Just As I Thought Read Online Free PDF Page B

could see right into Sutter’s Bakery, then on the corner of Tenth Street. These were my neighbors at coffee and cake.
    Sometimes the cell block was open, but not our twelve cells. Other times the reverse. Visitors came by: they were prisoners, detainees not yet sentenced. They seemed to have a strolling freedom, though several, unsentenced, unable to make bail, had been there for months. One woman peering into the cells stopped when she saw me. Grace! Hi! I knew her from the neighborhood, maybe the park, couldn’t really remember her name.
    What are you in for? I asked.
    Oh nothing—well, a stupid drug bust. I don’t even use—oh well, forget it. I’ve been here six weeks. They keep putting the trial off. Are you okay?
    Then I complained. I had planned not to complain about anything while living among people who’d be here in these clanging cells a long time; it didn’t seem right. But I said, I don’t have anything to read and they took away my pen and I don’t have paper.
    Oh, you’ll get all that eventually, she said. Keep asking.
    Well, they have all my hairpins. I’m a mess.
    No no, she said, you’re okay. You look nice.
    (A couple of years later, the war continuing, I was arrested in Washington. My hair was still quite long. I wore it in a kind of bun on top of my head. My hairpins gone, my hair straggled wildly every which way. Muriel Rukeyser, arrested that day along with about thirty other women, made the same generous sisterly remark. No no, Grace, love you with your hair down, you really ought to always wear it this way.)
    The very next morning, my friend brought me The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams. —These okay?
    God! Okay. —Yes!
    My trial is coming up tomorrow, she said. I think I’m getting off with time already done. Overdone. See you around?
    That afternoon, my cellmate came for her things. —I’m moving to the fourth floor. Working in the kitchen. Couldn’t be better. We were sitting outside our cells, she wanted me to know something. She’d already told me, but said it again: I still can’t believe it. This creep, this guy, this cop, he waits, he just waits till he’s fucked and fine, pulls his pants up, pays me, and arrests me. It’s not legal. It’s not. My man’s so mad, he like to kill me, but he’s not that kind of—he’s not a criminal type, my man. She never said the word “pimp.” Maybe no one did. Maybe that was our word.
    I had made friends with some of the women in the cells across the aisle. How can I say “made friends”? I just sat and spoke when spoken to, I was at school. I answered questions—simple ones. Why would I do such a fool thing on purpose? How old were my children? My man any good? Then: you live around the corner? That was a good idea, Evelyn said, to have a prison in your own neighborhood, so you could keep in touch, yelling out the window. As in fact we were able to do right here and now, calling and being called from Sixth Avenue, by mothers, children, boyfriends.
    About the children: One woman took me aside. Her daughter was brilliant, she was in Hunter High School, had taken a test. No, she hardly ever saw her, but she wasn’t a whore—it was the drugs. Her daughter was ashamed; the grandmother, the father’s mother, made the child ashamed. When she got out in six months it would be different. This made Evelyn and Rita, right across from my cell, laugh. Different, I swear. Different. Laughing. But she could make it, I said. Then they really laughed. Their first laugh was a bare giggle compared to these convulsive roars. Change her ways? That dumb bitch. Ha!!
    Another woman, Helen, the only other white woman on the cell block, wanted to talk to me. She wanted me to know that she was not only white but Jewish. She came from Brighton Beach. Her father, he should rest in peace, thank God, was dead. Her arms were covered with puncture marks almost like sleeve patterns. But she needed to talk to me, because I was Jewish (I’d