Small Great Things

by Jodi Picoult

  "What?"

  "The food, sugar. It's so much better at court than in jail, am I right?"

  I shake my head. "I've never done this before."

  "Me, I should have a punch card. You know, the kind where you get a free coffee or a tiny tube of mascara at your tenth visit." She grins. "What are you in for?"

  "I wish I knew," I say, before I can remember not to.

  "What the fuck, girl? You were in the courtroom, you were arraigned," Liza replies. "You didn't hear what you were charged with?"

  I turn away, focusing on the scenery out the window. "My lawyer told me I shouldn't talk to anyone about that."

  "Well." She sniffs. "Pardon me, Your Majesty."

  In the rearview mirror, the sheriff's eyes appear, sharp and blue. "She's in for murder," he says, and none of us speak for the rest of the ride.

  --

  WHEN I APPLIED to Yale Nursing School, Mama asked her pastor to say an extra prayer for me, in the hope that God could sway the admissions committee if my transcript from college could not. I remember being mortified as I sat in church beside her, as the congregation lifted their spirits and their voices heavenward on my behalf. There were people dying of cancer, infertile couples hoping for a baby, war in third world countries--in other words, so many more important things the Lord had to do with His time. But Mama said I was equally important, at least to our congregation. I was their success story, the college graduate who was going on to Make a Difference.

  On the day before classes were supposed to start, Mama took me out to dinner. "You're destined to do small great things," she told me. "Just like Dr. King said." She was referring to one of her favorite quotes: If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way. "But," she continued, "don't forget where you came from." I didn't really understand what she meant. I was one of a dozen kids from our neighborhood who had gone to college, and only a handful of those were destined for graduate school. I knew she was proud of me; I knew she felt like her hard work to set me on a different path had paid off. Given that she'd been pushing me out of the nest since I was little, why would she want me to carry around the twigs that had built it? Couldn't I fly further without them?

  I took classes in anatomy and physiology, in pharmacology and principles of nursing, but I planned my schedule so that I was always home for dinner, to tell my mama about my day. It didn't matter that my commute to and from the city was two hours each way. I knew that if Mama hadn't spent thirty years scrubbing the floors at Ms. Mina's house, I wouldn't be on that train at all.

  "Tell me everything," Mama would say, spooning whatever she'd cooked onto my plate. I passed along the remarkable things I learned--that half the population carries the MRSA germs in their nose; that nitroglycerin can cause you to have a bowel movement if it makes contact with your skin; that you are taller in the morning than the evening, by nearly a half inch, because of the fluid between your spinal discs. But there were things I didn't tell her, too.

  Though I may have been at one of the finest nursing schools in the country, that mattered only on campus. At Yale, other nursing students asked to see my meticulous notes or to have me join their study group. During clinical rotations at the hospital, teachers praised my expertise. But when the day was over, I'd walk into a convenience store to buy a Coke and the owner would follow me around to make sure I didn't shoplift. I'd sit on the train as elderly white women walked by without making eye contact, even though there was an empty seat beside me.

  A month into my tenure at nursing school, I bought a Yale travel mug. My mother assumed it was because I had to leave before dawn in order to catch the train to New Haven every day, and she'd get up and make me a fresh cup of coffee each morning to fill it. But it wasn't caffeine I needed; it was a ticket into a different world. I would settle the mug on my lap every time I got on the train, with the word YALE purposefully turned so other passengers could read it as they boarded. It was a flag, a sign saying: I'm one of you.

  --

  THE WOMEN'S PRISON, it turns out, is a good hour's drive from New Haven. After we arrive, Liza and I are shuttled into a holding cell that looks exactly the same as the one I was in at the courthouse, only more crowded. There are fifteen other women already inside. There are no seats, so I slide down a wall and sit on the floor between two women. One has her hands laced in front of her and is praying under her breath in Spanish. The other is biting her cuticles.

  Liza leans against the bars and begins to weave her long hair into a fishtail braid. "Excuse me," I say quietly. "Do you know if they'll let me make a phone call?"

  She glances up at me. "Oh, now you wanna talk to me."

