Insiders

by Olivia Goldsmith

  I turned and looked first at Cher, then at each of the others. The pain in my eyes was almost more than they could bear, but not one of them looked away. ‘I’m gonna die in this place,’ I said simply. ‘I’m never gettin’ out of here. Never.’

  ‘But …’ Cher tried to speak.

  ‘Shut up, girl,’ I said, raising my hand. ‘Shut up and listen, and make sure you don’t make the same mistake I made. You hear me? Don’t you trust no man when ya’ get outta here. They set ya’ up and then they let ya’ down. I was dumb enough to trust my Earl. I let him keep his drugs at my place ‘cause he told me it was just petty dealin’. But when the cops showed up and arrested me right in front of my babies, Earl was nowhere to be found.’ I shrugged. ‘When the police released me for turnin’ Earl in, he hurt me. He hurt me real bad. But all of the reasons and all that shit don’t mean a damn thing anymore. I killed him. And now I’m gonna live the rest of my days in here.’ I walked over to Cher and took her hands. ‘Much as I love ya’, girl, I don’t want ya’ comin’ back here, ya’ understand? When ya’ leave here tomorrow, I don’t want to ever see your face again. I just love ya’ too much.’

  Cher only nodded. She understood all too well.

  ‘We’re gonna miss you, Cher,’ Theresa said with uncharacteristic brevity and no Hallmark bullshit.

  ‘I’m gonna miss all the stuff you steal,’ Suki added. We laughed.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she told Suki. ‘The very first thing I’m gonna boost is a layette for the baby.’ We all laughed again. ‘And I might just miss all of you, too,’ Cher admitted. ‘But I’ll come back on visitor’s day. Wait’ll you see me then. I’m gonna get me a face-lift and a nip and a tuck …’

  ‘How are ya’ gonna steal a face-lift?’ I asked. Of course she couldn’t come to visit. But Jennifer raised her glass and the others followed. She said, ‘Here’s to our new and improved, soon-to-be-free Miss Cher McInnery.’

  ‘Hear! Hear!’ the others chimed in.

  I couldn’t really tell what Jennifer was thinkin’. It wasn’t like her and Cher ever got along real well, though since the phone thing they’d been chummy. I’m sayin’ they respected each other – but they weren’t tight. Oh, she was jokin’ and laughin’ with the rest of us – but I couldn’t tell whether she was happy for Cher – or happy to see Cher go. And then that girl did the nicest damned thing. ‘I’ve brought something very special to the party,’ she said with a smile, and she pulled out the fanciest box of candy I had ever seen. ‘It’s Richart Chocolat,’ she said – in French! ‘Lenny brought them for me.’

  The crew couldn’t get over these things – each one no bigger than the size of a sugar cube but all decorated up like a work of art. Some had dots – some had squiggles – some were striped. Each one a tiny little masterpiece. Who takes the time to paint on a piece of candy? And what does it cost? ‘Cher goes first,’ Jennifer said.

  I think Cher liked that. She reached into the box, fished out a deep dark cube. ‘It’s almost too pretty to eat.’

  She was about to put it in her mouth when Theresa, who was looking at the card or such that came with the chocolate, let out a screech. ‘Stop!’ she shouted. ‘You’re not eating it right.’

  ‘I’m not what?’ Cher asked.

  ‘There’s this little book here with the candy,’ Theresa explained. ‘And right here there’s a whole page on “tasting technique”.’

  ‘You mean I can’t just eat it?’

  ‘Girl, I been eatin’ chocolate all my life and it seems just fine. Never got arrested for it,’ I said.

  ‘No. If something’s worth doing, let’s do it right,’ Theresa said. ‘Everybody get a chocolate.’

  We did. She began to read. ‘Now, “To really taste the base and primary flavor notes, wait a few seconds after you place a piece of chocolate into your mouth. To release the secondary flavors, expand the chocolate’s surface area by chewing five to ten times. Let the chocolate melt slowly by pushing it gently against the roof of your mouth. Make note of the flavor, the texture and the way the chocolate lingers on the tongue.”’ Theresa read.

