Insiders

It is only now, seven years later, that I can look back at the situation without anger. As I said above, I am a better person now.

I knew that Jennifer Spencer would be given the orientation that included a tour of the facility, a bed assignment, and a work detail. I know what’s what here on my own, though I do appreciate the heads up I get when Frances delivers the ice with kites. I had to chuckle at the ‘kites on ice’. There is no work here in the library. The prison population consists of very few readers and what they would read doesn’t exist in the library. Needless to say, I would welcome Miss Spencer to Jennings when she came by later in the day. Lest you think otherwise, this would not be some warmhearted Shawshank Redemption nonsense where I take the girl under my wing. If I had wings, I assure you I’d fly the fuck out of here. Besides, I already have two sons – I don’t need a daughter. After a quarter century of girls’ schools, I know how much trouble they are.

Jennifer finally came to the library, with that Officer Camry, at about three-thirty, the time I usually fade out, having worked in schools all my life. She had the air of a young woman who was in trouble, there was no mistaking that. Her face was pale and drawn, her eyelids were swollen, and the eyes peering out from between them looked as if they’d glimpsed something horrific, but at the same time she still looked like someone whose car and driver were waiting for her. She had heavy attitude, Movita would say. But I could see right through that. The press, as usual, had gotten it wrong: Thanks to my twenty-seven years of working with schoolgirls, I could see that Jennifer had been a scholarship student. Determination to overcome obstacles was written all over her, so there had to have been obstacles. I could see that she had real strength to her, and that when the realization that she was going to be in here for some real time hit her, she would survive the shock.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’m Maggie.’ I sounded ridiculous to myself, as if we were in some kind of meeting.

‘Hi,’ she answered. She was so not present that I was driven to speak to her again. ‘This is our library, such as it is.’

She blinked at me, as if she didn’t understand why I was talking to her. ‘We have the space,’ I went on, ‘but we have very few books.’

‘It doesn’t matter to me. Don’t worry about it,’ she said, a little sharply. Then her expression changed. She was looking at me, wondering who I was, I expect. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said then. ‘I don’t mean to be rude. It’s just that I’m not going to be living here. But this guard has been very nice.’ I saw Officer Camry stiffen. It’s funny about how prison guards refuse to be called prison guards.

‘He’s an officer, dear,’ I said in a voice drier than the paper of my books. ‘Not a guard. You call them officers or COs.’

‘Correction officer,’ Camry the fool added. He was harmless enough and I nodded at him.

‘Oh. Thank you,’ the girl said.

Jennifer Spencer surprised me in one way. I, who have met such a wide cross section of women when you consider both my students, my social circle, and my present comrades, could not tell if the girl was essentially good or bad. It’s the kind of thing I almost always know at a glance yet I didn’t know it then, although I do now. I could see that she was honest.

8 Jennifer Spencer

With keen, discriminating sight, Black’s not so black, – nor white so very white.

George Canning, New Morality

After the night in Observation, Jennifer was ready for assignment to a cell. Though it was the relatively benign Officer Camry, rather than the brutal Byrd, who came to take her away, the relentless gloom of the institution put Jennifer into a state bordering on catatonia. If Observation had been hell for her, it was clear that the rest of the place was purgatory. It was all so grim that it was appalling to imagine that women actually lived in this hopeless drabness day after day.

‘I need to make a phone call,’ she managed to say to Officer Camry. Her head was pounding and she desperately needed some Tylenol – and maybe a Valium – but calling Tom was the most important thing to do right now. ‘I have to make a call,’ she said again. ‘Is there a phone near here?’

Camry stepped back and looked at her intently. ‘If there was, you couldn’t use it,’ he told her. ‘I’m scheduled to give you your house assignment. You can only make calls on your own time.’

Jennifer clenched her jaw and the headache intensified. She wasn’t prepared for any of this. She admitted that now. How could Donald and Tom abandon her to this experience? She couldn’t imagine the elegant Mr Michaels in a jumpsuit, or Ivy League Tom in the filthy hole. But that didn’t matter. She squared her shoulders behind Camry’s rounded ones and followed as she was instructed. She would not cry nor would she fuss. This whole ordeal was a punishment; not for the nonsense with the SEC, but for the terrible error in judgment that she had made.

