Lenora’s girth and her booming voice intimidated me at first. It was clearly her room, even though she’d only moved there three days earlier. I stayed on my bed, out of her way, as she dragged the chair from the corner by the window to the bunk bed ladder. It was scary watching her hoist herself up to the top bunk. At about five-foot-eight, she carried her weight around her like a barrel. She stood up on the chair, put one foot on the ladder, then threw her body onto the bunk as if she were mounting a horse. Luckily, the next day, Lenora went out to the rec yard and fell off the picnic bench. She was sent to medical where they filled out an incident report, gave her a bag of ice, and classified her as a bottom bunk. “They gave it to me because of my obesity,” she said proudly. Lenora wore her weight as a mark of distinction.

  You could see Lenora’s dimples when she grinned; beneath the layers of skin and the missing teeth, she had a pretty face and a nice smile. She had been at York for two years when I first met her and her parole hearing was coming near. She told me parts of her story but not the whole story in one sitting. She’d been incarcerated for knifing her cousin. “We were in the kitchen. I was smoking pot and he was doing crystal meth,” she said. “He got sort of crazy and tried to rape me. I told him to stop, and I pushed him and screamed at him. Then I cut him.” When I tried to picture the kitchen where the assault had happened, I saw the kitchen of the little house in Trumbull, Connecticut, where I’d lived as a child—a kitchen of earlier times and less money, before our big house on Hollydale Road with the fire alarm and the intercom system. “So I called the ambulance and the police. Then I got me a beer and went out on the front porch and waited. I thought he was dead.” Thankfully, he hadn’t been, and Lenora had gotten five years. If she made parole, she would only have to serve two and a half of those years before relocating to a halfway house for her final six months. Lenora had all her paperwork ready. “These are my certificates,” she said proudly, showing me a folder of awards and commendations.

  Lenora taught me practical stuff, like how to tie your bottom sheet down so it wouldn’t slip off the bed, how to write for packages from home, and why it was important to sign up for groups and apply for jobs. I was funny to Lenore—naïve about prison, and, in a way, about life. It took me a few days to realize why she looked familiar: Lenora had served the oatmeal at breakfast on the West Side. She had always smiled and said hello.

  Lenora was the leader of the black women in Fenwick North, who shouted as they came down the hallway, “Nora, you goin’ outside?” “Wanna play cards, Lenore?” “Nora, you got somethin’ to eat?” She was “Ma” to the eighteen-year-old across the hall. She answered every query, except when she instructed me to tell them she was sleeping. My name was “Lenora’s roommate” and because of that, they were nice to me, too. Lenora’s metal bin beneath the bunk bed was filled to overflowing with food and candy. She always offered me stuff to eat, but I usually said no. She rose at three-thirty each morning to get ready for work. If my snoring had kept her awake the night before, she was angry with me and would open her metal bin and let the cover clatter to the floor, tit for tat. Sometimes she would bang around without meaning to wake me, like the time she saw ants by her kitchen boots and whacked the boots against the floor in an effort to kill “the animals.”

  The nice thing about Lenora’s kitchen job was that she was gone before I had to get up. I’d fall back asleep until I heard the five thirty wake-up shout for breakfast. There was no intercom in the Fenwicks, so announcements were made by guards standing at the bottom of the stairs and bellowing. “Breakfast wake-up! Thirty minutes to chow!” Breakfast at the Fenwicks was easier than at other units because we didn’t have to leave the building. When the next scream, “Chow!” was heard, we just walked downstairs. Because I had no job assignment for the first month or so, I would go back to sleep after breakfast until they shouted “Count clear!” at 8:00 A.M. When Lenora returned from work at 10:30 A.M., she would take off her kitchen clothes and rush into the shower. Then she’d put on her shorts and T-shirt, get on her bed, eat something—usually potato chips—and go to sleep. Sometimes she brought stuff back from the kitchen to eat, like grilled cheese sandwiches. That was one of the perks of working in the kitchen: after cleanup, inmates could make themselves breakfast. Lenora also brought back huge bags of ice so all the girls could stop in and fill their travel mugs with ice for ice water. Bringing back the ice or the sandwiches wasn’t authorized, but no one ever stopped her. When all the commotion settled down and count began, Lenora would turn on her two fans, lie down on the bed, and go to sleep again. She would sometimes stay asleep until dinnertime. She would be back in bed by 8:00 P.M., retired for the night.

