Seeing this, Gay Pornstar bellowed across the room, pointing, “Hey!!! One more time and you’re outta here!!!” Every head turned to stare silently.

Larry was rattled. “What the hell is wrong with that guy?” He tried to grab my knee under the table.

“That’s just what they’re like, darling-don’t touch me! He’s not fucking around!”

It killed me to snap at him like that, when all I wanted was for him to touch me, but Larry didn’t understand that pushing boundaries in prison can have dire consequences. These men had the power not only to end our visits but to lock me up in solitary on a whim; my word against theirs would count for little.

Afterward, still traumatized, I asked Elena, one of the prisoners who worked in the visiting room, what the hell had happened. “Oh, the little guy was watching you, and he was turning red,” she said, “so Rotmensen got pissed off when he saw that his buddy was embarrassed seeing you kiss.”

The next week the regular CO was back on duty. “I heard you were out of line last week,” she said, patting me down before allowing me in to see Larry. “I’ll be watching you.”

In such a harsh, corrupt, and contradictory environment, one walks a delicate balance between the prison’s demands and your own softness and sense of your own humanity. Sometimes at a visit with Larry I would be overwhelmed, suddenly overcome with sadness about my life at that moment. Could our relationship weather this insanity? Larry had been steadfast for all those years waiting for me to go to prison; now that I was here, could we make it through the real test? Our minutes in the visiting room were so precious, we could never bear to discuss anything difficult or negative. We wanted every second in that room to be sweet and perfect.

Different women had different ways of dealing with prison’s impact on their relationships. On a sleepy weekend afternoon I stood by the microwave with my friend Rosemarie. She was in the midst of an elaborate cooking project, making gooey cheese and chicken enchiladas, and I was “helping.” Although I could be counted on to chop an onion (tricky with a butter knife), mainly my help took the form of indulging her passion for talking about our future weddings. Rosemarie was engaged to a sweet, quiet guy who visited her faithfully every week, and she was obsessed with wedding planning. She had subscriptions to all the bridal rags, which piled up in her cubicle, and she loved to dream and scheme about her Big Day.

She also wanted to plan for my Big Day-Larry and I had been engaged for almost two years. But I was hardly interested in a traditional ceremony, plus I knew we weren’t getting married anytime soon, and this colored my willingness to take wedding planning very seriously. Which drove Rosemarie nuts. When I told her I would wear a red bridal dress, she squealed with outrage.

On this particular day, Rosemarie was preoccupied with my headgear. If I was not going to wear a veil (a shame, she thought), then a tiara was most advisable. I snorted, “Rosemarie, do you really think I am putting a crown on my head to walk down the aisle?” In the heart of a budding wedding planner, anything is possible.

As Rosemarie filled tortillas and argued passionately in favor of seed pearls, Carlotta Alvarado approached: she wanted to know who was in line for the microwave. This was a strategic question. Carlotta, a committed system-gamer, was assessing who would let her cut the line, and Rosemarie was a definite possibility. The two of them worked together training seeing-eye dogs, and while Carlotta, an around-the-way girl from the Bronx, and Rosemarie, a preppy geek from New England, didn’t seem to have a lot in common, they got along very well. Rosemarie agreed to put the enchiladas on pause so Carlotta could fry some onions with Sazón, the Latin seasoning that makes everything orange, salty, and spicy.

“Carlotta’s engaged too!” said Rosemarie as the onions sizzled. Engagements were rare around the Camp.

“That’s great, Carlotta. What’s your man’s name?”

Carlotta beamed. “Rick-he’s my sweetie, he comes to visit me all the time. Yeah, I’m getting married. I can hardly wait.”

“It’s so exciting!” sang Rosemarie. Then she grinned. “Tell her what you told me, Carlotta.”

Carlotta smiled triumphantly. “Yeah, I can’t wait to get married. You know why?”

I didn’t.

Carlotta stepped back, to better deliver the truth that, when she contemplated holy matrimony, made her heart beat faster. She pushed her palm toward me, index finger pointing skyward for emphasis. “So bitches can hate!”

Er… bitches?

“That’s right. I’m going back to my neighborhood, and I’m going to get married, and that will show all those bitches who talk shit about me. I’ll be married, with my man, and you know what they’ll have? No man. A bunch of babies by a bunch of guys. I cannot wait to get married, so those bitches can just hate on me!”

I studied Carlotta, her pretty face bright and animated as she envisioned her future-one that included her man, some bitches, and a ring around her finger. I was fairly certain that she would get what she wanted. Among all the women at the Camp, she was one who could always figure out an angle. She had a primo prison job training the service dogs, she had all the contraband onions she needed, she ran a side business doing pedicures, and rumor was that she even had a cell phone secreted somewhere in the prison, so she could call her man on the outside without waiting in line and paying the prison’s sky-high rates. She was a smart cookie, with an unsentimental eye on the world. Rick, I concluded, was a lucky guy.

AS FOR me, I felt caught between the world I lived in now and the world to which I longed to return. I saw that those who couldn’t come to terms with their imprisonment had a very difficult time with staff and with other prisoners. They were in constant conflict because they couldn’t reconcile themselves with their fellow prisoners. I saw young women who had been running wild in poverty most of their lives rail against authority, and middle-aged, middle-class women who were aghast to find themselves living among people they thought were beneath them. I thought they were all unnecessarily unhappy. I hated the control the prison exercised over my life, but the only way to fight it was in my own head. And I knew I wasn’t better than any other woman locked up in there, even the ones I didn’t like.

On the other hand, some people were way too comfortable in prison. They seemed to have forgotten the world that exists on the outside. You try to adjust and acclimate, yet remain ready to go home every single day. It’s not easy to do. The truth is, the prison and its residents fill your thoughts, and it’s hard to remember what it’s like to be free, even after a few short months. You spend a lot of time thinking about how awful prison is rather than envisioning your future. Nothing about the daily workings of the prison system focuses its inhabitants’ attention on what life back on the outside, as a free citizen, will be like. The life of the institution dominates everything. This is one of the awful truths of incarceration, the fact that the horror and the struggle and the interest of your immediate life behind prison walls drives the “real world” out of your head. That makes returning to the outside difficult for many prisoners.

So I became obsessed with the almost daily departures and found myself asking Who’s going home this week? I kept a running tally in my mind, and if I liked the person, I would head up to the front door of the visiting room after breakfast to wave them off, a ritual observed by a gaggle of prisoners for every departure. It was bittersweet to watch them leave, because I would have given anything to be going with them. People planned their going-home outfit, which someone from the outside would ship to Receiving and Discharge (R &D) for them; their friends would prepare a special meal; and they would start to give away all their stuff-commissary clothing and “good” uniforms and blankets and other things of value that they had accumulated while doing their time. I fantasized about giving all my stuff away.