My mom, my sister and me

I’m standing in line at the county jail, and I’m watching the fish tread water in the tank that runs the length of the visitors’ line. I am new to this ritual, the ritual of family in jail, but I have heard the stories and think I know what to expect. I am nervous when someone says she wonders if she’ll be able to get past the guards since she has shorts on. I am wearing shorts, and the only thing I’m holding is my driver’s license and the slip of paper that I printed with my sister’s information in my shaky hand while I leaned over the prisoner record book with three other women who were looking for their family members.

Behind me is a woman with a baby on her hip, talking about Daddy and how happy he’ll be to see them; her friend is reminiscing about the last time she got out of the joint, how she couldn’t see her old man for two months because of probation. I hear the word violate a lot, and I’m not sure of the weight that it carries, but I am careful to keep my eyes leveled to the fish tank.

My mom is standing beside me, and I can smell her perfume, crisp as dollar bills. She looks like someone who should be sitting behind a desk counseling women on how to keep out of visitor lines at jails, but she has her driver’s license ready for the officer to punch into the computer, and I want to ask her what she’s thinking about, but I am afraid. I’ve been reading Virginia Woolf all summer, and I know the threat of carrying rocks in my pockets and the rivers that look calm. I want to ask my mom a lot of questions as we stand in this line with the last envelope of sky sliding through the darkened windows. Friday night traffic is slipping by outside, with people on their way to chilled glasses of chardonnay and music clinking like ice cubes, but all I can do is hurt for my sister in her orange jumpsuit, rehearse what I’ll say to her when I sit with the two-way phone receiver in my hand and wonder who cleans the fish tank at the jail.

I am sitting in the movie theater, and the lights have done that slow fade that buries you in darkness before you even realize they’re gone. I like the rocking seats, the cup holders, the sound of popcorn pushed through restless jaws. I watch the boy onscreen flip through the stack of albums that his sister left behind, the music to set him free, and I can name the albums; it’s almost like trivia, but then he flips past the Joni Mitchell album, and I know it’s Blue. I step back seven years, and I can still hear the needle scratch the vinyl, the quick skip past the first four cuts and then that easy settle into the fifth song, the one where the grooves are worn so deep I could run my hand across the record with my eyes closed and feel that song with my fingertips.

When I had barely squeaked into the legal drinking age, I was living with my mom and trying to budget my small paycheck for gas, car insurance and parties. The woman next door thought she was Joni Mitchell, and she played her guitar with her windows open so the music leaked through the fence. We lived in a condo then, and her house was so close to ours that they rubbed hips together like drunken dancers. I knew her room was upstairs behind the wall, so close to my own that I could hear her play Blue over and over again until the rise and fall of the needle was as constant as my breath, and I fell asleep believing that songs were like tattoos.

I had a crush on her and her blonde hair falling across her guitar and the shadow of her strong jaw line. I walked my garbage past her front window twice an hour to see if she was standing there, if her car was in the driveway, if her front door was open and the music was washing the house in the same color of light as the sun through her western windows. She was 14 years older than I.

She took me out once, tucked me into the seat of her Volvo, with the cassette tapes playing front-to-back until she led me into a dance club lit like a neon mystery and kissed me into a corner. Later, she rubbed me across the grain of her living room carpet while the rest of her house slept. I couldn’t help but think that the softness of Joni Mitchell’s voice did not come through in this woman’s body. I felt her lifetime’s worth of safety in whispered phone calls to women, the invitation of averted eyes and all the reasons why she needed her husband so she wouldn’t have to tell any truths come through the grip of her fingers. She let me go when the record reached the end, and then she slid the album back into the dust jacket, stacked it in a milk crate. I found my shoes and socks and knew that album wouldn’t play for me anymore.

I was young and thought being with her meant something, but all she gave me was the sound of a record through a wall and a long Saturday night pressed against the hard angles of her hips. I gave her the unspoken promise that I wouldn’t look through her window on my way through the parking lot anymore, wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in a smile she could feel, wouldn’t expose her truth. The record player stayed as quiet as I did. I let the garbage overflow, moved away, found someplace else to sit and wait for more music to seep through the walls.

The film rolls on, and I have been holding the same woman’s hand through three years of movie darkness and different music worn so thin that the color is faded and shines with memories. I know later, when we walk out of the theater and the sun slaps us both in the face while we fumble for our sunglasses and a recollection of where we parked the car, both of us half-drunk on the story we just stepped out of, she’ll tell me she liked the movie just as much as I did. She loves me even when I slip back a few years and try to figure out how I scraped through my 20s, despite women with guitars, marriage to a man who drank me through three countries and countless bars, the birth of a baby who rode shotgun down the back alleys of bad decisions. I know she won’t let me lose my footing again. I feel it in the grip of her hand.

I am standing in line at the county jail, and for the first time I notice the tiny fish that are hiding at the bottom of the tank, almost invisible against the backdrop of plants. I point them out to my mom and she says, “I wonder how they keep from getting eaten?” I am thinking of Virginia Woolf again, and I can’t answer her. I always want to know what happened for Virginia the day she filled her pockets with rocks, walked to the river and waded in to drown. I wonder about the voices in her head, whose hand she let go of, what record was playing in the background, what the color of the sky was when she stepped onto the front porch with her good shoes on. My sister had her pockets full of rocks when they found her. Oak Park was her river.

The line is moving forward, and I have sweated through the paper in my hand. From the corner of my eye, I can see a small fish leave the camouflage of the stone-strewn bottom and dart toward the exposure of the surface where the large fish are grouped in a knot of fins. My girlfriend is at home with dinner on the stove, my daughter is curled into the corner of the couch with a book, and my sister is upstairs behind a Plexiglas partition with her jail wristband tight around the tattoo that runs the length of her arm. She will be 23 next month. My mom squeezes my elbow and leads me to the desk where the sheriff’s officer waits. I will graduate from college this year, and my mom relies on me to keep walking forward. I feel it in the weight of her hand. I give the slip of paper and my driver’s license to the guard and wonder if the small fish will make it to the top of the tank. I hope she will keep swimming once she gets there.