Stanton - Body leaping backward: memoir of a delinquent girlhood

Top left: Me, Barbie, Sally, and Joanne in Stanton, California, 1976. Top right: Michael, Sally, my father, Barbie, Joanne, Patrick, and Sue, with me patched at right. Bottom left: Me at my work-study job, 1977. Bottom right: Me at Muir Woods, California, 1978.

If you grow up on the seacoast, you learn to swim, to navigate choppy water. The flatlands of the Midwest teach you about spaciousness and its possibilities, the safety of sameness but also tedium. In a factory town you learn about labor and time clocks. Growing up in Walpole, Massachusetts, home to the states maximum-security prison, I learned about good and bad, about being inside or outside, about escape.

In the mid-1960s, when my siblings and I were little (six of us at the time), if my mother was driving past Walpole State Prison, she would slow the station wagon to a crawl along the shoulder of the two-lane road. See that place? shed say, her head lowered to peer out the window, our faces pressed to the glass. If you misbehave, youll end up in there. My mother couldnt put too fine a point on her lesson. See the fence? It goes all the way around.

It was strangethat huge building with massive white walls surrounded by dense cedar forest, like something out of a fairy tale. I thought the walls looked like the papier-mch we made in first-grade art classthat same eggshell color. Around the perimeter was a chain-link fence topped with a curl of razor wire, like our Slinky toy stretched on its side. If youre not good, thats where youll end up, my mother would say. You cant even get out. Take a good look. Imagine spending your whole life in there.

Who knows where we were going on those drivesmaybe to the discount clothing store in nearby Plainville. Whatever our destination, it wasnt urgent enough to prevent my mother from taking advantage of the prison as a behavior-modification tool, a gigantic real-life object lesson. For my mother, the prison was a boon to parenting, an inescapable specter of destiny writ large in black and white, like the stripes of the jailbird in Monopoly. Once we saw the prison, once it lived in our imaginations, my mother could conjure its symbolism to discipline us. If my sisters and brother and I bickered, if we kicked and punched each other or aggravated each other by mere proximity, crammed in the backseat of the car (Mom, Sallys breathing on me, or Mom, Joanne wont stop staring at me), my mother yanked the car to the side of the road or craned her neck toward the backseat. If you dont behave, Ill put you in Walpole Prison!

A decade later, my mother stands in our kitchen about to drive to the Registry of Motor Vehicles. She is dressed in nice pants and a blouse, her dark brown hair pinned in a twist, mascara highlighting her nearly black eyes, lipstick outlining her movie-star smile. In her late thirties, she is a little thick in the waist after her seventh child, but still pretty and petitehigh heels raise her to five feet tall. She looks like who she isa thirtysomething suburban housewife, not a person about to commit a felony.

Im fifteen and at least I look like who Ive becomea druggie, a delinquent. The hems of my ratty jeans are frayed from dragging on the ground, my faded dungaree jacket is too big, my hair is pulled straight and parted in the middle; the start of a vertical frown line divides my brow, mark of an angry young woman. So much has changed in a decade in my family, in the country. Categories have shifted, boundaries blurred. Who are the good guys? The bad guys? Whats right and wrong anymore? Nothing is as clear and defined as it was in those hopeful early days of the 1960s when my mother drilled into her children a strict moral code, simple lessons made concrete by the concrete walls of the prison. Good and bad, inside and outside, the walls a solid, reliable boundary between the town and the prison that shared a name: Walpole.

My mother slides into the drivers seat of her car, onto the pillow that allows her to see over the steering wheel. Her pocketbook on the passenger seat holds forged papers to transfer ownership of a stolen camper. Keep your fingers crossed, she says as she puts the car in reverse. I could wind up in jail. Her words have a similar cautionary tone as when we drove by the prison years before, but the message is the opposite, and not abstract. Shes not warning against bad behavior but against getting caught.

I have a memory that, decades old, still makes my heart ache, a filmstrip that ticks through my minds eye like this: Late spring 1965, the morning sunny and warm as my family visits our house-to-be in Walpole, a small town twenty miles south of Boston. A sign in a vacant lot reads PINE TREE ESTATES , with a faded map of plots.