Bitch Is the New Black (4 page)

I got back at her by fixating on my death, constantly asking Frances what she would do when I died suddenly in my sleep or crossing the street to school. The countdown to Spain became a macabre advent calendar with questions about my imminent demise decorating each new day. If I didn't ask about her life without me, I thought it might come that much sooner.

“What would you do if I died tomorrow?”

“Oh, I don't know, little brown-eyed girl.”

“I'm serious! What would happen?”

“I don't know. I'd probably gather up all your pictures and your clothes and your toys and I'd move way up in the mountains somewhere.” Good answer, lady. Because if I didn't exist, then she couldn't either. More than a package deal, we were Siamese. Maybe Spain wasn't such a crappy idea after all. We'd disappear together. Like old times.

Or maybe not. In the end, my second-grade OCD couldn't save us.

Obviously there was a lot of packing and preparation in the months leading up to our escape, but me being six and totally self-absorbed, I remember none of this. Alls I know is that one day we were in the desert, and the next, we were on the 405
Freeway trying to get to LAX with my grandmother in the driver's seat. It was just the three of us, waiting with the rest of the cars to get to our respective point B's. Sitting in traffic, I watched an accident on the shoulder through a frame made with my thumbs and pointer fingers. There was an ambulance, a mangled car, and a stretcher covered with a white sheet.
No bueno
. Convinced that whatever was underneath was dead, I held my breath because breathing suddenly felt like bragging. I squatted up to the window and watched from the backseat of my grandmother's Nissan, trying not to choke on her cigarette smoke.

“Lena, sit back.” She was a barker. Effie, my mother's mother, is the type of grandmother who'd rather give an order than a cookie. I loved her because I knew she could break me if she really wanted to. And most times I imagined she did want to. I admired her restraint.

Without protest, I sat back down on my butt and shoved myself as far back into the upholstery as possible, craning my neck to see the coffin on wheels being rolled into the ambulance. Nobody seemed to care. I closed my eyes and smoked a secondhand Virginia Slim.

At the airport, I waited in the car while Frances got out to handle the whole checking-in-to-move-your-only-child-halfway-around-the-world-for-God-knows-what process, which surprisingly didn't take long at all. Commanded to be still, I followed her with my eyes like a haunted-house portrait. See Frances waiting in line. See Frances at the ticket counter. See Frances handing someone some papers. See Frances smiling. See Frances waving.

She motioned to me from inside, giving me the international hand sign for “Get out of the car and come start the rest of your life!” I could have sworn I saw her mouth those words, so I jumped to put my fingers on the handle.

“No, Lena, stay,” rasped Effie from the driver's seat, not even bothering to turn around or even eye me from the car mirror. She hadn't said much more than “Umm-hmm” since the accident. The sudden presence of her voice made the car almost claustrophobic. Only she could make “stay” sound like a complete sentence. There was no question of obedience. This was the woman whose number my mother made me repeat like a prayer of protection whenever I went somewhere alone—Girl Scout camp, sleepovers, down the street.
You okay, little brown-eyed girl?
Yes.
What's Grandmommy's number?
779–7520!
Good girl.
So with one syllable I sat back in my seat and looked straight ahead, ignoring my mother, who was standing alone waiting for me.

Then we drove off.

 

After however long it takes to get away with stealing someone, my grandmother dropped me off at the house of an unfamiliar and hugely fat old woman I'd never seen before, except for maybe in my nightmares. Truthfully, she was perfectly nice, but still—hello, I had been kidnapped!

Grandmommy said I'd be staying with Mrs. Humongobutt (as my memory calls her now) for some adult-sanctioned and therefore indeterminate amount of time. She also said that my mother was going on ahead to Spain without me. That's when I knew this was all bullshit. That nothing was going as planned. Because I knew us. Me and Frances, we were forever. That's when I decided not to run. She'd be coming for me. I don't even remember shedding more than two or three tears, and those were just for show. Didn't want them to suspect anything. She
was
going to come for me—eventually, maybe.

