CHAPTER 3. #11187-424

On February 4, 2004, more than a decade after I had committed my crime, Larry drove me to the women’s prison in Danbury, Connecticut. We had spent the previous night at home; Larry had cooked me an elaborate dinner, and then we curled up in a ball on our bed, crying. Now we were heading much too quickly through a drab February morning toward the unknown. As we made a right onto the federal reservation and up a hill to the parking lot, a hulking building with a vicious-looking triple-layer razor-wire fence loomed up. If that was minimum security, I was fucked.

Larry pulled into one of the parking areas. We looked at each other, saucer-eyed. Almost immediately a white pickup with police lights on its roof pulled in after us. I rolled down my window.

“There’s no visiting today,” the officer told me.

I stuck my chin out, defiance covering my fear. “I’m here to surrender.”

“Oh. All right then.” He pulled out and drove away. Had he looked surprised? I wasn’t sure.

In the car I stripped off all my jewelry-the seven gold rings; the diamond earrings Larry had given me for Christmas; the sapphire ring from my grandmother; the 1950s man’s watch that was always around my wrist; all the earrings from all the extra holes that had so vexed my grandfather. I had on jeans, sneakers, and a long-sleeved T-shirt. With false bravado I said, “Let’s do this.”

We walked into the lobby. A placid woman in uniform was sitting behind the raised desk. There were chairs, some lockers, a pay phone, and a soda machine. It was spotless. “I’m here to surrender,” I announced.

“Hold on.” She picked up a phone and spoke to someone briefly. “Have a seat.” We sat. For several hours. It got to be lunchtime. Larry handed me a foie gras sandwich that he had made from last night’s leftovers. I wasn’t hungry at all but unwrapped it from the tinfoil and munched every gourmet bite miserably. I am fairly certain that I was the first Seven Sisters grad to eat duck liver chased with a Diet Coke in the lobby of a federal penitentiary. Then again, you never know.

Finally, a considerably less pleasant-looking woman entered the lobby. She had a dreadful scar down the side of her face and neck. “ Kerman?” she barked.

We sprang to our feet. “Yes, that’s me.”

“Who’s this?” she said.

“This is my fiancé.”

“Well, he’s gotta leave before I take you in.” Larry looked outraged. “That’s the rule, it prevents problems. You have any personal items?”

I had a manila envelope in my hands, which I handed to her. It contained my self-surrender instructions from the U.S. Marshals, some of my legal paperwork, twenty-five photographs (an embarrassing number of my cats), lists of my friends’ and family’s addresses, and a cashier’s check for $290 that I had been instructed to bring. I knew that I would need money in my prison account to make phone calls and buy… something? I couldn’t imagine what.

“Can’t take that,” she said, handing the check to Larry.

“But I called last week, and they told me to bring it!”

“He has to send it to Georgia, then they’ll process it,” she said with absolute finality.

“Where do we send it?” I asked. I was suddenly furious.

“Hey, do you have that Georgia address?” the prison guard asked over her shoulder to the woman at the desk while poking through my envelope. “What are these, pictures? You got any nudie Judies in here?” She raised an eyebrow in her already-crooked face. Nudie Judies? Was she for real? She looked at me as if to ask, Do I need to go through all these photos to see if you’re a dirty girl?

“No. No nudie Judies,” I said. Three minutes into my self-surrender, and I already felt humiliated and beaten.

“Okay, are you ready?” I nodded. “Well, say goodbye. Since you’re not married, it could be a while until he can visit.” She took a symbolic step away from us, I guess to give us privacy.

I looked at Larry and hurled myself into his arms, holding on as tight as I could. I had no idea when I would see him again, or what would happen to me in the next fifteen months.

He looked as if he was going to cry; yet at the same time he was also furious. “I love you! I love you!” I said into his neck and his nice oatmeal sweater that I had picked for him. He squeezed me and told me he loved me too.

“I’ll call you as soon as I can,” I croaked.

“Okay.”

“Please call my parents.”

“Okay.”

“Send that check immediately!”

“I know.”

“I love you!”

And then he left the lobby, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand. He banged the doors hard and walked quickly to the parking lot.