‘Right this way,’ Camry said, leading her down a long narrow corridor. Then he stopped abruptly and opened a door. ‘While we’re here, this is the athletic facility,’ he said.

Jennifer looked in to see a small room with a couple of flabby volleyballs and a few exercise mats that were so soiled that she had to avert her eyes. So this was the gym. She almost laughed. It was nothing at all like the Vertical Club where she and Tom worked out. Well, she’d be out of there before she needed to go to the gym. But what about the women who had to use the place? God almighty.

‘You can use the athletic facility in your free time, but not during lockdown or after eight p.m.,’ Camry told her.

Jennifer sighed. As if. Once again she turned to Camry and said with great urgency, ‘Are you certain I can’t use a phone? It is imperative that I get in touch with my lawyer.’

Camry lifted his eyebrows and looked up at the ceiling. He shook his head as if to say, No, you crazy bitch, no!

Jennifer knew then that she had made a terrible error. For the first time in her life she had been so confident that she knew everything that she needed to know that she had gone into a test completely unprepared. Prison wasn’t like life on the Outside. In here, there was no multiple choice to guess at, and there was no essay that she could bluff her way through. This was all true or false – black and white. This was the test of her life, and she’d willingly come into it unprepared and ignorant.

Tom and Donald had told her that it would be easy. She didn’t know why she had believed them – except that they’d never lied to her before. Christ, there was no way this could’ve been easy. She should’ve known that. Life had taught her that nothing came easy – it all took work, it all took discipline, and above everything else, it all took a willful determination not to fail. She knew that. She had always been prepared, always one step ahead of the rest.

Jennifer hung her head and looked at the orange jumpsuit that she was wearing. When she was a kid she used to lay out her school clothes before going to bed. She hated uniforms so much that she spent hours figuring out ways to make a plaid jumper and a navy blazer look like something out of Vogue. But she did it. She stood out from all the rest.

It was that kind of preparation and thinking ahead that were the big secrets to her success. She got into State on scholarship, and her grades there earned her a free ride into the MBA program at Wharton. When it was time to go out and get a job, Jennifer’s research landed her an interview with the already legendary Donald J. Michaels. She walked into his office, clearly a girl from the working class, and she started to talk about his Gulbenkian porcelain. Donald lifted his eyebrows. He knew she was faking it, but he also knew she was really good at faking it. Preparation and a poker face were exactly what she needed to succeed in his Wall Street firm. Donald Michaels not only hired Jennifer on the spot, he put her on his own team. They were known as the smartest and the most aggressive of all the Wall Street shark pool. They specialized in the highest-risk/ highest-reward IPOs and some very leveraged buyouts. They didn’t miss a trick. They were invincible.

‘We go down from here,’ Camry told her, and Jennifer preceded him down the stairs. She was glad she wasn’t with Byrd as they made their way down the dark and damp stairwell.

The trek seemed to take forever, and through it all Jennifer mentally beat herself up. From the first moment she had gotten into the van, things had been out of her control. She tried to control the rising tide of panic that was threatening to overtake her. Why didn’t the Warden know who she was? If Tom had called, whom did he talk to? And if she didn’t find out, how would she be cushioned and protected from this nightmare? Who was the Warden’s boss? Could she go over the stolid Warden Harding’s head? She would just have to wait until this ridiculous process was over. Then she would call Tom. Or Don. Or both of them.

At long last, she and Camry entered the cellblock, and Jennifer was taken to her cell. She thought she’d seen the worst of Jennings, but no – they had saved the worst for last.

‘This is your house assignment,’ Camry told her.

House? This wasn’t a house; it wasn’t even a dormitory – and it most certainly was not a country club. It was a prison cell, plain and simple. The concrete walls were painted a color that a decorator might claim to be Dusty Rose, but to Jennifer’s eyes it was a hideous Battleship Pink. The beds – four of them – were bunked and bolted against the side walls with only about ten square feet of floor space in between. There was no furniture except a tiny desk that was suspended from the wall, and, beneath it, a single chair. Jennifer wondered if she would have three cellmates, and if the four of them were supposed to share that chair.