  We tried to do it just like the book said, but I was laughin’ so damn hard I nearly choked. Suki drooled some chocolate down her chin. Jennifer shook her head and just walked out.

  Cher took another piece.

  ‘Wait,’ Theresa commanded. ‘Is that a plain chocolate or a filled chocolate?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s a good chocolate,’ Cher said.

  ‘It’s a filled one and there’s a different way to eat them,’ Theresa said.

  ‘Get the fuck outta here,’ Cher said and grabbed the little booklet. She looked it over. ‘Holy shit,’ she said. ‘It’s true. Look at this. They tell you to chew the filled chocolate only three to five times!’ She then read aloud from the book. ‘“New flavors continue to appear as the two melt in your mouth. Finally, make note of how long the flavor lingers on the tongue.”’

  ‘Are they talkin’ about eatin’ candy or givin’ a blow job?’ I asked.

  ‘Screw it,’ Theresa finally gave in. ‘Let’s just eat the damn things. Besides, what kinda world is this?’ Theresa asked. ‘They got pages and pages on what wines and what teas you can mix with this stuff. Who had the time to think this shit up?’

  Everyone laughed but Cher. ‘That’s the world I’d like to live in,’ Cher said.

  You ain’t allowed to see an inmate off. I don’t know why they would think there’s a security risk. Cher wasn’t gonna try and make a break for it – she was free as a bird. No one else would, because even Springtime with all of her botched escapes wasn’t dumb or crazy enough to try to escape out the front entrance of Jennings while the officers and the guns were right there. I didn’t expect to see Cher again but The Woman, tryin’ to be nice, I think, invited me to join the escort party to take Cher out.

  Fact was, I didn’t want to. Night before I had had a few bad readings after the good-bye party and in the mornin’ I didn’t even look in Cher’s direction before I went up to the office. What’s gone is gone, and another ten minutes with Cher didn’t seem like no favor, since both she and I knew that we would never see each other again. Livin’ Inside ya’ gotta learn to cut your losses and let go. I had been in the process of lettin’ go for weeks and this wasn’t gonna be nothin’ but painful. Still, I knew I couldn’t explain it to the Warden, so I got up and went with her.

  I know it was sorta an honor to be invited. They don’t let no convicts into the group and I suppose – since I was never gonna see it any other way – it was interestin’ to check out the release procedures. But the fact is, I could hardly look at Cher and she could hardly look at me. The two women officers were quiet in front of the Warden, and although Gwen was present it couldn’t make up for the awkwardness between me and Cher. I watched as she traded her uniform for the clothes she had worn in. She looked real good in them, too. She got a bagful of possessions, the cash from her canteen fund and the money the state gives you to start a new life – a pathetic amount that wouldn’t pay for a bus ticket past Pennsylvania. There was a lot of paperwork – the stuff I saw afterwards and often had to file and put away, and Cher was busy signin’ her name on a lot of sheets and copies.

  I kept my head down and my eyes on the floor durin’ most of it. Fact was, I was jealous that she was goin’. I was sad to see her leave. I was happy for her, and I was generally miserable. Finally we got to the exit and The Woman gave her some little talk about somethin’ and Cher, bein’ Cher, cracked wise. I don’t remember what she said but I remember what happened next. ‘Well,’ Gwen Harding said, ‘I guess you two will want to say good-bye.’ I guess she expected a warm prison scene, somethin’ where the two of us hugged and cried on each other’s shoulders or somethin’ like that. But I had already been in enough pain and Cher was too eager to go to be bothered with that.

  Cher and I stood there. I looked up from the floor. Somethin’ was expected so I put my hand out. ‘Good-bye,’ I said, and Cher took
my cold hand in her cool one.

  ‘Good-bye,’ she answered. She turned around and I looked at her back, dressed in some real nice jacket. I figured that would be the last time I’d ever see her again, and I turned around and headed back into Jennings.

  31

  Maggie Rafferty

  Murderers – the people we fear the most – make up a minority of the prison population, and most of them have killed a mate, not a stranger. They represent no danger to society.

