Neighborhood Watch (3 page)

I’ve tried to keep this a secret, but I’m not sure it’s worked. I’ve learned that women in prison can be extraordinarily generous, especially in hard times. I’ve watched my fellow inmates nurse one another through sickness and spend their last commissary dollar on Christmas presents they hand out wrapped in toilet paper. I’ve also seen the wall of silence that goes up around anyone who gets special treatment. I fear it’s already started. At lunch, when I asked Taneesha to pass the salt, she said I was a bitch if I thought I could get whatever I wanted around here. Everyone’s been prickly, even Wanda, who says she doesn’t want to know when I get the news. She’s not around when the guard finds me in the library and tells me my lawyer is here.

I walk into the small, beige-colored conference room, where we’re allowed to sit, unshackled, alone with our lawyers, and I already know what he’s going to say. Jeremy can’t control his facial expressions or his body. He’s a foot tapper, a finger drummer. His body talks for him. This time, though, there’s none of that. He simply leans forward beaming like a child. “There’s no match!” he whispers. “We’re getting you out of here!”

W
hen I first came to CCI, I spent four days being asked so repeatedly about my feelings for events I didn’t remember that I started giving the answers they seemed to want.
What difference did it make,
I thought.
My trial is over, my fate decided.
“Yes, I probably did love Geoffrey Steadman,” I said, sighing. “Everyone did. He was that kind of man.”

The intake therapist looked at me. “Manipulative?”

“Charming. Smart. Funny in those unexpected ways.” I smiled and held her eye. She had short gray hair and looked maybe sixty, but I thought she recognized what I was saying. Did I sound crazy? Like those poor Manson girls with their tattooed foreheads and unwashed hair? Surely not. Surely people could recognize what I would still—even then, in spite of everything—characterize as a relatively normal, married person’s crush.

By the time I got my cell block assignment, I was already something of a celebrity. Not that people welcomed my arrival, just that they were aware of it. They assumed I was crazy and rich, and for a while I let them believe both things. With so few ways to differentiate ourselves, I took advantage of silly ones. I used expensive tea bags and washed my underthings every night. I medicated myself into a stupor by doubling the doses of the Elavil I’d been prescribed by the psychologist, who didn’t know I had two other prescriptions in my bag. For months I moved through my new world in a gray fog I couldn’t taste or feel. I slept fourteen hours a night and shuffled through days, exhausted and yawning. I have very few memories of the time before Wanda arrived and became my first cell mate to ask if I knew what the rules were about nail polish in here. “Someone told me you can have one color only, someone else said three.”

I lifted my head off the pillow and grunted. I knew she was in for murder, a long-termer like me, looking at thirty years, and she was thinking about nail polish? “It’s not me I’m worried about, it’s everyone else,” she said. “I like to offer choices.”

Within a week she’d begun an exercise program of sit-ups and weight lifting using cinder blocks she found outside in the yard. She tacked up a daily activity schedule including time for work, self-improvement, and isometric exercises. She asked me for advice on the self-improvement portion, and then, after I threw her a book from my side of the cell, she said that what she really wanted to do in here was meet some men. I wondered if she was taking the opposite drugs I was. Uppers of some kind. “In a women’s prison?”

She pointed out the window at the medium-security men’s prison across the way and flicked her hair. “There’s Riverside over there.”

We were about the same age I guessed, in our mid-thirties. She had thick, long brown hair, skin the color of honey, and cheekbones you could roll a marble around in. She walked over to the window as if she might catch a lineup of prospects along the fence. “You see them sometimes, right?”

“I guess,” I said. We had a maintenance crew of inmates from the men’s prison that came through occasionally to fix a toilet or a broken light. I knew girls who put on makeup and changed their clothes before they came. “If you’re interested in that type.”

“What?” Wanda laughed. It was her second week and already she was laughing, full-throated and deep. “Like we’re better than them?”

