The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  Ellen. Silent smiler; looked about twelve years old. She bobbed her head, conciliating but wordless, when introduced to Nan. Long hair that hid her face, except for red mournful lips. Sleeves of her blue prison sweater pulled down to hide the tips of her fingers, arms wrapped around her knees while the others explained this new world to Nan.

  The room felt full of bodies, humid with sweat and the odor of unwashed hair—but comfortingly so. Marjorie and Donna Jean talked, often at once, contradicting and upbraiding each other. Ellen sat and smiled, occasionally patting the Raggedy Ann doll in the crook of her arm. A tide of information mixed with admonition washed over Nan—more, far more, than she could absorb. Warm night air from the open window brushed her cheek, the back of her neck, and she could hear the sounds of traffic from the freeway beyond the high wire fence. She listened, silent as Ellen. She understood her choices: be adopted or perish. At last Donna Jean said, “Kids’ Day tomorrow, gotta get our beauty sleep,” and Marjorie said, “You keep that bunk, honey, Donna Jean’ll trade you,” and Ellen said nothing at all. Donna Jean reached over and turned out the light. Darkness; silence.

  |

  On the second day, Sunday, Nan woke to far-off church bells, a sound that always (even now, in this place) said Italy to her. It was still early: a soft pink light filtered through the curtains. No breakfast on Sundays, the others had told Nan the night before; instead, the children came. There was a table with juice and fruit and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, out in the yard if it was nice weather, in the reception area if not. Nan slid soundlessly out of bed. Without waking the other three, she pulled on her scratchy beige cotton pants and shirt and left to roam the quiet, nearly empty corridors.

  She discovered the Library, with its few volumes stacked sideways on the shelves, its smell—it was in the basement and windowless—of mildew. (“Everything is for the men,” Marjorie told her later, bitter but resigned. “The women get the leftovers. You oughta see the men’s Computer Room.”) The Smoking Porch, with its pool table, its card tables painted with checkerboards (but no checkers), its Pepsi machine. Long and light, a place to catch the summer breezes. (“The guys have a gorgeous gym,” Marjorie said, “and a law library. The philosophy is, women ain’t likely to cause trouble, let’s take care of the men.”) The Crafts Room, where prisoners could make baby clothes and knit afghans. The yard (Nan peered through a square of glass in the heavy metal door at the end of the corridor, under the watchful Nanny-gaze of a guard), with its peeling wooden picnic tables, a gangly lilac in one corner, a couple of bees assaulting the pink and red impatiens planted around its trunk, as cheerful as they were anywhere.

  What did you expect? Nan chided herself. Ashes, cinders, carbolic? The smells of Auschwitz? Frivolous comparison. Nan had seen Auschwitz. This was not that; this was nothing like that.

  Then she noticed that the yard was encircled by high cyclone fencing topped with barbed wire. Beyond it was another building, the mirror image of Nan’s own, a long colonial brick structure like a college dorm. It boasted a white-painted dome topped with a weather vane. Nan moved to one side of the mesh-covered window and craned to see down the street. Behind her the guard coughed warningly. Somehow Nan knew not to touch the glass, or the door itself. Squinting, she could make out more brick buildings, grassy spaces; the whole place resembled a shabby, down-at-heel college campus. The women’s section of the ACI, according to Marjorie, had originally been built as a mental hospital in the forties. Both Minimum Security, where Nan was, and Maximum Security—the building beyond the fencing—were still called by the names they’d had back then, disarmingly collegiate: Dix Building; Gloria McDonald Building.

  But there was the endless march of cyclone fencing, the evil glint of barbed wire. The ACI: Adult Correctional Institute. Every word a lie, Nan thought, as she turned from the window. The women so young, so often childlike; the idea of correction, like orthodontia for the soul; the suggestion of seminars and panel discussions.

  Nan’s bitter little exercise in translation was interrupted by a sound so foreign to the place that she thought she must be hallucinating. No—there it was again. Laughter, high-pitched squeals, the quick clap of feet. Of course: today was Kids’ Day. If she turned again to look out the window and waited, she would see them. Instead, she began to walk back down the empty corridor, faster and faster, until she reached the stairs. She sat in the dim little basement library thumbing through a mildewed copy of Great Expectations until the lunch gong sounded.

