Bitch Is the New Black (11 page)

We both knew this was all bullshit—a rehearsed spontaneous dance number that was getting harder to perform night after night. I was the jerk in the Magical Mister Mistoffelees costume wondering how my master's in fine arts came to this. Dex was the master of backtracking. My phone rang by evening. Maybe he'd come around—the white-capped mountains of my gleaming perfection. Maybe it was snow blindness he was scared of, not a healthy, loving, and monogamous relationship with one Helena “You're Awesome, You're Perfect, Now Change” Andrews. How would I ever know if I didn't pick up the phone? “Hello?” We're back “together” in the time it takes to spell-check
abracadabra
.

I was an annoying narrative arc on a teen soap opera. Okay, we get it. These two crazy kids will never get together! It's impossible. Too much has happened! Dan and Serena, I'm bored of you now. The best way to flip the script would be to get the upper hand this time. I never IM'd Dex first. Let the phone ring at least three times before answering. And I refused to play Scrabulous with him for weeks, ignoring every new game he started and then pretending like I hadn't. I was through with games, see.

“Stop ignoring my Scrabulous requests!”

“What are you talking about, crazy pants?”

“My pants aren't crazy. Get on Scrabulous.”

Obviously this man wanted to marry me and inseminate me immediately thereafter. Why else would a stupid computer game be so important? He loved me in a place where there's no cyber space or time. So Scrabulous became our new thing. We made dates to play—
Okay, be at your computer in an hour
—and our daily conversations were peppered with talk of word scores and numbered tiles. And then, of course, he screwed it all up again.

“I just don't want you to hold out for me,” he said out of the total blue one day while we were spending quality time online. I'd mentioned a blind date I was maybe going on—maybe. He had to know I had options. Endless tiles!

“I see,” I said from my couch.

“I dunno…,” he said from his. “I just don't want you to drop perfect guy for not-so-perfect me.” My exhausted fingertips rested against the keyboard, and I watched our latest reconciliation disappear as he typed each new hurtful line.

“So I guess you're right,” I wrote. “I'll move on.”

“Geez Louise.”

“What? That's obviously what you're saying.” I was too exhausted to do anything but play the game. “Anyways, what does ‘swap tiles' mean?”

“You lose your turn, but you can exchange your letters for new ones.”

“K.” Just perfect.

ABORTION MONKEY? Who
wouldn't
open that e-mail?

It was the winter of 2004, and my virtual load of junk mail was engorged to the point of needing medical attention. While sifting through spam from Seymour Butts and Mike Hunt to make sure nothing nonpervy got lost in translation, I noticed the most random coupling of nouns capitalized. Abortion and monkey. Not
tits
and
ass
or
pleasure
and
her
or
lottery
and
winner
, but
abortion
and
monkey
in all fucking caps. There was also the subject line to consider—“chimp.” My inner pervert had been piqued.

“No wonder your father left you and that dyke,” it read. Wait, what? Was this a telepathic telemarketer? Was I the unlucky member of a new golden demographic? And if so, what exactly was Abortion Monkey hocking—therapy?

The e-mail address didn't help any: [email protected]. At first it looked like Helenaisastan kape. Never been there. Or maybe Helena I. Sastankape. Don't know her either. Suddenly settling like a snow globe, I saw it for what it really was—
Helenaisastankape
. The fuck?

There was only one person in the history of the universe who hated me so much that he'd take time out of his busy schedule of being fucking nuts to come up with a clever alter ego and then set said phantom up with its own e-mail account. Abortion Monkey was his nom de guerre. First name Abortion, last name Monkey.

This was microwaveable abuse. He knew that word would fry my insides. Abortion, abortion, abortion, abortion. No matter how many times I tried to make it toothless, it still gnawed. Had anyone glanced over my shoulder to see it written in all caps? Had they then cracked the code that was “helenaisastankape,” and finally, like Occam, arrived to the so obvious conclusion that at nineteen, with barely a peace sign's worth of sex partners, I'd had an abortion using the money I got from my student health insurance?

It happened sophomore year, right before falling in love for the first time with Darin (hotmail known as Abortion Monkey).

 

I've never wanted a Valium more in my entire life, but I still said no.

“Are you sure? Lots of women think they won't need it but then find that the pill…eases their nerves. It can actually help a lot.” This was my preabortion “counselor” talking. A slender black girl who I guessed was around my age and who had a boyfriend with whom she practiced “safer” sex. She went through
the steps of a too-long speech rehearsed more than once that day. It was 11:00 a.m.

