Bitch Is the New Black (3 page)

We'd started out promisingly enough. Dex was terrifyingly good-looking and had a quirky I-write-poetry-about-the-women-I-date-to-make-each-one-feel-special thing going. He was in law school. He'd be my Cliff. And I'd be a less pathetic Pygmalion. James who?

Then, on that never-ending Saturday night, I stupidly decided to do a drive-by. Sure, I was going to check up on him at the club, but I was going to be super-covert about it—two-stepping in the background and pretending not to care about what he was doing over there with that woman dressed for Homecoming 1996. So the girls and I posted ourselves on the fringes of the dance floor, and he was so good for the first two hours.

Then I came back from the bathroom.

“Stop staring at him!” I screamed over the music. They were busy drilling neat holes in the back of Dex's head, arms crossed over their chests like pissed-off principals.

“That girl just kissed him,” said Adrienne, my best friend since freshman year, too matter-of-factly to be joking.

“Ummm, what?”

“She kissed him on the lips,” she repeated in the same “just the facts, ma'am” voice they use with victims on
SVU
. “We both saw it. There wasn't tongue or anything. But definitely on the lips. Whaddyawannado?”

What do I want to do?
What do I want to do?
I want to fucking scream is what I want to do! I want to punch that bitch in the damn throat and slap that shirt back to the bargain-basement bin to which it belongs. I want to slap
you
for seeing them tongue
each other down and then telling me about it. I want to hop in my time machine and take back the blow job I gave him last night. Fock! This dude was supposed to be
it.
I took him to an office party, for Jesus' sakes. An office party! I couldn't stop saying, “Oh fuck.” He was gorgeous and smart and funny and muscle-ly and beautifully weird and ugly when he came. I'd farted in front of him and didn't bother to pretend it wasn't me. And now I was going to have to start over. But fuck it, right? Keep it moving.

Yeah, maybe tomorrow morning.

I clicked over to where Dexter was sitting with Forever XXI girl and pounded my fingers into his left shoulder. “We need to fucking talk.”

He was surprised to see me but followed my back through the club without asking questions. I pushed past people like an astronaut with space dementia. When I finally whirled around to face him, I could tell he was drunk. “Are you here with that fucking girl?” I screamed with my feet shoulder width apart and my nails digging into my hips. Power stance. “And don't even try to fucking lie, ass face, because Adrienne saw you licking her goddamn titties.” Dex's eyes got big, but he didn't deny it, not even the parts I'd made up. Not a sound came out of this man's mouth, even though it was so wide open I could've put my fist through it. I thought seriously about doing that.

“Omigod, your breath! It's doing karate moves. Close your fucking mouth, retard!”

He closed it, and I left.

I ran past Adrienne, who'd witnessed my meltdown along with a bouncer and a few other people, to the ATM across the street to try and get $20 for a cab. Why do I never have cash?! Adrienne ran too. “Get in my car, Helena. I know you're embarrassed, but it's me, dude.” Fock.

As soon as I got into my apartment, my always empty but now totally emptier apartment, I flipped open my laptop and deleted Dexter from Facebook, MySpace, AIM, and my Outlook address book. I needed to do something real. But really, he was just another ephemeral disappeared-into-the-Internet ether. Nothing. It was 4:00 a.m., and I wore down my living room floor pacing back and forth, making guttural sounds—grunting like a damn maniac because I couldn't cry. I
wouldn't
cry—not after only five weeks. So instead I lay on my bed, hissed at the ceiling through clenched teeth like a woman in labor, and waited for sleep to come.

Then he caaaaalled, and we taaaalked, and he beeeegged, and I liiiiiistened.

Yes, I am totally familiar with how ridiculously pathetic I am. How fucked I am in this entire situation. How like Lisa I am right now. She'd been in outer space. Outer freaking space! I assume she knew she was better than dirty Depends (I mean, there
are
rest stops). And yet this woman, this woman who was like us in so many ways, was willing to abandon life on the moon for a man with whom she shared “more than a working relationship but less than a romantic relationship.” Does success drive you totally insane? Or do men?

