Orange Is the New Black (32 page)

I pleaded with my father on the pay phone—she would be fine, she would get better, she would be there when I came home. He didn’t argue back, just said, “Write her.” I was on a regular schedule of writing short, cheery updates to my grandparents, reassuring them that I was fine and couldn’t wait to see them when I got home. Now I sat down to write a different kind of letter, one that tried to convey how much she meant to me, how much she had taught me, how I wanted to emulate her rigor and rectitude, how much I loved her and missed her. I couldn’t believe that I had screwed up so badly,
to be in this place when she needed me, when she was sick and maybe dying.

Immediately after posting the letter, I asked the Camp secretary for a furlough request form. “Were you raised by your grandma?” she asked brusquely. When I said no, she told me there was no point in giving me the form—I would never be granted a furlough for a grandparent. I sharply said that I was furlough-eligible and would make the request anyway. “Suit yourself,” she snapped.

Pop gently counseled me that in fact I had no chance of getting furloughed, even for a funeral, unless it was my parent, my child, or maybe my sibling, and that she did not want me to get my hopes up. “I know it’s not right, honey. That’s just how they do things.”

I had seen many other prisoners suffer through the illnesses of their loved ones and had felt helpless watching them when the worst would come—when they had to confront not only their grief, but also the personal failure of being in prison and not with their families.

I was not festive that Halloween. I was feeling some kinda way, like I had been walloped in the gut with a sledgehammer. But there was no escape from the festivities of the two hundred-plus women I was living with cheek by jowl every day. The women love their holidays.

Halloween in prison was odd, I had been told. Could it be odder than anything else here? How would one create a costume with such limited and colorless resources as we had at our disposal? Earlier that day I had seen some idiotic cat masks made from manila folders. Besides, I was in no mood for anything, let alone handing out candy.

The faithful could be heard from halfway across B Dorm. “Trick or treat!”

Trying to focus on my book, I stayed in my bunk. Then Delicious spoke to me from the doorway of my cube. “Trick or treat, P-I Piper!”

I had to smile. Delicious was dressed as a pimp, clad in an all-white outfit she had put together somehow using her kitchen uniform and inside-out sweatpants. She had a “cigar” and a cluster of
hoes around her. This included a bunch of the Eminemlettes but also Fran, the motormouthed Italian grandma, at seventy-eight the oldest woman in the Camp. The hoes had tried to sexy themselves up, hiking sweatshorts high and T-shirt necklines low, but mostly relying on makeup that was garish even by prison standards. Fran had a long “cigarette holder” and headband she had made from paper, and heavy rouge; she looked like an ancient flapper.

“C’mon, Piper, trick or treat?” Delicious demanded. “Smell my feet. Gimme something sweet to eat, y’know?”

I never kept candy in my cube. I tried to muster up a big smile to let them know I appreciated their creativity.

“I guess Trick, Delicious. I am flat out of sweetness.”

I
BEGAN
to stalk the prison officials who might have some say in whether I ever saw my grandmother again. One was the always-absent temporary unit manager, Bubba, who could tell you to go fuck yourself in the most pleasant possible way. My counselor Finn, another BOP lifer, was an indifferent jokester who was quick with an insult and never did his paperwork, but he liked me because I was blond and blue-eyed and had “a tight ass,” as he would mutter under his breath. He very kindly offered to let me call my grandmother from his office—the hospice number was not on the approved list in the prison phone system, so I could not call from the pay phones. She sounded exhausted and astonished to hear my voice on the line. When I hung up the phone, I dissolved in sobs. I rushed out of his office and down to the track.

I returned to my old, lonely ways. I shut myself off and kept quiet, determined to gut out this worst-case scenario alone. Anything else would be an admission to the world that the feds had succeeded in bringing me down, lower than my knees, flat on my face; that I couldn’t survive my imprisonment unscathed. How could I admit that the All-American Girl’s force field of stoicism and self-reliance and do-unto-others-and-keep-smiling wasn’t working, wasn’t keeping pain and shame and powerlessness away?

