In the Slammer With Carol Smith

by Hortense Calisher

  At last I’m through. Nothing beats argument like necessity. He has no big towel. I can’t bear to put on again the clothes dropped on the bathroom floor. I have to get to the Shelter-Pak for that change of clothes I carry. But is this the time to scoot out nude? The toilet seat is warm wood. He’s given me such a bundle to think on. Or to banish from my aching head. What a headful I have. Like I’m wearing a tight new hat. Some headaches maybe provide energy.

  It takes me a while to hear the quiet out there.

  The bathroom door creaks from all that steam. I creep down the hall, past the hung bedrolls. The table where we had tea is bare. There’s nobody in the chairs. In the glass enclosure, now thermally bright, something inside casts a shadow—maybe a salesman’s trunk?

  No breath disturbs. He’s cleared out.

  Headache gone—says that ever attentive coroner the body provides. Replaced by empty hole in chest.

  Piece of white paper on the Shelter-Pak. Envelope. I hear my cry.

  Back in a month or so. Mother’s address and number next to hall telephone. Further info on bulletin boards. Stationer’s down the block stockpiles newspapers for me. Pick up, if interested in the world. Buy a plant and water it. If interested in me.

  Martyn

  But it is the address on the envelope that rivets me.

  Carol Smith, Footsoldier

  Parliament of the World.

  I hear the fur district below, the snap and chortle of the trucks, the low weave of footsteps, the business shrill-and-mutter that starts a commercial day. Plus the unrecorded passersby who are the staple of the city. And the fixtures. On the corner already perhaps, the animal-protester, her hair a furry tangle. On the standpipes in winter, or in summer stretched out under an air conditioner’s exhaust, some anonymous body, clothed in stuffs no one district supplies.

  Time to go down there. Up Carol, and to your business. That agenda for which there are no printed forms. That routine which has no office. That Parliament which has only one party—the Outs?

  How easily you’ve judged me, Martyn. A song-and-dance man would have to be tops at summing up.

  I AM STILL HERE. The glassed-in cubicle is now a realm of light cast from the window it must conceal. On its front panel, behind the drums, is a decal of a continent whose shape I recognize. Pasted there so that once a song is unfurled, or a bedroll, a troupe can dream that on the other side of the glass is Africa?

  Maybe once the sun was gone, they lit a lamp behind it. Or one would come on, from within?

  Inside the enclosure there are shadows. Boxes maybe, into which I shouldn’t pry. Empty boxes, the prop shadows that a man of action might save. Or only the salesman’s air-conditioners. Around the side of the enclosure the glass panel has a knob. The panel rolls easily.

  It’s an office. Two windows, each with air-conditioners at the base. The office fittings are old and frail. A desk as narrow as an ironing board, on it dusty supplies of the sort purchased but unused: paper envelopes, a jar of ballpens, an empty spring-binder, some clips. It’s an on-again, off-again assortment I recognize. I even know that old-model computer on its rickety metal stand, that beat-up adjustable typing chair with a hole in its gray weft. In front of me are all my secretarial skills.

  I back out of the enclosure but leave the sliding side-panel ajar. The dusty computer screen draws me in again like a magnet. I wipe it off and sit down to it. After a kind of prayer to the gods of chance, I plug in. It works. The tufted gap in the chair seat gooses me like a familiar overseer.

  This is a volunteer’s office. Whatever the cause it serves. ‘Inner city,’ the ‘aged,’ the ‘juvenile?’—the vocabulary is roughly the same. New diseases, old insurrections—on behalf of the rights of the wronged.

  Summertime, the scholarship student was the only paid staff. ‘So good of you—’ the polite one-day-a-week patron women would murmur as I typed, printed out, and usually instructed, pressing the levers, shifting the innards, cartridges, software, on their roster of second-hand machines. Sometimes a young deb in for the afternoon swung her bob at me—‘Won-derful.’ … So good of us to have her, their glances said.

  Winters, I had a second job, scuttling between the college’s admissions office and the Dean’s. The paneling was boardroom, the machines improved, and the typist’s chair an Italian import that cupped one’s bottom like a pair of hands.

