by Dana Jerman

“These were my people, but I was not theirs. Their clammed unhappy world was my world, and it terrified me.” – Dale Gunthorp (from Gypsophilia)

Her face was constantly consumed in a grin that lent her an emotionally invincibility. Somehow, no one could piss her off. In high school, a time when the rest of us were doing nothing but being pubescent and grumpy and frowning, embracing its toughness, its indifference- she was busy being engaged in a teeth-flash fest all day long. Even in class when concentrating her closed lips were upturned at the corners. She endured taunts with laughs that only brightened her face, because she was beautiful, although it was easy to make fun of her. Those who would blow off steam on others knew they could go to her because she wasn’t going to get all huffy and turn their friends on them later. I only saw her get mad once and it was all in her eyes and brows.  Her mouth remained open and perky. Tall, brown eyes. A high voice that danced around you with singsong qualities. Never had a boyfriend and walked with a tall briskness that defined direction. Ashley.

I was graduating a class ahead, so during my sophomore year, she showed up for her first at the same city university. I suppose it wasn’t a day, as in a defined 24 hours, that the temper in her smile changed, dissolved. It was a pretty subtle process dragging for weeks, insidious. I still feel as if I should have guessed that something like it would happen. That her mouth would get tired.

I’d run into her on campus at a random juncture and was startled into an indignant curiosity not to find that brazen show of oral cavity on display. Upon trying to engage her in that familiar shining smile her bottom lip would barely twitch in a gesture akin to a muscle spasm and she would breeze past like the embodiment of the cold shoulder. All that wattage was burning right out.

I spied her in a study carol at the library one day, her head buried in a few open texts at a time and writing diligently. I’d never had the opportunity to study her physically before beyond the smile and for a minute I thought she was someone else. Older. With her hair up in a bun on her head, it was plain to see the words “Red Brick Door” tattooed simply on the pale flesh of her neck. Struck by a bewildering force, I stood in amazement. Once glee-filled oozing endorphins this girl was now shrouded in an enigmatic cloud that rebuilt her. I recalled the furiousness of her pen as it moved across a near full sheet of notebook paper. It was probably at this time that I felt I could have changed things, like everyone believes in their individual power to affect a situation and pivot history.

//

Much later amongst old friends at a house party with drinks in hand, I observed an old comrade feed her new significant other hummus for the first time as they sat around a long table. Watching, smirking, until my ears burned as a few seated around the television in the next room began to call the name Ashley White in casual speaking. I moved in to eavesdrop.

“You heard about all this, right? Do you remember the tall blonde from the 1991 class?  She acted kind of scatterbrained?” The question.

“Yeah, somebody mentioned something to me a few days ago. Isn’t she, like, dead now, er something?” The remark.

“No, no, she’s been incarcerated for murdering members of an all-girl gang. Like, thirteen of them are dead. Amazing. She has yet to go to trial, but I guess she was part of the gang, the “brick house” or something.”

They nodded in understanding and went back to drinking and watching the news, full of superficially covered street crime and commercials. I felt flush with anger for hearing this report second hand and of all places at a party. It made me consider the largeness of the city, the impersonality. Ashley’s smile was like a beacon of pure light, accompanied by those wild brown eyes. In my memory again this time like a force changed- a sense of history and balance now altogether flawed, astray. Who could have guessed how much she really needed from a community that continually denied her?

I left the party. Seized with a sensation ineffable, existential. Before realizing it I was seated at home with a pen in one hand, writing a letter to Ashley. I asked questions and made statements.  She returned my post after a few months with this:

"Look, it’s hard for me to write in here. I’m not comfortable with how mail is handled and scrutinized. My general ability to be mobile in this ward is continually limited. To be blunt, I’m getting used to things. Deep thanks for writing to me. Explanations will follow if you wish to communicate further by making your presence known on an allotted visitation date. Until then, with hope and liberation – Ashley."

And so I went. There is a belief that places only really exist between when you come and when you leave.  Everyday for the rest of my life that penitentiary and things said there will blaze on in the back of my brain like an ache impervious to aspirin.

//

Max security. The walls gray and pea green and orange, reminding me of middle school– stale, injected with a numbing agent, a tranquilizing drug that made my insides feel like mildew. The rhythm of thick doors slamming around me gave a claustrophobic feel to each room I was escorted through. The plexiglas window had a stainless steel circular screen in its middle. We would be speaking through a bathtub drain. Two women down on the end were engaged with inmates I couldn’t see. The feeling of encouraged separation, isolation, of total warranted domination by a system sat on my shoulders like puttied guilt. Then the door buzzed and a blue light came on across from me, through the glass.

