Twenty
Massachusetts, 2002
The night I’m accepted to law school, I break in.
Harvard Yard is a long, empty expanse of black now that it’s nearly midnight. The glow from the streetlamps in the Square pinpricks through the trees. Standing on an empty wooden porch, I shiver. The night is colder than I thought it would be, windless and clear and silent, the kind of Boston night that will always remind me that the city is on the water and that water becomes ice.
At twenty-three, finally graduated from college after a second try, I live in New Jersey with my boyfriend, Adam, and the dog we’ve adopted whom we’ve named Professor. We share the first floor of a house that’s tucked into the armpit of a highway exit ramp. The road from my parents’ house—an hour and a half north of ours—to the one Adam and I share is a snarl of factories that light up shiny and gray as the slick of fur on a rat’s back in the highway headlights, that Jersey Turnpike smell like it’s always summer in the city and you’re always standing over a sewer. Our house is pretty enough, with a slap of peach paint and even a picket fence that used to be white. But at night, lying on my back in bed while Adam sleeps next to me, l listen to the husband and wife next door yell at each other for hours. Their voices scare me. All that clabbered bitterness.
It’s too close to how I feel, still living in New Jersey. Still circling my parents’ house, around memories I don’t want inside me and can’t escape. After a year of being in their house I went back to college, this time in New York, at Columbia. I did well, making straight As, but before two years were up I’d moved back in with them to finish school, commuting over the bridge. Living in the gray house makes me depressed, but when I’m depressed, to live there feels right, like the walls are confirmation of the memories. After graduation I moved in with Adam, but that didn’t help, either. Then, in a Hail Mary pass to the future, I applied to law school. The old route that had worked for my parents. The old love from my childhood. And it turned out that all those afternoons I’d spent lying on my stomach on my parents’ office carpet as a kid, doing logic games in books from the newsstand downstairs, prepared me well for the LSAT: I got into Harvard.
Now, as we stand under the motion sensor light on the porch in Cambridge, there’s a bag at Adam’s feet that holds two matching sweatshirts from a newsstand in the Square, the only store that is open at this hour. The acceptance letter arrived this afternoon while Adam was at work. When he came home I was still sitting cross-legged on the carpet, staring at it in open-mouthed, catatonic disbelief. “Baby!” he said, and spun me around until my tears stopped and I laughed. “How do you want to celebrate?”
As soon as he asked, I knew. I wanted a sweatshirt. I wanted a school-colors maroon sweatshirt with HARVARD on it. When I was six years old, my father had called me to a conference at his bedside. He was propped up against pillows with his reading glasses on the covers beside him. He looked so serious that when I saw him I paused in the doorway. He motioned me in. I sat down on the edge of his bed and he reached over to the stack of newspapers that was next to his bedside all through my growing up—that is next to his bedside still—and withdrew an envelope. Then he put on his glasses, opened the envelope ceremoniously, and we discussed: Was my very first report card on track to go to Harvard? My father was from a New Jersey immigrant community and had gone to state schools. To him Harvard would mean we’d made it. By seven I had a maroon sweatshirt I wore everywhere, but by seventeen I wouldn’t have applied to Harvard even if there had been a chance that I, with all my cut classes and blank spots on my high school transcript, could have gotten in. For me Harvard means a time before things went wrong.
Adam drove us six hours up from Jersey right then. Now we stand at a building I’m pretty sure must be on the law school campus, though in the dark I can’t find a sign. It just looks like what I want a law school building to look like: large red and tan stone bricks, wooden columns, turrets that carve out from its sides. He blows on his hands and watches me, waiting for my lead. “Do you want to go home?” he asks. In eight hours I’m due at the bookstore where I work. “Or”—he draws the consonant out and arches his eyebrow at me—“do you want to go in?”
“In.” If we’re caught, I’ll pretend I’m a student. It will be true soon enough.
In the photograph of me Adam takes that night, I lie on my back on the maroon benches inside Austin Hall at Harvard Law School, my black wool coat still buttoned around my neck, the maroon turtleneck I’d worn without realizing peeking out of the coat’s collar, my hair spread around me and my eyes half-closed. I look how I feel: peaceful, finally secure.
