The Only Woman in the Room

At the Tazewell County Justice Center, on a Monday night in May, five women gather for a creative-writing class. They microwave plastic cups of instant coffee, then drag chairs up to the conference table where we’ll write. Grey brick walls, barred opaque windows, a bookshelf crammed with battered paperbacks—the room we’ve been given is ugly and precious: a room of our own in an environment systematically designed to confiscate most privileges that count.

We vary in age and appearance. A couple are in our early twenties, two in their early thirties, one fifty-something. Two brunettes with French-braided pigtails and two bobbed blonds, all wearing green scrubs, white tennis shoes, and plastic ID bracelets, their faces pale and sleepy.

I’m the one in street clothes—a scoop-necked white shirt, jeans, sandals, thick black glasses—plain yet somehow conspicuously feminine, with my delicate necklace, shiny brown hair, and hint of mascara. Just in case, a bright orange badge reinforces my privileged (but closely watched) status: Visitor.

***

Some of our group have been in jail for a few days, and some have lingered for weeks: doing days, awaiting trial, waiting out the anger of lovers or mothers or grandmas who will post bail, eventually. Only one of us is here to get an education. I’m a first-semester grad student at a university which professes a commitment to “literature, community engagement, and the pursuit of social justice,” and which requires its students to spend at least four months engaging their literary skills in a community setting. I chose my school for its academic excellence and for that field-study requirement. At twenty-four, I’m still an eager student, a classic overachiever, and something of an artistic idealist: I still believe that art can and does—and must—make our lives and our communities better somehow.

Of course I don’t really know how. But when I saw a flyer posted at my library for the local YWCA Adult Literacy program, I called the number hoping that would get me started. In January, I met with the literacy director, Pam. She casually mentioned that a local church offered a Wednesday-night Bible study for women at the jail, but that was it—no other programs, no educational opportunities. Just TV and the Bible and paperback romances from the meager library. No matter that I knew nothing about the justice system and had never taught creative writing, only high school-level composition. I said I’d teach a creative writing class there.

We’d call the class “Song of Myself: Writing Your Stories.” We’d combine women’s literature, discussion, and writing exercises to help students explore and express their experiences as women. This is it! I thought, clutching the steering wheel as I drove home, punch-drunk on the possibility of literature, community engagement, and the pursuit of social justice.

One month ago, in April, class began. Each Monday since, I’ve passed out literature like life vests and preached the power of telling stories, coaxing and wheedling and occasionally manipulating my two to five students into putting words to experience. “Your thoughts matter,” I’ve said. “No one’s grading you,” I’ve said. “Use your words! Express yourself! Okay, just…try, please?” I’ve written with them and read my scribbles aloud. Most of my stories have been about family; about growing up small-town, in church, the daughter of a pastor; about being a girl athlete, a difficult daughter, a young wife. Sometimes I’ve written about men or pets or books or countries I’ve loved. On the page, my life seems so small and quiet. Still, I attend to it, as I’ve asked my students to do: examining those shards of experience, piecing them together when I can. “Expressing” myself, or at least trying.

My Monday-night spiel is full-throated Gen Y: like most of my friends, I was raised on the gospel of self-esteem, hardwired to believe we’re all individuals, all valuable, all of us one of a kind for life. (“Of course you’re special,” my husband jokes, “just like everyone else!”) But here, in this room of our own—so straight and spare and disorienting—secretly, I question everything. What, really, am I doing here? When I nag my students to express themselves, am I helping them exercise a right or a privilege?

It must be a right, because we’re born for self-expression: cut from our mothers, lifted and slapped, we gulp in that first taste of air and howl it back out, making ourselves heard, if not yet known. But then we’re tagged and swaddled, placed back in our mothers’ arms or whisked away. Someone gives us a name. For the rest of our lives, most of us answer to it. We come when we’re called.

Society gives and takes privileges. Does that include articulating who we are and what we think? Actions are a form of self-expression. Aren’t crimes the moments when we abuse the privilege and express ourselves too far, harming someone or something else—individuals, governments, companies, guiding principles of society? If so, then all of this sure feels like social justice: remove our identifying details. Suspend our ability to choose and to express. Create an environment free from stimulation. Trade our names for numbers. Tell us when and what we’ll eat, when and how we’ll sleep, shower, relieve ourselves, or treat our companions. If we disobey, isolate us so that whatever we have won’t spread. Limit our interaction with the people who know us best, those to whom we can say anything, and with whom we can be ourselves. For a time, make us a little less human. Let the punishment fit the crime.

