Orange Is the New Black

going to be permanent. He was quiet, watching me and maybe imagining what it might feel like to get a real tattoo. Finally I sat up, satisfied. But was he?
    I got a big smile. He admired his arm. “Thank you!” John-John was a sweet kid. He ran off to show his older brother, the football star.
    In the afternoon, near the end of the scheduled activities, it was time for the prison-made piñatas stuffed with candy and little trinkets. Breaking them open was supervised by the jerk from the commissary, who was uncharacteristically nice to all of the kids. John-John, blindfolded, whaled on the Pokémon piñata I had decorated until it burst, giving up its goodies to the throng of children. Now the moment we had all been trying to put out of our minds was drawing very close: the end of the day and the goodbyes. Kids who had traveled from far away, gotten closer to their moms than they had been all year, and then eaten a bunch of candy could hardly be blamed for shedding tears when they had to leave, even if they were “too big for that.” At dinner the mothers appeared subdued and exhausted, if they came to the chow hall at all. I am just glad that I was too busy to think all day because afterward, curled up in a ball in my bunk, I also cried and cried.
    O NE MORNING I checked the callout and saw that I had OBGYN next to my name.
    “Oof, girl, the annual gynecologist! You can refuse the exam,” commented Angel, who was also checking the callout and always had something to say.
    Why should I refuse it? I asked.
    “It’s a
man.
Almost everyone refuses it because of that,” Angel explained.
    I was horrified. “That’s ridiculous. It’s probably the most important exam most of these women could have all year! I mean, of course a prison for fourteen hundred women should bring in a female gynecologist, but still!”
    Angel shrugged. “Whatever. I’m not having no man do that shit.”
    “Well, I don’t care if it’s a man or not,” I announced. “I’m getting a checkup.”
    I reported to the medical office at my appointed time, feeling smug about getting my money’s worth out of the system. My smugness evaporated when the doctor called me into the room that served as his exam room. He was a white man who looked to be in his eighties and whose voice quavered. He commanded me, irritated, to “take off all of your clothes, wrap yourself in the paper sheet, and climb up on the examining table. Put your feet in the stirrups and slide all the way down. I’ll be right back!”
    In a minute I was stripped down to my sports bra, cold and freaked out. The paper sheet was inadequate covering for my body. I should have had a robe on, or at least my T-shirt. The doctor knocked, then entered. I blinked at the ceiling, trying to pretend that this was not happening.
    “Slide down,” he barked, getting his instruments ready. “Relax, I need you to relax!”
    Let me just say, it was horrible. And it hurt. When it was over, and the old man gone, departed with a bang of the door, I was left clutching that paper sheet around me, feeling just like this prison system wanted me to—utterly powerless, vulnerable, alone.
    T HE WORK in construction was a lot more physically challenging than being an electrician. I got stronger and stronger, lifting extension ladders and paint cans and two-by-fours, loading and unloading the pickup. By the end of August we were almost finished with our work preparing the warden’s house for its new resident, painting the garagedoor bright red and cleaning up the postconstruction debris. It was an old New England house that had been expanded a couple of times, with low ceilings and tiny upstairs bedrooms, but it was comfortable enough. It was nice to spend time in a house, after months of living in a barracks. At the far edge of the prison grounds, my coworkers and I would scatter around the empty house to finish various projects.
    One afternoon, alone in the upstairs bathroom, I caught my reflection in the big mirror with surprise. I looked as though years had fallen away from me, shed like dry old snakeskin. I took off my white baseball cap and pulled my hair out of its ponytail and looked at myself again. I locked the bathroom door. Then I took off my khaki shirt and my white T-shirt and shucked off my pants. I was standing in my white sports bra, granny panties, and steel-toes. I took those off. I looked at my own body in the mirror, seeing myself naked for the first time in seven months. In