Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

“It’s mail call, honey!” she answered.

A very tall black woman up on the landing seemed to be handing out toiletries. Someone on my right gestured toward her. “Gloria’s going home, she’s down to a wake-up!” I stared at Gloria with renewed interest, as she tried to find someone to take a small purple comb off her hands. Going home! The idea of leaving was riveting to me. She looked so nice, and so happy, as she gave away all her things. I felt a tiny bit better, knowing that it was possible someday to go home from this awful place.

I wanted her purple comb very badly. It looked like the combs we used to carry in the back pockets of our jeans in junior high, that we’d whip out and use to fix our winged bangs. I stared at the comb, too shy to reach up and ask, and then it was gone, claimed by another woman.

A guard, different from the one Minetta had pointed out earlier, emerged from the CO’s office. He looked like a gay pornstar, with a bristling black crew cut and a scrub-brush mustache. He started bellowing “Mail call! Mail call!” Then he started giving out the mail. “Ortiz! Williams! Kennedy! Lombardi! Ruiz! Skelton! Platte! Platte! Platte! Wait a minute, Platte, there’s more. Mendoza! Rojas!” Each woman would step up to claim her mail, with a smile on her face, and then skitter away somewhere to read it-perhaps someplace with more privacy than I had yet observed? The hall’s population thinned as he worked through the bin of mail, until there were only hopefuls left. “Maybe tomorrow, ladies!” he shouted, turning the empty bin upside down.

After mail call I crept around the building, feeling vulnerable in my stupid little canvas slippers that so obviously marked me as new. My head was spinning with new information, and for the first moment in hours I was sort of alone with my own thoughts, which turned immediately to Larry and my parents. They must be freaking. I had to figure out how to let them know that I was okay.

Very timidly, I approached the closed door to the counselors’ office, clutching a blue phone sheet that Annette had shown me how to fill out, bubbling in the numbers of people I wanted permission to call on the pay phones at some future date. Larry’s cell phone, my family, my best friend Kristen, my lawyer. The lights in the office were on. I rapped softly, and there was a muffled snort from within. Gingerly I turned the handle.

The counselor named Toricella, who always wore a look of mild surprise, was blinking his little eyes at me, annoyed at my interruption.

“Mr. Toricella? I’m Kerman, I’m new. They said I should come talk to you…” I trailed off, swallowing.

“Is something wrong?”

“They said I should turn in my phone list… and I don’t have a PAC number…”

“I’m not your counselor.”

My throat was getting very tight, and there was no need to fake tears-my eyes were threatening to spill. “Mr. Toricella, they said maybe you might let me call my fiancé and let him know that I’m okay?” I was begging.

He looked at me, silent. Finally he grunted. “Come in and close the door.” My heart started pounding twice as hard. He picked up the phone and handed the receiver to me. “Tell me the number and I’ll dial it. Just two minutes!”

Larry’s cell phone rang, and I closed my eyes and willed him to answer it. If I lost this opportunity to hear his voice, I might die right on the spot.

“Hello?”

“Larry! Larry, it’s me!!”

“Baby, are you okay?” I could hear how relieved he was.

Now the tears were falling, and I was trying not to screw up my two minutes or scare Larry by totally losing it. I snuffled. “Yes, I’m okay. I’m really okay. I’m fine. I love you. Thank you for taking me today.”

“Honey, don’t be crazy. Are you sure you’re okay, you’re not just saying that?”

“No, I’m all right. Mr. Toricella let me call you, but I won’t be able to call you again for a while. But listen, you can come visit me this weekend! You should be on a list.”

“Baby! I’ll come on Friday.”

“So can Mom, please call her, and call Dad, call them as soon as we get off the phone and tell them you talked to me and tell them I’m okay. I won’t be able to call them for a while. I can’t make phone calls yet. And send in that money order right away.”

“I mailed it already. Baby, are you sure you’re okay? Is it all right? You would tell me if it wasn’t?”

“I’m okay. There’s a lady from South Jersey in my room, she’s nice. She’s Italian.”

Mr. Toricella cleared his throat.

“Darling, I have to go. I only have two minutes. I love you so much, I miss you so much!”

“Baby! I love you. I’m worried about you.”

“Don’t worry. I’m okay, I swear. I love you, darling. Please come see me. And call Mom and Dad!”

“I’ll call them as soon as we get off the phone. Can I do anything else, baby?”

“I love you! I have to go, honey!”

“I love you too!”

“Come see me on Friday, and thank you for calling my folks… I love you!”

I hung up the phone. Mr. Toricella watched me with something that looked like sympathy in his beady little eyes. “It’s your first time down?” he said.

After thanking him, I headed out into the hall wiping my nose on my arm, depleted but exponentially happier. I looked down at the doors of the forbidden Dorms and studiously examined the bulletin boards covered with incomprehensible information about events and rules I didn’t understand-laundry schedules, inmate appointments with various staffers, crochet permits, and the weekend movie schedule. This weekend’s film was Bad Boys II.

I avoided eye contact. Nonetheless women periodically accosted me: “You’re new? How are you doing, honey? Are you okay?” Most of them were white. This was a tribal ritual that I would see play out hundreds of times in the future. When a new person arrived, their tribe-white, black, Latino, or the few and far between “others”-would immediately make note of their situation, get them settled, and steer them through their arrival. If you fell into that “other” category-Native American, Asian, Middle Eastern-then you got a patchwork welcome committee of the kindest and most compassionate women from the dominant tribes.

The other white women brought me a bar of soap, a real toothbrush and toothpaste, shampoo, some stamps and writing materials, some instant coffee, Cremora, a plastic mug, and perhaps most important, shower shoes to avoid terrible foot fungi. It turned out that these were all items that one had to purchase at the prison commissary. You didn’t have the money to buy toothpaste or soap? Tough. Better hope that another prisoner would give it to you. I wanted to bawl every time another lady brought me a personal care item and reassured me, “It’ll be okay, Kerman.”

By now conflicting things were churning around in my brain and my guts. Had I ever been so completely out of my element as I was here in Danbury? In a situation where I simply didn’t know what to say or what the real consequences of a wrong move might be? The next year was looming ahead of me like Mount Doom, even as I was quickly learning that compared with most of these women’s sentences, fifteen months were a blip and I had nothing to complain about.

So though I knew I shouldn’t complain, I was bereft. No Larry, no friends, no family to talk to, to keep me company, to make me laugh, to lean on. Every time a random woman with a few missing teeth gave me a bar of deodorant soap I swung wildly from elation to despair at the loss of my life as I knew it. Had I ever been so completely at the mercy of the kindness of strangers? And yet they were kind.

The young woman who furnished my new shower shoes had introduced herself as Rosemarie. She was milky pale, with short curly brown hair and thick glasses over mischievous brown eyes. Her accent was instantly familiar to me-educated, but with a strong whiff of working-class Massachusetts. She knew Annette, who said she was Italian, and had made a point of greeting me several times already, and now she came by Room 6 to bring me reading material. “I was a self-surrender and I was terrified. You’re going to be okay,” she assured me.