Free In the Slammer With Carol Smith by Hortense Calisher

to set it down. The hall’s scrubbed linoleum is a palace rest-stop, compared to what that one will endure. For I’ll have a domestic life as much as any householder. Only of a different order. The search for running water being prime. After that the question of where you can lay your head. I have no grand theory on the adventures of the road. Except that in desert or oases, California or Niagara, the ground-rat knows early and best what the country’s coming to.
    It helps to leave with an errand. Outside, it’s not light yet. Too early for those here who will be going out for milk—and coming back in. I can’t see the note on the fridge, but it is there. On her pallet, once mine, Daisy lies face down, her hair gleaming in the dim ray cast from the hall bulb; we got the color just right. Accepted—when Carmen brought her a mirror—with a weak smile.
    My last night’s revelation sank into her like the dye. In former days she’d have cried out, like someone who’d found a lost key. In my own mind I continue speaking to her all the night through. Or to the eternal someone: grateful, that neither of them replies.
    This is a new silence for me. In a head with a dialogue solely its own. The aunts have taken their enigma into the shadows behind me. My parents, whoever they were, have played out their variations. Gold has a hole in her where the children once were; it may never heal. I have no hole in me any more—its rim working like a mouth that wants a breast, its core of air sucking me toward the fatherless. My case is different; I was the child. Time will be my triumph. Whatever it brings.
    I stand in front of the mirror. Full-length, yes, a bargain. You have an instinct for those, Carol—Gold said to me once. So I do. Comes with having a bargain for a face, neither ghostly white as the lady librarian’s nor so Blue Coal dark as the sergeant’s in the Legion Hall. The short haircut is becoming; it was a bargain too, in a barbers’ training-school, where I paid nothing. Except for my dues, which were internal.
    The girl student who gravitated to me, like a young witch riding the shears she was pointing, had almost the same skin as me. All down the line of barber’s chairs people’s heads were turning into spiky cubes, or other propositions out of Euclid. The carrot-head next to me was being shaved to the crown, except for one sprout. I am like on a ward, but this time I am laughing.
    My operator touches my cheekbone, then her own. She has almost the same hair too, curly but smooth, straight but not dead straight. ‘Man, are we going to make us kicky,’ she says, sleeking a hand on her own coif, that sits like a bell halfway up her nape. ‘Will you have the same? Look great on you. And easy care. Grows into a pigtail, if you can’t come in here regular. Or a bun.’
    After she was done, an attendant moved to scoop up behind my chair. The whorl of hair that went into the carpet sweeper looked like the long-outmoded head of a college girl. ‘What made you finally do it?’ the operator said. ‘I kind of like to know.’ We smile at each other, sisterly. ‘I had this great barette,’ I said. ‘I wanted to give it away. I cut my hair so I could.’
    Goodbye Daisy Gold. Though in a way we’re still linked. Both of us on the receiving end now, you on the severance pay and whatever welfare you can luck into later, me still on the stipend the street calls ‘the disability.’ Both of us bound to whatever offices that so dispense. You to the courts, for judgment—I to the clinics, and the streets. The mails may make things simpler in your case. So I give you this house. Easy-chair.
    This woman, in this mirror—who knows what she might yet be? Or how bright are her errands?
    The gorilla-cage is bare now except for what’s hung there, still neat under its plastic. Alphonse’s shirt.

T HE STREET AHEAD should look more crooked. Seen from behind, it somehow looks straighter, even before she’s there. Has the