Orange Is the New Black

with jelly.”
    Nina, her bangs in rollers, tilted her head as she reminisced about Passovers past. “One year I was in Rikers. Matzoh was the only edible thing they gave us,” she mused, rolling her cigarette thoughtfully between her fingers. “It’s a delicious with buttah.” This year I would not be ferrying back and forth between Larry’s family’s seder and my own Easter traditions. Too bad—I love the ten plagues.
    Pop and her crew pulled out all the stops for Easter dinner. It was positively lavish, a spring miracle. The menu: baked chicken and cabbage with astonishing dumplings, so dense you could have used them as weapons; mustardy deviled eggs; and real vegetables on the salad bar. For dessert, we had Natalie’s very special bird’s nest confection—a deep-fried tortilla cupping a mound of pudding, covered with lush green-dyed coconut “grass” strewn with jelly bean “eggs,” and a gaily colored marshmallow Peep perched on top. I just stared at it, unable to believe my eyes, while everyone around me ate enthusiastically. Ididn’t want to eat this incredible diorama. I wanted to shellac it and save it forever.
    R IGHT AFTER Easter, Nina left to go down the hill to the high-security prison for the drug program. I would miss her. She had been knitting a scarf for weeks and weeks, and I had been consulting on it. “What color do you think now?” she would say, pulling out a remarkable collection of little scraps of yarn she had scavenged. “Purple!” I would point. “Green!”
    The whole Camp was in the process of readying the eight women who were entering the strict nine-month drug program. This process included purging any contraband they might have, acquiring new stuff at commissary, and loading them up with snacks and messages to carry to women who were doing time down the hill. It was a bit like sending them off to a scary summer camp.
    Nina would be just a few hundred yards away behind that awful fence, but it might as well have been thousands of miles. I might never see her again.
    Along with the seven other women, her duffel bag was loaded into the town driver’s van, and I hugged her. “Thank you, Nina, for everything.”
    “The scarf’s for you, Piper! I’m gonna finish it!” Pop was crying.
    As Nina headed down the hill to the FCI, I felt a real sense of loss. She was the first real friend I had made, and I wouldn’t have any contact with her at all. Prison is so much about the people who are missing from your life and who fill your imagination. Some of the missing were just across the prison grounds—I knew a half-dozen women who had sisters or cousins down the hill in the high-security prison. One day while walking back to work after lunch, I glimpsed Nina through the back gate of the FCI and went crazy jumping up and down and waving. She saw me and waved too. The truck that patrolled the prison perimeter screeched to a halt between us. “Cut that shit out!” came sharply from the guard inside.
    Pop, who had spent many years “down on the compound” before being moved up to the Camp, had enlisted multiple messengers to deliver treats to her friends still behind the wire. Living in A Dorm, “the Suburbs,” Pop had an enormous locker in her cube, twice the size of mine and Natalie’s. It was crammed with a bounty of her favorite things—food items like SPAM that were no longer available on commissary, clothing from long ago that no one else had, and most important, perfume. She liked to mix her own—a little White Diamonds, a little Opium.
Eau de Pop.
“I’m almost done,” said Pop as she selected a few precious contraband lace brassieres to send to a friend doing life down the hill. “What am I hanging on to these for? I go home in January; I’ll get pretty new bras for my jewels!”
    Pop was a source of wonder and mystery and revelation. I didn’t know it at the time, but Nina had set me up with the woman who would help me do my time in every sense of the word, who would baby me when I needed it most and tell me to suck it up and get tough when there was no other option. She had cast a skeptical eye over me at first. But when I procured a wooden board from the CMS shop to put under her mattress for back support, her opinion of me improved significantly. My ability to write her furlough requests was also useful. But it was my voracious appetite for her cooking and her stories that won her over.
    Pop had lived a crazy life on the outside, arriving in this