By Jennifer Cacicio
The first few drives are long and wintry, with trees bare against the sky. You smack the dashboard of your mother’s beat-up Escort to get the heat to blow. The first time you pull into the parking lot, your mother kills the engine, but keeps her hands on the wheel. The car ticks in relaxation. This isn’t what I had in mind when I walked down the aisle, she says. You’re only eight, but you laugh to make her feel better. Bean laughs too, because three-year-olds are copycats. Danny just coos in her car seat, unaware of the cement gray walls, the lookout towers manned with guns, the barbed wire lying along the top of every surface like frosting on an evil cake.
Your mother doesn’t know any of the rules at first. She has no idea the list of things you need: her car registration and your birth certificates, a clear Ziploc bag full of quarters, an arrival time that doesn’t coincide with the shift changes or head counts when they don’t let anyone in or out. You wait. You wait. And then you wait some more. You try not to stare at the heavy women who cake on lipstick in the reflection of a window, letting their many children run wild. At the uniformed men behind bulletproof glass who drink Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and laugh only with each other, treating even the visitors like inmates.
There are lockers, and an invisible stamp they press into your hand, and the metal detectors that beep from your mother’s under-wire bra. When you are ten, you set off the machine for the first time, though not from lingerie. You are wearing the birthday present your father sent you in the mail: a pair of real gold and emerald heart-shaped studs bought at the mall by your aunt. You got your ears pierced just so you could wear them here, so you could show him the gift he had given you, but a female guard named Pam shakes her head and rips them right from their tender holes. You are too shy to explain, but your mother tries. Two minutes later you are back in the lobby, tucking them into the locker that already holds your mother’s gold cross, Bean’s tiger barrettes, and whatever you may have found in Danny’s pockets that day—dried Play-dough, plastic silverware, old gum. The only jewelry you can wear inside is a wedding ring, but your mother’s already stopped wearing hers by then.
You get buzzed through the doors to step into that large visiting room, and you’re surprised it’s not more like TV: a small, dark cage with metal bars your father could loop his arms through, wringing his hands and saying how sorry he is to have landed here. Or the group of you squished into a tiny cubicle with a telephone for talking and a sheet of thick, clear glass between you so you could press your palms together while you spoke. But the room reminds you more of the mess hall at your Girl Scout Camp, with its linoleum floor, vaulted ceilings, and echo of conversation. There are rows and rows of chairs in the center, benches that line the walls, a patch of grass outside for smoking. Lights flicker from the vending machines. Babies wail. A guard checks out your mother’s behind, nudging his coworker’s beer belly with a nod. You look around the room at all these people, their screaming and crying, their laughing and clanging and buzzing—their noise—and you feel a slamming in your chest. There must be some mistake, you think, and you want to scream it out and loud: this is a place where your family does not belong.
You wait. Bean and Danny stare at the Barbie playhouse in the kids’ playroom that always seems to be blocked off, and you stare at the door, waiting for his face. You make bets with yourself about what he will look like this time: beard or no beard, belly or thin as a stick. Your mother just stares at her hands. Or else passes you the large bag of quarters you eventually learn to gather and bring. Each visiting morning, your mother calls out Ready, set, go, and the bunch of you run around the apartment searching for loose change. You know all the best places to look: under couch cushions and beds, or behind the toilet where the pockets of your mother’s faded jeans empty as she undresses for her bath. You win until you learn that the prize is nothing but an extra dollar for the vending machines, which doesn’t matter in the least. No is not a word you know on visiting days. You average two Kit-Kats—deliberately eating away the chocolate from the top and sides before the naked wafer—one can of Coke, and a stomachache. Bean can eat three Crunch Bars without blinking. You let her win the quarter game.
You kill time in the bathroom. It always smells terrible—pee, body odor, cheap perfume—and is filled with the crying women who hog up mirror space wiping the streaks of mascara off their faces. You and Bean call them the bathroom babies, and they are always the same ladies who sit outside on benches with the men they have come for, kissing for hours. Sometimes you go sit in the corner of the room, tell your mother you want to look outside to see your father walk from his building to yours. The truth is that you watch these couples, the way their tongues mix together in each others’ mouths, the way their hands grope at the waistbands of their jeans until a guard walks past and kicks their bench with a boot. Once, when you are twelve, you do see your father out that window, though instead of walking toward you he is running laps on the track. He’s skinny this time, but with muscles, and you watch him run around and around and around. You return to sit next to your mother. You’ve been waiting for hours, and you’ll wait hours more. See anything? she asks. Nope.
