Summer 2024
Neal nearly shits the metaphorical brick the first time the new second-shift female C.O. – a saucy, pleasingly plump package of red-fingertipped attitude – saunters onto Neal’s prison block. What puckish god of irony hath assigned this spitting image of my ex-wife to vex my memory and fan the fires of my guilt? He wonders. My Lord, she could pass for the identical twin of eighteen-year-old Rose!
May 1968
Twenty-one-year-old Neal first notices the future mother of his children sitting with a girlfriend on the opposite side of a bonfire. Their eyes meet, karmic tumblers engage, and ten minutes later they meet at the business end of a beer keg. Pleasantries are exchanged, as well as relevant data, and as the price of a first date, Neal agrees to meet Rose’s parents. After Rose and her high school senior friend scoot home before they violate their parents’ curfew, Neal is razzed by his buddies for hitting on a plus-size nymphet. He laughs them off, cites in his defense the old saw: The bigger the horse, the smoother the ride. Plus, he thinks, she’s sure some cute!
2024
Meanwhile, fifty-six years later, Neal can’t get over the new C.O.’s uncanny resemblance to Rose’s teenage self. “Miss D.,” as she of an unpronounceable surname is quickly dubbed, nimbly carries Rose’s approximate displacement, boasts a similar beam, and proudly sports a comparable prow. By the end of her first week, Miss D. manages to win over her jaded subjects, and even her few apostates generally agree that if any bad shit were to hit the fan, they will intercede on her behalf.
Neal concurs, recalls defending Rose’s honor one beery night with an effective left hook. He was much younger then, strong and volatile, but now that he’s seventy-seven – brittle and cautious – he prefers to offer an olive branch. Looking up from the chessboard, he watches Miss D. circulate through the dayroom, her long, dark hair in a bun, her light-green eyes rimmed with kohl, or whatever the hell it’s now called, and feels a wee spasm of his still-smoldering affection for his long-divorced ex. Every flip of Miss D’s uplifted chin is another reminder of how much Neal’s hard-nosed/headed/hearted contrariness has cost him. But then, with a fetching tilt of Miss D’s head, a hesitant smile, he is transported back to Rose’s front porch.
In a geographical happenstance that Neal will later consider a favorable omen, the warehouse of his pipeline contractor employer is only two-hundred yards from Rose’s country home. Over time, a seemingly inexorable sequence of events will domino carefree Neal into wedlock. But let’s not get ahead of our story, which resumes with jittery Neal standing outside his date’s front door, worried that Rose’s parents might frown upon a four-year-older man courting their still-in-school daughter.
Exhaling a deep, now-or-never breath, he taps on the door, hears a muted flurry of excitement within, a cry of “Someone’s knocking on the wrong door!”, detects a patter of approaching feet, and then, at last, hears the creak of the rarely used door. (Neal will later learn that everyone – a plural noun that encompasses six Herzberg daughters and a son, four sons-in-law, and a roiling passel of grandkids – enters the modest two-story home of Russel and Pauline via the backyard kitchen door.)
He is confronted by Rose’s eight-year-old sister, Sally, her pipe stem arms akimbo, who demands, “Well, who are you, and what do you want?”
Neal looks down at the impertinent minx, discloses his name and mission.
The impudent lass eyes him from head to hoof, cries out, “Rose! There’s a funny-looking guy here to see you!”
As Neal digests that, ten-year-old Richie appears, followed by his mother and father. Mini-skirted Rose, her hair styled into a fashionable “flip,” brings up the rear.
Introductions and handshakes are exchanged; questions asked and answered. Then, in the first of an ensuing series of “coincidences,” Russel mentions that he had once worked with Neal’s namesake grandfather at Geiersburg Steel, Russel’s longtime employer.
Uh-oh, frets Neal, acutely aware of his grandfather’s reputation as a hell-raisin’, whiskey-swillin’, barroom brawler. I’d prefer for that particular cat to stay in its bag. However, he deftly deflects any character-besmirching linkage by noting that his mischievous Gramps had died three years before his angelic grandson’s birth. And, fortunately, Russ and Pauline – Neal is urged to drop the “Mister” and “Missus” nonsense – have no objections to the age differential between their innocent daughter and the smooth-tongued rogue who most likely hopes to ravish her but good.
Throughout his ordeal, Neal has been sneaking glances at a long row of 8×10” family photographs upon the fireplace mantel. Each member displays an unfaked smile, glows with apparent contentment, and it is obvious that the legendary bluebird of happiness has taken roost in the Herzberg family tree.
