Bitch Is the New Black (2 page)

Gina is staring out the window of her discontent as we drive up Rhode Island Avenue, lost in thought. I'm twenty-eight, she says, breaking the silence of a night that produced more bunions than love connections. This shit isn't a fucking game anymore, she says. I'm fucking tired, she says. It's two thousand and fucking eight, she says. I say Umm-hmm and look out my own window, wondering when and having no answers. We go the rest of the way in silence, drag ourselves up four flights, and fall asleep. Tomorrow, maybe, will be different.

 

Lisa Nowak taught us different the year before.

“Please tell me you saw this shit about this crazy-ass white lady? The astronaut lady?” she IM'd me one morning as I clicked between the
New York Times
and TheYBF.com, pretending to bone up on Sen. Whoeverthehell's latest bill about scratching balls while scrolling through snark-infested blogs about black celebs and/or crazy white ladies.

So of course I'd seen it. Mug shots? Murderous monkey-junk love? A productive workday's worst nightmare. This was what the two of us lived for—something so ridiculous it warranted research.

“Fock! That shit was so damn awesome,” I typed back. “I can't even breathe right now it's touching my heart so much.”

“YES!!”

“Dude? Yes!”

And with that, a diapered astronaut became our muse—the awesome crazy we measured our own bizarre love lives against. If we didn't go
that
nuts (950 miles with Depends at the ready)
over some dude with helmet hair, then maybe we'd be okay. Just maybe. This was the same year that we'd decided to stop “dating” and start “looking.” Two thousand and seven was the year we officially entered our late twenties—the starting line of the death march to menopause. This was the year I fell in love with Dex10, Gina got proposed to, and we both came up smelling like teen spirit—overbored, in denial, and mostly unintelligible. Hello? It was the year my mother, a pot-smoking lesbian who in a moment of overbonding told me she'd been celibate for twelve years because she hadn't found “an acceptable mate,” began to sneak “grandbabies” into every conversation. She even asked me to come visit her in Atlanta one bitter February.

“How do you know I don't have plans, like for Valentine's Day or something?”

“Well,” she purred, “do you?”

I hate her sometimes.

This was also the year Gina erratically swore off black guys for white guys, then Jewish guys, then any guy, even gay guys. It was a flag on the play year for all of us girls. One of my best friends from home, Monique, was dating a married man with four kids who made $490 every two weeks.

“He's getting divorced.”

“Yeah, but he
is
married now, right?”

She also had an on/off thing with this Sunday-jazz-brunch guitarist guy. We called him
Mr.
Damon because he was in his mid-forties, and we respect our elders. Two of my sorority sisters were getting divorces. They had three years of marriage and as many kids between them. My college roommate, Stella, was living with a potentially gay man and constantly checking his e-mail. She'd come across a few juicy tidbits—drinks with an ex when he was supposed to be with the guys—but I don't think she ever found what she was looking for.

This year, we had a certain refrain committed to memory:

“Dude, where are the men at?” Gina would start.

“Sheeeeeeiiiiiit,” I'd say. They might as well have been on the moon.

Our astronaut, Lisa Nowak, was like us. She was well educated: U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1985. She was successful: umm, NASA. And she would do practically anything to hold on to what she thought was a good man—checking his e-mail, Google-mapping her competition's whereabouts, then showing up unannounced. We worshipped her. The police found her in an airport parking lot in possession of a steel mallet, a four-inch buck knife, a BB gun, and a map to the home of her rival, Colleen Shipman. All Lisa wanted to do was “talk.”

“Dude, if by ‘talk' you mean do intense bodily harm!”

We laughed and cried over dirty astronaut diapers for months, dissecting every new morsel of the three-way between Nowak, Bill Oefelein, and Colleen, the other woman. This part was especially hilarious: while planning a vacation to his parents' home, Bill e-mailed Colleen to say that they needed a hotel room “due to noise requirements.” He wrote, “We need some ‘privacy'!!!!”

“Dude, why are there so many exclamation points in this correspondence?” I wrote.

“You KNOW he holding something,” wrote back Gina.

“Grodie!”

We were diaper-dope sick, every day wondering if there was no end to what a hard-up housewife would do for a little romance—trash your current marriage, murder your coworker, crap your pants. But this was more than just another Midwest meltdown or celebrity slipup. Something besides the random ridiculousness of Nowak's situation made us hungry for her canonization. See, I don't watch
Flavor of Love, I Love New York, For the Love of Ray
J
, or
Real Chance of Love
because I like to keep my white people crazy limited to the Fox News Channel. So what kept us glued to Ms. Nowak wasn't just the fact of her lunacy—tune in to any of the aforementioned shows, and your eyes will bleed reality-TV red—but the
cause
of it. It was the same thing that was causing ours. When being interrogated by the police, Lisa described her fling with Bill as “more than a working relationship, but less than a romantic relationship.” We immediately started a blog in her honor. Our mission statement:

I was obsessed with the blog for about a month—paying $29.99 for the domain name dirtyastronautdiapers.com, getting some college geek I found on Craigslist to design our Web site, and coming up with a pseudonym for my snarky but sentimental posts. Then we posted like three things on there and got bored of it. Hello, real life was calling. Plus, writing about how much our reality was biting seemed less like some type of postfeminist protest journal and more like a defeatist's dying declaration.
Remember that one scene in
SATC
when Carrie wants to go live in Paris with Petrovsky's old light-installing ass and Miranda's all, “What about your column?!” and Carrie's all, “I'm old as shit and I need to live my life instead of just writing about it for some bootleg tabloid nobody's heard of!” Sorta like that.

