Orange Is the New Black

no family to talk to, to keep me company, to make me laugh, to lean on. Every time a random woman with a few missingteeth gave me a bar of deodorant soap I swung wildly from elation to despair at the loss of my life as I knew it. Had I ever been so completely at the mercy of the kindness of strangers? And yet they were kind.
    The young woman who furnished my new shower shoes had introduced herself as Rosemarie. She was milky pale, with short curly brown hair and thick glasses over mischievous brown eyes. Her accent was instantly familiar to me—educated, but with a strong whiff of working-class Massachusetts. She knew Annette, who said she was Italian, and had made a point of greeting me several times already, and now she came by Room 6 to bring me reading material. “I was a self-surrender and I was terrified. You’re going to be okay,” she assured me.
    “Are you from Massachusetts?” I asked shyly.
    “My Bahston accent must be wicked bad. I’m from Nawh-wood.” She laughed.
    That accent made me feel a lot better. We started talking about the Red Sox and her stint as a volunteer on Kerry’s last senatorial campaign.
    “How long are you here for?” I asked innocently.
    Rosemarie got a funny look on her face. “Fifty-four months. For Internet auction fraud. But I’m going to Boot Camp, so when you take that into account…” and she launched into a calculation of good time and reduction of sentence and halfway house time. I was shocked again, both by her casual revelation of her crime and by her sentence. Fifty-four months in federal prison for eBay fraud?
    Rosemarie’s presence was comfortingly familiar—that accent, the love for Manny Ramirez, her
Wall Street Journal
subscription, all reminded me of places other than here.
    “Let me know if you need anything,” she said. “And don’t feel bad if you need a shoulder to cry on. I cried nonstop for the first week I was here.”
    I made it through the first night in my prison bed without crying. Truth was, I didn’t really feel like it anymore, I was too shocked and tired. Earlier I had sidled my way into one of the TV rooms withmy back to the wall, but news of the Martha Stewart trial was on, and no one was paying any attention to me. Eyeing the bookshelf crammed with James Patterson, V. C. Andrews, and romance novels, I finally found an old paperback copy of
Pride and Prejudice
and retired to my bunk—on top of the covers, of course. I fell gratefully into the much more familiar world of Hanoverian England.
    My new roommates left me alone. At ten P.M. the lights were turned off abruptly, and I slipped Jane Austen onto my locker and stared at the ceiling, listening to Annette’s respirator machine—she had suffered a massive heart attack shortly after arriving in Danbury and had to use it at night to breathe. Miss Luz, almost imperceptible in the other bottom bunk, was recovering from breast cancer treatment and had no hair on her tiny head. I was beginning to suspect that the most dangerous thing you could do in prison was get sick.

CHAPTER 4
Orange Is the New Black

    T he next morning I and eight other new arrivals reported for a day-long orientation session, held in the smallest of the TV rooms. Among the group was one of my roommates, a zaftig Dominican girl who was an odd combination of sulky and helpful. She had a little tattoo of a dancing Mephistopheles figure on her arm, with the letters
JC.
I tentatively asked her if they stood for Jesus Christ—maybe protecting her from the festive devil?
    She looked at me as if I were completely insane, then rolled her eyes. “That’s my boyfriend’s initials.”
    Sitting on my left against the wall was a young black woman to whom I took an instant liking, for no reason. Her rough cornrows and aggressively set jaw couldn’t disguise the fact that she was very young and pretty. I made small talk, asking her name, where she was from, how much time she had to do, the tiny set of questions that I thought were acceptable to ask. Her name was Janet, she was from Brooklyn, and she had sixty months. She seemed to think I was weird for talking to her.
    A small white woman on the other side of the room, on the other hand, was chatty. About ten years my senior, with a friendly-witch aspect, straggly red hair, aquiline nose, and weathered creases in her skin, she looked as if she lived in the mountains, or by the sea. She was back in prison on a probation violation. “I did two years in West Virginia.