  But the apogee was my last year in college, when I worked for a pair of professors who lived together, an American of the English department, and a French historian: ‘Thee Renaissance, c’est moi.’ There I learned words like ‘apogee.’ As well as what a ‘variorum’ edition was—the American’s specialty, and how to breathe carefully on the Frenchman’s illuminated manuscripts.

  The pair had lived in their Beacon Hill house so long, and had subjected it to so much word bombardment, that in the evenings, when I was sometimes invited to supper after my stint, the walls of the small residence, wedged between two larger ones, would seem to all but disappear. While as we ate, ideas sent up in chat between them whistled over my head like arrows meant to pierce the old window-screens and be let loose upon the world. Yet there was no garden. At Christmas, my presents from them were inscribed: To Our Amanuensis, and in parenthesis (Look it up!), so I did. Finding in one source that I was a servitor who copied by hand (Latin, a manu), which was no longer true, but in another that I was a ‘devoted’ person—which I was.

  The scarf, from the American, was an illumination I could touch. The Frenchman’s small check bought me a thrift shop bathing-suit—for they were not rich. The ‘study’ I worked in, arranged for the line of students who must have preceded me, held equipment nearly antique. Yet the old copier—Xerox?—was just there, where this printer is. There are no atlases here. They had a globe, its blue nineteen-thirties surface never updated. But at my right is the same dictionary I used when the American’s longhand was too cramped for me to make out.

  There are no books here though, beyond an encyclopedia. Theirs, hooding the air in brown, parchment, and gold could not be lent. Instead, centered in constant hints from the variorum of what could be learned—and could be read in odd hours—I absorbed. But never told anyone. Though now and then, a reference escaped.—‘How is it, Carey, that your guest knows what the Nicene Creed is and you don’t?’ says Sir Somebody, her Dad.…—‘We know you did student billings at the Dean’s office, course catalogues. Those professors report, “When she left us, she was literate.” … And I suspect you’ve some Spanish from the barrio. All of which translates fine, employment wise,’ said Daisy Gold.

  So that old terror confronts me. Not of those little tap-tappings, the ‘skills.’ But of the wide flooding-in they can release. Pills don’t bury the frottage in a brain that has a story to tell. Or the tremor in the fingertips which have discovered the words for it.

  A variorum. A ‘classical edition, with quotes from suitable commentators’—of me. The keyboard appears serviceable.

  I stand in front of it, the nude volunteer. I have forgotten my nakedness. I reach for the dictionary, to look up the word: Parliament.

  By night or day, as I sit at this desk, the pair from Beacon Hill fly over me like geese, honking Work! Work! To follow routine is easier when you have more than one. I spend the week-nights out, coming here on Wednesdays and Fridays, Martyn’s newspaper, picked up at the stationer’s, assuring me which is which. On Saturday I sleep over here, leaving on Sunday, after doing the wash. Wednesdays and Sundays I bathe.

  The desk is my church. Where I hear only my own sermons. My words are not arrows. This old word processor cannot listen as it records. But it takes the pressure off. Crediting any voice it’s fed, it’s the only schizoid here.

  Maybe a mind like mine, furnished so old-fashionedly and recovering itself on the same terms, will soon be among the last to worry over what is sanity. Or to insist on any such baseline. This morning I found two flyers pushed under the front door. One from a computer outlet, notifying Martyn that
a year had gone by since he had had his serviced, and offering him bargain membership on a new network in cyberspace. The other, a take-out menu from a Chinese restaurant.

  I see us all chatting in cubicles, our hair electronically on end. All of us ordering our food in. Our body wastes being sucked from us on networks so ethereally worldwide that no sanitary arrangements will be necessary. While the battered outdoors, a relic of the twentieth century, is regretted by few. And my own dilemma exists no longer, everyone being comfortably outside—at home.

  I joke because I must. The single vision—will I end up losing it? ‘And who is it most begrudges Carol Smith the norm?’ Dr. Cee asked me once. He and I answered in unison: ‘Carol Smith.’

