In the Slammer With Carol Smith by Hortense Calisher Read Free Book Online Page B

slack off. You hunker down into what you are.
    Gold’s not there yet.
    At the top, last floor, is my door. She stands in front of it, legs apart, like she’s about to fall. ‘A wreath. A white one. That’s for a dead child.’
    ‘Carmen Lopez picked a load of wreaths off the garbage truck.’ Shouting at the sanitation men didn’t they know enough to sort out the goodies for people to keep? Corning up the stoop afterward with two, three, like bracelets on her arm, one around her neck and on her head a wreath crown. ‘We all got them, the whole house. Carmen says a wreath is a protection. And they’re not all-white. They have red velvet wound in.’
    I take out my new key.
    Gold says ‘You have a double lock now.’ She begged me to, when I first got here, but I held back.
    ‘Yeah, Lopez again. He’s gunning for high class super. I’m his Master’s thesis. He’ll get in the union yet.’ Then the Lopez’s will leave. But before that, I could be gone.
    The lock sticks, but I push in. She falls into the desk chair just in time.… I know that allgone shuddering, not connected to any muscle you can name. A tremble that a medic may identify, if he thinks you’re worth explaining to, as ‘indiscriminate.’ The long words that intern used peeled out of my brain like on a string. ‘Fear can pool in the limbs like blood, Miss—.’ He’d stolen a glance at the name-choices on the chart. ‘Call me Carol,’ I’d said.…
    He was right about the fear. It lies ready, like blood. But I am maybe wrong about Gold. She can still cry.
    ‘They took the kids away from me,’ she says. Her hands come down from her face and settle in her lap, tremoring. She squeezes them to a stop. ‘The worst is, I wanted them to.’
    It’s hot up here; my room is the oven of the house. She shrugs off her jacket, the same plaid one as always, and lets it fall. I pick it up; the floor is always powdery.
    ‘Let it lie,’ she says. ‘It could use a spot or two.’
    The jacket is dead clean, and flat out of the wringer. Like it no longer wants a body in it. This is the way the clothes you go in with come back to you when you leave.
    ‘It’s been disinfected, huh?’ Now I am shivering.
    ‘It’s been in the vat, yes. Of community wrath.’
    We are both whispering.
    ‘They said you were in retreat. That Mickens; she did.’
    ‘Who’s she?’
    She doesn’t remember?
    ‘The new worker.’
    ‘That was kind of her.’
    I am out of talk. Ordinary talk-fest—I’m beginning to be able to. But when an emotion comes up, I have to wait. Funny, that it was Gold herself suggested how to handle that. Count to twenty, she’d said—or to whatever the traffic will bear. So I do twenty-five.
    ‘She’s no substitute.’ I hack out then. ‘Not for you.’
    ‘That’s kind of you.’ She chokes. ‘Can I have some water?’
    I keep it cold in an old milk bottle I bought at the thrift. There’s more food in the fridge now because of the Club—little goodies I bring there. It’s worth it to see maybe the dancer’s face light up with a yearn. And so as not to push for thanks, I’d have to eat along with them.
    Gold stands in front of the fridge like before a shrine. Everything is in perfect rows there. I’m not squeaky clean. But it is. ‘Still not—’ she whispers.
    ‘Not what?’
    ‘Casual.’
    ‘I keep telling you. Don’t ask me to be what I can’t.’
    ‘Why not? That’s what they asked of me.’
    Shame colors her face. When people first come out they are too delicate; they don’t want to be asked anything. But where’s she been?
    ‘Up the Hudson, were you, Gold? You never sent me that card.’
    ‘I couldn’t.’
    ‘Rockland State, was it? They do drug rehabs.’
    She goes so quiet. With such a look. Must be hard for her profession. When it crosses over to being us.
    ‘That what Mickens told you?’
    ‘Come on, Gold. When does a worker really tell you anything?’
    Not fair. She did, sometimes.
    She’s fisted up. So