Maggie Hill
HOOPS
We’re going to jail for Christmas. Sing Sing. Ossining, New York. My brother Bobby and I ride in the back seat, the both of us held captive by images of branch, stone, sky going in the other direction. Our mother and father—the both of them, together—ride up front, not talking. It’s supposed to snow.
“Kate, crack your window a little to get the smoke out,” my father says.
She does. It is immediately freezing. Bobby, whose seat is behind the front passenger, my mother, looks at me as if it is my fault. I got sick once in a car a million years ago and nobody ever forgets it. He wouldn’t dare complain to them—not today. Not after getting thrown out of Bishops High School for the latest infraction. Smoking cigarettes. That’s what they told me. I know it was smoking, but it wasn’t cigarettes. I let them think I don’t know it was pot. They need me to be innocent.
“How is the wind back there?” my mother asks, even as she is rolling up the window. “Claire, don’t read. You’ll get sick.”
“Don’t get sick in this car,” my father says to nobody, everybody.
“She wasn’t reading, Jack, I was just reminding her in case she was thinking about it.” My mother looks back at me as if she is examining me for signs of future criminal behavior. I open my lips, mouth What? This gets a smirk out of Bobby.
The sky looks puffy with snow just behind it. Shapes seem to be pressing down, making land feel closer to sky than usual. Up ahead, a white blob meets the horizon, and I imagine it is already snowing up there. It is especially quiet outside; a combination of the mummy sound of almost-snow and the geography of upstate New York.
Since we left the city, there are only a few cars on each side of the road. It’s a monotonous view. Row after row of trees jut out from woods held back by huge boulders and stones, surrounding us, on either side. Every once in a while, ice clings to the branches, making them look sculptured and eerie. We’re the only people on this four-lane highway; it looks like someone hacked it out last night, pouring white broken lines over black, flattened silly putty.
We are doing so many unthinkable things in this car, on this Christmas Eve, for this family, that it’s better if we are all just rolling along, stunned silent. First of all, we’re going to jail for Christmas. No, first of all, my brother John is in jail. Christmas is just the after-effect.
My father is driving us to the prison in one of his cab driver friend’s cars. He has been upbeat, even almost in charge since we left. This is what he does—drive—and he seems to really know what he’s doing about getting on highways. I hear him, but I can hardly see him over the high back of the front seats. From the rearview mirror, I can see the top of his cap. And the smoke of his cigarette drifts back here in skinny, horizontal lines. Not like my mother’s smoke, which blasts through the car like we’re in Vietnam and we have to run for cover.
They will be—my mother and father—in prison with John tomorrow—Christmas—while Bobby and I wait back at the motel. I imagine John in his cell wearing grey clothes, looking like himself except he can’t open the locked gate. When he first went away, I used to have cartoon bubbles in my head of him wearing black and white striped pajamas, and a ball and chain around his ankle. That was a year and a half ago, and this is not a freaking cartoon. This is John.
We can’t ask direct questions about anything because we’ll get them nervous, then they’ll just yell at us. So Bobby and I have pretty much figured out the way it’s going to work. We also know that when the time comes, we’ll just be given directions and that’s that. We figure we’ll probably stop by the prison on the way to the motel for visiting hours. Me and Bobby’ll wait in the car. Hopefully, there will be a window we can wave up to so John can see us. We only got as far as that. We figure the way it’ll work is they’ll drive to the parking lot, then tell us to be good, and they’ll be back in, probably we think, an hour or so. Bobby and I have talked about it, so we’re used to the idea.
“Can you put the music on?” Bobby asks. I whisk my head over to him, are you crazy?
My father doesn’t make a big deal of it; he just says, “No.” But my mother’s shoulders wing back a little. She says nothing.
“Oh, man. Why not? Come on,” Bobby whines.
My mother starts: “Are you driving this car? Are you trying to find the exit when it’s about to snow all over the place and the road is unfamiliar? Do you think we should stop this car and break out our dancing shoes because you feel like a little music in the backseat there? Do you…”
“All right, Kate, I said no. That’s all,” my father says. He sounds like he’s trying to be gentle, but he can’t because his voice has a rumpy coughy rolling in it. Like he has never been able to clear his throat.
Bobby’s hands are shoved inside his new pea coat, his head against the bumper next to his window. His eyes are slits. I peek at him now that my mother has been startled into one of her nervous machine-gun ravings. Bobby always messes up timing with her. He doesn’t remember to gauge the level of whether it’s going to be immediate or take some time for her to become hysterical. I’m so much better at timing her than he is. But she is much, much more loving to him than all of us. It used to work. Now he gets angry all the time, about nothing.
Here it is….here they come. We are surrounded by little tiny flakes in hundreds and thousands of swirls. “Bobby!” I say, shaking his arm. “It’s snowing.”