Swaddled in a muumuu on most days, Mrs. H made me feel more houseguest than hostage. I remember her gray hair, parted in four parts and then braided into thick ropes the length of ChapStick. Her granddaughter lived there too (or maybe she was brought in to keep me company), and the two of us played while she was cooking, which was always. Her granddaughter was no new Jocelyn, but prisoners can't be picky. Her name was something like LaNiece or Michelle. Whatever, she's barely important—actually, that's not right. Without her constant distractions—it was at Humongobutt's that I learned you shouldn't lick toilets and to sing gospel—I would've had to think about where I was and where I wasn't. I was somewhere between alone and afraid. I wasn't learning my Espanish. When it was dark, I'd pretend to dream, but I spent most nights wide awake, imagining a plane with Frances in it flying over the roof. Straining my ears, listening for the once-frightening roar to turn into my mother's voice, like thunder before the possibility of lightning. After hours of waiting, I'd finally go to sleep, knowing she wasn't in the sky.

The five days I spent without a mother were and will always be the worst of my life. Frances was my dirt, and when she left, she took my feet with her. A six-year-old girl without gravity. Weightless but not flying, because that would have been a relief. Instead, I was in a constant state of losing—spending one minute remembering the plump of the small bump on both her pinkies where her sixth finger used to be, and the next minute trying to picture the curl of the three hairs near her chin. There were moments when I could call up her face on speed dial and others when I couldn't remember the number to save my life. I needed saving.

Repression was my refuge. There are few things I can remember from that week. Whose clothes did I wear? Where did I sleep? What did I eat? How did I cope? Why didn't I jump out a
window? No one spoke of Frances to me, except once. According to Humongobutt, a glass of water cost like $5 in Spain, and apparently that was a lot and therefore more than my mother could afford. She said this by way of explaining my presence in her home. My grandmother, according to this woman I'd never met before, was saving me. A messiah, not a mobster. Also, according to this woman, because Frances had failed to calculate the exorbitant cost of drinking into our Spanish plans, she was therefore unfit not only as a mother but as a human being.
Your mother didn't know what she was getting you all into.
Plus, you know, she had just left me here all alone in an unfamiliar America like Fievel. I was better off now, supposedly. Nobody said she'd be back.

After spending about a week with Humongo and LaNieceMichelle, a familiar face finally showed up. Without explanation—a recurring motif—my auntie Barbara came and took me away on a boat.

She was the youngest of my mother's four sisters, and I was in awe of her. She knew everything. She smelled like clean, shopped at Robinsons-May, and had a high-class voice that made me feel special. But when she came to spring me from Humongo's, I knew I hadn't been rescued yet. She took me to the mall, for McDonald's, and then to Catalina Island for a day at the beach with a bunch of skinny kids I'd never met. I ran, I jumped, I ate sand, I threw sand; I was a child finally. In the fleeting moments not crowded with activity, I felt guilty for all the fun being had sans Frances—but I needed this. Maybe this was my new life, I thought. Maybe from now on, I would be bounced from unknown to unfamiliar and then back to alone. Maybe I should just adjust.

After one day of feeling normal and loved, Auntie dropped me back off at Mrs. H's without explanation, and I went back to
being a motherless child. Later she'd say that I seemed happy, well-adjusted. Her job, I think, was to make sure they—my grandmommy, Humongobutt, the Boogie Man—hadn't severely damaged me in some irreparable fashion. To see how I was, then report back to whoever masterminded this whole thing. These women were protecting me from something horrible, something they couldn't name, something Frances must not have known existed. Snapping my childhood in two was simply par for the course.

I figured it was really Frances they wanted tamed. I was just an irksome but unavoidable byproduct. No more panty-free days at school, no more moving on impulse, no more lesbians, no more living. That was the first time I cried, when Auntie left me on that fat woman's doorstep with a shopping bag full of new stuff and emptied-out insides. Even LaNieceMichelle couldn't shut me up. I remember well what it's like to be a child crying. The slobber, the spit, the throat-scratching stuttering and uncontrollable shoulders.

The old lady held me to her massive boobage for a long time, trying either to suffocate me or to give me succor. I wished she'd done the former.

I was captive for four, five days at the most. Then Effie, whom I hadn't seen or heard from since we sped away from the airport together, came and got me. Just like that. She didn't say where we were going or why. I grabbed the plastic bag with my new two-piece in it and climbed back into the getaway car from just a few days before. I didn't say good-bye to Humongo or LaNieceMichelle. I never saw them again, and at six I knew that would be the case. We drove in smoky silence through L.A. smog. Me trying not to choke her with the strings of my bikini. Her eyeing me every once in a while from the car mirror. I knew where we were once we got to the brick alley that always led to the back of
Effie's house. She still wasn't talking, but I knew Frances was around here somewhere.

