Poor Jenny, Bright As A Penny

Chapter 6

It’s incredible, but we’re in juvenile hall. We didn’t do anything wrong. We’re here because there is no one at home to be responsible for us. Mama is in jail. I can hardly bear to write about it. I’ve left a note for Lud, he wouldn’t even know what happened to Mama. The police just came to the door with Bingo and we got our things and left.

I can’t believe everything that has happened today. This morning sitting on my bed eating an egg sandwich might have been a year ago. It’s nine thirty now and we’re locked in our room for the night. Locked in! Oh, well, I guess I’m being melodramatic.

But it’s the real thing. Crystal even had to wear handcuffs riding in the police car. That was her own fault, she really kicked and fought. Imagine, handcuffed with her hands behind her back. And all the time she was making eyes in the rearview mirror at the young red-haired officer who was driving. What an idiot she is. He only glared back at her.

We entered the building through an iron door that was locked behind us and were led down a hall where the doors had no doorknobs, just locks. Crystal and I are in Girls’ Unit Two, and Bingo’s in Boys’ Unit One. They go by age. The door to our unit was locked behind us too. Outdoors there are play yards, and lawns around the building, and you can see some trees and some flowers, even if you do have to look at them through barred windows. This unit has twelve girls, some are two to a bedroom, some only one. It has a living room, a dining room, a craft room, and looks more like a house than a jail. There’s a fireplace, and books, and even a television, couches, and print curtains at the windows, which sort of hide the bars.

The food is brought in on carts and we do the dishes afterward, that is, the girls assigned to the kitchen do. There is a list on the wall with jobs. Mine is to scrub the johns.

When we came in we had to take showers. They took our old clothes away and the group worker gave us clean denims and panties and shirts. Crystal looked sexy in hers, but I just looked like me. They lock us in our rooms every night at nine and we can have the lights on until ten. There are all kinds of rules like no smoking, bath every night, no dirty language at the dining table. There’s school during the day, and church on Sunday. Crystal snorted at that. Well, I shouldn’t criticize, I don’t want to go either.

The other girls really watched us when we came in, particularly Crystal because she’s by far the best-looking one here. She let them look, all the time watching them secretly with little innocent glances, sizing them up.

When they started asking questions, Crystal kept her cool. She just smiled that easy smile of hers and answered with lies. Crystal knows her way around anywhere. Once when they started on me she came and stood beside me and teased them right back. Crystal knows, just like Mama knows, how to hedge and keep from giving straight answers. I never can think of anything. They didn’t find out that Mama is in jail from either of us.

It’s strange, most of the girls here don’t look directly at you. They keep their faces turned a little away. And they don’t smile, or giggle and act silly. Maybe some of them are dull, butothers aren’t, you can see they’re more cunning. At first I wanted to get away from them and go to my room and read, but what good is that. What could I learn shut up in my room?

One dark fat girl, Mary Lou Hudley, told me that she’s in J.D.H. for incest. It was just a word to me until I thought what it meant. What it meant had happened to her. Then I felt sick. I wanted to ask her more, but I couldn’t.

She didn’t seem a bit ashamed. Maybe she wanted to shock me. Or maybe it wasn’t true at all, maybe she just made it up.

Bev McDougal is the ringleader. She has it in for Crystal already. I heard her say Crystal was “too smart for her own good.” I hope she doesn’t do something to Crystal.

For dinner we had chicken and gravy over mashed potatoes, green peas, and all the milk we wanted, and for dessert lemon cake pudding. I’ve never had that before.

In spite of everything I feel sort of safe here. I think some of the others do too. The littlest girl, Nancy Jo Blake, told me that at home she sleeps in a bed with four sisters, and that her brothers sleep on the floor, “like a row of stiffs.” She’s nine. She said that when she first came she was afraid to sleep in a bed alone at night, but now she likes it. “I like the clean of it and I like the secretness and the way I can reach with my legs and not touch anyone.” She had never tasted warm biscuits and butter until she came here, and never got all the milk she wanted. She said that the first week she was here she “emptied them milk cans faster than the truck carried ’em in.” She’s not like most of the others. She isn’t hard and blank like they are. But, still, her face does go blank when she doesn’t want to talk about something. Or maybe think about something? She is different, though. I feel bad about Nancy Jo.

There’s a girl here called Babette. That’s a pretty name, but she’s swarthy and sour. The girls have made beaded belts. They can keep them when they leave. Babette’s belt had dirty words done in the beading. The group worker saw it today and told her she had to take the beads off. Babette said she would stick the group worker and kill her. The group worker didn’t seem very upset. I suppose Babette was bluffing. Anyway, I guess the group workers are trained to handle that kind of thing, like that woman officer handled Crystal. Otherwise, how could they control a riot? Yes, there are riots. Then the girls are locked in their rooms, sometimes for all day.

I wouldn’t want to be locked up here too long, but knowing it’s only for a little while just makes me feel protected. It’s nice not to be wondering what apartment we will be in tomorrow. It’s nice to know I will absolutely be here, sleep in this same bed, for at least two more nights.

