T. Boyle: Talk Talk

It wasn't so much the contrast between bologna-on-white and pad thai or the ambience of the cell as opposed to the restaurant with its exotic smells and the fish tanks and scurrying waiters and all the rest, or even the absurdity of the situation, the wrongness, the waste, but the fact that if this was dinner it was the first marker of time she'd had since they'd led her in here and locked her up. If this was dinner, then it must be six o'clock, six at least, and nobody had come for her, not Bridger, not a lawyer, not her mother in New York who could have made phone calls, pulled strings, shaken the earth to its molten core in her deaf daughter's behalf. There was nothing. Nothing but the walls and the bars and Angela, who, after an interval, curled up on the bunk opposite and absented herself in a deep drugged sleep.

If she'd been impatient and angry, now she was scared, lonely, distracted. She wanted out, only that, and she found herself pacing again, round and round the confines of the cell, one foot in the trace of the other, like some neurotic animal in a zoo. Something had gone wrong. Bridger couldn't get through to them. He couldn't raise the bail money, couldn't find a lawyer because all the lawyers in town had shut down their offices for the weekend. Worse: more charges kept coming in, this other Dana Halter, whoever she was, off on a regular crime spree. Tulare County. Where in God's name was Tulare County, anyway? Couldn't they see-couldn't “anybody” see-that it didn't have anything to do with her? She hugged her arms to herself and kept pacing. There was nothing else she could do.

At some point-it might have been an hour later or even two: there was no way to know in this place-the door at the end of the corridor swung open and the taller of the two policewomen appeared, her right arm supporting the elbow of a blond woman who looked to be in her late thirties/early forties and who seemed to be having trouble standing upright. Down the corridor they came, the woman leaning heavily into her escort, and then the door to the cell stood briefly open, Angela rousing herself to fire off a few random curses before dropping her head to the cradle of her arms, and their number had grown to three. The door slammed shut with what must have been a boom-doors were always booming in books-and then the policewoman was gone and the blond woman stood there befuddled, as if she couldn't quite make sense of the sequence of events, the arm at the elbow, the opening and shutting of the door, the turning of the key in the lock and the interposition of vertical cylinders of steel between her and the naked gray wall of the corridor.

She looked round her in bewilderment, both hands clinging to the bars, before slowly subsiding to the floor. She was drunk, that much was evident, but as a drunk per se she was the antithesis of Angela. Her hair, which looked as if it had been washed, set and dried at the salon ten minutes earlier, was parted just to the right of center and fell glistening to her shoulders. She was wearing a matching navy blue skirt and jacket, very business-like, with a fresh white carnation pinned to the breast, a white silk blouse and sheer hose, but no shoes-they must have taken her heels away when they booked her. Dana was trying to decide whether she was a lawyer or maybe a real estate lady when the woman fixed her eyes on her and gave her a full, dazzling wide-lipped smile. “Hi,” she said. “My name's Marcie, what's yours?”

Angela stirred herself, raised her head and said something in response. Dana watched her lips round and draw back in a grimace. “She's deaf,” that was what it was.

Dana ignored her. “I'm Dana,” she said.

“Pleased to meet you,” Marcie said. And added something she didn't catch.

Angela said something then. “I'm telling you,” it looked like. “She's deaf.” And then something else. And then, to Marcie, she made the sign for a smoke.

Marcie was still grinning. “I'm drunk,” she said, ignoring Angela and staring into Dana's eyes from where she sat on the floor with her knees tucked up under her. She moved her lips mechanically, enunciating as slowly and exactly as she could. “They made me walk the line and sing the alphabet. Isn't that a riot?”

Neither of them had anything to say to that. Even if Dana had interpreted her correctly, and there was no assurance of that, the rhetoric was questionable: they were in jail, all three of them, whether guilty or innocent, drunk or sober. And that was no riot-it wasn't even funny.

At the county jail-a bus had come for them in some dead hour of the night and they were made to line up, submit to leg restraints and handcuffs and shuffle aboard-the three of them were put into a larger cell already occupied by six sleep-deprived, angry-looking women in various stages of degradation and despair. Two of them had the faded blue outline of a scorpion tattooed on the right side of their throats, and one, a massive baby-faced teenager whose head had been shaved to stubble, looked as if she could break through the wall without working up a sweat. The other three-thin Asian girls wearing heavy makeup and all but lost in the orange prison jumpsuits-might have been prostitutes. They all might have been prostitutes for all Dana knew. And what difference did it make? She was one of them now, and if she had to sleep on the floor because a quick calculation showed nine people sharing six bunks, she would. She'd do whatever it took if only she could get through this, if only the nightmare would end.

She was wearing her own orange jumpsuit by now, her clothes-even her shoes and underwear-taken from her and replaced with well-washed easy-care cotton (SAN ROQUE COUNTY JAIL was emblazoned across the shoulders in six-inch letters) and a pair of cheap flip-flops, courtesy of the taxpayers of San Roque County. Angela had come to life the minute they entered the cell-she embraced the big girl as if they were sisters, then immediately trolled for cigarettes, employing the same pantomime gesture she'd used on Dana and Marcie. That was the last thing Dana remembered clearly, because what followed were two nights and two interminable days of focused aggression. She was repeatedly backed up against the wall trying to explain herself with her lips and her hands while one woman or another breathed some sort of malcontent's tirade in her face. “Didn't she have anything to offer, no cigarettes, lozenges, gum, makeup, nothing? What was she, stupid? Deaf and dumb, right?” And then there'd be an arch look for the rest of the cell and all their faces (except Marcie's: she'd been bailed out the first morning) would twist with the kind of cruel glee Dana had endured all her life. But this was worse. It was special. It was like being on the playground at Burgess Elementary all over again, and they never got tired of the routine because she couldn't answer them, or not quickly enough and not in any recognizably human accent, and so she was their pincushion, their totem, the only animate thing in sight that could make them feel better about themselves through all the long hours of brooding and hate.

On Monday morning, at four a. m. by the clock at the end of a long hall that led to the fresh air and the sick-sweet punishing smell of exhaust that rode heavily atop it, they were herded back onto the buses, women on one side, men on the other. Dana was beyond despair. She felt numb to everything, cauterized against the humiliation of using the toilet in the middle of a brightly lit room while seven other women watched her, dead to the clasp of the chains round her ankles and the cuffs that pinned her left wrist to the big girl's right, rinsed clean of any memory of student papers, her apartment, her job, her boyfriend, even innocence. This was her life, these chains, these abusive, ignorant and foul-smelling women, two slices of white bread, a sliver of bologna, one red squirt of ketchup. This, only this.