  Martyn’s mail, directed to that same stationer, is presumably kept, or sent on. When I pick up the paper I do not ask. The store-owner, one more Paki or East Indian in the city’s scheme, is usually attending to the day’s lottery ticket purchasers. He hands me what he knows I come for, his head averted to the luck-seekers and his and their mutual business: grab the ticket, here’s your change. He sells luck, news, cigs, mags, and soft porn; everybody wants some of his wares. I have the feeling that his life is all scheme. Perhaps we are colleagues in reverse, he in flight from streets that have rejected him.

  I store the newspapers in a pile, under the bulletin boards, appropriately opposite the drums. All in them sounds as Before. Hard to believe they are reporting Now. Yet no surprise. I read first as if through the wrong end of opera glasses, in whose smaller lenses tiny people are still rolling their planet toward Utopia. Reverse to the broad end, and the magnified print swims up and over my head, nearly drowning me in its omnivorous wave. But I suspect this is usual. So the ideologies return, like college barflies I once jogged elbows with.

  But today is Sunday, which Martyn’s subscription does not include. Once inside, the gleaming bathroom is my icon; I become its acolyte, my handmaiden the suave brown wooden toilet seat. Wrapped in the buff towel I carry in my pack, I don’t quite match any of this, but in the mirror the sun, slanting up from Furtown in seventh-day quiet, turns us all into an art nouveau print.

  Behind me, in the mirror, that picture of a family or families assembled in front of what could be a longhouse or a stockade, keeps me company. I have the feeling the air in the picture is hot. The sepia tone may be partly responsible for the skin tones. Dark to light, the faces have accepted that variorum. Man, woman, to child, down the line-up the impression given is that they have learned this posture or have been taught it. The house or barn behind them is the power. But is it theirs? Or are they its helpers? Clothing nondescript but neat, the men’s white, whether Western or not, the women head-scarfed or bare. If I stare long enough I become part of the photograph.

  Where is the garden? Was it there the shot rang out?

  Later I’m dried and dressed. A woman seated at a desk that though narrow is not up-ended, avoided. Her past at last wrested from behind the muted landscape of the pill-country. Her flesh newly cleansed—for the offices of all the norms?

  ‘And how do you view those norms?’ Dr. Cee is saying.

  ‘The norm is a honeybear,’ I told him. ‘Ever at my elbow. Waiting to be fed. Amiable. With claws.’

  ‘Carol, restrain your images,’ he said. ‘If you ever want to get out of here.’

  So I say, docilely: ‘The norm is a decent little dog, Doctor. I have it well on leash.’ And it sees only gray. But this I kept mum.

  But now, am I learning? I see even by the morning paper what the normal message is. Restrain. Confine. Police the crime.

  It is dangerous, what I’m doing. This keyboard, this smallish screen so palely lit, as if by the ghost of confiscated paper, this jiggery-pokery software whose parts, no matter how jumbled on the table, will explode only on a print-path targeting a brain—I know what they’re offering me. Alternatives.

  Next, unless wary, I’ll be living by the calendar. Giving each of these entries a date.

  It was Saturday night. Top o’ the week for all the prom kids in colleges in all the boroughs. For the high school goonies shifting their platform sneakers and twenty-inch hairdos on line for the Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood. For the prossies on lower Park, poking their silky-shiny breastpoints at passing motorists. For the oldie couples foxtrotting for a fee at Dance-night, Lincoln Center. And tired mom-poppas in McDonald’s, wiping off the baby’s milk-moustache.

  And for me, to sleep over here.

  What I wanted, like anybody, was to celebrate—even if I didn’t know what. To kick responsibility in its doughy, daily face. And to stay Out, as late as possible, from this glassy prism where all the colors of the world seemed to have churched themselves. What’s with the color spectrum that once you have it again, the eye can’t limit that wily profusion everywhere? Like at the disability office, where I still must check in. Once, the clients and their garments were dun, their dependency drizzling down on them like rain. Now their civil rights have exploded into opera, jungle-striped; the aisles crawl with pink-and-brown babies, inching into what one has to hope is a top life.

  It takes grit to face the multiple. That’s why they put you on pills, and put the hospitals out of town. To simple things down.

  Bottom line—I find myself hankering for that old quagmire—pill-land. Bury the head?

