I could not imagine anyone actually lying on the floor in V&C, but sometimes there were couples who had trouble restraining their amorous activities, resulting in a stern reprimand, not from a guard coming discreetly to their table but by a blast from the loudspeaker for everyone to hear. Although I often slid my chair closer to Shane’s than I was supposed to, so I could rest my hand on his leg or his back, he knew better than to suggest I do anything more risqué than that.
As we worked on rebuilding intimacy, removing sex from the equation for the time being was a positive thing from my point of view—not so much from his. I was glad we did not have the option of jumping into bed together, hoping that sex would somehow solve all our problems. Based on my experience prior to falling in love with Shane, this never works, and it tends to cloud the issues rather than resolve them. In the first part of our relationship, sex had become a battlefield, and now I felt that being forced to discuss and consider it all theoretically without the pressure of actually having to test out our new understanding of our former difficulties was an advantage.
A great many other issues needed to be sorted through first, not the least of which were jealousy and trust. I forgave him for having sex with Linda Porter on New Year’s Eve. I forgave him for wanting to run back to Brandy. I also forgave him for frightening me.
Repeatedly he said, sometimes with tears, “I’m so sorry. I never meant to scare you. I was out of my mind. I’m so sorry. You are the last person in the world I would ever hurt.”
I said, “I believe you. But whether you meant to scare me or not, you did.” On this issue I added another condition. “If you ever frighten me like that again, I will leave you.”
I forgave him for not knowing how to love me in the way I deserved to be loved. I forgave myself for not knowing how to love him either.
He said he wanted to learn how to think about love differently so he didn’t make the same mistakes again.
“Love is a verb,” I said, quoting something I’d read in a self-help book years ago. “It means we should be treating each other in a loving manner, not like enemies.”
He said, “I get it.”
But it is always much harder to forge new good habits, remains all too easy to slide headfirst back into the old bad ones. Each time he did, I called him on it. When he questioned my fidelity, wondering what I’d been up to for all those months we were apart, I reminded him that he was the one who had slept with someone else, that just because he had done it didn’t mean I would too. Now I understood that his mistrust of me was a matter of projection, that because other women, including Brandy, had been unfaithful to him, he assumed I would be too—and that because he obviously couldn’t trust himself very much, he didn’t know how to trust me either.
There was also the matter of testing. Now I understood that this too was part of being institutionalized, that every single day in prison was a long and unrelenting series of tests of one sort or another. I worked on convincing him that life out in the free world is challenging enough without the addition of all these tests from the person who loved me.
“But how can I know that you really love me?” he asked.
I said, “Here I am back again. How can you not?”
When we decided to get back together, I had not been deluded enough to think it would be easy. Yes, he was my person. But he was a difficult person. He would always be a difficult person. And I can be more than a little difficult myself. Perhaps this was another way in which we were a lot alike. But those first few months were not all relationship boot camp. We were back on familiar ground now—in a different prison, yes, but the basics were the same. We had hours to be together, hours and hours to talk about anything and everything that came to mind, past, present, and future. And every day I was hopeful and happy as we set about starting over.
I BEGAN THE NEW YEAR OF 2010 as I always do, putting up my new calendars around the house. Regardless of how difficult the previous year has been—and certainly 2009 had been one of the worst—I always draw hope and optimism from this small ritual of ringing in the new. I took extra care in choosing this year’s kitchen calendar, the main one that hangs above the telephone stand and on which I record important events and upcoming appointments. It was called Mindful Living: The Words of Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Zen Buddhist master, poet, and peace activist, one of the world’s foremost spiritual leaders.
I chose this calendar because on the front, with a photograph of white lotus blossoms in a terracotta bowl, it said: In TRUE dialogue, both sides are willing to CHANGE. The January photograph was another lotus blossom, deep pink, resting on a bed of crystalline snow. The message for the month read: I am DETERMINED to CULTIVATE only thoughts that increase TRUST and LOVE. As Shane and I continued to work on rebuilding our relationship, I thought bearing these wise messages in mind was bound to help.
I bought him a calendar too: twelve months of photographs of Ché Guevara, Ché being one of his heroes. But I was never able to get permission to bring or send it to him. Was this because it was Ché, or because it was a calendar, a device for marking out time perhaps not welcome in a place where time is truly of the essence—treacherous, torturous, and weighted with tension, but essential nonetheless? I was disappointed, but Shane said it didn’t matter: he already knew what day it was and how many had passed since he got sent back.
He said, “I don’t need a constant reminder of the days spooling out in front of me for God knows how long before they let me out again.”
Not surprisingly Shane and I had completely opposite relationships with time. For me, and for everyone else I knew, there was never enough of it. I was always trying to figure out how to make more time in the day: get up earlier, stay up later, no more naps. For Shane, naturally enough, there was always too much of it. He was constantly trying to find ways to pass it, fill it, get through it. For him, time was something to be endured. For me, it was something to be made the most of. In his world, time was a punishment. In mine, it was a precious commodity.