An idea strikes. “Be my lookout?” I say.
Adam grins. “Anytime.”
I find a narrow staircase that looks like it goes up the full length of the building. The first floor is dark, but surely there’s a security guard somewhere. One more flight, to be safe. I try the first door I come to after the landing—open.
The classroom is surprisingly small, cloistered with only a single, postage-stamp window and fewer than a dozen chairs arranged into neat little rows. And a green chalkboard. With chalk. Can I? Yes. “Thanks for letting me in!” I write.
I mean, thanks for letting me in. Not just to law school, but to the law.
* * *
Months later, when Adam has stayed behind in Jersey with our dog and I have moved to the city that grows so bone-chillingly cold, I am thriving. All around me the books I borrowed from my father’s bookcase have to come to life. My torts professor is a skinny woman, nervous as a rabbit, with a disconcerting habit of using her two toddlers as the examples in hypotheticals. “Now imagine,” she says, “that my daughter Marguerite is crossing the street one day, and an hour before a gasoline truck has leaked all over the road. In the explosion, she loses her foot.” In torts—which are really a measure of how you judge the harm a person does to another, how you assign fault, how you understand cause—someone is always catching fire, losing a limb, or being maimed. In my favorite case, Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co., a man leaps for a departing train, dropping a package onto the train tracks. The package contains fireworks. They explode. At the other end of the platform, a scale falls on a woman. It’s a chain of events, and really a question of how to tell the story. A question of cause. The day we learn that Marguerite, the professor’s daughter, really doesn’t have a foot—that the limb she keeps losing in these stories is already gone—we sit in awkward shock. “It’s OK to laugh!” the professor says. “It’s funny!” Property class becomes not about rules to be memorized, but the question of what can be owned; constitutional law about the commitments we’ve made, what binds us together as a country.
My classmates and I love ideas. At night we argue over beers in our dorm rooms, or glasses of red wine in bars. Sometimes we tape sheets of white paper end to end and draw maps of our belief systems, trying to plot out our ideals as if they were logic trees. Consistency is what we prize, and coherency, and reason, and to be true to our ideals so that they fit together into the neat puzzle of us. I want to be driven only by my ideals. That’s why I’m here. In my law school application I wrote about standing on the tarmac as a child and knowing instantly that I did not believe in the death penalty. Why wasn’t taking a human life considered cruel and unusual? I wanted to come to law school, I wrote, to understand.
When it’s time for me to apply for summer jobs, death penalty defense firms are where I apply. I find two firms that specialize only in death penalty cases and are looking for law students to work for them for the summer. One’s in California, and while the summer that the lawyer from that firm describes to me sounds great—I’d love to live in San Francisco—the office has only one case. “You’ll get to sit in on brainstorming meetings,” he says on the phone.
The lawyer from the Louisiana firm sounds strapped and harried. “Let me ask you a question, try something out,” he says. In Jefferson Parish, a parish formed by white flight out of New Orleans, prosecutor
s have begun showing up for the sentencing hearings of young black men facing the death penalty wearing ties printed with nooses. I’m shocked at the story—in 2003, nooses? I stammer out that it’s got to be prejudicial but admit I don’t know any rule that would cover it.
He laughs, the sound sharp as a bark. “Neither do we. I’ll let you know what we come up with. But we’ve got more work than we can handle. We’ll have plenty of work for you.”
By the time the follow-up interview call comes around, two weeks later, I’m certain I want to work for the Louisiana firm. I take the call in my dorm room, a single room in a converted hotel where the back of the door still has checkout instructions, the heavy paisley drapes are foil-backed, and my bathroom has a rack meant for a flurry of small towels. I’d chosen to live in the dorms hoping to make friends, but the dorm I picked was a mistake—I accidentally chose the one for grade-gunners. My classmates don’t cook in the communal kitchen or hang out in common areas. There’s no friendly gossip or late-night study breaks. On move-in day I’d been wearing torn jeans and a sweatshirt, wrestling a giant cardboard box of clothing into the elevator, when a man had passed by me wheeling a clothing rack. His hair was parted to knifepoint precision, and he wore a blue oxford shirt and khakis that had clearly been freshly pressed. The bar contained five more identical pairs of khakis and twice as many identical blue oxford shirts. As I held the elevator door open, he wheeled in a pressing machine.