  "I'm sorry. I don't mean to be rude. I...I'm new to all of this."

  She snaps a rubber band at the end of her braid. "Sure, you get a phone call. Right after they serve you your caviar and give you a nice massage."

  I am shocked by this. Isn't a phone call a basic right for prisoners? "That's not what it's like in the movies," I murmur.

  Liza places her hands under her breasts and plumps them. "Don't believe everything you see."

  A female guard opens the door to the cell. The praying woman gets up, her eyes full of hope, but the officer motions to Liza instead. "Good God, Liza. You back again?"

  "Don't you know nothing about economics? It's all supply and demand. I ain't in this business by myself, Officer. If there weren't such a demand for my services, the supply would just dry up."

  The guard laughs. "Now there's an image," she says, and she takes Liza by the arm to lead her out.

  One by one we are plucked from the cell. No one who leaves comes back. To distract myself I start making lists of what I must remember to tell Adisa one day when I can look back on this and laugh: that the food we are given, during our multihour wait, is so unidentifiable that I can't tell if it's a vegetable or a meat; that the inmate who was mopping the floor when we were marched inside looked exactly like my second-grade teacher; that although I am embarrassed by my nightgown, there is a woman in the holding cell with me who is wearing the kind of mascot costume you see at high school football games. Then finally the same officer who took Liza away opens the door and calls my name.

  I smile at her, trying to be as obedient as possible. I read her name tag: GATES. "Officer Gates," I say, when we are out of earshot of the other women in the cell, "I know you're just doing your job, but I'm actually being released on bail. The thing is, I need to get in touch with my son--"

  "Save it for your counselor, inmate." She takes another mug shot of me, and rolls my fingerprints again. She fills out a form that asks everything from my name and address and gender to my HIV status and substance abuse history. Then she leads me into a room slightly bigger than a closet that has nothing inside but a chair.

  "Strip," she announces. "Put your clothes on the chair."

  I stare at her.

  "Strip," she repeats.

  She folds her arms and leans against the door. If the first freedom you lose in prison is privacy, the second is dignity. I turn my back and pull my nightgown over my head. I fold it up carefully and set it on the chair. I step out of my panties, and fold them, too. I put my slippers on top of the pile.

  As a nurse you learn how to make a patient comfortable during moments that would otherwise be humiliating--how to drape the spread legs of a woman in labor, or draw a johnny over a bare bottom. When a laboring mother defecates because of the pressure of the baby's head, you clean it up briskly and say it happens to everyone. You take any embarrassing situation and you do what you can to make it less so. As I stand shivering, naked, I wonder if this guard's job is the absolute opposite of mine. If she wants nothing more than to make me feel shame.

  I decide I'm not going to give her the satisfaction.

  "Open your mouth," the officer says, and I stick out my tongue like I would at the doctor's office.

  "Lean forward and show me what's behind your ears."

  I do as I'm told, although I can't
imagine what anyone could hide behind her ears. I am instructed to flip my hair, and to spread my toes and to lift up my feet so she can see the bottoms.

  "Squat," the guard says, "and cough three times."

  I imagine what a woman might be able to smuggle into jail, given the remarkable flexibility of the female anatomy. I think about how, when I was a student nurse, I had to practice to figure out the width of a dilated cervix. One centimeter was an opening the size of a fingertip. Two and a half centimeters were the second and third fingers, slipped into an opening the size of the neck of a bottle of nail polish remover. Four centimeters of dilation were those same fingers, spread in the neck of a forty-ounce bottle of Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce. Five centimeters was the opening of a fifty-ounce Heinz ketchup bottle. Seven centimeters: a plastic shaker of Kraft Parmesan cheese.

  "Spread the cheeks."

  A few times, I have helped deliver the baby of a survivor of sexual assault. It makes perfect sense that, during childbirth, memories of abuse might be triggered. A body in labor is a body in stress, and for a rape survivor, that can lead to a survival reflex that physiologically slows down or stops the progress. In these cases, it's even more important for the L & D room to be a safe space. For the woman to be listened to. For her to feel like she has a say in what happens to her.