The only other place to sit was on a toilet that was quite unlike anything Jennifer had ever seen before in her life. At first glance, the stainless steel creation reminded her of a metal miniature of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. On closer inspection she saw the faucets and realized with horror that it was a monument to prison efficiency. It served as both wash basin and commode, with the seat only inches from the lower bunks. She remembered a snippet of a song parody her mother used to sing: And my bunk is where the skunk is. Did someone actually sleep with her head virtually in the head? She set her shoulders and tried not to show her dismay. After all, she only had to sit there until Tom came and took her away. She wouldn’t be spending the night.

‘Home sweet home,’ Camry said as he rolled open the door in the fourth wall, which consisted completely of bars. The section slid open, and for a moment it doubled the bars on the left side of the cell. The shadow play they made passing reminded Jennifer of the sun through the windows of New York’s elevated trains. But there was no sunshine here. The cells were on a windowless hall, and although each one did have a window, it was so high in the wall that even from the top bunk you couldn’t peer through the chicken wire. Camry took Jennifer’s elbow and firmly guided her into her new home.

‘It’s only for a few hours,’ she told herself. Maybe now she could finally call Tom. She looked for a moment at Officer Camry, but decided not to ask.

‘Get comfortable,’ Camry instructed. ‘I’ll go get your cellmate so you two can get acquainted.’

‘Right,’ Jennifer said.

‘Pardon?’ Camry responded.

‘I wish,’ Jennifer said with a cynical sigh.

Only one of the four bunks was made up, and over it, taped to the walls, were six pictures. One was of a baby – obviously a snapshot – but the other five were clipped from magazines. There was an angel, a toddler on the beach building a sand castle, a fire engine, the Nike logo complete with Just Do It, and finally a picture of Jesus, looking a lot like Donny Osmond. Jennifer stood there for a moment, trying to imagine what kind of brain had arranged those particular images in that particular way.

She walked over to the desk. It was bare except for three books: the Bible, a copy of The Pokey Little Puppy, and a paperback Baby-Sitters Club book. Jennifer had read the Baby-Sitters Club when she was in fourth grade. Had they put her in a cell with a child or a simpleton?

On the lower bunk on the opposite wall, Jennifer found a rolled up mattress and a set of sheets. Hers, she wondered? She thought about making the bed, but was enraged at the thought of actually making herself ‘comfortable’ as dopey old Roger had suggested. This was no place to be comfortable. She would never sleep here, and she would most certainly never use the toilet. Anyone – even someone like Byrd – could look right through the bars and see everything that went on.

Jennifer sat on the solitary chair and wondered what time it was. Would Tom still be at home, on his way to the office, or was he already there? She knew his cell phone number by heart, but she wasn’t sure if a cell phone could accept a collect call. She stood up suddenly in a rage. Goddamnit! She wasn’t a convict. She had her own damn cell phone – and they had taken it. She had a Verizon credit card with no limits. Why couldn’t she use it? What harm would there be in that? It had rounded corners, too. She couldn’t kill anyone – or herself – with a fucking cell phone. The rage took its toll, and Jennifer wilted onto the made-up bunk. Tom had better get her out of here before the end of the day. This was worse than anything she’d imagined.

‘You’re sitting on my bed,’ Jennifer heard a timid voice say. She jumped up to see Officer Camry standing in the door of the cell with a very small and very pretty young blonde woman.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jennifer said sincerely.

‘It’s okay,’ the girl said timidly. She looked as if she was terrified of Jennifer, and she seemed to be almost clinging to the smiling Officer Camry.

‘Miss Spencer, this is Suki,’ Roger said as he gently guided the young girl into the cell. ‘You and her will be bunking together.’

Jennifer saw the girl looking at her still damp jumpsuit.

‘Were you the one who stuffed the toilet in Observation last night?’ Suki asked her. Then she went over to her bunk and looked at the wet spot Jennifer had left when she sat there.

‘You can use this bedding,’ Jennifer said, pointing to the roll on the bunk meant for her. ‘I won’t be using it.’

‘Why not?’ Suki asked her.

‘I’m not staying,’ Jennifer replied.

‘Where are you going?’

Jennifer thought she was going to scream. ‘Can I just make a phone call?’ she asked, looking past this Suki and talking to Roger.

‘Not until after work,’ Suki told her.

