Piper Kerman - Orange is the New Black

I finally got a formal introduction to my new bunkie. “What’s your name?” she drawled. I introduced myself. She was LaKeesha, from Atlanta, and on her way to… Danbury! The minute she heard I was coming from Danbury, she had a million questions. Then she crawled back into her bed and went to sleep. I soon discovered that LaKeesha slept about twenty-two hours a day, getting up three times to eat and, mercifully, shower. She always looked disheveled, though, emerging from our cell with her twists sticking out in all directions. “Peeper, what’s wrong with your bunkie? She looks like Celie in The Color Purple!” cracked Slice.

I was totally wired on my first day in Oklahoma City -it was a brand-new scenario to get the hang of, with all new rituals and routines. Unfortunately, there was absolutely nothing to do. There were three TV rooms without chairs, and one little rolling bookshelf filled with a bizarre assortment of volumes-Christian books, ancient copies of John D. MacDonald, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, a handful of romances, and two Dorothy L. Sayers novels. A weird structure in the middle of the unit looked like a reception desk and contained nothing but stubby little pencils and various forms of scrap paper. Next to three pay phones there was an outdoor room where smokers shivered, and you could see a slice of the sky over a partial wall topped with razor wire. The unit felt like a train or bus station, but without a newsstand or a coffee shop. I tried to use the pay phone to call Larry or my parents to tell them I was alive, but the phone would place only collect calls, and no one’s phone service would accept them, which intensified the feeling that I had been dropped into a plane of being that didn’t exist to the rest of the world.

Women came and went quietly. The place was subdued and spotlessly clean. The unit seemed to be at most half full, maybe sixty women in the breakfast line. At eleven A.M. the CO brought in large rolling carts, signaling that lunch was going to be served. I watched a woman emerge from a cell on the top tier and descend the stairs on the opposite side of the unit. That curly hair, that fireplug shape… glasses. Something stirred in my belly; I sat up very straight. What was Nora Jansen doing in here with me?

I had been certain that a “separation order” would be placed on my codefendants and me, but apparently I was wrong. I stared at her as she got in the chow line. “Come on, Peeper!” Slice nudged me to get my lunch. Despite her obvious misgivings about befriending skinny white girls, she was willing to accept me as Jae’s buddy, especially given that I didn’t eat much. I trailed behind my two companions, drawing a bead on the woman who I thought was Nora.

In the past eleven months I had occasional thoughts of Nora-bad thoughts. I wanted to be certain before I made a move. I had fantasized about confronting the woman I’d followed down the wrong path, the woman who had likely ratted me out. In my head I usually set the moment in a lesbian bar in San Francisco and imagined much smashing of bottles with pool cues and breaking of pug noses and general bloodletting. Now the real moment had arrived. What was I going to do?

The short, curly-headed, and decidedly middle-aged woman received her lunch box and turned to head to a table. It was the same woman I had followed to Indonesia, to Zurich, to the Congress Hotel. If I had never met her, I wouldn’t be sitting here now holding a bag of lukewarm milk and wearing government clothing. It was the same French bulldog face ten years later-ten apparently long, hard years. She looked like hell. She glanced at me as she passed, and I saw the shock of recognition cross those flattened features. I held my breath, my pulse pounding.

At the table with my companions, I hissed, “Jae! I think I see one of my codefendants!”

Jae looked at me, very serious. Almost all drug prisoners have codefendants, and that can have a host of meanings, but Jae knew immediately from my tone that this was not a good thing.

“What’s up?” asked Slice, catching that there was a problem.

“Piper thinks she got one of her codefendants here, and she’s surprised.”

“Where?”

I indicated without pointing.

They relaxed a little. “That old lady?” “Shee-it, Peeper, what kind of gangster is you anyway?”

I glared at them. “Jae, I think that bitch ratted me out.”

All levity ceased. Slice studied Nora. Jae thought for several moments, then spoke deliberately.

“Piper, you do what you need to do, knowhatmsayin’, but know this-you will be in the SHU the rest of the time here. If it sucks like this here, imagine what the SHU is like. And fuck knows what else is gonna happen to you. You about to go home, to your man who you know loves you, he got his ass up in the visiting room every damn week. Is that bitch worth it to catch another case? I’ma back you up to a point. I’m telling you f’real though, I am not going to the SHU, but I respect that you gotta do what you need to.”

Slice piped in, “I’m not going to the SHU either, not for some white girl I don’t even know. No offense, Peeper. But do your thing.”

I did nothing. Jae kept a worried eye on me. Slice procured a full deck of playing cards from another prisoner and began to shuffle them. I couldn’t stand it, though. I took a break and lay on my bunk and stared at the cinder-block wall. The woman who had landed me here was finally within my grasp, and I was paralyzed. Would I really do nothing?

I left my cell and stalked around the unit, which took about three minutes. Nora was nowhere to be found. Jae gestured me over. “C’mon, Piper, play with us.”

Jae and her cousin riffed back and forth as we played cards. Slice was full of very funny accounts about the life of a bulldagger on the make in the FCI back in Danbury, including the story of being caught in the act in the middle of the night by a guard we all knew. “I froze, man, he’s got his flashlight on us, and it wasn’t the kinda situation where you can deny, know what I mean? And he just said, ‘Let me watch.’ Sooooooo…” and she indicated getting back to business. It was the same guy who had bird-dogged me for giving Pop an innocent foot massage. Filthy pig.

By the time the dinner cart showed up after the four o’clock count, we were laughing our asses off. When we took the lid off the plastic trays, the stench made us slam them back on immediately. Jae spoke up, after a beat: “We’re gonna have to kill one of these bitches and eat her, or starve.”

I was crossing the unit to return my tray when I saw Nora headed toward me. I squared my shoulders and adopted my most arctic ice-queen stare. As we passed, she looked at me uncertainly.

“Hi,” she said, almost under her breath.

I stalked by her.

“What happened?” asked Jae, concerned.

“Tried to say hello to me.” I shook my head, and we started playing cards again. “You know, the thing I can’t figure out is why she’s here and her sister isn’t.”

“Her sister?”

“Yeah, her sister’s my codefendant too. She’s doing time in Kentucky.”

The next morning at breakfast, there was Hester. That was the way it was in Oklahoma -new people materialized in the middle of the night while you were locked down in the cells. They popped up at breakfast, a day-making novelty. I witnessed the sisters’ reunion from my turf-they hugged ecstatically and headed to a corner to confer.

My companions took note. “You need to kill sis, too?” asked Slice.

“Nah, I never had any beef with Hester-she’s all right.”

Time had been kinder to Hester. She looked more or less the same, perhaps due to her old chicken bone charms: long reddish curly hair, a faraway but quizzical expression, and a witchy, mystical demeanor.