Five Years...

I’ve never doubted that leaving my job in the prison was the right choice, even though it meant leaving England too.  I had dinner with a friend last night and he asked me what it was about that country I loved so much and as many times as I’ve been asked that question, I’ve never been able to answer.  I have no words for it, but it was there in every breath I took, every rainy day, every blade of grass and overgrown ivy and thatched roof and winding one lane road. It was the only place I never felt like a stranger even when I didn’t know a single person.

Even when I was scared and so darkly, deeply unhappy, I felt at home there. Even after five years, it still strikes me as incredibly unfair that everything I loved about that place and everything that was wrong were so entwined that I had to give up one in order to escape the other.

                                                            ***

It’s impossible for me to think of the last time I left the prison without remembering the first time I went in.  That first day was in April 2006, and I was there to interview for the position of Library Manager.  I set my bag in a tub on a conveyer belt that fed into an x-ray machine, and I stepped through metal detectors. I stood with my arms out while a woman in a uniform ran her hands down my sides, around my back, across my stomach and down my legs. I stiffened and she told me if I got the job this routine would eventually feel normal. She was right, but getting used something isn’t the same as being comfortable.

After passing through a set of double sliding doors, I was met by an officer who worked in the library. He gave me a tour of the prison, and because it was lunchtime and the inmates were locked up, he took me everywhere --  through the workshops, the healthcare center, onto one of the wings. He even locked me in an empty cell in the segregation unit because I had arrived so early for the interview, he didn’t know what else to do with me. He was patient and answered all my questions, and when I told him I was used to criminals because my dad was a lawyer, he didn’t shake his head or call me naive. After I got the job, he would often do both of those things.

I don’t remember going in the last time, but I remember every step I took on the way out.  I remember looking at the clock. And then Jane, the officer I hired to work in the library after the first one transferred, said “Let’s go let’s go let’s go.” She wanted me out fast --  too fast to think and get emotional and cause a scene because there was no crying in the library. That’s a rule I broke only twice in the four years I was there, both times early on, before I found other unhealthier ways to cope.  

“This is it, then,” I said to Jane. I gathered my stuff and we locked the door to the library. I looked back through the unbreakable wired glass one last time, at the shelves I had picked out from a catalog, and the books and music CDs and DVDs I filled them with, and the light matte blue I’d painted the walls.

When we reached what is known as the sterile area (where the prisoners were not allowed), I paused and said, “Wait. Am I supposed to turn in my ID?” I wish I hadn’t asked that question. I could have taken it with me. What would they have done? I was leaving the country; they wouldn’t have been able to find me. But I said it, so we detoured into the Security Office and I handed in the badge with my picture on it, taken the first week I worked there, when my hair was so short it barely reached my chin.

In the gatehouse, I dropped my keys through a chute, and bent down to speak through the opening. “I’m not coming back,” I said so that the officer on the other side of the thick glass window wouldn’t exchange them for a metal disc imprinted with a corresponding key number, which is what would have happened on any other day.  

                                                            ***

Five years ago today, I walked out of the prison for the last time. I checked my journals from 2010 but I didn’t write that day. The nearest entry is almost a month earlier, after I’d made the decision to leave, but before I understood what I was giving up.  I was unhappy. I’d been unhappy for a long time. My happiness (or lack thereof) is not usually a factor in my writing, but most of my last year there went unrecorded. I’m sorry about that now, but the gaps between entries have as much meaning as the pages I filled before and after. The lost time reminds me that leaving was the right choice.  

But even though I didn’t write about that, I remember.

                                                            ***

The first set of doors slid open and Jane put her hand on my back to push me through. “Let’s go let’s go let’s go” she said again. I walked through the second sliding doors into the lobby, and then finally through the front door. I thought about the first time again.  Looking up, the twenty-foot walls surrounding the prison seemed to extend forever in each direction.

I wanted to take a moment, but I didn’t know what to do with it.

So I just kept going.

Last Friday...

Last Friday, I’m driving to lunch when a bad headache comes on, all of the sudden, and I turn around to go back to the library. I tell my supervisor I have to go home but I drive instead to my parents’ house in Williamson Valley because I need to pick up my dog. She’s been there for days, because of a javelina situation, and because I’ve been busy.  But no one is there when I arrive, just Bella and Milo howling on the porch, and I can’t just take off with Bella because I know my parents will worry when she’s not on the porch, and also my headache is so bad I think I’m going to throw up.

