Before the grandparents brought his girls back home, the Warden thought I should meet them someplace neutral. We’d always dated when the kids were at the grandparents’. Looking back, it seems odd that I didn’t meet them before, but those were different times—times when the likes and dislikes of children played a lesser role in the goings-on of adults.
“Meet your girls? Sure,” I said, thinking that I’d rather pirouette in a pink tutu.
“Mamaw and Pappy can bring them by the prison tomorrow.” He kissed me on the cheek. “Now I got to go tend to those roofing tiles.”
I took in a deep breath. “Tomorrow.”
“You’ll be fine.” He kissed the top of my head. “They’re nice girls. Got to be tomorrow since they are coming home the day after.”
He clicked the door shut. I stood there with my mouth hanging open and my guts bubbling up with panic. Tomorrow?
I needed some help here.
The dining room chair threatened to commit suicide when I lowered myself into it, but it somehow found the strength to go on. I tested it further by leaning back to grab a soft hand-sewn pouch I’d put in the drawer of the Warden’s plate cabinet. It was the pouch that my grandmother had given to my mother when she got married and my mother had given to me when I left for Sugar Land—my first marriage of sorts.
I rolled the pouch around in my fingers before pulling out the rosary. It was constructed of ten rows of white Hail Mary beads that looked like suppositories. Sitting stoically in between the groupings, were perfectly round, pink beads for the Lord’s Prayer. My mama had told me that those pink beads were genuine opals, one of the two birthstones of her mother’s mother, the woman who first owned the rosary. A delicate silver chain connected all those beads.
The rosary was cold, as if it had been kept in the ice chest, but somehow gentle. The only part that felt hard was the crucifix itself, all pointy edges, especially where the nails in Christ’s hands and feet stuck out. Even his body was pointy—his kneecaps and the crown of thorns and his thin ribs. I used to think that they made the crucifixes sharp so you’d have to hang them outside your pocket for fear of stabbing yourself, then everyone would know you had a rosary on you, like an ad for God.
The night before I was to meet the Warden’s little girls, while he clomped around on the roof above me, I did something I hadn’t done since I was nineteen: I prayed that rosary. The entire damn rosary, since I needed all the help I could get.
I offered my rosary up as a prayer to the Almighty that the Warden’s girls would not walk up to me and proceed to make derogatory comments about my rectangular stature or my big feet or my closely shorn hairdo in front of the Warden. I knew he didn’t see me the way I saw myself, but I worried that he might see me the way they saw me. So, despite the arguments in my mind in favor of bourbon over rosary, I moved over to the more comfortable light green chair in the living room, near the cactus, and prayed that rosary until my left butt cheek fell asleep—then I prayed some more.
I dozed off with the rosary and woke up to the Warden lightly touching my hair. It was morning.
“I didn’t want to wake you.”
“Aw, hell! What time is it?”
“There’s no rush—we got forty-five minutes to be at Sugar Land. You get yourself some coffee, and I’m going to go have a cigar.”
I got up without saying anything, annoyed that I could feel him smiling about it all.
It wasn’t a long decision; I only had my white Sugar Land shirts and two sundresses to choose from. So, the blue one with the white flowers or the dark gray?
I was glad then that Sugar Land was the chosen meeting space because, although I wasn’t the prettiest thing going, next to tattooed prisoners with yellow teeth and hairy ears, I could hold my own. Besides, I knew also that the Warden was most comfortable at the prison. He thought of that place as a kind of retreat for children who had been beaten into dangerous adults, and therefore saw his role as part father, part drill sergeant. They were his extended family, even if they didn’t know it. It made sense that his immediate family would be meeting up there.
I chose dark gray—the blue made me look like a giant hot-air balloon—and a pair of sunglasses with light yellow frames.
“It’s funny,” I said when I came out. “I have three times as many sunglasses as I do sundresses.”
“You could wear some shorts.”
I gave him a look that let him know what I thought about that.
“Well, all right then.”
He held the door, and I walked through, smoothing down my hair. We strolled along Guardtown, him holding my hand. He smoked his cigar down, and I tried to keep myself calm so I wouldn’t get sweaty.
