Orange is the New Black - Страница 39

I was lucky to have a job waiting for me when I went home: a generous friend had created a position for me at the company he ran. Every time he came to visit me, Dan would say, “Would you hurry up and get out of here? The marketing department needs you!”

Hardly any of the women I knew in Danbury were as fortunate. The top three worries for women getting released from prison are usually: reuniting with their children (if they are a single mother, they have often lost their parental rights); housing (a huge problem for people with a record); and employment. I had written enough jailhouse résumés by now to know that a lot of the ladies had only worked in the (enormous) underground economy. Outside the mainstream, they didn’t have the first notion of how to break into it. So far, nothing about prison was changing that reality.

A bald guy from the central BOP office in Washington, who seemed nervous, opened the Fair and welcomed us. Programs were handed out, folded photocopies with a drawing of an owl on the cover. Below the owl it read: BE WISE-Women In Secured Employment. On the back of the program were Andy Rooney quotes.

Various companies had committed to participating in the event, many of them nonprofits. The day would include a panel discussion on “Emerging Jobs in the Workforce & How to Land One,” mock job interviews, and Mary Wilson, the legendary Motown singer from the Supremes, was going to deliver a motivational speech. That I had to see. But first, Professional Appareling!

Professional Appareling was run by Dress for Success, the nonprofit that helps disadvantaged women get business-appropriate clothes. A jovial middle-aged woman briefed us on the dos and don’ts of outfits for job interviews, then asked for volunteers. Vanessa almost broke her seatmate’s nose waving her arm madly, so the woman had no choice but to pick her. And then in the blink of an eye I found myself standing at the front of the room with my Amazonian neighbor, Delicious, and Pom-Pom. “These lovely ladies are going to help us to demonstrate the dos and don’ts,” said the volunteer brightly.

She herded us into the bathroom, then passed out togs. She gave Delicious a sharp, almost Japanese-looking black suit; Pom-Pom, a pink suit that looked like she was going to church in the South. I got a hideously dowdy and itchy burgundy outfit. And for Vanessa? A fuchsia silk cocktail dress with beading on the chest. “Hurry up ladies!”

We were like schoolgirls getting into costume for the senior show, giggling and fussing with the unfamiliar street clothes. “Is this right?” asked Delicious, and we fixed the long asymmetrical skirt on her. Pom-Pom looked pretty in pink-who knew?

But Vanessa was in a state of distress. “Piper, I can’t zip this, help me!” My neighbor’s pride and joy were busting out of the too-small cocktail dress. She looked like she was going to cry if she didn’t get to wear it.

“Oh, man, Vanessa, I don’t know. Okay, hold still… now suck it in!” I inched the zipper up. “Suck it in, bitch, it’s almost there!” She arched her back, sucked wind, and I got the back of the dress closed over the broad V of her shoulders. “Just don’t breathe, and you’ll be fine.”

The four of us looked each other over. “P-I Piper, put your hair up. Be more professional and shit,” advised Delicious. I scraped my hair back into a quick bun. Now it was time to show off.

We each got a turn on the catwalk, much to the glee of our fellow prisoners, who whooped and whistled. They went bananas when they caught sight of Vanessa, who basked in the glory, tossing her curls. Then we were lined up, and the volunteer explained who was a job-interview do, and who was a don’t. Delicious’s outfit was deemed too “edgy”; Pom-Pom’s was too “sweet.” Vanessa looked crestfallen when she heard that she was wearing “the last kind of thing you would want for an interview.”

“What kind of job are we talking about?” she asked plaintively.

My ugly tweed librarian outfit was lauded as the most work-appropriate.

After the dress-up fun, a panel of businesswomen spoke seriously about growing sectors of the economy that had entry-level jobs for workers, like home health care. But there was nervous rumbling among the audience. When the Q &A time came, hands shot up.

“How do we get trained for these kinds of jobs?”

“How do we know the jobs that are open out there?”

“How do we find out who will hire women with a record?”

One of the panelists tried to answer several things at once. “I recommend you spend quite a bit of time on the computer researching these companies and industries, looking at online job listings, and trying to locate training opportunities. I hope you have some access to the Internet?”

This caused a mild rumble. “We don’t even have any computers!”

