Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

I was pretty staunch in maintaining an “us and them” attitude about the prison staff. Some of them seemed to like me, and I thought they treated me better than they did some other inmates, which I considered rotten. But when I saw other prisoners behaving in ways that challenged my sense of unity, for lack of a better term, behaving in petty or ignorant or just plain antisocial ways, I really had a hard time with it. It drove me a little nuts.

I took this all as a sign that I was too engrossed in prison life, that the “real world” was fading too much into the background, and I probably needed to read the paper more religiously and write more letters. Focusing on the positive was hard, but I knew that I had found the right women at Danbury to help me do it. A little voice in my head reminded me that I might never see anything quite like this again, and that immersing myself in my current situation, experiencing it, and learning everything there was to know might be the way to live life, now and always.

“You’re thinking too hard,” said Pop, who had managed to do over a decade on the inside and still stay sane.

Boy, was that a nice pedicure. Plus there were lightbulbs to change, term papers to ghostwrite, sugar packets and hardware to steal, puppies to play with, and gossip to gather and pass along. When I thought too much about my prison life, when I should have been thinking about Larry, I felt a little guilty. Still, certain things brought my absence from the outside world into sharp relief, like once-in-a-lifetime events that would happen without me. In July our old friend Mike would be wed in the meadow on his fifty-one-acre spread in Montana. I wanted to be there, among friends, in the gorgeous Montana summer, toasting Mike and his bride with tequila. The world kept going despite the fact that I had been removed to an alternate universe. I wanted to be home desperately, and when I said “home,” that meant “wherever Larry is” more than Lower Manhattan, but the next seven months stretched out in front of me. I now knew I could do them, but it was still way too early to count the days.

ON JULY 20 Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison and five months of home confinement, a pretty typical “split sentence” for white-collar criminals but far below the maximum for her conviction. Some prisoners raised eyebrows over her sentence. About 90 percent of criminal defendants plead guilty. Usually, a defendant who does take a case all the way to court and loses a federal trial is hit hard by the judge, with the maximum sentence, not the minimum; this had happened to a number of women in the Camp who were doing very long bids. Regardless, most of the Camp was convinced that Stewart would be someone’s new bunkie in Danbury, and that would certainly liven things up. If Martha were designated to Danbury I felt pretty sure they’d stick her in the A Dorm “Suburbs” with the OCD cases.

I HAD been hearing about Children’s Day since I got to Danbury. Once a year the BOP held an event when kids could come to the prison and spend the day with their mothers. Activities were planned, including relays, face painting, piñatas, and a cookout, and the children got to walk around the Camp grounds with their moms, very vaguely like a regular family enjoying a day at the park. All the other prisoners were confined to their housing areas. For this reason, gals in the know had strongly suggested that I volunteer to help out, if only so that I would not be stuck in my cube for eight hours on a potentially hot day.

They needed a lot of hands, so in the first week of August I was summoned to a volunteer meeting. I would be manning the face-painting booth. When Saturday arrived, it was in fact hot as hell, but the Camp was humming with nervous energy. Pop and her crew were toiling to get the hot dogs and hamburgers ready. Volunteers were either milling around or getting our stations ready; there was a little pop-up canopy over the face-painting table, scattered with pots and pencils of rainbow-colored greasepaint. I was surprised at how nervous I was. What if the kids were badly behaved and I couldn’t handle them? I certainly wasn’t about to reprimand another prisoner’s kid-just imagine how that would go over. I anxiously questioned the other face painter, who was an old hand. “It’s easy. Just show them the designs and ask ’em what they want,” she said, totally bored. There was a sheet with line drawings of rainbows and butterflies and ladybugs.

The first children arrived for their big day. Kids had to be registered ahead of time, and they had to be dropped off at the visiting room and picked up by the same adult, who could not come into the Camp-the kids had to come alone. Many families had managed to get the kids there from long distances- Maine, western Pennsylvania, Baltimore, and farther-and for some of them it might be the only time they saw their mother this year. Being processed in through the visiting room must have been scary for the kids, who then could go racing into their mother’s arms. After hugs and kisses, they could take their mother’s hand and walk down the stairs by the dining hall and out behind the Camp, to the track and the picnic tables and the outdoors and the whole day stretching in front of them.

Our first customer shyly approached the face-painting booth with her mother, a coworker from the carpentry shop. “Piper, she wants a face painting.”

The girl was probably about five, with curly golden-brown ponytails and chubby cheeks. “Okay, sweetie, what do you want?” I pointed at the sheet with the designs. She looked at me. I looked at her. I looked at her mother. “What does she want?”

Mom rolled her eyes. “I don’t know, a rainbow?”

The rainbow in the picture was coming out of a cloud. It looked kind of hard. “How about a heart with a cloud-in blue to match her dress?”

“Great, whatever.”

I cupped her tiny chin in my hand and tried to keep my other hand steady. The final result was very big, and very… blue. Mom examined my handiwork and then gave me a look like What the fuck? But she cooed, “That’s so cute, baby, que linda!” and off they went. This was harder than it looked.

But it got easier. After the kids’ shyness around strangers wore off, everyone wanted their face painted. The children were well behaved, waiting patiently in line and smiling sweetly when it was finally their turn and they got to pick their design. We were busy for hours, until we all finally got a lunch break. I went and ate a hamburger with Pop and watched families dotting the grass and the picnic tables. The little kids were playing together. Gisela’s teenage daughters were flirting with Trina Cox’s teenage sons, who were frankly pretty fine. Some of the mothers looked overwhelmed-they were no longer accustomed to supervising their own kids in a normal, day-to-day way. But everyone was having fun. I got that feeling again, the feeling I had when Natalie’s GED scores had come back, that tornado feeling inside. So much concentrated happiness, in such a sad place.

After lunch I went back to the face-painting booth. Now some of the older kids started to approach.

“Can you do a tattoo? Of a tiger, or a lightning bolt?”

“Only if it’s okay with your mom.” Once I had secured maternal permission, I went to work “inking” thunderbolts and anchors and panthers on forearms and shoulders and calves, much to the delight of the postpubescent set. I showed off my own tattoo, which got gratifying oohs and aahs.

The younger of Trina Cox’s two boys approached me. He was wearing an immaculate white New York Jets jersey, with matching new hat and green shorts.

“That’s my team,” I said, as he took a seat in my tattoo parlor.

He looked at me seriously. “Can you do Olde English?”