“You all right?” he asked when we were almost up to the white buildings.
“Yes. You?”
“I’m just fine.” He winked, and I thought that he did seem fine. How could that be—didn’t he see that he had married a giant piece of cement?
So there I was—just a week after my wedding—back at Sugar Land. I rubbed my finger over my teeth, in case any of the light-colored lipstick I’d put on had rubbed off. It was my Sunday lipstick and, although it felt like one more thing to worry about, it was better than worrying about not having any.
He waved over to where their grandparents had dropped them off. The only grandparents left were on his dead wife’s side. They waved, but never made it over to meet me—not that day and not any day after. Maybe they thought the Warden shouldn’t have remarried, or maybe it hurt too much to see their daughter’s girls looking to another woman for care; I don’t know.
The Warden walked back toward me, that big bear of a man hulking in the middle of his two wispy girls—one in pants and one in a skirt. They all held hands, strolling across the flesh-colored dirt at high noon. As they got closer, I wasn’t sure if I should stay seated or stand or what. I wished I’d brought a cigarette.
A small plane flew overhead, and I looked up through my sunglasses, wondering how long geese feel the pull of the plane engines sucking them in before they lose the battle and get shredded. How much they struggle against a wind that will always overwhelm them.
“Miss Dara.” The Warden cleared his throat. “This is Edna, who sleeps with the dogs, and Debbie, who sleeps with the cats.” They had two wiener dogs from the same litter and two cats of nondescript parentage who would soon be added in with my two cats. Since they slept with them, the animals had also traveled over to the grandparents’, who were dropping them by the house tomorrow.
They smiled up at me, squinting. Debbie curtsied, as much as a seven-year-old made almost entirely of hair can. She wore a pale pink skirt and white shirt with a blue belt in the middle.
“Daddy, can Edna and me have a race?” she asked.
Before he answered, Edna—in the blue sailor suit—yelled “Go!” and the two girls were off across the yard.
The Warden sat down. “Taking this in?”
“I am.” I sat there with my legs pressed close together under the picnic table.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
He nodded, then turned to watch his girls. Edna, the younger one, was winning the second leg back from the wired prison fence.
He called out to them: “Bring it on in!”
The girls pushed harder when they realized their Daddy was watching. They stormed up to our table.
“I won!” Debbie shouted.
“I tripped.” Edna sulked. “You didn’t win—I just lost. It’s diff’rent.”
The plane overhead was almost out of sight. I wondered why when I saw that plane I thought of the death of geese—why, instead, I didn’t see people off to enjoy their lives. I vowed to begin seeing things on the light side and started by turning to Edna and saying, “The best winners are the ones that lose a lot when they’re young. Life only gets better.”
Edna looked around the penitentiary yard. She turned to me, cocked her head, and said the words that made me love her right off: “If this is better,” she said, “I quit now.”
× × ×
We went through the growing pains folks go through. I found out when I could reprimand the girls and when exerting my authority would threaten to paint a bright red circle around me as the one member of this family who didn’t really belong. I came to know when I could remind the Warden that I came in late to the structure of all these people, and sometimes I just needed time to myself—and when such a reminder would sound like I didn’t love his girls like I should. And I worked out when I could ask how their time was at their grandparents’ house without sounding like I was trying to compete, which, truth be told, sometimes I was.
Then my second rosary came. Edna was just turning nine and was so skinny that we dressed her in clothes for girls much younger than she was, even though they were too short in the sleeves and too high in the dress line. Her hands were always dirty since she was a bright girl filled up with this drive to understand the world from grub worms up.
The Warden and I had told Edna that she could have three kids over for the night to celebrate her ninth birthday. Only she decided that two of the three friends she wanted to invite were boys—and the Warden told her flat-out no.
Edna shut herself in the room she shared with Debbie. I knocked and asked if I could come in.
She shouted in that way that only young children can, without care for the neighbors, “No!”
“Please.”
“I don’t want a birthday party!”
I stood with my hand against the door, as if I could feel something through the thin wood. After a moment, I walked in.
