Bitch Is the New Black (10 page)

“Uh-huh,” J.C. grunted, sliding down a few more inches in his chair, junk in full view. We were done here.

But there was still the question of my ride.

Ray said he knew the best young person to take me around and introduce me to black people—his oldest daughter, Rayetta. Suspicion and superiority immediately took hold of my soul.

When she arrived, she told me she was twenty-six, only a year younger than me. Her nails were long and red, and her hair was hard and crimped. She had never been on a plane before and asked me twice if police cars in Washington looked the same as the ones in Columbia. Not sure of what she meant, I answered yes.

“Can we see the stuff you write online?”

“Umm-hmm, just go to—”

“But we can get that here? On our computers in Columbia?”

Loose lawns ran into one another and past the windows of her cab (she worked for Ray during the day). She could have been one of my cousins, the ones who made me drink Listerine and still thought I lived in New York. I kept still in the backseat, silently scrolling through already-read e-mails. For whatever reason, chitchatting with her felt like a chore. Actually, I knew the reason. I didn't ask, but I guessed that she had kids. That she went to the karaoke every Friday night if there weren't any lanes left to bowl on. And that she was married, engaged, or in some other way involved with a man. Just like all the Korean girls from high school with new Facebook albums—“Jackie Kim's Wedding!” According to Gina, our best bet was to be an Asian psychology major from Biloxi. Too late. Even Gary—the slutbag I lost my virginity to in college and then was bored into dating after graduation—was getting married to a girl whose profile pic read “Cambodian.”

“Her name is fucking Sue Meh,” I groaned.

“Ohmigod, dude, her name is litigious.”

“The Asians, that's what it's about. It's like 1989 all over again,” I said, having absolutely no idea whether or not there was a violent uptick in Asian/black unions in 1989. But for some reason, it sounded about right.

“It's time, man—the marrying time. Just not for us. Not black women. We don't ever get a time. Not never.” A
Waiting to Exhale
moment followed, and afterward the two of us got back to the business of living our lives.

Rayetta had probably never even seen
Waiting to Exhale
. And if she had, I'm sure she didn't know any of the lines by heart like we did. For example: “Well, guess what, John, YOU'RE the motherfuckin' improper influence!” Sitting up there in the front seat with her red-ass nails on the steering wheel, Rayetta didn't
have a care in the world, because her world was about as big as a tank of gas. I should've asked her some questions while we were on our way to the hotel—it would save me some time—but I didn't want her voice in
my
piece.

Instead I made appointments with graduate students and young professionals, wrote my story, and flew home. It made the front page without Rayetta in it.

But she wasn't all gone. I finally got the courage to interview her on our way to the airport—we were running ridiculously late because she didn't realize I needed to be there more than ten minutes before my flight. For the last few days, whenever I climbed into the backseat—after she'd been waiting for me to finish asking someone more worthy what
real
regular folk felt about Obama—Rayetta would always ask how it went. I'd grumble meaningless stock sentences, and we'd take off. Once I got as far as “so…” but stopped myself before adding “what do you think?” Deciding I already knew her life, I felt stupid asking about it. On my way out of the South, I figured what the hell, it's not like I'll ever see her again. I acted like we were having an actual conversation while I tapped her answers into my Berry. She didn't think I was paying attention. She said her mother hosted a party for Mrs. Obama a few months back. “Michelle came to the house and served hors d'oeuvres,” said Rayetta with something more than pride—familiarity maybe. “She was real nice. She sure got our vote.”

This was the first time I'd felt stingy since second grade. Michelle was ours, damn it!

A black president—shrug. For those of us who didn't watch
Roots
on the first color TV ever, that always seemed possible. But a black first lady—with diplomas in plural, a career in progress, a presidential husband, and perfect babies—now that was “historical quantity.” Michelle was our anchor in outer space.

Rayetta knew this, and I'd tried to ignore her. After spending years claiming to be the best black woman possible, I wasted two silent days in a backseat, afraid to talk to a real one. I left Rayetta out of my story, but kept our interview on my Berry for months.