Neal’s initial unease has been dispelled by a pervasive aura of domestic felicity, and for the first time since fleeing his own dysfunctional family, feels welcome, accepted as he is. For the past year, Neal has lived in a $12-a-week, shower, bed, and toilet-equipped room above a roadside tavern. He eats breakfast at a nearby diner, lunches at the nearest barroom to his ever-changing job site, and then has supper at the same diner, where (in a second “coincidence”) Rose’s married sister, Vicky, is a waitress.
Just as Neal is about to escort Rose out the door, little Sally cuts an outsized fart which provokes a round of laughter from the openly amused Herzberg clan.
“Oh, my God, Sally!” Rose blurts, red with embarrassment. “Is that any way to act among company?”
But Neal laughs, too, thinking that maybe – just maybe, mind you – he may have finally lucked into a family after his own heart.
Back at Neal’s present home, Miss D. circulates about the dayroom, alert as a tiger shark for incipient mischief, sashaying serenely amid stentorian upswells of babel, opening cell doors with a smile, quelling with a mere frown potential rebellions, while all the while accepting calls on her two-way radio with one ear, and registering complaints from her perpetually disgruntled charges with the other.
Despite a general disfavor of female guards in men’s prisons, and vice versa, Neal retains a grudging respect for Miss D. and her distaff coevals, keenly aware of the constant risks they assume, from “flash attacks” by sicko exhibitionists, to the ever-hovering specter of possible rape. And it’s no secret that in the event of a riot – when the shit gets really ugly – the safety of every female employee – guards, especially – will hinge upon the crop of good will sown in the past.
Fortunately, these insurrections are rare, and here at Neal’s medium-security institution, rather unlikely. However, “unlikely” is not synonymous with “impossible,” and now and then during Neal’s darker moments, when an attack of the “lifer blues” threatens to scuttle his customary never-give-up Gemini buoyancy, he fantasizes rescuing Miss D. from a wolf pack of opportunistic rapists by appealing to the better instincts of every mother’s son, every sister’s brother, and every daughter’s daddy, and then escorting her to safety, a hero’s welcome, and a recommendation of pardon from the grateful warden.
This recurrent daydream, and others of similar substance, goose Neal’s creativity, stoke the fires of his craft, strengthen his resolve to write himself out of bondage, reassure him of his essential goodness. Even if such a hypothetical effort were to fail, and he is killed in his attempt, for what better advocacy for forgiveness could he possibly wish?
But Neal is always dragged back to reality by the memory of his and Rose’s failed marriage, and sometimes fears that his undisputed passage through the Pearly Gates is as improbable as his “Knight Rescues Damsel” scenario. Oh, the hell with it, he eventually surrenders, back to Memory Lane, and with a quantum leap and bound, he and Rose are on their first date, feeling each other out and up in the front seat of his ’51 Chevy.
During cigarette breaks between Neal’s probes and Rose’s rebuffs, they swap discretely edited accounts of their respective histories. Upon confirming where he dines twice a day, she detects a culinary path to his heart, vows to secure a favorite-food road map to his tummy from Vicky.
Their date goes well, certain biological gears smoothly mesh, and within a month Neal has settled into a comfortable rut that threatens to terminate in – horror of horrors! – matrimony. For when Vicky apprises Rose of Neal’s meatloaf/mashed potatoes/no “weird” vegetables palate, Rose invites him to sup at the Herzberg table. After calculating a weekly savings of twenty-some bucks, plus all the obnoxious quarter tips, Neal eagerly assents, blithely unaware that the “free” eats are actually downpayments on a wedding ring.
Summer sweats by; football season kicks off; and every autumn Sunday finds newly domesticated Neal cheering on his team-of-the-day from his favorite chair in the Herzberg TV room, as Rose empties his ashtray, fetches his snacks, and re-beers him as necessary. Unlike his own nit-picking, teetotaling (!) Irish parents, Rose’s nondrinking Pennsylvania Dutch kinfolk accept Neal for what he is, reciprocate his earthy wit, and refute his hesitant farts with uninhibited blasts of their own. Neal – hardly anyone’s dummkopf – is aware that his bachelorhood is skating on thin ice, acknowledges the diamond ring of Damocles dangling above his noggin, but accepts the danger as his admission fee to a happy home.