The prison guard and I watched him get into the car. As soon as he was out of sight, I felt a surge of fear.

She turned to me. “You ready?” I was alone with her and whatever else was waiting for me.

“Yeah.”

“Well, come on.”

She led me out the door Larry had just exited from, turning right and walking along that vicious, towering fence. The fence had multiple layers; between each layer was a gate through which we had to be buzzed. She opened the gate, and I stepped in. I looked back over my shoulder at the free world. The next gate buzzed. I stepped through again, wire mesh and barbed metal soaring all around me. I felt fresh, rising panic. This was not what I had expected. This was not how minimum-security camps had been described; this didn’t look at all like “Club Fed.” This was scaring the crap out of me.

We reached the door of the building and again were buzzed in. We walked through a small hallway into an institutional tiled room with harsh fluorescent light. It felt old, dingy, clinical, and completely empty. She pointed into a holding cell with benches bolted to the walls and metal screens over all visible sharp edges. “Wait in there.” Then she walked through a door into another room.

I sat on a bench facing away from the door. I stared at the small high window through which I could see nothing but clouds. I wondered when I would see anything beautiful again. I meditated on the consequences of my long-ago actions and seriously questioned why I was not on the lam in Mexico. I kicked my feet. I thought about my fifteen-month sentence, which did nothing to quell my panic. I tried not to think about Larry. Then I gave up and tried to imagine what he was doing, with no success.

I had only the most tenuous idea of what might happen next, but I knew that I would have to be brave. Not foolhardy, not in love with risk and danger, not making ridiculous exhibitions of myself to prove that I wasn’t terrified-really, genuinely brave. Brave enough to be quiet when quiet was called for, brave enough to observe before flinging myself into something, brave enough to not abandon my true self when someone else wanted to seduce or force me in a direction I didn’t want to go, brave enough to stand my ground quietly. I waited an unquantifiable amount of time while trying to be brave.

“ Kerman!” As I was unaccustomed to being called like a dog, it took her a number of shouts before I realized that meant “Move.” I jumped up and peered cautiously out of the holding cell. “Come on.” The prison guard’s rasp made it hard for me to understand what she was saying.

She led me into the next room, where her coworkers were lounging. Both were bald, male, and white. One of them was startlingly big, approaching seven feet tall; the other was very short. They both stared at me as if I had three heads. “Self-surrender,” my female escort said to them by way of explanation as she started my paperwork. She spoke to me like I was an idiot yet explained nothing during the process. Every time I was slow to answer or asked her to repeat a question, Shorty would snort derisively, or worse, mimic my responses. I looked at him in disbelief. It was unnerving, as it was clearly intended to be, and it pissed me off, which was a welcome switch from the fear I was battling.

The female guard continued to bark questions and fill out forms. As I stood at attention and answered, I could not stop my eyes from turning toward the window, to the natural light outdoors.

“Come on.”

I followed the guard toward the hallway outside the holding cell. She pawed through a shelf filled with clothing, then handed me a pair of granny panties; a cheap nylon bullet bra; a pair of elastic-waist khaki pants; a khaki top, like hospital scrubs; and tube socks. “What size shoe are you?” “Nine and a half.” She handed me a little pair of blue canvas slippers like you would buy on the street in any Chinatown.

She indicated a toilet and sink area behind a plastic shower curtain. “Strip.” I kicked off my sneakers, took off my socks, my jeans, my T-shirt, my bra, and my underpants, all of which she took from me. It was cold. “Hold your arms up.” I did, displaying my armpits. “Open your mouth and stick out your tongue. Turn around, squat, spread your cheeks and cough.” I would never get used to the cough part of this drill, which was supposed to reveal contraband hidden in one’s privates-it was just so unnatural. I turned back around, naked. “Get dressed.”

She put my own clothes in a box-they would be mailed back to Larry, like the personal effects of a dead soldier. The bullet bra, though hideous and scratchy, did fit. So in fact did all the khaki prison clothes, much to my amazement. She really had the eye. In minutes I was transformed into an inmate.

Now she seemed to soften toward me a bit. As she was fingerprinting me (a messy and oddly intimate process), she asked, “How long you been with that guy?”