 ***

 “Aw, you look cute!” A student named Stacie bounces into the room, flops into a chair, and looks me over. At twenty-three, she’s the youngest of our group. The other women call her just a baby, but she has two children at home, ages five and two. I grin, relieved to see her for a second week.

“You look cute too!” I say. Bird-boned, with an oval face and skin so pale it’s nearly translucent, tonight she’s adorable in braided pigtails. Ribbons of fine brown hair twist from her temples to the base of her narrow neck, dangling, begging to be dipped in some old-timey inkwell. She’s no schoolgirl, but in pigtails, Stacie looks younger than her age—soft, pretty, almost innocent. Her cheeks are splotched with pink, her blue eyes red-rimmed. Maybe she’s been crying; maybe she’s exhausted. I don’t ask.

She’s brought a couple of women with her, Paula and Carrie. Plastic chair legs groan against the tile floor as the newcomers find seats and settle in, glancing at the pencils, handouts, and stack of loose-leaf paper I’ve arranged in the center of the table. They scrawl their signatures on the sign-in sheet and fill out intake forms: Name, birthdate. Where are you from? What was the last school grade you completed? When did you enter TCJC? What’s your anticipated release date? How can the YWCA help you during your incarceration? How can we help you after you’re released? I glance over their answers before filing the forms in my binder. Under anticipated release date, they’ve both written a question mark.

Each student takes a copy of tonight’s lesson plan, titled in bold, “Creative Writing, May 3: About Beauty.” I take a seat next to Carrie and peer at Stacie’s hair, trying to gauge how long those tiny twists took. “Who did your braids?”

“Lana did,” Stacie says, patting at them. “And I did hers. Wait, where is she? Thought she said she was coming tonight. I been telling her about you all week. Maybe she’s asleep.” She leaps from her chair and pounds on the steel door that opens into the “Pod,” inmate living quarters. “Lana!” she hollers, “it’s class!”

With a pop-click, the door opens and Lana the braider ambles into the room, her face still glazed with sleep. “Sorry, sorry,” she mumbles. “No one woke me up.” She slumps into a chair and yawns hugely as I pass out copies of tonight’s reading material: two essays from Anne Lamott’s memoir Traveling Mercies: Thoughts on Faith and an excerpt from Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

“Is this all for me?” Paula looks up from her growing pile of papers, her eyes huge.

“Yes, but we’re only going to read that first short piece,” I explain. “The other’s for your own reading pleasure, on the same topic, and the third is for a writing prompt you can try during the week, if you want.” Paula relaxes slightly.

Lana flips through the pages and slaps them back down on the table. “Shit, man.” She turns to Stacie, all traces of fatigue gone now, her features twisted in a sneer. “Man, thought you said this wasn’t school. This is school—all this reading and shit.”

“It ain’t!” Stacie snaps, as I blurt, “It isn’t!” and raise my hand, blushing in the abrupt silence. My heart thuds in my throat.

“We’re reading to learn from what other writers are doing.” I speak slowly, re-gathering my wits. Lana fixes me with her glinty, beautiful brown eyes. “We learn to write by paying attention to the work of people who’ve been writing very well for a long time. We’ll talk about the meaning in their stories and look for the choices they made to express that meaning. Then we’ll dig around for tricks we can use in our own work. And we’ll write because—”

I grope. Suddenly I can’t explain why all this reading and shit, the language and literature I’ve loved for years, matters here. How can we help you during your incarceration? I always felt sorry for the kids who weren’t like me, who didn’t thrive on words and stories and, yes, school. Forget self-expression. What if all I’m offering Lana is to help her be more like me?

My tongue feels thick. Lana’s still glaring. I blink once, slowly, before looking away.

“—because this is a YWCA literacy program, so it has to involve both reading and writing,” I finish lamely. “Both are good.”

Lana’s upper lip curls a little, exposing a gap where her left incisor should be. She nods, so I thrust my hand across the table. “Hi. I’m Sarah, by the way.”

