LaShonda Greene, tiny, pretty, hard-wired to be belligerent. Incredibly smart. In another life, under wildly different circumstances, she would have been valedictorian at my college. She would have become a world leader. Instead, she was serving eighteen to twenty-five years for using that intelligence to rob a bank. Unfortunately, as she told me, despite meticulous planning, a guard was shot dead and that was a game changer. “He shouldn’t have gotten all hero on us. Shouldn’t have thought he was some kind of Lone Ranger. Poor fella. What did he care if we took that money? They weren’t gonna pay him no prize money for stoppin’ us.” LaShonda’s eyes were a preternatural green, more big cat than human. Like a cat’s eyes, they glittered in the gray light of the overhead fluorescents, giving her a sparkle better suited to a fly girl than a felon. “Waste of life.”
“Do you regret it? That he died?” I meant was she sorry that she and her boyfriend caused his death. There had been no intention of killing the man; it was just an unfortunate outcome. Like my killing Charles.
LaShonda shrugged. “It was his own fault, you know. I mean, I didn’t pull the trigger, but I might’ve if Deon had given me the gun like I told him to. So, I guess I’m lucky. Accessory, not killer. But, yeah, maybe I do feel a little bad about how things turned out. He was one of those old guys, probably happy to have this shit job standin’ on his feet all day, nobody talkin’ to him. Too poor to retire.”
LaShonda and I worked together in the prison laundry and had struck up a casual friendship folding sheets together. As prison jobs go, it wasn’t the worst. At least at the end of the shift you had something to show for the time spent. And it smelled good. I think my pay was maybe ten cents an hour, and it went toward my commissary account, so that I could buy the little things that make prison life livable: a candy bar now and then, ramen noodles, prison-approved dental floss. Nasty old-fashioned sanitary pads that made me feel like I was back in diapers. Real luxuries. Unlike some of my compatriots, I didn’t receive funds from anyone on the outside to supplement my commissary account. No one even sent a letter.
“What about you?” LaShonda snapped a towel; it crackled with static. “You care that he died, or you care more you got caught?”
“It was an accident. I shouldn’t be in here.”
LaShonda laughed, yanked another hot towel out of the massive dryer, and folded it. “That’s what we all say.”
“But it’s true. I didn’t see him.” Blinded by angry tears, I didn’t see him. “I wasn’t used to the car.”
“Then why you here? Sounds like a tragic accident.”
“His mother hates me.”
“Man, if my man’s mother hated me that much, I’da been in here a lot sooner.”
“She’s got powerful friends.”
“Couldn’t you get a better lawyer?”
“I got a public defender.”
LaShonda laid the folded towel on the pile and gave me a look of absolute skepticism. “No way. You don’t look like the type that goes through the system. No offense.”
“None taken. I am the type that goes through the system. I haven’t got any money. My family hasn’t got any money.” I didn’t add that I was alienated from my family. The Collins family doesn’t take disloyalty well. We call it “burning bridges.”
“So your PD was as good as mine?”
“Probably worse. She’d been a PD most of her career, so she no longer cared; she was too jaded to feel like she could make a difference anymore. She was lazy. More than once I was pretty sure she was high.”
“Yeah, sounds like mine.” LaShonda giggled. “You’re better off with some fresh-out-of-law-school kid, stars in her eyes, wavin’ her Mount Blank pen like a sword, defendin’ the rights of the innocent. Thinkin’ she’s makin’ a difference.”
I smiled at LaShonda’s Montblanc reference. My father would have liked her. He liked the unpretentious of the world.
Putting on airs is how my mother saw it. My new habits. Like preferring Starbucks to Dunkin’ Donuts. Buying wine by vintner instead of the two-for-ten kind at the local bottle shop. Disdaining chuck roast and choosing to have barely singed sirloin. I’d come home from my Seven Sisters college ready to go back to my plebeian life. Indeed, I had fitted right back in, leaving the thrift store chic in my closet and going back to Target and Old Navy for my clothes. I worked at that fancy-schmancy coffee bar and dreamed of finding a job that would put me on the path to getting my own place, but I imagined it somewhere in the old neighborhood, or maybe Somerville, where all the other recent college grads and twentysomethings were making their way in the world. I fell in with my old friends, and we haunted the karaoke bars and flirted with boys who could pass for my brothers. I made sure that Teddy had company in that long hour before my mother came home from work to start dinner and my father banged through the front door after a “pop” with the boys. We’d play endless games of Scrabble, with me placing his tiles on the board where he directed me. Teddy had a good vocabulary, reading being one of the things he could do independently with what motion he had in his left hand. Thank goodness for e-readers.
And then Charles came into my life, and, like Henry Higgins, he looked at me as his Eliza Doolittle. I was his project.
