Dark Days, Dangerous Nights

After my divorce, I took a job teaching poetry to inmates in the Massachusetts prison system. By then, my daughter and I had moved into a large, creaky house in Cambridge with two other single moms and their children. Looking back, I can honestly say that life in that big house could seem as dark and dangerous as the rigors and uncertainties of life in prison.

The first time I met him was in the kitchen of my best friend, Eloise’s, country house in East Moriches. His name was Roger Davis, but everyone just called him Davis, so that’s what I called him, too. He was a small man with bright red hair that stuck up, flame-like, from his head. I thought he was gorgeous, so filled with vitality that the whole room seemed lit by his presence. Over the years, Eloise had talked about him frequently, her good friend Davis whom she would have fallen in love with and married if he hadn’t been gay. He was a sculptor who had somehow begun an arts and photography program in the Massachusetts prison system. He had a sweet dog named Lucy, wore plaid flannel shirts and drove a pickup truck. As we stood there in the kitchen, he smiled broadly at me and asked if I’d be interested in a job on his program -- they were looking for someone to teach poetry to inmates.

Interested? Hell, yes! I knew nothing about the Massachusetts prison system, or about prison in general, but I’d just returned to the US after eight years in London, and I needed a job, a hook to hang my life around. I didn’t want to live in the same city as my parents -- New York -- so Cambridge was perfect. I had friends there. I could go back to school (I still had one term to complete for my B.A.). It was a small enough town for me to develop a support system as a single mom.

I moved quickly. Eloise had been my closest friend in high school, a big, raw-boned girl with straight yellow hair and a flat, mid-western sounding voice. I stayed with her and her boyfriend, Aaron Gerwig, while I was looking for a place of my own.

I felt young and carefree even though I was the mother of a two-year-old and very burdened. But I’d just left a repressive marriage and was happy to be able to make my own decisions.

The first involved where I would live. I looked through dozens of ads in the paper and eventually chose a situation with two other single moms in their thirties, one with a seven-year-old son, the other with an eight-year-old daughter.

The house we chose was enormous, three floors and three sets of steep, creaky stairs, a large kitchen/living area and many annoying nooks and crannies where children could insert themselves and hide. The woman who had found the house, Janey, took the whole top floor; all three of our children were relegated to bedrooms on the second floor; and Lina, the third woman, and I took two small rooms off the kitchen. And that’s where this story begins, because Davis, who was gay and who was also my boss, decided, awkwardly, that I was the one and only woman he was attracted to and that it would make sense to test out his sexuality in my new house on my new, narrow bed.

We were three single moms who’d met through a newspaper ad and rented a large, furnished house on Fayerweather Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My bedroom was tiny and dark, a desk, an awkward bunk bed, harsh overhead lighting. Jofka, my two-year-old, had a much larger bedroom, one that was big and scary to her, on the second floor; every night she would find her way down the stairs to my room and I’d wake in the morning with her cuddled against me, and of course I would wonder what damage this large, unfamiliar, creaky house would do to her soul. But I was too stressed to allow myself to worry about it. Everything I was going through around then was strange, new and frightening to me.

I had christened the bed with my boss, Roger Davis. Although I didn’t like to admit it to myself, I had a crush on him. I knew he was gay, but there was something between us, a curiosity, a heightened awareness, an awkward attraction. On the day I moved into the house, he drove me over there with my luggage and belongings. I don’t know where Jofka was -- perhaps at the Harvard University communal daycare center where I’d enrolled her. Davis looked around my new room with a furrowed brow, as if he didn’t totally approve of the space. He put down my bags and we stared at one another for a moment. Then, very shyly, we kissed. His mouth was moist and warm.

We didn’t take off our clothes, but we climbed up onto the top bunk and he lay on top of me, unzipped his fly and felt between my legs. I knew I should put in my diaphragm, but was too worried he’d stop touching and kissing me to interrupt the proceedings.

Truthfully, I wasn't sure much had happened. I could briefly feel him inside me, but as far as I could tell, he hadn’t ejaculated and the whole thing was kind of a non-event.