“Lana.”

“I like your braids,” I say. Thick ropes of espresso brown hair hang down her back. Lana smirks, bats her eyelashes, and tosses the braids, and the air in the room loosens slightly. I breathe in.

“I did ‘em,” says Stacie.

“Nice!”

“And she’s pregnant!” Stacie chirps, reaching to rub her friend’s belly, hidden under loose scrubs. Lana yawns and stretches like a cat, and there it is, her round abdomen pressing against a white undershirt.

I cough. “That’s great! How—how far along are you?”

Lana leans back, throwing an arm behind her. “Five months.” When she’s relaxed, her voice is velvety, curvy in a way that doesn’t match her blunt features. Stacie is still petting the baby belly.

“Okay.” I slide my beat-up copy of Traveling Mercies across the table. “Let’s get started.” We warm up with a bit of context: Anne Lamott’s writing history and style; her father’s death and mother’s anxiety; the drugs and alcohol and men; the deep love she has for her son Sam and for her God. “Out of a crazy, crazy life, she wrote this incredible memoir,” I conclude. Everyone looks unimpressed except Stacie, who’s peering intently at Lamott’s picture, nodding.

We flip to the essay “Gypsies.” No one wants to read first, so I start, then pass off to Stacie. She stumbles a few times.

“You read faster!” she groans.

“You read fine.” And she does. Two more pages with hardly an error, then Paula, Lana, and Carrie take their turns.

“Gypsies” begins as a lament for the middle-aged: Lamott’s eyelids are sagging. Her thighs pooch with fat. She eats a Kit Kat bar and “instantly” gains five pounds. And goddammit, why do the men she dates always go for younger (“young young—she was ten or something”) women? She’s still sulking when friends coax her out of the house to a documentary about gypsies, until onscreen, the oldest gypsy women—wrinkly crones with stringy, bent bodies and harsh lives—get up and dance. Lamott is riveted. “You can feel the rush of life force this frees up inside them,” she writes. “It’s so sexy and intimate and stark that you almost have to look away.” The youngest gypsy girls watch the oldest carefully, then they dance too, practicing. Such beauty. The beauty of the old, their freedom; the beauty of the young, their newness. And that leaves cranky, middle-aged Lamott with the realization that she holds both inside her: the budlike wonder of the young, the hard-won wisdom of the old. She’s quick to admit she’d take back the body of her youth, but in the meantime she’ll start practicing cronehood—she’ll “watch, smile, dance,” and practice beauty like that.

Lamott’s a hilariously grumpy narrator, but this is a tough crowd. One or two smiles, the occasional chuckle. Paula, a thin fiftyish woman with sandy blond hair and soft eyes, snorts when Lamott describes herself as a “fabulous woman on sale at the consignment store.” When we finally finish the piece, pages rustle, but no one talks.

“Sooo. We call this a personal essay,” I say. “A mixture of opinion, storytelling, and reflection. It’s probably pretty obvious, but what is Lamott’s definition of beauty, and do you agree with her?”

More rustling, more silence. Then someone mumbles, “Yeah.”

“Yeah? So what’s her big idea?”

Carrie raises a finger. “That beauty comes in all forms.” Her eyebrows lift, an unspoken duh.

“Absolutely.” I pause. “But did she ever actually come out and say that? Her opinion is pretty clear, but she gives it without, you know, writing us a sermon. Look at her use of detail. When she describes the old gypsy ladies, could you see them?”

Heads nod. “What did they look like?” The women flip pages and list a few specifics: loose skin, dark eyes, furrows of fatigue.

“Beautiful. No way would those ladies ever make it on the cover of Vogue.” Laughter, finally, and the ice cracks, plunging us into argument.

“That’s nice, what she says, but it isn’t what we see on TV or in the magazines.” Tiny Stacie, always fidgety, is practically bouncing in her seat now, head bobbing and weaving for emphasis. She reminds me of a nervous bird. “People say things about you. They tell you you beautiful or you ugly. Teenage girls think they gotta be skinny, gotta wear the right clothes and makeup to be beautiful.”

“True,” I say, “for a lot of us. Our important parts aren’t on the inside—at least not after kindergarten. It matters how we’re taught to think about ourselves.”

