A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [174]
I racked my brain, trying to think of something that didn’t point to Lizzy. Later I came up with numerous topics we could have spent hours belaboring, but at our booth I was sure we had lost our bearings, that we had somehow forgotten crucial information about each other. We both went at our breakfasts as if we were actually hungry. When we were finished Theresa cleared her throat, and wiped her mouth carefully, and I blew my nose. She picked up a sugar packet and read it, and I motioned Sharon, the waitress, for more coffee. “Those girls sure are busy,” Sharon said.
“Yes,” I nearly shouted. “Aren’t Claire and Audrey doing a good job?”
“Oh, they are,” Theresa cried. “They really are! They are so good.” We turned to look at them over in their corner, sitting at the desks, scribbling in their books. Emma always used to play with Audrey; Claire was the one who had been Lizzy’s friend. “I was really impressed by how well the older girls included Claire when they were at our house,” she said. “Alice, oh Alice, was it awful in there, in the jail?”
We had come through. We had passed the doldrums, found wind for our sails. I shook my head first and then nodded. “I don’t know.” I laughed at my own confusion. “I read a lot. There’s a poem, ‘No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.’ The last line too especially spoke to me: ‘All life death does end and each day dies with sleep.’ ”
“That sounds good,” Theresa said faintly. “I’ll have to look it up.”
“One of the funny things I finally figured out,” I said, “was that the need for stories was so elemental—the jail girls could turn the smallest happening into something supernatural.”
“Oh God, Alice,” she groaned in her good old way.
“Any longer in there and one of us would have turned into a top-notch orator, a little Homer, a Homerette, reciting the long list of inmates as if they were ships going to battle.” I put the warm coffee cup to my cheek. “I’m still pretty disoriented. I’m mixed up about the whole experience.”
“Of course you are.”
“Take Sherry,” I said, “the one I told you about who was driving the get-away car. She was nineteen years old, had two or three children. At first I thought of all the girls as wayward kids, but by the end I realized that Sherry, in particular, had a dignity, a nobility, that I will never have, no matter if I live to be ninety. I don’t even know how to talk about it without making that nobility sound like some ridiculous racist stereotype, the Noble Savage idea. I don’t know how to talk about them. Maybe there isn’t any way to talk about them. Even Dyshett, the other girl I wrote you about, tried to bridge what seemed to me an infinitely wide, an unfathomably deep gap. When I was in my do-gooder phase several years ago I used to think I might volunteer at a prison, tutor someone toward their high-school equivalency test, but now I don’t see how I could teach those girls anything they don’t already know.”
“Can you imagine having to take them through something like the—the Boston Tea Party?” she said, laughing. “All of that seems so irrelevant to street kids.”
I started to tell her that that wasn’t exactly what I meant.
“What they need is life skills, birth control, nutrition, that kind of thing,” she interrupted.
“I-I-I don’t know,” I faltered. “I think Dyshett would have understood, ‘No worst, there is none.’ ”
We ate some more. Everything had changed: I had been carted away, her daughter was still dead, we no longer lived close by, I might end up locked away for the next several years. I had been naïve to think a friendship could be maintained on a different plane from circumstance.
“I should visit them,” I said, “but I’m not sure I could face it. I’m working up to sending them something, a care package.”
“Give it time, Alice.”
“I feel—”
“You don’t have to ever visit them. You don’t have any obligations to those people.”
“Obligation,” I said. “I don’t understand the first thing about obligation. Howard’s mother called the other