  I may not have much say here, but I still can make the choice to not be a victim. The whole point of this examination is to make me feel lesser than, like an animal. To make me ashamed of my nakedness.

  But I have spent twenty years seeing how beautiful women are--not because of how they look, but because of what their bodies can withstand.

  So I stand up and face the officer, daring her to look away from my smooth brown skin, the dark rings of my nipples, the swell of my belly, the thatch of hair between my legs. She hands me the orange scrubs that are designed to conform me, and the ID tag with my inmate number, meant to define me as part of a group, instead of an individual. I stare at her until she meets my eye. "My name," I say, "is Ruth."

  --

  FIFTH GRADE, BREAKFAST. My nose was buried in a book, and I was reading facts aloud. "There were twins who were born eighty-seven days apart," I announced.

  Rachel sat across from me, picking at her cornflakes. "Then they weren't twins, stupid."

  "Mama," I yelled automatically. "Rachel called me stupid." I turned the page. "Sigurd the Mighty was killed by a dead man he beheaded. He tied the guy's head to his saddle and was scraped by a tooth and got an infection and died."

  My mother hurried into the kitchen. "Rachel, don't call your sister stupid. And Ruth, stop reading vile things while everyone's trying to eat."

  Reluctantly, I closed the book, but not before letting my eyes light on a final fact: there was a family in Kentucky that, for generations, had been born with blue skin. It was a result of inbreeding and genetics. Cool, I thought, holding out the flat of my hand and turning it over.

  "Ruth!" my mother said sharply, which was enough to let me know it was not the first time she'd called my name. "Go change your shirt."

  "Why?" I asked, before I remembered I wasn't supposed to talk back.

  My mother yanked at my uniform blouse, which had a stain the size of a dime near my ribs. I scowled. "Mama, no one's even going to see it once I put my sweater on."

  "And if you take that sweater off?" she asked. "You don't go to school with a stain on your shirt, because if you do, people aren't going to judge you for being sloppy. They're going to judge you for being Black."

  I knew better than to cross Mama when she got like this. So I took the book and ran to the room I shared with Rachel to find a clean white shirt. As I buttoned it, my gaze drifted toward the trivia book where it had fallen open on my bed.

  The loneliest creature on earth is a whale that has spent more than twenty years calling out for a mate, I read, but whose voice is so different from those of other whales that none of them ever respond.

  --

  IN THE BEDROLL I am given are sheets, a blanket, shampoo, soap, toothpaste, and a toothbrush. I am entrusted to the custody of another inmate, who tells me important things: that from now on, all my personal hygiene items have to be purchased from the commissary, that if I want to watch Judge Judy in the rec room I have to get there early for a good seat; that halal meals are the only edible ones so I might want to say I'm Muslim; that someone named Wig gives the best tattoos, because her ink is mixed with urine, which means it's more permanent.

  As we pass by the cells I notice that two inmates occupy each one, and that the majority of the prisoners are Black, and that the officers are not. There is a part of me that feels the way I used to when my mother made my sister take me out with her friends in our neighborhood. The girls would make fun of me for being an Oreo--black on the outside, white on the inside. I'd wind up getting very quiet out of fear that I was going to make a fool of myself. What if a woman like that is my roommate? What could we possibly have in common?

  The fact that we're both in prison, for one.

  I turn the corner, and the inmate sweeps her arm in a grand gesture. "Home sweet home," she announces, and I peek inside to find a white woman sitting on a bunk.

  I put my bedroll on the empty mattress and begin to pull free the sheets and blanket.

  "Did I say you could sleep there?" the woman asks.

  I freeze. "I...uh, no."

  "You know what happened to my last roommate?" She has frizzy red hair and eyes that do not quite look out in the same direction. I shake my head. She comes closer, until she is a breath away. "Neither does anyone else," she whispers. Then she bursts out laughing. "Sorry, I'm just messing with your head. My name's Wanda."

  My heart is beating in the back of my throat. "Ruth," I manage. I gesture to the empty mattress. "So this is..."

  "Yeah, whatever. I don't give a shit, as long as you stay out of my stuff."

