Ruby on the Outside (3 page)

Chapter Five

Needless to say, the corrections
officer didn't let me take my mother home, and “soon” became the most meaningless word in the world to me. It was six years ago that I tried to take my mother home with me, and after that, we all just stopped talking about it. We never used the word “soon” again, and in fact, thinking about it now, there are millions of things we just didn't talk about.

We didn't talk about those certain things but still, sometimes I would hear Matoo on the phone with my mother, or the two of them talking in front of me in clipped, cryptic sentences about things they thought I didn't understand. Parole hearings. Lawyers. Letters to some family named Tipps. Prisoner advocates.

And I was just as willing not to hear and not listen. And not to know.

I had figured out one thing very clearly that day: My mother was not coming home. And from then on, everything shifted from waiting to coping.

That same CO was still there. Not every time I visited, but a lot of the time. Enough that she knew me by name and I knew hers—Officer Monroe. She was actually the nice one. There was another seminice one, Officer Peterson. A meanish one, Officer Charles. And then there was Officer Rubins.

“Table fourteen,” Officer Rubins told us one visit.

I didn't want table fourteen.

Table fourteen is right next to the vending machines and there's no privacy. But I didn't say anything. I must have been visiting my mother for a couple of years by then. And I may have only been seven years old, but I knew better than to make trouble. Matoo and I sat down and waited.

Sometimes it took a long time for my mother to arrive. Sometimes it took forever. They had to call down to the housing unit and my mother might not be ready. It wasn't like we were here for a doctor's appointment or a business meeting.

It was prison.

We just had to wait.

“She might be in the library or in her class,” Matoo said. “Or on work duty.”

My mother had a job in prison. She answered calls from people who thought they were calling the Department of Motor Vehicles and so when I was in school and had to tell someone where my mother worked, that's what I said. I told them she worked for the DMV, which really wasn't a lie at all.

I didn't mention that she got paid $1.10 an hour.

Matoo and I twiddled our thumbs, literally four fingers making little spinning windmills. There were books and toys in the children's center, but that part of the visitors' center hadn't been opened yet that day. The visitor's room was pretty empty still.

One by one, a few of the inmates had come down and those families were huddled together at their table. Each time the big metal door would clank open, everyone else would look up, hoping it was their person, finally coming in. I could hear that noise anywhere in the world and I would know what it was. My heart would stop and I would stop whatever I was doing, expecting to see my mother. It's that kind of sound.

That day, there was a little girl at the next table, a little younger than me, I guessed. She was waiting too. It looked she was with her grandmother, but the grandmother was just dozing, right in her chair, sitting up. They had been waiting longer than we had. Maybe the girl's mother was in her class or checking a book out of the library too.

Or on her work duty.

But then all of a sudden this girl made this funny noise, like a dog yelping or a cat when you step on its tail, but she didn't move; she sat frozen. I followed her eyes past the other tables, and all the other families, inmates in green and officers in blue, to where her mother had walked in.

The mom was so young and pretty. Her hair was twisted into tight braids that ended, each one, in a tiny colorful beads at the nape of her neck. And she was smiling, a smile bright with all the love in the world. Just like my mom did when she would see me waiting for her.

And for the first time, I wondered.

What could this pretty mother have done to be put in jail? In
prison
, because back then I didn't know the difference between jail and prison. It was all the same. On the inside. Or on the outside. You're either out or you're in.

Here.

Or there.

I knew as much about my situation as I wanted. I knew about my mother's husband, Nick. Even though we were all living together, I can't remember him at all. I had seen one picture of him, one that must have slipped by Matoo when she threw all the others away. He was tall and dark, with hair on his face but none on his head, and in the photo he is standing next to my mom, gripping her arm like he doesn't want her to get away. I don't know who took the picture, but she is squinting and he is wearing those aviator sunglasses. He looks very confident and I guess he was, because he convinced my mother to accompany him when he needed drugs and my mother thought she needed him.

So I never wanted to ask why my mother was in prison, but all of a sudden I wanted to know about this little's girl's mother.

What had she done? Did she have a bad husband like my mother?

“Larissa,” the mother called out, and that seemed to do the trick; the little girl jumped right up out of her seat like a Ping-Pong ball smacked by a paddle. She ran directly to her mom. And I watched the mother wrap her two arms all the way around her little girl, until I couldn't tell one body from the other.

I don't remember anything about visiting with my own mom that time. I've had so many they start to blend into one another. But what I do remember was that when our visit was just nearly over, there was a random mandatory head count, or maybe it wasn't random. Maybe something had happened somewhere else in the prison. Whatever it was, everybody in the whole place needed to be accounted for.

All the visitors had to sit down, not move, and all the prisoners had to stop talking and stand.

“Don't move.” Officer Rubins started counting with his little clicker everyone in green, everyone standing up.

It took another forever. Then, and no one said why, all the moms and sisters and daughters were all taken back to their cells and we had to leave. It was just one of those things.

“I'm just going to the ladies' room before we leave, Ruby,” Matoo said. “Wait here.”

I waited but I thought about that little girl again and I just had to know. I remembered her mother calling out her name—Larissa—and I took a chance.

“Can you tell me what did Larissa's mother did?” I stepped up to the CO. “Why is she in here?”

A lot of the correctional officers were women, but Officer Rubins was a man. He was tall, at least to me, and pretty fat. His face was all scarred with tiny indents. He never smiled, so I don't really know where I got the courage to talk to him at all. Just seven-year-old stupidity, I guess, combined with this strange new urge to find something out.

“Larissa's mother?” He looked down at me. I thought he was going to answer me. Maybe I had been wrong. Maybe he was nice after all.

“Yeah, the girl and her grandmother. They were sitting next to me and my mom. Table fifteen? Larissa. Do you know what her mother did to put her in jail?”

