Who Named the Knife Read online

  I write to Maryann about this dream. I ask her about faith. Does she still have it? Did it leave her and then return, like a lost pet? What about my idea of visiting her?

  Maryann sends back an application for visiting privileges. With it is a list describing the rules for the prison visiting room. It says that prisoners are allowed one bracelet, one necklace with charm or religious medallion, one pair of stud earrings, one watch, and two rings. They may not bring in bags or eyeglass cases or cigarette cases or Bibles. They must wear bras and underpants and they may not use the restroom during a visit.

  No drinking cups, ink pens, or umbrellas are allowed. Also no kissing or touching. Embracing may occur when a visitor enters and leaves. No sitting on laps, except for small children. No sitting on the tops of tables or sitting straddled on the bench. No sitting between the legs of visitors.

  No mention of faith.

  26

  The only prisons I have seen are in movies.

  This one looks like a big, brick, sprawling elementary school. Built for eight hundred women, it holds twice that many and is surrounded by a twenty-foot-high double chain-link steel fence. On top of the fence is a big roll of barbed wire. And around all of this are dairy farms on a scale that is hard to believe. Thousands of dairy cows waiting to be milked, their necks between steel bars.

  The waiting room. All those children. Babies in the arms of young fathers. Babies in the arms of grandmothers waiting to visit mothers. And children waiting to visit grandmothers. A family of nine waiting for three hours on the plastic chairs all in a row, the father commanding obedience, not to move, not to wiggle, not to turn and look into the visiting room where the grandmother would become visible.

  It makes me feel faint.

  There are no magazines to read. No pictures at which to look. “Do you want me to take you out to the van?” the menacing father asks. “Right now? Do you know what that means?” The old fear hits me and I try to make friends with the children to compensate, to make their daddy see that they are innocents. I picture Maryann as she waits for her call. I picture her trying to remember the other side of the steel fence.

  There is, first, an outside waiting area. Then the inside waiting room. In the outside area there are flies. They cover feet and faces and hands as visitors sit in the shade of the cement-block shelter fanning themselves. But inside we are grim, having passed, one by one, through the metal detector, having put the items we are carrying into a tray and having passed through the electronic gate. We are carrying only a car key, thirty one-dollar bills, and a driver’s licence in a clear plastic bag. “When’s Gramma coming?” The line of children try to peer through the smudgy glass as their father enforces straight backs and parallel knees. “Do you want to go out to the van?” The baby is thirsty and cries for two hours. There is nothing to drink.

  For two hours we suffer a misery that is a form of penance or a punishment for coming to visit those who are here to be punished. As each prisoner is led into the visiting room, she can be viewed through the dirty glass. Making her way through prisoners and visitors who are shouting and hugging and holding each other, she stops at a line drawn on the floor and waits for the door to be buzzed open, for her mother or sister or husband to cross the line.

  I have that picture in my mind of the fragile girl behind big glasses, her soft blond hair, her steady walk, and when I see her cross the crowded room, I know her immediately. She moves as if she is off somewhere else. There is that calm, as if all the important questions have already been asked. Then the door is buzzed open and her arms are around me. “It’s so good to actually see you.” Her hug is fierce.

  I am fumbling at my wad of one-dollar bills. No one comes to visit without buying food for the inmate; this much, during the long wait and the observation through glass, has become clear. No inmate comes into the visiting area without being summoned by a visitor and no inmate leaves the visiting area with anything at all – no gift, no souvenir, not even a grain of popcorn. We must consume whatever we buy on the spot. Burritos can be pulled from a machine, carried to the microwave oven and heated. There are hot drinks, cold drinks, snacks, and ice-cream bars, even fresh fruit. The selection is fantastic.

