Jill McDonough

Lockers, metal detectors, steel doors, C.O. to C.O., different forms, desks—mouth open, turn—so slow I use the time to practice patience, grace, tenderness for glassed-in guards. The rules recited as if they were the same rules every week: I can wear earrings. I cannot wear earrings. I can wear my hair up. I cannot wear my hair up. I dressed by rote: cords in blue or brown, grey turtleneck, black clogs. The prisoners, all in grey sweatshirts, blue jeans, joked I looked like them, fit in. I didn't think about it, until I dreamed of being shuffled in and locked in there, hustled through the heavy doors. In the dream the guards just shook their heads, smirked when I spelled out my name, shook the freezing bars. Instead of nightly escorts out, I'd stay in there forever. Who would know? So I went to Goodwill, spent ten bucks on pink angora, walked back down those halls a movie star. When I stood at the front of the class there rose a sharp collective sigh. The one who said she never heard of pandering until the arraignment said OK,I'm going to tell her. Then she told me: freedom is wasted on women like me. They hate the dark cotton, jeans they have to wear, each one a shadow of the other their whole sentence.You could wear red! she accused. Their favorite dresses, silk slips, wool socks all long gone, bagged up for sisters, moms—maybe Goodwill, maybe I flicked past them looking for this cotton candy pink angora cardigan, pearl buttons. They can't stop staring, so I take it off and pass it around, let each woman hold it in her arms, appraise the wool between her fingers, a familiar gesture, second nature, from another world.

That's why we're here, said Julio Lugo to the Globe. Sox fans booed poor Lugo, booed his at-bat after he dropped the ball in the pivotal fifth. That ball,I got to it,I just couldn't come up with it. Lugo wants you to know he is fast: a slower player wouldn't even get close enough to get booed. Lugo wants you to know he's only human:We're human beings. That's why we're here. If not, I would have wings. I'd be beside God right now. I'd be an angel. But I'm not an angel. I'm a human being that lives right here. Next day, all is forgiven. Lugo's home run, Lugo's sweet comment to the press. I wanted to make a poster like the ones that say It's my birthday! or First Time at Fenway! or, pathetic,ESPN. Posterboard, permanent marker to say Lugo:me,too. I'm a human being that lives right here, decided it's too esoteric, too ephemeral a reference, but it's true: Oh, Lugo, Julio Lugo, I'm here with you.

Our cabdriver tells us how Somalia is better than here because in Islam we execute murderers. So, fewer murders.But isn't there civil war there now? Aren't there a lot of murders? Yes, but in general it's better. Not now, but most of the time. He tells us about how smart the system is, how it's hard to bear false witness. We nod. We're learning a lot. I say—once we are close to the house—I say,What about us? Two women, married to each other. Don't be offended, he says, gravely.But a man with a man, a woman with a woman: it would be a public execution. We nod. A little silence along the Southeast Corridor. Then I say,Yeah, I love my country. This makes him laugh; we all laugh. We aren't offended, says Josey.We love you. Sometimes I feel like we're proselytizing, spreading the Word of Gay. The cab is shaking with laughter, the poor man relieved we're not mad he sort of wants us dead. The two of us soothing him, wanting him comfortable, wanting him to laugh.We love our country, we tell him. And Josey tips him. She tips him well.

English Composition at South Middlesex Correctional Center. Julie reads out loud, and I praise her super thesis, then show how her paragraphs veer away from it, just summarize. And is she pissed! Too pissed to listen when her classmates try to help. Amanda offers Act 2 Scene 1—"Now I do love her too"—as evidence of Iago's state of mind. But Julie's shutting down, frowning at her handwritten draft, writing that took her weeks.Hey Julie, I say. Julie doesn't look up. Says What. Says I hate this stupid paper now. So I say Hey Julie.Amanda's helping you—write down what she's saying. She says I'm aggravated. I think they take classes on naming their feelings. I say I know it but you need to pull it together,or you'll end up screwing yourself.This is your chance. We're all quiet, breathing together, willing her to break out of this. Then: a little miracle. I look around the room and see that everyone is beautiful. Each did something special with her hair.Hey, I say, again. I say hey a lot in prison. Hey wait a minute.What's up with everybody's hair? Mabel got a haircut. Ellie's hair is long and black and gleaming down her back, Amanda's in French braids. Julie's freshly blonde, down to the roots.You guys all look great! They laugh. They're happy I noticed. Thank god I noticed; now, for a minute, we are women in a room, talking about their hair. Julie says Amanda did her highlights, and Sandy blew it out.Good job, guys; she looks great. And then I say,Julie.Look at you all pissed off over your paper when you're so lucky! Look at all these good friends you have.Helping with your paper, doing your hair. . . She nods. She looks me in the eye, back with us, back on track. I know, she says.I need to work on my gratitude.

