Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair by Susan Sheehan Read Free Book Online Page A

after the drug arrest (“City jails are casual,” she says), had not intimidated her. Only her belt and her sneaker laces (“things they think you’ll commit suicide with”) had been removed. This time, her bra, socks, shoes, jacket, and barrettes were taken away; she was left with nothing on but her panties, pants, and a short-sleeved shirt. She was locked in a cell furnished with a bench (but no pillow or blanket), a sink, and a toilet (but no toilet paper). The mild September day became a chilly September night. Crystal was shivering, but the woman corrections officer insisted on leavingthe cellblock window open. Crystal kept requesting tissues—she pretended to have a bladder problem—and the officer gave her a few at a time. Although the officer could see Crystal’s cell on a television monitor and knew what she was up to, she doled out tissues for a couple of hours. By then, Crystal had used the paper to wrap her cold feet. The officer finally gave her the tissue box with the remaining tissues. Crystal put the box under her head for elevation, put her cold arms inside her shirt for warmth, and nodded off at 4 A.M. At the end of the night there was cold coffee, “nasty hard eggs on a hard roll,” and another child-care worker from St. Christopher’s to drive her home. Back at 104th Avenue, Crystal took a shower, threw out the clothes she had worn in jail, and went to bed. “I would have burned the clothes if I could have,” she says. “I felt nasty and dirty. I felt like a whole lot had been taken from me—my self-respect, my pride. Macy’s dropped the charges—I guess they figured they had taught us a lesson. I never shoplifted since. My worst fear is having to sleep in jail again. I won’t steal even an eyeliner. Now if I don’t have the money I do without, much as I hates doing without.”
    Crystal still tries to avoid doing without. A while ago, she passed a Woolworth that was having a going-out-of-business half-price sale. She went in and bought a package of mascara—Maybelline Great Lash—and some other odds and ends, like soap and Kotex. When she got home, she emptied out the Woolworth bag with her purchases, and for a minute she didn’t see the mascara. When she found it, she decided to returnto Woolworth the following day with her receipt to ask for the mascara that the clerk, according to her, had failed to put in her bag. She went back to Woolworth with a girlfriend, sought out the manager, told her story, and was given a replacement mascara. “For a minute, I really thought I had been done out of my Maybelline, and by the time I found it I already got the idea in my head to ask for it and there was no turning back,” she told her friend. “It beats putting it in my pocket and having it taken away, and I likes beating the system honestly.” Crystal’s friend, a sheltered girl, who is perennially astonished by Crystal’s adventures and misadventures, asked her how she had the nerve to ask the manager to replace the unmissing mascara. Her eyes narrowed merrily, and her lips widened into a grin. “My name is Crystal,” she replied.
    T he longer Crystal remained at the group home, the less inclined she was to obey its regulations. Serving restriction for having shoplifted designer socks would have cost her too much face with Diamond Madison, a twenty-two-year-old drug dealer she had started dating a month earlier. Diamond Madison had plenty of money and was open-handed. “If he had found out, he would have said, ‘What I’m going to steal for, I had the money in my pocket,’ ” Crystal reminisces. “He kept me in line a lot.” Crystal is fickle, and most of her sexual relationships have been fleeting. Diamond is the man she has loved best so far.
    By the time Crystal was four, she had been sodomized by one of her father’s brothers. At twelve, she had been