Sylvia tossed the phone onto her daughter Ava’s couch. Her daughter bought from IKEA everything she didn’t drag out of people’s trash. Ava called it Dumpster diving, but Sylvia had other names for it. Turns out there were plenty of good reasons to throw stuff away. Sylvia tried to get the image of Marcus on a chain gang being dragged by bigger prisoners out of her mind. Every visual she had about prison came from shadowy Charles Bronson movies with snarling men in gangs, the lead prisoner either a skinhead or a giant very black man with laughing minions in his wake egging him on. She prayed those scenes were from some pampered white writer’s Hollywood ideas and not what Marcus had to endure. What could she do about that? She had no say, no control, nothing at all to say about what happened to Marcus in his locked-up life. Instead of further frustrating her, his calls made her feel strangely useful though she knew she had done practically nothing. She had the same kind of feeling she used to get from working out at the gym. The gym. The word felt foreign and difficult in her mouth, like when she accidentally said porridge. She had forgotten the smug virtue she had felt going. Just telling somebody she was on her way to the gym or that she needed to go to the gym or finally that she missed her visits to the gym had a certain satisfaction. Virtuous was the word. Virtue without sweat was still satisfying, do not be misled.
Though she tried to relax, Sylvia couldn’t get comfortable on the hard too-little couch. She would not say another word to Marcus about Devon. He had enough on his plate without thinking about a man he’d never even met and besides that too much had happened for Devon to return. The lie she told to Marcus was not easily untold. But nothing was easy about her relationship with Marcus. Not relationship, that wasn’t the word. Relationship sounded both too formal and too intimate at the same time. Friendship? Desperate collision of desperate people?
Prisoners at the minimum security prison could make phone calls three times a week. Some of the very sad ones called random numbers to get someone, anyone to accept charges and get a message to a loved one. Marcus had used up his loved ones and improbably Sylvia had become his best and only friend. Why Sylvia answered Marcus’s call in the first place was a mystery. Why she accepted the charges that day months ago, she could not really say. All she knew for sure was the ordinary days melted into each other and the spark of the new thing drew her in. Boredom can be an answer. Wasn’t it always an answer? But the reason that nagged at her and threatened to take her breath was that growing certainty that she had failed her mother, her children, even her piece of man husband. A voice bubbled up like heartburn and popped softly in her head; you have ruined everything.
Marcus had just turned twenty-five, young, black, and in that first five-minute conversation had told her that he was an ugly duck in a family of pretty ducks. No swans to speak of, none that he’d mentioned anyway, but a lot of pretty ducks. She imagined him chubby with a round schoolboy’s face. His hair too short for the current styles, his clothes neat and matching, like his mother picked them out in the mornings. He said that he was a father and hadn’t seen his daughter for seven months. He told her about his girlfriend who was disappointed now, but who might love him again. He wanted Sylvia to know that he was a nice man from good people who kept their houses clean, didn’t set cars on blocks in their yards, didn’t hang their oversize panties and BVDs on the clothesline for just anybody to see. He wanted her to believe that they were the kind of black people that whites saw some good in. They were a better, more acceptable subset of the race that spoke well and presented well, more and better than a cut above the great mass of regular black folks that they (whites and the special blacks) all looked down on, tolerated, and pitied. Get a message to his people, he asked. Come to see him. Write to him. Don’t forget him.
If Sylvia were being completely honest she would admit that his need attracted her. So few people needed her exclusively and with so much heat that she was strangely flattered. But the calls had amounted to more than that. She liked Marcus. No matter how her conversations to him started, she now wanted to help him. She needed to help him. She might just show up at that prison on Sunday. Twenty minutes in the car was nothing. The gray squat building built against the wishes of the community was better looking than they expected (but that wasn’t the point) and just on the outskirts of the south of town. Sylvia could surprise Marcus with a pie and a couple of magazines. He would be glad to see her once she was there and the decision made. But she shouldn’t go, not as long as he asked her not to. Even a man in lockup ought to be able to make some decisions without the imposition of someone else’s better knowledge.
Sylvia dragged herself up to the sound of her popping knees. Once in the kitchen she fixed a tray with a pitcher of iced tea and two tall glasses. No limes again like she liked—another thing to put on the grocery list. Until Ava came home she’d sit on the patio in the backyard. Of all the spaces in her home the yard was the only area she worked on and primped like it was a loved child. What she’d inherited was scrabble ground, a few pokeberries, choking weeds, and honeysuckle rooted in among the high weeds, skinny sticks of maple trees sprouted up around the perimeter of a half-acre lot—not much land, she knew that, but enough.
She’d grown up on a dirt road in the woods near the Wilkes County line. In her early years, they’d had no bathroom, no running water at all, and their heat came from a woodstove at the back of the house. Though the shack was surrounded by green rolling hills, a pebbled creek bubbled just out of sight, and the clearing where they burned garbage circled by rows of honey blond broom straw, none of them had thought to consider the place beautiful. Part of that inattention was just a by-product of being young and believing that every day had a possibility of being better than the days before. But mostly what Sylvia remembered about her childhood was the outhouse and the lingering smell of shit. No matter where she went in her life, Sylvia felt she couldn’t entirely wash herself clean. Even at her most accomplished she expected to find flecks of it on the soles of her good shoes.