Katherine Dunn - Attic

Every day the matron comes in with the mail. She stands in the bull pen and calls out names — there are letters from lawyers and lovers and families and busy-bodies — sometimes there is money or a card — for a while the letters are being read — slowly, painfully — everything is quiet except the murmur of Kathy reading to Dorothy who never got around to going to school. Then Rose laughs at something in the letter from Seagullville. “Sherman says he’s gained five pounds since he’s been there — he’s gained two and George has gained three! He calls it George!” Then they talk and show letters — or cry or sit still looking at nothing with a letter hanging from their fingers.

The matrons read all the mail before they hand it out — every letter is read before it is mailed from the tank. People who have been here a while pay no attention to who reads it besides the addressee. They write anything — everything — or dictate it to whoever is handy if they haven’t got “the hang of lettering.”

Patsy got no mail while she was here.

Blendina has never received a piece of mail.

I got a letter about two weeks after I came here. It had been mailed in the jail and read by the deputy — it went down to the K.C.P.O. — came back and was read by the matron — then I got it. It was from Dean — a guy who had been working with my magazine crew. He got busted the same day I was for burglary. If he knocked on a door and nobody answered he broke in. They traced his robberies through nearly every town we had stopped in from Seattle to Boston — New Orleans to Kansas City.

He was a big loud brag. He bumped against girls and came on as sincere as a used-car salesman.

We all hated him. He always had money. Once in the car between Green River and Laramie he had singed my eyelashes when his butane lighter flamed too high. The manager looked at him hard. “Where did you get that lighter?” “I found it.” He stuck it into his pocket and was quiet a while.

The letter said he was sorry for what he’d done — that everyone had been very kind to him and he was going to straighten up and get a good job when he got out. He prayed a little at the end. I tore it up and took a shower. I used to look at him out of the corners of my eyes sometimes.

The other letter came a long time later. It surprised me because nobody on the outside knew I was there. I hadn’t written out. It was in ball-point pen on ruled notepaper in a big dumb hand. It said:

“You don’t know me but I heard about you from Horace [the crew manager]. I use to work on a mag. crew and would like to help if you’ll let me. I know a good lawyer who could get you off. I’ll come and see you this Sunday and we can talk about it. If there’s anything you need like money or cigarettes or anything just let me know. Your friend Jerry Simmons.”

I folded it up carefully with the ring holes inside and put it in my pocket. I lay on the bunk. That was Friday. Saturday I thought he would be blond and young and concerned with “human rights.” I washed my hair and brushed it dry and went to bed early.

Sunday is visitors’ day. At the far end of the bull pen there are three little windows in the wall at eye level. They look like portholes — the glass is thick and brown from some old fire. Beneath each window is a grid. It is a microphone and speaker. You can’t see anything through the windows unless you know what you’re looking for. The speakers crackle any voice. The visitors stand in the hall outside and shout through a speaker — the inmates stand at the windows inside and shout. You’re not allowed in the bull pen during visiting hours unless you have a visitor — then they call your name. You come out of the cell fast. It’s very noisy. There are girls crowding at the windows jumping and shouting each to different people outside. They reach up their hands and touch the glass and someone on the other side touches their hand through the glass. Everyone shouts. No one can hear. Someone says “Let me see you” and a girl runs back and jumps up on the bull pen table to pose and primp and laugh. Someone says “Let me see you” and someone outside moves to the far side of the hall and poses and turns around and spreads their hands. There are fights through the glass, and flirtations, insults and innuendoes, slights and questions. Questions — what when why when who when when when. It starts at one o’clock right after lunch and goes on till three. Then it stops.

All morning long there is fixing of hair and makeup and ironing of uniforms.

Every week Jean washes her pink hair and rats it into cotton candy high on her head and draws thick red eyebrows that arch and then drop down to her cheekbones and takes off her size fourteen and puts on a size ten uniform and her best bra and paints her nails siren red and shows the picture of Pudge with her D.A. and cabby’s shoulders.

Joyce puts her short poodle cut up in pink foam rollers and then combs it into bangs and puts on blue eye shadow and dark lipstick and smooths her uniform over her high full breasts and long sloping buttocks.

Every week Kathy wets her pale hair and slicks it back into a D.A. with a short black comb — pushing it back over the ears with the heels of her hands.

Every week Dorothy spends the night with her long hair in rags so the corkscrews will be firm and full for Sunday. She stands in front of the mirror practicing pooching her lips so her gums don’t show when she speaks.

And all the others — even me this time — he might want me — but never Blendina.

Lunchtime — we can’t eat — oxtail stew again — the small bones rolling on our tongues.

The tank is warm — the pillow on my bunk is thick and white — sheets, a blanket — a pencil—4 cell is all right — you don’t have to be sociable and chatter all the time — you can’t — but then usually I don’t want to anyway.

We are so afraid of eating each other. Sharks do — wolves do — it is irresistible — there are no vegetarian summer camps in the sea — the messiah leads his enclave of rusted adolescents to the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais where they consume carrot cookies and high protein vegetable patties with pure cane sugar cubes waiting for the end of the world and casting each other’s horoscopes — in the winter with the snow crusting we sat by the heater listening to newscasts of UFO sightings while Mother told us that when the aliens came they would want a few very special people to take back with them to study. She said I would be one and I sat hugging myself waiting anxiously for them to arrive — I was ready to go then and dreamed that night on my belly with my head on my arm that I woke and the pale soft hairs on my arms were long and silky and thick as goat’s hair and all over my body the white goat’s hair was growing. The Goat Woman would know — she lived in a trailer by the garbage dump and all the sick animals went to her with her cotton dresses and her shoes cut from inner tubes — she never combed her hair and the animals lived there undisturbed. I would run tiptoe desperate over the grass afraid to step on the bugs — the million bugs who would meet me in heaven when I died — and never pick a flower — never eat meat or milk or eggs for fear of them — not love of them but fear of meeting them alive in me — how disgusting they all were — the living things — and I sitting in the tree above the brindle bull giggling as the Goat Woman went past and carefully not touching what she touched and carefully not shitting near the well or the garden for fear of typhoid in the rutabagas — great bleeding yellow typhoid tomatoes.

It’s time. Glad-Ass is calling me. It’s slow and thick all the way to the window — looking through with my hands braced against the wall of the tank — hair floating behind me — he has yellow eyes he is yellow and dark with orange hair he looks at me with holes in his face — pimple scars in Man-Tan his nails are black at the glass his teeth are showing long and bucked and black with pale vaulting gums he is tall and cheap and looks past me at Goldie dancing on the table with her long jaw hanging below black lipstick he says Hey! You know I tried to get that little piece in a bar out on Michigan Avenue a month or so ago but we couldn’t agree on the price. He is talking — looking at me again from the yellow eyes — he wants me to move back so he can see me and I hate the saddle shoes two sizes too big and my bare legs where they won’t let me have a razor to shave them and my arms feel thick and everybody else’s argument gets tangled in the conversation. He wants me to admit I did it and he knows a lawyer if I’ll live with him in Santa Monica he has plenty of money and used to manage his own magazine crew. He can see I’m no dumby his eyes looking at Goldie but no I’ve got class and are a smart chick and have probably had a lot of help learning how to keep a fellow happy and I say yes yes of course and when? he’s gone.