  Maryann is pointing to the buttons, the slot for bills, the place for coins. The prisoners are not allowed to handle money. “Let’s go find a seat.” Like everyone else – all the prisoners – she’s wearing jeans, sneakers, a grey T-shirt. Her hair is short and her rimless glasses are slightly tinted, the kind that darken in sunlight. While I fumble at the slot for change, she retrieves the food and then leads me out to the cement tables in the open air. We pass the children and their grandmother, who has a warm and intelligent face. “That’s Beth. And her best friend. The family always fills out forms for both of them because Gena doesn’t get other visitors. It gives her a chance to see someone.” Eleven of them around the table, with various board games unfurled along with cards. Beth and Gena, she says, killed husbands. Most of the lifers are here for that. In this way, she is different. At another table a little boy’s mother and grandmother watch as he runs on the grass. He has spent three hours waiting to get to his mother. Before that, the ride in a hot car, the slicking back of hair, the starchy shirt, while now his mother is distracted. Her eyes are elsewhere.

  “It’s nothing like prisons in movies, is it?”

  I say, “So many older women. Grandmothers. And I can’t get over how ordinary everyone looks.”

  “Any one of us could be your neighbour, right?” Maryann pauses. Then she says, “And you could just as easily be in here.”

  I stretch out my legs. For several days I’ve been worried about this one-on-one conversation with someone I’ve never met. I’ve been imagining the awkwardness of wanting to get up and leave. Of being bored. Of running out of talk. Now, the first thing I want to say is that I’m stunned by the ugliness of this place; would it be so hard to have a few plants, a few colours, something for the kids besides one set of swings? But that wouldn’t be polite. Even if she didn’t choose the décor, this is where she has to live. It represents all she has of a public face.

  At times like this people try to establish things they have in common, but all we have is a few days in a Honolulu courtroom and the fact that we both got married in Arizona, that I know how it feels to be out on a limb, sawing it off. I could say I recognized some kind of kinship that first day in court, but how much would I be embroidering? I could talk about a night in Guadalajara when Philip’s friend, Roberto, pulled a gun on a stranger who asked me to dance. I was twenty years old and it was thrilling.

  The California Institution for Women is run by the state. Maryann says it was built to look like a campus back in the 1950s, when the brick housing units were called cottages and each woman had a cell to herself. But when Ronald Reagan became governor of California, the cells got double- and triple-bunked. Beds were put in the auditorium and the gym. Programs were cut. Now, lifers are told that any trouble will get them shipped north. To a tougher place. “The new prisons are so much worse.” While Maryann explains this, she’s giving me time to get my bearings. We have our food spread out on our laps, and she’s saying that CIW has two kinds of inmates. The drug user is Level 2. Maryann and the other lifers are Level 4. “And allowed a little more leeway.” But no conjugal visits. “The men ruined that for us.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, their women got pregnant, then had to go on welfare.”

  “So this is the only kind of visit allowed.”

  “But in the old days we could have a whole weekend in a special house. With our family or husband. But not now.”

  “Your folks used to come?”

  She nods. “Every chance they got. And when they couldn’t drive, a few times my sister brought them. Then my mom died from cancer four years ago and after that Dad didn’t give a rip any more. I lost him this past July, the day before his eighty-fourth birthday.”

  “Are you and your sister close?”
/>   “She won’t take my calls. They run up her phone bill. When I was adopted, she just never got over it.”

  “You were adopted?”

  “I never told you?”

  At last I am on to something. It is an afternoon in the winter of 1961 and a clerk at the county courthouse in Phoenix decides not to take her lunch break. Everyone else has left the building, but she wants to catch up on the work that’s been piling up. She’s rummaging through a stack of papers next to the phone when a man comes through the door, panting, out of breath. He’s come up the stairs at a run. He wipes his hands on his trousers. “Where do I adopt a baby?” he blurts out.

  “You want a baby?”

  “No, ma’am. I already have one. Or rather my son does. Or rather my stepson. Does.”

  The clerk studies the man. He’s young, in his early forties, and he’s wearing the clothes of a working man. “Where is this baby?” she asks softly, so as not to frighten him, and meanwhile she reaches across the pile of papers and edges the heavy telephone closer to her chair. She has not stood up or changed the look on her face, which is calm and businesslike.

  “At its mother’s …” He shakes his head. “But that’s no problem, ma’am, believe you me.”

