Orange Is the New Black

worked hard at forgetting what loomed ahead, pouring my energies into working as a creative director for Web companies and exploring downtown New York with Larry and our friends. I needed money to pay my huge ongoing legal fees, so I worked with the clients my hipster colleagues found unsexy and unpalatable—big telecom, big petrochemicals, and big shadowy holding companies.
    With everyone but Larry, in my interactions I was partially absent. Only to him could I reveal my fear and shame. With folks who knew nothing of my criminal secret and looming imprisonment, I was simply not quite myself—pleasant, sometimes charming, but aloof, distant, perhaps even indifferent. Even with close friends who knew what was happening, I wasn’t fully engaged—I was always observing myself with an unstated foresight, a sense that whatever was happening now didn’t matter much given what was to come. Somewhere on the horizon was coming devastation, the arrival of Cossacks and hostile Indians.
    As the years passed, my family almost began to believe that I would be miraculously spared. My mother was certainly logging a lot of hours in church. But never for a minute did I allow myself to indulge in that fantasy—I knew that I would go to prison. There were times when I was pretty damn depressed. But the revelation was that my family and Larry still loved me despite my massive fuckup; that my friends who knew my situation never turned away from me; and that I could still function in the world professionally and socially, despite having ostensibly ruined my life. I began to grow less fearful about my future, my prospects for happiness, and even about prison, as more and more time passed.
    The main reason was Larry. When I was indicted,we were definitely in love, but just twenty-eight and freshly arrived in New York, we were not thinking about the future beyond where we would move when the guy we were subletting from reappeared from London. When my criminal past reappeared, who could have blamed him if he had sat me down and said, “I did not sign up for this crazy shit. I thought you were good crazy, not scary-crazy”? Who could predict how a nice Jewish boy from New Jersey would process the information that his ex-lesbian, boho-WASP girlfriend was also a soon-to-be-convicted felon?
    Who knew that my extroverted, mercurial, overcaffeinated boyfriend would be so patient, so capable, and so resourceful? That when I cried myself into hyperventilation, he would hold my head and comfort me? That he would guard my secret and make it his own? That when I moped for too long, letting the poor-me blues clamp around my ankles and drag me down to very bad places, he would fight to get me back, even if it meant terrible battles and tough days and nights at home?
    In July 2003 we were in Massachusetts at my family’s beach shack. On a beautifully sunny day Larry and I kayaked out to Pea Island, a speck of rock and sand set in a small cove off Buzzard’s Bay. The island was placid and deserted. We swam and then sat on a rock looking back at the cove. Larry was fumbling with his swimming trunks, and I eyed him sideways, wondering why he was being so weird. He withdrew a plastic Baggie from his swim trunks and from it a metal box. “P, I got you these rings, because I love you, and I want you to have them because you mean so much to me. There’s seven of them, for every year we’ve been together. We don’t have to get married if you don’t want to. But I want you to have them…”
    Of course I can’t remember another word he said, because I was so surprised and astonished and touched and thrilled that I couldn’t hear anything anymore. I just shouted, “Yes!” The box held seven hammered-gold rings, each as thin as manila paper, to be worn stacked. And he had gotten himself a ring too, a thin silver band that he worried nervously on his finger.
    My family was ecstatic. Larry’s parents were too, but despite thelength of my relationship with their son, there was a lot they didn’t know about their future daughter-in-law. They had always been kind and welcoming to me, but I was terrified of what their reaction would be to my nasty secret. Carol and Lou were different from my former-hippie parents: they were 1950s high school sweethearts who predated the counterculture. They still lived in the bucolic county where they grew up, and they went to football games and bar association dinners. I didn’t think they were going to understand my