Edna, her thick brown hair in a mess, was face down on her bed. Her fourteen stuffed animals were off in the corner, all looking over at her with great concern.
She sniffed. “I don’t want a party if the boys can’t come.”
“Do they want to come?” I asked.
She rolled onto her side, away from me, and said slowly, “I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you just have your one girl friend over then?”
She rubbed her face against the pillowcase. “No one has one person over for their birthday!” She flopped onto her back and stared up at the ceiling, her face blotchy from crying. “Let’s just cancel it. I’ll tell everyone you won’t let me have one.”
To my shame, I felt a pang of dread that folks would hear that the Warden’s new wife wouldn’t let his daughter have a birthday party. I said, “Are you sure?”
“I just want to know what’s wrong with me!” she shouted, crying hard, that deep kind of cry.
I stood up and pushed a few strands of hair behind my ear. Clearly this was beyond my experience.
To me she was a spirited, smart little girl, though there was something in the distance she had with the rest of the world that I understood. I stood by her bed. Edna sniffed an irritated sniff then lifted her messy head and handed me the pillow. She rolled over to cry into the bedspread.
“I don’t want a party,” she said, muffled and sad.
“Well you need to have one,” I said, making the rookie mistake of caring more how other people saw me as a parent than how my stepdaughter saw me as a parent. “You’ll have fun. I promise. I will invite those three girls, and that’s that.”
“I won’t,” she cried. “I’ll sit there and not say a word the whole time!”
She went silent. After a few minutes, I left the room.
I did host that party. And it was horrible. The neighborhood girls came dressed in their finest regalia and brought fancy gifts and stacked them up in a pile while Edna, who had refused to wear anything other than her pants and a brown blouse, sat with her back to everyone, facing the wall in the living room.
That night—the night after her terrible party—I prayed another rosary that I wouldn’t be such a selfish asshole. And after I was done, I went in to her bedroom.
Edna scowled at me from her sheets.
“I was wrong and you were right,” I said. “I’m sorry, honey. So sorry.”
Edna softened. We didn’t hug or anything, but she nodded in a way that let me know that she had accepted my white flag. I left her room wondering how many people I would hurt because I cared what others thought.
× × ×
It wasn’t until 1939 that I prayed the rosary for the third time since my youth. The subject of this rosary: Debbie’s junior prom.
This time, I offered up my prayers not for Debbie’s tenuous sixteen-year-old virginity or her safe transport to and from the dancehall, but that I would manage to help her with her make-up without her ending up like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The only make-up trick I had was wearing sunglasses instead of mascara.
That night, a breezy spring night that made all the sheets on the line look like ghosts, I stayed downstairs and said the rosary. I prayed for the Almighty to intervene and endow me with make-up skills by dawn.
The next morning, I was greeted with proof that God did truly exist when the Warden surprised Miss Debbie and me by reserving a spot at the Sally Joan make-up counter for Miss Debbie to get her outer lids and the rest of it done professionally while I just stood there, complimenting. Praise be!
Who knows what became of Miss Debbie’s virginity, but the way she looked when she left, I have no doubt it was the flag to be captured that night. It reminded me of that one time Rhodie asked me to dance, her holding her hand out, saying, “Dance with me. No one can see us.”
Me blanching. “I can’t. I don’t know who would lead.” What a donkey’s behind.
Miss Debbie adjusted her purple corsage after her date did his best to slide it on her wrist. “Daddy, you know Brian. And Brian, this is my . . . Nana Dara. My daddy’s wife.”
And that was how it happened—that was how I became Nana Dara. I wasn’t her mother—never could be—but I wasn’t really her stepmother either. I was Nana Dara.
Not long after, Edna and the Warden started calling me Nana Dara too, and then the folks at church. The name spread faster than crabs in an all-boys school, and within the year even the folks bagging up my ice cream were calling me Nana Dara. It matured me, this name and the status that went with it. I was no longer a girl from an egg store who left to cook at a prison, then became the wife of the Warden. I was Nana Dara, God dammit. I had my own place in this world.