 

“I have never been more hyped to not have nobody,” said Gina as we were making plans for the inauguration. She'd be in Washington for the whole week. Triple negatives aside, I was confused.

“Are you serious, dude?” Since when did single and loving it become acceptable for our “about me” sections?

“Dude, Michelle is making it super famous to be a black woman right now. I'm ready.”

I guess she was right. Maybe Mrs. Obama would be our sixth man, invisibly racking up assist after assist. Maybe we'd even get laid. But Gina was the basketball star in high school. It took a year of scoring a grand total of ten points in JV until I ditched the Alonzo Mournings for a pair of pom-poms—making noise on the sidelines seemed more productive. Anyway, I was beginning to think I was unMichelle-able—at least when it came to the man I wanted most to see me as first-lady material.

During the final four of our breakup championship, Dexter called me an elitist. We argued about picket fences and my hatred for the mediocre lives they were built to prettify. That type of life disgusts me, I told him after it'd been made totally clear that he didn't want that type of life with me. We're so different, he said. You're right; I was just horny when we met. We both know this is pointless, I mean, it's not like you were ever in my league or anything.
Sweet Jesus, somebody stop me
. I want
someone who'll take me to live in Malaysia or something, I said, like a Peace Corps volunteer with an endless trust fund. Because Dex didn't want to run the country with me, I decided to run him down with all the expectations I never had.

Like I say, it was frightening to be a black woman when a black woman like Michelle was around, was everywhere. And when her husband won the White House, everybody kept talking about how little black boys would have no more excuses. No father, no money, a name blacker than dirt—you too can rule the world. But no one talked (cared) about how Michelle changed us. We'd lain awake nights wondering if our Wonder Woman acts would ever get found out. Then suddenly there was proof we could be everyday and superhuman. But where were the instructions?

Still, Gina was weirdly positive that all this would work in our favor, and I was still scared shitless—this could be a train wreck waiting to happen. But like a rubbernecking driver on the freeway, I couldn't take my eyes off her.

Michelle does weird things with her lips sometimes. When she's waiting for someone to finish asking her a question or just waiting for someone to shut up, she folds her mouth in on itself just briefly, like she's warming it up or something. What comes out next—you know it's going to be good.

She was on
The View
once, televising the revolution. While Barbara Walters stuttered on about something or other, there it was again. Michelle's lips pressing against each other as if getting ready for a smack or a smack-down.

“People aren't used to strong women.” She was talking about her husband's opponent, Sen. Hillary Clinton, but this was all about me. Usually the people who think the people on TV are talking to them are straitjacketed. I, on the other hand, couldn't be saner. “We don't even know how to talk about 'em,” she continued,
wearing a $148 dress from White House/Black Market. Rayetta could get that dress.

I bought a J. Crew dress that looked like something she'd wear—sheath, cobalt blue, understated. Once, I was in a car packed mostly with women when the one guy, a friend of mine, almost got killed. “Michelle isn't even all that cute,” he said. “She got a really high booty.” By some miracle he made it out in one piece. But the truth is, she isn't the most beautiful woman in the world. Her butt does sit up kind of high. She's a “dark, black, woman,” as Whoopi put it that day on
The View
, slapping the back of her hands together to slam home the meaning of each of those adjectives.

I don't think Michelle minds being our new muse. I think she gets it. We little brown girls—drunk off
The Cosby Show
, sobered up by life, and a little suicidal—we need her.

These days the word
hope
is unsuitable for civilized conversation, having been ridden hard and put away so wet on the campaign trail. But despite being the vocabulary equivalent of a slutbag, there's no better word to describe Michelle's spot in our run-down hearts.

Gina's even got a new pickup line to be used during our inauguration-weekend festivities: “I have a master's degree. Fuck me.”

He meant it as an insult.

Maybe if he called me a “stuck-up bitch whose sadistic obsession with a mythological black male would inevitably leave her childless,” maybe then I could've slapped him like a monochromatic movie star before slinking off to the boudoir to be “ahvown.”