“Cut it out!” Bobby swings and punches me, hard, in my shoulder. I scream and lunge for him across the inches that divide us. I am punching his head and neck, he grabs my right arm and twists it right up my back. It goes beyond regular hurt. He keeps twisting, twisting. I am begging. God. God. Stop.
My mother is halfway into the backseat along with us, her arms tearing at Bobby. He lets go. I curl up into my side holding my shoulder and arm. My mother is chanting, “What is wrong with you? How can you hurt your sister like that? What is wrong with you?”
Bobby’s reason is that I woke him up. I startled him. I think I can do whatever I want. I am a spoiled brat. He hates me.
My father opens the window, spits, closes it. “I won’t have this goddamn behavior in this car, do you hear me?” He shouts. In the mirror, I can see how red his face is, and we are all stunned at how mad he is. “You keep your hands to yourself, boy, and you stop with all the chatter, miss. Goddamn kids.”
I have made things worse than they are by forgetting to think before I act. I forgot that Bobby can’t take sudden movements; I forgot that I can’t win a fistfight with him.
“I’m sorry,” I say, forcing myself, my head against the window.
Bobby is crazy and I am the only one in the car who knows it. If I can bend my behavior around him, I am safe. The long quiet softens the pulsing inside the car. We drive forever.
After a while, my father says, “I have to stop for gas. We’re almost there, but I don’t want to get caught on empty. Tell me when the next exit is, and we’ll stop there.”
“Yes. All right. Maybe we can stop at a restroom, too. Claire, do you have to go to the bathroom?” my mother says. Then as an afterthought, “Robert?”
“Okay,” Bobby murmurs to the bathroom idea. I don’t have to look at him to know he looks exhausted, sick. He always does after he goes crazy.
“We’re stopping for gas and for a quick bathroom visit, period,” my father says. “No lollygagging around.”
I twist my head to Bobby, who twists his head to me. I do my lollygagging face—stick a pretend lollipop down my throat, choke, gag, panic—until I see Bobby’s face cave into a mime man’s laugh. We make no sound but snort one at a time through our noses. I catch my father’s eyes in the rearview mirror; he winks at me.
It looks darker out than before, as we drive through a turn that’s cut in the middle of two lines of giant trees. They’re so tall and this road is so narrow, the tops of the trees seem to be bent toward each other, like ladies talking over a clothesline.
My father is hunched up right next to the wheel with both hands on it, looking ahead at what’s coming. My mother looks like she’s ready to shovel out the whole country if she has to; she is sitting upright, one hand on the door and one hand firmly placed on the console in front of her. If there’s a gas station anywhere, she’ll dig it out.
The main road is empty, and we make a right turn onto it. We are slowly, slowly moving through the sheets of snow down this deserted road, surrounded by trees and quiet.
“Up ahead,” my mother points. “There’s a town, and I see orange lights. Exxon is orange, isn’t it?”
We all strain forward to see if we can see it. “It’s on the right, after that church steeple, see it? It looks like that’s a post office or a government office across from it, it’s right up ahead,” my mother tells us.
We can see the town ahead on the downward slope of the road, how it just appears out of nowhere. A bunch of dirty-white, two-story buildings in the clean snow. A frayed American flag pointing straight out, flying with its head down. Old cars half on the road, half up on a rise. Crooked Christmas lights nailed over a broken screen door. Not even one person on the street.
My father rolls up to the orange sign with no words on it, and we enter the gas station as if we were a boat, rocking back and forth and finally settling into place in front of the only pump. It feels like the dead of night.
The fattest person I’ve ever seen comes out of the doorway to the office, where the windows are so dirty it’s not possible to see inside. He moves toward the car in thundering steps. He wears no coat; only a plaid shirt over a big undershirt, inside the widest pair of jeans overalls ever made. His hair is thin, light, wispy. His face is pink, stretched, wet-looking. He could be, but he’s definitely not, a fatter Santa Claus. He’s not smiling.
“What do you need,” he demands.
“Fill ‘er up, pal,” says my completely-at-home father. “Do you have a john we can use?”
I am not going in that john, no way. I am not getting out of the car.
“Inside,” he indicates with his head. His eyes are so wide apart, they could be on either side of his temples, like a great sea animal. They have no color.
“All right, let’s get this show on the road,” my father says.
“Come on kids, out of the car, let’s use the toilet,” my mother says as she is opening her door and stepping out. Bobby is stepping out, too. My father is already out. Snow is slanting down at them.
“It’s okay, I don’t have to go,” I say. I don’t either, or at least not much. I can hold it, I don’t care how much farther it is to the prison.
