Orange Is the New Black

nasty; when I was, she took it without resistance. Hester/Anne was bemused but didn’t interfere. I guess she figured her big sister could fend for herself, or that she had it coming. I learned that Nora had taught in a vocational program they had in Dublin; Hester/Anne was in the Puppy Program in Lexington. Before she’d been locked up, Hester/Anne had gotten sober, got married, and quietly embraced Jesus as herpersonal savior. Nora was just as I remembered her—funny, scheming, curious, and sometimes an insufferably egotistical pain in the ass in need of a takedown.
    Finally, I cut to the chase. “So why don’t you fill me in on everything that happened after we broke up in 1993?”
    According to Nora, many months after my departure from her life, she did some soul-searching and tried to get out of the business with Alaji, who told her in no uncertain terms, no dice, and warned her of the consequences if she did walk. “I’ll always know where your sister is,” he threatened her. A while later, when a pair of drug couriers got arrested—separately in San Francisco and Chicago—things began to get messy and ugly, and of course the whole operation collapsed.
    With her drug money Nora had built her dream home in Vermont—or at least it was her dream until a SWAT team of heavily armed federal agents arrived in jackboots to take her into custody. When the feds sat her down, she claimed, they already had detailed information about the whole enterprise. Someone—I thought probably her slimy business partner Jack—had been singing.
    “Did they have my name?” I asked.
    “Yes, they knew exactly who you were. But at first I told them you were just my girlfriend and you didn’t know anything.”
    At this point it was hard to know what to believe. I had invested a lot of time and energy into hating Nora and elaborating fantasies of revenge. Her story was plausible, but it could easily be a lie. I believed that she felt terrible about the mistakes she had made, and when she looked across the table at her little sister, or talked about her elderly parents (who had not one but two children in prison), I felt bad for her in spite of myself. My brain and my guts were twisted, a snarled cat’s cradle that I would have to pick apart.
    I was starting to understand what the Marlboro Man meant by “diesel therapy.”

CHAPTER 18
It Can Always Get Worse

    E very day in the Chicago MCC began the exact same way: at six A.M. male inmates (who were allowed to have jobs) brought food carts up to the women’s unit and through the massive metal security doors. Then the lone CO on duty would go around the unit unlocking the female prisoners’ doors. When the bolts clicked, everyone would vault out of bed and rush out into the unit to stand in line for breakfast. The line was not a happy place; no one spoke, and faces were hard and set or just stuporific. The food was usually cold cereal and a half-pint of milk and sometimes some bags of bruised apples, handed out by an inmate named Princess. Every now and then there were hard-boiled eggs. It was clear why everyone always got up: as in Oklahoma City, breakfast was the only meal of the day that was guaranteed to be edible.
    As quickly as everyone had appeared, the room would empty. Almost everyone went back to bed. Sometimes they ate their breakfast or sometimes they just stashed it, sticking the milk on ice in a scavenged receptacle. The unit would remain quiet for several hours, and then the women would start to stir, the televisions would go on, and another miserable day in the high-rise fortress would begin.
    E VERYBODY WHO loved me wanted me to be innocent—tricked, duped, all unawares. But of course, that was not the case. All thoseyears ago I wanted to have an adventure, an outrageous experience, and the fact of it being illegal made it all the more exciting. Nora may have used me all those years ago, but I had been more than ready to take what she was offering.
    The women I met in Danbury helped me to confront the things I had done wrong, as well as the wrong things I had done. It wasn’t just my choice of doing something bad and illegal that I had to own; it was also my lone-wolf style that had helped me make those mistakes and often made the aftermath of my actions worse for those I loved. I no longer thought of myself in the terms that D. H. Lawrence used to observe on our national character: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It