Hand and foot, from head to toe, the body we know like the back of our hands, we say, patting our palms since we don't know back from front, don't know our ass from our elbow. I help Liz find her vagina to use a tampon her first time, Brooke tells me what to expect during a blow job, Jeff says to let the funneled force of Coors hold open my throat, a stranger gives me Valium when I reach for her hand on a plane. Now Depo, condoms, the Pill make way for FSH and BBT, how the sperm that makes boys goes faster, dies sooner, like boys, says Joanna, holding her little girl. Laura's fingers flick to show how the dye popped open her fallopian tubes. Rita Mae says a 48 year old's sperm could cause autism, Esther says kids are nice but they do ruin your life. Billy's friend announces, out of nowhere,I am so happy with my decision not to have children and none of us believe her. X shopped around for the perfect Jewish eggs, Y injected her belly, evenings, with little syringes, the bruises blooming black, now purple, now yellow and green. During implantation the nurses played soft eighties hits— I bought a ticket to the world, I know I know I know this much is true. She says in the ultrasound her ovaries looked like bunches of grapes. Z has a baby at forty-two— in vino she and her husband joke,in vitro a no-no in the Roman Catholic Church. Encyclicals entitled Donum Vitae, Dignitas Personae say why:the human person is objectively deprived of its proper perfection: namely, that of being the result and fruit of a conjugal act. The church, thank god, is soothing, confident, ready to clear all this up. Life a gift, human persons dignified. And we, most of us, are perfect, because fathers put their penises in moms.

WTF texts Josey, and I text back OMG. We had to tell Maggie what LOL meant– it's not Lots Of Love, though that almost always fits. Major emailed LMAO when I assumed his inbox gets dealt with by an underling, some undergrad, assumed it was Major's minor who invited me to read but "can not pay much sum of monies."Sum of Monies? I emailed back. Who wrote this? Your assistant's a Nigerian prince? WTF. For a while we just played with these, joking, like I tried on Wicked when I moved to Boston, called Lisa Liser, pizza pizzer, said Fucken, wicked, pissah, dood. But before you know it, it's part of how you talk, how I talk, fucken guy. Dude. When my ex student saw me she said Sick a dozen times, amazed, delighted, meant it's super I've moved back, and, whoda thunk it, come in to her cafe. She checked out Josey, my instant street cred. Josey bought new pants for work with a cell phone pocket; the cell phone pocket pants are Husky Boys' Dickies, which I can't get enough of, laugh every time I think of them, or try to name them out loud. Josey wears Husky Boys' Dickies. My darling, my husky, my husky little boy. Hey, Husky, we say, around the house, just waking up, just bumping into each other en route from basement to garden to kitchen.Hey, Husky, do you want coffee? Hey Husky, Hey Bunny, Hey Hon. When I'm helping my students translate Sappho's Fragments 1 and 31, I get them to make a list of many-colored things, so they don't feel stuck with colorful throne. One girl can't think of anything but Skittles.Terrific, I tell her, you're breaking product placement ground. Then I ask them to think of voices they love, the voice of someone they love. It's hard to describe a voice, but I ask them each to try, put his or her beloved in the place of Sappho's, make her theirs, more real than just sweet-voiced and lovely-laughtered.You have three minutes. Get something down, I tell them,some adjective or comparison, even if you just write the same word over and over again. 5:47 p.m. on a Wednesday, me saying Do your best and You could just say husky husky husky husky husky.

