screeching. In less than a second, Big Red jumped up and stood on the table, narrowly missing Jennifer’s hand. ‘Kill the bitch!’ Big Red screamed. Jennifer wasn’t sure that even in her exalted position Red could see anything. The imbroglio seemed to be on the floor, on the other side of the table, near the wall. Correction officers were on the two fighting women in an instant, and, although Jennifer didn’t want to look, she couldn’t help but see one of the officers – she thought it was Byrd – throw a vicious kick at an inmate who was rolling on the floor.
Just then, louder noise and movement broke out to the right. Jennifer looked over, but before she could see what was going on, she noticed a pay phone out in the corridor. This is it, she thought.
As the two women continued to shout, and as several officers rushed their table, Jennifer calmly started to walk backward to the exit. She’d walked against a crowd that way many times in New York’s movie theaters when she wanted to get in to a popular show. As she made her way out, she watched the activity in front of her, but also glanced behind her to make sure she didn’t disturb anyone by bumping into them. The last thing she needed was to be in a jailhouse brawl. Though she was known as the ‘Warrior of Words’ at Hudson, Van Schaank, the one thing she didn’t know how to do was fight physically. Her path was clear – only another twelve steps before she’d be at the phone! It seemed that no one had noticed her, but her heart was thumping so loudly that she was certain that everyone could hear it, even over the ruckus.
Jennifer looked behind her again; in two more steps she reached the phone. She picked up the receiver and started to dial. She could hear the tones of the numbers in her ears and they drowned out the increasing noise from the room behind her. She dialed collect, and when the automated operator’s voice asked for it she gave her name. At the other end of the line, in another world altogether, she heard the phone ring. She imagined Tom’s apartment in Battery Park City overlooking New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty. She’d looked out at the view a hundred times. She heard the phone ring again. Women were screaming and shouting from every corner of the room. It was worse than a snake pit. Jennifer couldn’t help it: She instinctively put her hands over her ears, but still the noise penetrated despite her resolution. A tear began to drip from the corner of her right eye along her nose and down to her nostril. But she couldn’t take her hands off her ears to wipe it away because the noise was so overwhelming.
Suddenly a squadron of guards surrounding someone was coming her way. Jennifer was bumped into by another woman who was struggling against three officers. ‘Lockdown!’ she heard an officer shout from the far side of the cafeteria. But Jennifer stayed where she was, listening to the distant ringing. Answer, damnit!
A shuffling line of women approached the exit, and one woman stood directly in front of Jennifer and smiled. She was almost certain that this was the creature she had seen tending the marigolds on her way into Jennings. The black face split into a skeletal grin. ‘Trying to escape this place?’ the old woman asked.
At that same moment, a hand reached over and yanked the receiver away from Jennifer. ‘You can’t use the phone now,’ a woman officer said, obviously agitated. ‘Damn freshman!’ She grabbed Jennifer and pushed her into line. ‘Face forward!’ the officer snapped. ‘You too, Springtime. Step lively! Go to your houses,’ the officer shouted.
Jennifer thought that she might just scream, break and run, even though the barred doors visibly truncated the long hallway ahead of her. She had to do something. She had to get through to Tom. He and Donald couldn’t have known that this place was such a madhouse. Even one more day would be too long for her to keep her sanity. If Observation wasn’t enough to make her want to kill herself, another meal like this would be.
Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws.
Walter Savage Landor
Gwen Harding tightened the sash of her bathrobe, retied the bow, and studied the papers spread before her. In her office at Jennings she was kept busy from moment to moment simply trying to deal with the administrative load, employee problems, staffing, and management. Now for the first time she looked at the JRU International information package and the charts spread out on her dining table. JRU had completed their proposal to the state and Warden Harding, along with half a dozen other state correction professionals, was being asked to write up her opinion of their plan.
She took a preliminary look at the proposal. ‘Fact: The private sector consistently saves government money. In the past decade, at least fourteen separate independent studies have compared the costs of operating private and public institutions. Twelve of those studies demonstrated that the cost of privately managed prisons is from two to twenty-nine percent less than that of government-managed facilities.’ Gwen wondered how they managed to cut costs. Perhaps by firing outdated wardens.
She rose from her chair and passed the counter that was the only demarcation of where the dining room ended and the kitchen began. The kitchen was spotless. She crossed the blue and white tile floor to the stove, where a kettle – the only cooking implement she ever used in this kitchen anymore – sat on the one burner that she ever turned on. She took a mug from the cabinet. It had been a gift from a social-worker friend years ago. It was one of those ready-made but unpainted objects that children and women with time on their hands paint in shops set up expressly for that purpose. On it, Gwen’s friend Lisa Anderson had painted BECAUSE I’M THE WARDEN, THAT’S WHY.
When she was given the gift, she and Lisa laughed over the reactions the mug stirred up among the other women at the shop where Lisa had painted it. Now Gwen filled it with hot water and dunked a tea bag into it. She was actually longing for a glass of gin, and the olives in the refrigerator seemed to be calling out to her, but she knew she had to keep a clear head. JRU was waiting and JRU came first. She crossed to the sink holding the steaming mug, opened the under-cabinet and dropped the wet tea bag into the empty trash bag. She didn’t even make trash anymore. Gwen sighed. There was a different time and a different place where she used to cook and give dinner parties on a regular basis. And she’d been good – everyone praised her coq au vin. ‘Jesus,’ she thought, walking back to the dining table, ‘do people even make coq au vin nowadays?’ She hadn’t seen it on a menu or at a dinner party in years. But then … she tried to think of the last dinner party she had attended and couldn’t remember one. That couldn’t be! She stood still, one hand resting on the back of a dining chair, the other clenched around her mug. There was the dinner at the restaurant at the close of the Eastern States Correction Officers Association. And of course, there was always the rubber chicken at local civic functions. But actual dinner parties – just social time at someone’s home, seemed to be a bit thin on the ground.
Gwen took a sip of tea and wondered where her friend Lisa Anderson was now. She smiled. They had had a lot of fun together. Gwen had been divorced and Lisa had been in the process of separating from her husband. The two of them went out at least once a week, but that was … Gwen put down the mug and tried to think whether it was six or seven years ago. Could it be that long? She tried to think it out. It had to be. It was just after she got the job at Jennings.
At Jennings Gwen was too busy to see old friends or to make new ones, at least in the beginning. Then, when she had settled in, it seemed as if there were no friends to be made. Certainly she couldn’t count any of the Jennings staff as friends. Perhaps her initial conscious distancing had put people off, but she’d only done it because she’d been frightened and overly sensitive about her new position and its required authority. She supposed that by the time she felt secure and was ready to unbend a little, no one else seemed to be so inclined. Well, that was understandable. She took another sip of tea and reminded herself that she’d never
