Читать книгу The Pink House - Trish MacEnulty - Страница 15

Saturday, June 10

Jen rode in the passenger seat of Lolly’s Honda Civic and stared out at the passing scenery. Highway 90 wasn’t much to look at except for the crepe myrtles waving in colors of white, pink and purple like girls in dresses. The sisters hadn’t said much to each other, though she could tell that Lolly wanted to talk about what they’d be doing that day.

Finally Jen asked, “Why do they call it a wellness program?”

“You can never say you are there for any kinds of arts programs. The legislators would have conniption fits if any coddling of the worthless criminals took place. I am there for ‘wellness.’ But that’s accurate enough. Words can be good medicine.”

“I guess they don’t see how the arts by themselves could be a benefit,” Jen said.

“Are you nervous?” Lolly asked.

Jen shrugged and asked, “Shouldn’t I be? I mean, these are convicted murderers and thieves, right?”

“Some of them are, but you know, that’s not what they do every day. Most of them just got into some kind of bad situation and couldn’t figure out how to get out. I try not to judge them.”

“Well, it’s not like I’ve been an angel my whole life,” Jen admitted. She’d never told Lolly about her Miami years, and yet she imagined that Lolly must have figured out some of it by now. There were whispers, rumors around Tallahassee. That’s probably why she couldn’t get a fulltime teaching job and had to scrape up a living as best she could. To think of all the thousands of dollars she’d made and blown in those few short months: right up her and Lyle’s noses.

“What I think you’re going to find is that these women are incredibly talented and willing to take risks. You’ll love them. I know I do,” Lolly said.

“You would, Lolly,” Jen said. “I just hope you don’t let any of them take advantage of you.”

Lolly glanced over at her. Lolly had thick Frida Kahlo eyebrows and freckles across the bridge of her nose.

“How much advantage can they take? They’re locked up. Some of them for decades,” Lolly said.

Jen didn’t answer.

“You’ll be amazed at how talented they are,” Lolly said. “I have one who is a really good writer. I actually sent a couple of her poems out after the poetry class and they were taken by a literary magazine. And last week, when I met with them, I brought in a monolog from The Trojan Women. Wow. Some of them were really good. Of course, some of them are not so good, but we’ll find things for them to do.”

Jen mused. “But they’re convicted felons, right? I guess I’m having a hard time imagining this. Do they have any education?”

“Some of them have been to college. In fact, Lucille has a master’s degree. They all have to have a GED or high school diploma to take the program. That’s their rules, not mine. Personally I would open it to everyone, but that’s not the way it works.

“What about behavior problems?”

“We shouldn’t have many problems. They all want to be in the program. It’s like a form of escape for them, and if they screw up, they won’t get to come back. You have to understand they only let twelve women in and those are probably going to be among the more peaceful.”

“So, no murderers?”

“Oh, we’ll have a couple of murderers, but, Jen, it wasn’t like they were going around murdering people every day of their lives. One time. One moment of their life. People make mistakes. You ought to know that.”

“Bite me.”

“God, why do you take everything so personally?”

Jen didn’t answer.

Lolly turned off the state road and drove down the long winding road that led to nowhere but the prison. Jen soon saw the turrets and the shining silvery gleam of the fences. A thick bank of purple and black clouds hung over the prison but gold fingers of sunlight snuck around and under the clouds. The parking lot was in full sun.

“One of the women once told me that it rains right on top of them,” Lolly said. “She said, ‘You can see the sun shining just on the other side of the fence while we’re standing in the durn rain.’”

The heat rose up from the tar of the parking lot in waves.

“Let’s go,” Lolly said. She grabbed her satchel and headed toward the Control Room. Jen followed. “Be ready to smile. You always smile at the guards. And they never smile back. But if you don’t smile, you’re likely to stand in between fences forever: prison’s purgatory. Or else they’ll decide you need to be searched. Every time the protocol is different.”

They stood at the window and Jen noticed a big barrel of sand beside the gate. A sign said it was for “spent casings.” She wasn’t sure the logistics of the barrel and the spent casings (from shotguns?) but it held a violent significance. Perhaps there was reassurance in that—you knew you were entering a world where you were powerless, completely at the mercy of those who wore guns and pushed buttons that swung open the steel gates. You always knew where you stood. Lolly slid her driver’s license through the metal slot toward a woman dressed in a brown uniform, and Jen followed suit with her faculty I.D. since she didn’t have a license for the time being.

“Lolly Johanssen with the Department of Corrections Wellness Program. This is Jen Johanssen. We’re scheduled to give a workshop today,” Lolly explained. “We should be on your list.”