Her hair was cut very short. Her eyes only sunken a little, she smiled when she spied me with her mouth and nothing more. She wore loose fitting grey scrub-type pants and black moccasin slipper sandals that made her feet look too small. A yellowish shirt. Her hands, the deft fingers lithe with clean, short nails, cuffed in front- a death-row Christ. As she sat, I smiled to return her grin but no words would come out.

“I’ve been excited at the thought of your coming.”  In the opening confession her voice was a warm rasp like high grain sandpaper. I thought about her sitting at her typewriter (it was a typewritten note she had sent to me not so long ago), not speaking for days on end as she wrote, her diligent pain pouring out onto sheet after thin sheet – easily ripped and discarded, the dry ink smeared on the edges from the tips of tongued-wet curious fingers. I knew I was crouching in my seat and felt like a tree stump that never got any sun from its place on the back of a hillside. I sat up. I wanted to be candid and open, but asking again the questions I’d posed in my letter seemed trite. I almost forgot the woman was a murderer. It made me sick for a split second to feel safe behind the glass. I didn’t want safety.

“Ashley, I owe you an apology.” I cleared my throat, “I’m here for selfish reasons- I only want to listen.” I couldn’t move a muscle under her wily eyes that might have wanted my voice more than her own. Her smile, like glimpsing her naked, stayed as her eyes dropped away.

“Hmm. You’re probably interested in all the minor bullshit my lawyer would advise me against sharing. But hey, you’re the first to visit me, you know? People are too busy worrying about what I have become and what I’ll look like if they do finally get around to visiting me. Anyway, it won’t matter for much longer, someone’s pulling my number. Women survived my injustice and I don’t want to be a part of that world. If there is a need to say it, life with them became more about hard-line assertion. Vengeance.” She seemed eager to launch into philosophy, regardless of my understanding. A guard moved over to light the cigarette that appeared between her lips.

“Life with the affiliated clan, you know success became less about presenting situations and initiating challenges to one another. Less about liberation and embracing the “necessity to freedom” that for so long we nailed ourselves to in credo. RBD to us represents the entrance to our minds. We have the power to bulwark our consciousness and keep ourselves and what we need in, while the rest stays out. Reducing our wants through sisterhood. That’s why when you come in, you don’t leave.”

The look on her face suddenly weakened.  She reached back with both cuffed hands in a motion to loosen her neck muscles. I thought again of the tattoo there. A reminder and announcement, an enunciation.

“There were two women- partners, central to the group. Had just adopted a baby girl. Before too long one of them was being neglectful. Turns out she was abusing her position by seducing a woman from another organization. One night the other woman came and tried to take their child. The innocent lover discovered that the guilty one had encouraged this woman to kidnap their baby, and she went off.  She used those within and solicited other alliances to start a war. It’s always easy to find an enemy if you want one.

For me, it’s a case of  “right time, wrong revolution.” My attempts at destroying what I believed was a stagnant, poorly executed terrorist movement landed me here, because even if I wasn’t the punisher first, someone has to be punished. I was devoted to a localized uprising that had to die before it fell into the oppressive trap of mainstream power by associating with the wrong ideas, the wrong classes. But my struggle isn’t new.

I think about the women I chose to assassinate and admitted to slaying in court not but two weeks ago – in front of mothers and fathers and husbands and children and friends. I have three months to live because I called these women to my apartment one afternoon- just picked up the phone like it should be done. I’m not insane. I feel pain when I think of them. I think of what we did as a family. Little moments of peace.” She dropped the cigarette under her slipper and leaned back.

“A handful of us worked at the sugar plant near the east side. The sunset at the horizon point there reflected on this huge set of sheet glass windows on the rooftop– it made everything warm. I felt a balance when I went there, like I was standing on the equator. Like South America. Have you ever been there? We were beginning to plan a trip to Argentina before things…”

She paused with a sigh under closed eyes.

 “I fought for a freedom and that’s exactly what it cost me. Hard to face that I was a part of them, yes, but more a part of this… future that ironically I no longer have?”

Taciturn, I waited for her to answer her own question. Then her smile, that shining light, possessed of a kind of sheer magnetic power, returned briefly at the buzzer before she rose and left. She melted back into the cell of my memory now reconstructed from conflicting histories and righteous agendas. Of course I never saw her alive again, so she remains very much trapped there, in-between but whole, smiling.