  I didn’t have a problem with Lenora’s schedule because I had the room to myself in the morning and I liked going to bed early. The only problem I had was in the afternoon. Before I got a job, I was just as happy to stay on my bed and read or write or just lie there because that was all I could handle. But Lenora wanted the door closed and I didn’t have a fan. Also, because she never washed her washcloth with her laundry, it had a pungent odor that permeated our room. Lenora wanted the door closed to the noise and I wanted it open to the air. That and my snoring were our issues. After I got a job and a fan, and Lenora got rid of the washcloth, the door thing no longer mattered.

  I can still remember so clearly the girls who lived on our short hall. Little Tammy lived with Tanya in the end room. Some of the girls called Tammy “the Smurf” because she was four-foot-ten and weighed about 170 pounds. Tammy was a drug addict who couldn’t stay out of prison. It was just as well; at least in prison she could see the doctor and have her hepatitis C treated. I knew Tammy the whole time I was in and wrote to her a couple of times after I went home. We were friends in a way, although our friendship was based mostly on my helping her and giving her stuff from my commissary. But on one of my first days in prison, Tammy had given me half a tube of toothpaste because I’d run out of indigent supplies, and I’ve never forgotten that kindness.

  Across from Tammy and Tanya lived Keisha and Kyra. Kyra was a middle-aged white woman trying to act like a twenty-something black girl. After a couple of months, she became really sick. That was when I found out she had HIV and hepatitis C. Kyra, who’d dropped out of school in eighth grade, told me all about the prison school where she worked as a teacher’s aide. One afternoon, against all odds, she talked the guards into letting me out of my unit so that I could meet with a teacher at the school who was looking for an aide. I got the job, and finding useful work grounded me for the rest of my stay at York. This is going to sound sappy, but looking back, I now realize that Kyra’s intervention was a gift from God. Inmates could not sign out of a unit for another destination if they were not on a list, but somehow Kyra and the Lord had made it happen.

  Brenda and Gwen lived across the hall from me. Brenda was a twenty-year-old Puerto Rican girl with large brown eyes and a big mouth. She was in the nurse’s aide class at school and sat on the bus every morning with her girlfriend “Brown,” who lived on the first floor and went to cosmetology. Using my nail clippers, Brown gave me the best haircut I ever got in prison. It cost me a package of cappuccino and two Honey Buns. Brenda and I had a huge screaming fight one morning. It was a daily thing with her: as soon as the wake-up call came, she would start talking and yelling down the hall. After about a week of this, I asked her nicely to be more quiet. She began mocking me. When I asked her again, she began yelling. I told her to shut up. Then my next-door neighbor, Diane, entered the fray. “This is prison!” she screamed. “If you don’t like the noise, go to mental health!” I told Diane to shut up, too. Downstairs in the dining room over breakfast, Diane continued to taunt me from another table. I finally turned around and said, “Diane, shut the fuck up.” The room went silent as I walked out. A guard, waiting in the hallway, summoned me to the office. I was so angry that I burst into tears. I can picture him—an older man with white hair and a mustache. He’d been around. He wrote about the incident in the logbook and suggested I keep my room door shut to avoid further trouble. I was still so clueless about how things worked that it didn’t occur to me until years later that he could have given me a ticket and sent me to seg for fighting. That was pretty much the last time I went to breakfast at the Fenwicks.

  Diane lived with Teresa. Teresa came from Hartford, like Lenora, and they worked in the kitchen together. I don’t remember why Teresa was in prison—something to do with drugs. She had boyfriend issues. Lenora used to tell me that Teresa was always waiting for her man to send her money, but that he was running around with another woman now and Teresa was living in a fantasy world. Teresa and I had our skirmishes, too. One day, she and another girl were talking in the bathroom about a movie I’d seen. Getting out of the shower, I joined the conversation. “Shut up, Mrs. Kravitz,” Teresa said. “No one’s talking to you.” I said I didn’t realize it was a private conversation. “Well, it is, so butt out.”