  The next day, Monday, was both better and worse.

  Because she was classed as “A&T”—Awaiting Trial (because there hadn’t been a trial, only a pretrial hearing)—Nan wasn’t eligible for work detail. After breakfast, when her roommates disappeared—Marjorie and Donna Jean to the laundry, Ellen to the kitchen—Nan roamed C Wing, looking for other women in beige. (Beige, she’d discovered, was for A&TS and “Papa Charlies,” women in protective care; sentenced prisoners wore blue.) She struck up occasional conversations, usually accompanied by the sound of TV, either soaps or soul-baring talk shows. Under her arm—no pockets in prison clothing—she carried a little chintz-covered notebook Donna Jean had given her, with “My Soul’s Journey” printed on it and a tiny green pencil attached to its spine by a string. She wrote down what she saw. Just a list at first; then somehow, in the course of that day, Monday, the little notebook became a record she was keeping for Alex. The Alex who’d had an affair was not the Alex Nan had always known. The Alex who’d had an affair was someone who might, in time, come to understand Nan. Neither of them had known the other. Now it seemed possible that one day they might. The little notebook was a beginning. A form of consolation, the only one available to her in this place: that her daughter could—someday, somehow—know every detail of Nan’s gift to her.

  Starting that day, Monday, she wrote it all down. The display case in the hall outside Warden Gordon’s office, full of karate trophies with the names of the winners—inmates and staff side by side—engraved on brass plates. The closed-circuit TV divided into sixteen squares, each captioned: Laundry, Yard, Front Porch, Holding. The cameras. Cameras everywhere, Alex. In the halls, in the common rooms, in the john, peering evilly down from the corners. The sense of surveillance, the sense of confinement, of the locked wire doors at either end of C Wing, never left her, though she walked and walked. (Her heart doctor in Seattle, a lifetime ago, would have been pleased.) Jail was the fate Attila the Nun foresaw for us, Alex. Deenie & me. More than forty years ago, now. When they found out who put the crotchless black lace panties down the convent laundry chute.

  More disturbing than the sense of confinement was the comfort it brought. Relief: that was what Nan felt. She was unspeakably weary, as if her outburst in court, that decision wrung from her at the last minute, had taken all her strength. Now the phrase out of my hands echoed in her head, in her footsteps on the vinyl floor, in the indecipherable mutterings of the walkie-talkies riding the hips of the guards as she passed by. Out of my hands, she wrote in the little notebook. A chant, a benediction, a prayer, it had, blessedly, replaced The Thought. Nan Mulholland was a prisoner; there was no longer any action she could take. Here, the only role going was that of Little Red Waitinghood. Everything she saw confirmed it.

  The neutralization of color—like the Soviet Union, all those years ago. Beige, brown, navy, gray gray GRAY. The reduction of texture to vinyl, cinder block, linoleum. The impersonal smells of disinfectant, crumbling plaster, mice, dust. All of it redeemed only by the inmates’ tireless knitting of things—afghans, pillow covers, stuffed animals, bureau scarves—in shouts of yellow and orange and red. Only a few such articles can be kept; everything else has to be sent out with a visitor, or it will be confiscated.

  And the women. The women.

  Mary Louise (Possession), small & sleek & deaf, dancing up to you & tugging at your sleeve. Crystal (Prostitution), telling anyone who’ll listen, “I’m gonna turn my life around.” Sharon (Aggravated Assault), rap
ed by her mother’s boyfriend, barely eighteen. Voncile (Dealing), stately, black, hates me for being the Media Queen, as seen on TV before I ever set foot in here. Radiant Lourdes (Prostitution), eight months pregnant, a Spanish galleon in full sail.

  The woman in for Burglary, a safecracker who’d once worked for the police. The woman in for Manslaughter (reduced from Murder One) because she’d breast-fed her baby while on heroin. The woman Nan thought of as the Other Grandmother—the only other inmate near her age. She’d gone on driving after her license was pulled, until one day when she couldn’t lift her foot off the accelerator and, careening through a city park, killed three young children. These last two were shunned by all the others. No one spoke to them; no one sat at their table at meals. Children had died.

  |

  Talking. Talking. When the women weren’t working or napping, they talked.