Grant, my potential baby's daddy, had given me $200 the night before, unaware that Columbia's health insurance plan paid for “terminations.” I figured he owed me, having acted like an asshole when I screamed in his face, “I'm fucking pregnant, you idiot.” We were at a party on campus. Grant had spent the week prior trying to compel me into menses—“It's probably just stress.” We had sex once, the fourth time I'd done it ever, and the condom broke (a phenomenon that seems to occur most prominently in the young and the retarded). The plan was for me to get the morning-after pill from Women's Health the next morning and for us to go back to being teenagers.

To Grant's credit, he felt guilty enough to endure the walk of shame with me. On the way back to my room, I tried holding his hand while he succeeded in avoiding mine. Once in front of McBain Hall, we gave each other a series of awkward friend pats and blended in with everyone else like nothing had happened or was happening.

There was a football game that day. I showed up at Health Services in my cheerleading uniform, standing in line behind a guy whose penis was apparently on fire. The whole setup was either ill advised or thought up by a devotee of Opus Dei. A woman whose sole job it was to make sure idiot kids didn't kill themselves over the weekend, known professionally as a triage nurse, sat behind a type of bank teller booth–slash–confessional in the middle of the waiting area. She was irritable and old, so mumbling your midnight transgression wasn't an option. A lot of stage whispering was going on. And because there were so many of us sinners, a line had formed, giving each of us a chance to mortify ourselves in public. I was on deck after the chick with
vaginal itch. She got as far as “but there isn't any discharge or odor” when I left.
Pregnant? Me? Noooooo
.

Two weeks later, I sat corrected in that same building. I was too scared to purchase a pregnancy test from the neighborhood Duane Reade. Peeing in a cup and coming back for the results would be more private.

“So, according to this you're about three weeks pregnant,” said a closeted gay man with a skinny tie and khaki pants.

“Really?” I asked, straining my neck to get a better look at whatever official papers he was getting his information from and hoping that maybe he'd read someone else's file by mistake, the file of some slutastic idiot who didn't know how to use a condom or self-restraint.

“Yep. Definitely. Pregnant. So, whoever the father is, now we'll see if he's really a real man.” I had absolutely no clue what he meant by this, except maybe to say that Grant's masculinity was predicated on his reaction to the news, which was something like, “So I guess I have to pay for an abortion now?”

Weeks later, I tucked the stack of twenties he gave me in a pillowcase and rode the train alone to the P-Squared in Greenwich Village, because I supported their mission and figured no one would find me there, not that anyone was looking. My roommate, Stella, wanted to come with, but this wasn't a fucking shopping spree. Plus, I couldn't look at anyone looking at me like I was broken, ruined, condemned, or whatever. One soundless and snotty cry in the women's bathroom was all that was allowed. All that I could take.

I should have taken the Valium.

“I'm not nervous,” I said, interrupting my counselor's soliloquy while folding in half one of the brochures she'd handed me about the “procedure” and what to expect when you want to stop
expecting—touching the two edges together, then pinching the fat bulge in the middle and smoothing it down from one end to the other until it was perfectly flat. It's funny, the tiny bullshit things we remember when our lives are forever changing. “I'm just anxious.”

A “technician” upstairs had the sadistic task of giving me an ultrasound. She told me the baby was five weeks old, or more mercifully, that I was five weeks along: still, I wished her a violent death. Up until then I'd been hoping this was all a terrible mixup or a practical joke orchestrated by the same zealots who do those “hell houses,” where instead of a vampire jumping out a coffin, they've got a blond cheerleader getting a bloody abortion.

Just as gruesome were the hospital gown and vacuum hose I got. Whatever medieval torture techniques I'd previously imagined, it definitely wasn't that, but it was close. I also thought maybe they'd roll me into a white room with talking bunny rabbits and caterpillars and a magical blue pill that read “
EAT ME
” in cursive, which upon swallowing would make whatever was inside me grow smaller and smaller and smaller until it ceased to exist. Simple. Instead, two masked men debated for five minutes over whether or not they'd “gotten everything” with the Hoover attachment they had shoved into my womb, a part of my anatomy that I hadn't given much thought until that day. Numbed below the waist, I laid there for what seemed like forever, feeling like I'd been abducted. Finally a woman with a white coat walked in, reminded them there was “a patient on the table,” and everything was taken care of.

No, I didn't have someone waiting for me down in the lobby. It was just me. No, nobody was going to pick me up. It was just me. No, I didn't need to call anyone. It was just me.

Changing back into my clothes, I felt fixed, glad to even be able to say “just me.” What kind of monster was I? According to the unfolded pamphlet in my purse, a normal one. I checked to make sure I wasn't some horrible baby-killing fiend who danced naked on the tiny graves of the unborn at full moon. “You may have a wide range of feelings after your abortion. Most women ultimately feel relief after an abortion,” it said under the heading “Your Feelings….” I wished there was a less opinionated word for whatever had just happened to me, but I was happy for the second to my emotion.