And Officer Rubins started laughing. His laugh was loud and like a bullet, it just forced its way out of his belly and his mouth and into my chest. When his laughing lessened to a chuckled, he just looked mean again.

“Never mind about Larissa's mother. Why don't you just worry about why
your
mother is here,” he told me.

Of course, that's what I really wanted to know.

Of course.

But I wasn't ready for that. I wanted to keep my two worlds apart. I didn't want anything from this inside world that might affect my outside world. When I got home and
that
world became
this
world again. I decided to never make the mistake of asking about anyone else, ever again.

And then, hopefully, no one would ask about my mom.

Not even, and especially not, me.

Chapter Six

Visiting hours at Bedford Hills
are from eight thirty in the morning to three thirty in the afternoon, which means during the school year I can see my mom only on weekends.

And now, even though school is out for the summer, I still have to wait a full week before I can see my mother again. During the week, I'm supposed to go to the pool, where two older kids in the condo run a “camp.” The good news is that Kristin left for her real sleepaway camp in Maine or Maryland or Massachusetts—I wasn't really listening when she told me—and that Margalit gets stuck here with me and that Matoo seems to have forgotten about taking me to a fancy hair salon.

“This is so boring,” I say. But I'm not really bored. I am happy to be out of the house and happy that Margalit is here at camp with me. Happy it's not raining and it's not too hot. And happy that they have a carrom board.

So I'm not bored at all, but Kristin makes fun of me when I get too excited about things. So I think I have to act like I am.

“Really? I'm not,” Margalit says. She is standing on the other end of the board getting ready to shoot her red checker piece into the hole, if she can. “I love carrom.”

And, wow, that's so cool. But now I am feeling stupid for saying I was bored when I wasn't, and maybe that made her feel stupid, which makes me worried. I really want her to like me. I wouldn't want to hurt her feelings.

“Do you want to do something else?” she asks me.

She misses and it's my turn.

“Oh, no,” I say quickly. “I love carrom too. I just thought you were bored. So I said I was bored. I know, weird, right?”

Margalit is just looking me. “No,” she says. “Not weird at all.”

I feel a big smile take over my face. Matoo might be right about smiling making you feel good. I look down at the wooden board, position my fingers, take my shot, and I miss too.

There are no cabins at this camp or dining hall or whatever else they probably have at real summer camps. We have the condo pool, a couple of high school girls from the condos as counselors, and the grass on the other side of the fence, where there is a picnic table, which is where we are having lunch.

“My mother made me peanut butter and jelly again,” Margalit says. There are only five of us by noon. The one boy who comes usually leaves around eleven. I think this is more like a drop-off babysitting. It's not like we learn to make fires, sing camp songs, and roast weenies. Though I think that stuff might be fun too.

But right now it's me and Margalit, one really annoying seven-year-old girl named Elise, and our two “counselors,” Beatrice and Yvette.

I have peanut butter and jelly too.

“Me too,” I tell Margalit and we both open our mouths and bite.

“Beatrice is a funny name for a kid,” Elise is saying to one of our counselors. Elise has finished her lunch, apparently. She gets one of those packaged lunches from the grocery store, with the little compartments of cheese or grapes and a container of milk, which Yvette keeps, as advertised in her flyer, in a cooler, which is never that cool, but Elise doesn't seem to mind, though. She doesn't seem to have eaten much of it.

“It's no funnier than Elise,” Beatrice says. She's trying to have a high school–type conversation with Yvette, but Elise keeps interrupting.

“Yes, it is,” Elise says. “It's like an old-fashioned name. Like an old-lady name.”

“Gee, Elise. Thanks for that,” Beatrice answers, but she doesn't turn her head. She and Yvette are both sitting on the same side of the picnic table, practically whispering to each other. When they talk quietly like this, they are talking about boys.

“Go finish your lunch.” Yvette shoos her away.

“We'll go for a swim after rest time,” Beatrice says and they go back to their whispers.

I think that Elise is going to start bothering
us
now, but she doesn't. She just looks kind of dejected. She gets up from the table and goes and slumps down onto the grass.

“I feel sorry for her,” Margalit says.

“Yeah, me too,” I say. “She's got no one her age to hang out with.” But really that hadn't occurred to me until just then.

I know what it feels like to sit alone and feel left out, watching other kids hanging out with their best friends. But in this moment, now that I don't have to be doing that, I can see how sad that is for someone else.

After we finish eating, Margalit and I are sitting under the shade of the one full-grown tree in the whole condo complex. It's a big, thick tree, with its root gnarled and poking out of the ground all around the base, like giant bark fingers. We each have our favorite “finger” to sit on and eat and talk.

We watch as Elise starts bouncing her pink rubber ball, the one she keeps in her pocket, on the concrete. Elise and her parents live in the unit right next to mine. She is always bouncing that ball against her front steps.

“Too bad there aren't more little kids here for her to play with,” I say. “She doesn't have any brothers or sisters, either, so she's alone all the time.” I say this mostly because I want to look like I have something to offer, even if it's just how much I know about the neighborhood. Like maybe that'll be another benefit to being my friend.

Margalit looks at me with this sad face and I wonder what I've said wrong. It's just like me to say the wrong thing. I'm sure I have, but I don't know what it is.

“I used to have a brother,” she says.

So now I know.

“Oh, I didn't mean like that. Like there is something wrong with that or anything. I mean, I don't have a brother or sister either.” And now I am rambling because that's probably not at all what Margalit meant, but before I can fix it or make it worse or anything, she stands up and brushes the peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich crumbs from her shorts.

“Let's play another game of carrom before they make us rest on our towels.” And she looks pretty happy again.

“Okay,” I say. “Wanna ask Elise to play too?”

Margalit nods and smiles. “Yeah, that's a great idea.”