But she was still determined that she wouldn’t eat anything. And she wouldn’t lie down. Even though the day seemed a hundred hours long, she wouldn’t allow her hunger or fatigue to get the better of her.
She leaned her back against the wall, pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around her cold ankles and tried, once again, to close her eyes and imagine what treats would come her way when she went back to her real life. Donald had better be especially generous with her bonus. In fact, she might not have to wait until the end of the fiscal year. Of course, after December there would be the full partnership and the big office. She took a deeper breath of the fatal air. Concentrate on it, she told herself. Think how beautiful that place will be compared with this one. She knew each partner got a generous budget to furnish and decorate his or her office, but now she thought that she might move her reproduction Beidermeyer desk from home into the office. She’d bill Hudson, Van Schaank and use the money for the dressing table she’d admired in the antique shop on upper Lexington Avenue. She’d … she tried once again to get into the reverie but it wasn’t working.
She opened her eyes. She couldn’t really imagine anything but this room, her freezing feet, the unbearable light and the hunger gnawing at her belly. She tried to remind herself that she was the hero of the Vareen takeover and the heavy lifter in the Cooper Corp. scenario, but she hadn’t been cold and wet and humiliated then. Jennifer may have managed not to drink and not to use the ladies’ room, but if she had had to pee then, she wouldn’t have had to do it in front of a dozen pairs of eyes.
She felt her eyes begin to get wet and forced herself to stand up. Just then a noise outside the cell brought her to the front. Another guard was wheeling a trolley down the corridor. When he reached her, he didn’t even look up. He merely bent toward her, his face forward, and slipped a plastic tray through the slot. It almost looked like an airplane meal.
‘No,’ she told herself firmly one more time. But her cold feet walked, without her permission, over to the tray. She bent and picked it up. Something green. Something brown. And something that looked like it had tomato sauce on it. Whatever it was, she took it to the bed, sat down crosslegged on the filthy mattress, and ravenously wolfed it down.
I was a prisoner long before I was an inmate.
Bonnie Foreshaw, inmate. Andi Rierden, The Farm
I know that it will seem a truism, but I must say that shooting your husband, accidentally or otherwise – and even more – having him die from the bullet wound, totally changes your life. The chief benefit is, of course, that he is gone, but there are other benefits, which I’ll get to later. The main drawback, however, is that in most cases you’re deprived of your liberty and might have to live in a place with a library that has only one hundred and sixteen books. That is the exact number of books in the library here at Jennings.
But back to my husband. He could have lived; he died just to spite me. The bullet only grazed his aorta. Serious? Yes – but with his will power, he might have lingered long enough for the paramedics to stabilize him. But no. He always had to get his way in the end. He could turn any situation to his advantage. This was, of course, only one of the many reasons why I hated him so fully and completely, and why the gun I was holding went off while it was pointed in his direction. At the time, I had meant to kill myself. How foolish of me.
My husband was the famous Richard Rafferty, Riff to his friends. At the very minute the bullet was nicking his deceitful heart, his latest book, The Life of the Heart, was being talked about on the six o’clock news. A book? On the evening news? How can that be? Easy. Richard was sleeping with the woman who produced the show.
And speaking of the evening news, I understand that the new arrival, this Miss Jennifer Spencer, is up in observation hell. She’s certainly been news. I’ve been following her story with some interest, since one needs such pastimes in prison, and because both of my sons are in the same type of business as she is … or was. From the beginning I could see that she was taking the fall for someone else, probably a man. The only question that remained in my mind was, did she know what was going on? Was she complicitous? I was actually looking forward to seeing her in person, because then I would know.
How would I know? Well, let me explain another result of happening to murder your husband: It turns your brain inside out. Although this is terribly painful at the time and for a long while afterward, in the end it is a good thing. I know this sounds totally insane, but I am a better person for having killed my husband. For instance, I’ve become nearly as good as a dog at reading people.
Lest anyone think that I am advocating murder as a method of self-improvement, let me correct that impression at once. Yes, I am a better person, but I was a good enough person before. Riff wasn’t; he wasn’t worth dirtying my hands for. What he deserved from me was the indifference that I only now feel toward him. Trading life and liberty for well-deserved revenge and an enlightened mind is a very hard deal to accept. Jennings, have I said it before, is a kind of hell.
When I arrived here, I fell into despair at once. The trial, Grand Guignol though it had been, was a reason to get up, get dressed, and perform. Here there was nothing. I wanted to die. Imagine. I had been headmistress of one of the most prestigious private girls’ schools on the East Coast, and had lived among the very rich and instructed their daughters. On my first day at Jennings, I was told to ‘get my fuckin’ ass movin’.’ I had been in Who’s Who In American Education. Here I was referred to as ‘the old bitch’.
Somehow I got used to the vulgarity. It was the deprivation of every sensory pleasure that was the hardest thing for me to bear. My marriage had not been happy, but I had lived in a beautiful home, traveled to Paris and London nearly every year, spent summers in Tuscany, was a connoisseur of wines and fine foods, collected rare books and Herend, drove an immaculate ‘62 Mercedes Gullwing, subscribed to the ballet, shopped at Neiman Marcus.
And suddenly I was confined to one of the ugliest places on the face of the earth, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I assure you, no bleaker, duller, more visually offensive place can exist. I’d rather be in Craigmore Prison, dank dark dungeon that it is. It at least has some architecture to boast of. Jennings is the kind of dull, featureless maze they put rats into when they’re trying to see if they can stunt their brain development. Even crumbling ceilings or walls would add interest, but here there is no crumbling, just ugly, 1960s efficiency. Jennings was built when there was a soul-sickness plaguing the earth, probably an aftereffect of the war. Buildings were built to last, but beauty in architecture was eschewed. The style could be called ‘Plainness with a Vengeance’, ‘Ugly is Fine’, or ‘Death in Life’. And I have to stay here for the rest of mine. There are no aesthetic pardons.
So I wondered how Jennifer Spencer was faring in Observation. She had a lower-middle-class youth, upper-middle-class adulthood. A transition to Jennings wasn’t going to be easy for her, to say the least. But my interest in the fate and character of Jennifer Spencer was going to be limited compared to the keen interest I have in women like Movita Watson and her ‘sidekick’, Cher. I had never met women like them before my incarceration and I am fascinated by their unschooled intelligence.
Movita, for example, is someone I pegged as decent the minute I saw her despite her hellfire exterior. She plays tough, and sometimes dumb, but she’s generous and clever, too, and has her own eye for ‘attitude’ in others. She will tell you that when she entered Jennings, I had no ‘attitude’ at all. This was why we became friends fairly quickly. She was, in her words, ‘curious ‘bout that weird ol’ bitch’. Well, attitude is one of the petty attributes that I lost as a result of my husband dying at my hands, or more literally, at my feet. When I came in, I’ve been told by Movita, I had the look of a ‘schoolteacher who’d been wiped out by a nuclear bomb’. Change ‘schoolteacher’ to ‘schoolmistress’ and her assessment was pretty much accurate.
But those credentials as a schoolteacher