The woman looked at Lolly’s driver’s license, then pushed a button, and Lolly and Jen walked through the first gate. It clanged shut behind them. They now stood in a six-foot square area between two locked gates, looking out at a few pink buildings with flowers planted in front of them. Lolly pointed to the buildings

“That area is called Zone One,” Lolly said. “There’s a library, the drug treatment center where my classes always take place and a few classrooms for GED students. Just beyond that other fence down there is the compound.”

Jen noticed that prisoners, identifiable by their shapeless gold shifts or their blue jeans and blue workshirts, all walked right along the edge of the road. She asked Lolly about it.

“See that yellow line about a foot from the edge of the road? The women have to walk in that one-foot area or they’ll get written up. After three ‘write ups’ they could wind up in the box or lose their gain-time. On the other hand, we are allowed to walk all over the road.”

“It seems an odd and arbitrary means of control,” Jen said. “And what is ‘gain-time’?”

“Like time off for good behavior.”

They stood at the second gate waiting for it to open. Thunder drummed in the distance. A group of women in blue began strolling up from the compound. A tall African-American woman was in front.

“There’s Lucille,” Lolly said.

Lucille waved, and Lolly waved back from behind the gate at the other end of the road.

“She’s wonderful. A little boisterous, but very warm. When I had her for poetry, she used to write about fishing and cooking and a life far in her past. Nicole is with her. Now, there’s a diamond in the rough.”

“Is she the one you mentioned before?” Jen asked.

Lolly nodded and then said impatiently, “When are the guards going to open the damn gate and let us through?”

“You’re probably the only person in the world who actually wants to get inside a prison.”

The gate finally opened and they stepped through. Jen jumped as the gate clanked behind her, but Lolly didn’t even seem to hear it. She was intent on the crowd of women in blue work shirts and jeans standing in front of the low cinder block building to the right. She marched toward them with Jen following.

“Hey, Ms. Lolly,” a short cute young woman with caramel-colored skin said.

“Hey, Nicole. Hey, everybody,” Lolly smiled big and waved.

“We’re so glad to see you,” the tall woman said.

“I’m glad to see y’all, too, Lucille,” Lolly said.

Jen felt an odd curiosity. She was used to being the center of attention. Hadn’t she craved attention all her life? Some goddamn dimestore psychologist said it stemmed from the birth of Lolly which was followed shortly thereafter by the desertion of their father. Of course, Jen could barely remember when their father lived with them. But there had been a few sporadic visits that ended when she was eleven. “Some men aren’t cut out for fatherhood,” her mother said and left it at that. But what, Jen had wondered, would he have done if there’d only been one little girl to take care of, not two.

All of it, of course, had been aggravated by Lolly’s cancer. Well, maybe the therapist was on to something. Nothing made Jen happier than to be looked at and fawned over. That was how Lyle and Irv had persuaded her to take off her clothes and have sex in front of a camera crew. But she found that it wasn’t the same as an audience’s applause. It wasn’t the same thing at all.

Now she was not the center of attention. Once again it was Lolly. She wondered what these women saw in her goofy younger sister. They were watching her with sharp, inquisitive eyes.

“This is Dr. Jen, everybody,” Lolly said. Lolly had warned Jen that she had to use some sort of title, but Jen didn’t like it. The whole ‘doctor’ thing felt pretentious, especially since she hadn’t technically gotten the degree. But one of the women—the tall one who had big freckles across her reddish-toned face, the one Lolly had addressed as “Lucille”–solved the problem.

“Hey, Doc,” she said with a big grin.

Jen grinned back. “Doc. I like that.”

Jen was swept up in impressions of faces. As she walked in, a woman who was distinctly Native American with thick black hair and large brown eyes said, “Welcome.”

“Thank you,” Jen said.

“Oh, Alice,” Lolly said. “I’m so glad you signed up for the class.”

“Well, I’m not much for acting, but I thought I could help with the sets and stuff like that,” Alice answered with a sort of humility that made Jen suspect she had gifts beyond the ordinary.

“Oh, Lolly,” the short woman said. “We missed you all week long. I’ve been writing some poems and I want you to see them.”

“Nicole be always with her face in that journal of hers, Ms. Lolly,” another woman chimed in. This woman had very dark black skin and large teeth in an enormous smile.

“Shut up, Daffy,” Nicole said. Now the one with the killer smile had a name. A very quiet brown-skinned woman, who looked like a librarian, followed them. And a short blond white girl with a swagger came behind her. Then a couple of Spanish women and a slightly aloof woman who looked Middle European. There was something so ordinary looking about them all that Jen felt ashamed about any misgivings she’d had.

