When I returned to the common room, the women in front of the television shrank from me: they all knew why Polsen had called Dolores away, and they had watched from the shadows the byplay that took place when I went into the laundry. None of them wanted Polsen to think they supported me.
Back in my cell I wrote down a verbatim account of Polsen’s language and what I’d seen, with the date and the time. I interleaved the pages with a copy of Cosmo, which I’d bought at the commissary as a cover for my notes. When Freeman’s intern came out the next day to tell me my trial date was set for the last week in September, I managed to slide the magazine to her in a flurry of exchanging documents. I asked her to take the magazine away with her and keep it for me. I wasn’t sure what use I’d make of my notes, but I didn’t want to leave them in my cell—we’d already been locked down twice for searches in my short time at Coolis.
Before she left, the intern asked if I was ready to post bail. It was hard to say no, but I wanted to get a look at the clothes shop. I said I’d give it one more week before throwing in the towel.
I was pretty sure at least one CO was going into rooms on our wing after lights out—it was the only explanation I could think of for the banging doors and cries that sometimes woke me in the night. But none of the women ever said anything. There were several pregnancies in the prison, I noticed, among women who had been inside for over a year—in one case six years.
When I asked about it during my letter–writing sessions, the women clammed up. One of them whispered to me in line at dinner later that someone named Cynthia spent a year in solitary for filing a report on a CO who raped her. The prison said she made up the charge to try to shorten her time. After that, people were more afraid than ever to complain. Usually, too, if they got you pregnant they gave you drugs. “They say, oh, your cycle out of balance, you take these. Then you sick for three days, a week, and you lose the baby.”
Chemically induced abortions, in a country that banned RU–486. How enterprising of the Department of Corrections. I wondered who made the diagnosis and who dispensed the drugs, but we had gotten our trays and my informant scuttled across the floor to join her friends.
If Polsen decided to come into my cell after lights–out, what would I do? The thought made me lie tense in bed that night and for some nights after.
39 An Audience with Miss Ruby
At the start of my third week I was assigned to a kitchen shift, a miserable job, especially in summer. We lugged fifty–pound pots of food between stove and steam table, carried out mounds of refuse, slipped in grease on the filthy floor, got covered with burns from careless cooks flinging hot food around. The work paid sixty cents an hour. My coworkers were sullen and sloppy and made it harder to keep from getting injured.
The only job action available to Coolis workers was refusal to work. This led to a ticket, and enough tickets sent you to solitary confinement, but usually after your stint in segregation you got a new work assignment. Turnover was high in the kitchen, but I couldn’t afford time in segregation, so I grimly kept at my post.
“This isn’t a vacation resort,” the CO in charge would say if a woman complained of a burn or a sore back. “You should have thought of that before you thought a life of crime was fun. You’re not here for your health, but to learn a lesson.”
I had already learned that such medical care as existed was hard to come by. When a woman had hot grease spilled down her arm, the CO in charge of the kitchen upbraided her for crying over nothing. The next day she didn’t come in to work; I learned from the comments of the other women that her arm had become a mass of pustules in the night. She had been treated by the in–house “doctor,” a CO who had studied prenursing for a year at the local junior college before getting into Coolis.
The stench of the overboiled food and the sight of roaches and mouse droppings took away most of my appetite; if it hadn’t been for the fruit my clients brought me I don’t think I would have eaten. After a week in the kitchen I was so exhausted it was hard to remember why I’d decided to stay in jail instead of posting bail. I was lying on my bunk Friday night, trying to make up my mind whether to call Freeman and ask him to bail me out on Monday, when Solina came in to say that Miss Ruby had sent word over that she wanted to see me.
On my first day at Coolis, Cornish had sent me back to my cell with a reprimand because jail inmates were supposed to use recreation facilities at a different time than the prisoners, but I’d learned early that was a regulation the CO’s enforced only if they wanted an excuse to write you a ticket.