Blame: A Novel Read online

  Patsy sat naked until finally someone unlocked the door and handed her a set of thin orange pajamas and a sheaf of forms, a pen. No, she could not use the bathroom, not yet. She filled out form after form—name, permanent address, next of kin, health history, drug allergies. She finished and tried lying on the bench, but it was too cold. Time passed, an hour or more, and a woman corrections officer opened the door and took the forms. No, she couldn’t use the bathroom. Just a few more minutes, the woman said.

  More time passed, and another woman wordlessly handed Patsy a stack of clothes and bedding and led her to a dormitory crammed with bunk beds. Patsy had to squeeze in sideways to get to her assigned place. The bunk bed itself was undersized, as if imported from a children’s camp or hospital, the frame bolted to the floor, the springs loose and twangy, the mattress less than two inches thick. Patsy had the top bunk. She unfolded a green army blanket raveled at the edges, coarse white untearable sheets reeking of chlorine bleach, a crackling plastic mattress pad. She was assigned a banged-up metal lockbox at the foot of the lower bunk.

  Patsy filled her lockbox with her new possessions: another pair of the prison pajamas, two pairs of used blue jeans, two T-shirts, white cotton panties, a gray sweatshirt, canvas slip-ons, and a plastic bag of toiletries—toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant.

  Do you think we’ll get our own stuff back? she asked a young woman watching her from the neighboring bunk.

  Don’t aks me, I don’t know jack.

  4

  Patsy had imagined prison to be like life in the convents she’d heard about in Catholic school, places where novices were made to scrub perfectly clean floors in silence. But no work, no activities took place in Receiving, or RC, as it was called, where women were evaluated for disposition elsewhere. RC lasted sixty or more days. Patsy had one half-hour meeting with a counselor. She also compiled her visitors’ list, then signed and sent visitors’ questionnaires to everyone on her list, one morning’s chore.

  Prisoners sat around the open dorm or in the television room. They did each other’s hair and nails and passed around three-year-old women’s magazines. Some tried to clean around their beds, several compulsively, polishing the floors with hoarded napkins, Kotex, any rag they could scrounge.

  Now, girls, the COs said. Now, girls. Time for bed, girls. Count! Attagirls. Keep to the right, girls. No talking, girls. Keep those voices down, girls.

  The dorm held forty-two women. Some spoke only at the top of their lungs and did so day and night, even very late at night and at dawn, day after day. They talked without ceasing, to themselves, to anybody who would listen, to nobody at all. They argued, picked fights, sang the same snatch of song over and over again. For hours at a stretch, a short, fat woman named Doris sang, It’s a small world after all / It’s a small small small small world. Others vocalized nonsense, like parrots. Patsy marveled: Didn’t these women ever crave silence?

  No, they labored constantly and mightily against silence.

  Patsy hadn’t been in RC for a week when a woman tapped her shoulder on their way to the dining room, in the hall where the sour odor of rancid food adhered like resin to the block walls. The woman was in her late twenties, tall and muscular. Who you? she said. You pretty.

  A caress down Patsy’s arm ended in a grabbed wrist. Then the woman was flush against her in what seemed to be an embrace—the woman’s face was close, as if for a kiss—except that she’d twisted Patsy’s arm up behind her back.

  Oh no, Patsy said. Please. Please, let go. She had to speak right into the woman’s lips with their awful curved smile. The woman’s eyes looked over her shoulder, as if bored.

  Patsy had no idea what the woman wanted, except to work her arm like a lever and make her emit small high cries at will. Please let go, Patsy said. The lever administered more pain. And again. Patsy lifted her foot and pulled her leg up as high as she could. She had been drilled in self-defense in childhood by Burt. The three N’s, he said, never forget: neck, nuts, and knees. At such close range Patsy couldn’t get enough swing for the knee, so she stomped as hard as she could—given her flimsy canvas slip-ons—on the arch of the woman’s foot. A loud baying right in her ear, and the next moment the woman was off her and there was only shouting. My lord, my fucking jesus fucking white-ass bitch.

  Patsy stood there, disoriented; she hadn’t expected the stomp to work. Then again she’d never before stomped on anyone’s arch as hard as she could. Terrified of official discipline and of the other women—who flowed on into the dining room around them like water around boulders—Patsy fled to her bunk and waited for a guard to loom, for six or ten women to encircle her bed, however retribution would come. For the next twenty hours she stayed on her bunk until a CO ordered her into the yard for exercise.

  Looking around the dirt yard, Patsy couldn’t identify her attacker. She walked close to the fence and avoided looking anyone in the eye. A plump older woman came up alongside her and said in a low voice, You had to do what you did, it was the right thing. Nobody will bother you now.

  And mostly, nobody did.

  •

  In RC, there were no cubicles for privacy, no chance to be alone. No letters were allowed in, no packages, no visitors, no contact with the outside. No books. No street clothes. No commissary goods. Patsy took three-minute tepid showers every third day. She sat on the toilet in full view of male guards, some of whom watched with obvious interest, one of whom always put his hand on his crotch. She learned to close her eyes for privacy. When allowed, she went outside, walked in slow circles for twenty minutes, talked to some women, avoided others. Mostly she walked with Ruth, a tall and quiet mother of two boys. Her husband was the manager at a fluid technology plant. Patsy had no idea why Ruth was in prison, but heard women call her firefly. Why do they call you that, Ruth?

