Jennifer mechanically imitated the inmate in front of her so that she would be sure not to mess up in mess hall. There were three drink machines: one with grape something or other, one with orange something or other, and then a much less desirable lemonade mixture that was certain to taste more like water than lemon. She took a metal cup from the inverted stack, selected the orange drink, then stepped down the line a little further only to be presented with a plastic tray covered in a clear plastic lid.
‘Hey, where’s the Reuben?’ an inmate asked.
‘Yeah, I thought someone said we were having Reubens,’ another inmate intoned.
‘Well, Officer Summit must have been misinformed,’ the officer at the head of the line said.
Oh man, was there going to be a riot over what was served? Jennifer had been through enough already and she couldn’t take any more disruption. She’d never felt so out of control in a controlled environment in her life. She took her tray and followed the woman in front of her to the table.
Jennifer stared down at her tray. She watched the other woman at the table dismantle the lid, carefully slide it under the bottom tray, and then unwrap a utensil from a napkin and let it fall in her hand. It was an abbreviated spoon – a shortened bowl with three equally short prongs extending briefly from the center. She stared at the micro landscape of food in front of her. There was a hill of instant potatoes, a wide river of grease, a dying forest of cabbage greens beside a toxic dump of gristle and gray meat. A week ago, Jennifer would have scraped something like this off her shoe in disgust. She was hungry, but eating this would be a challenge, even without the bizarre implement.
A large woman of indeterminate race with light skin, freckles, and kinky red hair pulled back into a knot at the top of her head sat down opposite and gave Jennifer a smile that lacked intelligence and the left bicuspid. ‘I’m Big Red,’ she said, then lowered her voice. ‘You want some brew, you call Big Red.’
‘What do you call this?’ Jennifer asked her dinner companion, holding up her utensil.
‘A spork,’ Big Red told her, as if Jennifer was the stupid one. ‘You never seen no spork before? Used to get them all the time at Kentucky Fried.’
‘Are all the forks and spoons gone?’ Jennifer asked.
‘Get outta here, girl,’ Big Red said. ‘They don’t give us no knives, no forks, no nothing. Don’t want us to make weapons out of ‘em.’
Jennifer used the spork to scoop up a little potato and gravy, but the gravy ran through the space between the two tines. ‘Couldn’t they give us just a spoon?’ she asked in exasperation. ‘You can’t hurt someone with a spoon.’
‘Oh, say what?’ Big Red spoke up. ‘Lottie J. took out Sabrina’s eye with a spoon.’ She was sporking up her food with the kind of relish Jennifer had rarely seen at three star restaurants. ‘Lottie J. faked being sick and went to the dispensary and she got herself a spoon there and sharpened it and then when she came back and that Sabrina be botherin’ her again, she just scooped out her eye like a melon ball.’
Jennifer put her spork down. The greasy taste of the gravy sat on her tongue like oil on a driveway. Her hunger turned to nausea. The glutinous gray-brown mass that passed as meat couldn’t possibly be cut by the spork. ‘You finished with that?’ Big Red asked, eyeing Jennifer’s tray.
Jennifer picked up a plastic cup of pudding and nodded. Before she could get her arm out of the way Big Red grabbed the tray and pulled it over to her, placing it on top of her first tray. She dug in and Jennifer realized that the niceties of cutting the meat were not an issue here; Big Red sporked the entire piece into her mouth and Jennifer watched as she masticated in a bovine manner for a lot longer than it took Jennifer to down the watery tapioca. This was definitely not the Four Seasons and there was no cotton candy cake with sugared violets and a candle on top for dessert.
To help calm her nausea, Jennifer tried to see what the other women were doing to get through their meals. Most of them were talking amongst themselves; some were even laughing. Then, to her absolute horror, Jennifer saw a grown woman trying to make herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich using a spork. It would’ve been easier if she’d just used her fingers.
This was humiliation, not rehabilitation! Jennifer couldn’t get beyond it no matter how she tried. She wondered if the population was really so dangerous that they couldn’t be trusted with real eating utensils. She looked at Big Red, now mopping up the last of the food, and wondered if the story about the spoon was even true. Maybe it was one of those things they told a newcomer to scare her, like the camp story of the parked couple and the bloody hook hanging off the door of their car.
Then, even as she put the thought away, two women began screeching. In less than a second, Big Red jumped up and stood on the table, narrowly missing Jennifer’s hand. ‘Kill the bitch!’ Big Red screamed. Jennifer wasn’t sure that even in her exalted position Red could see anything. The imbroglio seemed to be on the floor, on the other side of the table, near the wall. Correction officers were on the two fighting women in an instant, and, although Jennifer didn’t want to look, she couldn’t help but see one of the officers – she thought it was Byrd – throw a vicious kick at an inmate who was rolling on the floor.
Just then, louder noise and movement broke out to the right. Jennifer looked over, but before she could see what was going on, she noticed a pay phone out in the corridor. This is it, she thought.
As the two women continued to shout, and as several officers rushed their table, Jennifer calmly started to walk backward to the exit. She’d walked against a crowd that way many times in New York’s movie theaters when she wanted to get in to a popular show. As she made her way out, she watched the activity in front of her, but also glanced behind her to make sure she didn’t disturb anyone by bumping into them. The last thing she needed was to be in a jailhouse brawl. Though she was known as the ‘Warrior of Words’ at Hudson, Van Schaank, the one thing she didn’t know how to do was fight physically. Her path was clear – only another twelve steps before she’d be at the phone! It seemed that no one had noticed her, but her heart was thumping so loudly that she was certain that everyone could hear it, even over the ruckus.
Jennifer looked behind her again; in two more steps she reached the phone. She picked up the receiver and started to dial. She could hear the tones of the numbers in her ears and they drowned out the increasing noise from the room behind her. She dialed collect, and when the automated operator’s voice asked for it she gave her name. At the other end of the line, in another world altogether, she heard the phone ring. She imagined Tom’s apartment in Battery Park City overlooking New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty. She’d looked out at the view a hundred times. She heard the phone ring again. Women were screaming and shouting from every corner of the room. It was worse than a snake pit. Jennifer couldn’t help it: She instinctively put her hands over her ears, but still the noise penetrated despite her resolution. A tear began to drip from the corner of her right eye along her nose and down to her nostril. But she couldn’t take her hands off her ears to wipe it away because the noise was so overwhelming.
Suddenly a squadron of guards surrounding someone was coming her way. Jennifer was bumped into by another woman who was struggling against three officers. ‘Lockdown!’ she heard an officer shout from the far side of the cafeteria. But Jennifer stayed where she was, listening to the distant ringing. Answer, damnit!
A shuffling line of women approached the exit, and one woman stood directly in front of Jennifer and smiled. She was almost certain that this was the creature she had seen tending the marigolds on her way into Jennings. The black face split into a skeletal grin. ‘Trying to escape this place?’ the old woman asked.