As a teenager, you visit less. Your mother still goes once every couple of months with your sisters: Bean, a middle-schooler, gifted with a natural popularity and athleticism that never came your way, and Danny, a child who’s never seen her father outside of jail. During their visits, you study. You take your SATs. You write your college essays. You sneak cigarettes from your landlord’s truck parked in the driveway. The reason you can’t go is simple: you don’t know what to do with yourself when he arrives. When you were little, you watched for his figure at the door, then ran and jumped into his arms when he came. Bean followed suit, and soon he held each of you in one arm, carrying you toward your mother like a couple bags of groceries. You spent the day playing Checkers or Go Fish, you sitting on the knees of your father, stealing sips from his can of ginger ale, and Bean sticking to your mom’s. As you got older the games became Gin Rummy and Chess. Danny became the one who watched and waited, the one who ran and leapt. You just stood up beside your mother, waiting for him to come to you. But now even that doesn’t seem like far enough, so you stay home and do your homework at the kitchen table, watching the clock, waiting in a place he can’t yet reach.
One day, while they’re visiting, you unearth the box you keep locked in a drawer. Inside there are journals and keepsakes, plus the stack of Polaroids you’ve been collecting for years. There was always a photographer loitering around on visiting days, ready to take family photos for a couple of bucks each. It was your job to find him and ask for two: one for your father, one for you. Your mother always kept the latest one affixed to the fridge, and when a new replaced the old, the old became yours. You have dozens of them now: the five of you placed in some neat formation against a brick wall, or sitting outside at a picnic table in summer. Your father looks serious and unsmiling beside your mother, who somehow appears half her size. You and your sisters stand in front, one of you kneeling or sitting Indian style in the grass. You can see the passing of years, the changing of fashion, your hair going from straight to permed to straight again. You can see the three of you grow up, creeping through the awkward years one by one—your braces and tight-rolled jeans, Danny’s sweat suits, Bean’s perfect bowl haircuts.
You graduate high school. You get a scholarship to a college in the city. You turn your secrets into stories, learn to impress girls and boys alike with tales of your harried youth. Right before you turn twenty, the telephone in your dorm rings out, and the next day you take two subways and a bus to your aunt’s. You see moments of your childhood stretch out in her yard: your bikes lying all over the place, your cardboard forts leaning against the side of the house. You pass the spot where your mothers and aunts and grandmothers once lounged in chairs beneath big umbrellas, smoking cigarettes or drinking coffee or light beer, the blue, orange, and pink paper lanterns draped through the trees above their heads. You walk inside and up the stairwell that still smells of hot, laundry air and cat food. You pause.
This morning the state released your father into the world—several years early for good behavior—and one of his sisters picked him up just before dawn to drive him to New Hampshire, where he ran his first marathon in under five hours. You think of him circling the track on that visiting day long ago, and you understand. But now he sits on the other side of this door, likely looking the same but a bit older, his crow’s feet crinkling at the sight of you. There will be coffee instead of soda cans, pasta in place of Kit-Kats, real conversation instead of card games and chess pieces that don’t match. Your sisters will be there—Bean a teenager now, voted class beauty, and Danny only in junior high and already causing hell. Your mother. You think of the bathroom babies, the way they kissed like their lives depended on it. Your parents never kissed in prison, except for the very first visiting day you ever had. As you were saying goodbye, your father pulled your mother toward him and pressed his lips to hers. One of her legs lifted; her back arched like a movie. She pushed him away and blushed, yanked you and Bean away by your hands. You were only a child, but even you could see how it made her face glow. You take one more breath and push open the door, see your father sitting there at the kitchen table, a mug of steaming coffee in his hand. This time he is the one who waits, the one who stands up and crosses the room when you arrive.
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