The Mars Room(20)
6
Children must be supervised, quiet, and behaved at all times, or guardians will be asked to remove them from the visiting area Inmates cannot handle vending machine cards Vending machines do not accept cash. You must buy a prepaid card in Visitor Processing Cards cost five dollars. Two dollars and fifty cents will be returned if your card is in reusable condition Inmates can stand no closer than three feet from vending machines One short hug is acceptable at the beginning of your visit, and one very brief hug at the end of the visit. No sustained bodily contact or the visit will be terminated Holding hands is sustained contact and not tolerated No high fives
No hands under the table during your visit. Visitors and inmates must keep hands where officers can see them at all times No hands in pockets No yelling
No raised voices
No arguments
No “horse play”
No loud laughing or boisterousness Keep crying to a minimum
7
The road to Stanville prison is straight. It goes toward the mountains, which can be seen from the main yard on low-smog days. In winter their caps are dusted white. The snow is far away. It never falls on the valley floor where Stanville is. We see those caps of white through the baked layers of valley air. The snow is as remote to us as home.
* * *
Only people who should be on the road to Stanville are on that road. The morning of our arrival, no one was on it but us. The road was lined on both sides by almond orchards. I would not have known what was growing, or cared, except that Laura Lipp was awake and talking again, and she said what they package as almonds are not real almonds, but instead poisonous fruit seeds, did I know, and that one of her children had almost died from eating them.
“You ever split open a peach pit?” Laura Lipp said. “That’s where they come from. They aren’t actual almonds. They’re the poisonous part of a peach. A neighbor once gave my kid some without asking me first and if it weren’t for the paramedics she would have killed him.”
“You killed him,” a woman behind us said.
I felt a wave around me, people tsking in disgust.
White women in prison have two crimes, baby killer or drunk driving. Of course they have many more crimes, but those are the stereotypes, which help to impose an order among the women, the races.
“They don’t know what happened,” Laura Lipp said. “About him and what he did to me, what he did to us—to me and the baby. None of you has a right to judge me. You don’t know anything. Just like I don’t know anything about you.”
She turned to me, as if I were the one person she could reason with.
“Do you know who Medea is?”
“No,” I said. “You need to be quiet. I don’t know you and I don’t want to talk to you.”
“You want me to be quiet, but I’ll shut up when I’m finished and not before. I went to college, unlike the rest of you. Medea’s husband abandoned her and that’s what happened to me. He took everything from her, including her children. She had to put him in pain. So he could know her pain. It’s written into history. It’s real. You can’t do that to a person without damage. He tore her life apart, and so she found a way to do the same to him. That’s my only comfort. It’s very very very small. It’s so small I can’t see it most of the time.”
My eyes were closed. I was turned away. I was trapped with her but willing myself elsewhere. I pictured a woman on the landing of a hotel, picking up lint from ugly red carpeting to see if it was crack cocaine. Picking up a crumb, a match head, rug fluff. Inspecting the object between her fingers, smelling it, giving it a little taste, putting it down. Picking up another crumb, inspecting it the same way. She starts to cry, this woman, in her search, her endless search. It’s as sad as anything I’ve seen. I kept seeing it, though I did not want to, while Laura Lipp talked on and on.
The woman searching the carpet was Eva, I realized. I block certain things out. Everyone does. It’s healthy. But in trying to block the words coming from Laura Lipp I accidentally thought of something bad. Eva went in for coke, early on. Freebasing it, then shooting it, and, finally, crack was enough and it was the thing. Turned skinny, lost a tooth in a fight, had a limp from a car accident. But she was still Eva and I loved her.
* * *
When you see lights even higher than stadium lights, you are at prison.
They hustled us off the bus two at a time, yelling, Move it, Let’s go. I was trying not to trip. Conan, in front of me, was unhindered. He had a walk that was unaffected by the chains. I don’t know how he did it. He practically floated. He was dragging and smoothly syncopated. It was a walk that belonged on the streets of Compton, or in the parking lot of the Inglewood Forum, out at the Pomona car show, not in a line of shackled women headed into prison receiving.
The officers who greeted us were angry. Especially the women. It was a rude and aggressive welcome but it shut Laura Lipp up. The only person who got gentle treatment was the extra-large-sized lady who had slid off her bus seat. They let her lie quietly as we more able-bodied and conscious women were prodded down the aisle of the bus. The woman looked to be peacefully sleeping when I shuffled past her. The last passenger, she was moved off the vehicle in a stretcher, by medics who pronounced her dead and placed her on the floor of receiving with a tarp over her face.