“Seven years,” I replied sullenly.

“He know what you were up to?”

Up to? What did she know! My temper flared again as I said defiantly, “It’s a ten-year-old offense. He had nothing to do with it.” She seemed surprised by this, which I took as a moral victory.

“Well, you’re not married, so you probably won’t be seeing him for quite a while, not until he gets on your visitor list.”

The horrifying reality that I had no idea when I would see Larry again shut me right down. The prison guard was indifferent to the devastating blow she had just dealt me.

She had been distracted by the fact that no one seemed to know how to use the ID machine camera. Everyone took a turn poking at it, until finally they produced a photo that made me look remarkably like serial killer Aileen Wuornos. My chin was raised defiantly, and I looked like hell. I later figured out that everyone looks either thuggish and murderous or terrified and miserable in their prison ID photo. I’m proud to say that, against all odds, I fell into the former category, though I felt like the latter.

The ID card was red, with a bar code and the legend “U.S. Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Prisons-INMATE.” In addition to the unflattering photo, it also bore my new registration number in large numerals: 11187-424. The last three numbers indicated my sentencing district- Northern Illinois. The first five numbers were unique to me, my new identity. Just as I had been taught to memorize my aunt and uncle’s phone number when I was six years old, I now silently tried to commit my reg number to memory. 11187-424, 11187-424, 11187-424, 11187-424, 11187-424, 11187-424, 11187-424, 11187-424, 11187-424, 11187-424.

After the ID debacle, Ms. Personality said, “Mr. Butorsky’s gonna talk to you, but first go into medical.” She pointed into another small room.

Mr. Who? I went and stared out the window, obsessing about the razor wire and the world beyond it from which I had been taken, until a medic-a round Filipino man-came to see me. He performed the most basic of medical interviews, which went quickly, as I have been blessed with more or less perfect health. He told me he needed to perform a TB test, for which I extended my arm. “Nice veins!” he said with very genuine admiration. “No track marks!” Given his total lack of irony, I thanked him.

Mr. Butorsky was a compact, mustachioed fiftyish man, with watery, blinky blue eyes and, unlike the prison staff I had met so far, of discernible intelligence. He was leaning back in a chair, with paperwork spread out in front of him. It was my PSI-the presentencing investigation that the Feds do on people like me. It is supposed to document the basic facts of one’s crime, one’s prior offenses, one’s family situation and children, one’s history of substance abuse, work history, everything important.

“ Kerman? Sit down,” he gestured, looking at me in a way that I suspect was much practiced to be calculating, penetrating, and measuring. I sat. He regarded me for several seconds in silence. I kept my chin firm and didn’t look at him. “How are you doing?” he asked.

It was startling to have anyone show the slightest interest in how, exactly, I was doing. I felt a flood of gratitude in spite of myself. “I’m okay.”

“You are?”

I nodded, deciding this was a good situation for my tough act.

He looked out the window. “In a little bit I’m going to have them take you up to the Camp,” he began.

My brain relaxed a bit and my stomach unclenched. I followed his gaze out the window, feeling profound relief that I wouldn’t have to stay down here with evil Shorty.

“I’ll be your counselor at the Camp. You know I’ve been reading your file.” He gestured at my PSI on the desk. “Sort of unusual. Pretty big case.”

Was it? I realized I had absolutely no idea if it was a big case or not. If I was a big-time criminal, who exactly would my cellmates be?

“And it’s been a long time since you were involved in all that,” he continued. “That’s pretty unusual. I can tell you’ve matured since then.” He looked at me.

“Yeah, I guess so,” I muttered.

“Well, look, I’ve been working up at that Camp for ten years. I run that Camp. It’s my Camp, and there’s nothing that goes on up there that I don’t know about.”

I was embarrassed by how relieved I felt: I didn’t want to see this man, or any prison staffer, as my protector, but at the moment he was the closest thing to human I had encountered.

“We’ve got all types up there. What you really have to watch is the other inmates. Some of them are all right. No one’s going to mess with you unless you let them. Now, women, they don’t fight much. They talk, they gossip, they spread rumors. So they may talk about you. Some of these girls are going to think you think you’re better than them. They’re going to say, ‘Oh, she’s got money.’”

