Orange Is the New Black

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