Eileen (3 page)

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.