I felt uncomfortable. Was that how I came across? Was I going to be pegged as a snotty rich bitch?

“And there’s lesbians up there. They’re there, but they’re not gonna bother you. Some are gonna try and be your friend, whatever-just stay away from them! I want you to understand, you do not have to have lesbian sex. I’m old-fashioned. I don’t approve of any of that mess.”

I tried very hard not to smirk. Guess he didn’t read my file that closely. “Mr. Butorsky?”

“Yes?”

“I’m wondering when my fiancé and my mother can come to visit me?” I could not control the querulous tone in my voice.

“They’re both in your PSI, right?” My PSI detailed all the members of my immediate family, including Larry, who had been interviewed by the probation department.

“Yes, they’re all in there, and my father too.”

“Anyone who’s in your PSI is cleared to visit. They can come this weekend. I’ll make sure the list is in the visiting room.” He stood up. “You just keep to yourself, you’re gonna be fine.” He gathered up my paperwork and left.

I went out to retrieve my new creature comforts from the prison guard: two sheets, a pillowcase, two cotton blankets, a couple of cheap white towels, and a face cloth. These items were crammed into a mesh laundry bag. Add to that an ugly brown stadium coat with a broken zipper and a sandwich bag that contained a stubby mini-toothbrush, tiny packets of toothpaste and shampoo, and a rectangle of motel soap.

Heading out through the multiple gates of the monster fence, I felt elated that I would not be behind it, but now the mystery of the Camp was rushing toward me, unstoppable. A white minivan waited. Its driver, a middle-aged woman in army-issue-looking street clothes and sunglasses, greeted me warmly. She wore makeup and little gold hoops in her ears, and she looked like she could be a nice Italian-American lady called Ro from New Jersey. The prison guards are getting friendlier, I thought as I climbed into the passenger seat. She closed the door, and smiled encouragingly at me. She was chipper. I stared back at her.

She flipped up the sunglasses. “I’m Minetta. I’m an inmate too.”

“Oh!” I was flabbergasted that she was a prisoner, and she was driving-and wearing makeup!

“What’s your name-your last name? People go by their last names here.”

“ Kerman,” I replied.

“Is this your first time down?”

“My first time here?” I was confused.

“Your first time in prison.”

I nodded.

“You doin’ okay, Kerman?” she asked as she guided the minivan up a small hill. “It’s not so bad, you’re going to be all right. We’ll take care of you. Everyone’s okay here, though you’ve gotta watch out for the stealing. How much time do you have?”

“How much time?” I bleated.

“How long is your sentence?”

“Oh! Fifteen months.”

“That’s not bad. That’ll be over in no time.”

We circled to the back entrance of a long, low building that resembled a 1970s elementary school. She pulled up next to a handicapped ramp and stopped the car. Clutching my laundry bag, I followed her toward the building, picking through patches of ice while the cold penetrated my thin rubber soles. Small knots of women wearing identical ugly brown coats were smoking in the February chill. They looked tough, and depressed, and they all had on big, heavy black shoes. I noticed that one of them was hugely pregnant. What was a woman that pregnant doing in prison?

“Do you smoke?” Minetta asked.

“No.”

“Good for you! We’ll just get you your bed assignment and get you settled. There’s the dining hall.” She gestured to her left down several stairs. She was talking the entire time, explaining everything about Danbury Federal Prison Camp, none of which I was catching. I followed her up a couple of stairs and into the building.

“… TV room. There’s the education office, that’s the CO’s office. Hi, Mr. Scott! CO, that’s the correctional officer. He’s all right. Hey, Sally!” She greeted a tall white woman. “This is Kerman, she’s new, self-surrender.” Sally greeted me sympathetically with another “Are you okay?” I nodded, mute. Minetta pressed on. “Here’s more offices, those are the Rooms up there, the Dorms down there.” She turned to me, serious. “You’re not allowed down there, it’s out of bounds for you. You understand?”

I nodded, not understanding a thing. Women were surging all around me, black, white, Latino, every age, here in my new home, and they made a tremendous collective din in the linoleum and cinder-block interior. They were all dressed in khaki uniforms different from the one I was wearing, and they all wore huge, heavy-looking black work shoes. I realized that my attire made it glaringly obvious that I was new. I looked down at my little canvas slippers and shivered in my brown coat.