Instead he called me “perfect girl,” and I was forced to snuggle up to the rented space between his bicep and his pits, breathing in the stink of another relationship gone bad. Perfect girl? I gave us another month. Two, tops.

First you have to know that Dex already had a growing urban harem of “girls.” There was “hotel girl,” “club girl,” “seven-month school girl,” “London girl,” “law school girl,” and a girl whose secret identity I knew but whom I refused to refer to as anything other than “Prom Shoes.” Actually, I knew the etymology of each one, because so far, I'd been losing at a little game I play called
“Super Cool,” in which I pretend to be the super coolest girl in the history of the universe, so cool, in fact, that it's totally cool for us to chat about all your other so-called relationships because “it's cool, my baby,” and we both know that in the end you'll choose me, the coolest. Despite sucking at sports, I keep at it.

The toughest part of my favorite pastime is making sure the other player never catches on to how I really feel. Keeping secret that one more word about Prom Shoes' (the only one of Dex's girls who I'd seen in real life, in silvery rhinestoned peep toes) complete lack of moral authority as evidenced in her choice of footwear might send me to the other team, Red Rover style—sweaty, pissed, and eventually submissive.

Even with all that pent-up obsession, when the time came for my comic book christening I used my amazing super powers to keep my mouth shut. It happened like the Fortune Cookie game where the future always tastes better “in bed.” We were lying on one, stretching out my Jersey sheets with 3:00 a.m. predictions of what might come next for us. For me, it was a life made painless by the proximity of another human being. For Dex, it was probably another blow job, the possibility of which brought him to his next point.

“Wanna know what our code word for you is?” he whispered to the ceiling that night as I lay naked by his side, trying to make a permanent impression of my 34Bs on his chest—a physiological proof of purchase. Staring down at his other head, I was immediately grateful he couldn't see me smiling like a dismembering serial killer.
Our
? He talked about me with his friends?
Code word
? I was worthy of synecdoche?! Some lucky part of me (bitchy, baby-hungry, black?) was going to be the immortal epithet to my issues with men. If I'd paid more attention to Mrs. Paul's sixth-grade lecture on word choice, I'd know whether to be anxious or eager.

“Whaaaaaaaat?” I sighed, hoping to sound appropriately apathetic and not like the possessed Dex fiend that I'd become.
Umm, he already knows, dude.
By then it'd been about a month, and already everything about him gave me uncontrollable ghost itch—his love of the History Channel and skinny neckties. I would call it something paranormal if this hadn't been the natural flow of things: girl meets boy, boy says something awkwardly amusing to girl, girl decides boy must be
him
, and then Facebook turns him into a hobby—or a habit. I was addicted, and
our
code word would be my next fix.

“Perfect girl,” he said in the dark.

Fuck. I stretched the ashen webbing between my toes to their limit, arched my back to the point of breaking, and dug my nails a few centimeters deeper into his man boobage. But this wasn't ecstasy, it was exhaustion.

I'd spent the last thirty days doing everything to prove myself worthy of calling this jackass my boyfriend. When Dex called me at 3:00 a.m. wanting to talk about nothing in particular (but really everything indefinable), I answered the phone (which had been waiting impatiently beneath my pillow). When Dex wanted dinner, I cooked as if I hadn't ordered the No. 17 from Sala Thai for the last six nights in a row. When his number showed up on my BlackBerry in the middle of a Tuesday (ice cream at the Lincoln Memorial!), I slapped an end quote on the ass of another boring story and ran outside to meet him. I even had an “in case of Dex” bag under my desk at work (mascara, thongs, Burt's Bees, invisible solid). I washed his dishes while mine nurtured micro universes at home. I did his laundry while going pantyless by necessity. I gently lectured him on fiscal responsibility while waiting in line at ACE Check Cashing and Pay Day Loans.