I wake up with a toothache, think Ishouldwrite about a toothache, make it somehow worthwhile. It's got everything: intimacy, decay, how the body's busy, night and day, doing you in. One of the hundreds of jumpers' corpses pulled from the bay had a note in its pocket saying No reason at all except I have a toothache. Josey's grandfather shot himself after his fifth sinus operation failed. Josey says Empty Nose Syndrome and I get confused— how can hollows be hollowed? But then I go to emptynosesyndrome.org, cup my poor nose in horror, grateful for all I take for granted, can't see. Golden Gate Hank hates his nickname. If you wanted to be called Serenity Hank, Ken tells him,you shouldn't have jumped off the fucking bridge. The ones that live all say they changed their minds in the four seconds before they hit, tried to land feet first and managed it. Ken says don't tell people I think every day of how I wouldn't kill myself, they get the wrong idea. I think every day of how I'd save myself, save Josey: stab the bad guy, fall feet first, punch the Great White in his eyeball, play dead in the bullet-ridden mass grave. From the back seat of the Suburban, I heard my mother say to my father Driving across a high bridge always makes me want to jump. You might live: A seventeen year old boy hit feet first, swam to shore and walked for help, saying his back was killing him. Another guy realized he was alive and underwater, felt something brushing his broken legs.Great, now I get eaten by a shark, he thought. It happens. But this was a seal, circling, apparently the only thing that was keeping me alive, and you can not tell me that wasn't God, because that's what I believe, and that's what I'll believe until the day I die.

The night we got bashed we told Rusty how they drove up, yelled QUEER, threw a hot dog, sped off. Rusty:Now, is that gaybashing? Or are they just calling you queer? Good point. Josey pitied the fools: who buys a perfectly good pack of wieners and drives around San Francisco chucking them at gays? And who speeds off? Missing the point, the pleasure of the bash? Dear bashers, you should have seen the hot dog hit my neck, the scarf Josey sewed from antique silk kimonos:so gay. You missed laughing at us, us confused, your raw hot dog on the ground. Josey and Rusty and Bob make fun of the gaybashers, and I wash my scarf in the sink. I use Woolite. We worry about insurance, interest rates. Not hot dogs thrown from F-150s, homophobic freaks. After the bashing, we used the ATM in the sex shop next to Annie's Social Club, smiled at the kind owner, his handlebar mustache. Astrud Gilberto sang tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema... and the dildos gleamed from the walls, a hundred cheerful colors. In San Francisco it rains hot dogs, pity-the-fool. Ass-sized penguins, cock after cock in azure acrylic, butterscotch glass, anyone's flesh-tone, chrome.

I stopped at a red light on Mass. Ave. in Boston, a couple blocks away from the bridge, and a woman in a beat-up old Buick backed into me. Like, cranked her wheel, rammed right into my side. I drove a Chevy pickup truck. It being Boston, I got out of the car yelling, swearing at this woman, a little woman, whose first language was not English. But she lived and drove in Boston, too, so she knew, we both knew, that the thing to do is get out of the car, slam the door as hard as you fucking can and yell things like What the fuck were you thinking?You fucking blind?What the fuck is going on?Jesus Christ! So we swore at each other with perfect posture, unnaturally angled chins. I threw my arms around, sudden jerking motions with my whole arms, the backs of my hands toward where she had hit my truck. But she hadn't hit my truck. She hit the tire; no damage done. Her car was fine, too. We saw this while we were yelling, and then we were stuck. The next line in our little drama should have been Look at this fucking dent!I'm not paying for this shit.I'm calling the cops,lady. Maybe we'd throw in a You're in big trouble,sister, or I just hope for your sake there's nothing wrong with my fucking suspension, that sort of thing. But there was no fucking dent. There was nothing else for us to do. So I stopped yelling, and she looked at the tire she'd backed into, her little eyebrows pursed and worried. She was clearly in the wrong, I was enormous, and I'd been acting as if I'd like to hit her. So I said Well,there's nothing wrong with my car,nothing wrong with your car. . .are you OK? She nodded, and started to cry, so I put my arms around her and I held her, middle of the street, Mass. Ave., Boston, a couple blocks from the bridge. I hugged her, and I said We were scared,weren't we? and she nodded and we laughed.