As we proceeded up the long main hall, several more women came up and greeted me with the standard “You’re new… are you all right?” They seemed genuinely concerned. I hardly knew how to respond but smiled weakly and said hello back.

“Okay, here’s the counselor’s office. Who’s your counselor?”

“Mr. Butorsky.”

“Oh. Well, at least he does his paperwork. Hold on, let me see where they put you.” She knocked on the door with some authority. Opening it, she stuck her head in, all business. “Where did you put Kerman?” Butorsky gave her a response that she understood, and she led me up to Room 6.

We entered a room that held three sets of bunk beds and six waist-high metal lockers. Two older women were lying on the lower bunks. “Hey, Annette, this is Kerman. She’s new, a self-surrender. Annette will take care of you,” she told me. “Here’s your bed.” She indicated the one empty top bunk with a naked mattress.

Annette sat up. She was a small, dark fiftyish woman with short, spiky black hair. She looked tired. “Hi,” she rasped in a Jersey accent. “How are you? What’s your name again?”

“It’s Piper. Piper Kerman.”

Minetta’s work was apparently done. I thanked her profusely, making no effort to hide my gratitude, and she exited. I was left with Annette and the other, silent woman, who was tiny, bald, and seemed much older, maybe seventy. I cautiously placed my laundry bag on my bunk and looked around the room. In addition to the steel bunk beds and lockers, everywhere I looked there were hangers with clothes, towels, and string bags dangling from them. It looked like a barracks.

Annette got out of bed and revealed herself to be about five feet tall. “That’s Miss Luz. I’ve been keeping stuff in your locker. I gotta get it out. Here’s some toilet paper-you gotta take it with you.”

“Thank you.” I was still clutching my envelope with my paperwork and photos in it, and now a roll of toilet paper.

“Did they explain to you about the count?” she asked.

“The count?” I was getting used to feeling completely idiotic. It was as if I’d been home-schooled my whole life and then dropped into a large, crowded high school. Lunch money? What’s that?

“The count. They count us five times a day, and you have to be here, or wherever you’re supposed to be, and the four o’clock count is a standing count, the other ones are at midnight, two A.M., five A.M., and nine P.M. Did they give you your PAC number?”

“PAC number?”

“Yeah, you’ll need it to make phone calls. Did they give you a phone sheet? NO? You need to fill it out so you can make phone calls. But maybe Toricella will let you make a call if you ask him. It’s his late night. It helps if you cry. Ask him after dinner. Dinner’s after the four o’clock count, which is pretty soon, and lunch is at eleven. Breakfast is from six-fifteen to seven-fifteen. How much time do you have?”

“Fifteen months… how much time do you have?”

“Fifty-seven months.”

If there was an appropriate response to this information, I didn’t know what it was. What could this middle-class, middle-aged Italian-American lady from Jersey possibly have done to get fifty-seven months in federal prison? Was she Carmela Soprano? Fifty-seven months! From my presurrender due diligence, I knew it was verboten to ask anyone about their crime.

She saw that I was unsure what to say and helped me out. “Yeah, it’s a lot of time,” she said sort of drily.

“Yeah.” I agreed. I turned to start pulling items out of my laundry bag.

That’s when she shrieked, “Don’t make your bed!!!”

“What?” I spun around, alarmed.

“We’ll make it for you,” she said.

“Oh… no, that’s not necessary, I’ll make it.” I turned back to the thin cotton-poly sheets I’d been issued.

She came over to my bunk. “Honey. We’ll. Make. The. Bed.” She was very firm. “We know how.”

I was completely mystified. I looked around the room. All five beds were very tidily made, and both Annette and Miss Luz had been lying on top of their covers.

“I know how to make a bed,” I protested tentatively.

“Listen, let us make the bed. We know how to do it so we’ll pass inspection.”

Inspection? No one told me anything about inspections.

