Ruby, Wanda and Me, Late at Night, in the County Jail

Abstract

I loved him more than I loved yellow seahorses and red anemones and glass-hearted frogs put together, and when I was with him, I thought of myself as Psyche with a bosom full of fish or as Daphne, her hair in wild disarray. I don't know if you could say we were ever happy together. It seemed like happiness, but it was more like the excitement of infatuation combined with insecurity, jealousy, and the tantalizing prospect of reforming him. I never imagined I'd turn on him, but Psyche's wings got burnt and Eros somehow got immo lated by his own principle, fire. Eventually he joined the Air Force and was shipped off to Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota; I got pregnant and had his baby. Then I was arrested and convicted and sent to the Federal Correctional Facility in Alderson, West Virginia. His name was Theodore St. Clair, but I called him T-Bone. We met at the Mount Abrams Military Academy at the corner of Riverside Drive and noth Street, where, every Thursday after school, I creat ed quite a sensation by lying across the doorway in my skeleton cos tume so that every young warrior coming out of school had to step over me. One day, Theodore stopped, took my hand, yanked me to my feet, told me the police were on the way and suggested I do something legal with my passions. Dioxin is legal, I said. Nuclear bombs are War is legal. I could see that he was a leader and probably a nonconformist because he was the only one in the school who had managed to hang onto his hair. He walked me to the end of the path and offered me a ride on his motorcycle, and from then on, every afternoon, I found myself wandering out of school in my grey and blue St. Ursula's uniform with a scapular of the Blessed Virgin around my neck, jumping onto Theodore's motorcycle, and disappearing into a trail of smoking sin. Pet your dog, not your date, my father said, and the billboard up on Broadway advised, A tisket, a tasket, a condom or a casket. But I felt myself looking underneath Theodore's military husk and seeing a