Eileen Read Free Page B

blouses unbuttoned, hands in each other’s brassieres, legs spread, made me want to vomit.
    There was a small section in a book I’d found in the public library that showed casts of faces taken of figures such as Lincoln, Beethoven, and Sir Isaac Newton after they’d died. If you’ve ever seen a real dead body you know that people never die with such complacent grins, such blankness. But I used their plaster casts as a guide and practiced very diligently in the mirror, relaxing my face while keeping an aura of benign resilience, such as I saw in those dead men’s faces. I mention it because it is the face I wore at work, my death mask. Being as young as I was, I was terribly sensitive, and determined never to show it. I steeled myself from the reality of the place, this Moorehead. I had to. Misery and shame surrounded me, but not once did I run to the bathroom crying. Later that morning, delivering mail to the warden’s office, which was within the complex of chambers where the boys studied and had recreational activities, I passed a corrections officer—Mulvaney or Mulroony or Mahoney, they all seemed the same—twisting a boy’s ear as he knelt down in front of him. “You think you’re special?” he asked. “See the dirt on the floor? You matter less than a speck of that dirt between those tiles.” He pushed the boy’s head down face first into his boots, big and steel-toed, hard enough to club someone to death. “Lick it,” said the officer. I watched the boy’s lips part, then I looked away.
    The warden’s secretary was a woman so steely-eyed and fat she appeared never to be breathing, her heart never beating. Her death mask was impressive. The only sign of life she ever gave was when she lifted a finger to her mouth and a centimeter of pale lavender tongue came out to wet its tip. She leafed through the stack of envelopes I handed her robotically, then turned away. I lingered for a minute or two, pretending to count days on the calendar hanging on the wall by her desk. “Five days till Christmas,” I said, trying to sound cheerful.
    â€œPraise God,” she replied.
    I often think of Moorehead and its laughable credo,
parens patriae,
and cringe. The boys at Moorehead were all so young, just children. They frightened me at the time because I felt they didn’t like me, didn’t find me attractive. So I tried to cast them off as dunces and wild animals. Some of them were grown, tall and handsome. I was not immune to those boys either.
    Back at my desk, there was plenty I could have pondered. It was 1964, so much on the horizon. In every direction something was getting torn down or built up, but I mostly pondered myself and my own misery while I arranged my pens in the cup, crossed off the day on my desk calendar. The second hand on the clock shook and bolted forward like someone at first terrified with anxiety, then, bolstered by desperation, jumping off a cliff only to get stuck in midair. My mind wandered. Randy, more than anywhere else, was where it liked to go. When my paycheck came that Friday, I folded it and slipped it into my bosom, which was hardly a bosom. Just small, hard mounds, really, which I hid beneath layers of cotton underthings, a blouse, a wool jacket. Istill had that pubescent fear that when people looked at me, they could see through my clothes. I suspect nobody was fantasizing about my naked body, but I worried that when anyone’s eyes cast downward, they were investigating my nether regions and could somehow decipher the complex and nonsensical folds and caverns wrapped up so tightly down there between my legs. I was always very protective of my folds and caverns. I was still a virgin, of course.
    I suppose my prudishness did its duty and saved me from a difficult life such as my sister’s. She was older than me and not a virgin at all and lived with a man who was not her husband a few towns