“Inspection happens whenever Butorsky wants to do them-and he is insane,” Annette said. “He will stand on the lockers to try to see dust on the light fixtures. He will walk on your bed. He’s a nut. And that one”-she pointed to the bunk below mine-“doesn’t want to help clean!”

Uh-oh. I hated cleaning too but was certainly not about to risk the ire of my new roommates.

“So we have to make the beds every morning?” I asked, another penetrating question.

Annette looked at me. “No, we sleep on top of the beds.”

“You don’t sleep in the bed?”

“No, you sleep on top with a blanket over you.” Pause.

“But what if I want to sleep in the bed?”

Annette looked at me with the complete exasperation a mom shows a recalcitrant six-year-old. “Look, if you wanna do that, go ahead-you’ll be the only one in the whole prison!”

This sort of social pressure was irresistible; getting between the sheets wasn’t going to happen for the next fifteen months. I let go of the bed issue-the thought of hundreds of women sleeping on top of perfectly made military-style beds was too strange for me to deal with at that moment. Plus, somewhere nearby a man was bellowing. “Count time, count time, count time! Count time, ladies!” I looked at Annette, who looked nervous.

“See that red light?” Out in the hallway, over the officers’ station, was a giant red bulb that was now illuminated. “That light comes on during count. When that red light is on, you better be where you’re supposed to be, and don’t move until it goes off.”

Women were streaming back and forth in the hallway, and two young Latinas came hurrying into the room.

Annette did a brief round of introductions. “This is Piper.” They barely glanced at me.

“Where’s the woman who sleeps here?” I asked about my missing bunkmate.

“That one! She works in the kitchen, so they count her down there. You’ll meet her.” She grimaced. “Okay, shhhhh! It’s a stand-up count, no talking!”

The five of us stood silent by our bunks, waiting. The entire building was suddenly quiet; all I could hear was the jangling of keys and the thud of heavy boots. Eventually a man stuck his head into the room and… counted us. Then, several seconds later, another man came in and counted us. When he left, everyone sat down on beds and a couple of footstools, but I figured it wouldn’t be cool to sit on my absent bunkmate’s bed, so I leaned on my empty locker. Minutes passed. The two Latina women began to whisper to Miss Luz in Spanish.

Suddenly we heard, “Recount, ladies!” Everyone leaped back on their feet, and I stood at attention.

“They always screw it up,” muttered Annette under her breath. “How hard is it to count?”

We were counted again, this time with seeming success, and the payoff of inspections became apparent to me. “It’s suppertime,” said Annette. It was 4:30 in the afternoon, by New York City standards an unimaginably uncivilized time to eat dinner. “We’re last.”

“What do you mean, last?”

Over the PA system the CO was calling out numbers: “A12, A10, A23, go eat! B8, B18, B22, go eat! C2, C15, C23, go eat!”

Annette explained, “He’s calling honor cubes-they eat first. Then he calls the Dorms in order of how well they did in inspection. Rooms are always last. We always do the worst in inspection.”

I peered out the door at the women heading to the chow hall and wondered what an honor cube was but asked, “What’s for dinner anyway?”

“Liver.”

After the liver-and-lima-beans dinner, served in a mess hall that brought back every dreadful school-age cafeteria memory, women of every shape, size, and complexion flooded back into the main hall of the building, shouting in English and Spanish. Everyone seemed to be lingering expectantly in the hall, sitting in groups on the stairs or lining the landing. Figuring that I was supposed to be there too, I tried to make myself invisible and listen to the words swirling around me, but I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. Finally, I timidly asked the woman next to me.

“It’s mail call, honey!” she answered.

A very tall black woman up on the landing seemed to be handing out toiletries. Someone on my right gestured toward her. “Gloria’s going home, she’s down to a wake-up!” I stared at Gloria with renewed interest, as she tried to find someone to take a small purple comb off her hands. Going home! The idea of leaving was riveting to me. She looked so nice, and so happy, as she gave away all her things. I felt a tiny bit better, knowing that it was possible someday to go home from this awful place.

I wanted her purple comb very badly. It looked like the combs we used to carry in the back pockets of our jeans in junior high, that we’d whip out and use to fix our winged bangs. I stared at the comb, too shy to reach up and ask, and then it was gone, claimed by another woman.