  “Made parole? That dumb bitch?”

  “Colleen told me.”

  “She’s a piece of work.”

  “And that Deciolaria—you know, over in B Wing?—sweet little madonna, she belong to—is it the Latin Queens, or Los Alitos? One a those gangs. Her boyfriend, too. You’ll see him Sunday, Kids’ Day, he bring their kid every week.” Marjorie sat cross-legged on a lower bunk, the one given to Nan, her wide jelly breasts packed into a black lace bra. Warm night air poured through the open window.

  Deciolaria. The mother of Bug? It must be; there couldn’t be two women in the ACI named that.

  “Those teardrops tattooed on Deciolaria’s cheek?” Donna Jean said. “That’s one for every person she killed.”

  “Nah,” said Marjorie. “Could be for deaths in the family, too. Be fair.”

  “And Voncile, she’s been in Seg twice for flunking her ions.”

  “Ions?” said Nan.

  “Yeah, you know. That, like, paper they rubbed over your hands and arms when they brought you in here? They do it three-four times a month. Surprise checks—the Dolphin’s big on surprise checks.”

  “The Dolphin?”

  “Warden Gordon. Don’t he look like one? Anyway, that paper they rub you with, it detects every drug known to man. Didn’t they tell you that?”

  “They didn’t tell me anything.”

  “Honey! Well, you got us now. We will tell you everything. Won’t we, Ellen?”

  |

  Fourth day, fourth demerit. Alex, you can’t do a thing here without permission. You give up everything of your own, like entering the convent. You belong to them. Your body belongs to them. You can’t move it without asking.

  The demerit, for being off her wing, was worth it. Hungry for color, she’d gone to see the murals in B Wing, the Recovery Wing, where former addicts had covered the walls with bright paintings and words of exhortation. (WELCOME! THIS IS THE FIRST STOP TO THE REST OF YOUR LIFE! HOPE IS THE DESTINATION; LOVE IS THE ROAD.) The guard—small and freckled and clear-eyed—pointed Nan back in the direction of her own wing. Now only one demerit separated Nan from Seg. So what? she thought. What do I have to lose? I’m out of my hands.

  |

  Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. By Tuesday, her fourth day, Nan could feel herself clinging to mealtimes, moving from one to the next, stepping-stones that kept her from falling into the vast anesthetic pool of the day. The big news at lunch (FRIED CALM PLATE, the blackboard above the steam table announced) was a woman on D Wing who’d gone on hunger strike. Something to do with her children; opinions differed as to what. Donna Jean said that the Dolphin had it in for the woman, whose name was Nancy, because she wouldn’t sleep with him. Marjorie said no, it was the police, trying to catch Nancy’s boyfriend, though how refusing to let her see her kids would accomplish that, she couldn’t say.

  “She’s got gumption. You got to give her that.”

  “Gunction? What’s that?”

  “Gumption, Donna Jean. Christ! The word means ambition.”

  “Dear Lord, forgive your servant Marjorie her profanity, for she knows not what to do.”

  “They gonna put her on tomorrow’s medical run, that’s what I hear.”

  The dining room, in the basement, was lit by small, dusty windows set high in the walls. The effect was vaguely liturgical, women here and there bathed in shafts of light, like saints in Renaissance paintings. Gray-painted cinder-block walls; gray cement floor. The steel tables were round and bolted to the floor, each with six round stools attached to its base. The Other Grandmother set her tray down on a table near Nan’s; immediately the two women seated there rose and went to another table.

  Next to Marjorie, the safecracker said, “There’s some people I know wanna boycott macaroni and cheese.”

  “Why?” Nan asked.

  “Because, uh … It has something to do with the cigarette companies.”

  Donna Jean said, “Nancy goes on the medical run, Doc Shovelton’s gonna see her right. Could be she’ll escape, like, what was her name?”

  “Oh, Doc! He’s all right. You meet him yet?” Marjorie turned to Nan, who shook her head. Her mouth was full of vegetable casserole. Carrots, turnips, onions. Roots! she thought, cellar food; and a phrase came back to her from her youth: Mortification of the Flesh. Penance for our sins.