  “If you want to have a private conversation, don’t have it in the bathroom,” I snapped back. Teresa responded by informing me that no one at Fenwicks North liked me, which hurt my feelings.

  “She’s just stupid,” Lenora said later. “No one likes her. Why you even talk to her?”

  Later, Teresa and I made amends. “Hey, Roberta, what’s up?” she’d say. She was one of the few girls at the Fenwicks who called me by my first name.

  Next to Brenda and Gwen were Alicia and Nadesha. Alicia was a twenty-eight-year-old white woman who also did the let’s-pretend-I’m-black-or-Hispanic-or-a-lesbian-in-prison thing. She had a couple of tattoos and would get the girls to braid her hair in cornrows. She and Diane were good friends for a while. I used to hear them talking in fake Jewish accents when they passed my room. Diane would walk by my door and shout, “Gefilte fish!” Then the two would burst out laughing. I’m slow on things like that, so it took me a while to figure out that Diane was trying to insult me with anti-Semitic remarks. Alicia just wanted attention and would try to get it any way she could. Mostly, when no one was looking, she was a sad little girl who missed her baby and her mother. After Lenora made parole, Alicia and I became roommates.

  Finally, in the room at the end of the hall, were Rita and Lynda. Lynda was a Latina in her late thirties who was always singing, or talking loudly in Spanish with her friends down the hall, or on the phone with her family. Rita was another middle-aged white woman—malnourished and forever complaining about her low blood sugar. She had dull eyes and a bulbous nose, and her thin hair fell across her waiflike face. Rita was a drug addict like me, in prison this time on a parole violation. She had left the state without permission and then been extradited back from Arizona. There was a husband somewhere, also a drug addict, and a lot of crying and moping around. At first I took Rita for granted. I could always sit with her for a meal if there was no other seat available. She was always good for a conversation or a cup of coffee. One day Rita came by, sat in the chair by the door, and began to cry. She said she was so lonely she didn’t know what to do—that she had to find herself a girlfriend because she couldn’t bear to be alone anymore. She was unfriendly to me after that confession. A lot of it had to do with my friend Maureen who lived at the other end of the hall. Rita decided she liked Maureen and would follow her around like a puppy dog. Maureen, also a middle-aged white drug addict with no money in her account, would take anything she could get from Rita. In exchange, she’d sometimes hang out with her in the rec yard or sit with her in the dining room. Maureen was from Bridgeport, and her lawyer was an attorney I had worked with in my former life. At first I found her to be abrasive, the way she would shout out anything that popped into her head. But one day while I was sitting on the steps waiting for the guard to unlock the door, Maureen sat down next to me and started asking me about the book I was reading. That’s how we became friends. Eventually, Lynda convinced Rita to stop chasing after Maureen and fixed her up with someone else. As I walked into the bathroom one evening, I saw Rita on her bed kissing Lynda’s friend. This was the beginning of a series of failed attempts for Rita to find love in prison.

  The thing was: every one of my companions at Fenwick North had a story, a need to be listened to, and a longing to be loved. In that respect, we were all the same. I was one of the fortunate ones in that I didn’t have to go through prison alone. Although there was always that one heart-stopping second before Alex, on the other end of the line in Texas, accepted the charges for my collect calls, he would inevitably say yes. Then we would talk, and my loneliness would subside.

  My mother and I have the same hands. I stretch mine across the visiting room table and we touch fingertips. “My nails are all broken,” I say.

  “My nails are growing because I can’t do anything,” my mother says with a sigh.