We never told anyone about our moment of intimacy. Eloise Fein, my old high school friend who had introduced us, had no idea there was anything between me and Davis. She was very possessive of him. Although she had a live-in boyfriend, Davis was her best friend, her shining light and she had no intention of sharing him with anybody. She was fierce in that way, liked to compartmentalize her life so that friends were kept separate, like dolls relegated to different shelves. She was, I suppose, possessive of me, too, her old connection who’d shown so much promise and talent back in the day. It was important to her, for instance, that I immediately go into therapy, and not just with any therapist, but with the practitioner she herself had seen for years, a Dr. Burton Leonard who practiced in Newton and ran groups for divorcing people. She schlepped me out there to meet him, the only person, she said, who could deal with my particular problems. And so it was that without my really understanding how or why, I got stuck in a five-thirty time slot that met three times a week, the worst possible hour of the day for a single mom who needed to be quietly at home, running a bath and making dinner for her tired, cranky child.

Group therapy three times a week seemed like a lot, but I agreed to go, even though most of the time I sat there like a lunk and didn’t say anything. The problem was I really needed to be home making dinner for my daughter, but whenever I pointed that out the group would chorus: “No! You need to be here in order to become the best parent you can be!’

Which meant that while I was driving to and from Newton, sitting in a carpeted room for an hour as people discussed their phobias or the problems they were having with their ex-husbands or ex-wives, Jofka was being picked up from daycare by a babysitter who took her to her own house and fed her dinner. For a two-year-old that was an incredibly long day. Not to mention, a confusing one.

It was confusing to me, too. I would sit in the group and say nothing about what was going on in my life, while, in fact, I worked a terrifying job and was growing increasingly out of control and depressed. No one had really prepped me about the dos and don’ts of teaching in prison. Instinctively, I knew to wear baggy clothing, big sweaters, shirts and pants that hid my frame. I pulled my hair back into a tight ponytail and eschewed makeup. Although trembling inside, I forced a look of confidence onto my face.

Three times a week I visited three different prisons, all of them maximum security. As the gates clanged shut behind me, I’d tell myself, You can do this, you can do this, but, of course, I wasn’t convinced I could.

What did I know about the American prison system? Nothing. I’d lived outside of the States for eight years, and was a bit of a stranger in my own land. So a guard would lead me into a classroom and one by one the prisoners, my students, would be brought in, most with smiling, Hey Teach looks on their faces. The surprising thing was how much they knew about me without my divulging a single word about my history. They knew, for instance, that I’d just returned from a sojourn in England and that I was a writer and single mom. I, in turn, knew very little about them. They were a mix of white and black, large and small, skinny and fat, meek and aggressive, angry and sweet, talented and lacklustre, calm and crazy. They would bring me reams and reams of poetry, essays, private sketches, short stories, all of which I had to fastidiously go through to see if there was anything remotely publishable. Some would bring me no work at all, just happy to be out of their cells. But here’s the deal: I was not allowed to discuss with them the nature of their crimes or what they’d done to get them there. Frequently I’d learn via via that the sweetest-looking, the most ardent and hardworking of my students, was a hardcore murderer or rapist, and I’d just have to rein in my curiosity and live with that.

Looking back on those times after all these years, I can honestly say life in the big house on Fayerweather Street could occasionally seem as dark and dangerous to me as the rigors and uncertainties of life in prison. This was largely because of Lina De Vries, the tall, beautiful woman from Suriname whose room was just opposite from mine leading off the kitchen. Lina was a few years older than I was. I can’t say what her profession was -- she often slept late and I never saw her go to work -- but she was well-read and intelligent and I enjoyed talking to her. She had café au lait skin, a deep, hoarse, sexy voice, a head of lustrous black curls, and a striking face that made men stare at her wherever she went. Over her curls she wore her signature piece -- a jaunty black beret pierced by a glinting diamond brooch (I never saw her without this accoutrement). That, combined with her throaty Dutch accent, caused her to be something of a sensation as she wandered in and out of the shops and bookstores and restaurants of Cambridge.

