Orange Is the New Black

the kids were badly behaved and I couldn’t handle them? I certainly wasn’t about to reprimand another prisoner’s kid—just imagine how that would go over. I anxiously questioned the other face painter, who was an old hand. “It’s easy. Just show them the designs and ask ’em what they want,” she said, totally bored. There was a sheet with line drawings of rainbows and butterflies and ladybugs.
    The first children arrived for their big day. Kids had to be registered ahead of time, and they had to be dropped off at the visiting room and picked up by the same adult, who could not come into the Camp—the kids had to come alone. Many families had managed to get the kids there from long distances—Maine, western Pennsylvania, Baltimore, and farther—and for some of them it might be the only time they saw their mother this year. Being processed in through the visiting room must have been scary for the kids, who then could go racing into their mother’s arms. After hugs and kisses, they could take their mother’s hand and walk down the stairs by the dining hall and out behind the Camp, to the track and the picnic tables and the outdoors and the whole day stretching in front of them.
    Our first customer shyly approached the face-painting booth with her mother, a coworker from the carpentry shop. “Piper, she wants a face painting.”
    The girl was probably about five, with curly golden-brown ponytails and chubby cheeks. “Okay, sweetie, what do you want?” I pointed at the sheet with the designs. She looked at me. I looked at her. I looked at her mother. “What does she want?”
    Mom rolled her eyes. “I don’t know, a rainbow?”
    The rainbow in the picture was coming out of a cloud. It looked kind of hard. “How about a heart with a cloud—in blue to match her dress?”
    “Great, whatever.”
    I cupped her tiny chin in my hand and tried to keep my otherhand steady. The final result was very big, and very… blue. Mom examined my handiwork and then gave me a look like
What the fuck?
But she cooed, “That’s so cute, baby,
que linda
!” and off they went. This was harder than it looked.
    But it got easier. After the kids’ shyness around strangers wore off, everyone wanted their face painted. The children were well behaved, waiting patiently in line and smiling sweetly when it was finally their turn and they got to pick their design. We were busy for hours, until we all finally got a lunch break. I went and ate a hamburger with Pop and watched families dotting the grass and the picnic tables. The little kids were playing together. Gisela’s teenage daughters were flirting with Trina Cox’s teenage sons, who were frankly pretty fine. Some of the mothers looked overwhelmed—they were no longer accustomed to supervising their own kids in a normal, day-to-day way. But everyone was having fun. I got that feeling again, the feeling I had when Natalie’s GED scores had come back, that tornado feeling inside. So much concentrated happiness, in such a sad place.
    After lunch I went back to the face-painting booth. Now some of the older kids started to approach.
    “Can you do a tattoo? Of a tiger, or a lightning bolt?”
    “Only if it’s okay with your mom.” Once I had secured maternal permission, I went to work “inking” thunderbolts and anchors and panthers on forearms and shoulders and calves, much to the delight of the postpubescent set. I showed off my own tattoo, which got gratifying oohs and aahs.
    The younger of Trina Cox’s two boys approached me. He was wearing an immaculate white New York Jets jersey, with matching new hat and green shorts.
    “That’s my team,” I said, as he took a seat in my tattoo parlor.
    He looked at me seriously. “Can you do Olde English?”
    “Olde English? You mean, like fancy lettering?”
    “Yeah, like the rappers have?”
    I looked around for his mother, but I didn’t see her. “I’ve never done that before, but I can try. What do you want it to say?”
    “Um… my nickname, John-John.”
    “Okay, John-John.” We sat knee to knee, and I held his forearm. I guessed he was about fourteen. “You want it lengthwise, or stacked?”
    He thought about it a little harder. “Maybe it should be just ‘John’?”
    “That sounds good. ‘John.’ I’m going to do it lengthwise, big.”
    “Okay.”
    Neither of us talked while I worked, bent over his arm. I was very careful, and tried to make it as cool-looking as I could, as if it really were