Two years later, the same year they bombed Pearl Harbor, I was presented with a situation that required I say the rosary for the fourth time since my teen years. I said this rosary for the Almighty to give me the strength to know how to console little Edna when she didn’t go to her prom. You need to remember, this was the 1940s, and prom could turn you into a princess or a spinster overnight. Trust me on that.
On the night of the prom, the Warden huffed and looked off at the pink clouds. “I’m going to head to the movies tonight.”
In that moment, I knew how much harder it was for men sometimes. No matter what, they had to hold up the heavy walls of society for fear that everything would otherwise cave in and hurt their families. They had to swallow their tenderness and let themselves sail away from softness.
After he left, Edna and I sat on our unpainted porch swing, me pressing up beside her with my hot body. I put on the radio and pulled out a bottle of champagne from a cardboard box I’d put out on the porch earlier. I popped the cork without too much trouble and poured us each a mason jar.
“Nana Dara, I’m only sixteen,” Edna said, her brown eyes looking as intense as they always did.
“This is a special occasion. Tonight is the first night you and I get to spend alone as grown women. And for that I am glad you didn’t go to prom.”
“I wasn’t asked.”
I nodded, and she sipped her champagne in the yellow light of our porch light. The crickets chatted about their day, and one of the chickens from a few houses over came up to peck at the weed sprouts in our front yard.
I wondered why Edna hadn’t been asked to prom. Unlike me, she had hair as thick as a horse’s mane and perfect teeth and could sound out almost any song on the piano. Sure, she could be full of fire every now and again, but what sixteen-year-old isn’t?
“Later on you’ll meet someone special—like your father—who will recognize how special you are, Edna.”
She nodded, clearly unconvinced.
I moved to the wicker chair across from the swing, pulled out the upside-down trashcan that we used as a table, and suggested we learn a little poker. Edna smiled so big and true in the afterglow of the fireworks that she looked like another person.
“Only if we can bet!” she said.
“That’s the only way to play.”
I shuffled loudly for effect and arched a fancy bridge.
“The trick to poker is the poker face, but it’s also the poker fingers and the poker feet. You can’t let your face or the other parts of your body reveal that you’ve told a lie. We all do it—we all want to get that lie out, so we tap our fingers or move our feet around or do something that lets other people know. The body and the soul—they want to be honest,” I said. “You have to work at it to be dishonest. But that’s part of poker. That’s what we call bluffing. To be great at poker you have to lie with your entire body.”
“I can do that,” she said.
I spread out the cards and wrote down what hand beat what other hand on a sheet of paper for her to use.
First two games I won, both with aces high.
“Why don’t I deal the next hand,” Edna said, smiling.
“Now I’m not sure what you are accusing me of, but all right, your deal.”
Halfway through our third game, and our second glass of champagne, we moved inside. I set the fans up in a way that wouldn’t blow the cards around, and suggested we liven up the bets by a nickel—and liven up the drinks with a little gin.
“A bite of it, as they say.”
“Well, sure.” Edna shuffled the cards while I made us drinks. I heard her stop. “Nana Dara,” she called out to me, “I was asked to go to the prom tonight.”
I didn’t turn around from the silver tray we called our bar. I just let her talk.
“I was asked by this nice boy who plays trumpet. But I didn’t want to go. I told him I couldn’t go. I, ah, it would’ve just felt too strange—I don’t know how to say this, but to dance with a boy against this body . . .”
And there it was: my moment to come clean and tell Edna how much I understood, how I felt the same way. That my daydreams about Rhodie kept me going through the odd days when I didn’t feel a true, deep sense of intimacy with the Warden. I could tell her that it would get easier. That there are moments of real love if you let them in—and that, after a few years, you might feel more and more true about it. That she’d learn somehow to do the dance or look for someone who didn’t like to dance very often.
But instead I swallowed my secret again and handed her a glass.
“This here is a French 75,” I said.
I felt her looking up at me with those nearly black eyes, wanting me to say something.
“You dealing?” I asked.
Edna took a sip. “Sure.”
We were quiet for a minute while I battled out what to say. I knew she was thinking that I was troubled by her and that pressure made it harder for me to figure out what words to use. What I came up with was this: “All I can tell you is that I support whatever settles into you right.”
