plate. Holding the fork between thumb and palm, driving leaves of Boston lettuce around oil and vinegar, piercing olives, lifting rings of onion on tines only to let them drop again and again, Heed had chattered on, eating nothing. Junior fixed on the hands more than on what occupied them: small, baby-smooth except for one scarred spot, each one curved gently away from its partner—like fins. Arthritis? she wondered. Is that why she can’t write her own book? Or some other old-lady sickness? Memory loss, maybe. Even before the food arrived she had heard the change in Heed’s speech, the slow move away from the classroom to the girls’ locker; from a principal’s office to a neighborhood bar.
Yawning under blankets in the bed to which Heed had directed her, Junior fought sleep to organize, recapture her impressions. She knew she had eaten too much too quickly, as in her first days at Correctional before she learned how to make food last. And just as it had been there, she was already ready for more. Her appetite had not surprised her—it was permanent—but its ferocity had. Watching the gray-eyed Christine cleaning shrimp earlier, she had leashed it and had no trouble figuring out that a servant who cooked with twelve diamond rings on her fingers would enjoy—maybe even need—a little sucking up to. And although she had caught the other one’s pose as well and recognized it from the start as a warden’s righteous shield, Junior hoped that some up-front sass would crack it. Still, gobbling real food after days of clean garbage and public filch, she had let her antennae droop. As now, when sleep—alone, in silence, in total darkness at last—overwhelmed caution for pleasure. Simply not having a toilet in the room where you slept was a thrill. The bath she craved had to be postponed. When Heed said the weather was too nasty, the bus depot too far, and why not spend the night and collect your things tomorrow? Junior thought immediately of a solitary soak in a real tub with a perfumed bar of colored soap. But the water she heard running through pipes above reduced the tap flow in the second-floor bathtub to a sigh. Heed had beat her to it, so Junior spent a few minutes rummaging in the closet, where she found a helmet, one can of tomato paste, two rock-hard sacks of sugar, a jar of Jergens hand cream, a tin of sardines, a milk bottle full of keys, and two locked suitcases. She gave up trying to force the locks and undressed. After massaging her feet, she slid under the covers with two days’ worth of dirt on hold.
Sleep came down so fast it was only in dreaming that she felt the peculiar new thing: protected. A faint trace of relief, as in the early days at Correctional when the nights were so terrifying; when upright snakes on tiny feet lay in wait, their thin green tongues begging her to come down from the tree. Once in a while there was someone beneath the branches standing apart from the snakes, and although she could not see who it was, his being there implied rescue. So she had endured the nightmares, even entered them, for a glimpse of the stranger’s face. She never saw it, and eventually he disappeared along with the upright snakes. But here, now, deep in sleep, her search seemed to have ended. The face hanging over her new boss’s bed must have started it. A handsome man with a G.I. Joe chin and a reassuring smile that pledged endless days of hot, tasty food; kind eyes that promised to hold a girl steady on his shoulder while she robbed apples from the highest branch.
2
FRIEND
Vida set up the ironing board. Why the hospital had cut out the laundry service for everybody except “critical staff”—doctors, nurses, lab technicians—she couldn’t fathom. Now the janitors, food handlers, as well as the aides like herself, had to wash and press their own uniforms, reminding her of the cannery before Bill Cosey hired her away for the first work she ever had that required hosiery. She wore hose at the
Yawning under blankets in the bed to which Heed had directed her, Junior fought sleep to organize, recapture her impressions. She knew she had eaten too much too quickly, as in her first days at Correctional before she learned how to make food last. And just as it had been there, she was already ready for more. Her appetite had not surprised her—it was permanent—but its ferocity had. Watching the gray-eyed Christine cleaning shrimp earlier, she had leashed it and had no trouble figuring out that a servant who cooked with twelve diamond rings on her fingers would enjoy—maybe even need—a little sucking up to. And although she had caught the other one’s pose as well and recognized it from the start as a warden’s righteous shield, Junior hoped that some up-front sass would crack it. Still, gobbling real food after days of clean garbage and public filch, she had let her antennae droop. As now, when sleep—alone, in silence, in total darkness at last—overwhelmed caution for pleasure. Simply not having a toilet in the room where you slept was a thrill. The bath she craved had to be postponed. When Heed said the weather was too nasty, the bus depot too far, and why not spend the night and collect your things tomorrow? Junior thought immediately of a solitary soak in a real tub with a perfumed bar of colored soap. But the water she heard running through pipes above reduced the tap flow in the second-floor bathtub to a sigh. Heed had beat her to it, so Junior spent a few minutes rummaging in the closet, where she found a helmet, one can of tomato paste, two rock-hard sacks of sugar, a jar of Jergens hand cream, a tin of sardines, a milk bottle full of keys, and two locked suitcases. She gave up trying to force the locks and undressed. After massaging her feet, she slid under the covers with two days’ worth of dirt on hold.
Sleep came down so fast it was only in dreaming that she felt the peculiar new thing: protected. A faint trace of relief, as in the early days at Correctional when the nights were so terrifying; when upright snakes on tiny feet lay in wait, their thin green tongues begging her to come down from the tree. Once in a while there was someone beneath the branches standing apart from the snakes, and although she could not see who it was, his being there implied rescue. So she had endured the nightmares, even entered them, for a glimpse of the stranger’s face. She never saw it, and eventually he disappeared along with the upright snakes. But here, now, deep in sleep, her search seemed to have ended. The face hanging over her new boss’s bed must have started it. A handsome man with a G.I. Joe chin and a reassuring smile that pledged endless days of hot, tasty food; kind eyes that promised to hold a girl steady on his shoulder while she robbed apples from the highest branch.
2
FRIEND
Vida set up the ironing board. Why the hospital had cut out the laundry service for everybody except “critical staff”—doctors, nurses, lab technicians—she couldn’t fathom. Now the janitors, food handlers, as well as the aides like herself, had to wash and press their own uniforms, reminding her of the cannery before Bill Cosey hired her away for the first work she ever had that required hosiery. She wore hose at the
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