In short it was no surprise, then, that when given the Rorschach test of premeditated shit I never do, the suicidal adjective that
leaped from Dex's lips was “perfect.” This was an involuntary response based on shoddy research, like having a panic attack after a missed period. Just wait a couple more days. What shocked me was that he'd actually bought it. He seriously believed that he'd found the Ivy League Barbie Doll, the fully posable collector's edition complete with removable panties. No wonder Frances refused to buy me those monsters as a kid. It wasn't about the impossible complex I'd develop—to be young, gaunt, and blond—but the all-too-possible fulfillment of that fantasy. I could and would be perfect for this perfect man, my Ken without the plastic hair. The thing is, I was, and he wasn't. So I resented, and he retreated. That night, he thought explaining himself would break the awkward silence he didn't expect. (I mean, who doesn't want to be “perfect girl”?)

“You are actually better than me as a person,” he confessed, unnecessarily. “If we had a person contest, you would defeat me—handily.”

“Are you serious?” I answered back, trying to sound both flattered and surprised, but definitely not scared shitless.

“Yeah, I mean, you're awesome.”

Like I said, Dexter didn't know it yet, but with one word he'd begun to seal our fate, activating the ticking time bomb on the dating doomsday device. Perfect girl? Depending on which side of the law you were on, she was either superhero or villain. By now it should be apparent to most that I am neither perfect nor any synonym thereof. Moreover, at this exact moment in time I've realized that playing Super Cool is not a good look, because despite my very best efforts, I'd become a girl, not
the
girl. Really, I was one of
those
women—the ones who are so strong and black that the jumbo-size
S
on their chests is assumed. I for one don't remember the trip to the phone booth.

Actually, that's a lie.

It's like how I figured out how to cheat at FreeCell.

I discovered the game one virgin night in my freshman dorm room, JJ 602. Mousing through My Computer seemed more gratifying than reading more Virgil. Minesweeper, being the most asinine guessing game ever invented, was out of the question. Hearts is for a demographic who don't know nothing 'bout no computers. And Solitaire? Too obvious.

FreeCell I'd never tried. The mug shot of the bearded blond king guarding the game had misled me all these PC years. He was staring offscreen somewhere, perhaps into the blank page that was my social life. I read it as a warning sign but double-clicked anyway, spending the next four hours pairing black queens with red kings and forgetting about the fact that some jackass hadn't called. Highlighting the arrow of All Programs to Accessories, which led to Games, which then pointed to FreeCell, made me feel like I was going somewhere. Having unblemished stats made me feel like it didn't matter that I wasn't. If a single round seemed lost, before giving up I'd walk away from the computer, take a lap around the sixth floor, maybe even have a conversation with a human being, and then come back—mind cleared and ready to rock. At the height of my lameness, I had a streak of like 27 wins and 0 losses, which is not to say that I only played 27 games of FreeCell. If I ever lost—no matter how geekily high my win column—I'd take a final glance at the awesomeness of my achievement and start over. “Are you sure you want to clear all statistics?” Yes. Eventually, I got sloppy, got my cherry popped, and left FreeCell behind with all my other freshman things.

When real life happened, the idea of stealing a few minutes from work doing something mindless became as compulsory as a cigarette break. This time around, however, losing was not an option. Half-finished games would stay minimized at the bottom
of my screen for days, the bearded king looking militaristic. Stumbling into a statistical loophole that ensured I'd never “lose” made me feel more genius than cheat.

Say all the free cells are loaded. A Queen of Spades is propped up against a King of Diamonds. Just one column over is a lonely King of Hearts. She's sort of got options—one egomaniac for another—but then again, not really. So the game's over, technically—but, since there are pointless moves left, not really. At this point, there's nothing else to do but stare at the screen and wish you had made better choices in the beginning, right? Not quite. If you ever find yourself stuck between that Queen of Spades and no place (that is to say, in royal trouble), relax. Just make sure you save all the really important crap you have up—Excel spreadsheets entitled “HDA Expenses: The Musical Comedy,” and PDFs of party invites you'll never rsvp to—and then go to your start menu and end it all. I mean shut the shit down. For some holy reason, the “Are you sure you want to resign this game?” box doesn't pop up. And best of all, when you log back in to Windows, FreeCell won't count your cowardice as a loss—just a temporary breakdown.