Edna nodded real slow, keeping her eyes on the bubbles in her mason jar. She said, “I feel like there’s been a great injustice done to me somehow.”
“An injustice?”
She paused. I watched her thoughts move around behind her eyes as the fans clicked and whirled.
“But I guess there’s more injustice in the world than fleas in the bayou,” she finally said.
I nodded, not exactly sure what she was talking about, wondering if maybe it was the beverages causing her to talk crazy—and anyone who has had a French 75 can attest why I made that assumption.
An hour later, the Warden came home. In the crook of his arm was tucked a gorgeous bouquet of carnations and baby’s breath.
“They call this a nosegay, Edna. You wear it on your wrist.”
While he fiddled with the box, I slid our mason jars off to the side then hurried them into the kitchen. I don’t think the Warden would’ve cared if we had a few, but my leaving the room with hidden mason jars sealed our night as a private moment between just Edna and me.
As I watched from the tiny square of linoleum that made up our kitchen, Edna stood up in her yellow summer pajamas and held out her wrist. Her father, all blustering and red—the way he got when the humidity was as high as it was, or he was about to be gentle, or both—slid the bouquet on her wrist. He pulled out the ribbon that had gotten wrapped around her thumb and made sure it was centered just so.
The Warden turned up our radio and held out his hand for a dance. Edna took her father’s hand, and they waltzed around the living room. He spun his daughter around while I wiped away a tear or two. After a minute, I quietly shut off the lights in the kitchen and left them alone.
× × ×
Before you knew it, we had POWs being housed in the encampment at the Fort Bend County Fairgrounds, turning something so innocent and playful into a place for captured and caged humans. Before Pearl Harbor, folks around town would talk about the war as spectators, especially on Sunday when the thick paper came out. How Denmark surrendered the very same day it had been invaded by Germany, followed by Norway and the Netherlands and Belgium. How France had agreed to let Germany occupy its northern half, only to have Italy invade its southern half. Basically, how the rest of the world was falling like eggs in quicksand. Then Pearl Harbor happened, and America came undone, too.
It was a new feeling, to think about being in America and being in harm’s way—but they’d blown up Hawaii, and now there were spies everywhere. Even though the encampment was for POWs—for folks we had captured and such—it constantly reminded us of this new feeling of vulnerability. We had the enemy here with us in Sugar Land, Texas, of all places. If they were here, they could be anywhere.
The prisoners in our POW camp who could work manned the local fields and businesses, replacing our men who had gone off to war. It was an odd switch to me and ruffled a few of the old birds around town, them thinking these POWs might form some kind of group determined to poison our lands and food supply. When it was pointed out that they would then also be poisoning their food supply, the old men would grizzle and say, “Of course!” as if the goal of every honorable POW was suicide. A very Japanese thing to say, I thought to myself.
Through it all—and years beyond—I felt satisfied knowing we, in Guardtown, were safe. I doubted anyone would waste ammunition blowing up a prison. But safety still didn’t keep us from ordinary death.
On September 8, 1949, the phone rang. I let it go two rings, as was some odd custom I’d picked up along the way.
“Dara?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Doctor Dixon here at Central Unit—the prison.”
I leaned back against the wall, feeling its cold against my shoulder. “Yes?”
“It’s the Warden, Dara. He fell down the concrete steps on his way to the mess hall for his daily walk-through, and died.”
“What?”
“The fall didn’t kill him, though. It was another stroke. The stroke caused him to fall. It ripped through the part of his brain that controlled his body, which means that his heart probably stopped before he hit the last stair—if that helps to hear.”
“Another stroke?”
Doctor Dixon paused.
“He’s been having strokes for years now. You didn’t know? He went blind in his right eye a few years back, and last year he started having trouble moving his right foot.”
“I asked him about that,” I said. “I asked him why his foot seemed to be dragging. He said it was just old age.” I rubbed my stomach where it stretched out the fabric of my skirt. “He was blind in one eye?”
Doctor Dixon didn’t say anything.
“And his headaches?” I asked.
“Those are from his condition also.”
“So he didn’t feel it? The fall?”
“He was probably out before he hit the first stair.”