The car stopped. The engine cut off. A front door opened. I pulled a handle. I jumped to the concrete. I saw her.

Someone grabbed my arm, slapped a vein, and shot me up with Christmas morning, new puppy, the last day of school, and snow boots all at once. I ran to her, my arms flying open involuntarily, straining like ghost limbs for feelings that had been snatched away. Frances didn't make a sound. She dropped to her knees and let me smash into her chest. Whatever tears refused to come when I first lost her marched from my eyes, tiny soldiers on a steady and quiet advance down my cheeks. I put my hands on her face, pulling her skin to the right and left, making sure it was the real her under there and not a fake. I circled my arms around her neck, landed my ear between her breasts, closed my eyes, and listened. We rocked. Finally, after what seemed like forever, we would get up from the patch of grass. Frances suggested out loud that we take a walk around the block to get reacquainted. My grandmother nodded, and we left.

We were about halfway around the block when a van screeched up to the curb beside us, the side door slid open, and a man pulled me in.
You gotta be kidding me!
Thank God, Frances came too.

 

I'd like to think we were to Catalina Island as Jesus will be to the Rapture—thieves in the night. That I was whisked to this secret place via some covert method of whisking from the big red boat that brought us there to the brown van that zipped up the street of Avalon to the twin beds of the Edgewater hotel, where I was finally settled. That we stole the souls of all the white, Christian, and blond, with her blackness and my ashy knees.

In real life, Frances and I arrived in broad-ass daylight. We walked the half mile to the hotel by the beach that would become our newest home. She carried the big bag, and I carried the small one. It knocked against my six-year-old thighs with every step I tried matching to hers, our shadows moving like one three-legged, lopsided monster.

That's how we ended up walking down Crescent Avenue in Avalon with only two bags. The small town on the small island was only twenty-six miles across the sea, but we might as well have been on the moon. This would be the start of my factual childhood, not the new Helena but the real one. Everything before it was a blessed blur—Jocelyn, Lancaster, Misty the pony, moving, kidnapping. Memories of this place had more weight than the six years that came prior—capture the flag in People's Park, sixth grade with Mrs. Paul, breeding Crystal the rabbit, my first drink at Descanso Beach, throwing peanuts on the floor of Antonio's, Bobby M.'s sandy blond hair. Little more than two thousand people lived on Catalina, most of them religious, all of them white. Frances and I increased the black population by 200 percent. Here we were memorable, and I remembered nothing from the previous us. We were technically from Los Angeles, but Catalina is where I originated.

“Really, sweet the beat? You've been here before?” Frances asked, probably tired from kidnapping her own daughter back from her own mother but still sounding interested.

“Yeah, over there.” I pointed. “Auntie Barbara brought me, and she bought me a new
two
piece, and…” I told her the rest of my story but got no reaction. Umm, two pieces are a big deal.
Hellooooooo
. We walked the last piece of the way in silence, checked into a hotel, and went about the business of settling in. Finally.

We spent the next five and a half years on the island, still moving constantly, of course. But this time there wasn't far to go.
There was one public school, one post office, one Chinese food place, and two pizzerias called Antonio's. Whatever insanity we'd experienced to get there got swallowed up by the ocean.

Two decades later, through the blast of a hair dryer, I found out why.

What had happened was a grammatical error, a misinterpretation of synonyms. Before we left for Spain, one of my mother's ex-lovers asked if she was taking me along too. My mother replied, “Of course: Lena is my biggest asset.” Frances had gotten a job as a nanny to a rich American family in Madrid. I'd be raised up with their kids, go to an international school, eat tapas, and be exotic. What Frances meant by “asset” was that I was like a prototype—the most important bullet point on her mommy résumé. This ex of hers thought that by “asset,” Frances meant something more along the lines of goods for sale, the liquefiable kind. So then this asshole called up my grandmother, and my grandmother called my aunties, and my aunties called each other, and a few days later, Frances would end up alone in an airport parking lot. In a
really
crazy twist, my grandmother had my mother arrested.
So we were both in prison
. Frances could have me back, Effie promised, only after marrying a man named Herbert, staying in California, and raising me up right. After five days of stubbornness, she was freed and we sailed away.