Easy Girls Break Down First

Easy Girls Break Down First

My name is Venus, but I never learned much about love. All I ever did learn about it came after I’d been locked up in Cheyenne for over a decade and I was watched over by a night guard named Bill Stephens. Back then, I shared my room with a woman named Reenie. She was a cute, middle-class girl with a bubbly laugh ⎯ the type who usually got a break.

When we asked Reenie how she got locked up, she said she bounced a check. I didn't believe her and neither did anyone else: You don't get put in Cheyenne for bad checks. But even Sister Jackie, our nurse who knew all the gossip, said she didn't know what Reenie had done. I always thought she might have been a prostitute, the glamorous kind who made hundreds per hour.

On the day Reenie and I first became roommates, I was given an award by the Sisters of Mary. It wasn't much, just a paper certificate, but it was the only award I’d ever received in my life. Altogether, I had made over six hundred rosaries from plastic beads and nylon string. Over the years, each rosary was packed into a long thin cardboard box. When there were one hundred boxes, they were packed into a larger box and sent to a missionary group in Africa.

Even though I was happy to have an award, a peculiar thing happened after that day ⎯ I stopped making rosaries. Looking back now, I'm sure it had everything to do with having a new roommate who was young and pretty and so much more alive than everyone else in here. I wanted Reenie to teach me new things. I wanted to stop making rosaries. And because Reenie signed up for the music class, I did too.

Stephens, the guard who taught music, was a tall man with blond hair. Throughout Cheyenne, he was known as one who was all business. He refused to smuggle cigarettes or magazines like the other guards. When he prayed, he gave God his full attention.

I think we forgave Stephens for his stiffness because we all wanted to touch his hair: Each strand was like a thread of gold, and perfectly straight. It was cut in choppy layers all over his head, and when he moved his head the layers would fall against each other like folds of satin.

“I'll touch it,” Reenie said one day during lunch. Her long brown-red curls were held back with a green rubber band, and her eyes were round and blue like a kitten’s. “I'm not afraid of Bill Stephens.”

Everyone at the table laughed. But that night in music class, she came through on her promise. As Stephens was leaning down to arrange her fingers into position on the guitar, she reached up and ran her hand along one side of his head, just above his ear, drawing out the layers for all of us to see. I thought Stephens would write her a demerit or smack her hand off, but all he did was put his hand over hers and move it away, very gently. His mouth was closed tight, firm and pale, but I thought I saw his bottom lip flinch a little.


In the first music lesson, I noticed Stephens loosened up and smiled when he had a guitar in his lap. He taught us how to read the music scale with two word tricks: FACE and Every Good Boy Does Fine. We sang an octave higher with each letter or word ⎯ all of us except for Reenie: She would start at the opposite end of the scale, starting with the up pitch and going down. And she had her own word trick: Easy Girls Break Down First.

Reenie got Stephens' attention with her strange little rhyme. But he didn’t scold her.

“Interesting,” Stephens said. “Interesting.”

She sat back in her seat and gave him that innocent look. I knew that Reenie had something bad and mischievous inside her; it was the thing that had gotten her locked up with us. But Stephens didn’t see it. I don’t know if he ever did or not.

We finished that class by learning to play Happy Birthday to You. After that, we leaned Three Blind Mice and My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean. Eventually, we were playing America the Beautiful, God Bless America, and Kum Bye Yah.
And then Stephens encouraged write our own songs. As an example, he played us a tune that he had written. “It's about Cheyenne,” he said. “This place. The feeling I get when I walk my rounds.”

He strummed and sang:

         Moon on high
         Where you lie
         You feel God's love in the firefly’s light

Stephens had named the song “Ballad of a Fence.”
“It’s beautiful,” Reenie told him, locking her eyes into his.

And he locked his eyes into hers with such a fierce hold that I was embarrassed for them both, and for all of us who were sitting there as witnesses.

After that, music class dwindled down to just three people: me, Reenie, and Stephens. I kept on going to the class because I liked singing, and because I wanted to see what happened when a man and a woman fall in love.


Every Sunday is visitor’s day, and it is my favorite day of the week. I don’t have visitors very often, but I’m not bothered by that. What I like about Sunday is the freedom. There’s church, but no work. There are meals, but no assigned seating. We are allowed to walk in the woods, to listen to the radio, to watch television, play volleyball, visit the library, or make greeting cards in the crafts room. For some of the women in here, Sunday is the day to meet with boyfriends or husbands in the lounge.

I never had a boyfriend, not ever. Unlike most of the women here, my crime had nothing to do with a man. What I did was a simple thing, and it was an act of self-defense. My mother was going to kill me, so I killed her first. At that time, I was nineteen years old. About seventeen years from today, I will be eligible for parole.

Reenie didn't like Sunday the way I do. When no visitors came for her, she would lie on her cot and cry ⎯ deep sobs like she was dying, and she would scratch her arms like she was trying to draw blood, although she never did. It didn’t matter that her mother sent her letters every week, or that her brother was working on her appeal, or that ⎯ unlike most of us ⎯ she had enough money in her account to buy face powder, makeup and batteries. All that mattered was that she was alone, and she couldn’t take her mind off it. In spite of her breakdowns, we respected each other and had a deep level of understanding. That’s something that can take two people a long way inside a friendship.