So I take both dogs into my old room and lie down. The dogs curl up on the bed with me, and even though I am allergic to him, I bury my face against Milo’s back and close my eyes. I think about the pain, and the nausea, and about car accidents and whip lash and brain tumors and aneurisms and I fall asleep as Bella, after trying unsuccessfully to engage Milo in a sparring match, sprawls across my feet and settles her head in the crook of my knees.

When my mother comes home about an hour later, the dogs erupt into a hairy ball of thunder and teeth and toenails, scattering pillows and scratching me as they leap from the window to the door to greet her.

She is surprised to see me and but knows right away that it means I am sick.

The phone rings and it is my father. He’s with my grandmother, shopping, and won’t be home for hours. My mother and I sit on the couch and she offers to make me soup and I say yes but first, she sorts through the mail.

“This is for you,” she says. She doesn’t like that after moving out again more than 3 years ago, I still have mail coming to the house. It’s an alumni magazine is from a college I went to in England. I drop the magazine on the  living room table. David Attenborough is on the cover, “I thought he died,” she says.

“Maybe it’s a tribute.”

I tell her about my week, about the Volunteer Banquet and the trivia night I went to with a friend and the latest library gossip and she tells me about the family – most of which I picked up already on Facebook, but she’s not on Facebook, so I let her talk.

She tells me about her brother who just published his third novel. She’s eight chapters in, and it’s good, she says. I already bought it, but haven’t had time to start reading it yet. She tells me that our family reunion for the 4^th of July has been cancelled, and that my cousin Anne is going to live in England for 6 months.

This ,I’ve known for a while, but no details, no dates, just a half a year in England. “Where will they be living?”

“Near Manchester?” she says but I don’t think she knows where that is. I think about the Manchester accent. I think about the prisoners I knew from there.

And then she says, “We should go. You and I. We should go and you can see your friends and I can tour around with Anne.”

And I immediately reach for the same excuse I’ve used for the past 5 years.

“I don’t have a passport.”
“So… get your passport.”

Easy answer. Been meaning to do it for years. I got the pictures taken, filled out the form, found another excuse, put the form in a drawer.

There is a reason I haven’t gone back. But maybe now, this time, there is no real excuse anymore. I just need to face it. I should go back and if it happens, if England still feels like home, then maybe I need to think about what that means. And if it doesn’t, then maybe we’ll just have a nice time.

“Oh,” says my mother. She’s on her kindle, checking her email. “I got a message from Marshall.” My brother. “He says he’s sorry about the reunion, and that we should go to Portland instead.”

I tell her I need to think about it, that it depends. I don’t know what it depends on, but I’m tired and my head still hurts and I don’t want to make any decisions or commitments or anything.

“Want to watch a move?” she asks.

“Yes. But, also, can I have some soup?”

She puts down the kindle and tells me to go upstairs and lie down, turn on the TV and she will make me a tray.

“Also, cheese and crackers?”

“Yes. Now go upstairs. Take the dogs.”

I lie down on the couch and start sneezing. I’m starting to think it’s not Milo I’m allergic to but something in the house.  But the couch is sort of new and wide and soft and I pull a fuzzy blanket up to my chin and think about England but also how nice it is to have my parents living nearby when I feel like this.

My mother calls from downstairs. “Have you got the dogs? If Bella jumps on me on the stairs …  no soup for you.”

Milo was already asleep on the floor, but I call Bella over and she climbs halfway onto my chest. She’s not allowed on the couch, but if her back legs are on the floor it doesn’t count. I know this and she knows this. I hold onto her collar just in case.

My mother comes up the stairs carrying a tray with two bowls of homemade chicken soup, a glass of water and cheese and crackers.

“Let’s watch something terrible,” she says.

And we do. Automata, a dystopian sci-fi low-budget version of  I, Robot starring Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith.

My mother sleeps through half of it, startling awake occasionally and grabbing my foot because she thinks it’s the remote control. “Oops,” she says, taking back her hand. “Sorry.”

More time passes and she doesn’t know what’s going on. A robot voiced by Javier Bardem gets his head blown off. “Why do all the robots have different accents?”

I think that’s a great question.

After the movie, we go back downstairs. My allergies are out of control and it’s time to go home. My headache is gone, but then my father pulls into the driveway, so I wait.

He comes in, asks about my headache, asks if it’s because of the accident, reminds me to drink more water and not settle with the insurance company yet.

