A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [152]
I used to think that I would go and find Lynelle on the streets of Chicago, and take her to see the “Oprah” show. I still dream of her sitting on the set, smiling, those long teeth flashing at us in the light, telling the millions across America, “Your big old body, it ain’t nothin’ but shit.” I used to wake up in the night, my heart racing, wondering just how long I’d have to walk before I found her.
“Let Oprah be the judge,” I said to Rafferty at one of our meetings. “Let Robbie and me, Mrs. Mackessy, Howard, Theresa, Dan, Mrs. Glevitch—let all of us come before Oprah. Let the studio audience decide. They’re nice suburban women, many of them, dressed for a lark. They have common sense and speak their minds.” I remember how he looked at me, as if I’d found a new voice, as if I had been altered more than he’d thought by serving time. Although I didn’t know Lynelle for long, she raised me up. I often wanted to wake her, in that short week she was with us, to sit by her side, but she seemed to want to keep to herself. She sat, day after day, on her mat with her bony knees bent, nearly up to her ears, mumbling to herself. I waited for three o’clock when together we got lost in what seemed the simple problems of the estranged daughters, the celebrities after privacy, the sexually wayward, the overweight, the underweight, the shoplifters, the cross-dressers, the sick in body, the sick at heart.
When someone down in Chicago paid Lynelle’s bond and she was getting ready to leave I went and stood by her cell. I started stuttering things such as, “You take care.” She was trying to fit her long feet into her tight jail shoes, her Keds, so that she could go to the holding room and put on her street clothes. She looked up. “What you say your name was?” She waved her hand in front of her face in that particular fanlike way she had. “Oh, it don’t bother. You keep the faith.” She handed me a worn bookmark, with the words of the Twenty-third Psalm typed in a column. At the bottom it said, Presented to Lynelle Duchamps, November 12, 1974. First Baptist Church, Chicago, Illinois. “You keep the faith, you hear?”
The minute the door had closed behind her Dyshett shuddered. “That nigger,” she said, “give me the creeps.”
I remember clearly when Dyshett got out of solitary confinement the first time, after she beat up Debbie. She came waltzing into my cell while Debbie was taking a shower. “Come on in,” I said, after she was already well into the middle of the room, right on Debbie’s pillow with her dirty shoes. She assumed her characteristic pose, one hip out, her fists at her waist. “You some kind of smart-ass professor, always readin’ like you the Queen?”
“I read about other things besides horses and dogs,” I said. “So who’s next? Do you systematically work your way through everyone here? I’ve never been in before and it would be nice to be able to plan. Are you going to go from cell to cell and insult us and then beat us up?”
“Oh my,” she said, her eyes wide, her nose in the air, her lovely long neck extended. “If she ain’t going to figure me out, mother fuckin’ an-a-lyze me.” She called out across the day room, “Hey, Sherry—she one of them mind doctors, tell me your problems, your dreams, all that shit.” She turned to me, coming closer, squinting at me so that I couldn’t see the least shine of her eyes. “It kill me, you know that?” She spoke in the most dulcet of tones. “It just drive me crazy, how you can’t tell nothin’ by looking at it. I’d walk down the street past you, think you was the perfect person, you know, wid the house, the two-car garage, the country club, the maid to wipe your ass. I see people like that and part of me is saying, ‘I hate that bitch.’ Another part says, ‘How come I can’t be her?’ And now come to find out you nothin’ but a pervert.” She shook her head once, back and forth, her right nostril hiked up in a sneer. “That make me crazy, when things turn out so different from what I see.”
I regret that