Despite what he’d said about the calendar and not wanting to be reminded of the days ahead, in fact, Shane was always preoccupied with the future. He suffered from a kind of chronic hopeful looking-forward that seemed both to indemnify the past and countermand the present. Always, always the next thing would be better. This was aided and abetted, I felt, by the whole concept of gradual release: having finally managed to take one step forward, he must then immediately focus on the next step. He could never be satisfied with where he was or what he had achieved. He could only be hungering for the next thing.
When he was at Frontenac, he could think only of making day parole and getting to the halfway house in Peterborough—then everything would be better. When he got to the halfway house, he could think only of making full parole and getting home to stay—then everything would be better. Home was the ultimate goal, the final frontier, the brass ring, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow—at the end of the six rainbows we’d seen right before he was granted full parole. And that was where it all broke down. Everything was not better. Everything was worse. He had nothing left to look forward to. There were no more steps.
After our brief disastrous attempt at living together, I realized that he didn’t know how to settle in and accept, how to relax and just go along, how to let go of the anger and the hate and be happy. He did not know how to stop doing life and start living it. He also did not know how to stop thinking of himself as a convict, as Janice Mackie at Frontenac had long ago advised. On the inside, he’d been a somebody, murderers being at or near the top of the prison hierarchy, a rigid ladder of crimes, with sex offenders, especially those whose offences had involved children, being at the absolute bottom. But on the outside, he felt like a nobody, or, as he sometimes said, just another loser and an old one at that.
When he was still in Peterborough, I’d once said that if we didn’t get the present working better, we weren’t going to make it to the future, at least not together. He didn’t ever
seem to see the present as entirely real. For him it was just a shadowy way station between the past (which had been unmitigatedly miserable) and the future (which, in its as-yet-unlived brilliance, was bound to be perfect).
As the months at Bath passed, he sometimes lapsed back into this kind of thinking. If only we could get Private Family Visits, then everything would be better. If only he could get transferred back to Frontenac, back to camp, then everything would be better. I reminded him that this time at Bath was not wasted, that this was our chance to work on our problems and make our relationship healthier and stronger.
By the time we’d been back together for six months, he had twice taken a program about boundaries given by the Bath chaplain, and I had enlisted Louise’s help too. She was providing a kind of couples counselling customized to accommodate the fact that one member of the couple couldn’t come to her office. She gave me worksheets and exercises that I would then copy and mail to Shane, so we could work on them together when I went to visit. I wasn’t permitted to bring these in myself, but he could bring them from his cell to V&C. They covered topics like empathy and sympathy, guilt and shame, cognitive distortions, core beliefs, problem solving, and boundaries and expectations. On a good day, we could work on these together and learn something.
On a bad day, they just caused more problems, especially when they focused on expectations for the future when we hoped to be living together again someday in the free world. In response to one of these exercises, he wrote out a detailed plan for managing our future daily lives, including when and for how long I would work each day. He presented this to me proudly. I appreciated the effort he was making, but I disagreed with some of what he’d outlined and suggested that the decisions regarding my work should be made by me, not him.
He said grimly, “You like it better when I’m in prison, don’t you?”
I said, “No, I don’t. Of course I don’t.”
But in retrospect, I can see that in some ways perhaps I did. Considering my own problems with relationships, perhaps with him in prison I felt I could have a partner but maintain my independence too. I did not have to figure out how to find a healthy balance in the real world. I did not have to deal with him all the time, and I did not have to have him in my house. Perhaps with him in prison, I thought I had more control.
That day I could see he was working himself into a big bad mood, so I tried to jolly him out of it. I said, “Of course I don’t like it better when you’re in prison, you silly duck.”
Like all couples, we had pet names for each other. His for me included “pixie,” “munchkin,” and “Charles in Charge,” because, he said, I was bossy and liked to be in control of everything. I called him “silly duck” because I liked the sound of it as a variation on the more common “silly goose” and because it made me think of the ducks we’d so enjoyed feeding in Peterborough. I’ve always liked ducks.
But that day he said, “When you call me that, do you really mean ‘stupid fuck’?”
I was annoyed and I said, “Yes.” Sometimes we were both guilty of “deteriorating attitude.”
But it was never that. It was only ever a term of endearment. Now it was ruined, and I never said it again. Perhaps I should have told him that Shakespeare used it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to mean “dear” or “darling.” But what did Shakespeare know? In his day, the word bully was a term of endearment too.
AT BATH VISITORS WERE NOT ALLOWED to bring in food or beverages of any kind. Here there would be no home-cooked healthy meals, no pretty placemats, no real plates or cutlery. Here we could eat only what was available in the vending machines: sandwiches, hamburgers, bagels, and sometimes, on a good day, wraps and the odd hot entrée. Shane could bring in certain items he’d bought from the canteen: pop, chocolate bars, microwave popcorn, and large bags of potato chips. I was hardly surprised when, at my next physical, not only had I gained weight but my cholesterol level was up too.
