Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

It was a story meant to be told in a different way, he thought reasonably, protectively.

“You can go back for the installation of the stone,” Loup said. “There’s always the next opportunity.”

Cliff looked at him meekly but the older man was looking away, studying someone across the room, someone whom he had greeted earlier and already dismissed.

A Mr. Hill was doing my paperwork.

“What will you take away from this experience,” he asked me.

I looked at him, a little wildly, I guess.

“What do you think you will learn from the incarceration experience?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Mr. Hill wore a pink shirt and looked tired. His eyes were bloodshot.

“Have you been swimming,” I asked.

“I haven’t been swimming,” he said frankly.

I thought of Mr. Hill doing a strenuous butterfly in a blue cool but overchlorinated pool deep in the earth beneath the Mission.

I had been in jail but a single day and night when they realized they had overlooked the wedding ring on my hand. I wasn’t married anymore but couldn’t get the ring off. My knuckles were swollen possibly because of the prednisone I’d been taking because I was tired, so tired. It was just a cheap gold band but I made a terrible fuss when they said they’d have to cut it off. Some of the girls had gathered around.

“They’re gonna cut off her wedding ring,” one muttered with amused awe.

I asked for Mr. Hill. He might tell them not to bother, I thought. I was only in for nine days.

But they couldn’t find Mr. Hill or he had in the meanwhile sickened or died, I don’t know.

They were determined to cut off my ring and after several attempts with a variety of implements they did. They took pictures. First the little ring was on my lumpish hand, then the poor broken thing was zipped up in a baggie for safekeeping and future retrieval. I didn’t regret the mangling of the ring as much as the disclosure heard throughout the dorm that I would be there for a mere nine days. Most of the girls were serving ninety or a hundred and eighty days. One girl, Lisa, who even with my paucity of instinctual knowledge terrified me, had been here since September and it was now June.

It was Sunday evening and on Sunday evenings there was Snack, a bottle of Pepsi and a packaged cookie. Usually you had to pay for this stuff out of the machines. Two inmates with magnificent hair distributed Snack, which was allocated by bunk number. Everyone except the guards had the most astonishing hair. I didn’t want to call any more attention to myself so I lined up with the others but someone had already used my number to double-dip.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“You didn’t pick up Snack already?” one of the gloriously maned girls demanded.

“It’s perfectly all right,” I assured her.

“Somebody take her cookie?” the other said, her eyes darkening.

“Some bitch took her cookie.”

“Really, it’s fine,” I said. “I didn’t—”

“I’m gonna find the bitch took her cookie!” She looked around with unsettling purpose.

“Please, please, please,” I said.

“She don’t want to get the bitch in trouble,” the first one said, not altogether approvingly.

They pushed a warm soda and a cold cookie into my hands.

“You can give me them if you don’t want it,” the girl behind me said.

I was DUI, which was so boring in the vast scheme of things and particularly in the louche gray world of the Mission. DUIs were beneath interest and I had already experienced girls looking right through me in a practiced way even though this would change if the particulars of my case became known. I had been drinking Manhattans all afternoon for reasons that remain obscure and when returning home had driven off the road into the city’s largest cemetery, demolishing seven headstones before my old Suburban stopped. If one of those girls had a friend or family member whose marker had been so desecrated, God himself wouldn’t be willing to help me.

The first policeman on the scene said, “You’re lucky you didn’t kill somebody.” Naturally, he was laughing.

This happened four months ago. I didn’t go to jail right away. First they took me to a place called the Pit, where more or less endless processing is conducted. There’s a water fountain and a phone. My only companion was a woman saying “Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom. Mom. Mom” into the receiver. I don’t think anyone was on the other end. I think she was just trying to pass time in the Pit.

Do you know that Kafka is buried with his mother and father in Prague? Their names are on his stone. He couldn’t get away from those people, not in life and not in death. I have never been to Prague but had I been and by some misfortune demolished Kafka’s headstone, the rage of the people there, indeed the rage of people the world over, would not exceed that of the kinsmen of those whose rest was disturbed here in our little city’s largest cemetery. The families Dominguez and Schrage and Tapia and McNeil and Byrne and Pennington…they hated me. They howled for my ruin. I’d been told their anguish was existential and therefore without limit or promise of closure. Reparation would never be enough.

They let me go after twelve hours to deal with all the horrid things that would occupy me for years — the sentencing and community service and judgments, the lawyers and lawsuits and probation officers and trials and plea bargains and financial penalties and loss of privileges and rights. Nine days at the Mission might very well be the least of my burdens.

In the bunk next to me was a girl whose eyelids were tattooed. I had never seen anything like it. She was a vandal. She went out into nature, into state parks particularly, and hacked whatever she could to pieces. She hacked up trees and spray-painted SOMA on boulders and petroglyphs and interpretive signs. She had misread Brave New World, maybe in high school, I thought, but I wasn’t going to mention that to her or anything else.

“Have you ever read Brave New World, ” I asked.

She turned her head in my direction, closed her eyes, and very very slowly shook her head.

“OK,” I said. “Cool.”

You’re better off if you don’t count the days in jail. Never count the days. Time served does not go Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and so on but Monday to Tuesday, Tuesday to Wednesday, in that manner. It’s longer that way, which is how they want it.

One girl said that when she got out there was a job waiting for her decorating cakes. But she did not have high hopes for the position. “You can’t be real creative,” she said. “It’s not as creative as you’d think.”

I just overhear these things, no one ever speaks to me. For example, I heard that Lisa was in for armed robbery and three of the five fathers of her children had restraining orders against her. One afternoon Lisa looked at a girl who had left her boyfriend for dead with a knife in his head as they were traveling by bus to Key West — just left him in the seat when she exited in Key Largo — and said, “Do you have anything you’d like to share?” Most of the girls kept food they’d bought from the machines in the drawers under their bunks. I was very frightened but the girl gave Lisa Snickers and Skittles and even a little bag of that Smartfood popcorn, all of which Lisa accepted in a gracious manner.

The next morning I saw Mr. Hill standing by the front station with some folders.

“Mr. Hill!” I cried.

“Hello, N. Frame,” he said.

“I’m not N. Frame,” I said, somewhat hurt, “unless she’s to be released today.”

“She is to be released today.”

“Then sure I am,” I said.