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“I think so. I’m Helena Hunter. I don’t think I said that already.” I pass him the CD with Aaron’s latest submission saved on it and hike my purse strap higher on my shoulder, ready to take my leave.
“Aaron tells me you know everything there is to know about computers.”
“Not everything. Aaron exaggerates.”
“Tell me what you do know.”
“Is this an inquisition?” Milk is damn near four dollars a gallon. Too expensive to be sitting around in a hot car while I sit around in a chilly office.
“What if it is? Tell me what you know.”
“Graphic design, some typesetting,” I say. “I’ve designed and built a few websites, done a few software programs.”
“Which ones?” He sits up and folds his hands on the desktop, searches my face.
“Which ones what? Websites or programs?”
“Both.”
“Websites? Okay. You’ve heard of Crichton Pharmaceuticals?” He nods. “Grambling and Rochester, the company that makes all the household cleaning agents? Those websites are examples of my work. As far as programs go, you probably use Winstar Express or you’ve heard of it.”
“Word processing software,” Don says, thinking.
I smile. “Mine.”
“Aaron says you rebuilt his computer in a matter of minutes.”
“I did what I could, but she’s got one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. It won’t be long.” I think I know where the conversation is going, and I lean sideways and eye the laptop sitting on a table behind him. “Oh, I see . . . you’ve got a computer emergency too. Give it to me, let me see what the deal is. It’s a newer model, but they’re all the same inside.” My mind is clicking, wheels turning. “There’s probably an issue with your cookies settings or a firewall discrepancy.”
“Can you get around firewalls?”
“I can hack with the best of them.” I think about what I have said and my lips snap closed. “I don’t actually do that but I have heard it’s fairly easy, if you know what to do.”
“You’ve heard?” he leads me with a sneaky sparkle in his eye.
“I’ve heard.”
“Why are you squeezing goo into snack cakes?”
Our eyes meet across the desk and do a complicated two-step. I watch him watch me and I wonder if I should lie. His is a personal question, and I don’t do personal questions. Still, there is something about the way his eyes bore into mine that tells me he is looking for a lie. Looking for me to shift in my seat and look away from him. If I do these things, then I will have truthfully answered his question, no matter what I make my mouth say.
Something else is there too, and it makes me want to tell him the truth. I have nothing else to lose, except for my integrity, and that I will not relinquish under any circumstances. “It pays my bills.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“Because I am a convicted felon.” I wait for his porcelain skin to redden.
It doesn’t. “I think I recall Aaron mentioning something to that effect.”
“I think Aaron talks too much.”
“Your crime?”
“Involuntary manslaughter and, before you ask, eight years. That’s how long I was locked down. Any more questions?”
“Just one. When can you start?”
I scoot my chair closer to his desk and extend my hands. “Right now. Pass me your computer and leave me alone, so I can work in peace. I can probably fix it real quick.”
“I don’t think you understand,” Don says. He drops a hand on my arm, sees my eyes land there like missiles, and pulls back. “I mean, when can you start work?”
“Excuse me?”
“I need a junior typesetter. Aaron suggested to me that you could handle the job in your sleep. I’m offering it to you, if you’re interested.”
“A job,” I say slowly, carefully. “As a junior typesetter.”
“As I said, it’s a junior level position, but there is room for advancement. We have computers here, and from time to time they do require servicing. What do you think?”
“Why me? Why hire a felon when you could pick somebody off the street?”
“I have picked somebody off the street. I picked you. Now, do you want the job or not?” He glances at his watch and sighs. “It’s my lunchtime and I’m half starved.”
“Oh, I want it, but are you sure you want me?”
He rises from his chair and walks around the desk toward the door. Shakes his head like I am trying his patience. “Miss Hunter, I believe you’ll fit right in around here. Give your job two weeks’ notice and report at eight sharp on the twenty-third. Do you need anything in writing?”
“I’d feel more comfortable with a firm offer.”
He goes back to the phone. “Darla? Prepare a letter of intent for . . . get a pen and paper, would you? Helena Hunter. Yes, like a deer hunter, and Helen with an A.” He cuts his eyes at me and makes an exasperated face. Good help is hard to find. “The typesetter’s position. The twenty-third, and bump the starting salary up two grades. She has experience. She’ll wait.”
I think about mentioning the milk that I’m sure is coagulating in the backseat of Aaron’s car, and then I think, to hell with the milk. Right now I need that letter from Darla worse than I need my daily dose of calcium.
Aaron is ready for me when I storm into the apartment building lugging a gallon of warm milk and a soggy grocery bag. I know he hasn’t been to sleep since early this morning, when he crawled away from his computer and came to me in search of food. He is waiting up for me, pacing up and down the hallway with his hands stuffed deep in his pockets.