But I’ve made other friends here, idealists like me. They’re the reason I worry about what I’ll be asked during the job interview. Because after a year of law school and our late-night debate sessions, I am starting to understand that I really don’t believe my opposition to the death penalty—or anyone’s support of it—comes down to reason. It’s still that simple, basic conviction I’ve always had: that everyone is a person, no matter what they’ve done, and taking a human life is wrong.
But on the phone, the lawyer never asks why I oppose it. “Tell me,” she says, her voice low, at once formal and somehow intimate, a practiced tone designed to elicit confession, “how do you feel about defending the guilty?”
“I have no illusions that all my clients will be innocent,” I say. My words sound awkward even to me, but I’m a little irked at the question. I want to talk about reasoning, not feelings. I’m glad to know that there will be female lawyers at the firm—unlike most other public interest law, the death penalty world is heavily male—but her words strike me as condescending. Does she really think I’m that naive?
“How about defending people accused of murder?”
“I believe everyone deserves a lawyer,” I say. It’s a death penalty firm. Of course some clients will be accused murderers.
“You may have to meet with them. You may have to sit with them.”
I change tactics: “My father’s a criminal defense attorney. I grew up around his clients.” When I was a young teenager I spent one of my parents’ office Christmas parties hovering around a tall, slim man whose teeth flashed whenever his face stretched into a wide smile. All evening I offered him cheese cubes from a tray, a fresh napkin to replace the one he was holding, anything to get him to shine that smile on me. Later I realized that he was a client my father had told me about, a hit man for the Korean mafia. After the party he entered the Witness Protection Program. My father has always defended the bad guys. He has told me more than once that his job is to be amoral, never to think about what the people he defends did—“if,” he always adds, a defense attorney to his core, “they did it.”
The lawyer continues. “Some of them may be charged with other crimes in addition to murder.”
“I understand.” I get up and pace around the room. How can I make her hear me? “Look, I believe in what your firm does. I’ve always opposed the death penalty. I’d like to help fight it.”
“Our clients are not the most popular people.” Her voice lowers. “We just finished a case, for example, in which we defended a man who’d previously been convicted of child molestation. Can you defend a child molester?”
My grandfather has been dead for eight years, but suddenly I see him and my body seizes. I see him alive, wearing one of his tweed newsboy caps, sucking on a hard violet candy, and me as the adult I am—sitting with him, a legal pad propped on my lap, trying to take notes but noticing only those hands that touched me, the body I know too well. In the vision I hold my knees very still, trying not to let them brush against his. Then suddenly I’m a child again, and there’s his face after he’s taken out his false teeth, grinning gummily, his breath wet and murky, tinted with a note of lavender. I am very small, small enough to be both fascinated and repelled by the black expanse suddenly inside his mouth. The doll lamp bathes his face in yellow as he grins at me. “I’m a witch,” my grandfather says. “You remember what that means.”
This job will be my test. If I really oppose the death penalty, I must oppose it for men like him.
“Yes,” I say. “I can defend a child molester.”
Twenty-One
Louisiana, 1991–2000
Early December 1991, and Ricky lasts a few scrub-brush weeks living with Bessie, Alcide, and his younger brother Jamie, but he hates it. Living with them is like going back in time. He works whatever odd jobs he can pick up and spends the rest of the hours smoking pot by the river, trying not to think about where Jamie’s going in his life and where he so far has failed to go.
But then he catches a break. There’s an opening at the local Fuel Stop, doing maintenance. Maybe one of the guys from the river gets him the gig; maybe Ricky stops in one day for a Coke and sees a handwritten HELP WANTED notice in the window. But he stops in. He can push a broom and he takes orders well, at least right now, now that he’s trying to please. He’s proud of the polo they give him. Maybe this one will be his for longer than a few weeks.