I walked the long way back to the train station and caught a glimpse of myself in a storefront window. Hair? A little mussed. Nose? Normal. Lips? A bit dry and, in the middle, cracked. Teeth? Crooked on the bottom row. Cheeks? The same. Chin? Fat. Eyes? This game was stupid. There were flowers waiting for me on my extra-long twin. Stella. I fell asleep with plastic-wrapped carnations cradled in my arms.

 

I told Darin, my soon-to-be first stalker, all of this not too long after he first said he loved me. He needed to know what he was getting. “I could have a fucking kid right now,” I said, waiting for his disgust. “Lots of people could have kids right now,” he said, wrapping his arms even tighter around my shoulders and shushing me to sleep. Right before winter break he gave me a card that read on the front, “All I want for Christmas,” and then on the inside, “is YOU!” with a pop-up finger pointing straight at me.

So, the beginning of us was mostly just him promising me that I wasn't going to hell. When I broke it off two years later
because I was twenty-one and that's what twenty-one-year-olds do, he made a decent living trying to send me there personally. A different finger was getting some exercise now. Darin was known on campus for being sort of militant—he was the strongest man pound for pound on the wrestling team and wore the same dark jeans and black Nikes every day unless I begged him to change—but aggressive love is what I needed then. Then when I didn't, he got on the offensive.

There were the random Darin sightings outside my dorm, because this was supposedly the quickest way to New Jersey, where he worked; the time he showed up at a party I was throwing with a “friend” he just couldn't seem to find, but since he was “already here, why not let's talk about us” the spitting incident, which he later claimed wasn't all that bad, because the loogie landed near me, not
on
me; then the “accidental” tour down a flight of stairs, courtesy of his open palm to my back, and finally the trip to the police station.

“Yeaaaah,” I said looking around the “precinct,” thinking how much it resembled a public elementary school front office. “I think I need to get a restraining order.” I was there on my lunch break.

“No problem, ma'am. Let's go sit down over there,” said the black lady with lacquered nails and freeze-dried hair, pointing to a long metal table that would have been just as at home in an OR. We sat down to gossip. She typed while I talked. Turns out I had to file a “domestic violence incident report,” which made me want to forget the whole thing. I wasn't a battered woman, just a bitter one. When your love life belongs to Dolly Parton's discography, you know it's time to switch gears. That's what I thought I had been doing when Abortion Monkey showed up, throwing bananas in my tail pipe.

That would show his crazy ass. I raised my index finger high above my head, slamming it down on the send button with all the force of a carnival sledgehammer. Take that, monkey ass! I wanted to show him how much better at life I was. As evidenced in the line, “I could not possibly care any less,” because so many “smart” people say “could care less,” which implies that there is a rock bottom of caring that you have yet to strike, thus and therefore you do, in fact, care—most likely the exact opposite of what you were trying to say in the first place. Proper syntax was empowering when dealing with the man who once argued loudly that the correct phrase was not “get the gist” but “get the just.” And that diarrhea was when you drank too much water and constipation was from not drinking enough. The e-mails kept coming:

We went for one more round. Me, spending an entire day crafting, spell-checking, editing, grammar-checking, revising, workshopping, and then copying and pasting the only two hundred words in the world capable of cutting him down a notch. Him, shutting me down with just two—Abortion Monkey. No matter how much high ground went into my e-sermon, once Darin hit his reply button—“Don't worry about responses, since I'll just delete anything else you send before reading it. Have a nice life, Mighty Joe Young!”—I'd get yanked from my pulpit, forced to lay my cursor hand on those two abject and filthy words. I was scared of them, felt sorry for them, and refused to delete them. I started solely referring to Darin as “the devil,” hoping that he was, in fact, a liar.

Involving Frances in all this was out of the question—obviously. I'd handle Darin on my own, like always. Like the whole abortion situation. I refused to tell her then, because I knew she'd want to pray to father/mother God through the phone or make me wave a bushel of burning sage over my broken body. I couldn't take being taken care of. When I first started having sex, we had an ad lib conversation about penises and vaginas.
Where have you been, little brown-eyed girl?
Downstairs
. With who, that new boy?
Yep
. What kind of birth control are you two using?
Ma!
The sponge, the condoms, dental dams?
The pill!
Good.
She said if I got pregnant she wouldn't be angry—“Just send the baby down for me to raise until you finish school.” Obviously, I'd decided not to take her at her word. In the process of becoming
childless, I'd grown into a motherless child—untethered—not knowing my mother felt the same about herself once.