Orange is the New Black - Страница 30

“Who is it?” asked Boo. A lot of shoulders were shrugged, which irked her.

“It’s Piper!” shouted Sheena and Amy in triumphant unison.

“I don’t get it,” Trina pouted at her girlfriend. “That don’t make no sense.”

Boo was exasperated. “‘She lives right here between you and me’-that means she lives in B Dorm. ‘And when you see her, you think of the sea,’ that’s her tattoo. Get it? See, sea? The fish?!”

“Oh yeah!” Lili Cabrales grinned, “That’s my Dolphin!”

CHAPTER 10. Schooling the OG

I had learned a lot since arriving in prison five months ago: how to clean house using maxipads, how to wire a light fixture, how to discern whether a duo were best friends or girlfriends, when to curse someone in Spanish, knowing the difference between “feelin’ it” (good) and “feelin’ some kinda way” (bad), the fastest way to calculate someone’s good time, how to spot a commissary ho a mile away, and how to tell which guards were players and which guards were nothin’ nice. I even mastered a recipe from the prison’s culinary canon: cheesecake.

I made my first effort at cooking for someone’s going-home party, preparing a prison cheesecake according to my coworker Yvette’s Spanish-and-hand-gesture instructions. Unlike a lot of prison cookery, most of the necessary ingredients could be bought at the commissary.

Prison Cheesecake

Prepare a crust of crushed graham crackers mixed with four pats of margarine stolen from the dining hall. Bake it in a Tupperware bowl for about a minute in the microwave, and allow it to cool and harden.

Take one full round of Laughing Cow cheese, smash with a fork, and mix with a cup of vanilla pudding until smooth. Gradually mix in one whole container of Cremora, even though it seems gross. Beat viciously until smooth. Add lemon juice from the squeeze bottle until the mixture starts to stiffen. Note: this will use most of the plastic lemon.

Pour into the bowl atop the crust, and put on ice in your bunkie’s cleaning bucket to chill until ready to eat.

It was a little squishy the first time; I should have used more lemon juice. But it was a great success. Yvette raised her eyebrows when she tasted it. “¡Buena!” she proclaimed. I was very proud.

Prison cuisine and survival techniques were all well and good, but it was time to learn something more productive. Pleasantly but persistently, Yoga Janet had been inviting me to join her class, and when I wrenched my back, she iced it while I lay prone on my bunk. “You really should learn yoga with us,” she gently chided me. “Running is too hard on the body.”

I wasn’t going to give up the track, but I started descending to the little gym for yoga class several times a week. Larry laughed when I told him. He had been trying to get me to try yoga at a fancy downtown studio for years, and he found it both entertaining and annoying that it had taken incarceration to get me into Downward Dog.

The field house gym had a rubber floor. At first we used undersize blue foam mats, but with great effort and persistence Yoga Janet got proper orange yoga mats donated to the Camp from the outside. Tall and calm and down to earth, Janet managed to create the sense that she was teaching us something important and valuable without taking herself too seriously.

Camila from B Dorm was always there. Alongside all the many misfit toys at Danbury, Camila was instantly noticeable. My friend Eric spotted her in the visiting room and declared her “the hottest woman in prison in America -no offense to you, Pipes.” She glowed with health and radiated beauty; tall, slim, with a glossy black mane, tawny brown skin, a pointed chin, and huge dark eyes, she was always laughing, loudly. I was drawn to her willingness to laugh, but that very quality was the subject of derision among some of the white women.

“Those Puerto Ricans, it’s like they don’t even know they’re in jail, they’re always laughing and dancing like idiots!” sneered tall, mopey Sally, who wanted everyone to be as miserable as she was. And as ignorant-Camila was Colombian, not Puerto Rican. Camila was a natural at yoga, easily mastering warrior poses and backbends and giggling helplessly with me as we tried to balance on one leg while twisting the other around it.

