Mary Gaitskill Reads “Kitchen Workers” by Gail Leonard
Mary Gaitskill reads Gail Leonard's “Kitchen Workers,” second place winner for fiction in PEN's 2007 Prison Writing Contest, at the 2009 event Breakout: Voices from Inside. Read the story below.
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Kitchen Workers
It is as quiet as it ever gets. By itself, that statement is not particularly informative. But in a room that sleeps one hundred and forty women, quiet times are rare and brief. When I say “quiet,” I am describing the noise level you would hear in a bus station in the middle of the night. The laundry compressor going on and off outside the window, the whispered conversations of women and loud talk of officers, and the hall public address announcements give a definition to quiet. I have learned to sleep through much of this constant racket, so I could not understand what keeps walking me up at this ungodly hour of 3 a.m., when I should be taking advantage of the relative quiet to get desperately needed sleep. The kitchen workers are up and getting ready for their early morning shift, but they make very little noise. I thought I had taught myself to sleep through their ministrations, but here I lay in my bed, once again awake. I struggle to quash the feelings of desperation that wash over me regularly—carefully contained despair that is always seeking an outlet.
[…]
I have been here almost six months and it took some time to develop my routine, such that it is. Competing for space, showers and quiet time are not easy tasks when living among, not only the one hundred and forty women in this room, but amidst the other seven hundred within the walls of a prison originally built for five hundred women. I currently live in Mary Johnson’s Prison for Women, an elegant sounding name for the only women’s prison in this state. It is old and decrepit like the system that sends women here by the hundreds. It is also constantly overcrowded with faces changing daily. My living space consists of one single bed, 6 feet by 2½ feet wide. The comparison to a grave is hard to resist when I consider the dreariness of my surroundings and the futility of existence in this place. There are one hundred and forty graves, covered not by brown dirt, but by blue blankets. There are one hundred and forty identical spaces, holding one hundred and forty identically dressed women, who have one hundred and forty identical looks of despair. Because of the misery penetrating the whole facility, when my eyes open at 3 a.m., I am annoyed that I must face my current reality against my will. On the other hand, it is only in the middle of the night that there is any chance of finding a few minutes of relative quiet so a lady can think undisturbed.
Everyone living here has a “state job.” They call it a job no matter what task we are assigned. Some consider themselves lucky and get a job requiring little effort or time. I never understood that attitude, because all we have is time. Deborah has such a job. She is a “South Yard Worker,” which entails picking up cigarette butts twice a day for 10 minutes each time in the exercise yard. We do not get to go out often despite what the logs show, so many days there is not much to pick up. Deborah gets called to work by a loud disembodied voice over the P.A. system screaming, “South Yard Workers report to the South Yard and DO your job—NOW!” I could see Deborah’s bed across the room. She would be slowly putting her boots on so she could report to work. Ten minutes later she is back, whereupon she promptly lies down on her grave and resumes reading a book.
Of course, there are those who work all day too, some harder than others. The prison has invented a myriad of jobs to keep us all busy to some degree, and let’s face it, to keep payroll as low as possible. For every job an inmate does, that is one person they do not have to hire. […] [I]f an inmate is lucky, she got a state job in an air conditioned office, because there is no air conditioning in the dorms.
I am one of the lucky ones. My job consists of tutoring other inmates enrolled in the G.E.D program. Every morning, Monday through Friday, at 7 a.m., I walk down a long hall, periodically answering a correctional officer’s (they do NOT like to be called guards, though that is a better description of their duties) barked question, “Where are you going?” “To work, sir.” I politely answer, looking down at the floor so there is no question of arrogance or lack of submissiveness. Once I arrive at the prison-ground school, I spend the day in air conditioning, happily teaching math and science, answering questions and generally counting my blessing that I am not a laundry room attendant or much worse, a kitchen worker.
At the end of my working day, I walk back down the long hall, answering the same barked questions I responded to that morning on my way to work. I spend these moments dreading entering the dorm where my blue blanketed grave waits for me. The hall, being enclosed, stays relatively cool, but not so the dorm. Crossing the threshold was like stepping from purgatory into hell. The damp heat grabs me like a childhood monster with clammy paws, pulls me in, smothers my body and makes it hard to breathe. I sweat profusely from the humidity and laugh inwardly that women pay good money at spas for such steamy air. I will get no relief for the next 16 hours. I am home.
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