  Kathryn Watterson, Women in Prison

  For a murderess serving a life sentence, I’m lucky. I’m also well aware of the humor of that statement, but it doesn’t make it any less true. I have a room to myself, a constant flow of books from the Outside, two loving sons who try to make my days as interesting as possible and visit me often. I’m also lucky in having an understanding warden who doesn’t go out of her way to ‘bust my chops’ – as they quaintly put it here at Jennings. So when I poured boiling water into my tea cup and bowl of McCann’s oatmeal as I did each morning rather than eating in the mess hall, I also opened the pages of the New York Times. One of the small pleasures of imprisonment has been having enough time not only to read the New York Times daily from cover to cover, but also to read the New Yorker each week before the next one comes.

  When my oatmeal was ready and the tea steeped, I had a spoonful of one and a sip of the other and then continued to thumb through the Times. When I reached the business section I paused and nearly spilled my tea. I looked down at a picture of Tom Branston and Donald Michaels. They were standing next to – and smiling with – the investigator who had charged and arrested Jennifer Spencer for investment fraud. The headline over the photo read: FURTHER INVESTIGATIONS INTO HUDSON VAN SCHAANK & MICHAELS CALLED OFF. The caption below the photo quoted Branston: ‘Hudson Van Schaank gave full cooperation throughout the investigation, and the weight of evidence now convinces me that Jennifer Spencer – and she alone – was the “bad seed” at our firm.’

  Bad seed, indeed! Was there no end to the perfidy of men? It was then that Frances came to the cell door to deliver ice, and this time it wasn’t just the frozen H2O I received but also a kite. Frances, as always, was careful to fill the cooler to the very top. I thanked her and waited until she was gone to open the note. Meet me and the deb during recreation at 2:30. It wasn’t signed – kites are contraband and it would be stupid to sign one – but I knew Movita’s handwriting and who ‘the deb’ was.

  Recreation always struck me as a particularly sad word for the ninety minutes that we were allowed outside the walls of Jennings every day. In effect, though we were outside we were still within the walls because the three wings of the prison created a U-shape and the open part of the ‘U’ was blocked by double fencing. Still, it was a chance to see the sky. I have never understood how many of the women could bear to go on without any view of the sky at all or why the prison architects consciously decided to create prison cells – and I’m not talking about the ones in the SHU – that had no windows at all. Oddly, at least to me, because they were in a newer part of the building they were considered very desirable by many women, but I would never give up my window, small and too highly placed as it was. Recreation for me was the time I tried to do what the Buddhists and contemplative nuns call walking meditation. I usually started by keeping my feet moving around the perimeter of the yard and slowly closing in. I took a breath with every other step and if I was lucky – which I admit has been rare in my life – I could complete a constantly shrinking square until I ended my ninety minutes in the very center of the recreation yard. But more often than not, arguments, interruptions, distractions, or athletics prevented me from my pilgrimage. Still, I looked forward to the time and the challenge. I wasn’t really pleased to think of spending it talking, but I knew this was, of course, important.

  The weather was what I used to call gray and drizzly but now I thought of as ‘soft’. Somehow the light and the dampness were kinder than the sunshine against the brick and I, like all the other inmates, needed as much kindness as I could get. But I took it as a good sign and although I saw Movita from the moment I got out to the recreation area I made sure that I began my walk as usual.

  Movita hadn’t been herself lately. Of course it was particularly difficult on us lifers when an inmate ‘graduated’, since we never would. And it was particularly cruel that they were not allowed to communicate with us or us with them. But as a lifer I had learned to let changes like this flow over and through me. It was unusual that Movita had gotten close enough to Cher that her leaving upset her. This is one of the lessons prison teaches: not to care too much about anyone.

  At any rate, Movita was moping and I did not join her. It wasn’t my way. Inmates, particularly female ones, are attuned to any change in the pattern of the day, and this was not a meeting we needed to have attention drawn to. Still, it wasn’t unusual for me to be interrupted a dozen or more times when I was doing my walk.