On the mat next to Camila would be Ghada. Ghada was one of the handful of Muslim women I met in prison. It was difficult to guess her age-her face was deeply creased, but she had an air of tremendous vitality-she might be in her fifties or sixties. Her hair was salt-and-pepper, and she hid it under makeshift head scarves-sometimes a pillowcase, sometimes a contraband cloth napkin. I never quite got the story straight, but it seemed that the guards frequently confiscated her head scarves. We were not allowed to wear “doo-rags” when in uniform, only commissary-purchased baseball caps or prison-issue wool knit caps that itched like hell. I thought surely there should be some exception for Muslim women. I could never figure out if I was mistaken and the hijab was forbidden in the prison system, or if Ghada just couldn’t get it together to obtain a prison-approved head scarf. She wasn’t much for rules.

Ghada was from Lebanon but had lived in South America for many years and so was fluent in Spanish, with pretty tenuous English. Because of her long residence in Latin America, Ghada was an honorary Spanish mami. This was a good thing, because she was totally unaccepting of the authority of the staff and uninterested in the institution’s rules, and only the monumental efforts of her friends to protect her from the consequences of that indifference kept her out of the SHU. This won her both annoyance and respect from her fellow prisoners. No one seemed to know what Ghada was down for, but we could all agree that she was another OG. Ghada loved Yoga Janet, which was the primary reason she came to class. She was not all that interested in doing the poses properly, but she brought great enthusiasm to the ritual.

The final member of our ragtag band of aspiring yogis was Sister Platte, who took proper form very seriously. Sister had tight hips, so twists and Pigeon Pose prompted a knitted brow, and if she had indulged in the greasy home fries at the midday meal, the forward bends would give her trouble. When I sank into a deep lunge, the tiny nun would study me, plaintively wondering, “What am I doing wrong?”

The five of us had a camaraderie that made those few hours among the most enjoyable of the week. Every class we would meet to claim the peace that, at Danbury, could only be found within one’s own body. Each session ended with Janet’s final relaxation, when she spoke soothingly to us of the work we had just completed, and the things we had to be grateful for every day, together in prison. And every single week Ghada would fall asleep within minutes during final relaxation, snoring loudly until someone woke her.

ONE EVENING Miss Mahoney, the cheerful education administrator from down the hill, made a lot of people very happy. Miss Mahoney was one of the few prison staffers who seemed to be on our side. As near as I could tell, she was one of the education department’s few saving graces. She did have an annoying habit of trying to be “down on tha mic” when she was on the PA system. On this particular evening she announced that a gender awareness class would be offered in the dining hall. What exactly was going to be conveyed there was unclear.

Then she got to the important matters: “Would the following ladies please report to the CO’s office for their GED test results…” And you could just tell from her voice that the news was good for every name called.

“Malcolm!” Mahoney called.

I jumped out of my bunk. Natalie had taken the GED test approximately a dozen times and was definitely way past due to pass it. She got nervous during the testing, and time and again the math section had proved her bête noir. Where was Natalie?

When I got to the main hall, there were already screams of joy, and women were pouring out of all of the Rooms and Dorms. When a woman of twenty-five, thirty-five, forty-five has struggled to earn her high school diploma in prison, taking pretest after pretest and trying to learn in a poorly run program and classes full of every imaginable delinquent student behavior, and then actually passes, it is a victory. Some of these women had dropped out of school thirty years before and were finally getting one of the only positive things-one of the only measures of achievement-one can earn in prison. Plus, it meant that these women could finally earn above the lowest pay grade at their prison jobs-if you didn’t have your GED, you couldn’t earn over fourteen cents an hour, which was barely enough to pay for toothpaste and soap. Everything came out of our prison accounts-hygiene items, phone calls, fines. If a prisoner didn’t have her GED and didn’t have money coming in from outside, she was screwed. Natalie had toiled for many years as a skilled baker in that prison kitchen, a treasured member of the cooking staff, and yet she could never be paid more than $5.60 a week for forty hours of work.

Where was Miss Natalie? Her name had been called five minutes ago, but I didn’t see her in the throng of jubilant, shouting, laughing women in the hall. Where was my enigmatic bunkie, that supremely self-possessed woman? I knew how badly Natalie wanted that diploma, I suspected it hurt her that she had struggled for so long to pass that math section. With embarrassed dignity, she had declined my offers of study help. This was her moment! Could she possibly be hiding, ashamed to join the orgy of congratulations and illegal hugs taking place in the hallway?