  Enthusiastically the women described how Doc Shovelton had been in jail himself, nearly seven years, back in the seventies. An accessory after the fact, because he’d given medical care to some black militants who’d bombed a military base, killing a guard.

  “He’s on our side, honey. You will love the man. Every one of us does.”

  Women had escaped while being taken to the hospital for treatment insisted on by Doc. Two, or was it three?

  “’Course, they couldn’t never pin it on him. He’s too smart.”

  “He knows what it’s like. He escaped himself, while he was A&T. Lord God Almighty! That’s how come he got such a long sentence.”

  Dessert was bathroom sponges filled with magenta poster paint. Nan remembered JFK’s Berlin Wall speech, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” much admired by Tod’s colleagues in the embassy at Bonn, whose command of German did not include the knowledge that a Berliner was a jelly doughnut. That life—had it really happened? It seemed now not merely past, but other, not hers, something she’d read or heard about. The lunch-table talk returned to food. The safecracker said that the State spent $2.10 per day per inmate to feed them. Marjorie recited a recipe she’d read somewhere for Omelette Louis XV: 24 ortolans (“whatever they may be”), 18 pheasant eggs, 6 whole black truffles. Donna Jean said, “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts.”

  |

  A new sign in the hall announced, JULY PROGRAMS!!!

  • ADVANCED MACRAMÉ

  • DOMESTIC VIOLENCE GROUP

  • IDENTIFYING WILD LOVERS

  • MIND OVER MOOD

  No—that was WILD FLOWERS. Anyway, no prison programs were open to Nan, the A&T.

  |

  “Mulholland! You got a visitor. Move it!”

  Nan, who’d begun to wonder why Val and Mel hadn’t come to see her, felt a leap of joy. But when the little freckled guard led her to a cubicle off the sitting area of B Wing, the drug rehab wing, it was Jenny Root who sat staring around her at the walls covered with bright paintings and encouraging slogans.

  Jane! was Nan’s first thought. “They found her?” she blurted.

  Startled out of her reverie, Jenny Root rose. “Nan! No—no, they haven’t.”

  The guard motioned her to sit down again, then led Nan to the other side of the rickety card table. Nan sat, too, knees still wobbling. Through the open window the sound of a lawn mower approached and receded, approached and receded. It was a beautiful bright June day. The heat made her stiff cotton clothes itch; she rubbed her arms, shoulders, stuck a hand down the back of her shirt. Jenny Root regarded her with a mixture of exasperation and sympathy.

  “You okay? You’re, like, pale.”

  Nan raised her eyebrows. “Prison pallor. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

  Jenny Root sighed
. “Nan. I’m on your side.”

  “Really?”

  The guard went around to the other side of the partition, keys jingling. The heady, tickling smell of new-mown grass filled the cubicle. Nan sneezed.

  “Look. It was my duty as your attorney to present any offer that might be to your benefit. We’ve been through this. You’re my client. Nobody else—not even Jane. Are we on the same page?”

  Ashamed, Nan looked away. How could she tell Jenny Root that her very presence brought back what she, Nan, had been free of for four days now? It brought back Jane. Brought back the vision, quickly warded off, of all she had lost. Brought back The Thought.

  Jenny Root handed her a Kleenex. “Your welfare, not Jane’s. But now it appears they may not be … um … mutually exclusive.” She waited, watching Nan, who had no idea what she meant. “Lemme explain our position. Sound-Bite Wright is treating this like civil contempt, which he can’t do because this is a criminal charge, but he’s doing it anyway. The way civil contempt works is, the prisoner holds the keys to her cell. All you have to do is show the judge you’re willing to testify truthfully, and you’re free.”

  “Let me guess,” Nan said. “I tell him where Jane is, or I’ll rot here.”

  “Right. You give him Jane, he’ll lift the contempt charge, and you’re out on bail. Then the state’s attorney drops the Kidnapping charge, and you’re a free woman. If you don’t tell, Wright can keep you in here forever. When your six months’re up, he’ll just charge you all over again.”

  Beyond the partition came the jingle of coins, the whir and thump of the Pepsi machine. Nan waited for Jenny Root to urge her to give in, give up Jane. Instead she seized the little table in both hands and shook it till it rattled. “The fucker’s blackmailing us!”