ONE OF the many contraband items I had in my possession was nail polish. There had been a time when it was sold on commissary, but now it was a banned item. Yoga Janet had given me a bottle of gorgeous bright magenta polish, which my pedicurist Rose Silva openly coveted. I promised that I would give it to her when I went home, but for now I kept it for myself and for Yoga Janet, who also loved beautiful toes. Any self-respecting New York woman has a good pedicure, even if she’s in the clink.

I had been Rose’s customer for a while now. That there were prison pedicurists was one of the few true things I had gleaned in my pre-prison research, along with the strong recommendation that if you were going to avail yourself of their services, you had better buy your own tools from the commissary. The prison population has a high incidence of blood-borne diseases like HIV and hepatitis, and you don’t want to risk an infection of any kind.

When I first got to the Camp, I was far too shy to request a pedicure, though I admired Annette’s gold toenails. “I only go to Rose,” she explained. There was actually only one other option to Rose, and that was Carlotta Alvarado-Pop was among Carlotta’s clients. Between the two of them they split the market. Prison pedis are strictly a word-of-mouth business, and in this case prisoners were fiercely loyal.

I had my first pedi back in the chilly early spring. Annette had given it to me as a gift. “I got you a pedicure with Rose Silva, I can’t stand looking at your toes in those flip-flops anymore.” A week later I dutifully reported to one of the Rooms’ bathrooms off the main hall to rendezvous with Rose, armed with my own pedicure tools-cuticle clippers, orange sticks, foot file (all of these were sold by the commissary, but no colors of nail polish). Rose arrived with her own toolkit, including towels, a square plastic basin, and an array of polishes, some in decidedly odd colors. I felt very awkward, but Rose had the gift of gab and was businesslike.

Rose and I quickly established that we were both from New York, she from Brooklyn and me from Manhattan, and that she was Italian-Puerto Rican, born-again, and serving thirty months after getting caught trying to bring two keys of coke through the Miami airport. She had a no-nonsense briskness and liked to clown. She also gave a meticulous pedicure and a damn good foot massage. No one is supposed to touch you in prison, so the intimacy of a languorous foot rub, intended to please, almost sent me into ecstatic tears the first time. “Whoa, honey. Take some deep breaths!” she advised. For all this Rose charged five dollars of commissary goods-she would let me know on shopping day what to buy her. I was hooked. I was a customer.

Rose’s latest effort on my feet was definitely her masterpiece so far. It was a pale-pink French pedicure with magenta and white cherry blossoms added on my big toes. I couldn’t stop looking at my toes in my flip-flops, they were so cotton-candy fabulous.

DESPITE THE groove that I had settled into, I still had flashes of irritation with my fellow prisoners, which troubled me. In the gym I nearly lost my temper with Yoga Janet during class when she insisted that yes, I could get my foot behind my head if I just tried a little harder.

“No, I can’t,” I snapped. “My foot is not going behind my head. Period.”

Being among many people who very pointedly couldn’t or wouldn’t exercise much self-control was taxing, and I meditated a great deal more on self-control. Sitting there in prison, I heard a lot of horror stories, of women with many children they loved but couldn’t handle, of families with both parents locked away for long years, and I thought about the millions of children who are put through terrible experiences because of their parents’ poor choices. Coupled with the government’s crap response to the drug trade, which perpetuated the damaging myth that they could control the supply of drugs when demand was so strong, it seemed an enormous amount of totally unproductive misery, which could only come back to hurt us all later. I thought about my own parents, about Larry, and about what I was putting them through right now. This was the penitence that sometimes happens in the penitentiary. It was emotionally overwhelming, and when I saw women still making bad choices day to day in the Camp, or simply acting objectionably, it upset me.

I was pretty staunch in maintaining an “us and them” attitude about the prison staff. Some of them seemed to like me, and I thought they treated me better than they did some other inmates, which I considered rotten. But when I saw other prisoners behaving in ways that challenged my sense of unity, for lack of a better term, behaving in petty or ignorant or just plain antisocial ways, I really had a hard time with it. It drove me a little nuts.

I took this all as a sign that I was too engrossed in prison life, that the “real world” was fading too much into the background, and I probably needed to read the paper more religiously and write more letters. Focusing on the positive was hard, but I knew that I had found the right women at Danbury to help me do it. A little voice in my head reminded me that I might never see anything quite like this again, and that immersing myself in my current situation, experiencing it, and learning everything there was to know might be the way to live life, now and always.

“You’re thinking too hard,” said Pop, who had managed to do over a decade on the inside and still stay sane.

Boy, was that a nice pedicure. Plus there were lightbulbs to change, term papers to ghostwrite, sugar packets and hardware to steal, puppies to play with, and gossip to gather and pass along. When I thought too much about my prison life, when I should have been thinking about Larry, I felt a little guilty. Still, certain things brought my absence from the outside world into sharp relief, like once-in-a-lifetime events that would happen without me. In July our old friend Mike would be wed in the meadow on his fifty-one-acre spread in Montana. I wanted to be there, among friends, in the gorgeous Montana summer, toasting Mike and his bride with tequila. The world kept going despite the fact that I had been removed to an alternate universe. I wanted to be home desperately, and when I said “home,” that meant “wherever Larry is” more than Lower Manhattan, but the next seven months stretched out in front of me. I now knew I could do them, but it was still way too early to count the days.

ON JULY 20 Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison and five months of home confinement, a pretty typical “split sentence” for white-collar criminals but far below the maximum for her conviction. Some prisoners raised eyebrows over her sentence. About 90 percent of criminal defendants plead guilty. Usually, a defendant who does take a case all the way to court and loses a federal trial is hit hard by the judge, with the maximum sentence, not the minimum; this had happened to a number of women in the Camp who were doing very long bids. Regardless, most of the Camp was convinced that Stewart would be someone’s new bunkie in Danbury, and that would certainly liven things up. If Martha were designated to Danbury I felt pretty sure they’d stick her in the A Dorm “Suburbs” with the OCD cases.

I HAD been hearing about Children’s Day since I got to Danbury. Once a year the BOP held an event when kids could come to the prison and spend the day with their mothers. Activities were planned, including relays, face painting, piñatas, and a cookout, and the children got to walk around the Camp grounds with their moms, very vaguely like a regular family enjoying a day at the park. All the other prisoners were confined to their housing areas. For this reason, gals in the know had strongly suggested that I volunteer to help out, if only so that I would not be stuck in my cube for eight hours on a potentially hot day.