My mother bends into the car, “Come on, now. Let’s-go-inside-together and then come-back-out-together.” I know what she means, but I can’t move.
“No, go ahead, I’ll just stay here.” Bobby sticks his head in the front seat side. “What are you doing? Come on.”
“I’m staying here! Just go.”
My mother shuts the door as she and Bobby straighten up. Her head reaches only to his shoulders. She starts inside. Bobby follows, then turns around. He goes back to the side of the car and gets in next to me.
“What are you doing?” I demand.
“Staying here,” Bobby says, bunching his arms up under his shoulders and pushing himself against the seat, hunkering down.
I peek out at the gas station guy. He’s capping off the hose, ready to replace the nozzle. His eyes are blank, his face is closed. I turn to Bobby, evil on my face. There’s a macaroni commercial that Bobby and I always scream laughing at. This poor fat kid is playing on the street and his mother starts yelling for him out the window. He doesn’t answer her, but then she tells him it’s spaghetti day. The fat kid drops what he’s doing with a big moronic smile on his face and runs home. I am making that face now as Bobby turns to look at me.
“Hey, Anthony, it’s Prince spaghetti day! Come on, I got a barrel of macaroni for you! Open up those overalls, Tony, because you’re gonna need more room. Anthony, wait, here’s a fork…Anthony, take your head out of that pot of macaroni…”
We are both giggling as the doors open on either side, and my mother and father look at us accusingly before they settle back in.
There’s no big street sign telling us that we are nearing the prison. We just reach a corner of the town, turn left, head toward it. Here, the road slopes downward to the Hudson River, a liquid neon sign in the snow, glinting at the end of the white road. We ride down this sloping, quiet, empty street until the fortress of Sing Sing Prison rises up to stop us. It braces against land on the edge of the river. It’s a hulking structure, all turrets and stone, with two tacked-on wings spreading from the center. It looks like an over-fed eagle turned to stone as it was about to crash into the river.
Inside the iron-gated entry, we are directed to the parking lot. Another guard directs us to a parking space and to a tiny door in the body of the building. A paper sign, taped to the door, says, Visitors entrance. My father puts the car in park, then turns to my mother for further instructions.
“Bobby, Claire, let’s go,” she says.
“We’re going inside?” I’m the first to get the words out.
“Did you think we were going to leave you outside in the car?” my mother says.
We get out, walk together toward the door. I feel like I am walking inside a bubble of gum. I am blinking to clear my eyes, to feel awake. My words come out slower than usual, whispery. “I thought you said we couldn’t visit.”
“No, you can’t, but there is a waiting room for children. They told us it’s a nice room where you can wait for us,” my mother looks at both of us as if she just told us someone died.
I’m blinking and slow. “Is there a bathroom there?”
“I’m sure there is. And you’ll both be together in the room. There’s nothing to be frightened of,” she says.
“Ma, we’ll be fine. We are fine,” Bobby says. To me, he says, “I have to go to the bathroom, too. I’ll find out where it is and take you there. Don’t worry.”
I want to tell them that I’m not worried. Words form in my head but they get stuck in my throat.
My father is blowing his nose, turning his head away from us. My mother seems smaller than her usual five feet, two inches. She stands there in her cloth, three-button winter coat, holding the handle of her pocketbook in the crook of her left arm, her forearm stiffly pointed up as though she just donated blood. Her old white dress gloves, buttoned at both wrists, cover her clenched hands. She sewed a button on the left glove last night. She is wearing her old navy blue suit underneath that coat; it’s always the same skirt but she changes the blouse and puts a sweater with it sometimes to make it look like a whole new outfit. She’s clever like that. My mother stands like she’s always telling us to: keeping her spine line-straight and squaring her shoulders. On her head, she wears a small hat, really just a fabric-covered thick headband with a gathering of tiny glass beads on one side. She has short hair but a lot of it, dark black, dipped in white by the scalp. She doesn’t wear any makeup, ever, on her lined, dry face. I am looking deep into her strong brown eyes, which look back from her clumpy lashes that huddle together at the corners. Her eyes are bright, clear, sober.
My father shuffles behind her as we walk. Although he was a soldier, my mother is the General in this army.
Bobby and I are deposited in a room full of brown, white, black children. When the guard calls for the visitors, my mother is the first to line up, head up, for the walk to the prisoner visiting area. Everything about her says, It’s Christmas. I’m here to see my son.
Maggie Hill is a writer in Rockaway Beach, New York. She has an MFA in Fiction and was a fellow at BookEnds manuscript mentoring program. Her essays and non-fiction have been published in The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and Scholastic professional magazines. Current publications include Flatbush Review, Persimmon Tree. She teaches creative writing and literature at CUNY-Kingsborough. HOOPS is her first novel.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #36.
Submit to Cleaver!
