About a third of the girls at the Maryland Youth Center were there on grounds of immorality, which usually meant they were pregnant. Some of them were showing but most weren’t, because once you were showing they would send you to St. Catherine’s Home in Delaware, which was a worse prison than the Maryland Youth Center. At St. Catherine’s Home there were no visitors of any kind, and if someone called for you they would say they’d never heard of you. I was told all that by a weeping girl who had given birth there four months earlier and been sent back to MYC afterward because she tried to scratch the eyes out of the on-staff obstetrician. It was because of the immorality that they took away the makeup. The pregnant girls would congregate in the dayroom after breakfast, and a woman from a church would come and teach them to crochet.
Then there were the girls who had committed actual crimes. I was one of those, I guess. There were quite a lot of thieves, but most were the shoplifting kind. My grand theft gave me some status over the girls arrested for stuffing Schiaparelli perfume and paste earrings into their coats in department stores, although I felt my offense was less intentional than theirs, since I had only been borrowing the car. Of course, if things had gone differently for me that night, I might have been borrowing it for quite a long time. But I tried not to think about that.
And then there were the girls who frightened the rest of us, whose offenses were unclear because they were so feral we couldn’t ask them questions. One girl had cut a boy’s face with a razor; another had broken her little sister’s arms, both of them. Another girl, the one who most horrified and fascinated the staff and the rest of us, actually straddled the line: she was both violent and pregnant. Every third day she was taken out of the general population and confined to the solitary rooms on the second floor for bloodying noses or tearing out clumps of hair. She scratched at first, and then they sedated her and cut her nails. She would wait out her time in solitary, and when she came out she would be completely unchanged. She threw her relative freedom away each time with a new fight over nothing, which I thought was kind of aristocratic, how little she cared. She was showing, but no one talked about transferring her. She was like something painted on a vase, a pregnant Medusa. Her haircut looked involuntary, short like a child’s and crooked across the bangs, as if she’d been coming out of sedation when it happened, and she was too tall for her smock, so it showed her knees and pulled on her arms, bending her into a parenthesis.
Sometimes black girls came in, but they were always transferred in a day or two to another place on the other side of Baltimore. “They have their own place,” said a girl who had been leaning over me in the homemaking class that followed breakfast on a morning when two black girls, cousins, had been brought in overnight. “They don’t stay here. There’s some standards, at least.” I told her she should shut her mouth and that segregation was against the Constitution, and she called me a Jew. We were knitting and not sewing that morning because a fourteen-year-old had made a dogged effort at killing herself with a needle the day before. The story was causing amusement on the third floor. They said she had been at it for forty-five minutes when they caught her, and had succeeded only at putting a bunch of red dots on her wrist, like a polio vaccine.