I let myself get swept up in Wanda’s campaigns for longer exercise times, more nail polish, and eventually a real library. She was the one who pointed to the shelf of water-damaged books and said, “I bet you could do better.” She got me going again, thinking about the rest of my life. “Look,” she said one night after lights-out. We were lying in our beds, like two girls at camp. “I spent seventeen years coming home every night to a terrible man. Being here, it’s like I’m free.”

I think of Wanda as the best friend I’ve ever had, which might be a surprise to my old neighbor, Marianne, who has made a duty out of visiting me twice a month for the last five years. Though nothing is official—we’re awaiting judge’s orders, which means paperwork and bureaucracy—she’s heard the news from Jeremy. “I just can’t believe it,” she says, beaming and shaking her head. “You’re coming to stay with me when you get out. That’s all arranged.”

I’m surprised by this and also grateful because I don’t have too many other options. Or, if I’m being honest, any.

“Jeremy’s a little worried about you moving back on the block where everything happened.” She means the murder, of course. “But I told him it’s all new people now. Everyone you knew has moved away. Really, Bets. I think it’ll be fine.”

Her face tells me she’s less sure. I know that visiting has been one thing, but living together might be different. I reach a hand across the table and squeeze hers.

In the last two years, we haven’t been required to wear handcuffs for these visits, which means that before every visiting day, Wanda paints our fingernails and we sit in this room doing everything we can think of with our hands: waving broadly, gesturing like mimes. Though full body hugs are allowed only at the end of a visit (and Marianne and I generally pass on this), I’ve come to appreciate the simple pleasure of a hand squeeze. “Thank you,” I say.

I give Marianne credit for her loyalty over the years. On Christmas, she brings me chocolate and on my birthday, a present, though I do sometimes wonder if she’s wrapped something she found around the house. Last year she gave me a clear plastic desk organizer. “For paper clips and staples,” she said. I didn’t know what to say. It’s been twelve years since I’ve seen a staple.

I appreciate her good intentions, even if our visits can be awkward. We pick our subjects carefully. She asks very little about my life inside, and we no longer mention her daughter, Trish, or her husband, Roland. I don’t know what he thinks about my staying in their house or if he’s even still there to offer his opinion. It’s possible he’s left and Marianne has never mentioned it to me, because I know how her mind works. She believes my life is hard enough and I shouldn’t have to hear bad news. When I’ve asked about Trish, she’s said only that “she chooses not to share her life with us,” which I now realize means they don’t talk at all. She doesn’t know where her daughter lives, or what she does. I know Marianne visits me in part to fill in the holes she doesn’t like to think about too much. At one time she helped me adapt to our neighborhood life of surfaces and veneers, and now—as unlikely as it sounds from my spot here in prison—I help her maintain it.

When we first moved onto the block, Paul and I were twenty-five-year-old newlyweds who’d never cared for a houseplant, much less a house with a garden in front. We were beginners at everything, our ignorance on display every weekend as we stooped over chores we’d never done before—sealing a driveway, edging a flower bed, cleaning the gutters. Marianne and Roland were older than we were and experienced in these matters. They talked us through the basics of replacing storm windows and laying new grass seed over a half-dead lawn. She was patient and nonjudgmental, a maternal figure, though she was only ten years older. I imagined our life might look like theirs down the line, with two bookish children and oddball interests, like the solar panels they’d stretched across their roof.

Now with only twenty minutes left, Marianne pulls her hand free and remembers something she brought in her purse. I’m allowed to accept nothing from visitors except the quarters that must be used in the vending machines before the hour is over. Even a magazine article is contraband, as Marianne must know because she shouts at the guard as she pulls it out, “I’m just
showing
her something, for God’s sake.”

I’m grateful she doesn’t scream,
Plus she’s innocent,
to add to my problems.

“Wait’ll you see this,” she says, unfolding the article. “It’s about Geoffrey.”

We’ve tried to make Geoffrey a joke between us. He lives in Los Angeles and writes for television now, a crime show so stupid Marianne has declared it unwatchable, though she has, at least a few times. “Be glad you didn’t see Geoffrey’s show last week,” she’ll say. “A serial killer into dismemberment. That was nice.” I’ve never seen Geoffrey’s show because in here, guards control the remotes and we watch the same lineup every day:
Oprah,
then
Ellen,
then the reality shows that we talk about afterward as if we knew these people personally. The article is from
Finer Homes Digest
.

