Blame: A Novel (7 page)

In the kitchen, Patsy found hot water. She would wash her arms, her armpits, her face. Hot, scalding water proved a saving grace. And in the storeroom she located a crate of saltines and, with Gloria keeping watch, stole a handful every morning, although the theft, if detected, could have cost her additional prison time. She ate other things that could be washed under the hottest water: an apple, a banana. She didn’t gain much weight, but she survived her last three weeks in RC, at the end of which another bus took her and nineteen other women north.

The mother and daughter she’d killed found Patsy again at Bertrin, a men’s prison off Interstate 5, where one wing had been allocated for a women’s minimum-to-medium security unit.

Bertrin did not look like any kind of school. It looked like a prison. Billowing tangles of razor wire topped twenty-foot hurricane fences. Men with rifles could be seen in the two towers. Nearby stockyards infused the air with the cloying, almost sweet stink of manure.

Patsy, being a low—level two—security risk, was housed in an open dorm; had she been more violent, she would have been assigned to a cell. This time she and fifteen other women were to live in one large room divided up into cell-sized areas by thigh-high cinder-block partitions. Each partition contained a bunk bed and two lockboxes chained to the wall, two shelflike desks. Her bunkmate, Rhoda, a morose, quiet woman in her late forties, had already claimed the upper mattress.

Some of the women had knitted or crocheted or quilted blankets and bedspreads, and useless yellow curtains flanked the windows. Rhoda had a small nightstand with drawers, provenance unknown, that Patsy had to squeeze past every time she left and returned to her bunk. Their neighbor had a wobbly chair. Treasures.

A large plate-glass expanse separated the dorm from a guard station and dayroom, an open space with eight widely spaced round concrete tables and benches bolted to the floor. This dayroom served two dorms, with a bank of toilets and showers, also behind plate glass, between them. There was a kitchen they could use across the way, as well as a separate TV room with pink fiberglass bucket chairs and a small seminar-style classroom for groups and meetings. The telephone, a modified pay machine sunk into a stainless-steel counter, was in an alcove behind the guard station.

Twice a day, after breakfast and before dinner, the women lined up in front of their dorms for count. Count lasted from ten minutes to an hour, if someone wasn’t speaking up or the COs had something to say.

The guard station/dayroom cluster, with its dorms and amenities, was called a cottage, a term Patsy took to be intentionally ironic, as nothing could less resemble the small, scenic dwelling the word implied. (She later learned that women prisoners were once housed in real cottages, with the idea that a safe, attractive home could rehabilitate. The term had since devolved to mean the number of women such a cottage once accommodated: thirty-two.)

Patsy knew roughly half of her cottage mates from RC. Ruth was in her dorm; Annie and Gloria were in the adjacent one.

Her gym bag was restored to her, so she could wear her own sweater and underwear. A package from her mother arrived with more clothes and books, a saucepan.

Patsy signed up one day to use the telephone, called her mother the next. Mom, Mom, you there? she yelled over a steady buzz of static. Can you hear me? How’s Dad?

Mommy Mommy can ooo hear me? The echo, in sarcastic baby talk, came from a large, ferocious-looking woman from her dorm named Joyce, who waited to make a call.

Are you okay, hon? Her mother’s voice wobbled in and out. Can I send you any . . . you heard that Burt is apply—

This call is from the California Correctional Institution for Women . . .

I need books, Mom. Paperbacks only. And clothes, but remember to leave the prices on . . . The cord was short. Patsy had to cozy up against a small, sagging stainless-steel shelf. What did you say about Burt? Mom?

Burdy burdy burdy, sang the voice behind her.

Yes, but what books, Patsy? Can you speak up?

This call is from the California Correctional Institution for Women . . .

Any kind. Novels. Biographies.

Okay, hon . . . see what I . . . The cadence of closure already sounded in her mother’s voice. Your father’s going to be so upset he missed . . .

But what about Burt? Did he get the transfer?

This call is from the California Correctional Institution for Women . . .

We’ll see you soon, sweetheart . . .

Mommy mommy mom-eeeeee. Joyce lumbered up to the phone.

•

At Bertrin, there were no drugs or alcohol, for the simple reason, Gloria said, that the guards were searched when they came on shift. The staff in general seemed less sadistic than their RC counterparts, more like weary civil servants, their games less practiced and cruel. Still, Patsy did what she could to stay below their radar.

