Rebecca Coleman: Inside These Walls

“He’s getting along.” There’s no need for her to ask me. They read my mail and discuss it amongst themselves.

“Good old Southern men,” she says, and moves on.

I sit down on my stool and get to work on the drawing. I’m working on a college art history textbook, which is certainly the most lovely assignment I’ve had. The curriculum developer has selected ten paintings, representative of different periods and styles, to be recreated as tactile art. Shirley, the Braille program director, chose me for the task due to my meticulousness and high level of skill. Right now I am working on the foil mock-up of Van Gogh’s Starry Night , the seventh among the ten. I modify the textures according to color—the blues and yellows, the sea-green—to give a sense of variety, and try to preserve a sense of the brushstrokes, sweep and motion. To determine if I’m doing well, I occasionally close my eyes, clear my mind and then reach out to touch my work, trying to experience it as someone who has never seen anything in the world, least of all this painting. Over time I have gotten better and better at finding the mistakes. It’s a skill, learning to be blind. I believe I have gotten quite good at it.

I take up a toothpick and get to work on a small house in the foreground, hashing every other strip along the roof to indicate the lighter blue. My dream—I think about this often at night, while falling asleep or trying to—is to recreate Degas’ Int é rieur as a tactile drawing. It’s a painting of a woman slouched in her chair with her back to a man, who stands at the closed bedroom door in an attitude of tensed agitation, his hands pushed deep into his pockets. The shoulder of the woman’s chemise has slipped down. The room is dim but for a single overbright lamp in the center, illuminating an opened sewing box and the bed’s coverlet, which might be stained with blood. I try to imagine the parts I would accentuate. The man’s dark shadow, taller than himself, against the door; the woman’s vulnerable shoulder and strangely blurred eyes; the obscured map hung above the dresser, its streets reduced to a smear, a tangle. It would be difficult to capture all of this in foil, but I may try, and include it with the proof of the art history textbook in case they would like to use it. I can imagine a thousand copies of my handiwork spread across the world, with a thousand readers running their light fingertips across its hills and valleys, absorbing the story. My name would not be on it, of course, but most of them have probably heard of Clara Mattingly. Perhaps my name and this image will find each other in their minds, and somehow, they’ll know.

Most days, as I put on my special dancing socks and warm up before Afternoon Classics comes on, I listen to the brief news broadcast on NPR. I don’t have a television, but like everyone else in this place I am fascinated by crime and follow the latest tales of others’ mistakes out there in the world. For weeks I have been following the arrest of a young woman named Penelope Robbins, whose father, state Congressman Edwin Robbins, was shot in the back as he teed off at the country club. I can’t quite picture Penelope, but details about her life abound on every news broadcast. Nineteen years old, educated at Sacred Heart Country Day School, a conservative family, a strained relationship with her father due to an interracial relationship. I wonder how she feels about that—the details of her private family traumas trotted out to the media, turned into fodder for the merciless drumbeat of news reporting. Her connection to the shooting is hazy, but she’s been charged with obstruction of justice.

“I think she did it her own self,” my cellmate, Janny, declares as she sits on her bed, allowing me to plait her dark hair into a neat French braid. “Like in a telenovela . Come out from the trees, raise the gun. Close-up camera, scary church music, bang .”

I laugh a little. “I don’t think you could get away with that on a golf course. All that open space, remember? Too obvious.”

“Maybe.” She runs her hand softly down her braid. “Is it straight?”

“I think so.” She stands and I examine my handiwork. Janny is fifty-four years old and her eyesight would probably be failing her at this point regardless of circumstance, but in any case she’s already blind. Ten years ago a fight in the yard ended badly for her, and she has been like this ever since. For a while they kept her in Medical Segregation, but eventually they got the idea to put her with me and free up her spot there. It was a good move for both of us. I take care of her, and the Latina women stopped trying to kill me at regular intervals.

“Looks good,” I tell her. “But there’s ketchup on your blouse.”

“Oh, no.”

“I’ll find you a clean one.”

I help her change, and soon the C.O. comes to collect us. Saturday evenings are always the same for me. Afternoon Classics , then dinner in the chow hall, followed by confession in the office wing. Janny goes ahead of me and always takes a long time. For a while, as I wait, I think about the Robbins shooting, and then my thoughts wander to the particularities of Intérieur —the sharp beard and ear tips on the man in the doorway , and how easy they would be to capture with a toothpick or tortillion, which is a soft-pointed stick of tightly rolled paper. The challenge is mainly in the light. I’m very unsure of how to convey illumination to a person who can’t sense light—and yet it is so important to the image. Her bared shoulder. His long left side disappearing into the shadow. Sometimes I am allowed to bring in Janny to test my drawings, but the fight that took her vision also left her a bit mentally slow, and when she praises my work I can’t always be sure she’s right.

At long last Janny comes out, wiping her eyes as always. Deep wrinkles score the sides of her face, and she has a long, noble nose and crisp cheekbones—an Aztec look. It makes her look particularly pitiful when she cries, as if only a very terrible thing could have brought her so low. She sits carefully in the chair beside me, fingering her rosary and murmuring in Spanish.

I pat her arm, then stand and step through the doorway. Father Soriano is a diminutive, olive-skinned man whose face calls to mind the boy from the Karate Kid movie, now several decades worse for wear. He has been here for five or six years, and I suspect he’s ready for a new assignment.

“Nice to see you, Clara,” he says. He makes the sign of the cross.

I sit in the chair across from him and cross myself. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last confession.” I wait out a clamor in the hallway—an inmate shouting indignantly as she is hauled toward Administrative Segregation. “I’ve thought ill thoughts of other people, committed an act of sexual impurity and took money under false pretenses.”

He raises an eyebrow. “What false pretenses?”

“I let a man from North Carolina put twenty dollars into my canteen account. I didn’t ask him to, but I accepted it. He thinks he’s in love with me.”

The priest purses his lips in a considering way. “Did you promise him anything in return? Or falsely claim to return his love?”

“No.”

“Well, then, it sounds like it was a free-will gift.”

I shrug.

“What sexual impurity?” he continues.

“With myself. Once.”

“Is that everything?”

I nod.

He leans in, and I know what’s coming. I straighten up.

“What have you done to try to make amends to your victims?” he asks.

“I can’t do anything for them.”

“You could pray for their souls.”