Lana growls. “Ain’t no little girl gotta be taught that she’s beautiful. It’s what’s inside you or not.”

“Yeah?” By now, it’s clear she’s a bomb we’ll have to defuse again and again. I take it easy. “Most women would love to know what you have that we don’t. What’s your secret? What makes you so sure that you’re beautiful, when most of the rest of us aren’t?”

“Yeah.” Stacie and Carrie look genuinely curious. Paula listens, arms crossed.

Lana tips her chin and glares. Somehow her missing tooth and dark pigtails soften her defiance, and she seems strangely childish, an overgrown, stubborn toddler. “It’s what you gone through to get to where you are that makes you strong and beautiful. Ain’t no little girl gotta be told.”

“It’s character,” says Carrie.

“Character.” Paula leans into the word.

I grab a marker and scribble three prompts on the whiteboard. “Keeping Lamott in mind—that use of detail, how she shows instead of tells you what to think, her strong and personal voice—choose one of these.”

1. Write about the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. Write all the details, like you’re raking your eyes over that person, place, or thing. Then tell why that thing is beautiful.

2. Write about a time in your life when you felt beautiful—a moment, a period of years, a certain situation, anything. Write all the details. Then tell why you were beautiful.

3. Write about a time when you felt you were ugly. Write all the details. Then tell what made you ugly.

Lana stares at her blank notebook paper. “I ain’t never had a moment when I felt ugly,” she murmurs. “I ain’t never given myself a chance, and can’t no one make me feel ugly.”

“Write that down, then.”

“You want an essay? How long it got to be?”

“It can be a list, for all I care,” I say, thinking whatever she writes will be cocky, will have that same hard sheen of confidence she wears like armor. I almost envy her for it. “It can be anything you want because later, that list can become an essay or a poem or a short story. Just get it down on paper. Tell us, or tell yourself, why you’re beautiful.”

For a while, it’s quiet except for the steady scratch of lead against paper and the occasional cough. We finally throw down our pencils, and my heart does a little jig at their willingness to share. “Go for it,” I say, trying not to appear eager, and Lana begins.

She’s written a list about why she’s beautiful. One: because her experiences have made her tough. Two: because her inner strength and confidence draw people to her. Three: because she’s fought back against others’ meanness. She must see the unasked question on my face because with thumb and forefinger, she makes an imaginary gun and presses the barrel to the spot on her head where an old bullet wound hides under her braids. My eyes widen. Lana shrugs. It was an argument, she says. He was a jealous man. So, four: because she survived that man. Lana flops back in her chair and gives me a lopsided grin.

Paula clears her throat. So softly we have to strain to hear, she reads about her wedding day: she wore an old-fashioned dress with delicate lace sleeves and tiny buttons. The whole room felt full of love. The end. It isn’t the end, of course, but we understand that’s all for now.

Once upon a time, Carrie says, there were long nights on a dance floor and crowds that would part for her and her lover, just to watch them sway alone to “You Look Wonderful Tonight.” Breathless, Carrie presses both hands to her chest like a teenager. “It’s how you feel when someone who loves you looks at you like you’re the only woman in the room, you know?” We all nod because sure, we know. “I was so beautiful,” she sighs.

I’m no longer trying to smother my grin. They all wrote something. A list, a few sentences, a whole gorgeous scene. This is what I’ve been hoping for—women connecting through stories.

Stacie smiles and ducks her head. She doesn’t want to read, not really, but she props her forehead in her hand and reads anyway. The most beautiful thing she’s ever seen: her baby boy, the first time she laid eyes on him. His tiny face. His wrinkles and redness and dark hair… Suddenly she stops, slides her hand over her eyes, and whimpers, “Oh…”

I gulp. Maybe I should reach for her other hand. I should just say something comforting. No. I’ve never had a kid. What would I say? I sit very still instead, holding my breath.

Then Lana lays a hand on Stacie’s bony back and rubs gently, the way her friend rubbed her belly an hour earlier. Sympathetic murmurs circle the table.

“I miss him so much.” Stacie’s crying now. Her voice barely breaks a whisper. “Mmm,” the women croon. They’re all mothers missing children. “Mmm, Baby Girl, you’ll be okay, go on.” Stacie wipes her nose and finishes her story. The writing is surprisingly good. The story is somehow better. It resonates within this circle of aching mothers; it seems to give itself to them and ask something too.