She never went to the dining room, for it exuded the exact same sour odor as RC’s. She relied on the commissary, which was like a badly stocked convenience store. On her allotted forty dollars a month, she bought off-brand raisin bran, tuna fish, and ramen noodles. She boiled the ramen at odd hours in the kitchen, taking the cheap aluminum saucepan back to her locker after each use.

Patsy wrote letters and read books on her bunk. Big, nineteenth-century American novels: Wharton, Howells, Twain. She’d always heard there was time in prison. Time to read, to write, to make yourself into a lawyer. Nobody mentioned that the time was filled with the ambient sounds of women raging, gates clanging, an ever-crackling public-address system.

Lights-out was marginally dimmer here than at RC, so sleep was deeper, once Patsy got there. Now, as she closed her eyes, the plump thirty-four-year-old woman and her adolescent girl rose to mind as if emerging from some dark lake, drenched and inscrutable, their faces in shadow. Patsy could not have recognized them on the street, yet here they presented themselves night after night, bringing a wave of guilt so black and suffocating, Patsy never believed it would pass.

•

When the guard led her parents into the loud, filthy visiting hall, Patsy blamed her mother’s pallor on the gauntlet of metal detectors and frisks and the two-hour wait to see her. Both parents seemed forlorn, old, and fragile, but her mother looked ill, her skin pale, her belly oddly swollen. Patsy wept throughout their visit. Mom, don’t come again, Patsy told her. We’ll talk on the phone, we’ll write. Send Dad and Burt. Don’t go through this again.

We’ll see how it goes, honey, she said.

Her father and Burt alternated after that. Her friend Sarah made the tedious four-hour drive from Pasadena once. Otherwise, Brice was her most regular visitor, showing up every month or so. Patsy first wondered at this constancy, so missing when they were lovers, then came to rely on it. He always caused a stir in the visiting room. Some women were convinced he was a movie star or Paul Newman’s brother. A somebody.

Patsy, and all the others, lived for letters, proof they weren’t forgotten.

I went down to Altadena last week and met with your new tenants,
wrote Burt.
He’s postdoc at Caltech—microbiology—and she’s an economist looking for work.

Your father prays for you every night
, her mother wrote.
I hear him in the kitchen talking to his Higher Power.

Sarah wrote,
I miss you, I worry about you, please let me know what I can do, what I can send you to read.

•

Gloria and Annie half hoisted her between them. Flattered that they bothered, she went along.

Nine women sat in a circle in the classroom behind the guard station. Gloria and Annie, of course, and Ruth too, who wasn’t a drunk but applied the program to her pyromania—
I am powerless over setting fires.

Yvonne told of having her kids taken away and shooting up her pimp with bad heroin. Barbi described waiting tables drunk, spilling soup and drinks on customers. Gail’s mother got her drunk the first time when she was six. All the women sang the glories of AA, of God, of not having to drink.

Patsy recoiled at the loser litanies and simplistic religiosity. She might have a genetic propensity for alcoholism, but she’d always stayed on track, accumulating degrees and honors and publications in spite of a concomitant taste for liquor, pharmaceuticals, and rich boy wastrels. She’d been valedictorian
and
Party Hardiest in high school, the first in her family to matriculate into a University of California grad school
and
a California correctional institution. She, at least, had range.

Not for me, Patsy told Gloria afterward. Besides, I’m not sure I want to give up alcohol for the rest of my life.

How ’bout one day at a time?

That’s sophistry, said Patsy. Everybody knows it means forever.

They do? Gloria shrugged. So drink till you’re done. Then, if you feel like a meeting, they’re around. Oh, look, here’s Ruth with coffee.

After the big show Gloria and Annie had made of dragging her to an AA meeting, she thought, they might have fought a little harder to make her stay.

•

Benny came to see her. This is a surprise, Patsy said.

I told you I was coming.

I mean the sport shirt. I’ve never seen you outside a suit. She pointed to the wall of vending machines. You buying?

They sat at one of the long metal picnic tables, chips and sodas between them. So, Benito, whassup? she said.

In fact, someone would like to visit you, Benny said. Someone not on your list. Mark Parnham?

Fear squeezed her veins shut.

Name ring a bell?

Don’t be sadistic. What does he want?

To talk to you. Get to know you a little. You up for it?