  The clerk has the number in her head. “Just a sec. Maybe I can help.” Her friend Gladys. And Bert. Lost their boy just two months ago to an asthma attack. She feels no need to explain herself. All her work at the courthouse, all her work for the church, all her life has taught her to think of the greater need. No reason to explain that their first baby died and now they’ve lost the boy … it’s nobody’s business and anyway the phone is ringing. “Gladys! Get Bert quick. I have a baby for you!” The clerk covers the receiver with her hand and whispers, “I forgot to ask. Girl or boy?” Then, taking her hand away, shouts, “No kidding! I mean it. Get Bert right over here this minute.” Now Maryann looks at me. “That’s the way it begins,” she says, “my story. In a courthouse.”

  We sit there for a long, long minute.

  “Were they overly protective, your parents?”

  “I was cherished.”

  “Except for your sister.”

  “Well, she was attached to her brother who died.” She looks away, defensive. “Do you have a sister?”

  I say no. I say my brother died ten years ago. Crashed his plane and killed himself and his second wife. I say my father died the same summer my husband walked out and for a minute I can see the tail of something disappear just around the corner of my mind. I want to call it back, but Maryann is saying that her parents just wanted her to marry a good person and have a good life. “That’s all. Mom actually loved my first boyfriend.”

  “The one before William?”

  “I mentioned Doug in a letter. Remember? Returned missionary. Six two. Sandy hair. Good-looking. He was the reason I moved back to Phoenix. Well, which I wanted to do anyway, I guess. But just think. If I’d adhered to the teachings of chastity, morality, and faithfulness … who knows? But I met William during Doug’s business trip. Met him and married him before Doug even came back. Like that” – snapping her fingers – “I really wasn’t thinking seriously of getting married at eighteen. I still wanted to live my life.” She stops talking and listens, as if there is another conversation going on in her head. Then she says, “I wanted to make everybody happy.” Another silence. “Be a rebel and a pleaser. I was running around behind their backs giving my parents the blues before I hit sixteen. Then I moved back to Phoenix. So I didn’t have to sneak around after that.”

  The landlady had a sofa. Maryann had brought her waterbed from home and she built a new frame for it. She got dressed in the morning and went to work at Arizona Hardware, the same distribution company that employed her father. At work, she was pleasant to people and when a co-worker mentioned a brother who was coming to stay, Maryann showed polite interest. “She said he’d had a rough life. She said he was a sweet guy who needed someone to care about him.”

  Doug was away on that business trip.

  And William got a job working for Arizona Hardware in the warehouse. One day he came inside and met Maryann. It was after lunch, sometime in the afternoon. He was sweating a little. He had the look of something abandoned, like the kitten she had taken in a few weeks before. He had a mother in California. And the sister. But he was just out of jail and he talked a blue streak. “At eighteen I wasn’t thinking about who this guy is.…” They went out the evening of the day they met and then he came back to her place as if he belonged to her. It was the lost cat all over again. He needed her. It was a new experience and it excited her. There had always been expectations, always, but never like this. The way he came straight at her. He didn’t know any better than that. He wasn’t experienced. It was what she thought about. Helping him. The way he reached out to touch her to prove something to himself. The way his future was up to her. He liked to drink, unlike Doug, but for Maryann it was a daytime nighttime shift, two sides of herself, light and dark. “Bill was so exciting to be with. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever experienced ever, being with him.”

  She had that kitten, eight weeks old, who refused to be in the same room with him. Whenever he came home, the kitten hid, ran to a closet or under the bed. “I should have paid attention. The kitten was right. Once, it jumped down from the window over the bed and bit him hard. He had taken a shower and was lying there naked. He screamed. That kitten bit him in the balls,” Maryann told me. She grinned.

  Within days of moving in, William was talking marriage. “He kept bugging me about it and then he caught me one day when I just said, Yeah, okay, just to shut him up. But the next thing I knew, I was calling my parents.”

  While she’s telling me this, I remember William on the witness stand saying, “We got married a month after we met. Oh, Maryann could play emotional games, man. She was able to tap on emotions pretty good.” So I look at her. The room around us is still bright with noise and chaos, but I shut it out. How much do I believe? How much of our brand-new friendship is concocted out of thin air and guilt?