  When I put on my slippers that night, I notice my mother and I have the same feet, too. It is the act of slipping my foot inside the soft blue shoe that reminds me of her. My mother is so little now. We used to be the same size, a smidgen taller than five feet. She used to weigh five or ten pounds more than my 115. I am always telling people we are built exactly alike from the neck down. “I look like my father and my father’s mother,” I say, “but I’m built like my mother.” This isn’t a bad thing. My mother is thinner than I am now. Her hair is colored a reddish blonde. My hair is brown, gray, and coppery red—a combination of natural color and hair dye long faded. My mother’s hair is short. Mine is too long. My mother is still able to go to the hairdresser every Friday. I cut my bangs with my nail clippers and have not had my hair colored since December.

  I’m on the telephone in the hall when she tells me. I’m seated on the floor with my finger in my ear so I can hear. The girls are loud-talking as they walk back and forth. Most don’t even notice I’m here. “I was hoping you would call back yesterday,” my mother says. I had called in the evening but no one picked up the phone. I don’t get upset anymore when I hear the voice say, “Your call has not been accepted.” I just wait to call her the next day.

  “I wanted to know if you were feeling better,” I tell her.

  She gets that funny sound in her voice. “I have something to tell you,” she says. “I have lung cancer.”

  I don’t say anything at first. I try taking a breath. “I don’t understand what you mean,” I say. And I truly don’t understand. Just this afternoon, my friend Amy came to see me. In another life, Amy’s mother and my mother were best friends—before my father left my mother and took their friends with him. Amy and I have played together since we were babies. When she asked me this afternoon how my mother is, I said she couldn’t seem to shake her pneumonia. “I’m not worried though,” I told Amy. “My grandmother lived to be almost ninety-five and my mother’s grandmother lived to be ninety. My mother will be just fine.”

  “What don’t you understand?” my mother asks. She has tears in her voice, but I don’t cry. I can’t.

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” I repeat.

  “I didn’t want to tell you like this,” my mother says.

  I take deep breaths. I remember to ask some medical-type questions. I am reaching inside of me for something from God—a word, a phrase. “You’ll be fine,” I say. “You have to think positively. You have to have faith.” I’m sorry for every moment I have wasted, for every time I didn’t call because I took for granted she would be there the next time I did. I love my mother. I can picture her clearly. What will I do if something happens to her while I’m in prison?

  No, it won’t happen. My mother will not die.

  Roberta Schwartz’s mother died in 2003 while her daughter was still in prison. In May 2005, Schwartz married Alex and returned to Austin, Texas.—Ed.

  The Chase

  BY BRENDALIS MEDINA

  Barbara and I were on our way back to Fenwick North from the medical unit when CO Andrus stopped to give us a ride. Barbara saw it first. “Hey, y’all—there’s a car on the compound,” she announced. I thought she was crazy until I looked out the window and saw the red Toyota myself.

  “What the hell?” Andrus muttered.

  “Why do you think they’re here?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure gonna find out.” With that, he hit the gas. I don’t know if the people in the car noticed us behind them or if they were scared, but they picked up speed. Andrus looked over his shoulder at us. “Hold on girls,” he said. “I’m going after them.” The chase was on.

  Giddy with excitement, I held tight to the armrest. “Wow, I’ve never been on this end of a car chase before,” I said. The DOC van took a sharp turn.

  “Faster! Faster!” Barbara yelled.

  Caught up in the moment, I yelled, too. “Catch them, Andrus! Don’t let ’em get away!” Nothing like this had ever happened at boring York CI before, and for a moment, I was back home—fifteen again, and sipping that old familiar cocktail of danger and excitement.

  It was a summer night and I was on the block with some of the brothers and sisters. I’d only been in the gang for about five or six months. There wasn’t much going on that night. Gang life was like that: long stretches of boredom punctuated by sudden bursts of drama: run-ins with the cops or with rival gangs. I was talking with Lisa, one of the sisters, and Maria, a friend of ours who wasn’t in the gang but for some reason was always around us. We were in the middle of a heated dispute over whether or not a bandanna looks better with straight or curly hair. Wearing baggy black jeans and a tight little white shirt, Lisa swung her long brown hair. “See?” she said. “You have to have curly hair like this to rock a bandanna right.”