Page 8 of His First Wife

“Anything else?” she asked mockingly.

“Well, I could use a magazine or something. Maybe a book?”

“A magazine?” She started laughing and turned to walk away. “A magazine . . .”

I stood at the cell door, afraid to move. I’d been holding in pee, but standing between me and the toilet was the lack of a door and a woman I was sure had been a man once. While she was sitting down, I was certain she was at least six foot tall and about 200 pounds. I’d gained twenty pounds of baby weight, but I was still no challenge for her.

“A magazine?” I heard, but it wasn’t coming

from the guard anymore. She was long gone.

It was the woman, but I didn’t respond. I was too busy trying to figure out how long I could hold off going to the toilet.

She started laughing and I turned to look at her to see that she was now looking at me.

“You in prison, lady,” she said loudly. “Ain’t no damn magazines.”

Suddenly, laughs came echoing down the hall, crescendoing around me and slapping me upside the forehead. They’d all heard her.

“I know,” I said.

“McKenzie,” she said, reaching out to shake my hand.

“I’m Kerry. . . . Hi.”

McKenzie didn’t look as bad in the face as I’d imagined. There were no cuts in her eyebrows, no bullet wounds, no tears beneath her eyes. In fact, oddly enough, she had what most people would consider a sweet face. While her hair was a five-alarm mess, her nutmeg-colored skin was as smooth as a baby’s and her eyes were gentle and clear, nothing like someone who’d spent a life on the streets. Her eyes were comforting, in fact. They allowed something in me to loosen, and while she’d made everyone in the jail laugh at me, my ankles were about to implode if me and my extra twenty pounds didn’t sit down, so I walked past her and sat on a bench near the commode—I still wasn’t brave enough to use the toilet just yet. I’d have to hold it.

“These fucking crackers picked me up this morning on some old bullshit,” she said. Her voice was scruffy, nearly baritone.

“Okay,” I said. What else could I say? I wasn’t privy to jailhouse chat, but I knew I shouldn’t ask too many questions.

“You a damn lie, McKenzie,” someone shouted from down the hall. “You know you was selling that bent-up pussy of yours.”

Everyone started laughing again. Some people yelled similar sentiments. I was sure she was about to get up and kick through the bars like Superman to go beat up the girl, but McKenzie just laughed.

“Fuck you, Pepper,” she said, getting up from the bench. She walked to the bars. “I was doing that shit, but they didn’t have to arrest me. Got to feed my damn kids.”

The baby kicked me hard three times when the word kid fell from McKenzie’s mouth. Perhaps he was just as surprised to hear that news. Two things I might have never thought about my cellmate were now true—she was a woman and she had children. I’d believe that George Bush was taking a pilgrimage to Mecca before I ever connected those two things to McKenzie. But my disbelief didn’t stop me from laughing. I rubbed my stomach to let my son know I heard his kick and laughed about the ridiculous prospects of the news—I laughed inside, of course. It was crazy, but it was just the kind of news I needed to get my mind off of Jamison so I could stop crying long enough to let the swelling in my eyes go down.

“Fucking crackers,” McKenzie said.

I had so many questions to ask her.... Like why was she a prostitute? Who would have sex with her? And who had sex with her to make her get pregnant? But all I could say was, “Yeah.”

“So, what you in for?” she asked, leaning against the bars toward me.

“Me?” I asked a stupid question and she looked at me the same way. “Oh,” I continued, “I . . .” Before I could try to make up something cool, the truth came barreling from my overfull gut, “. . . I caught my husband with a woman.”

“What?”

“Yeah, he was at her house. And I just hit him. I hit him and I hit him and . . .” I didn’t know where all of the emotions were coming from, but the anger I felt at five that morning was restoring itself in my mind. McKenzie was the first person I was really able to tell what happened.

“Hell, yeah,” she said, swinging her fists at some invisible foe in the room. I was getting her all riled up. I guessed we were bonding. I wondered how she might fit in at the next book club meeting. “Yoooo, rich lady beat her husband’s ass,” she yelled down the hall.

“Word?” someone said who sounded like Pepper, the woman who was speaking to McKenzie before. “Why she do that?”

“Caught that fool in bed with some ho!” someone else said. I got up and walked to the bars. Had the woman seen me? Was she there?

“I would’ve beat that clown’s ass too. Him and the trick and then the cops for trying to stop me,” someone said. They started laughing again and I laughed too. The thought of my turning crazy on everyone was a picture I’d love to send to my mother in the mail. Let her hang that in the den with the pictures of me at my debutante ball.

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