A guard, different from the one Minetta had pointed out earlier, emerged from the CO’s office. He looked like a gay pornstar, with a bristling black crew cut and a scrub-brush mustache. He started bellowing “Mail call! Mail call!” Then he started giving out the mail. “Ortiz! Williams! Kennedy! Lombardi! Ruiz! Skelton! Platte! Platte! Platte! Wait a minute, Platte, there’s more. Mendoza! Rojas!” Each woman would step up to claim her mail, with a smile on her face, and then skitter away somewhere to read it-perhaps someplace with more privacy than I had yet observed? The hall’s population thinned as he worked through the bin of mail, until there were only hopefuls left. “Maybe tomorrow, ladies!” he shouted, turning the empty bin upside down.

After mail call I crept around the building, feeling vulnerable in my stupid little canvas slippers that so obviously marked me as new. My head was spinning with new information, and for the first moment in hours I was sort of alone with my own thoughts, which turned immediately to Larry and my parents. They must be freaking. I had to figure out how to let them know that I was okay.

Very timidly, I approached the closed door to the counselors’ office, clutching a blue phone sheet that Annette had shown me how to fill out, bubbling in the numbers of people I wanted permission to call on the pay phones at some future date. Larry’s cell phone, my family, my best friend Kristen, my lawyer. The lights in the office were on. I rapped softly, and there was a muffled snort from within. Gingerly I turned the handle.

The counselor named Toricella, who always wore a look of mild surprise, was blinking his little eyes at me, annoyed at my interruption.

“Mr. Toricella? I’m Kerman, I’m new. They said I should come talk to you…” I trailed off, swallowing.

“Is something wrong?”

“They said I should turn in my phone list… and I don’t have a PAC number…”

“I’m not your counselor.”

My throat was getting very tight, and there was no need to fake tears-my eyes were threatening to spill. “Mr. Toricella, they said maybe you might let me call my fiancé and let him know that I’m okay?” I was begging.

He looked at me, silent. Finally he grunted. “Come in and close the door.” My heart started pounding twice as hard. He picked up the phone and handed the receiver to me. “Tell me the number and I’ll dial it. Just two minutes!”

Larry’s cell phone rang, and I closed my eyes and willed him to answer it. If I lost this opportunity to hear his voice, I might die right on the spot.

“Hello?”

“Larry! Larry, it’s me!!”

“Baby, are you okay?” I could hear how relieved he was.

Now the tears were falling, and I was trying not to screw up my two minutes or scare Larry by totally losing it. I snuffled. “Yes, I’m okay. I’m really okay. I’m fine. I love you. Thank you for taking me today.”

“Honey, don’t be crazy. Are you sure you’re okay, you’re not just saying that?”

“No, I’m all right. Mr. Toricella let me call you, but I won’t be able to call you again for a while. But listen, you can come visit me this weekend! You should be on a list.”

“Baby! I’ll come on Friday.”

“So can Mom, please call her, and call Dad, call them as soon as we get off the phone and tell them you talked to me and tell them I’m okay. I won’t be able to call them for a while. I can’t make phone calls yet. And send in that money order right away.”

“I mailed it already. Baby, are you sure you’re okay? Is it all right? You would tell me if it wasn’t?”

“I’m okay. There’s a lady from South Jersey in my room, she’s nice. She’s Italian.”

Mr. Toricella cleared his throat.

“Darling, I have to go. I only have two minutes. I love you so much, I miss you so much!”

“Baby! I love you. I’m worried about you.”

“Don’t worry. I’m okay, I swear. I love you, darling. Please come see me. And call Mom and Dad!”

“I’ll call them as soon as we get off the phone. Can I do anything else, baby?”

“I love you! I have to go, honey!”

“I love you too!”

“Come see me on Friday, and thank you for calling my folks… I love you!”

I hung up the phone. Mr. Toricella watched me with something that looked like sympathy in his beady little eyes. “It’s your first time down?” he said.

After thanking him, I headed out into the hall wiping my nose on my arm, depleted but exponentially happier. I looked down at the doors of the forbidden Dorms and studiously examined the bulletin boards covered with incomprehensible information about events and rules I didn’t understand-laundry schedules, inmate appointments with various staffers, crochet permits, and the weekend movie schedule. This weekend’s film was Bad Boys II.