That's what Dex was. Or, better yet, that's who perfect girl was. Just a momentary lapse in perception. The game, not being lost or over, just needed a reboot. Pretending perfect works just as good as being. If I showed him the Michelle in me, then eventually he'd have to see the Helena in me too. She's creeping around here somewhere—crouched down behind the trash cans blocking my basement apartment's window, sneaking peeks at the two happy people clicking between History Channel and HGTV. One is dreaming of a “three, two” somewhere in Silver Lake, and he's boning up on the big bang theory. One time, they both got really crazy and started Googling Chicago real estate. The perfect girl almost had a seizure. He was just having a spou
sal moment. It would eventually pass, though, and the window to the basement apartment would get blocked by too many recycling bins.

The same conversation got rinsed, reprocessed, and repurposed every few weeks:

“I'm just scared I can't live up to even your lowest expectations of me,” Dex announced to the back of my head on another night for insomniacs.

“I'm sorry…what?” Remember, alls I had to do was reboot without regret, and none of this would count in the morning. I was only half listening.

“I don't know.” He sighed, using one hand to wipe down his face like a clean slate. “It's like you're perfect, you put everything like out there and do everything right. What do I do besides screw everything up?”

“I have no clue how to respond to that without violence.”

“You're like my favorite verse. I've got you on repeat and I never get tired of you, but…”

“So just to review—” I had to stop the hip-hop similes before Jeeps got involved. “You're saying that I'm too good for you.”

“I don't know. Something like that. I'm just bad with women.”

I exhaled resignation, flipped over so my back faced his front, and scooted my ass deeper into the crook of his crotch. “Go to sleep,” I said, shutting him down. Tomorrow we'd start up again, and maybe then I'd figure out a way to win. And if this was a blinking warning signal, then Gina was the pop-up message that spelled everything out, “Sorry, you lose. There are no more legal moves.”

“If dude is telling you fifty thousand ways that he ain't ready, listen to him,” she concluded at the end of a marathon my-life-sucks-and-every-dude-I-date-turns-out-to-be-a-raging-asshole phone call. She was probably right, but 'member before what
he
said?
He
said
I was perfect. Remember that? Can't we just focus on that for a minute, please?

Gina had memories of my own to share. Like when West Point Willy told me he wanted to “take a step back,” and I let him date other women, knowing he'd come back to me one day because,
hellooo
, I was the best thing that'd ever happened to him since not dying in Iraq. I wasn't, and he didn't. And when Abdul said he wasn't over his ex-fiancée and I gave him time, because seriously, that chick was hideous, and he, despite being Muslim, bought me a DVD player for Christmas. Like if he could barrel through religious roadblocks as hard-core as Islam versus whatever I was, then forgetting some hideola girl who wore jean skirts should not be that hard. They got back together in three months, and I got Netflix. And when James said he thought he would lose his job shuffling legal briefs because I worked in the newsroom twenty-one floors down, I thought he was totally justified. The plan was to just wait until he went back to school in the fall. September came and went. He started dating some midget who ran marathons and, according to Facebook, liked cooking “big ole meals.”

Gina had points.

“We broke up last night,” was how I said hello the next morning. I gave up on being perfect and decided to be a soldier instead. I blocked Dex on IM. I threw the toothbrush I kept at his apartment in
his
trash can, hoping the pathetic image would drive him insane, or at least to my basement apartment on Ninth Street.

“Whaaaaa?” Gina said, feigning an appropriate modicum of surprise. Best friend indeed.

“Yeah, dude. He said he wasn't ready for a relationship and bla bla bla. We're done this time. I can't do this back-and-forth shit anymore. It's for the birds.”

“Right, dude, you gotta keep that shit moving.” She was on auto-pilot now. “K.I.M.”