Six months and one Lisa later, I still didn't know for sure. This is why I can't answer Dex's whining IMs. This is why I
have
to get over him. This is why I've been super-strong and full of resolve for the past two weeks. This is why when I saw him walking up the stairs of yet another club just last night, my stomach flipped, my eyes went all watery, and I almost choked on a shard of ice. This is why when he came over to our pack with a shit-eating grin on his face and
embraced
one of
my
friends and then tried to give me the one-armed homie hug, I gave him the thumbs-up. This is why, when I saw him later the same night,
this time standing by himself at the bar looking all lonely and irresistible like DVF at Filene's, I
had
to say hello. This is why we ended up talking all night. This is also why I woke up to him the next morning and have to start all over again with the whole ignoring thing.

This is why I never win.

Know how I found out my family thought my mother was a
crack-addicted sex fiend who dabbled in the international child slave ring and planned to sell her only daughter to the highest bidder? Over the phone and under a hair dryer.

“Whaaaa?”

“I never told you this?” Umm, no.

See, Frances does this. We'll be talking about something FCC-approved for mothers and daughters, like, say, vaginal itch, and she'll bust in like the emergency broadcasting system with a “What kind of birth control do you use?” or an “I've been celibate for almost a decade” or an “Oh, so you two are just fuck buddies then.” Beeeeeeep goes the filial flat line. Dead. She's got mommy Tourette's.

Even better than talking, she'll actually
do
things that are totally unkeeping for a woman her age or sexual orientation. In a perfect world, I'd be blissfully oblivious to these random acts
of kinkiness, but for the persistent photo evidence. It's as if she's leaving me Kodak crumbs, snapshot SOSes. Like the time I found a picture of her with Treach. Yes, that Treach, one half of the Grammy-winning rap duo Naughty by Nature, who famously asked, “Ya down with O.P.P.?”

“What. The hell. Is this?” I say, ripping the four-by-six from her fridge and eyeing it up close. Oh, it's Treach, all right. I pinch a triangle of the edge and dangle it in her direction.

“Oh yeah, he's a performer,” she says, actually using the word
performer
, which proves just how wrong it is for her to be in this picture.

“Jesus, woman!” I feign a proper degree of daughterly disgust, when really I'm proud of how utterly ridiculous she is. How totally unacceptable her whole life is. She's in this picture cheesing like someone told her to, holding a glass of champagne, and wearing Treach's arm for a shawl. This lady is old enough to be
wearing
shawls. According to her version of the night in question, the two of them—my mommy and the hip-hop star—just happened to be in the same club celebrating the release of a porno Treach was in—she claims ignorance here—and Frances, being Frances, finagled her way into VIP bottle service, because that's what she does. Now she's got proof of how inappropriate she is magnetically fixed to her fridge.

It was also through
This Week in Pictures: The Frances Andrews Edition
that I learned she'd gotten married. I was in grad school at the time, and the “wedding” to which I did not receive an invitation had taken place a few months before. The groom was this African guy named Isa, who was gay and illegal. Frances wore garb for the “ceremony,” which in five-by-seven looked like it took place in the kind of church basement slash community center slash banquet hall in which fake marriages are held. Less than two years later, they were found out by the Feds when nei
ther one could remember (a) the last time they had sex or (b) which way the toilet paper rolled off the handle. Frances said two weeks ago and under. Isa said two months ago and over. The INS agent decided to be merciful and file their interview in a trash can. Better it never existed.

Frances is an oxymoron personified. She grows ganja next to her geraniums and “Gee milacres!” is her go-to exclamation. She thinks having a nice pair of “slacks” is synonymous with success but will never set foot in a mall and whines whenever you ask her to try something on. Ikea is her Shangri-la, but every piece of furniture she owns was “found” on somebody's curb. She has absolutely no clue what O.P.P. stands for but has a seemingly endless catalog of original-score birthday songs. When I turned twenty-eight, she sang a new one to my voice mail. And I thought I'd heard 'em all.

On this Saturday morning over the drone of the hair dryer, her voice is just as clear, cutting through the metal hood like a cake knife when she says, “Oh yeah, Grandmommy and Auntie and all them thought I was going to sell you on the black market
in Spain. They thought I was on crack.” Since I'm in the beauty salon and not an insane asylum, screaming is out of the question.