From a young age I had learned to get over—to cover my tracks emotionally, to hide or ignore my problems in the belief that they were mine alone to solve. So when exhilarating transgressions required getting over on authority figures, I knew how to do it. I was a great bluffer. And when common, everyday survival in prison required getting over, I could do that too. This is what was approvingly described by my fellow prisoners as “street-smarts,” as in “You wouldn’t think it to look at her, but Piper’s got street-smarts.”

It wasn’t just my peers who applauded this trait; the prison system mandates stoicism and tries to crush any genuine emotion, but everyone, jailers and prisoners alike, is still crossing boundaries left and right. My deep contempt for Levy was not only because I didn’t like the way she put herself above others but also because she was the opposite of stoic. Nobody likes a crybaby.

In the following weeks I walked around in a state of tightly leashed fury and despair. I kept to myself, civil within the requirements of prison society but unwilling to chat or joke. Fellow prisoners, offended, sniffed that I must be feeling “some kind of way,” as I was not my usual optimistic self. Then someone in the know would whisper to them that my grandmother was very ill. Suddenly I was the recipient of kind words, sympathetic advice, and prayer cards. And all those things did indeed remind me that I was not alone, that every woman living in that building was in the same rotten boat.

I thought about one woman whose face had been a mask of pain upon the news of her mother’s death—she had rocked silently, her face frozen in a howl as her friend wrapped her arms around her shoulders and rocked with her (in violation of the physical contact rules). I also remembered Roland, an upright Caribbean woman whose staunchness I admired. Roland would tell you straight up that prison saved her life. “I would be dead in a ditch for sure, the way I was living,” she told me. She had done her bid with grace. She worked hard, didn’t mess with other people, had a smile for the occasion, and asked no one for anything. A short while before Roland was to go home, her brother died. She was stoic and quiet and received permission for a half-day furlough to attend his funeral.

But when her family members arrived at Danbury to pick her up, they drove a different car than the one registered in her paperwork. And that was it—she was sent back up to the Camp from R&D, and her family was sent away. A few weeks later she was released. The heartlessness, the pettiness, the foolishness of the situation was the talk of the Camp. Contrarians pointed out that you had to assume that the feds would thwart you brutally given the chance, and that such mistakes were avoidable, but everyone’s hearts ached collectively for her.

Pop sat me down for a talk. “Look, honey, you are eating yourself up. I am gonna tell you, when my father was dying, I was out of my head, so I know how you feel. But listen to me: these bastards—as far as they’re concerned, you got nothing coming to you. You think if you were getting a furlough, you wouldn’t know it by now? Sweetie, you need to call your grandma on the phone, you need to write her, you need to think about her a lot. But you cannot let these fuckers make you bitter. You’re not a bitter person, Piper; it’s not your nature. Don’t let them do it to you. Come here, honey.” Pop hugged me hard, squashing me to her big, scented “jewels.”

I knew she was right. I felt a tiny bit better.

Still, I haunted the administrative offices, which were almost always empty. (God knows what those people were doing.) I wrote letters home and sat in my bunk with my photo album, staring at my grandmother’s smile and her hairdo, the same Babe Paley set she had worn since the 1950s. The Eminemlettes would come by to see me in my cube, then wander away, frustrated that they couldn’t cheer me up. As the air got colder and Veterans Day passed, I checked in with my father every other day by pay phone (she was holding stable, would I be able to get the furlough?), nervous that I would run out of phone minutes. I thought about praying, something I was certainly not practiced at doing. Fortunately several people offered to do it for me, including Sister. That had to count extra, right?

I wasn’t inclined to formal prayer, but I was less skeptical about faith than I had been when I entered prison. On a late September day I had been sitting behind A Dorm at the picnic table with Gisela. She
was my coworker in the construction shop, as well as the bus driver, and was one of the sweetest, kindest, gentlest women I’ve ever met, delicate and ladylike, and yet no simp, no Pollyanna. I can’t remember ever hearing Gisela raise her voice, and given that she was the CMS bus driver, this was pretty amazing. Gisela was also graceful and lovely, her face a perfect, pale-brown oval, big brown eyes, long wavy hair. She was from the Dominican Republic but had lived in Massachusetts for years—not in neighborhoods I knew well, but we shared some common ground. Her two kids were waiting for her there, in the care of an elderly woman named Noni Delgado, whom Gisela called her angel.

