Rebecca Coleman: Inside These Walls

Janny nods. She’s sitting on the stool beside our desk, rubbing Vaseline into her hands. She has been here for fifteen years—first-degree murder was her charge—and although the canteen sells hand lotion now, she still uses the Vaseline that was the only offering when she first arrived. Every week I help her prepare her canteen order, and every week she requests the same things: Rolaids, sensitive toothpaste, hot cocoa, chicharrones and her Vaseline. A few years ago the canteen stopped carrying the type of shampoo she ordered—a Mexican import—because the State of California decided it contains a carcinogen. They offered a different Mexican shampoo in its place, but she always mixes up the names, maybe because she has never seen the bottle, maybe because of her memory problems. So once a month she says “Vanart” and once a month I check the Gizeh box.

“I’m glad you didn’t go to the Hole for throwing milk on that white girl,” Janny says. “You go to the Hole, they gotta send me with you. And I don’t like it there.”

“They would have put you back in Med Seg. They wouldn’t punish you because of what I did.”

“ Please don’t do stupid stuff like that, Clara. I got five years left here, and I don’t want no drama.”

I sit beside her on the bed. “I’m sorry.”

She smiles indulgently. Pats my hand with her sticky one. “You want to show me some more about that Braille? We got some time left before chow hall, right?”

“Fifteen minutes.”

I take out the pages I’ve typed up for her in the workshop—the names of her three children, her mother and Jesus, each on its own line. Secretly I doubt she’ll ever learn all the letters. We’ve been working on these same five words for more than a year but she’s making slow progress, and that brings her joy. And so it brings me joy, too.

A few days later, as I’m carrying Janny’s Styrofoam dinner tray to our table in the chow hall, the crackly-haired girl strides straight toward me and punches me in the face. Pain slashes across my cheekbones, fogs my vision. A joyous cheer rises up from her friends, and I take two large steps backward to allow the guards to step in, which they do, quickly. The blouse of my jumpsuit is speckled with blood, red on pale blue. The pain is throbbing, but not insurmountable. Someone in a gray uniform hands me a messy wad of paper napkins, and as soon as I press them to my nose they go crimson.

“That was for the Koreans,” somebody shouts, and a bunch of people laugh.

The girl and I are, once again, escorted down separate hallways—her in handcuffs to the disciplinary offices, me to the clinic. I stand in the doorway with my bloodied napkins, and the nurse says, “Oh, Ms. Mattingly. I haven’t seen you in a while.”

I’m jostled toward a chair. There are three green cots in a row. One is occupied by a woman lying with her arm around her stomach and a kidney-shaped dish beside her, which contains a film of vomit. The other two are empty, although one is surely intended for the heavily pregnant woman pacing by the cabinets. She stops and hunches over a little, eyes closed, bobbing slightly at the shoulders. Her nostrils flare. I wonder what they’ve drugged her with, and whether that’s a standard procedure now or something you can buy with canteen funds. A woman with finely styled hair, wearing a black Department of Social Services name badge, sits in a chair along that wall reading a paperback. I know her role. Spirit away the infant as soon as it emerges, replacing it with a stack of paperwork. The government’s official Rumpelstiltskin.

The nurse peels back the wad of napkins from my nose. “Janny Hernandez needs someone to get her dinner,” I say thickly. “Can you call somebody down?”

“I’m sure they’ve got it.”

“The spaghetti needs to be plain.”

“They’ll deal with it, Ms. Mattingly.” The nurse touches my nose with a tentative gloved finger. “My, my. Well, I don’t think she broke it. You didn’t fight back, did you?”

“No.”

“That’s a good girl.” I snap my head up to look at her with narrowed eyes, and the guard’s hand drops to my shoulder. A trickle of blood bursts from my nose again, pooling on my bottom lip, and I taste its copper.

“Easy now.” She hands me a wet-wipe and a thick rectangle of wound cotton. “You get yourself cleaned up, and then back you go.”

The C.O. walks me back to my cell. It’s the nice officer, Sergeant Schmidt, a thick-shouldered woman who wears her strawberry blond hair in a low bun. She has been here for a long time. “I’ll get an inmate to bring your dinner. Somebody’ll take care of Janny, don’t you worry.”

“She can’t eat tomato products, and it’s spaghetti night. That’s the problem. They have to ask for plain spaghetti for her, no sauce, or she’ll get heartburn. And she forgets, so if they give it to her with sauce, she’ll eat it by accident.”

“Calm down . You think you’re the only one who can handle Ms. Hernandez?” She offers me a wry smile as she locks the bars. “Put your feet up for a few. Write a letter to Mr. Pugh. Now you’ve got an interesting story to tell, right?”

She makes her slow way down the cellblock, and I sit on Janny’s bed and sigh, touching my nose cautiously to see if it’s still bleeding. I’d never tell Emory Pugh about anything like this. He’s a simple man, but I don’t trust that he wouldn’t sell juicier information to the kind of people who might publish it. Any time I begin to think the public’s interest has died down, a letter like Karen Shepard’s pops up to remind me none of this will ever go away. I’m beyond caring what anyone out there thinks of me, but it’s a matter of self-ownership. There’s hardly anything in this world that’s mine, and so I hold close my truths, my secrets.

When I was seven years old, my mother bought me the record album of Captain Kangaroo’s narration of The Nutcracker . It enchanted me to hear my own name coming from the hi-fi speakers because I had never known another Clara, and that Christmas season I lay on the braided rug for hours, listening to the story again and again. Look! Look! Through the keyhole! it began. Do you see what I see? The locked room Clara saw through the keyhole contained the wondrous Christmas tree, the toys and sugarplums, but also the evil Mouse Army and their ruthless king, the gingerbread men soon to be wounded in battle. Sometimes I feel like that room, closed off from all those piling up at the doorway and scrabbling for a glimpse. I am everything inside it. And though it is mostly tree and gift, light and candy, there is no story without the evil element. Without the heartless animal, it’s just a pretty dance.

When Father Soriano appears at my cell, his cassock broken by the gray bars like a Magritte painting, I am surprised. This is the hour of the day when many of the inmates attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings or anger management classes, including Janny, but I just stay in. I’m replying to the latest letter from Emory Pugh, who wrote that he went fishing and that the lake reminded him of my eyes. My eyes are brown, but the reality of who I am doesn’t really matter in this correspondence, so I only thank him. The second letter from Karen Shepard has already found a home in my trash can.

The C.O. unlocks my cell, and I offer the priest my chair. The bed feels like a strange place to sit to receive a visiting clergyman, almost suggestive, but the only alternative is the toilet, so I try to perch on the mattress in a proper way. I can see my mother in my mind’s eye, pulling up the string.

“Nice to see you at Mass this morning,” he says. He brushes a hand toward my magazine. “I see you get the Magnificat .”