Lina had an eight-year-old daughter, Shelly, who lived on the second floor, and an ex-husband in California. She and I spent a lot of time together. I’d bought a little yellow Toyota Corolla, which turned out to be a dud, but which took us all over the place on various adventures. We both drank a lot. I’d come home from work or from picking Jofka up from the babysitter, and we’d spend the evening cooking and getting drunk on big bottles of cheap wine. The two of us smoked a lot, too, easily going through two or three packs of cigarettes a day. And then there was weed, a substance I hadn’t used very much during my marriage, but which I indulged in frequently now, even though it made me feel paranoid and depressed. Together Lina and I would get very high, then talk late into the night. Sometimes, wasted and slurring her words, walking unevenly, Lina would leave the house, disappear to a bar or secret haunt, and I wouldn’t see her again till late the next afternoon or evening. Where had she been? She’d never say.

To me she seemed haunted and mysterious, a beautiful woman who’d suffered some sort of unspeakable tragedy, and was quickly -- and unadvisedly -- becoming a close friend.

I went home to New York for Thanksgiving that year. A few weeks earlier, I’d filled a prescription for pain meds from the dentist and put the bottle in my top bureau drawer after having taken only one pill. When I returned, I noticed the bottle was empty save for a single tiny white pill. “Um, what happened here?” I asked Lina. I’d only been gone four days and there had been twenty-nine pills in the bottle. “I had a migraine,” Lina said, pouring me a drink. “So I used a few of your pills.”

“A few?” I said, goosebumps rising on my neck.

“Yeah, not a big deal,” she said.

I took a deep breath. I didn’t want this to be a big deal either, so I decided to ignore the situation, temporarily at least. “Okay,” I said. “But this can’t happen again.”

Famous last words.

A quick sketch I did of Lina as I recalled our time as housemates

My relationship with my boss, Roger Davis, was very up and down. Because we’d had a haphazard and not very rewarding sexual experience shortly after my arrival in Cambridge, we were nervous and uptight around one another. I had a major crush on him and wanted to be with him all the time, whereas he probably found me overbearing and tiresome and frequently went out of his way to avoid me. Out to dinner with friends like Eloise and her boyfriend Aaron, we would snap at each other … or act as if neither of us was there. If I were drunk, which I frequently was, I had no control whatsoever over my behavior. I’d go into a blackout, say something terrible, then return to a more conscious state to discover that everyone was staring at me, appalled.

What had I said? Probably something derogatory about Davis and what a pansy ass he was. A few dinners like that, and Eloise began to slowly distance herself from me. We’d been best friends since the age of sixteen; now, fourteen years later, a coolness crept into the relationship. She was jealous of the attraction between Davis and me. And jealous of all the attention I received from men, since I didn’t seem to have any inhibitions about flaunting myself at them. The truth was, I was extraordinarily shy around members of the opposite sex. Drunk, I could deal with them (or so I thought). But sober, I’d feel less-than, mumble god knows what, and stare at my feet. Eloise’s mother had been an alcoholic who got sober in AA, and my behavior must have rung some very bad bells. Certainly, I embarrassed myself though that didn’t prevent me from running around. And, too speedy and crazy to understand what was going on, I stopped paying attention to my body, which had grown thin and ribby. I hadn’t had a period in two months, but I attributed that to stress.

One Sunday, much to my alarm, I heard a voice in my head that warned, You’re in danger, you’re in danger over and over again. Danger from what? I wondered, deciding to ignore the voice. That night I finally got my period, so I figured all was well.

The next morning was my time to pitch in at Jofka’s daycare center. I loved it there, the peace in the cozy room where women nursed their babies, the undaunting cheerfulness of the staff. I arrived, handed Jofka over to her teacher, and began my task of the day -- cleaning up the kitchen. I’d been bleeding heavily, soaking through a tampon every few minutes. “What’s going on with you?” one of the other mothers asked. By then my flow was so substantial that I’d had to switch to Pampers. “You’re white as a sheet,” she said, scrutinizing me. “Do you think you’re having a miscarriage?”

A quick sketch I did of Roger as I recalled our awkward encounter

Did I think I was having a miscarriage?

Those words ricocheted through my mind as reality sank in. Two months before, I’d had unprotected sex with Davis; I hadn’t had sex with anyone else so this current situation had to be attributable to him.