Here books and newspapers were contraband. This meant the inmates could not help their children with their homework, and Shane’s reading was once again limited to what he could find in the prison library. It also meant that we could not do crossword puzzles anymore. Here I was not allowed to bring my crib board or my Scrabble game from home. Here a small stack of battered board games for use by inmates and their visitors was kept on a shelf beside the door.
It was not unusual for us to play five or six games of Scrabble in a day, and now it was no longer unusual for me to win. Shane was as bad a loser as he’d ever been, possibly worse, and might sulk for an hour or more if I beat him badly. I was all out of patience with this routine. One day after I trounced him thoroughly two games in a row and then laughed about it, his sulking went all the way to nastiness. In my work on boundaries with Louise, we’d talked about this sort of thing. I decided to put into practice some of what I’d been learning. I told him calmly and firmly that his nasty sulkiness was not okay with me, especially over something as trivial as a Scrabble game. He continued. I warned him that if he didn’t stop, I would go home, even though it was early yet, with two hours still remaining in the visit. He continued. I tried one more time. I stood up and said, still calmly, “I didn’t come all the way out here to sit and be treated badly by you. I’m going to the bathroom now, and if you’re still acting like this when I come back, I’m leaving.”
Shane didn’t seem to understand one of the fundamentals of human nature—if you treat someone badly, they are not then likely to want to do things for you, to help you, or, in this case, to spend the day with you. Was this another part of institutionalization? After all, as long as he didn’t cross the line too far, the prison staff was paid to put up with him whether they liked it or not, and the other guys were hardly in a position to break up with him.
When I came back to the table, still he showed no sign of stopping. Although we’d talked many times about his bad habit of testing me, I knew that was exactly what he was doing—testing me to see if I would really do what I’d said I would. In the first part of our relationship I wouldn’t have.
I cleaned off the table, put the Scrabble game back on the shelf, went to the exit door, and waited for them to let me out. Shane was obviously surprised.
“And now you’re just going to leave?” he said incredulously, as if I hadn’t warned him at all.
“Yes, I am.”
“Easy for you,” he snarled. “You’ve got a home to go to.”
Louise had warned me that when trying to implement boundaries now, I should not imagine that he would be happy about it.
“Yes, I do,” I said, “and I’d much rather be there alone than here with you.” The door clicked open and I was gone.
I signed out on the clipboard, stomped down the hallway, grabbed my jacket off the rack, stomped across to the other building, waited for the two doors there to be unlocked, stomped to the lockers, got my car keys, waited for the next two doors to be unlocked, stomped down the sidewalk to the gate, waited again for the two gates to be unlocked, then stomped out to the road. Even with a superlative stomping technique, it was difficult to make a dramatic exit with so much stopping and starting, locking and unlocking along the way. But I knew that in the prison world, making an unplanned early exit from a visit was dramatic enough.
As I headed, still stomping, for the parking lot, I could see one of the scout trucks coming towards me. These were blue and white pickup trucks that constantly patrolled the prison property. Shane had been amused by my naïveté, when, after watching them drive around for weeks, wondering why and commenting that that must be the most boring job in the world, it finally dawned on me that the scout truck drivers were armed and watching for someone trying to escape. Now the truck pulled up beside me. Surely they weren’t going to shoot me for leaving a visit early. Surely as a visitor I was free to leave the property whenever I wanted to.
The driver rolled down the window and stuck his head out. It was Arthur, one of the pleasant guards with whom we’d become f
riendly over the past few months, the one with whom I’d once shared one of my nicknames for Shane—“Mr. Grumpy Pants”—another term of endearment that Arthur now also used liberally.
“Going home early?” he asked.
“You bet,” I replied. “He’s throwing a fit because I beat him at Scrabble. I’ve had more than enough of Mr. Grumpy Pants for today.”
“Don’t blame you,” he said, laughing and continuing on his way. My angry early exit would no doubt be noted on Shane’s record, and I didn’t care.
As I got into the car, I could hear gunshots coming from the firing range farther on down the road, around the corner, and out of sight, where the officers gathered to practise their shooting acumen. Not armed as they went about their daily duties, they nevertheless had ready access to firearms in case of an emergency.
On a normal day, our visit ended as it began, with a quick kiss and a rib-crushing hug. Then Shane left the room through the inmates’ door, while I went out through the visitors’ door. Usually I took my time signing out and going back to my car. He was often, but not always, searched after a visit. This search could be of the “bend over and cough” variety, what he called a “skin fan.” With any luck, by the time I was driving out of the parking lot, he’d be done with this and standing out on the hill behind the fences with three or four other inmates, all of them waving as their visitors drove away. As he advised, I would wave back with my window closed for fear of being accused of trying to throw him something from the moving car. I’d wait until I was out of sight before lighting my first cigarette for the drive home.
This Is Not My Life Page 23