  27

  One afternoon Maryann’s best friend – the one named Mariann – dropped by the apartment and went home in tears. It was a defining moment. It was the moment Maryann made a choice. She was forsaking her best friend, someone she’d loved since they were ten years old. She was forsaking this twin because William was drinking beer and saying religion was a crutch and she had to stand by one of them. After he said Mormons were lame and stupid and credulous, that they should learn natural principles, he squashed up his beer can and threw it across the room, which made her mad but what could she do? He said the law of nature was obvious and he was pointing at the plate-glass window as if it framed the universe. “Church people are doing group-think,” he told Mariann, and he lay down on the landlady’s sofa and covered his face with one bent arm and talked about Ayn Rand and self-interest. It was impressive. He’d read a lot. “You have to create yourself, ladies. But, no, instead you take instruction from the old daddies at church like it was cookies and milk. Which makes you weak. Each and every human on the earthly planet should be acting to self-perfect. Not being an underling or a yes-sayer type.”

  Mariann knew he was out on parole. But she didn’t mention that; she was too polite.

  “Just thinking about Jesus about makes me puke,” William told her. “You believe he walked out of his grave and flew up to heaven?” He sat up and glared at her as if everything in the world were her fault, as if her stupidity had put him in jail. “I’m not into sacrifice,” he told her. He was getting drunk. The can he’d thrown across the room was his sixth or seventh beer in two hours.

  Maryann looked at her friend. They both knew that arguing with boys was part of a game. It was a little seductive. They’d both been listening to wild ideas all their lives. It was possible that their parents and teachers and even the elders were wrong. Even the bishop. It was possible that William could answer the secret questioning in her heart. When he sai
d that self-interest is actually a virtue, it made her understand something because she’d watched her mother bend and scrape for everyone else. She’d admired her mother, but William was right when he said if you take care of your own needs, you do a better job of everything else because she could never be like her mother anyway and maybe charity is unnatural. Are animals charitable? Tigers? Birds? Humans aren’t animals, but what does nature mean to a human being? Her friend was arguing with William about how God set humans apart, and when William laughed, Maryann saw her wipe her face with the heel of her hand and turn away, which made her feel awful. She noticed when her friend put down her beer, placing it carefully on a coaster the way she always did. She heard her say she was going home and she should have crossed the room then and said something nice but when her friend left, even then, she didn’t run after her or call the next day because William needed her and a true friend should know what that means. Need creates duty, that’s what the elders say, but it was the hardest thing in the world. To choose between them. To watch her best friend just leave. It was hard, but hard things are strengthening.

  The next day she told William that he could try hypnotizing her. If it worked, she would expose the truth of herself. She had nothing to hide. They sat on the floor in the bedroom and pulled down the shades. When they were both ready, both sitting face to face, he held his knife up in front of her and she felt something, a kind of interesting chill. Then William told her to watch the knife, keep her eyes on it and let herself go. “Like doing it,” he said. “Just relax.” He moved the knife back and forth close up to her face while he kept saying Justice was just an instrument, something man-made. He called his knife Justice, like the sword of right, and Maryann went back to the day she had gone out to buy it, how he had sent her off to the store for an eight-inch Buck knife. He sent her to buy it because he was on parole and she went in and purchased the best knife they had in the store and it felt perfect giving him something he wanted when he didn’t have anything else. She gave it to him like a present and he asked her to carry it for him because it sealed them. Like in a ceremony. It was strange to name a knife, but William didn’t have anything else to name. Not a pet. Not a home or a car or the things that matter to men who are twenty-eight. From now on, she was going to go along with him instead of arguing about every little thing because trust is important. Even if she didn’t necessarily believe what he was saying, it helped him to stay calm; it kept his understandable insecurities at bay. Ayn Rand worshipped the great and the exceptional, never the underdog. And look at William. He already had a following, a network of Randanians. People believed in him and sent him messages and looked after him. He had needed that in jail. And now, with her help, he could go someplace. And as far as the temper went, it was only because he insisted on things. Anyone would do that after jail.