Even so, I still wonder if I should have reported Stephens to the Sisters of Mary when he began coming into our room at night. Why I didn’t, I don’t know for sure, except that I was thrilled that, finally, something new was happening. And I couldn't get enough of the wine he brought. Warm and red and tangy, the wine lifted me out of myself like nothing I'd ever experienced. (Even today, I long to taste it again, and I pray that someday I’ll have another chance to drink what some consider to be the blood of Jesus Christ.) It became a drink of freedom and a drink of sin: My sins and theirs.

Stephens would bring the wine to our room in a brown paper bag. Reenie and I would drink the first bottle together, sipping from paper cups while Stephens walked the rounds and completed his reports. After midnight, I would go to bed with a book, and she would let him in. With the front of my body turned toward the wall, I would sleep or read and let them share the second bottle together. But, of course, I listened.

“I shouldn't be in here,” she told him again and again. “I shouldn't be in here.”

“I know,” he'd reply. “I'm trying. But you have to be patient.”

And I could hear them kissing. I could hear them making love when the lights were out, their bodies moving under the blankets, her little giggles and his deep sighs.          


After a few weeks had passed, Stephens and Reenie told me they wanted to go out on a date ⎯ a real date outside the fence. Reenie wanted a slice of apple pie. She wanted to sit near a lake, wear a pair of shorts, and drink beer from a frosted mug. Stephens sat beside her, quiet. The overhead light in our room shone harshly on his golden hair and white eyebrows. He was, once again, the man he had been before falling in love.

“OK,” I told them. “I’ll help however I can.”

Later that evening, we had our last music class. Reenie and I sang “The Ballad of the Fence,” as Stephens strummed the guitar. They looked at one another with liquid, lying eyes. 


On the night they went out, Stephens brought me a bottle of wine and a paper cup. For Reenie, he had a flannel shirt, cut-off jeans, and hiking boots. She changed quietly in front of us, laying out her jumpsuit under the bed sheets. Stephens handed me his equipment and the two of them left the room, closing the door as quiet as it could ever be closed.

With the walkie-talkie and phone on either side of me, I poured the wine and took a long, long drink, waiting for the magic to set in.

But on that night, there was no magic. A bad feeling knotted up inside me. For the first time in years, I cried. My grief came from knowing that I was probably never getting out ⎯ not ever, not even for a few hours. But then my tears slowed and the knot untied itself. The edges of everything in the room sharpened. My thoughts faded and I thought only about how my heart was beating and blood was traveling through my veins and circling back to the heart again. What was life, I wondered, other than that? Eventually, I fell asleep. It was the best kind of sleep, deep and restful ⎯ the kind you have only when you’re really tired. But at some point, Stephens pulled me out. He was shaking my shoulders and whispering into my ear.
The room was pitch black, and something was wrong. There was a smell in the air, the smell of something sour, the smell of cigarettes and wet clothes.

“Wake up, Venus,” he was saying, whispering. “Help me. Help us. You’ve got to help. She’s bleeding.”

Stephens shoved something into my hand ⎯ a flashlight. “Take it,” he said. “I’ve got to get back.”

After he was gone, I sat up and looked over at her bed. It was early morning, almost five o’clock. Reenie was huddled under the covers, whimpering, her hair tangled and wet. I could tell she was trying to keep quiet, but she was in bad pain. I got up and went to her, pulling away her covers. She was naked from the waist down; the jeans that Stephens had brought for her were on the floor.

The blood had formed a dark stain on either side of her hips. The jumpsuit beneath her was saturated.

“I need pads,” she said, tense. “And clean underwear.”

I nodded, but was frozen in my spot.

“It’s all right,” she said, just above a whisper. Then she put a hand on my arm. Her touch was warm and insistent. “I’ll be OK. I was pregnant,” she explained. “But now it’s over. No big deal. I’ll be fine. I went through this another time. It looks worse than it is. Just get the pads and a pair of panties from my top drawer.”

But even with the pads and new underwear and a glass of wine to help the pain, the bleeding would not stop. As the morning dawned, I helped her walk to the little nursing station on the third floor.

“I just won’t tell them,” she said. “I won’t tell them who. Not ever.”

Sister Jackie helped her onto the table. Then she sent me away.

I never saw or heard from Reenie or Stephens again.  For a long time, all I knew was that she did have to tell.

The award certificate I received for the rosaries is taped onto the wall above my cot. And I'm working on another one, although it's taking longer this time. I now use handmade clay beads and cotton string instead of plastic and nylon. I take my time, designing each set a bit differently. When I work now, I sing our songs from music class: I sing them under my breath, in my mind, and out loud. I even sing the scales. Every Good Boy Does Fine. Easy Girls Break Down First. I imagine the notes are absorbed into the clay, a single note for every little bead.

Sister Jackie sometimes comes in to help, and that was how I learned what happened after that night.

“Whoever did it wasn’t a real doctor,” Sister Jackie said. “The baby was still inside her, and it lived.”

The Sisters of Mary sent Reenie to a far-off place, where she gave birth to a little girl.

“And not long after that, he came for her.”

“Who came?”

“Bill Stephens, the guard.”

“But I thought he was put into jail.”

“He was, but he had served his time by then. And so had she, because her appeal went through. I heard they're together now, living near an ocean. California, maybe. I'm not sure.”

The story lingered with me for a long time. In the evenings, I would sit in the TV room, imagining what they were doing at that moment, where they were living, what they talked about, how they made love. But, over time, my jealousy burned itself out, and I turned again to the rosaries.