‘But I have to make the call now.’

‘Miss Spencer – Jennifer – will be working with you in the laundry,’ Camry told the young girl. ‘Will you see that she gets there this afternoon?’ he asked with a smile.

‘You bet Rog – uh, sir,’ Suki said, blushing.

Roger stood there as awkward as a teenager on a front porch after a first date. Was he going to kiss this girl? Jennifer wondered. But Camry finally turned and walked away. Suki watched him go until he turned for a moment and waved good-bye.

Jennifer didn’t know what that was all about, and she didn’t need to know. A deafening bell clanged loudly and echoed off the concrete.

‘Time to go back to work,’ Suki chirped brightly. ‘Come on, I’ll show you the way.’

Jennifer followed without question. Maybe she could find a phone in the laundromat.

9 Movita Watson

Here I am and here I stay.

Patrice de Mac Mahon

I did alotta work in the office that no inmate should be trusted with, but that was because of Miss Ringling. She was one of those state employees who felt the main function of her job was cashing her paycheck. Most work that required any intelligence was given directly to me by the Warden. The rest of it was given to me by Miss Ringling. But now I was finally shuttin’ down the PC and gettin’ ready to go to dinner, when Warden Harding strolled outta her office in that casual-like way that says she’s got something to tell me.

‘Movita?’ she asked.

‘Mmmm,’ I kinda murmured back. You can’t really diss the Warden, but by now her and me know each other good enough for me to voice a certain kind of awareness.

‘I’ve assigned Spencer to Conrad. Do you think Suki will mind having her as a cellmate?’ the Warden asked me.

Since when did The Woman worry about what I thought? ‘Why do I care what Suki minds?’ I answered back. It sounded kinda snotty so I softened it a bit with, ‘She’ll do fine. NBD. Spencer’s no suicide, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘I just thought that you might have a better sense of who would be the best to match the new inmate with. You are the – uh – main person for the crew. I just don’t want to add a problem to an already sensitive situation.’

‘Hey, my policy is just like that old president’s,’ I told her. ‘“Don’t ask, don’t tell.” That works for me, too.’ I knew what she was angling for. The Warden wanted me to take that little white witch to my lovin’ black bosom. That’s one of the deadly things about prison; you show weakness just once and everyone is ready to prey on ya’. Just ‘cause I unreasonably, uncharacteristically, and maybe unfortunately ‘adopted’ Suki Conrad into my crew doesn’t mean I’m gonna do it for every sorrowful new piece of meat that comes to Jennings. It bugged me that The Woman even asked me.

I don’t know if the others wanted to take Suki in, but I insisted. And when I insist, they don’t have much choice. It wasn’t like anybody really hated her, and face it, girls, Movita rules. Anyway, the very first day I saw Suki Conrad draggin’ her pitiful little butt through Intake, I just took to her. Maybe it was that baby-fine blonde hair or the lost look in her eyes. I got me a pink-skinned baby doll with yellow hair and blue eyes for Christmas once. Didn’t I love that dolly! Whatever. Sometimes, though, someone like that just tugs at your heart or some shit like that. I guess I just plain felt sorry for the little thing, and that’s the truth. Just ‘cause I’m in prison don’t mean I got no human feelings. And I felt like we needed a baby in our crew.

Women need family. Don’t matter if it’s blood or not. In the crew we’re like mother and daughters sometimes, and sometimes we’re like sisters, and sometimes we’re like other family members, too. That don’t mean we don’t fight and argue and stuff. But when you’re in a crew you just try to keep all that to a minimum.

‘Please let me know if there’s any trouble with the match-up, okay?’ the Warden asked me. She was lookin’ me right in the eye and I knew she wanted more than a trouble report. She knew how to get at me. ‘That’s it for today, Movita. You better go to dinner.’ She paused for a second. ‘What do you and your girls have planned tonight?’

I switched off the monitor and neatened up some stacks of papers on my desk. ‘Well, it’s Theresa’s turn to cook,’ I said, ‘so it’s gonna be a surprise.’ Sometimes I get the oddest feeling that the Warden is kinda – well – envious of us in the crew. It’s like she’d rather come and eat with us instead of goin’ to her own house. I don’t know much about her life Outside, ‘cept that she’s divorced and that she works all the time. I doubt she’s got much of a life.