  Somebody must have read my file, and blabbed it ’round.

  Why, what does it say?

  Says I set a fire.

  Where? Not your house?

  No, said Ruth. Up a canyon.

  A firebug. Patsy wanted to know more, but Ruth wouldn’t talk about it.

  Word got out on her too. Professor followed her to RC. And Teach. And her being a drunk was clearly in the public domain. Small World Doris tried to sell her a little jar of clear hooch, some jailhouse concoction closer to kerosene than vodka. Patsy’s eyes watered from the fumes and yearning.

  Trade me sumthun, Doris kept saying, but Patsy had nothing.

  Don’t you got no coffee powder? No canny bar?

  Annie tried to lure her to AA meetings—Annie, who confided she’d been a banquet waitress until she cut up her boyfriend’s face and kited a couple thousand dollars of his checks. I was sober for six years, she told Patsy, then had a slip. In two weeks I was freebasing. Me, who’d never even tried cocaine.

  C’mon, Patsy, Annie said. You might as well get sober inside, cuz it’s a hassle to drink here, and AA helps with parole. And meetings are good here.

  Maybe someday, Patsy said, thinking of the little jar, those fumes.

  Also recruiting for AA was the plump older woman, Gloria, whom the women called Granny, who was in her late fifties, ginger-haired, stout, and tough. Gloria had already been sober for twenty-four years, but she’d stopped her lithium and, in a manic episode, had stolen a hundred thousand from her business partner and set out across the country, giving cash away to strangers. Gloria was the closest thing to a den mother in RC. Her daughter was a cop and had connections. Gloria had privileges other women didn’t—a job in the kitchen, and visitors. Anytime you want to come to a meeting, Patsy, she said.

  Patsy tried sitting in the television room, but there were too many women talking and yelling and she couldn’t hear the program. She spent most of her days on her small, ache-inducing bed.

  She missed going outside at will. Walking down streets, and driving. Beautiful mobility. She missed the phone, the miracle of talking to a person whenever she wanted. She yearned for her own home and for the v
ery friends she’d ignored when they came to console her after the accident. She even missed those weeks, the awful stretch of guilt and self-revulsion. From here, those emotions seemed more pure and true than any she’d have in this stultifying dorm. In RC she did not brood—or even think—about the deaths she’d caused. If and when her victims crossed her mind, they seemed only remotely and incidentally connected to her present circumstances. When she’d declared in court that nothing could be as bad as how she already felt, she’d been hopelessly, laughably, presumptuously wrong. It was all she could do to keep hold of herself and do what she was told. RC finessed guilt and sorrow with its filth and demented noise, the pervasive smell of rancid food, the arbitrary ever-shifting rules—walk on this side of the hall, no that side of the hall—and the absurdist, make-up-the-rules-as-you-go-along games, such as how to get a sanitary napkin from the CO who had a case of them right there, beside her, in plain sight.

  I need half a dozen, please, said Patsy. Six.

  I’m out, said the guard.

  But . . . Patsy could see in the cardboard box the soft, squarish corners of pads stacked like so many tiny mattresses. I really need at least one, she whispered. It’s kind of an emergency.

  I just don’t know what to tell you, said the guard.

  So Patsy bled onto her socks, wearing and washing them in rotation.

  •

  She lost thirty pounds in her first month at RC. She had started out going to the dining room with the others, taking a tray and accepting the gravied meats, long-cooked vegetables, and powdered eggs, but it all had the same rankness, and she stopped being able to put any of it into her mouth. After she kicked the woman, she refused to go near the dining room. Patsy was five feet eleven inches tall, and in forty days she was down to a hundred and ten pounds.

  One morning, she could not get warm. Her teeth chattered. She huddled under a blanket. Some women said, Look, she’s turning blue. Someone went for Gloria, who had four or five women sit on the beds around Patsy, putting themselves between her and any CO. You’re starving, Gloria told her. That’s what’s wrong with you.

  Patsy shrugged.

  I can get you some sugar water, for a start. Or you’ll go into convulsions.

  So what.

  Yeah, but then they’ll put you in the infirmary, said Gloria. And trust me, you don’t want to go there. You’re shackled to the bed in a room full of lunatics. You pee and crap on yourself. They don’t care. Nobody looks in on you.

  I don’t care, said Patsy.

  Gloria looked up and down the dormitory and at the backs of the women sitting on the nearby beds. Well, you’re going to have to find something to care about, Patsy, she said. Or you’re going to die in here.

  I know, Patsy said, and began to cry, not because she might die, but because, to her shame, she couldn’t go through with it, she wanted to live.

  Gloria stood close and made an occasional humming noise and didn’t touch her, because in prison there was no such thing as touching for consolation or mere warmth, not here, not even between people who understood such gestures, who could differentiate between pure and clouded intentions.

  When Patsy calmed down, Gloria gave her a paper cup of sugar water and, when that stayed down, said, Would you eat some crackers for me?

  Patsy managed two saltines. An hour later, two more.

  How ’bout this, Gloria said that evening. Would you take a job if I could arrange it?

  What kind of job?

  In the kitchen, with me.

  Maybe. Patsy said this not because she wanted to work, but because she couldn’t spurn any kindness under these circumstances.

  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.

  5

  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 ca
ll 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.