They filed into the room. Jen felt as if she were following Lolly’s entourage as the women crowded around her, talking about what kind of week they had.

Lolly was clearly in control as she sat in the circle of women.

“We’re going to open up with a quick writing exercise. Then I’ll introduce our guest to you and we can start learning something about how to make plays. Does that sound good?” Lolly asked.

The women nodded.

Lolly and the women were soon writing furiously on sheets of paper that Lolly had handed out. They spent about ten minutes writing and then sharing what they had written. Lolly seemed to have something insightful to say about each piece. Then she turned to Jen with her wide smile. Jen felt she was looking at a complete stranger.

“Jen, I mean Doc, is going to be working with us to help us learn some acting techniques, and she is also going to help us put together our production. So I’ll work with the writers and she’ll direct the skits or whatever it is we decide to do. Doc has been working on her doctorate degree in Theater Arts from Florida State University. She’s also an accomplished actress. You may have seen her in that Pizza Delight commercial? Anyway, she does tons of theater around Tallahassee and just recently directed the Young Actors Troupe in some Shakespeare adaptations for the Shakespeare Festival.”

Jen was glad Lolly left out the dipsomania and sleeping with a married man part out of the brief intro. Lolly looked at her expectantly, and Jen figured it was show time.

“One thing actors always do is warm up,” Jen said. “And this exercise will help me learn your names as well. It’s called Sound and Motion. So, if you’ll all stand up. Stay in your circle, though. Now what we do is each person says their name out loud and follows it with some kind of motion. Then the rest of the group has to say the name and do the exact same motion. Like I’ll say, Doc,” Then Jen lifted her arms and twirled once. “Now you have to say Doc and do the same thing I just did.”

The thing Jen liked about this exercise was that she could nearly always identify even in this simple exercise who had the brassiness and the imagination for good theater and who was going to need work.

No surprise that Daffy with the big smile could project and come up with a fun dipping dance motion. Alice, the Native American, was a little more shy but was obviously well liked. Nicole added a snap and a strut to her motion but her voice didn’t carry well. There were various levels of enthusiasm – a key ingredient for theatrical success – but one surprise was the quiet woman who looked vaguely middle European. She had been slightly aloof up till the instant she announced her name, “Sonya,” with a flourish and then did a few moves from a belly dance.

“Good,” Jen said with a smile when they were done. Lolly seemed to be happy with the results as well, and Jen had a tiny hope that perhaps this group of women could create something exciting, something beautiful, together.

Her initial impressions were confirmed in the next exercise—an improvisation in which one character is hiding something from another.

“Lolly and I will demonstrate,” she said. “Okay, Lolly, there’s something you’re hiding. Something you don’t want me to know.”

Lolly nodded. They stood at the end of the room with the women forming a half-circle around them.

“What’s wrong?” Jen asked.

“Nothing. Why do you ask?”

“You seem distracted.”

“I’m not distracted.”

“You just poured salt into your coffee,” Jen said, indicating an invisible cup of coffee. She noticed the women register the pretense. You could tell when an idea traveled, and this was a new idea for them.

“Um, that’s part of a new diet,” Lolly answered. “Haven’t you heard about it? I saw it on Oprah.”

“Really?” Jen asked, skeptically. “You don’t watch Oprah.”

“You don’t know what I do when you’re not around. I watch Oprah, Sally Jesse Raphael, Montel. All of them.”

“Why is that? Is something wrong?”

“No, I told you nothing is wrong.”

“There must be if you’re watching all those personal advice shows.”

“I just find them entertaining.”

“Really? Hey, what’s this? A letter?” Jen picked up an imaginary envelope. Lolly reached out and snatched it from her hands.

“None of your business.”

“But it is my business,” Jen said and then lowered her voice, “I’m your husband.”

Several of the women laughed in surprise. Lolly pretended to put the envelope behind her back.

“Are you going to tell me?”

“It’s test results from a biopsy I had. I have a lump in my breast.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want you to leave me?”

“Leave you? I’ll never leave you. Open the envelope. What do the results say?”

The women leaned forward, watching in anticipation as Lolly pretended to open the envelope. Then she smiled.

“Curtain,” Jen said. Then she dropped out of character and faced the women. “That’s how we signify the end. You don’t want to drag the scene out too long. It’s something you sort of develop a feel for, so until you get the hang of it, I’ll call curtain for you. But do you get the idea? Good. I have a stack of cards here with secrets on them that you can use for your improv or you can make up your own. Okay, let’s have two volunteers.”