It wasn’t a whirlwind romance, although spring did seem to come earlier that year. Charles inched his way into my life, almost teasingly. A call, a text. Silence. A midwinter ski trip. Two weeks of “too busy to get together.” A late-winter weekend in Saint Thomas. First-class flight and accommodations; inseparable for three whole days and then he was off to some business meeting in Chicago and I didn’t hear anything. It was all right. I wasn’t losing my heart to him. At least I didn’t think so. Nonetheless, by May I began to think that maybe he ought to meet my parents. His mother lived in New York, and we hadn’t yet reached the stage of making a special trip to meet her, at least that’s what he implied when I asked, but my family was within a few miles of where we met. A zip over the Zakim Bridge, turn right off the Somerville exit, and there we were.
As I had learned to do in college, I always referred to my neighborhood by its proper name, Charlestown, because that had more cachet. So when I finally confessed to Charles that I was from the poor side of town, he was mildly appalled. After that, the closest Charles came to my neighborhood was when he sent an Uber to collect me for a Friday-night date. A fact duly noted by my mother, who wondered aloud why if he was such a gentleman he wouldn’t collect me himself, not send a taxi.
“He’s downtown already, so why would he come here to go back there? And it’s an Uber.”
“He’s paid someone to pick you up. It’s a taxi.”
Teddy came into the dining room in his clunky wheelchair. “Ma, give Rosie a break. At least he’s not making her pay for it.” He docked his chair at his place at the dining room table. Mom set down a plate of pasta in front of him.
“I’d like to meet this young man. Mr. Uber.”
And that’s when I thought that maybe it was time. I was beginning to think, maybe even hope, that maybe Charles and I were a couple. The stop/start of his early courtship had settled into a rhythm of daily contact. We’d slept together. I hadn’t left a toothbrush at his place in the South End, but I had one in my purse.
Just after the server had removed the dinner plates and set the dessert menu in front of us, I asked the question: “Would you like to come to my parents’ house on Sunday for dinner?” I tossed this out casually, as if it had just occurred to me. “They’d like to meet you.”
Charles had his wineglass lifted to his lips. A very expensive merlot, as I recall. His face was unreadable behind the balloon glass. He didn’t answer right away, and I took that as a negative and then instantly worried that I’d pushed some off button on the relationship by being presumptuous. “At their home?”
“Yes. My parents’ house.” Perhaps he thought Sunday dinners were restaurant meals.
“Aren’t they on the Somerville line?”
“Close.” Weird questioning, but I was just happy that he hadn’t rejected the idea out of hand. “East of the community college.” Where I might have gone had I not been encouraged by my favorite teacher to expand my horizons.
And then he set his glass on the fine white tablecloth and smiled. “That would be very nice.”
I was as nervous as a squirrel in a roomful of hounds that first meeting—one of only three—between Charles and my parents. I was afraid that my father would make some inappropriate remark that normally we’d just laugh off, something racist, off-color, or, worse, some crack about rich Republicans. He did.
I worried that my mother would make a big deal out of Charles’s hostess gift of a bottle of expensive, to her, wine. I knew my mother. She was certain to say something about saving it for later. She did.
I was hyperaware of all the flaws in my family’s grammar and table manners and the way the crucified Christ hung on our living room wall. The minute we walked into the house where I had grown up, with its threadbare rug and Bob’s Discount Furniture living room set, I was convinced that this was the baddest idea in a world of bad ideas. All the sophisticated veneer I had developed in college was exposed as a façade by my beloved family. I just knew that Charles would bolt.
He didn’t.
It was sometime after that first visit when Charles began making plans for us every weekend. He started bringing me silly little things, like a new lipstick he said would be a better color for me, and a tight little bolero sweater he said would make me look even more slender. Why didn’t I consider a new hairstylist? I kidded him about being such a metrosexual and he only smiled, his eyes brighter than usual, as if I’d touched a pleasant nerve. He made an appointment for me at a place on Newbury Street, where a simple haircut could run into the hundreds. “My treat,” he said. “My treat.” He advised the stylist, and I came out of the shop looking like the million bucks Charles said I was worth. I worried out loud that I would never be able to keep up with the style, bluntly letting him know that I could never afford a Newbury Street look on my own. Again, his eyes brightened and he smiled. “You won’t have to.”
I look back on this and I wonder at my naïveté, or maybe it’s the 20/20 hindsight of finally recognizing what a subtle monster control is. What can look like kindness and affection is far more sinister. The kindness and affection weren’t meant for me; they were meant for this figment, a miniature living golem. Charles wanted to mold what he saw as raw material into something of his own creation. It just took me a long time to figure out what he was doing. Who doesn’t like being treated to spa days and facials? Who wouldn’t want to be escorted to invitation-only trunk shows and be handed a credit card? I began to amass a closet full of clothes worth more than my college tuition—a loan I was no closer to paying off than I had been when I first met Charles.
