Getting Ready

My cellmate stayed on his bunk and out of my way as I packed two laundry bags with everything I wanted to take. I went through my prison footlocker, tossing out unimportant papers and useless slivers of soap. I had already given away my good sneakers and my old watch to inmates who needed them.

I was getting out after sixteen years, and though I tried to act calm, I could not keep my hands from shaking. The free world had changed: I knew because I’d watched it on television. I’d listened on the radio as the second airplane had hit the tower in New York City. But knowing about the changes and living with them were two different things. I didn’t know how to drive, find a job, or do my taxes.

When a prisoner leaves, sometimes his buddies will throw him under the shower and smear lotion and baby powder all over him as a way of saying goodbye. I’d asked my friends not to do that — I was too old for such games — but now I wished they had. It would have been a sign that they cared.

The next morning, when the doors opened after count, I went by each cell to say goodbye. When I stopped by Jack’s cell, his towel was over his door because  he was on the toilet. He stuck his hand out to shake mine and wished me luck. (He told me later in a letter that he’d been crying and hadn’t wanted me to see him.)

The corrections officer summoned me to go to the administration building, where I would wait several hours for my release papers. Donnie, who had been my cellmate for a while, helped me carry my laundry bags, heavy with books and papers. We stopped outside the administration building, and I gave him a hug. As bad as I wanted to be out, I would miss him. I would miss a lot of the men I was leaving behind. My hands trembled. Returning to the free world was scarier than my first day in prison. Who would have figured?

David Wood
St. Petersburg, Florida

My big brother and I lived with our grandparents and hadn’t seen our mother and father since they’d moved from El Salvador to the United States in 1990. Now it was 1999, and they wanted us to come live with them in Las Vegas, Nevada, so the family could be together again.

We’d heard that the journey to the U.S. was long and dangerous and could kill us. We’d heard stories about how people traveled in the back of big trucks without windows or holes to let in air. We’d heard that we would have to walk long distances and run from immigration officers. To prepare ourselves, my brother and I walked everywhere we went: to the store, to school, to the capital of San Salvador. When we would go to the lake or the beach, we would practice holding our breath underwater, just in case we had to ride in a truck where there wasn’t enough air. I began saving fruit we could eat on our journey. My brother collected cans and sold them so we would have money.

When the day came for us to leave for the United States, we learned that our parents had arranged for us to travel by bus, car, and airplane. All the preparations we’d made were for nothing. We didn’t have to walk across a desert or ride in the back of a truck. We didn’t suffer like so many others.

Juan Ostorga
Las Vegas, Nevada

I was at basketball practice the first time I got my menstrual period. I remember running down the court and suddenly feeling as if I were leaving my body. (In a sense, I was.) An unfamiliar dizziness came over me, followed by a wet itch in my crotch. When I went to the locker room, a small brown spot on my underwear confirmed my fears. I stuffed toilet paper in my panties and went about the rest of my school day feeling panicked at the possibility of visible spotting on my clothes — and at the thought of dealing with this every month for the next forty years.

I’d been amply forewarned. Two months earlier, my stepmother, Diane, had sat me down at the kitchen table and officially prepared me for it. She had purchased a young woman’s starter kit, complete with various types of pads, panty liners, and tampons. And she presented me with the book Dear Diary, which answers a young girl’s questions about her first period. I listened obediently, but I didn’t feel ready. Secretly I believed it would not happen to me — at least, not for a very long time.

Twenty-two years and roughly 260 periods later, I walked down the corridor of the oncology unit to Diane’s hospital room. My father sat at her bedside, crying quietly and taking notes as she told him, in her orderly way, what she wanted for her funeral service: cello music by J.S. Bach; a single red rose for each woman in attendance; a reading from Proverbs.

When Diane died eighteen days later, she was ready. But we weren’t. This wasn’t supposed to happen for a very long time.

Kathy Swink
Decatur, Georgia

When I was a child, it seemed that every frightening event was preceded by the command to “get ready.” So when my mother told me to put on my Sunday dress, I nervously asked why. 

“Never mind. It’s a surprise. You’re going to Aunt Mae’s while I take care of some business.”

The mention of “some business,” combined with a “surprise,” made me even more uneasy.

I put on my best dress, white knee-high socks, and shiny black patent-leather shoes, and we drove through town to the narrow street of row houses where my aunt and cousins lived. When we walked in the front door, my two cousins were sitting on the couch, both dressed as if for a special occasion. Tom, who was seven (a year younger than I), sat still, while Janet, only four, played with a wheeled toy on the end of a stick that rang bells as she rolled it back and forth.

After my mother had left, Aunt Mae went into the kitchen and came back with a plate of cookies: “You can each have two; that’s it.” Then she sat down opposite us, brushed her apron across her lap, and said, “Now, Uncle Buddy’s coming home today.”

She didn’t sound happy about it, which puzzled me. She loved her brother almost as much as I did. I thought he was the most handsome man in the world in his U.S. Air Force uniform. When he would come home on leave, we’d visit him at Grandma’s, and he’d play with us till he was exhausted and had to take a nap on the couch in the back room. He’d warn us not to come in and bother him, or else he’d cut our ears off. I’d crack open the door, peek inside, and giggle. Uncle Buddy would open his eyes and make a scissors motion with his fingers, and I’d close the door fast.

After we’d eaten our cookies, Aunt Mae gave us each a little stiff cotton flag on a stick, and she had us sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

“Now let’s do it again,” she said when we were done, “and when we sing, ‘Glory, glory, hallelujah,’ let’s really wave those flags!” We sang and marched and waved our flags, and Aunt Mae got up and marched in front of us, like the majorette of a band. For a while I forgot to worry about where my mother had gone.

When she returned a little while later, we piled in the back of the dusty blue Plymouth and rode across town to a beautiful house with a long driveway. A man came to our car and opened the doors for us. I felt like a lady. It was the most beautiful house I’d ever seen close up. There were gardens all around, and everything smelled fresh and clean. We ascended the steps of the deep porch, and another man in a suit opened the door for us and greeted my mother formally. I wondered if Uncle Buddy was going to meet us here, but I was afraid to ask.

We were shown to a large room with many chairs and a lot of flowers at the far end. While my mother went up to the front alone, my aunt bent low and told us that Uncle Buddy’s soul had gone to heaven, but we could see his body here. “What you see is just a shell,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”

C.R.
Scarsdale, New York

After I’d graduated from high school, my controlling mother made it clear that she and my father would not pay my college tuition if I moved out of their house. Afraid I couldn’t support myself on what I earned as a waitress, I chose to suffer her physical and mental abuse for four more years.

In my last semester of college, with my diploma in sight, I secretly made plans to get my own place. Gleeful with anticipation, I found a roommate and put a deposit down on an apartment. In my free time between classes and waitressing, I purchased cheap plates, glasses, pots, pans, and utensils, which I stored at my boyfriend’s house. I felt powerful and cunning as I transferred most of my savings out of the joint account my parents had cosigned with me when I was sixteen and into a new account of my own.

Two weeks before my move, I told Mom. She was incensed, called me a “slut,” and said I couldn’t leave. When I told her I was going, she tried to hit me. Instead of ducking her punch as usual, I grabbed her wrist in midair.

“Don’t you ever try to hit me, or you will never see me again!” I said in a steely voice.

In that moment, all her power over me drained away. For the first time, I saw her clearly: a frail, aging, unhappy woman worn down by life. Instead of rage, I felt compassion. I was free.

Name Withheld

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