 

When we were six and thirty-five, Frances decided to move us to Madrid. We were living in Lancaster then, a place Californians refer to as the high desert, not to be confused with the low desert, which doesn't exist to my knowledge, or is otherwise known as Los Angeles, the city Frances and I are technically from.

She never once sat me down to explain why we were becoming expats—if we were running away or toward something. All I know is that one day we were settled in “a two-story house with snow” (my personal request), and the next we were in a constant state of moving—selling my Snoopy scooter and giving away the wild horse she bought me for my birthday. She never framed it as a question like they do on 1950s sitcoms:
Hey, Little Ricki, how'd ya like to go to Cuba?

We moved allllll the time. And by all the time, I'm not using the suburban kid pejorative where moving maybe once or twice in one's little lifetime is so soul-crushing and eventful that one grows up wanting to be established and home-owning. No, I mean we moved whenever she felt like it, and because everything she felt meant everything to me, moving became our secret game. Secret in that only I knew the rules, so technically every time I won.

If I came home from school, and Frances said, “Guess what?” I didn't immediately start searching the house for a new Cabbage Patch Kid. I knew the score. With this woman, a “guess what” wasn't an invitation to imagine; it was a prerequisite for packing. In place of “Guess what? Ground chuck was 39 cents off today. Tacos!” I got “Guess what? The dollar is way up. Learn Spanish!”
I wasn't scarred by it or anything—at least not in the beginning. 'Cause see, I liked moving. Loved it, actually.

Then came the trip to Spain that went terribly wrong, forever ruining our secret game.

I don't have a childhood home—but homes. There does not exist in the greater Los Angeles area any street whose name I recall, whose sidewalks I hear, whose air I can taste, but it's okay, because I've got the flash cards. These quick-flipping images that, when sorted through, give me some idea of what being Frances's “first and last” was like.

There are two piles. The first has all the places I sort of remember—a brownish green yard and a black puppy that got away; another puppy found limp with his nose in a box of Abba-Zabas; a porcelain bathtub I pooped in while there was water in it; a pink corduroy jumper decorated in the front with throw-up because Frances left me with strangers without saying good-bye; a crumpling Victorian mansion filled with “special” people to whom she gave pills and to whom I gave orders; a red Porsche at night with the top down.

The second pile has all the places I can see clearly. My favorite is the street with our white wooden house and the steepled church on the corner. Dressed up like a clown, I celebrated my fifth birthday in that backyard. Or I could've had on a grass skirt made out of discarded palm tree leaves or a thrift-shop trench coat cut up to look like Inspector Gadget's—whatever, costume is every late October baby's burden. In the kitchen there was a cot I slept on not because there wasn't an extra bedroom, but because refrigerator noises were so scary that being close to them helped me fall asleep. Made sense then.

My best friend was another little girl named Jocelyn, who lived three houses down. She had a beautiful older brother and a huge clubhouse/refrigerator box in her backyard.

We shared everything, me and Jocelyn—an obsession with “doing it,” the lyrics to “Let's Hear It for the Boys,” ingenious blueprints for the refrigerator box, and…urine. In some clairvoyant preparation for our futures in nightclub bathrooms, we always peed at the same time. Like, literally. Both our bony butts could fit on one toilet seat simultaneously. We tested this once as a joke or dare—I can't remember which—and decided to stick with it. It was both economical and efficient. Mine on one side and hers on the other, our cheeks barely touching. I doubt anyone knew we were pee-pee partners or even cared. Still, we thought we were doing something nasty, something significant.

As if on cue Frances announced our third move in a year right when me and Jocelyn had a good rhythm going, a pissy symphony if you will. This time it was to somewhere called Lancaster—a two-hour drive up north. She said Jocelyn could come visit if she wanted. I shrugged; synchronized urination wasn't so complicated that it couldn't be duplicated with someone else. The new Jocelyn (whoever that might be) would do, because Jocelyn was just the new somebody else and so on and so on—a fun-house mirror of best friends. This was during my “me” phase—do phases last twenty-seven years?—so every one of our moves meant just one thing to me. Well, a few things: new stuff, new Jocelyns, new pets, a new car, definitely a new school, and, of course, the new Helena.

