Chapter 5: Eight Women, One Bathroom
Bertrand House is at 41 Anselm Street, a green two-story with a wheelchair ramp nobody used and a porch light that stayed on all day.
The intake took fifty minutes.
The house manager was a woman named Ivy Marchetti, fifty-something, reading glasses on a beaded chain, a laminated sheet in front of her.
She read the rules out loud. All of them. She did not skip any and she did not apologize for any.
Curfew is ten. In the building by ten, in your bed by eleven.
Sign the book in and out. Name, destination, time out, time in.
No alcohol. No guests. No cash over two hundred dollars in the house. Random urine twice a month.
Chores rotate weekly and the rotation is on the fridge. Program fee is ninety-five dollars a week, waived for the first thirty days by the re-entry grant, due Fridays after that.
“Do you have income,” she said.
“No.”
“Do you have a bank account.”
“No.”
“Do you have valid ID.”
“No. It expired four years ago.”
She wrote something. She was not unkind about it. She had done this eight hundred times.
“You can't cash a state check without ID,” she said. “State ID is eighteen dollars. You need a document to get the document.”
I said I understood how that worked.
She looked up over the glasses then, once, and went back to writing.
Bed six. Upstairs, back room, top bunk, by the window that did not open because it had been painted shut. A metal locker at the foot of the bunk with a hasp on it. No padlock provided.
I put the plastic bag in the locker and closed it and there was nothing to close it with.
Eight beds. One bathroom.
The bathroom schedule was taped to the door in fifteen-minute blocks starting at 5:30 in the morning.
Mine was 6:45 to 7:00.
I want to say something about that, because people hear halfway house and think it must have been a relief. It was not a relief. It was the same arithmetic in a smaller building.
But the door had a lock on the inside, and I stood in there on the first night with the lock turned for eleven of my fifteen minutes and did nothing at all.
The women were: Delphine, Roxy, Anne-Marie, Trish, Yolanda, Kenna, Sabine, and me.
Delphine had been out four months and had a job at a laundry and told everybody about it constantly, and nobody minded, because she was the only proof in the building.
Roxy was nineteen and had a daughter she saw on Sundays in a McDonald's on Route 6.
Anne-Marie did not speak for my first six days.
Trish stole. Everybody knew. She took small things, socks, a lighter, a hair tie, and put them back three days later.
Yolanda ran the kitchen like a housing unit and I found that restful.
Kenna had done nineteen months and talked like she had done nineteen years. Sabine was fifty-eight and had been in and out since she was twenty-two and knew the name of every judge in the county.
Dinner was at six. Somebody said grace over a pan of baked ziti and eight women said amen in eight different volumes.
Afterward Sabine leaned over to me at the sink.
“What'd you do,” she said.
That is not a rude question in that building. It is how you get filed.
“Vehicular homicide,” I said. “DUI. Six years.”
She whistled low and dried a plate.
“Who was in the car,” she said.
Not what happened. Not how many years. Who was in the car.
“My husband,” I said.
“Where's he now.”
“He's married to my cousin.”
Sabine put the plate on the rack, and she looked at me for a second, and she did not say anything comforting.
“Then you got two problems,” she said.
At 9:52 I signed the book because I had come in from the porch, and I wrote my name, and the destination column said porch, and the time column said 9:52.
That was the first time I had written my own name on anything in six years without an inmate number after it.
I sat with the pen still on the page for a second longer than I needed to.
Ivy came through at ten and locked the front door with a key on a coiled bracelet.
Then she stopped by the stairs.
“Mercer,” she said. “You get thirty days on the grant. After that I need money or I need an address.”
“Understood.”
“I'm not threatening you. I'm telling you the date.”
She told me the date.
I said it back to her, and I went up the stairs, and I lay on a top bunk under a window that had been painted shut and counted the days on my fingers twice to make sure I had heard her right.
Thirty.