“Oh. Right.”
“Stuff about cancer always makes your dad depressed. You know it runs in his family a lot.”
She glances over her shoulder at Sis shambling along. Sis had not worn a coat. The rain doesn’t seem to bother her. She is staring out at something still as if her face was nothing more than a mask which hides her real self. “You hear me?” Ma asks Sis.
If Sis hears she doesn’t say anything.
“How’re you doing this morning Jimmy?” Ma asks the fat guard who lets us into the waiting room.
His stomach wriggles beneath his threadbare uniform shirt like something troubled struggling to be born.
He grunts something none of us can understand. He obviously doesn’t believe in being nice to Ma no matter how nice Ma is to him. Would break prison decorum apparently, the sonofabitch. But if you think he is cold to us — and most people in the prison are — you should see how they are to the families of queers or with men who did things to children.
The cold is in my bones already. Except for July and August prison is always cold to me. The bars are cold. The walls are cold. When you go into the bathroom and run the water your fingers tingle. The prisoners are always sneezing and coughing. Ma always brings Dad lots of Contac and Listerine even though I told her about this article that said Listerine isn’t anything except a mouthwash.
In the waiting room — which is nothing more than the yellow-painted room with battered old wooden chairs — a turnkey named Stan comes in and leads you right up to the visiting room, the only problem being that separating you from the visiting room is a set of bars. Stan turns the key that raises these bars and then you get inside and he lowers the bars behind you. For a minute or so you’re locked in between two walls and two sets of bars. You get a sense of what it’s like to be in a cell. The first couple times this happened I got scared. My chest started heaving and I couldn’t catch my breath, sort of like the nightmares I have sometimes.
Stan then raises the second set of bars and you’re one room away from the visiting room or VR as the prisoners call it. In prison you always lower the first set of bars before you raise the next one. That way nobody escapes.
In this second room, not much bigger than a closet with a stand-up clumsy metal detector near the door leading to the VR, Stan asks Ma and Sis for their purses and me for my wallet. He asks if any of us have got any open packs of cigarettes and if so to hand them over. Prisoners and visitors alike can carry only full packs of cigarettes into the VR. Open packs are easy to hide stuff in.
You pass through the metal detector and straight into the VR room.
The first thing you notice is how all of the furniture is in color-coded sets — loungers and vinyl molded chairs makes up a set — orange green blue or red. Like that. This is so Mona the guard in here can tell you where to sit just by saying a color such as “Blue” which means you go sit in the blue seat. Mona makes Stan look like a really friendly guy. She’s fat with hair cut man short and a voice man deep. She wears her holster and gun with real obvious pleasure. One time Ma didn’t understand what color she said and Mona’s hand dropped to her service revolver like she was going to whip it out or something. Mona doesn’t like to repeat herself. Mona is the one the black prisoner knocked unconscious a year ago. The black guy is married to this white girl which right away you can imagine Mona not liking at all so she’s looking for any excuse to hassle him so the black guy one time gets down on his hands and knees to play with his little baby and Mona comes over and says you can only play with the kids in the Toy Room (TR) and he says can’t you make an exception and Mona sly-like bumps him hard on the shoulder and he just flashes the way prisoners sometimes do and jumps up from the floor and not caring that she’s a woman or not just drops her with a right hand and the way the story is told now anyway by prisoners and their families, everybody in VR instead of rushing to help her break out into applause just like it’s a movie or something. Standing ovation. The black guy was in the hole for six months but was quoted afterward as saying it was worth it.
Most of the time it’s not like that at all. Nothing exciting I mean. Most of the time it’s just depressing.
Mostly it’s women here to see husbands. They usually bring their kids so there’s a lot of noise. Crying laughing chasing around. You can tell if there’s trouble with a parole— the guy not getting out when he’s supposed to — because that’s when the arguments always start, the wife having built her hopes up and then the husband saying there’s nothing he can do I’m sorry honey nothing I can do and sometimes the woman will really start crying or arguing. I even saw a woman slap her husband once, the worst being of course when some little kid starts crying and says, “Daddy I want you to come home!” That’s usually when the prisoner himself starts crying.
As for touching or fondling, there’s none of it. You can kiss your husband for thirty seconds and most guards will hassle you even before your time’s up if you try it open mouth or anything. Mona in particular is a real bitch about something like this. Apparently Mona doesn’t like the idea of men and women kissing.
Another story you hear a lot up here is how this one prisoner cut a hole in his pocket so he could stand by the Coke machine and have his wife put her hand down his pocket and jack him off while they just appeared to be innocently standing there, though that may be one of those stories the prisoners just like to tell.
The people who really have it worst are those who are in the hole or some other kind of solitary. On the west wall there’s this long screen for them. They have to sit behind the screen the whole time. They can’t touch their kids or anything. All they can do is look.
I can hear Ma’s breath take up sharp when they bring Dad in.
He’s still a handsome man — thin, dark curly hair with no gray, and more solid than ever since he works out in the prison weight room all the time. He always walks jaunty as if to say that wearing a gray uniform and living in an interlocking set of cages has not yet broken him. But you can see in his blue eyes that they broke him a long time ago.
“Hiya everybody,” he says trying to sound real happy.
Ma throws her arms around him and they hold each other. Sis and I sit down on the two chairs. I look at Sis. She stares at the floor.
Dad comes over then and says, “You two sure look great.”
“So do you,” I say. “You must be still lifting those weights.”
“Bench pressed two-twenty-five this week.”
“Man,” I say and look at Sis again. I nudge her with my elbow.
She won’t look up.
Dad stares at her. You can see how sad he is about her not looking up. Soft he says, “It’s all right.”
Ma and Dad sit down then and we go through the usual stuff; how things are going at home and at my job and in junior college, and how things are going in prison. When he first got there, they put Dad in with this colored guy — he was Jamaican — but then they found out he had AIDS so they moved Dad out right away. Now he’s with this guy who was in Vietnam and got one side of his face burned. Dad says once you get used to looking at him he’s a nice guy with two kids of his own and not queer in any way or into drugs at all. In prison the drugs get pretty bad.
We talk a half hour before Dad looks at Sis again. “So how’s my little girl.”
She still won’t look up.
“Ellen,” Ma says, “you talk to your dad and right now.”
Sis raises her head. She looks right at Dad but doesn’t seem to see him at all. Ellen can do that. It’s really spooky.
Dad puts his hand out and touches her.
Sis jerks her hand away. It’s the most animated I’ve seen her in weeks.