “I asked him,” she began, voice modulated into a higher register, eyes squinting at the men who seemed to stiffen, wipe their mouths and look alive, “what Leonard had done to get so many days in the cave, as you all call it. And he said what you said, Eileen.” She put her hand on my knee and then just left it there, as though it had found its rightful place on my leg. “Boys will be boys. I bet it was for something of a sexual nature. Something deviant. They don’t like to tell us gals such things. Leonard has the look. You know what I mean?” she asked.

I was shocked, of course. But I knew exactly what she meant. I had seen “the look” through that little window the day before. “I know,” I told her.

“I thought you might,” she said, winked, and squeezed my thigh.

“What’d you say your name was?” one of the men hollered, interrupting our private moment. Rebecca lifted her hand, placed it against her chest, looked wide-eyed.

“My name?” she asked, uncrossing and recrossing her legs. The men stirred in their seats, expectant as young dogs. “I’m Eileen,” she said. “And this is my friend.” Her hand found mine, still ice-cold and limp in my lap. “Do you all know my friend here?”

“And what’s your name, sweetheart?” one of them asked me. I can’t tell you how fun it was sitting there with Rebecca, a table full of men at our disposal. At least that’s how it seemed.

“Tell these boys your name, doll,” prompted Rebecca. When I looked at her, she winked. “My friend is feeling shy tonight,” she said. “Don’t be shy, Rebecca. These boys won’t bite.”

“Unless you ask us to,” the first man replied. “Jerry here’s got some missing teeth, though. Show ’em, Jerry.” Jerry, the man nearest to me, smiled, peeling up his top lip to show a comical gap. “Go easy, Jerry,” his friend said, patting him on the shoulder.

“How’d that come about, Jerry?” Rebecca asked. Sandy set more drinks for us on the bar. I drank mine fast. I had a moderate tolerance for alcohol, but an extreme thirst for it once I got started. I was probably already drunk by that point. “Did you get in a fight with your wife?” Rebecca teased.

The men laughed. “That’s it. You guessed right. His old lady has an arm like Joe Frazier.”

“Oh dear,” Rebecca shook her head, turned to pick up her martini, winked at me surreptitiously. “To Jerry,” she said, raising her glass. The rest toasted and cheered and for the silent moment while everyone gulped from their drinks, I looked around, astonished at my new place in the world. There I was, a lady, celebrated and adored.

“Tell me, gentlemen,” Rebecca went on. “Do any of you know how to fix a broken exhaust pipe? You all look pretty handy.”

“Your car got problems?” Jerry asked, lisping like a twelve-year-old.

“Not my car,” Rebecca answered. “Belongs to my friend here. Tell them.”

I shook my head, hid behind my glass of beer.

“What’d you say your name was, honey?” one of the men asked.

“Rebecca,” I answered. Rebecca laughed.

“Feel like dancing, Rebecca?” she asked me.

As if by magic, the jukebox kicked back on. I set down my glass. I can’t say where I suddenly found the courage to dance. I never danced. I was drunk, of course, but even still, it astounds me how easily Rebecca pulled me off of my stool. I followed her to the little space by the jukebox, took her hands in mine, and let her lead me around, giggling and stopping every few seconds, covering my face in embarrassment and glee as we swayed and shimmied. We danced for what felt like an hour, first to quick, happy dance tunes, laughing, and then we waltzed around to slow love songs, sardonically to start, but eventually we were lulled into the heady, sweeping pulse of the music. I stared disbelievingly into Rebecca’s serene, wistful face, her eyes closed, her hands on my shoulders like an angel and a devil debating the logic of longing. Rebecca and I moved together in a little circle as we danced, and I held her around her waist, with only my wrists pressed lightly against her body. I kept my hands stiff and stuck them out at an angle so that they wouldn’t touch her. The men in their booth were at first mesmerized and entertained, but then they grew tired. None of them tried to dance with us. By the time the music quit, my head was spinning. Rebecca and I went and sat down at our drinks again. Still entranced and nervous, I shot back the whiskey and finished the beer. “I’ve had plenty,” Rebecca said, and pushed her martini away. I drank that, too. It was gin.

Sandy came over, counted out Rebecca’s change.

“How’s Dad?” he asked me.

“Is this your brother?” Rebecca asked, shocked.

“No, he just knows my father,” I explained.

“Small towns,” Rebecca said, grinning.

I never trusted Sandy. He seemed terribly nosy. He’s not an important figure here, but for the record, Sandy Brogan was his name and I disliked him. He said something like, “Don’t know if it’s a good thing I ain’t seen him, or it means something else.”

“It means something else,” I said, and put my cape back on, pulled the hood over my head. I was feeling very brazen. “Can I have one of your cigarettes?” Sandy shook his pack out toward me and I pulled one out. He lit it for me.

“Quite a gal,” said Rebecca.

“This one’s a good kid,” Sandy affirmed, nodding. He was an idiot.

I smoked awkwardly, holding my cigarette like a nine-year-old would, hand stiff, fingers outstretched, watching the burning tip, going cross-eyed as I brought it to my lips. I coughed, blushed and laughed with Rebecca, who took my arm. Together we left the bar, ignoring the men as we walked out.

Out on the street, Rebecca turned to me. The dark, icy night sparkled behind her, the snow and stars a galaxy of hope and wonder with her at its center. She was so alive and lovely. “Thank you, Eileen,” she said, looking at me oddly. “You know, you remind me of a Dutch painting,” she said, staring into my eyes. “You have a strange face. Uncommon. Plain, but fascinating. It has a beautiful turbulence hidden in it. I love it. I bet you have brilliant dreams. I bet you dream of other worlds.” She threw her head back and laughed that evil laugh, then smiled sweetly. “Maybe you’ll dream of me and my morning remorse, which you can count on. I shouldn’t drink, but I do. C’est la vie.” I watched her get into her car — a dark two-door, is all I recall — and drive away.

But I didn’t want to go home yet. The night was young and I was beloved. I was someone important at last. So I went back into O’Hara’s, passed the same booth of men who were drunk, laughing, slapping the table, spilling their beers. I took the seat Rebecca had sat on, feeling just a hint of the warmth she’d left behind. Sandy slid an ashtray toward me, slapped a cocktail napkin beside my curled hand on the bar, red from the cold. “Whiskey,” I said, and stubbed out the cigarette.

The next memory I have is of waking up in the morning slumped over the steering wheel of the car, which I’d parked half inside a bank of snow in front of my house. A frozen pool of vomit sat next to me on the seat. My panty hose were full of runs. In the rearview mirror I looked like a madwoman — hair sticking out in all directions, lipstick smeared down my chin. I blew on my frozen hands, turned off the headlights. When I reached for the keys, they were missing from the ignition. I’d lost my cape, the trunk of the car was open, and my purse was gone.