She folds her arms and leans against the door. If the first freedom you lose in prison is privacy, the second is dignity. I turn my back and pull my nightgown over my head. I fold it up carefully and set it on the chair. I step out of my panties, and fold them, too. I put my slippers on top of the pile.
As a nurse you learn how to make a patient comfortable during moments that would otherwise be humiliating—how to drape the spread legs of a woman in labor, or draw a johnny over a bare bottom. When a laboring mother defecates because of the pressure of the baby’s head, you clean it up briskly and say it happens to everyone. You take any embarrassing situation and you do what you can to make it less so. As I stand shivering, naked, I wonder if this guard’s job is the absolute opposite of mine. If she wants nothing more than to make me feel shame.
I decide I’m not going to give her the satisfaction.
“Open your mouth,” the officer says, and I stick out my tongue like I would at the doctor’s office.
“Lean forward and show me what’s behind your ears.”
I do as I’m told, although I can’t imagine what anyone could hide behind her ears. I am instructed to flip my hair, and to spread my toes and to lift up my feet so she can see the bottoms.
“Squat,” the guard says, “and cough three times.”
I imagine what a woman might be able to smuggle into jail, given the remarkable flexibility of the female anatomy. I think about how, when I was a student nurse, I had to practice to figure out the width of a dilated cervix. One centimeter was an opening the size of a fingertip. Two and a half centimeters were the second and third fingers, slipped into an opening the size of the neck of a bottle of nail polish remover. Four centimeters of dilation were those same fingers, spread in the neck of a forty-ounce bottle of Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce. Five centimeters was the opening of a fifty-ounce Heinz ketchup bottle. Seven centimeters: a plastic shaker of Kraft Parmesan cheese.
“Spread the cheeks.”
A few times, I have helped deliver the baby of a survivor of sexual assault. It makes perfect sense that, during childbirth, memories of abuse might be triggered. A body in labor is a body in stress, and for a rape survivor, that can lead to a survival reflex that physiologically slows down or stops the progress. In these cases, it’s even more important for the L & D room to be a safe space. For the woman to be listened to. For her to feel like she has a say in what happens to her.
I may not have much say here, but I still can make the choice to not be a victim. The whole point of this examination is to make me feel lesser than, like an animal. To make me ashamed of my nakedness.
But I have spent twenty years seeing how beautiful women are—not because of how they look, but because of what their bodies can withstand.
So I stand up and face the officer, daring her to look away from my smooth brown skin, the dark rings of my nipples, the swell of my belly, the thatch of hair between my legs. She hands me the orange scrubs that are designed to conform me, and the ID tag with my inmate number, meant to define me as part of a group, instead of an individual. I stare at her until she meets my eye. “My name,” I say, “is Ruth.”
—
FIFTH GRADE, BREAKFAST. My nose was buried in a book, and I was reading facts aloud. “There were twins who were born eighty-seven days apart,” I announced.
Rachel sat across from me, picking at her cornflakes. “Then they weren’t twins, stupid.”
“Mama,” I yelled automatically. “Rachel called me stupid.” I turned the page. “Sigurd the Mighty was killed by a dead man he beheaded. He tied the guy’s head to his saddle and was scraped by a tooth and got an infection and died.”
My mother hurried into the kitchen. “Rachel, don’t call your sister stupid. And Ruth, stop reading vile things while everyone’s trying to eat.”
Reluctantly, I closed the book, but not before letting my eyes light on a final fact: there was a family in Kentucky that, for generations, had been born with blue skin. It was a result of inbreeding and genetics. Cool, I thought, holding out the flat of my hand and turning it over.
“Ruth!” my mother said sharply, which was enough to let me know it was not the first time she’d called my name. “Go change your shirt.”
“Why?” I asked, before I remembered I wasn’t supposed to talk back.
My mother yanked at my uniform blouse, which had a stain the size of a dime near my ribs. I scowled. “Mama, no one’s even going to see it once I put my sweater on.”
“And if you take that sweater off?” she asked. “You don’t go to school with a stain on your shirt, because if you do, people aren’t going to judge you for being sloppy. They’re going to judge you for being Black.”
I knew better than to cross Mama when she got like this. So I took the book and ran to the room I shared with Rachel to find a clean white shirt. As I buttoned it, my gaze drifted toward the trivia book where it had fallen open on my bed.
The loneliest creature on earth is a whale that has spent more than twenty years calling out for a mate, I read, but whose voice is so different from those of other whales that none of them ever respond.