On one of my increasingly rare nights out without Charles, my high school bestie, Brenda Brathwaite, patiently listened as I extolled the generosity of my new boyfriend, doing a little humble bragging about the trouble I was having finding room in my closet.
“How come you never post anything about him on Facebook?”
“He’s very private. He told me right from the start that he didn’t want to be on my page or anyone else’s.”
“Does he have one?”
“No. Just the page for his company. All very professional.”
Brenda ran a finger along the rim of her margarita glass. We were in a little Downtown Crossing Mexican place. “Have you met his parents yet?”
“Not yet. Charles says that he’s really too busy right now; he wants to make it an occasion. And it’s just his mother. She’s very busy in New York with her charity work. We’ll probably meet over the holidays.” Holidays that were months away.
Brenda has known me all my life and so she has no filter when it comes to saying what’s on her mind when it pertains to me. “Sounds like you’re the ‘other’ woman.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, Rosie. He spoils you with stuff, but he never takes you home to Mom. He comes and goes in your life according to his schedule. He claims there’s no position open in his firm. I took a look. There’re a couple of entry-level marketing positions open in Wright, Melrose & Foster that’d be just perfect for someone like you.”
“You’re full of it. He’s being sensitive about nepotism.”
“You’re not related.”
I waggled my eyebrows to suggest that there was a yet.
“He’s probably worried about having you around when he decides to go back to his wife, or breaks it off out of guilt.”
“Brenda, he’s not married. I would know.”
“Googled him?”
Now it was my turn to smile. “Yes. Of course. One broken engagement, but never married.”
“Okay, my bad. You just keep having fun, and feel free to give me your select hand-me-downs when you’re closet is too full.”
“Look, you’re being kind of unfair to Charles. Let’s go out on a double date, you and Leon, and me and Charles. You’ll get to know Charles and he’ll see that my friends are the best.”
“You’re on.”
Except that Charles hated the idea. His capacity for finding reasons not to double-date with my friends was limitless. Neither did we ever go out with his friends. The closest we came was bumping into one of the principals in the firm, Laurence Wright, and his wife at Rialto, in the Charles Hotel. Although Mr. Wright politely suggested we join them, Charles declined and we took the table for two he’d reserved. It wasn’t until later that night, as we snuggled under the covers in our “weekend away” room at the hotel, that I realized Charles had never introduced me by name to Mr. and Mrs. Wright. An unusual lapse of manners, for which I chided him, but he only laughed and told me I was being a child. Of course he’d introduced me. But he hadn’t.
I was sorry that Charles died, of course. Before the trial, I grieved for him in a way, and flashes of his easier side would come to me, forcing on me a heavy guilt; but the truth was, I was relieved to be free of him. Of his oppressive nature. After the trial, I realized that his style of oppression had only been transferred to the more overt oppression of prison. If he’d kept me imprisoned by his jealous, controlling nature, now I was in a real prison, and no guard here cared the least for my emotional state. They weren’t guarding me jealously; they were guarding the world from me.
By my second year at Mid-State, I had “adjusted” to my circumstances, meaning that I went about my day no longer crying. I’d found the limited library. I went to my laundry job. I ate and walked the yard and didn’t cry. I listened to my mother’s unanswered phone and didn’t cry. I got used to my fellow inmates, even growing to like some of them, especially LaShonda. Once I had a dream that she and I were sitting opposite each other in a restaurant. She wore a fascinator and I wore a hijab. The waiter came to take our orders, and it was Charles. In the dream, LaShonda looked at me and said, “He’s nothing.” I woke up in a sweat.
By my fourth year of incarceration, I was in the law library, trying to fathom some legal precedent that would free me. I had stopped calling home. Like a rising senior, I had learned the ropes and I handled the four-times-a-day head count. I passed down the corridor with very little interference from inmates or guards.
Nearly four years in and I no longer felt like the fearful young woman, innocent of the crime and innocent of the ways of the gray world of prison. I saw them arrive, those youthful ghosts of me. Trembling, weeping, calling for their mothers. I felt for them, but I wasn’t kind to them. Kindness slows the hardening of the carapace you need in prison. Now I felt fully armored by my certainty that my life was fixed in the amber of prison rules, mores, and constant sense of threat—from fellow inmates, from randy guards. Some inmates got through by talking about what they would do when they got out, who they would see, what foods they would enjoy. Not me. By my fourth year, I had accepted this joyless, soul-dead life.