First payday, he cashes the check and rents a motel room to live in. He’s not thinking straight—the room will burn up the checks faster than he can earn them, if he thought about it he’d know this can’t last long—but back in the Georgia prison, when his counselor asked him to make a list of his goals, he wrote, “Get my own place,” and he’s got one now. It’s so sweet to be living alone. The room isn’t much, but it’s his. Iowa is dotted with welfare motels, longer-stay rentals, and his room is made for a man down on his luck who’s looking to invent a new kind. He’s got a coffeemaker and a hot plate and bedsheets he pays a couple of bucks extra for and a small television he can play as loudly as he wants, and he can smoke in the room, too. He spends his evenings lying flat on his back on the bed, his head cocked up on the pillows, chain-smoking into a black ashtray on the nightstand with a plastic cup of peppermint schnapps next to his head. Doesn’t seem lonely if it’s the best kind of aloneness you ever had. Even the noise from the other rooms—there’s a man a few doors down who smacks his wife and kids; there are people selling drugs and who knows what else every hour of the night—can’t get to him. It’s nothing like prison. It’s not even anything like living with Alcide and Bessie and Jamie in the trailer, so much emotion and history and hurt piled atop one another. This room may not seem like much, but inside it, he’s free.
Then, one evening, he goes to the parking lot to have a smoke under the stars.
* * *
Standing outside is a woman. Maybe she’s leaning against the side of the building, one hand resting on the top of the trash can, her head thrown back as she exhales into the night sky. Tired skin and tight eyes, her hair falling out of a ponytail, but she’s pretty in a closed-up kind of way. The kind of face that has lived, that holds secrets.
The woman brings her head back up. She stubs the cigarette out on the top of the trash can. She studies him a minute. “I know you from the Fuel Stop, don’t I? You work outside?”
Ricky nods.
“My name’s Pearl,” she says. “I’m a cashier there.” Maybe it’s the late fall night that makes them talk with each other, that turns them reflective
, the grace of cool dry air in a state that spends so much of the year so hot and muggy, the grace of the darkness to two people who right now in their lives want nothing so much as cover. Standing there in the motel parking lot, maybe rooting in her pack for another cigarette, perhaps knowing that when this one’s empty it’ll be a stretch to buy another but still needing that cigarette, trying not to hear the sounds of her children June and Joey as they play-tussle on the other side of the motel room door while Terry’s got the television up too loud again, to drown out their chatter, Pearl is cash-strapped and kid-exhausted. She’s smart enough to see that the motel is wearing her and Terry and the kids out, but there’s no way to have anything different, not on her salary. Ricky feels free in his room. But she feels trapped.
That must be what she’s thinking when she listens to Ricky talk under the night sky. Maybe he tells her how he wants a little bit of land down by the Calcasieu River where he can go and not bother nobody. He’ll hunt and fish and earn a little money at the Fuel Stop, just enough to keep him in cigarettes and booze and pay off the land so it’s truly his. When Ricky dreams, he doesn’t dream friends. He dreams a place where he can be who he is and where there won’t be anyone around to look that other damning thing, normal. Where it’s just him and he’s normal. True, a man living by the river, talking to no one, would be an object of fun or bogeyman stories among the neighborhood kids. But he kind of likes that idea. Because maybe there’ll be some kid like he was who doesn’t fit in, who just wants to get away, and he’ll hear about Ricky and he’ll know it’s possible.
Pearl listens, then drops the second cigarette to the concrete and rubs it out with her foot. She chews her lip like she’s thinking. Finally she says, “I want a house.” That’s her dream. She and Terry and the kids in a proper house, the kids with proper bedrooms, not whaling on each other like they do in the motel room, all up in each other’s spaces. Some privacy and a good night’s sleep. They’ve been talking about a house, but to afford it they’ll both have to take on more hours and then who’ll look after the kids? Maybe Ricky could rent a bedroom from them, in exchange for fifty bucks a week and help with the children.
The Fact of a Body Page 17