Supposedly she chose Lancaster because months before I'd put in a special request for a house with stairs and snow, so in mumbo-jumbled reverse psychology terminology the uprooting of our lives for the fifty-thousandth time was really all
my
decision. ME! Permission to start decades of self-fascination? Granted.

There were three other black kids in our row of town houses. Frances was like the manager of our apartment home community or something. We were living the high life—hello, stairs—
and as far as I could tell, we were now not only rich but also famous. Or at least I was. I made sure everyone saw me skating in the backyard parking lot with my new purple Barbie skates, not noticing they were on the wrong feet until Frances pointed it out; that everyone saw me scooting fluently on my pink-tasseled Snoopy scooter, which I'd been prescribed due to my bike-riding phobia; that everyone knew I had a snapping turtle named Tyrone, but not that I tortured him with sharpened pencils.

Existing exclusively in my own head, I collected best friends like My Little Ponies but was happiest alone. Common household items were my real friends—black markers, fingernail files, hairbrushes, red plastic cups, left shoes, bitten-off pencil erasers, power cords, matted toothbrushes, untwisted paper clips. They were all characters in my inanimate soaps.
Why should I buy you Barbies when you'd rather play with school supplies?
“The Numbers” was one melodrama mentally rewound so often I'm surprised the tape kept working. See, 3 and 4 were the elderly parents of 5, who was good and sweet and desperately in love with 6, the innocent beauty who herself was in love with 7 and never realized her secret power over 9, the billionaire brat who was betrothed to 8, who, of course, kept herself busy plotting against 6 and lusting after 7. I can't remember what 1 and 2 did. Directed, probably.

There was this one time when Frances, anticipating an early start the next morning, trusted me to get myself up and ready for school. A second-grader reading on a fourth-grade level, I awoke feeling so over it. What was all the fuss about? I'd be fine. Picked out a white sundress paired with purple snow boots because it was January.

This was also the same day I “forgot” to wear panties. Flowy dress, meet the wind. Wind, meet my tiny bare ass cheeks. Why six-year-old me decided to go grade-school commando escapes
me. If I had to guess, somehow underwear seemed unnecessary. When I met up with the kids that lived a few doors down to walk to school, nobody said nothing.

It was as if I'd been dressing like a Russian child prostitute all my life. School pictures were that day. The A's, being down in front, were given the star treatment, totally unmissable. Unfortunately, sitting Indian-style, so was my hoo-ha. Mrs. What's-her-guts couldn't wait to dime me out to Frances. Jerk. Apparently there was a seasonally appropriate pink sweat suit waiting blatantly on the downstairs couch that I'd completely missed in my rush to be grown.

Mrs. What's-her-guts, stool pigeon that she was, had a bunch more to report: I'd been cheating on our class book assignment for months—tracing my mother's signature on the “how many pages I read today” thingy she sent home every week. Plus, I frequently erased myself from the chalkboard reserved for naughty names; plus, I cheated at Heads Up Seven Up; plus, I was sneaking unauthorized Sprite into my lunch canister and telling people it was water. Needless to say, I never saw my legs or the light of day again that winter, and when the subject of moving to Spain came up, I was hardly in a position to whine it down.

“Do they have
Fraggle Rock
?” Watching singing mole men construct a never-finished underground maze of scaffolding was my only prerequisite for flying around the world with her.

“Yes, little brown-eyed girl, they've got everything in Spain,” she said, playing piano on my ribs as I stood accusing her in our kitchen—the first we'd had with a dishwasher. I wouldn't let myself laugh or give her the satisfaction of knowing I'd follow her anywhere.

“Is it in
Spanish
?” I asked, slumping down to the floor away from her tickling fingers, realizing that our lives would always be like this: move here, move there, move here, move there.

“Yes.” She didn't sound defeated. She knew she was abominable.

“Then I don't wanna go,” I said, fingering the grooves between the tiles on the floor. This was one of the first real house-houses that we'd ever lived in. She had a real job. I'd gone to the same school for almost an entire grade. She'd bought me a wild pony that I never rode once because, umm, it was wild, but I loved it fiercely. We kept Misty, named after a cousin I barely saw, at a stable not too far from our house-house. At six, I was finally ready to be settled, and here she was once again, all too ready to be restless.