Still, sweet heavenly Jesus if we didn't know what it was like to be in the more than / less than emotional equation—who
doesn't
know what that's like? Stuck in that in-between place where nobody's happy, nobody's leaving, and everyone thinks you're settling. But as black women, we felt an even bigger gravitational pull toward the jerks who were at once unworthy and seemingly worthwhile (and I speak for all black women because I can). How many times had we convinced ourselves of someone else's potential while ignoring our own, giving each other great advice that we never follow (girl, he just might not be right for
you
)?

Crazy astronaut ladies and fabulous twenty-something black chicks are in the same spaceship: they're aliens among men blasting off to who knows where.

Right before we met Lisa, I'd just finished licking the wounds of a wasted year being way more than a friend but much less than a girlfriend to a Wellbutrin-popping Muslim podiatrist named Abdul. I slipped up once and said something about “this relationship” in casual conversation. “What relationship?” he asked. Abdul was preceded by West Point Willy, who drunk-dialed a proposal that he, of course, couldn't recall the next morning. I pretended not to care. Then came possibly gay Winston, two-timing Darin, crazy Darin, short Eddie, possibly gay Jean Claude, etc., etc., etc.

Also, I had been surviving the workday by Facebook-stalking James, a summer associate in my job's legal department, whom
I fell in love with during a seminar on libel. He was staring at me so hard, my white work wife passed me a note: “That guy is totally checking you out!” No shit, Sherlock. He sneezed a few times during said meeting, so afterward I slipped him a packet of raspberry lemonade Emergen-C. He asked me out to Starbucks the next day.

“Soooo, basically this cat is an intern,” said Gina, doing her best to sound supportive.

James and I played relationship limbo for a while, meeting for coffee and philosophy twice a week and hooking up once in his bedroom, which was missing a door because it was two-timing him with the better half of a living room. A week later, he told me we couldn't get “romantically involved” because it might affect him professionally. Dude, you're a fucking intern! You've got Ikea curtains for walls! Six months later, I was still convinced we could make it work. I mean, he grew up in Namibia and France and Arkansas. Barack and Michelle 2.0!

At my twenty-seventh birthday party, about a year after the Emergen-C move, I slunk over to where James was standing and wrapped my fingers around his bicep. “Soooo, what are weeeee doing later?”

“You mean after
this
?” He used his martini glass to draw a circle around the crowd.

“Yes, retard.”

“Wait, you wanna have
sex
!”

“Omigod. I can't.” We left shortly after and did.

That was also the first time I met Dex10 (also known as Dexter). I don't remember it (James, champagne, hormones), but supposedly I was extremely friendly.

“Dude, get your fucking life together,” was the message that came down from the Oracle. But then again, she was the one who'd spent the past three years “dating” a guy we called the
Fireman because he was a fireman. He wanted to marry her and move her to St. Louis, where he fought fires and stuff. “I'm too bourgie for that shit,” was her answer. So now she's playing red light / green light with Bilal, who thinks marriage is for suckers and children are unethical.

The point is, we're becoming
those
women. The ones guys refer to as “wifey material,” since apparently spouses come in specific fabric grades. After about a week of flirting online, Dex10 described me this way: “Hi, my name's Helena and I'm awesome. The end.” Gee, thanks. I'll make sure to keep that in mind when we break up for the fifty thousandth time. Suddenly, Lisa Nowak didn't look so crazy. Actually, she might have been on to something.

What does “wifey material” even mean when someone at the
Washington Post
thinks the headline “Marriage Is for White People?” is okay? The article, of course, became another one of Gina's and my obsessions. The
Washington
fucking
Post
was against us now.

“Dude, is there anyone out there who wants us to find a man?” I asked, more begging than wondering. SOSing, really.

“Nope.”

The reporter who wrote the story worked part-time with kids, who I'm going to assume were from the “inner city,” because those are the kids people write about in newspapers. Once, in one of her classes, during a discussion on how to be a good father, one frustrated little boy said, “Marriage is for white people,” and clearly a movement was born (remember the AAHMI? Me neither). This kid wasn't into the whole “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage” thing. Perhaps Nursery Rhymes that Subliminally Teach Minority Children about Healthy Social Institutions 101 should be a kindergarten requirement.

If so, Dexter would still be eating Play Doh, instead of just playing dumb. Fast-forward to a scene between my sheets on one of the many horrendously long Saturday nights that led to my ignoring him on IM.

So, we're naked and he goes, “I don't know. It's like…I don't know…Maybe it's that I don't think I can live up to the low expectations you have of me.” He's looking past my forehead.

“What?” I'm trying to sound as nonmurderous as possible. No such luck. “Are you fucking serious right now? Like are you actually saying this to me right now?”

“Helena, you're the most amazing person.” Now he's looking me in the eyes. “Like, I'll never meet anyone better than you. I just know I'll mess this up.” He was slipping through my fingers, and I couldn't clench my fists fast enough. It was one of those terrifying, long-winded, up-late, naked conversations that never begin or end. The first of many we'd have.

This particular cram session all started with a bad fashion choice.

I'd “caught” Dexter—at this point my maybe-boyfriend for at least a month—kissing some girl in a club. Yep, he was tonguing down some light-skinned, curly-haired, Forever XXI fashion-top-wearing girl. The shirt she had on was asymmetrical. Repeat. He kinda betrayed me with a girl wearing a shirt that was long-sleeved on one side and tube top on the other. After a marathon curse-out, he managed to make the situation not about his “cheating”—we weren't exclusive yet—but about my inherent awesomeness physically compelling him to treat me like “some stupid chick off the fucking street,” in my humble opinion.

Was I too perfect? What kind of crazy monkey-junk logic was that? Was he just not that into me? Did I actually just ask myself
that? What kind of maniac subscribes to a self-loathing brand of reasoning created by a comic with frosted tips? So what was it then? And we're back to the beginning. What would Lisa do? Where does one purchase a mallet?