Someone gave me a recommendation for a gynecologist, a Dr. Mendelsohn in Brookline who months later would molest me on his examination table. I was driven to his office where it was confirmed that I was experiencing a miscarriage and sent home with a prescription for meds that would stop the bleeding and calm my system down. I was never given a D&C. I think the assumption was my body would take care of itself on its own.

The next few days were awful. I lay in bed, crampy and miserable, the pregnancy slowly seeping away as I tried to understand what had just happened. Davis would come and visit me. To my surprise, he blamed the loss of the baby on me even though I hadn’t known I was pregnant. “You’ve been running around, not taking care of yourself,” he admonished. Then he made it clear that had I not miscarried, he would have insisted I carry the child to term, no abortion (!), and he would have taken over and brought up his infant son or daughter on his own.

Well …

Interestingly, he told Eloise all about it, how he had fathered a child and how I, through carelessness, not sleeping or eating properly, drinking too much, had caused the pregnancy to go down the drain.

So now, for the first time, Eloise had the facts and understood that Davis and I had been lovers. Obviously there was nothing she could do about that, but our relationship grew even more strained and I became persona non grata in her house.

Not that she ever said anything. She just knew how to make me feel unwelcome with a narrow look or a critical remark that was clothed in concern, such as: “You don’t look so well, no wine for you.” Words that stung because Eloise Fein, with her high intelligence and carefully thought out observations, was a bit of a role model. As teenagers in high school, we had constantly hung out together, wandering around the city following random strangers who looked interesting, or forming crushes on improbable people (movie stars whose information we somehow managed to get hold of), or simply lazing about at her parents’ country house on Long Island. It would never have occurred to me back then that we would become serious enemies.

A quick sketch I did of Eloise when recalling the deterioration of our friendship

The other person who was beginning to make my life darker and more difficult was my housemate, Lina De Vries. For most of the year, save for the one time she stole drugs from me, we had functioned as best buds, running around Cambridge together, going to parties and dinners and restaurants and bars, Lina in her jaunty beret and me with my big sloppy smile and occasionally trenchant words. I had enjoyed her company. But now her behavior was changing, she wasn’t going out as much, was instead spending more and more time locked in her room. When I came home and knocked on her door, there would be silence, utter eerie silence.

Of course, I’d know she was in there. Her daughter would be hanging around the kitchen, waiting for her mom to come out and feed her a snack. We’d ignore the obvious -- that something weird was going on with her mother. In the meanwhile, I was still teaching poetry and writing in the Massachusetts prison system, leaving the house each morning with the hope I could inspire or change someone, and returning at night exhausted.

I missed Lina’s company. But it seemed as if she had turned into someone else, a tortured, shaky individual hiding behind a locked bedroom door.

When I tried to persuade her to come out and join us for a meal, she’d act as if she hadn’t heard me. In fact, it wasn’t long before we’d stopped communicating with one another at all.

She wasn’t communicating much with her daughter, either. Instead she was very busy entertaining various men. In the late afternoons, I’d return home from work and there’d be music and a male voice emanating from her bedroom. That was fine I suppose, except the males were interchangeable and it seemed there was a different guy in there every afternoon or evening. Sometimes I’d come out of my room to pee late at night, and there’d be a total stranger hunkered on a kitchen stool in his tighty whities. He’d stare at me dully while I grabbed something from the fridge and made a run for it back to my room.

This began to happen more and more frequently, and I was unsure how to deal with it.

I began to have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach every night when I drove home. What condition would my housemate, Lina De Vries, be in? The situation had deteriorated so badly that I was thinking of finding another place to live.

It was hard to work in the small bedroom that was my refuge from the world just across the hall from Lina’s. I’d be hyper aware of every sound coming from that room, the door opening and Lina traipsing out in a dingy negligee, muted jazz on her stereo, a burst of laughter, a surly male voice. But mostly in the spring of that year there was silence, and that, on a continual basis, was more disturbing than the loudest noise.

While Lina was wrestling with her demons, her daughter would lie forlornly on the living room couch, so needy of her mother that it was painful to witness. And that, I eventually learned, was the issue. Lina was thinking of giving up custody because she no longer felt fit as a mother. She was kind of having a nervous breakdown. Within days, her ex, Shelly’s father, arrived from California to remove his daughter from the house. With Shelly gone, all hell broke loose. Not feeling safe, Jofka and I moved in with Davis for a few days.

