A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [147]
She used to kneel on her mat with her hands clasped, and rocking up and down on her heels, she’d keen: “Jesse! Jesse! How could you do it? How could you do it to me?”
I had my own sorrows but hers were so noisy and continuous that her specific grief was contagious. I used to sit on the floor and hold her. I found myself crying easily for the babies, and for Debbie. At eighteen she should have felt that the possibilities for her future were before her in a stunning array. She probably would never again have much expectation or hope. I didn’t assure her that she wasn’t going to die for decades, that the present misery would probably change through the years and deepen, that the grief would always be with her, like some unwanted person holding her at her elbow, guiding her down paths she hadn’t planned to take. She never wondered why she didn’t love the babies, but given time she might ask herself who they had been and what they meant to her. I think she believed that they were still out by the freeway, somehow warm and taken care of, waiting for their shirts and diapers.
She never did heave up out of her own mire to ask after my particular brand of trouble. She assumed that I had been set down in jail for the sole purpose of listening, again and again, to the fairly consistent versions of the same sad story. We were all shut off from the world, but she was especially so because she couldn’t get beyond the horrifying details of that night; she couldn’t begin to be quiet and think about the nature of her own calamity. If there was one lesson she might have learned, it was that each of our stories was singular and so riddled with pain many of us became dull.
There were several others in our living unit who were in for at least three months. Dyshett had been charged with scratching a police officer while she was being booked for possession of cocaine. Sherry had been an accomplice in an armed robbery. Janet, a large white girl with curly blond hair that came down in front to the end of her nose, and a mouth that hung open, had charges too numerous to count. There were up to sixteen at any time, some in for an hour or two while their bond was being paid, some for a day or a week while they awaited their transfer or a hearing. When anyone new came in Dyshett, if she didn’t already know, bullied their charge from them and then she sang out into the day room, as if the felon were a beauty queen coming down the ramp, “Here she is, Debbie Clark, she do in her little tiny hepless twin girls under the viaduc’.” She often pointed out our cell to a newcomer. She’d say, “Don’t you get too close. The baby killers, they sleep in there.”
The first trouble took place not more than a few days after I began my stay. I tried very hard to think breezily of my term there as “a stay,” as if it were a nineteenth-century trip to the sanitarium up in the mountains, a little room from which I would emerge cured. We were eating lunch off of the yellow sculpted trays which were plate and tray in one. A slice of American cheese between two pieces of white bread, yellow applesauce, two flabby carrot sticks, and one chocolate chip cookie. Despite the fact that we had many of the major food groups, everything was of the same doughy texture. Dyshett came to the table wrapped up in her blanket and sat hunched over her tray. “What this shit?” she said. Without looking up, she said, “Did you know you was about to have them twins?”
When Debbie tried to whimper and eat at the same time there were often disastrous results. She choked regularly, even on soft foods, donuts and Jell-O, so that I, or later Sherry, would