“Turn the page,” Marianne says. I gasp. It’s the first time I’ve seen a picture of him in twelve years. The caption below reads, “Geoffrey Steadman and his wife, Renata, chop vegetables on their Ashfield stone countertop.” From Marianne’s updates, I know that he has two daughters—six and four—both adopted from China. In the picture, the two adults face the camera. The girls are seated at the counter opposite them, two tiny heads with straight black hair, shoulder length. I do the math and figure out this means they probably spent at least four years battling infertility, which makes me feel both sorry for them and grateful. He knows now what it’s like, month after endless month, to discover you are once again empty-handed.

T
he first time I met Geoffrey was at my wedding, where he came as Paul’s childhood friend, not yet a published writer, not yet famous, with his mother as his date. Both Paul and I were nervous and ridiculously uncomfortable. During the ceremony we recited our vows so softly we had trouble hearing each other. When Geoffrey stood up to offer a toast at the reception, obviously drunk but still so good-looking and at ease, we breathed a sigh of relief to have the spotlight of attention momentarily off us. He raised a glass, first to Paul for being so unafraid to take this leap, and then to me for making it with him. We felt grateful, caught up by something wondrous and larger than ourselves.

Four years passed before we heard from Geoffrey again, and by then his life had changed so radically we were surprised, frankly, to get his phone call. He’d published a book of short stories that had been not only a best seller but nominated for a major book award. He’d been photographed in
Vanity Fair
. At the library we had a hard time keeping our three copies of his book on the shelf. He was famous by then, or at least in our world he seemed so. He was also married, though we hadn’t been invited to the wedding, which took place in Jamaica and was, we were told, family only.

His voice on the answering machine sounded more subdued than I remembered, as if his new fame had become an embarrassment perhaps. In truth I wondered about this. I liked his writing, but I had to admit that the level of attention he received seemed mystifying to me, unless, as some people suggested, it had to do with the author photo. The picture was arresting, taken from above in an outdoor setting. He looked as if he’d been caught by surprise, playing in some leaves. One review called him “the Marlboro Man of Letters,” and his thick head of wavy hair got its own mention in the
New York Times,
which called him the most accurate male chronicler of the female experience since Dreiser wrote
Sister Carrie,
but added, rather petulantly, that it was hard to say if this reflected sensitivity or came as a result of a studied attention to his own hair and looks. By the time he called us, most of the hoopla had died away. He hadn’t won the prize, nor had he come out with the much-anticipated follow-up novel.

He wanted to see us as soon as possible, he said in his message. The last we’d heard, he was living in Florida with his new wife, Corinne, a biology professor. He told us he was coming to New York and wanted to drive up. Would Friday night be okay?

Of course,
was the answer, and right away we started overplanning the visit. We hired cleaners to do the carpet, and bought too much beer and wine, only to start the evening with Corinne’s face-inflaming allergic reaction to the carpet-cleaning chemicals and Geoffrey’s announcement that he’d quit drinking two years ago. Awkwardly, we moved everything out to the patio while Paul hunted for seltzer.

To me, Geoffrey’s sobriety was the biggest surprise, but I’d never seen him with anything besides a scotch in his hand. Paul had, of course. He had countless memories from their predrinking days as children when Geoffrey was the spirited boundary tester of their group, the driving force behind the neighborhood golf course fire, the point man on dumping fifty boxes of green Jell-O into the community pool. That night, though, I could tell there would be no reminiscing over childhood pranks, because the real surprise of the evening came early, while Corinne’s face was still a throbbing, angry red that didn’t match her expression, which was demure and sweet. She wasn’t, technically speaking, a beautiful woman, though she had all the trappings to be mistaken for one: long blond hair that fell below her shoulders, low-cut jeans, and the flat chest of a dancer, which I later learned she had been.