  Jennifer Spencer joined us shortly after Movita and I met and we decided to keep walking, although not in the deliberate way I usually did. I liked Jennifer Spencer. I admired her spirit and I was amused by the personal naïveté that I occasionally glimpsed behind the mask of a sophisticated and shrewd businesswoman. I felt that I understood Jennifer Spencer – her dreams, her determination, her now bitter disillusionment with a man she thought she loved. I certainly respected her business acumen. ‘Okay,’ she said to both of us now, and she spoke with complete authority. ‘Based on what I know, I think we have a situation here.’

  ‘Well, we all know it’s a situation,’ Movita said darkly.

  ‘I misspoke,’ Jennifer said. ‘I meant to say we have an opportunity.’ She began to explain the financial status of JRU. How the company was underfinanced and looked like a candidate for takeover. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, ‘better than trying to influence the board, or take one of those paths with an uncertain outcome, like trying to buy an influential minority of private stock, I think we should buy the company.’

  Movita shook her head. ‘This is not the time for jokes.’

  But I knew Spencer wasn’t joking. ‘How much would it take?’ I asked, with the first feeling of hope I’d had since the day I read the report.

  ‘That’s hard to say. But they’re very underfinanced. The other two prison contracts they have haven’t yet turned the corner and become profitable. I’m not sure whether either a CCA or a Wackenhut would step in at this point. And my information leads me to believe that they’re not going to have much more capital.’

  ‘What would it take?’ I asked her again.

  ‘I don’t know, but I think it’s time to meet with your sons.’

  Movita looked at the two of us. ‘You bitches are crazy,’ she said. ‘Or else you’re richer than I ever thought, and bigger thieves than Cher McInnery on her best day. How you goin’ to buy a big company like that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jennifer told her. ‘I don’t know if we can do it, but sometimes a leveraged buyout works. That’s what it’s called. You just need to offer some of the private owners more money for their share of the company than they think they’ll get any other way. And if they’re greedy or they’ve lost confidence in the business, they say yes and there we are.’

  ‘What do you mean, “we”, white girl?’ Movita asked. And I actually laughed out loud. ‘Then can you open all the doors and let us all out?’

  ‘Look, you know perfectly well that JRU can’t do that. You know they can’t change our sentences, affect our parole, or give us extra prison time. They are only going to administer the facility for the state. But if we were doing the administration …’

  ‘The changes we could make! We could institute classes again. We could create a wing for the really deranged inmates. We could have more exercise time, better work details, a better library,’ I said.

  ‘Hold on, hold on,’ Jennifer Spencer said. ‘We can’t lose money or throw it away. We would have to come up with a way to
make reform pay. But maybe we could do that. Still, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.’ Jennifer turned to me. ‘Could you ask your sons to come up here for a meeting?’

  ‘Of course,’ I told her. ‘And let the games begin.’

  Both of my boys are good-looking. Bryce is thirty-five and divorced. Tyler is thirty-nine and he’s never been married. They have all of my brains, their father’s charm, and more than a little of his larceny, but they have managed to direct it into an enterprise where brains, charm, and larceny – with the latter kept within limits – create a healthy profit. Both of them are rich in their own right, aside from the trusts they inherited from my parents and the not inconsiderable sum I will leave them.

  Yet, I have always felt nothing but sorrow for the women they have become involved with, beauties with brains whom they seduce and inevitably abandon. I have, however, stopped blaming myself and have to believe it’s either genetic or learned behavior from their father. That was only one of the reasons why I felt most uncomfortable when Bryce and Tyler came to Jennings for the visit and, though they sat across from me, kept their eyes on Jennifer Spencer. She, too, had a visitor, a nonentity named Leonard Benson whom I had to admit, after a little while, did impress me with his understanding of the situation. But when it came to first impressions Jennifer was making a large one on both of my boys. And it seemed to me she was quite taken with Bryce. As usual, that only served to incite Tyler’s greater interest.

  Needless to say, from the Jennings Correctional Officers’ point of view the meeting was not supposed to be a meeting but coincidental simultaneous visits. In the mayhem of the visitor’s room – and with the invisible help of Movita – we were assigned to adjoining tables. It wasn’t difficult for the five of us to talk without attracting too much attention.