For a moment, there’s a silence I recognize. The kind that sits heavy on your shoulders just before a hard rain. Then the women start preaching—that’s the only way I know to say it. They testify to the group, but mostly to the Baby Girl.

Sure, she’s in pain, they say, but it probably isn’t as much as they’ve felt. One says, This is what I’ve gone through, and another says, Well, this is what I’ve gone through. This is the part in the story where Mom comes in, or Gramma, or Men, and finally Me. Girl, the high life, money and pretty things, those don’t make a woman beautiful. Baby, Gucci jeans don’t do much for you if you’re missing half your teeth, if you’re black and blue all over. Pain is pain is pain, and it all matters. You think it hurts now? It’ll probably get worse, so you’d better buckle down.

They’re singing such sadness back and forth across the table. It’s call and response. It’s hymn and lament and liturgy I’ve heard before but never expected to hear here, from these women. They’ve got this young mother, barely a woman herself, whipped into shiny-eyed, righteous hope.

Sure, she’ll do her time—it’s looking like a long time—but then she’s got something important to go home to. Her babies. So she has to get herself right, pull herself up, and leave behind the people who’ve brought her down, ditch that man who used her.

Stacie shakes her head, her blue eyes watery and wild. “I can’t wait to get my G.E.D. and go to college,” she says, her gaze darting around the table before meeting mine. “You make me want to be better.” Who, me? My cheeks grow hot. Or does she mean all of us, every woman in this room?

The preaching goes on for forty-five minutes, full of emphatic gestures, pointed stares, toothy grins, and wagging fingers. I listen with my knuckles pressed to my lips. Sometimes I volunteer an opinion. Mostly I shut up because I’m the stranger here. Academia is another country, where geeks like me discuss reading and writing as acts of empathy: we teach and are taught that good stories, well told, should engage our imaginations; readers should want to inhabit the world of the narrator. That’s what makes literature an agent of social justice: for a moment, we inhabit an other.

But these women are sending dispatches from a world where ugly people do ugly things to each other, and I’m struggling to imagine myself there. Not because I can’t. I’m a lover, a sister, a daughter, like them. Like them I’ve tried and often failed to cultivate beauty in myself, in my life, and in the world. I’ve unleashed my share of ugliness, and occasionally, I’ve been punished for it. But mostly, I’ve been a pretty good girl. Has that made me a better woman, more deserving of beauty, or of the right to tell my small, quiet story?

Their stories are good and well told. And no one’s life is completely unimaginable. But forget social justice. I just don’t want to live there, in that world; I don’t want to be them. Do I? With one act of imagination, I’d be a tough woman with different resources and a different set of choices, living on less or more complicated love. I’d survive. I’d have a story to tell that would make you weep and want to change your life. If I had exercised my rights and abused my privileges in all the ways they had, what would I consider justice? Would it involve someone giving me writing prompts, asking me to conjure beauty, on paper, from within an ugly room where every day stretches out endless, one the same as the other?

***

“I feel ugly here, in jail,” Stacie says, pulling out her pigtails and combing restless fingers through limp hair. It’s late now, and we’re all standing around waiting for an officer to push a button, for the heavy click that means we’ll be released through separate green steel doors. My head aches. The click doesn’t come and doesn’t come.

“Why?” I ask.

“No makeup!” Stacie shakes her head mournfully. “No good shower, no good shampoo, no good conditioner or soap or lotion. These ugly clothes, my dry skin, bad food…”

“None of the things we normally use to care for ourselves, to make ourselves beautiful.” I study Stacie from where I’m leaning against the whiteboard. What she means is that in this place, she’s not herself. “Stacie. If your son were to come visit you tomorrow morning, would he care how you look? What would you say to him?”

She heaves a groan, closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath. “I’d probably tell him, ‘Sorry Mommy looks like this, baby.’”

I ask her how he’d respond.

Stacie giggles. “He’d yell, ‘Mommy!’”

“Exactly.” I’m with her now. I can see that little boy, hear him. “He wouldn’t care. You’d be the only woman in the room.”

***

Listen to Sarah read her essay:

Rumpus original art by Paige Russell.