On this particular day Gisela and I were talking about her upcoming release. Of course she was nervous. She was nervous about finding work. She was nervous about what her husband would do when she got out—he was in the DR, and they had what sounded like a tempestuous and tortured relationship. Gisela said she didn’t want to reunite with him, but he sounded like a person who was difficult to resist, and of course they had children together. I knew that Gisela had no money, and many responsibilities, and that she faced a massive number of unknown but looming challenges. But while she was quick to acknowledge that she was nervous, she also exhibited the peacefulness at her core, the loving calmness that made her the kind of person to whom everyone was drawn. And then she started to talk about God.

Normally, professions of faith or discussions of religion in prison would win eye-rolling and a quick exit from me. I believed that everyone should be able to practice according to their own preferences and beliefs, but an awful lot of pilgrims in prison seem to be making it up as they go along, in silly ways—wearing a contraband napkin on their head one month when they’re practicing Islam, and then appearing in the Buddhist meditation circle the next—after realizing that they could duck out of work for this new brand of religious observance. Couple that with a pretty reliable volume of ignorance about the rest of the world’s faiths (“Well, the Jews did kill
Jesus… everyone knows that!”), and I generally didn’t want any part of it.

Gisela wasn’t talking about religion or church or even Jesus, though. She was talking about God. And when she talked about God, she looked so happy. She spoke so freely, and so easily, about how God had helped her through all the struggles in her life, and especially the years she had spent in prison; how she knew that God loved her completely, and watched over her, and gave her the peace of mind, the good sense, the clarity to be a good person, even in a bad place. She said that she trusted God to help her, by sending her angels like Noni Delgado to care for her children, and good friends when she most needed them to help her survive prison. She glowed while she talked calmly and quietly about God and how much His love had given her.

I was startled to feel so moved by what Gisela had to say, and I listened quietly. Some of her beliefs weren’t stated all that differently from the scuttlebutt I had heard from the holy rollers in the Camp, but their protestations of faith were imbued with the need for redemption
—Jesus loves me even if I’m a bad person, even if no one else does.
Gisela already knew about love. She was talking about an unshakable faith that gave her real strength and that she had carried for a long time. She wasn’t talking about repentance or forgiveness, only love. What Gisela was describing to me was an exquisitely intimate and happy love. I thought it was the most compelling description of faith that I had ever heard. I wasn’t about to grab a Bible; nor was our conversation about me or my choices in any way. It was food for thought.

I had long recognized that faith helped people understand their relationship to their community. In the best cases it helped women in Danbury focus on what they had to give instead of what they wanted. And that was a good thing. So for all my scoffing at “holy rollers,” was it such a bad thing if faith helped someone understand what others needed from them, rather than just thinking about themselves?

In prison, for the first time, I understood that faith could help people see beyond themselves, not into the abyss but into the street,
into the mix, to offer what was best about themselves to others. I grew to this understanding by way of knowing people like Sister, Yoga Janet, Gisela, and even my holy-roller pedicurist Rose.

Rose, chatting in the midst of a pedicure one day, told me what she had learned from her faith; I thought later that hers were the most powerful words a person could utter: “I’ve got a lot to give.”

I
HAD
added frustrations, and my methods for dealing with them met with obstacles at every turn. The track was now closed after the four
P.M.
count. After work I would race back to the Camp, change into my sneakers, and run furiously until count time, cutting it closer and closer and stressing out most of B Dorm. I would look up from the far side of the track and see Jae frantically beckoning me, and I would run at top speed up the rickety steps and through C Dorm to my cube, other prisoners urging me to hurry.

“Pipes, you going to fuck up the four o’clock count, get your ass sent to the SHU!” Delicious admonished from the other side of B Dorm.