Oh god. What could I say to him? But I should see him, if he wants that.

You don’t have to. Or there can be a mediator.

I’ll see him. But alone.

You’ll have to put him on your list first.

And send him the questionnaire, thought Patsy. That would take at least a month to process. What does he want? she asked. Did he say?

To meet you. Talk. But it’s up to you, Patsy.

How can I refuse him?

•

I have a new boyfriend
, wrote Sarah.
Do you remember Henry Croft, in anthropology? We started talking at a party at Kelley’s and haven’t stopped since.

I got that transfer
, wrote Burt.
Bonnie and I both think life will be better for the kids once we get ’em off TV and onto ponies.

Your father went out to get a haircut and came home with a used Vespa
, her mother wrote.
I’m fit to be tied.

•

Don’t tell Larena you offed a couple JWs, said Gloria.

She one?

All day every day. Armageddon’s comin’, baby.

Larena lived in Gloria’s dorm. She was twenty-two years old and in for cashing a bad check—here in minimum-to-medium, some women gabbed freely about their crimes in group. Patsy found Larena painting her nails in bed. Hey, Larena, can I ask you some things about Jehovah’s Witnesses?

You want me to witness you? Course I will. Larena put down the tiny nailbrush, drew a newsprint magazine,
The Watchtower
, from under her pillow, and handed it to Patsy. On the cover, Jesus in robes looked askance at a big modern church. This will get you started, Larena said.

Patsy rolled the little tabloid into a tube. So what do you guys believe?

Larena blew on her orchid fingertips. Well, personally speaking, I’ve found that God is Jehovah, and my life is all about serving Him. His Kingdom is coming, and I’m just doing everything Jesus tells me till then.

Oh, so you believe in Jesus.

Well, sure. But we know Jesus isn’t God. Only God is God. Jesus is King and God’s son, but he’s a human, same as us, only perfect. And he died on a torture stake and not a cross. That cross business come from pagan times and was just added to make pagans believe.

You sound like a Unitarian, said Patsy.

A what?

Never mind.

You know, Teach . . . Larena gazed at the floor beside her bed, where missing linoleum revealed ridges of crusty black mastic. This idn’t the real world. The real world is yet to come. And it will be paradise. We’ll all live in big ole mansions on wide bullyvards. So hurry up, Teach, time’s running out on you.

When is this paradise supposed to come?

Nobody knows. They used to say dates, but that was a mistake. But there be plenty a warning. The earth’ll crack open, the sky’ll rain blood, the rivers, they’ll boil up outta their banks. The walls of this ugly ole
prison’ll crumble down like Jericho. It’ll be the big cleansing of the earth, just like Noah’s time, only the angels’ll come with their flaming swords to sort out the wheat from the chuff.

Her voice had risen almost into song.

But what about forgiveness? said Patsy. Where do you stand on that?

Oh, you gotta forgive. You gotta put shit behind you, or it eat you alive.

Yeah, but what about angels slashing everybody. Won’t they forgive?

God give everybody all the time in the world to come to Him.

Ahh.

Larena handed her an
Awake!
and more
Watchtowers
.

Patsy scanned the little tabloids at her desk, searching for some hint about the sad man who had seemed so fair-minded in the courtroom. She had assumed such generosity was religious. She found an article about “community,” but it only explained that JWs deplored churches and clergy—everyone taught god’s word. Another article said god was angry at the world, the illustration a bearded white man in the clouds, clutching thunderbolts.

Patsy had harbored some religious sentiment as a child—she once dreamed that Jesus liked her in particular. But twelve years of Catholic education had eroded such feeling, and the two summers during high school when she worked in the parish office finished it off. The priests! Each had his own carton of milk in the refrigerator—whole milk, skim, half-and-half, liquid Coffee-mate—and each kept obsessive track of fluid levels, convinced the others were helping themselves. So many accusations, lost tempers, and hard feelings over dairy products! Later on, her training as a historian further demystified the Church and made Patsy immune, even hostile, to institutionalized faith. In every intro-level and survey class she taught, Patsy used the historical Jesus to demonstrate the rigor of historical scholarship. If we examine Jesus’ life as historians and we look into
all
contemporaneous sources, she’d say in lectures, we are able to establish exactly three facts. Jesus was born, he ate some meals with people, and he died—possibly by crucifixion.