There’s another new girl besides us. She’s been here before, though. After dinner tonight she sang for us. It was bright, it had beat, and her voice is good. She brought all of us alive. There’s joy in her, but it only shows when she sings. Otherwise she’s silent and withdrawn.

It’s as if the whole answer about those who are alive and those who are withdrawn is right in front of me like a dark mountain, but I can’t make it out. I can’t see why, what’s the cause of it.

*

Bingo’s unit was much like the girls’ unit except the boys had torn all the covers off the books. And the hazing of the tough-minded small boys was more open, and louder. Strangely, this hazing did not upset Bingo. The questions fired at him, the jostling, all was done casually, in good spirit, and the proximity of lively, pushing creatures seemed to lift a weight from him.

“What you in for?” “What your real name? Bingo ain’t your real name!” “This your first time? You got a lot to learn in here.”

Bingo told no one that his mother was in jail. He bantered back, and held his own with ease. Maybe he had learned more than he thought, listening to Mama and Lud.

“Bingo the Bunghole,” shouted Willy Grimm. He didn’t bother to be quiet, and bald Mr. Serivan frowned at him. Willy Grimm was Bingo’s roommate, though Bingo rated only a mattress on the floor beneath the barred window.

Willy was eight, and small for his age. Wiry. He had sandy hair, a permanent frown, and a voice like a gravel pit. He had been in three juvenile institutions and eighteen foster homes. No one would keep him for long. “Hey, Bunghole, what’s the rap? You can tell me. I’m your roommate.”

At nine o’clock the boys were locked into their rooms. At one minute to nine Willy catapulted through the door and flopped on his bunk. Forced to shower, he now wore a plain white cotton nightgown, the same as the girls wore. Bingo, his own nightgown safely hidden beneath the covers, observed Willy. “You dressed for the tea dance?”

“Go screw yourself,” said Willy casually. “Hey, Bunghole, this really your first time in the cooler? You’re some fish, Bunghole. What you get sent up for, you rob your sister’s piggy bank?”

“I ran off with the cookie jar,” Bingo said.

“You got a ma?” said Willy. “What’s she like, Bunghole?”

“She’s just my ma. Well, she has blond hair, and she—”

“You got a dad too?” Willy asked.

“Papa’s dead,” Bingo said shortly.

Willy waited.

“He’s been dead three years. I was six. He worked in the timber.”

“Did he ever hit you?”

“No, well, he hit me when I needed it.”

“Yeah,” Willy said. “I never had no parents.”

“I have two sisters,” Bingo said, hoping to change the subject.

“You bet you have,” said Willy. “That one, Crystal, she’s the hottest thing to come in here in a long time.”

“How do you know?”

“Grapevine. Man, you are a fish, Bunghole.”

“Tell me about the grapevine.”

Suddenly Willy looked secretive. “Messages get passed, word moves along,” he said vaguely.

“You think I’m a spy or something?”

Willy just looked blank.

“O.K., O.K., tell me what you heard about Crystal.”

“That she’s a looker. That Bev McDougal, who thinks she owns Girls’ Two, has it in for her. Your sister’s been bugging that one.”

“What’ll she do to her?”

“Beat her up, maybe. Can’t hurt her much, the group workers break everything up. You can’t have no fun in here.”

“But it’s pretty rough over there, in Girls’ Two?”

“Naw. Those girls never get into much. Biggest thing they do is stand in front of the craft room windows at night with the lights on and open up their nightgowns. You can see them from the admitting room. It gives the new kids a thrill.”

“I’ll just bet it does.”

“What you in for, Bunghole? I won’t tell no one.”

For some reason, Bingo trusted Willy and wanted to tell him,

but— “I can’t tell you, Willy. I promised.” Well, he had promised himself.

“O.K., Bunghole, I won’t ask no more. You know how to hotwire a car?”

Bingo shook his head.

For the next hour Willy taught Bingo how to jerk the wires out of a car and hot-wire it, how to case a store, and how to make contacts to peddle hot merchandise.

The only use Bingo made of such valuable information was to tell Jenny later. Jenny wrote it all down; it could have been gold he’d given her. “I’m going to write about J.D.H. Stories, I mean. It’s the first time since I was little that I’ve wanted to write stories, write something whole.”

Willy talked as if he’d done a lot of things, but Bingo thought most of it was hot air. Willy was too young to have done half of that. Once, late in the night when they should have been asleep, Bingo rolled over and grinned at Willy in the darkness. “Willy, you’re giving me a snow job.” Bingo couldn’t see his expression. After a while Willy started telling him about some of the foster homes he’d been in, and those stories had a different ring to them, as if they had really happened to Willy. “I’m an uncorkable,” Willy said.

“You mean incorrigible.”

“Yeah, uncorkable.” He leaped out of bed and pounded on the door. “Hey, screw, come unlock this door, I gotta go to the can.”

On Saturday Willy brought Bingo news from Girls’ Two. “All hell broke loose. Crystal got herself in a fight with McDougal and four other girls and was put in solitary. Some sister you got, Bunghole!” Willy knew precisely Crystal’s condition. She had a cut on her cheek, a badly twisted arm, and some scattered bruises. Bev McDougal had been sent to the older girls’ unit.