When I got back to my house, Theresa was already chopping the carrots that Suki was washin’. ‘You want the salad dressing sweet or you want it tart?’ Theresa asked.

‘I don’t care as long as you’re making it,’ Cher told her. She was loungin’ her sassy ass on the bunk, readin’ a magazine, and just waitin’ to eat.

If prison is the place where society thinks they can make us cons eat shit, they do a damn good job of it. Even though the Warden keeps fightin’ with Ben Norton down in Food Services, the food at Jennings never gets any better. No one – and I mean no one – wants to eat the shit old Ben serves up in the cafeteria. It’s nothin’ but starch, grease, and real bad meat. People eat it, but only if they have to.

You can eat for free in the cafeteria. So if you’re destitute, or spend whatever you got on contraband, or if you can’t make even one friend, then you’re stuck in the cafeteria eatin’ one of Ben’s blue plate specials.

But if you got some sense, a little social grace, or any initiative at all, you can buy things from the prison canteen and cook ‘em up yourself. You just need to save a little money and get pots and pans and all. There’s no real kitchens in our houses, but Harding lets us have a hot plate or an electric skillet. Of course, the canteen doesn’t have much variety – maybe only seven or eight kinds of things. You can usually get a chicken, or sometimes beef. They always got a little lettuce or some vegetable. There’s potatoes and sometimes rice. And now and then some fruit like apples or bananas or even oranges. Theresa works down in the dispensary, so she always knows what’s comin’ in. She stashes the best for the crew, and with the money Cher gets from sellin’ some of the stuff she steals from Intake we can buy a whole lot of good stuff. Problem is, we don’t got refrigeration, and that’s why we need plenty of ice. Frances was the lucky one to get to deliver it. Ice is like gold in prison. Without it, lots of our good stuff goes to waste. If we buy a chicken on our own, by the time we eat half of it the other half is no damn good and we’re so sick of chicken that we’re cluckin’. We don’t wanna see no bird ever again.

‘Hand me that pot of water, Suki,’ Theresa said as I sat down to listen to the day’s bulletins. I wanted to know if anyone had any more news on Spencer. I thought Suki might speak up, but Cher was the first one to sound off, as usual.

‘I hear she’s already sashaying round here like she owns the place.’ Cher smirked. ‘Byrd told old Cranston down in Intake that he’s gonna toss Spencer into solitary if she demands to use the phone one more damn time.’

‘Well, you know what they say about asking and receiving, don’t you?’ Theresa said as she opened the Tupperware and measured out some pasta into the boiling water.

‘Yeah, well this ain’t Sunday school,’ Cher shot back. ‘And it ain’t the movies either. You don’t automatically get one call when you get here.’

‘It’s tough on you white girls when you don’t get your way, ain’t it?’ I said, givin’ Cher a look. She was copping some pretty amazing attitude.

‘That’s not very nice,’ Suki said with hurt feelings.

‘Movita wasn’t referrin’ to you, sweetie,’ Cher reassured her. She got up and gave Suki a pat on the shoulder.

That was for my benefit. Back when I first took Suki in, Cher made quite a fuss. ‘She can’t cook, she can’t steal, she can’t do nothin’ but cry,’ Cher bitched. ‘She’s dumb as dirt. That’s why she drove the car for her boyfriend.’

I guess Suki actually believed her boyfriend when he said he was goin’ into that 7-Eleven for cigarettes. He came out with the contents of the cash register, and little Suki thought she was guilty of nothin’ more than keepin’ the heater running.

Theresa, on the other hand, was more understanding. ‘But she lost her baby,’ she said to Cher. ‘She’s never going to stop crying about that. You know what they say about mothers when someone takes away their babies, don’t you?’

Well, nobody answered Theresa’s question. It got real quiet for a moment. You see, I don’t like talkin’ about children. I never talk about my little girls. Their granny is raisin’ them, and that’s all I can bear to say about it.

‘Just what in heaven’s name are you makin’ there, Theresa?’ I asked to break the tension. ‘You trying to kill us all before Cher gets a chance to get outta here?’

‘Get out of my way, Movita,’ Theresa warned. ‘You know what they say about too many cooks, don’t you?’