“Well? What happened?” he says, eyebrows high up on his forehead.
I skid to a stop and punch him in his chest with the milk I am carrying. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“Did you take the job or what?”
“I took it, but you could’ve given me a heads up, Aaron. Had me going in there in these funky jeans, looking like one of the Black Panthers. What’s the matter with you?”
“If I told you I was planning to help you find a better job, would you have gone?”
I don’t even have to think about it. “No. You should’ve asked me first.”
“So stay at the snack cake factory. Forget about working with computers and keep squeezing fake goo into fake Twinkies. It’s your life.”
“I know whose life it is.” He pisses me off, being sarcastic. I don’t need that right now. Especially since I’m beginning to feel like things are turning around for me. Finally. Today I look a man in the eye, tell him I’m a felon, and I still get a respectable job. I need Aaron to get that I’m trying to say thank you without having to come right out and say it. I don’t know if I remember how.
I figure out that he gets me when he sighs like he’s tired and says, “You’re welcome, Lena.”
“My mama always said a hard head makes for a soft behind.”
“Let you tell it, your mama co-wrote the Bible, the dictionary, and the lyrics to most of Marvin Gaye’s songs. You need to stop lying on the woman.”
“Don’t talk about my mama.”
“Whatever.”
“Loosen up, Lena. Damn.”
Aaron’s hands are large, and they are swallowing mine on the weight grips. He stands directly behind me, breathing down on the top of my head and doing his part to prevent me from dislocating my shoulders. I pull down on the grip and watch the metal pulley ropes angle across the front of my body, see the blocks of resistance lift into the air and know he is doing most of the work. I should’ve let myself be talked out of lifting weights standing up, but like he said, my head is hard.
“I am loose.”
“Liar,” he says. “Here, hold the grips down at your waist.” He takes away his hand, and I feel myself being pulled to the right like a marionette. I giggle and he groans. “Hold the damn things at your waist, Lena.”
“They are at my waist.”
“I got this,” I say, talking much shit.
“Right.” He releases the weights and watches me jerk sideways and almost collide with the frame. His hands on my waist are the only things stopping me from taking flight.
“I’m just not used to lifting standing up, that’s all.”
“If that’s what you need to tell yourself. Pull.”
Concentration eludes me, but I do my best to bring my hands to my center and feel the burn I crave. I’m lifting a total of fifty pounds, twenty-five on each side, and I can’t understand why it is suddenly so hard. My biceps tremble like they are overworked and my breathing is choppy like I am asthmatic, which I’m not. I tell myself that I am having trouble performing because Aaron’s hands aren’t steadying mine, because my palms are sweaty, but I think I know better. I can’t perform because he hasn’t taken his hands off my waist since we started and there is heat where he touches. It drains my energy.
“What’s going on up here?” Aaron says, feeling along the length of my raised arms.
“I can’t . . . I don’t know.”
“Do I make you uncomfortable, Lena?”
“A little, yeah.”
“Why?”
“You’re a man.”
“As opposed to a woman?” I don’t answer. We are treading into territory where I’m not sure of my footing. “Lena?”
“Yes, as opposed to a woman. Are you trying to ask me something, Aaron?”
“You know what I’m trying to ask you.”
“You think I’m a lesbian?”
“I’m more interested in what you think.”
“And why would you be interested in something like that?” I’m tired of lifting weights and I stop. I turn the hand grips loose and let them reel in with a loud clank. I step around Aaron and find space enough on the floor for me to stretch out. Crunches seem like a good idea.
“Maybe I’m interested in you.”
“I told you in the beginning that I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend.”
“Are you looking for a girlfriend?”
“I’m not looking for anything, right this minute. I’m still trying to adapt to life on the outside and get my life in order.”
“Like you adapted to life on the inside?” Aaron steps over me and goes over to the weight bench, stretches out on it and studies the ceiling. He folds his hands low on his belly and waits for my response.
“When in Rome,” I say, and he chuckles under his breath. “What?”
“Nothing. I’m just trying to picture you with a woman.”
“It’s different.”
“Better?”
“Different.”
“Take me there with you. Tell me what it’s like.”
“You don’t know?”
“I know what I know, and you know what you know. I want to know what you know, see how it compares with what I know.”
“Translation, you want to be nosy.”
“That, too.”
“Is this conversation off the record?”
He smiles at the ceiling. “What conversation?”
“If I read this shit somewhere, I’ll know where it came from and I’ll never speak to you again. And I’m only saying it once.”
“Were you, like, a pimp with a string of different women, or . . .?”
“There was only one.” I fall back against the floor and catch my breath a little at a time. I haven’t thought about Anna very much since I got out, but I let myself think about her now. She comes into the room with us and takes a seat, ready to listen to what I will say about her. How I will make her come alive for Aaron to experience with me. “Anna.”
