“I’m sure Ms. Knight explained during orientation why the system has changed. Here, you practice with the dolls, and you take those skills back to your regular life. I encourage you not to overthink it.”
The counselor sets goals. By next week, at least five successful hug sequences. More efficient articulation of shortcomings. Fewer shortcomings. More playful motherese. A higher pitch. Higher daily word count. Frida needs to relax. Her temperature and heart rate suggest an unsustainable level of stress. She needs to make more frequent and meaningful eye contact with Emmanuelle. Her touch should be gentler, more loving. Data collected from the doll has suggested substantial amounts of anger and ingratitude. Any negative feelings will impede her progress.
* * *
At dinner, they talk wants. Which guard, which day. Where. Empty classroom, broom closet, car, the woods. What they’d do if there were no cameras and no fence. They like the green-eyed guard best of all. Lucretia thinks Teen Mom has the best chance. The guard might only be twenty.
“He reminds me of my baby daddy,” Teen Mom admits. “But my dude is taller. Way taller. And hotter. And he has nicer teeth.”
“How do you know what his teeth look like?” Lucretia asks.
“He smiled at me.”
Beth and Lucretia whistle and high-five each other. Teen Mom tells them to shut up.
Lucretia asks Frida which guard she wants. Fuck, marry, or kill?
Frida isn’t thinking about the guards. She’s still stewing over her counseling session. The school must be bringing them low to induce cooperation, the way that men she dated used to insult her until she hated herself enough to put out. Maybe they needed to feel that they were the lowest of the low in order to believe. To see that the only creature they deserve to mother is a doll. That they can’t be trusted with a human of any age, can’t even be trusted with an animal.
“Fuck any,” she finally answers. “Marry none. Kill none.”
“It’s always the quiet ones.” Lucretia pats her hand. She says fuck the dining hall guard, marry the green-eyed guard, kill none. “Ask me again in a few months,” she says, giggling. She tells them she’d just been starting to date again when her daughter was taken.
They wonder if there have been any fires at the fathers’ school. Frida tells them about Helen’s idea of the pink lab coats fulfilling some kind of caretaker-nurse fantasy.
Beth thinks it’s possible. When she was in the hospital, she developed a flirtation with one of the doctors. “He kissed me once,” she confesses.
The normally sarcastic Lucretia becomes solemn. “And you told someone, right?”
“No. I didn’t want to get him in trouble.” The doctor was older. Married.
“But he’s going to do it to someone else. You have to report him. When we get out. Promise me.”
Beth tells Lucretia not to pressure her. She looks like she’s about to cry. Linda tells Lucretia to back off.
To take the heat off Beth, Frida tells them about dating in New York, the various sociopaths she dated before Gust. The string of short, angry bald men during her first year of grad school. The stand-up comic who told jokes about Chinese restaurant workers while she was in the audience.
They wind up comparing histories, the age when they gave it up. Lucretia says sixteen. Linda says fifteen. Frida says twenty.
“Look at you, Frida Kahlo,” Lucretia teases.
Linda asks if Frida married her first. Frida doesn’t tell them she married her twenty-seventh. She calls herself a late bloomer.
Beth and Teen Mom haven’t answered.
“Six,” Teen Mom finally says. “I wouldn’t say that I gave it.”
Linda’s smile fades. “I’m sorry, kid.”
Beth admits it happened to her too. Twelve, her choir director. Her mother didn’t believe her. Teen Mom says her mother didn’t believe her either.
She hands Beth a dinner roll, looks up at the rest of her classmates. “Well, now you know. Is this enough fucking bonding for you?”
* * *
For Sunday phone privileges, the mothers report to the computer lab in Palmer Library, the building to the east of the rose garden. The computer lab is on the ground floor, a white-walled room with a vaulted forest-green ceiling and coffee-stained tables. Mothers cycle in and out in ten-minute intervals. They line up in the hallway in alphabetical order.
Frida waits on the stairs. She stretches her arms, still sore from cleaning crew. Yesterday, Ms. Gibson came to her room before the morning bell and told her to dress warmly. This will be her new Saturday routine. She and Teen Mom and twelve others joined Ms. Gibson after breakfast. They were given gloves and sponges, mops and buckets and scrub brushes. Before they began, Ms. Gibson had them state their names and offenses and what was wrong with their homes. There were stories about rotting food and overflowing diaper pails, families of mice living in walls, mold infestations. The more innocuous offenders had sinks filled with dirty dishes, sticky high chairs, toys with food stains, odors that CPS deemed troubling or offensive. Frida confessed to dust and clutter and stale dry goods and a lone cockroach.