“Out,” I repeated. “And now he’s gone?”
The girls looked up from the dining room table, where they were pitting cherries.
Doctor Dixon’s voice got low. “Yes, ma’am, he is.”
I shook my head at Miss Debbie and Edna then turned to the wall to process it all—only my mind wouldn’t stand still. He had many strokes? He was blind in one eye? He fell and now he is dead?
I hung up the phone without saying goodbye and stood for a while with my forehead pressed to the wall. When I turned around, the girls were standing there. They’d heard enough to know what I was going to say.
Miss Debbie’s arms hung down at her sides. “What is going on, Nana Dara? Who was that? Who’s gone?”
“Is it Daddy?” Edna asked.
“Your daddy has died. He had a stroke and . . .”
Miss Debbie started crying right away. I handed her a dishtowel that I’d tucked into my waistband. She used it to blot her face before she grabbed the phone and pulled it around the corner to call her boyfriend, Bo.
Edna didn’t cry—not there. She nodded to me that she understood, then walked into the bedroom she still shared with her sister and shut the door without making a sound.
My heart spasmed. I felt it skip a few beats, then swell and contract back in my chest. I thought of a million things I needed to do—a list of funeral arrangements and other miscellaneous things—in order to keep me away from the tender spots. I wondered how the girls were going to get through this. I tried to console myself that at least this had happened after they were grown, Miss Debbie being twenty-four and Edna twenty-two—but then I realized he’d never get to walk them down the aisle like he’d wanted. Never rock a grandbaby.
My breathing tightened. I clenched my fists. I ran through more lists: casket, notification to the paper, the wake, the plot, the head-stone—I’d need to order it now.
I looked over at a picture of the Warden we’d had taken at the Cherry Festival five years earlier. As instructed, we’d both put on a cherry hat and toasted the camera with a tall glass of cherry juice. It was on the table next to that damn mustard couch of his.
Every Sunday morning, when he’d iron his pants and his shirt for church, he’d also iron the armrest covers on that damn couch. There were punch stains and wine stains and cigarette burns on the couch, but those armrest covers looked brand new.
And that’s when I started to cry, in choking waves of tears—seeing how much the Warden cared for things that other people might not value. Seeing how he looked deeper than a few scars to see that this was a comfortable God damn couch. It was just long enough for all four of us to sit on without squishing up against each other too much. It was used enough to weather a few oily spots from overturned popcorn bowls, but it was clean. It was loved. He was a man who knew how to love—not just fall in love, but really love, even after something isn’t new anymore.
That couch had been long enough for him to sit on one end and for me to lie down at a nice angle and get my feet rubbed through my socks. He’d tease me about pulling off my socks, and I’d threaten to pull my feet away, as if him giving me a foot rub was a gift to him.
It was on this couch that I’d seen him late one night, in the third year of our marriage, slumped over, looking at his dead wife’s picture, drinking gin and whispering. My guess was it was their anniversary. I never asked, just tiptoed back into bed and shut off all the bedroom lights.
That was the couch both girls slept on when they were sick, so the sick one wouldn’t wake up the other in that tiny room they shared. I’d bring out a hot pan of water with rosemary floating in it to clear their lungs while the Warden would run out for whatever medicine we could use to make us think we were doing something. That couch held more than its share of dirty tissues and had soaked up buckets of cool water running from washcloths held on burning foreheads.
I walked over and curled up on it that night, where I prayed my fifth rosary since my youth. I prayed for the Warden. I said the rosary for the secrets of his soul. I said it as my way of greasing the doorman at the pearly gates, just in case the Warden had hidden some misdoings from me.
I prayed when all I could think about was how I would ever be able to sleep in our bed again. I remembered that he never said anything about me lying to him about my letters with Rhodie—that he loved me and left me my secrets. I remembered the smiling faces of the people in the cafeteria on the day the Warden knelt down on that creaky stage to propose to me, and the moonlight on our wedding night, and the way the fans blew that white ribbon around the flowers on Edna’s wrist when he danced with her on her prom night—and I prayed.
I prayed the rosary because, God dammit all, I did love that man, after all.