We waited sitting side by side. Holding hands. Tess in my father’s place. Me in mine. All the people around us, the door opening and closing, all those prisoners ushered into the room. Blue for peaceful. Green for suicide watch.
Until at last, my mother appears in orange.
“That’s her,” Tess said, as if I might not recognize her. As if it had been Tess all that time coming to visit, and I’d just arrived in town. Right from the start it was that way. The instant my mother arrives in the room. Like that famous brand of love: an immediate and shattering thing.
She came to us moving in her new way. I’d noticed it the last few visits. A kind of imperious gliding. A dancer’s affect—hands loose at her sides, chin high, a look of bemusement, the slightest smile. A joke she’s still thinking about. A sweet story she’s just recalled. The look she gave you: Relent. I know all. Her face so relaxed. Nothing tight, no lines, no furrows. She seemed to have become younger in prison, not older.
So, she came to us, moving through the room as if it were a stage, a ballroom. And this new quality about her grew more pronounced when she saw Tess. Her eyes lightened. The smile grew into something beyond what she reserved for her son and husband. It was something closer to an expression of pleasure.
“Joey,” she said, kissing my cheek. “And you are Tess.”
We have all seen some version of this. Two people meet and something is changed. In the air, in the room. Something is acknowledged. Around them we exchange knowing looks. Did you see that? Did you see? Often, it is someone’s husband, someone’s wife who catches it. That flicker. The terror it can cause. The implications. So often a signal that a marriage will shortly suffer great damage.
“You are Tess,” my mother said again, but this time her tone meaning, at long last. The one I’ve been hearing about, the one who has captured my son’s heart. The motherly mode, so different from the first.
“I am,” Tess said with her fullest smile. No restraint. No caution.
My mother asked all the questions our time would allow. And in her new style consistent with the smile, the gliding, the hands at peace.
“Who are you, Tess? Where do you come from? What do you want from your life? Where will you go next? What are your intentions with my son?” This last with a laugh. “What are you doing here? A gorgeous young woman in a prison town? In a prison? Young lady, I don’t approve.”
She went on like that, Tess hypnotized. Enchanted, in the most literal sense. A spell had been cast. The straight-spined queen of The Pine has magical powers. Tess Wolff, our knight errant, is beguiled. The dutiful son sits silent and waits.
When our time ends, when our audience with her is nearly over, Tess slides her small rectangular box across the table. Six balls of wax rolled in white cotton.
“Thank you,” she says. “The noise is awful. Thank you.”
She presses her lips to the back of Tess’s hand, leaving a red stain.
The queen has found lipstick in prison.