  I jerk my head, agreeing, and make the bed as Wanda watches. "You from around here?"

  "East End."

  "I'm from Bantam. You ever been there?" I shake my head. "No one's ever been to Bantam. This your first time?"

  I glance up, confused. "In Bantam?"

  "In prison."

  "Yes, but I won't be here for long. I'm waiting for my bail to clear."

  Wanda laughs. "Okay, then."

  Slowly, I turn. "What?"

  "I've been waiting for the same thing. Going on three weeks now."

  Three weeks. I feel my knees buckle, and I sink to the mattress. Three weeks? I tell myself that my situation is not Wanda's. But all the same: three weeks.

  "So what are you in for?" she asks.

  "Nothing."

  "It's amazing how nobody in here did anything illegal." Wanda lies back on her bunk, stretching her arms up over her head. "They say I killed my husband. I say he ran into my knife." She looks at me. "It was an accident. You know, like the way he broke my arm and gave me a black eye and pushed me down the stairs and those were accidents too."

  There are stones in her voice. I wonder if, in time, mine will sound that way, too. I think of Kennedy, telling me to keep to myself.

  I think of Turk Bauer and picture the tattoo I saw in the courtroom, blazing across his shaved scalp. I wonder if he has spent time in prison. If this means we, too, have something in common.

  Then I picture his baby, curled in my arms in the morgue, cold and blue as granite.

  "I don't believe in accidents," I say, and I leave it at that.

  --

  THE COUNSELOR, OFFICER Ramirez, is a man with a face as round and soft as a donut, who is slurping his soup. He keeps spilling on his shirt, and I try not to look every time it happens. "Ruth Jefferson," he says, reading my file. "You had a question about visitation?"

  "Yes," I reply. "My son, Edison. I need to get in touch with him, so that he knows how to get together the papers we need for bail. He's only seventeen."

  Ramirez rummages in his desk. He takes out a magazine--Guns & Ammo--and a
stack of flyers about depression, and then hands me a form. "Write down the name and address of the people you want on the visitor list."

  "And then what?"

  "Then I mail it out and when they sign it and send it back, the form gets approved and you're good to go."

  "But that could take weeks."

  "About ten days, usually," Ramirez says. Slurrrrp.

  Tears flood into my eyes. This is like a nightmare, the kind where someone shakes your shoulder as you are telling yourself this is a dream, and says, This isn't a dream. "I can't leave him alone that long."

  "I can contact child protective services--"

  "No!" I blurt out. "Don't."

  Something makes him put down his spoon and look at me, not unkindly. "There's always the warden. He can grant you a courtesy visit for two adult visitors before the official application is processed. But given that your son is seventeen, he'd have to come in the company of another adult."

  Adisa, I think. And then, immediately, I remember why she'll never be approved by the warden for a visit: she has a record, thanks to a forged rent check five years back.

  I push the form back across the desk to him. The walls feel like the shutter of a camera closing. "Thank you anyway," I manage, and I walk back to my cell.

  Wanda is sitting on her bunk, nibbling on a Twix bar. She takes one look at me, then breaks off a tiny piece and offers it.

  I take it in my hand and close my fist around it. The chocolate starts to melt.

  "No phone call?" Wanda asks, and I shake my head. I sit on my bunk, and then turn away from her, so that I am facing the wall.

  "It's time for Judge Judy," she says. "You want to watch?"

  When I don't respond, I hear Wanda pad out of our cell, presumably toward the rec room. I lick the candy from my hand and then press my palms together and talk to the only slice of hope I have left. God, I pray, please, please be listening.

  --

  WHEN I WAS little, I used to have sleepovers with Christina at her brownstone. We would unroll our sleeping bags in the living room and Sam Hallowell would run a movie projector with old cartoons that he must have gotten when he was a television executive. This was, back then, a big deal--there were no VCRs or video on demand; a private screening was a treat reserved for movie stars--and, I guess, their children. Although I was skittish about being away from home for the night, this was the next best thing: Mama would run the bath for us and get me into my pajamas and make a treat of hot cocoa and cookies before she left; and by the time we woke up, she was already back and making us pancakes.