Rose’s older, married-with-kids sisters Jane, Sheila, Mary, and spy-in-the-apple pie waitress Vicky, live with their husbands within a convenient hop, skip, and drop-in-unannounced radius of den mother Pauline’s cozy fiefdom, into which they pop at will, gravid with gossip, all weekend long. Upon delivery of each rumored tidbit, midwife Pauline scores its viability on a personal Apgar score of juiciness. From daybreak to moonrise, the Herzberg daughters come and go, nattering of domestic affairs, while boring the bejeebers out of every estrogen-deficient male within earshot. The ladies’ hubbies, dragged from their man caves in order to render weekly homage to the family doyenne, greet their prospective brother-in-law Neal with unfaked friendliness. And thus, by these continual brushings of the jovial Herzberg clan’s “wings,” the stony bulwarks of Neal’s bachelorhood are gradually eroded. Like the slowly boiled frog of parable, too comfortable to quit its pot, for the first time in his life Neal relishes the simple pleasure of domestic tranquility, unaware that he is being parboiled into a wedding tux.
Time passes, one thing leads to another, while all the while the loving essence of his adoptive family permeates Neal’s soul, displacing drop by drop his reluctance to commit, and following an up and down, on and off, at times contentious three-year courtship, Neal and Rose are married by a District Judge who had once fined Neal for driving without an inspection sticker.
Several lady officers have overseen Neal’s block during his fifteen-year stay; all moved on within three months. It is not as if the Bureau of Correction fears that familiarity might breed contempt – hardly a career-killer – so much as their worry that it will propagate collusion. Small favors tend to shape-shift into favoritism, which may osmose into out-and-out corruption. To forestall that danger, officers are whisked from block to block, from day shift to second to the graveyard shift, until they either quit or retire. It’s not a job for the meek or weak, and the turnover is high.
Neal hopes that Miss D., who came on the block in mid-April with the robins, will winter-over with the house sparrows that roost in the heating vents. Her presence resurrects dormant memories of the happy long-ago, when his marriage was dewy-fresh, and sweet, pretty Rose a flower in full bloom.
But inevitably, when he wakes in his darkened cell, the not-so-hot memories arise, accompanied by their bully boy sidekicks, Shame and Regret. Neal drank heavily throughout his and Rose’s marriage, cheated on her more than once, and treated his three daughters with benevolent neglect, foolishly assuming that they were self-sufficient loners as he had been, resentful of adult supervision. Although he never raised a hand to them, he wasn’t as reticent with his voice, drunkenly venting his frustration over his circumstance-stymied goal of writing his way out of anonymity and his paycheck-to-paycheck existence. Finally, after numerous breakups, make-ups, and more of Neal’s fuck-ups, they agreed to a no-fault divorce in the spring of 1990.
For the next seventeen years, until Neal is arrested for a misconstrued act of self-defense in his own home, Neal and Rose maintain a civil relationship, attend the funerals of the other’s father, and share holiday meals with their children. Occasionally, they even have sex, about the only thing they ever excelled at. In time, Neal realizes that his affection for Rose’s family may not have been the best criterion for choosing a life partner. Still, they had loved once, and the good memories of that time counterbalance Neal’s regrets. When he calls Rose from prison to apologize for his shoddy behavior, she forgives him, thereby proving herself a better woman than he ever was as a man.
A lifelong, unrepentant smoker, Rose is tethered to an oxygenator, and Neal dreads the possibility of outliving the only non-relative who ever loved him. Neal had always known that the world was just so, but that doesn’t make it any easier to accept, and he obsesses over leaving so much undone when he dies. Had I known it was old age calling, he laughs, I would have barred the damn door!
Miss D. not only outstays the spring, she escorts the summer to the first kickoff of football season, when her queen bee reign is usurped by a panache-deficient, male-type drone. With nary a ripple, she sinks into bureaucratic limbo, pinballing from position to position like a rogue asteroid. Upon their sporadic encounters along the outside walks, Neal and Miss D. exchange smiles and forced jokes in unsuccessful attempts to revive their former camaraderie, but the old dialogue rings phony on a new stage, and they part with awkward gestures. And so concludes yet another star-crossed affair, Neal notes ironically. At least it won’t cost me any alimony or child support.
Neal’s life (sentence) goes on, the completed arc of each day’s sun whittling it a hair closer to oblivion. Sometimes on sleep-challenged nights he thinks of Rose, wonders if she ever thinks of him, wonders if the old woman she is now recalls the golden girl of her youth, remembers the sun-tanned lad who loved so much the summer lass who loved him in return. All too often, yesteryear’s lovers turned ex-lovers are anxious to whitewash bad memories along with the good, down a stirrup cup of remorse, and move forward to fresh entanglements. But then a shimmer of fireflies on a quiet summer night, a patter of rain upon a tin porch roof, or the tremulous cry of a lonely whippoorwill hearkens them back to…what? A stinging reminder of life’s transience? A generous sampling of toxic recollections?
With a groan, Neal rolls over, returns to the sender his too-painful-to-reopen memories.
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