  Pervasive underneath all my days is the image of the person whose quarters these are. I’ve studied the wall-clips until I could recite them, charting Martyn’s and his troupe’s circuit home and abroad, and much of the formal circumstances of his life, historical and pictorial. And no—his mother doesn’t look like me. But Martyn, the understander, is still about, still occupying this room. And the best side of that may be the worst. Still gentle if compelling in my memory, he doesn’t try to corner me. What woos me is that he never will.

  Stop the pills cold turkey, and the body doesn’t yet know why, craves a little sweetening. Hack hack, a legal drug can say, as you swallow it, alerting the nurses and your body too. A whole ward, dulling its crazy-quilt anguishes all at the same time in order to save staff, can sound like a gaggle of fowl. But if you are remanded, you steal away, stiff-legged, with the belly-ache they tell you is sanity.

  On the ward the scuttlebutt was that when off pills, sex was the best substitute. But too many like me had gone cold turkey on that too. You are counseled then to marshal other satisfactions. Yardages of fudge. Or those lessons in martial arts. Or go shopping in safe pairs on your weekly passes, even though one of you might be reported on return: ‘He asked to see what they had in space suits.’

  Or the dose is yours again, if you beg; or bribe.

  I couldn’t believe my body wanted to go back to that hypnotic balancing act. But addiction is a nostalgia of the flesh.

  So I sit here in my glass cage, thinking—for what? It’s more than being house-sick; maybe I’m even getting over that. What is it that would allay this hollow in the throat? This rictus in the jaw, like before you wail?

  Then it comes to me. Perhaps it’s the window that does it, with this Sunday quiet seeping in. Where I would like to be is sitting in a bay window, through which a breeze is rustling the pieces on the card table. What I would like to do is to be playing a game.

  THE DOOR AROUND the corner from Christopher Street was still open. That pair who lived there must still peddle those showers. What a neat way to earn.

  I peer in. The room looks the same, with those broad armchairs nobody could carry off. Pillows, the same taupe as the shadows. Floor was once battened down basement earth; maybe still is, under that linoleum, a sawtoothed pattern you blink away from and come back to. And there’s the card table in front of that cozy pot-belly stove. No fire behind its bull’s eye pane. Wasn’t then, either. I haven’t hit the season for it maybe. But, ‘Come back,’ they said. ‘Anytime.’

  Just then the same older man shuffles in from a door in the rear. And now I remind me. I have stepped on a buzzer just inside the entry. When I shift my feet t
he buzz stops.

  ‘Want a shower, do you,’ he says. ‘Singles only. No sharing allowed.’ Then he halts. ‘You been here before?’

  ‘Yeah. You said I could come back.’

  ‘Right. You know how it works then. Go ahead. There’s soap.’

  ‘Thanks. I have a pad. Temporary.’

  ‘Ain’t they all. You just hit town?’

  ‘Not really. I just kind of thought—you said stop back any time. And I’d like to. For a game.’

  His hand goes to his teeth, rubbing them. ‘Hey. I know you. You’re that girl.’

  I nod.

  ‘You beat him. I recall.’

  Then I see the table. His eyes direct me to it. Bare. ‘Where’s the checker board?’

  He goes through those well-known minor motions. Toss of the head. Mouth turned in. Good-looking guy for maybe sixty, but moused up some since I last saw. ‘It died.’

  ‘Died? Oh you mean—yeah, they do wear out.’ Like the parcheesi board we had to coddle, it was so cracked. But you can surely replace a checker board? ‘Ah, you lost the habit.’

  He’s not answering. People can get petulant about a game.—‘Can’t stand that Chinese puzzle with the missing triangles made out of construction paper. Can’t stand it. Not one more time,’ my music aunt huffed, tucking it well back in the cupboard under the window-seat, where it stayed. ‘Makes you lose the rhythm,’ she’d said.—

  ‘No, it’s there in the drawer,’ the man said. ‘Just went dead. After him.’

  ‘He’s dead? Oh, I’m sorry. And he was still so—’

  ‘Not that young. But younger, yes. Months ago. And here I am. “Healthy as a rat”—he said.’ And I could almost hear the other one. ‘Yop, I am. Eee-eye—o—Negative.’