I avoided eye contact. Nonetheless women periodically accosted me: “You’re new? How are you doing, honey? Are you okay?” Most of them were white. This was a tribal ritual that I would see play out hundreds of times in the future. When a new person arrived, their tribe-white, black, Latino, or the few and far between “others”-would immediately make note of their situation, get them settled, and steer them through their arrival. If you fell into that “other” category-Native American, Asian, Middle Eastern-then you got a patchwork welcome committee of the kindest and most compassionate women from the dominant tribes.

The other white women brought me a bar of soap, a real toothbrush and toothpaste, shampoo, some stamps and writing materials, some instant coffee, Cremora, a plastic mug, and perhaps most important, shower shoes to avoid terrible foot fungi. It turned out that these were all items that one had to purchase at the prison commissary. You didn’t have the money to buy toothpaste or soap? Tough. Better hope that another prisoner would give it to you. I wanted to bawl every time another lady brought me a personal care item and reassured me, “It’ll be okay, Kerman.”

By now conflicting things were churning around in my brain and my guts. Had I ever been so completely out of my element as I was here in Danbury? In a situation where I simply didn’t know what to say or what the real consequences of a wrong move might be? The next year was looming ahead of me like Mount Doom, even as I was quickly learning that compared with most of these women’s sentences, fifteen months were a blip and I had nothing to complain about.

So though I knew I shouldn’t complain, I was bereft. No Larry, no friends, no family to talk to, to keep me company, to make me laugh, to lean on. Every time a random woman with a few missing teeth gave me a bar of deodorant soap I swung wildly from elation to despair at the loss of my life as I knew it. Had I ever been so completely at the mercy of the kindness of strangers? And yet they were kind.

The young woman who furnished my new shower shoes had introduced herself as Rosemarie. She was milky pale, with short curly brown hair and thick glasses over mischievous brown eyes. Her accent was instantly familiar to me-educated, but with a strong whiff of working-class Massachusetts. She knew Annette, who said she was Italian, and had made a point of greeting me several times already, and now she came by Room 6 to bring me reading material. “I was a self-surrender and I was terrified. You’re going to be okay,” she assured me.

“Are you from Massachusetts?” I asked shyly.

“My Bahston accent must be wicked bad. I’m from Nawh-wood.” She laughed.

That accent made me feel a lot better. We started talking about the Red Sox and her stint as a volunteer on Kerry’s last senatorial campaign.

“How long are you here for?” I asked innocently.

Rosemarie got a funny look on her face. “Fifty-four months. For Internet auction fraud. But I’m going to Boot Camp, so when you take that into account…” and she launched into a calculation of good time and reduction of sentence and halfway house time. I was shocked again, both by her casual revelation of her crime and by her sentence. Fifty-four months in federal prison for eBay fraud?

Rosemarie’s presence was comfortingly familiar-that accent, the love for Manny Ramirez, her Wall Street Journal subscription, all reminded me of places other than here.

“Let me know if you need anything,” she said. “And don’t feel bad if you need a shoulder to cry on. I cried nonstop for the first week I was here.”

I made it through the first night in my prison bed without crying. Truth was, I didn’t really feel like it anymore, I was too shocked and tired. Earlier I had sidled my way into one of the TV rooms with my back to the wall, but news of the Martha Stewart trial was on, and no one was paying any attention to me. Eyeing the bookshelf crammed with James Patterson, V. C. Andrews, and romance novels, I finally found an old paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice and retired to my bunk-on top of the covers, of course. I fell gratefully into the much more familiar world of Hanoverian England.

My new roommates left me alone. At ten P.M. the lights were turned off abruptly, and I slipped Jane Austen onto my locker and stared at the ceiling, listening to Annette’s respirator machine-she had suffered a massive heart attack shortly after arriving in Danbury and had to use it at night to breathe. Miss Luz, almost imperceptible in the other bottom bunk, was recovering from breast cancer treatment and had no hair on her tiny head. I was beginning to suspect that the most dangerous thing you could do in prison was get sick.

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