Chapter Twelve
“You loved her?”
“I cared about her, but I don’t think I loved her. It’s hard to love someone else when you can’t figure out if you love yourself. There’s no room for love in prison.”
“What was she like?”
I think about the question before putting words together. I have to get this just right, have to make him understand what I need him to understand. “She was younger than me, still energetic and optimistic. Very pretty. Slender and shaped like a Coke bottle. I don’t remember the exact moment that I knew I was attracted to her. I just woke up one day and knew I was. Never thought I’d swing the other way, but it was happening before I could stop it.”
“You would’ve stopped it if you had seen it coming?”
“Probably not,” I admit softly. “It’s true what they say. Prison is a microcosm of the larger, free society. There’s racism and class systems, crime and drugs. Violence. All that shit happens every day, and depending on who you are and what you’re about, you react differently to it. But in a women’s prison, two women being together doesn’t get the same reaction it would in the larger society. Nobody looks twice because it’s normal, or if nothing else, it’s accepted. It’s a choice you make.”
“Did you choose her or did she choose you?”
I stick a finger into the midst of my locks and scratch my scalp, thinking. “I’m not sure. Seems like we chose each other. To her I probably seemed safer than some of the other options and I felt the same way. I guess I thought, if I’m going to do this, it has to be with someone safe. It has to be with someone I desire.”
“It was about more than being a victim of circumstance then. You wanted another woman.”
“Truth?”
“Nothing but.”
“I don’t think there’s a woman on earth who hasn’t thought about what it would be like to be with another woman. If you find one who says she hasn’t, even for a second, she’s lying. Could be she just thought about kissing or touching, naked or fully clothed, but she’s thought about it. Prison sets you free from just thinking, if you want to be set free.”
“Hold up,” he says, pushing up to his elbows and staring down at me. “You make it sound simple as hell. What about men who go to prison and end up being somebody’s bitch? You’re saying they’ve been set free?”
“There are women who are raped in prison too, Aaron. I’m not talking about rape or fucking by force, and I don’t know shit about what it’s like for a man in prison. I’m talking about your everyday housewife or real estate agent, secretly wondering what it would be like on the other side of the fence, if what’s on the other side is appealing to them in some way. Women see other women who are attractive to them in some way too.”
“So what keeps your average, everyday housewife from finding out?”
“Fear of the unknown,” I say without hesitation. “The hush-hush factor. What if she tells someone and everybody finds out? What will my husband or boyfriend think? My kids or my friends? Total secrecy isn’t guaranteed, and some women aren’t willing to risk it, so fear keeps them in line.” I grab his eyes. “Not the church, not your mom or your dad. Fear. Being trapped in a cage with nothing but women eliminates the fear.”
“And now that you’re not in prison anymore?”
“I’m not afraid of anything—except going back. I’m petrified of that. If I wanted a woman, I’d find one to be with. Wouldn’t give a shit what people thought if that’s what I needed to be whole. You ever been with two women at the same time?”
He chokes on his own breath and laughs. “Damn, where did that come from?”
“You don’t get to ask all the questions,” I remind him. “Have you?”
“Once or twice. It was . . . very erotic. Very stimulating.�
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“Tell me.”
“There’s something about watching two women make love to each other that takes it to a whole new level. You get to watch your fantasy come true right in front of your eyes and then you get to wiggle into the middle of it and play a leading role. You get the right mix and it’s . . . quite interesting.”
“Is that something you would want to do every night?”
His head rolls around on the bench and we lock eyes. “When a man finds the right woman, one is enough. You and Anna had a relationship, so you know what I’m talking about, Lena. Was being with her enough?”
“In that time and place, yeah. It wasn’t about degradation or control. It was about making each other feel good in a place that makes you feel so bad. One of the first things people do after a near death experience is run home and fuck somebody’s brains out or else wear out their vibrators. People need to be reminded that they’re still alive, that they haven’t died, no matter how close they come. You take what you can get, when you can get it.”
“You still keep in touch with Anna?”
“No.” I shake my head. “When Anna walks out of prison, she’ll either find herself a good man and have a baby or two while she still can, or she’ll find herself a good woman and live her life the way she wants to live it. Prison does one of two things, Aaron: It shows you what you aren’t or what you really are, and that’s across the board, on every level.”
“That’s deep. Answer me this, though: If lesbians don’t desire men, why do some of them buy penisshaped vibrators and dildos and use the hell out of them?”
“You probably need to find a lesbian and ask her,” I say. “Hell if I know.”
“Am I asking a lesbian right now?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him, “but I don’t think so.”
“Explain yourself. A bisexual man is considered a conflicted gay man who is in denial. How can you come out of a lesbian relationship and not think you’re a lesbian?”