The panelists looked at each other and frowned. “I’m surprised to hear that. You don’t have a computer lab, or any kind of computer training here?”

The bald BOP representative spoke up nervously. “Of course they do, all units are supposed to-”

This elicited outright shouts from the ladies. Rochelle from B Dorm stood up. “We do not have any computers up in that Camp! No sir!”

Sensing that he might have a situation on his hands, the BOP suit tried to be conciliatory. “I’m not sure why that would be, miss, but I promise I’ll look into it!”

Mary Wilson turned out to be a lovely petite woman in an immaculate soft brown pantsuit. Right from the jump she held the room in the palm of her hand. She didn’t really talk about work. She talked about life, and a couple times she burst into snippets of song. She mostly told stories of trials and tribulations and battling adversity and Diana Ross. But what was striking about Ms. Wilson, and was also true of the other outsiders who volunteered their time that day, was that she spoke to us prisoners with great respect, as if our lives ahead had hope and meaning and possibility. After all these months at Danbury, this was a shocking novelty.

MARTHA STEWART was still on everyone’s mind. Hysteria had been building on the outside and the inside as to where she would serve her short sentence, and what would happen to her. She had asked her judge to be sent to Danbury, so that her ninety-year-old mother in Connecticut could easily visit her. Her judge had no say over it at all, however. The Danbury (or Washington) powers-that-be in the Bureau of Prisons didn’t want her here, perhaps because they didn’t want close media scrutiny on the facility. The Camp had been “closed” to new inmates since her conviction, allegedly “full,” although we had more empty beds as every week passed.

A lot of nasty things had been written in the press about us. I wasn’t in the least bit surprised, but the women around me were upset, especially the middle-class ones. An article came out in People calling us “the scum of the earth” and speculating about the beat-downs and abuse Martha might suffer.

Annette turned to me after mail call, anguished by her copy. “I have been subscribing to People magazine for over thirty-five years. And now I’m the scum of the earth? Are you the scum of the earth, Piper?”

I said I didn’t think so. But the angst over People was nothing compared to the shock waves that rocked the Camp on September 20. I came up from the track in the early evening to find a cluster of A Dorm residents around Pop, cursing and shaking their heads over a newspaper. “What’s up?” I asked.

“You’re not going to believe this, Piper,” said Pop. “You remember that crazy French bitch?”

On September 19 the Sunday Hartford Courant had published a front-page story-we always got newspapers a day behind, so the institution could “control the flow of information.” Staff writer Lynne Tuohy had gotten an exclusive with a recently released Camper, “Barbara,” whom Martha had contacted for the inside scoop on life in the Danbury Camp. And “Barbara” had some interesting things to say.

“Once the shock of being in jail was over, it became a holiday,” Barbara said in an interview after her talk with Stewart. “I didn’t have to cook. I didn’t have to clean. I didn’t have to shop. I didn’t have to drive. I didn’t have to buy gas. They have an ice machine, ironing boards. It was like a big hotel.”

It was Levy, all right. After being whisked away to testify against her chiseler ex-boyfriend, she had reappeared in the Camp for one short week in June, and then she was released, her six-month sentence over. Apparently her stay had been far more enjoyable than she had let on when we had the pleasure of her company. She was singing the prison’s praises in the paper, going on about how much she had enjoyed the “wide range of classes” on offer plus:

“two libraries with a wide array of books and magazines, including Town and Country and People.” The food, Barbara said, was nothing short of “amazing.”

“This is a place that is so magnificent,” she said.

I pictured Levy, swollen with hives, looking like the Elephant Man, crying every single day over her six-month sentence and sneering at anyone she thought was not “classy.”

“I had my hair done every week,” Barbara said. “At home I don’t take care of me. I take care of my kids. I take care of my house. I had time there to take care of me. When I came home, I raised my standard of living a little bit.”

She hastened to add that the massages “are on the up-and-up,” and laughs when friends ask whether she was “attacked”-sexually assaulted-during her stay. “I’d say, ‘Are you kidding? Most people there were so classy.’”

The reporter got many minor facts wrong, such as that there were four nuns resident, and that we could buy CD players at the commissary. Women were outraged by the false claim that we could buy Häagen-Dazs ice cream. The Camp freaked out, issuing loud threats against the now-free Levy. Boo Clemmons was beside herself.