she conjectures it’s because of “all the electromagnetic interference in Bravo Pod.”
“Spying,” she claims. “All these male guards and a chance to see me with my clothes off. Locked up in here all by myself, and who’s going to witness what really goes on? I need to move back to where I was.”
Allowed only three showers per week, she worries about her hygiene. She worries about when she will be allowed to get her hair and nails done again by inmates who aren’t the most skilled stylists, and she irritably indicates her overprocessed short dyed blond hair. She complains bitterly about the toll incarceration has taken on her, about what it’s done to her looks, “because that’s the way they degrade you in here, that’s the way they get you good.” The polished-steel mirror over the steel sink in her cell is a constant reminder of her real punishment for the laws she’s broken, she says to me, as if it is the laws themselves that are her victims, not human beings she has violated or killed.
“I keep trying to make myself feel better by thinking,
She waits for me to affirm that her beauty really isn’t lost, that her steel mirror is guilty of fraudulent reflections. Instead I comment that what she describes sounds terribly difficult and if I found myself in a similar situation I’m sure I’d share many of her same concerns. I would miss feeling fresh air on my face and seeing sunsets and the ocean. I would miss hot baths and skilled hairstylists, and I sympathize with her about the food especially, because food is more than sustenance to me and I feel comfortable talking about it freely. Food is a ritual, a reward, a way of soothing my nerves and brightening my mood after all I see.
In fact, as Kathleen Lawler continues to talk and complain and blame others for her punishing life, I think about dinner and look forward to it. I won’t eat in my hotel room. That would be the last thing I feel like doing after being trapped in a dirty stinking cargo van and now inside a prison with an invisible code word stamped on my hand. When I check into my hotel in Savannah’s historic district, I will wander along River Street and find something Cajun or Greek. Better yet, Italian.
Yes, Italian. I will drink several glasses of a full-bodied red wine — a Brunello di Montalcino would be nice, or a Barbaresco — and I will read the news or e-mails on my iPad so no one tries to talk to me. So no one tries to pick me up, the way people often do when I travel alone and eat and drink alone and do so many things alone. I will sit at a table by a window and text Benton and drink wine and tell him that he was right about something being very wrong. I’ve been set up or manipulated, and I’m not welcome here, and the gloves are off, I’ll let him know. I intend to grab the truth with my bare hands.
“Well, imagine not really knowing what you look like anymore,” says the shackled woman sitting across from me, and her physical appearance is her biggest heartbreak, not the death of Jack Fielding or the boy she ran over when she was drunk.
“There was tremendous opportunity for me. I missed a very real chance to be somebody,” she says. “An actress, a model, a famous poet. I have a damn good singing voice. Maybe I could have composed my own lyrics and been a Kelly Clarkson. Of course, they didn’t have
Kathleen Lawler is unnaturally pale from years of being shielded from the sun, her body soft and shapeless, not overweight but broken down and doughy from a life that has been chronically inactive and unavoidably sedentary. Her breasts sag, and her upper thighs spread widely in the plastic chair, her former attention-getting figure as formless now as the white prison uniform she and other inmates wear in segregation. It’s as if she’s no longer physically human, as if she’s evolved backward, returned to a primitive stage of existence like a platyhelminthes, a flatworm, she says sardonically with a thickly elastic Georgia drawl that makes me think of taffy.
“I know you’re probably sitting here looking at me and wondering what I’m talking about,” she says, as I recall pictures I’ve seen, including mug shots from her arrest in 1978 after she and Jack were caught having sex.
“But when I met him at that ranch outside of Atlanta?” she says. “Well, I was something. I don’t mind saying it, because it’s true. Long corn-silk hair, big-busted, with an ass like a Georgia peach and legs that wouldn’t quit, and huge golden-brown eyes, what Jack used to call my tiger eyes. It’s funny how some things get passed on, like you’ve been programmed in the womb or maybe at conception and there’s no escaping. The roulette wheel spins and stops and your number comes up and that’s what you are no matter how hard you try or even if you don’t try at all. You are what you are, you are what you’re not, and other events and other people just enhance the angel or devil, the winner or the loser in you. It’s all about the spinning of the wheel, whether it’s hitting the winning home run in the World Series or being raped. Decided for you, and forget undoing it. You’re a scientist. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know about genetics. I’m sure you agree you can’t change nature.”
“What people experience also has significant impact,” I reply.
“You can see it with the dogs,” Kathleen continues, not interested in my opinions unless she tells me what they are. “You get a greyhound that was mistreated, and it’s going to react to certain things a certain way and have its sensitivities. But it’s either a good dog or a bad dog. It was either a winner on the track or wasn’t. It’s either trainable or not. I can bring out what’s already there, encourage it, shape it. But I can’t transform the dog into something it wasn’t born to be.”
She finishes telling me that she and Jack were two peas in the same pod and she did to him exactly what was done to her, and she didn’t recognize it at the time, couldn’t possibly have the insight, even though she was a social worker, a therapist. She was molested by the local Methodist minister when she was ten, she claims.
“He took me out for ice cream, but that’s not what I ended up licking,” she puts it crudely. “I was crazy in love. He made me feel so excited and special, except in retrospect I don’t think
Her unrestrained hands are tense in her lap, only her ankles shackled, and the chains clink and scrape against concrete whenever she restlessly shifts her feet.
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty, as they say,” she continues, “and what was really going on was I couldn’t tell anyone the truth about my life, about the lying, the sneaking around to motels and pay phones and all sorts of things a little girl shouldn’t know about. I stopped being a little girl. He took that from me. It went on until I was twelve and he got a job with a big church in Arkansas. I didn’t realize when I got involved with Jack, I basically did the same thing to him because I was encouraged and shaped in a certain way to do it, and he was encouraged and shaped in a certain way to accept it, to want it, and oh, yes, he sure did. But I see it now. What they call insight. It’s taken me a lifetime to figure out we don’t go to hell, we build it on a foundation already laid for us. We build hell like a shopping mall.”
So far she has avoided telling me the minister’s name. All she’s said is he was married with seven children, and he had to have his God-given needs met and considered Kathleen his spiritual daughter, his handmaiden, his soul mate. It was right and good that they were joined in a sacred bond, and he would have married her and been open about his devotion but divorce was a sin, Kathleen explains to me in a flat, dead voice. He couldn’t abandon his children. That was against God’s teachings.
“Fucking bullshit,” she says hatefully.
Her tiger-eyed stare is unwavering, her once lovely face peanut-shaped and haggard now, with a spiderweb of fine lines around a mouth that once was pouty and voluptuous. She is missing several teeth.
“Of course, it was unadulterated bullshit, and he probably moved on to some other little girl after I started shaving my parts and hiding from him when it was my period. Being beautiful and talented and smart didn’t land me anywhere good, that’s for damn sure,” she emphasizes, as if it is imperative I understand that the ruin sitting across from me isn’t who she is, much less who she was.
I am supposed to imagine Kathleen Lawler as young and beautiful, wise and free, and well intentioned when she began her sexual relationship with twelve-year-old Jack Fielding at a ranch for troubled youths. But what I see before me is the wreckage caused by one violation that caused another and another, and if her story is true about the minister, then he damaged her the same way she damaged Jack, and the destruction still hasn’t ended and
