In the Slammer With Carol Smith Read Online Free PDF

Gold.’ ‘They mailed me a mistake,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to go to the office.’ He could give me one of my usual, to tide me over, he said; ‘I know how that office goes, Miss; you could spend the day.’ And he did give me the one pill. Calling me ‘Miss’—but he kept that prescription.…
    I did go to the office. I’m responsible. They took a long time looking up my case, which is listed as I want it, under Carol Carol. Though the other names must be in it for the record, Gold always did her best for me, in those conferences, where they decide. This time I did my best for her. When I said to the worker at the desk, a youngish black man: ‘I’ll need a new prescription, my bag was stole,’ I could even hear her voice. ‘Say “stolen,” Carol. Stop putting on.’
    She wasn’t too honest to have faith.
    ‘Would you repeat the question, Mrs. Mickens?’ I say now. I know quite well the substitute’s not a Mrs. Just like she must know what I’m not.
    ‘Miss Mickens.’ But she repeats the question.
    ‘I’m not Westmount.’
    ‘We know.’
    Gold always said ‘I.’ Her and me. ‘We’ was the office.
    ‘Westmount is in Montreal,’ I say. ‘A suburb.’
    ‘A fancy one. Like all your names. For fancy places.’
    Miss Evanston, Miss Bridgehampton, Miss Paget—that’s Bermuda. The list is long. All in memory of the nice home-places a nice orphan college girl at a democratic college got invited to for the school holidays. Places as good as anywhere for stopping up your ears against the call of the wild. Around the country-club pool, in the borrowed bathing-suit.
    For a time, all that girl thinks to do is to swing. So did a lot of others then. So do a lot of us always, until after graduation we are pulled back—all but a few of us. If the suburbs don’t do it for sure, the city job will. Or the family job.
    But there are always some, a few, who are determined not to have just a single history. Funny how you think you can manage that—when you’re young.
    … Bomb camaraderie. In the basement of a brownstone front—so appropriate. Amateurs, playing the matchstick game. The others around that work-talk table all have parents who are too rich to love. They envy me my aunts, and my orphan freedom. I marvel at the electrical know-how and other survival lore that the top private prep schools seem to provide. Later on in the afternoon the lace-curtained windows in the house across the street will shatter in the blast. I’m told I wasn’t there; those who should know keep telling me that I’d gone for sandwiches. I can’t recall. But the weather-in-the-streets later—I too would have wanted that. So, like the others, I went on the run.…
    ‘Eastlake. Northwood.’ Mickens is being chummy. ‘Why?’
    Nine out of ten she’s hoping to do a paper on me. Funny, how it squints the eyes.
    ‘I was seeking direction,’ I said.
    When she’s about to leave she recalls that I haven’t answered the first part of her question.
    Does she mean that I am well? Or may shortly be considered so? The balance is hard. And winter is coming. To stay on the outside, you have to be just well enough.
    ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I say. ‘But by the time Daisy comes back, I may.’
    ‘Daisy? Oh—Mrs. Gold. I’m afraid—she’s not coming back.’
    Mickens is not ‘afraid.’ One thing the pills do, they make you see other people’s body movements. The involuntary ones you no longer have. She has planted her feet. She doesn’t know what ‘afraid’ is. ‘You may as well know. Mrs. Gold is no longer on the job.’
    I expected that. Those druggists have to report.
    I look her over. Showing nothing of what I may be thinking. This makes her nervous. She knows she’s not real enough. For these lower depths.
    I stare until she falters. This takes experience.
    Shrink back only a step like she has, and you’re in the pad’s little half-room, if you can call it that. I don’t have anything more to put there. You could