“They keep calling me. But I’m always at work,” I say.

“You’ve got time. You don’t know the long term effects.”

He tells me about his week, about shopping with Grandma. The phone rings, my mom says ‘it’s your mother’ as she answers it, but the line goes dead. His cell goes off next. I listen to his one-sided conversation.

“It wasn’t on the list, Ma.” There’s a pause, and then louder, “It wasn’t ON THE LIST. I’ll bring it tomorrow. I’LL BRING IT TOMORROW. TOMORROW MA. TOMORROW!”

And then his voice drops to barely a whisper. “Ok. Bye bye.” I think about how she probably never hears him say goodbye. I wonder if she thinks he hangs up on her.

He turns to me as he puts his phone away. “We forgot the water. It wasn’t on her list. I told her to make a list.”

He asks me about my phone. He wants to know how many apps I have. We have the same phone, but he’s been taking a class. “Did you know that locking your phone doesn’t shut off Siri? Anybody can get in there? A bad guy could steal the phone, say ‘call gramma,’ pretend to be you and steal all her money?”

I give it a try. I pick up my phone, double click the button without unlocking it first and ask Siri to call home. The house phone starts ringing. My mother, Captain Oblivious, says, “Phone!”

I do another test. “Siri. Set my alarm for 6:30 tomorrow.” Siri does it.

That’s cool. At least the bad guy won’t be late to his bad guy appointments.

I get up to leave.

Bella prances to the door, all tail and legs and growling purrs, and I wait for her to calm down before I attach the leash.

I say bye to my parents as she pulls me out the door. At the top of the stairs Bella pauses, head between the railings, searching for rabbits. She is so still, I can’t blame her for what happens next.

I’m on the second step when my left leg stops working, or gives out, or disappears completely.  In slow motion, I fall and land first on my knees, then my wrists and finally onto my right shoulder. I lay there for a moment until Bella turns, whines, and licks my face.

I take a deep breath and am glad, as I always am when this happens, that no one else was there to see. I pull myself up and rub my knees and imagine dark, symmetrical bruises.

The front door opens behind me, and my father steps onto the porch with the magazine in his hand. “Your mother says you forgot this.”

He doesn’t really care if I pick up my mail either.

“I thought you came out because you heard me fall down.”
“Nope. You forgot this thing.” He waves it at me and I take it. “Are you ok?”
“Yep. See you later.”

“Your car. I looked it up. For a side impact collision, it rates ok.” He’s continuing a conversation we’ve been having since my accident. He doesn’t think my Civic is safe anymore. “I couldn’t find the article about the roll over accidents though,” he said.

“Well, there’s a support bar, Dad. By the window?” I point at my car, and then continue, stupidly. “But I don’t know how safe a car can be with a sunroof? The glass would go everywhere.”

“I didn’t know it had a sunroof,” he says, like this changes something. Like he’s going straight back to the Consumer Report to see if a sunroof makes a difference. This is what he does. I was in an accident. I’m mostly ok. But still he worries.

“I don’t know,” he says again. “Just be careful.”

I put Bella in the car and drive back downtown to my house, thinking about accidents and England and my library and my grandmother, about headaches and falling down and how much it’s all going to hurt later.

Bella whines as we pull into the driveway, relieved to be home.

Pity Par-tea

In the wake of being turned down for another one of those perfect jobs, I was standing in the grocery store looking for garam masala to go in the vegan saag aloo I planned to make and instead came across a box of PG Tips tea bags and I started crying right there in the aisle.*

So embarrassing.

Those are the tea bags I used to buy when I lived in England. And they were sitting on the shelf next to a box of Hob Nobs and Cadbury's Digestive Biscuits, which I used to buy to go with my tea. In England. Where I used to live.

I loaded them all into my cart.  All I could think was I could be sitting in England right now, drinking tea and eating hobnobs (although with the time difference I would probably be drinking a pint and eating a curry) and I would have permanent residency status by now.  And a job. 

I can't believe I still feel this way sometimes. After a year, you'd think leaving England would not feel like a mistake I just made this morning. I wish it didn't feel like a mistake at all. 

I put the tea and the cookies back on the shelf. After traveling 6,000 miles they were super-expensive, and I knew they wouldn't taste the way I remember.

*I had the same reaction one time in England when Sainsbury's started carrying Oreos. What can I say? Processed food makes me emotional.