Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

“Olde English? You mean, like fancy lettering?”

“Yeah, like the rappers have?”

I looked around for his mother, but I didn’t see her. “I’ve never done that before, but I can try. What do you want it to say?”

“Um… my nickname, John-John.”

“Okay, John-John.” We sat knee to knee, and I held his forearm. I guessed he was about fourteen. “You want it lengthwise, or stacked?”

He thought about it a little harder. “Maybe it should be just ‘John’?”

“That sounds good. ‘John.’ I’m going to do it lengthwise, big.”

“Okay.”

Neither of us talked while I worked, bent over his arm. I was very careful, and tried to make it as cool-looking as I could, as if it really were going to be permanent. He was quiet, watching me and maybe imagining what it might feel like to get a real tattoo. Finally I sat up, satisfied. But was he?

I got a big smile. He admired his arm. “Thank you!” John-John was a sweet kid. He ran off to show his older brother, the football star.

In the afternoon, near the end of the scheduled activities, it was time for the prison-made piñatas stuffed with candy and little trinkets. Breaking them open was supervised by the jerk from the commissary, who was uncharacteristically nice to all of the kids. John-John, blindfolded, whaled on the Pokémon piñata I had decorated until it burst, giving up its goodies to the throng of children. Now the moment we had all been trying to put out of our minds was drawing very close: the end of the day and the goodbyes. Kids who had traveled from far away, gotten closer to their moms than they had been all year, and then eaten a bunch of candy could hardly be blamed for shedding tears when they had to leave, even if they were “too big for that.” At dinner the mothers appeared subdued and exhausted, if they came to the chow hall at all. I am just glad that I was too busy to think all day because afterward, curled up in a ball in my bunk, I also cried and cried.

ONE MORNING I checked the callout and saw that I had OBGYN next to my name.

“Oof, girl, the annual gynecologist! You can refuse the exam,” commented Angel, who was also checking the callout and always had something to say.

Why should I refuse it? I asked.

“It’s a man. Almost everyone refuses it because of that,” Angel explained.

I was horrified. “That’s ridiculous. It’s probably the most important exam most of these women could have all year! I mean, of course a prison for fourteen hundred women should bring in a female gynecologist, but still!”

Angel shrugged. “Whatever. I’m not having no man do that shit.”

“Well, I don’t care if it’s a man or not,” I announced. “I’m getting a checkup.”

I reported to the medical office at my appointed time, feeling smug about getting my money’s worth out of the system. My smugness evaporated when the doctor called me into the room that served as his exam room. He was a white man who looked to be in his eighties and whose voice quavered. He commanded me, irritated, to “take off all of your clothes, wrap yourself in the paper sheet, and climb up on the examining table. Put your feet in the stirrups and slide all the way down. I’ll be right back!”

In a minute I was stripped down to my sports bra, cold and freaked out. The paper sheet was inadequate covering for my body. I should have had a robe on, or at least my T-shirt. The doctor knocked, then entered. I blinked at the ceiling, trying to pretend that this was not happening.

“Slide down,” he barked, getting his instruments ready. “Relax, I need you to relax!”

Let me just say, it was horrible. And it hurt. When it was over, and the old man gone, departed with a bang of the door, I was left clutching that paper sheet around me, feeling just like this prison system wanted me to-utterly powerless, vulnerable, alone.

THE WORK in construction was a lot more physically challenging than being an electrician. I got stronger and stronger, lifting extension ladders and paint cans and two-by-fours, loading and unloading the pickup. By the end of August we were almost finished with our work preparing the warden’s house for its new resident, painting the garage door bright red and cleaning up the postconstruction debris. It was an old New England house that had been expanded a couple of times, with low ceilings and tiny upstairs bedrooms, but it was comfortable enough. It was nice to spend time in a house, after months of living in a barracks. At the far edge of the prison grounds, my coworkers and I would scatter around the empty house to finish various projects.

One afternoon, alone in the upstairs bathroom, I caught my reflection in the big mirror with surprise. I looked as though years had fallen away from me, shed like dry old snakeskin. I took off my white baseball cap and pulled my hair out of its ponytail and looked at myself again. I locked the bathroom door. Then I took off my khaki shirt and my white T-shirt and shucked off my pants. I was standing in my white sports bra, granny panties, and steel-toes. I took those off. I looked at my own body in the mirror, seeing myself naked for the first time in seven months. In the Dorms there was never a moment or a place where a woman could stand and stretch and regard herself and confront who she was physically.

Standing there naked in the warden’s bathroom, I could see that prison had changed me. Most of the accumulated varnish of the five unhappy years spent on pretrial was gone. Except for a decade’s worth of crinkly smile lines around my eyes, I resembled the girl who had jumped off that waterfall more closely than I had in years.

The red maple and sourwood trees were already starting to change color, which thrilled me with the promise of an early fall and the speedy arrival of winter. In Danbury I had learned to hasten the days by chasing the enjoyment in them, no matter how elusive. Some people on the outside look for what is amiss in every interaction, every relationship, and every meal; they are always trying to hang their mortality on improvement. It was incredibly liberating to instead tackle the trick of making each day fly more quickly.

“Time, be my friend,” I repeated every day. Soon I would go down to the track and try to chase the day away by running in circles. Even under very bad circumstances life still held its pleasures, like running and Natalie’s homemade cookies and Pop’s stories. It was these simple things that were within your grasp in the degraded circumstances of life in prison; the things you could do yourself, or the small kindnesses one prisoner could extend to another.

I needed some track time after a long day of painting the lobby down the hill. It was the new warden’s first day on the job, and to celebrate, I overheard that they shook down the whole FCI, a tremendous and rare undertaking encompassing twelve units of twelve hundred women and every one of their lockers. I was pretty sure the Camp’s turn would come quickly. The feds were looking for cigarettes.

The Bureau of Prisons had decreed that all of its institutions were to go smoke-free by 2008. It put financial incentives in place for prisons to do it even before the deadline. Warden Deboo’s parting shot to the women of Danbury was to impose the ban, to officially take hold on September 1. The preceding months had seen extensive communications about the ban. First of all, the commissary ginned up the demand for cigarettes in July, trying to get rid of their stock. Then in August everyone had one month in which to smoke their brains out before going cold turkey on one of the most addictive drugs known to man.