Floss, Part 2

A World Apart
by Cristina Rathbone

(Page 2 of 2)

It had taken a surprisingly long time for this to happen. The first few weeks had been terrible, of course, frightening and degrading and completely unnerving. "Just try to imagine it," she told me. "Everything was gone. My son, my home, my family, my car, my friends, my cigarettes, my alcohol, my drugs, my clothes, my makeup, my dishes, my paintings, my socks, my glasses, my bills, my life — not to mention my dignity and my self-esteem (which wasn't much anyways) . . . everything."

She could see, however, that in a way the shock and anxiety of it all had protected her back then too. One minute she'd been at home, packing her son Pat's brand-new Nintendo and his smart new clothes into the case he'd bring with him to her mother-in-law's house, the next she was inmate number F24447, being stripped naked, checked for STDs, and asked if she felt depressed by someone in a uniform on the other side of a desk. This last question seemed the cruelest of all because it wasn't as if she cared, the nurse or whoever she was. She didn't even look up from the checklist in front of her when she asked. And how was Denise supposed to feel anyway, facing five years and a day in this place?

She cried all night, every night, that first week. She didn't know, yet, how expensive collect-call rates were from prison, so she spent hours on the phone with her mother and her son, and endlessly marched around the yard, the headphones of her prison-bought Walkman tuned to heavy metal because she knew enough, even then, to stay away from anything in the least bit emotional. It only made her cry.

Then, two weeks after she'd arrived in August, just as her fixed daily routine had begun to numb her, three correctional officers unlocked the door to her room in the middle of the night. "Denise Russell? Denise Russell?" they asked, shining their flashlights in her face, so that even before she was fully awake, she knew something terrible had happened.

Silently the officers escorted her down linoleum-tiled corridors and through clanking metal doors to the Health Services Unit. There a nurse asked her to sit down, then told her that her son had just threatened to kill himself. He'd walked into her mother-in-law's living room with a knife, she said. They needed her permission to have him admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

Pat was her little just-nine-year-old boy, and right then he was in the admitting room of a state-run psychiatric hospital up in Maine someplace, while she, his mother, was in the Health Services Unit of MCI-Framingham, flanked by guards, and hundreds of miles away. Someone passed her a phone, and she found herself speaking to a nurse up in Maine who tried to assure her that Pat would be well taken care of. Denise felt that she had no choice. She gave her permission for him to be admitted, handed the receiver back to the prison nurse, who had a few words with her counterpart in Maine, and then hung it back in its cradle. After that there was nothing to do. It was hard to fully conceive of, but there was nothing in the world Denise could do then to help her son. She felt like throwing up.

Time slowed after that. She no longer marched around the yard — even that much activity threw her impotence into glaring relief. Sometimes she held her breath. She called her mother. She called her father. Then she called her mother again, over and over, because it was a terrible place where they had Pat, she was discovering. The prison wouldn't let her visit, of course, but they did allow her to call once a week, and Pat almost always came to the phone sobbing. He missed her. That was all, he said. And he worried about her and he'd even tried to come and find her, but they put him in restraints when he did that — in four-point restraints, he said.

The messages she got from her own parents didn't help. Her mother went to visit and came back horrified; her father told her he thought it looked like a fine place. Neither was able to take Patrick in. They had both remarried and had their own lives to lead. Patrick's father, Alan, was willing to have him, but Denise couldn't even begin to think about the consequences of that. Alan was a lunatic — a self-styled Christian with a history of violence and manic depression. And besides, he'd moved to Hawaii the year before, and Denise would lose all contact with Patrick if he moved out there.

She took the pills that Psychiatric Services had prescribed and tried to sleep. But she'd known something like this would happen, that was the thing. She'd done her best to avert it. She'd set up her mother-in-law's house as best she could with a TV, a VCR, and a brand-new Super Nintendo she'd bought for Pat with some of the proceeds of the furniture sale she'd held before "going away." She'd even arranged his Beanie Baby collection, creature by creature, so he'd feel more or less at home in his new room. But what, really, could she do to make up for her sudden and disastrous absence? Pat was nine. His mother was in prison. His father was in Hawaii. He was, suddenly, unprotected. She took more pills.

This was the nature of life in prison, Denise knew now, having to shut down whole parts of yourself, to compartmentalize. Over 60 percent of the women at Framingham were on some kind of psychotropic drug to help with this process. And though this internal division of the self into a series of solitary, isolated cells seemed like a further incarceration, it was, for some, the only way they could begin to tolerate their complete impotence in the world.

Most, it has to be said, had spent their lives reaching for medication at the first sign of discomfort. Across the nation more than nine out of ten incarcerated women are drug addicts, and a full half are actually drunk or high at the time of their arrest. The addicts in Framingham divide into two main camps, the crackheads and the smackheads, and there is very little difference in the way they detox in prison. Unless you're pregnant, when the stress to the baby is deemed too dangerous, you go cold turkey. Framingham has two entire wards for women who come in high. Each year, nine hundred women use these twenty-nine beds to get clean. The rooms reek of the vomit and the green liquid feces they release in all-night convulsions, along with the last traces of drugs from their bodies. Residence in these wards is so dreaded, in fact, that women in the know do everything they can to avoid being placed in them, and there are often one or two inmates in the mainstream residential units detoxing on their own. Sometimes there are illegal drugs in Framingham too, but very rarely, nowhere near enough to sustain an addiction, and mostly the women are forced to make do with fermented Jell-O juice when they want to get high. Wine, they called it. Jell-O wine.

For the first few weeks Denise allowed herself to believe that the outside world was still her realm. Frantic in confinement, she somehow managed to stand for inmate count four times a day, to march through corridors at the appointed times for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and to sit down quietly on her bed as she was locked into her room every night. But somewhere deep down, she persisted in believing that this mindlessly repetitive and passive routine was only some kind of dream, or mistake, or bizarre experiment even, that would end soon, prompting everyone to step out of their roles and smile, perhaps just a little bit abashed by all they had subjected her to, before sending her on her way.

Copyright © 2005 by Cristina Rathbone. Excerpted by permission of Random House Trade Paperbacks, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Cristina Rathbone has written for numerous magazines and newspapers, including the New York Daily News and The Miami Herald. Her last book, On the Outside Looking In: A Year in an Inner-City High School, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was selected as one of the best books of the year by the New York Public Library. She lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, with her two young children.