In the Slammer With Carol Smith Read Online Free PDF Page A

to keep the bull in the barn.’
    ‘Hmm. I should have had one of those dolls.’
    ‘I give you, missus. I get more.’
    ‘Thanks. Too late to shut the barn door.… Well, Carol, hasta la vista. Keep well.’
    ‘Have a good vacation.’ Her gray is showing. ‘Get blonder.’ I feel generous. ‘And remember me to the kids.’
    ‘Their father has them.’ She is looking at me like at a person. Like I am one. ‘I’m going in retreat. Up Hudson. I’ll send you a card, hair freak.’
    She never told me anything personal before. I don’t even know her maiden name. ‘In retreat? Don’t do that. I had a college friend did that. She came out a nun.’
    ‘Oh, Carol. Know something? You’re great.’ She shoulders the bag. ‘And I have to—get the year in repair. I have to.’ She is gone.
    ‘So what means “re-pair”?’
    How can I say? It’s what I’m in. ‘Have to get you a dictionary, Carmen. So you can pick these things up on your own.’
    ‘Also you.’ She squeezes the dishrag, draping it carefully over the sink’s edge; there’s no hook for it. ‘That lady, I think she is no more good for you.’ She drops a Spanish phrase I don’t catch.
    ‘What’s that mean?’
    A shrug, a headshake, a smile; she’s not going to say. ‘¡Cuidado!’ she shrieks suddenly, stamping her tiny foot.
    ‘What, what?’ I know already.
    ‘A roach.’

‘D OES BEING WELL scare you, Ms. Westmount?’
    August twenty-fifth. Mickens and me. For the third time.
    She’s the same as she was the first time, fresh-crowned with her SW degree ‘from Brandeis,’ cool as her vinyl rain-cape, stiff as her brand-new jogging shoes—and hell-bent on not being anybody’s substitute.
    That first time, she found Lopez’s gimpy bell-system pronto—which was more than the firemen could when the second-floor-rear’s oven exploded. And she was up the four flights to me before you could say crackerjack; she has never sat on a stoop.
    I was scattering the bicarb-borax when she banged on the door, and in answer to my ‘Who is it?’ yells back like they’re calling out the troops: ‘The visitor!’
    That’ll be the substitute, I think; they’re always louder than the original. So when I open up and she walks right in past me, I let her. Those thick shoe-soles of hers send up the powder like we’re on maneuvers. With a SW you always are, but the dust is not usually that visible.
    Her pitch is total honesty, she tells me. Even though I wouldn’t know her name is BRYNA, except for her fourteen-carat gold bracelet saying it. ‘Total’ means she interviewed my own neighbors before visiting me, but didn’t say. I only catch on when she asks me do I really feel touched by God? I say ‘I could only wish. It would save everybody energy.’
    The new style in social psychiatry is not to pussyfoot anymore ‘but to confront.’ She is up to her earrings in the new style. And even that first time, making sure I expect it. She’s read my record in full, and knows I have ‘the requisite IQ.’ What she’s really saying is that she’s got my number—which if she has, she will be the first, not excluding me—and that I am to play pattycake with her confront.
    And now this double-whammy question. Does being well scare me? When after what happened over Gold’s last prescription, I am scared, yes. To unbutton my lip to this dame about anything.
    … When I brought in that prescription to the drugstore down the corner, the pharmacist, who is also the owner, gives me a smile; by now he knows me, I don’t mind. He takes the folded white slip into the back, like always. But after a minute he comes out again. He is a nice, shriveled little man in a dirty white coat. ‘I can’t fill this, Miss. Some mistake maybe. Is this yours?’ On examination it wasn’t. Not for me, and not for tofranil or compazine either. Or for what I’d been getting. ‘For a controlled substance,’ he says. ‘—one on special register. In the name of Daisy