Which was fine except that I had to go back to the house for my typewriter, books, some clothing. Davis went with me.

As usual Lina’s door was closed, but while we were gathering my things it burst open and out flew Lina with a large, serrated kitchen knife in her hand.

A knife that was pointed straight at me.

Davis inserted himself between me and Lina. “Back up and get out of here as fast as you can,” he whispered. Luckily, Jofka was in daycare when this happened. I did as Davis suggested, backing up with my legs wobbly and my heart in my throat. Lina had looked at me with real hatred in her eyes and I didn’t want to be there one more second.

From the big house on Fayerweather Street, Jofka and I moved into a second floor apartment on a street of houses built so close together that everyone knew everyone else’s business. I didn’t mind that. My immediate neighbor, who was Irish Catholic and divorced, had six children, the youngest exactly Jofka’s age. She also had a Portuguese boyfriend, a fisherman who regularly brought home lobsters for us to eat. But the best thing about her for me at that time was she drank as much as I did, so I’d go over there in the afternoon or evening and we’d sit around her kitchen table, both of us getting soused. That was the way it went for the next three years as I wrote stories and attended graduate school and took care of my daughter. What I really wanted was the warm feeling of alcohol constantly dripped into my system and I set out with a vengeance to achieve this.

This story was originally published in eight parts in August 2021 on nicolejeffords.com.

I felt young and carefree even though I was the mother of a two-year-old and very burdened. But I’d just left a repressive marriage and was happy to be able to make my own decisions.

We didn’t take off our clothes, but we climbed up onto the top bunk and he lay on top of me, unzipped his fly and felt between my legs. I knew I should put in my diaphragm, but was too worried he’d stop touching and kissing me to interrupt the proceedings.

Three times a week I visited three different prisons, all of them maximum security. As the gates clanged shut behind me, I’d tell myself, You can do this, you can do this, but, of course, I wasn’t convinced I could.

To me she seemed haunted and mysterious, a beautiful woman who’d suffered some sort of unspeakable tragedy, and was quickly -- and unadvisedly -- becoming a close friend.

One Sunday, much to my alarm, I heard a voice in my head that warned, You’re in danger, you’re in danger over and over again. Danger from what? I wondered, deciding to ignore the voice. That night I finally got my period, so I figured all was well.

So now, for the first time, Eloise had the facts and understood that Davis and I had been lovers. Obviously there was nothing she could do about that, but our relationship grew even more strained and I became persona non grata in her house.

I missed Lina’s company. But it seemed as if she had turned into someone else, a tortured, shaky individual hiding behind a locked bedroom door.

As usual Lina’s door was closed, but while we were gathering my things it burst open and out flew Lina with a large, serrated kitchen knife in her hand.

Dark Days, Dangerous Nights

I felt young and carefree even though I was the mother of a two-year-old and very burdened. But I’d just left a repressive marriage and was happy to be able to make my own decisions.

We didn’t take off our clothes, but we climbed up onto the top bunk and he lay on top of me, unzipped his fly and felt between my legs. I knew I should put in my diaphragm, but was too worried he’d stop touching and kissing me to interrupt the proceedings.

Three times a week I visited three different prisons, all of them maximum security. As the gates clanged shut behind me, I’d tell myself, You can do this, you can do this, but, of course, I wasn’t convinced I could.

To me she seemed haunted and mysterious, a beautiful woman who’d suffered some sort of unspeakable tragedy, and was quickly -- and unadvisedly -- becoming a close friend.

One Sunday, much to my alarm, I heard a voice in my head that warned, You’re in danger, you’re in danger over and over again. Danger from what? I wondered, deciding to ignore the voice. That night I finally got my period, so I figured all was well.

So now, for the first time, Eloise had the facts and understood that Davis and I had been lovers. Obviously there was nothing she could do about that, but our relationship grew even more strained and I became persona non grata in her house.

I missed Lina’s company. But it seemed as if she had turned into someone else, a tortured, shaky individual hiding behind a locked bedroom door.

As usual Lina’s door was closed, but while we were gathering my things it burst open and out flew Lina with a large, serrated kitchen knife in her hand.

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