Bitch Is the New Black (6 page)

During all this, Mrs. Paul was clucking like a chicken while tap-dancing on top of randomly selected desks, and rule No. 1 said not to laugh, keep your eyes on your paper. What most of us didn't bother to do was read the instructions at the top of the page, which said to write your initials on the back and sit quietly until she called time. Paying attention was worthless if you didn't start out right to begin with.

Polly
would be a new beginning for me. The day I brought the tape in, I felt powerful, like when you know a secret that other people don't realize that they should know. I had a G14-classified VHS in my JanSport and was waiting for the perfect moment to slam it down on someone's desk.
Oh, you thought you knew what a black girl was? Well, take. A Look. At this!
Minds would be blown. After two hours, everyone would know what me was: well, me if I was a singing orphan in 1950s Alabama. Whatever. It was a start.

Someone from the AV club rolled in a two-hundred-pound twenty-inch. Mrs. Paul called my name, and I got to walk all the way from table no. 12 to the front of the room to pop in the tape and press play. The whole way back, I couldn't stop smiling. Once we got rolling, even Johnny Leonardi laughed, and I was pretty sure he was plotting to kill me one day, or at least trip me en route to sharpening a pencil. Everybody liked it. They ooooohed when the old white doctor who looked like the Kentucky Colonel calls Polly a “pickaninny,” having the faint intuition that it meant something bad (Frances had to explain it to me). We all cheered at the end when Polly cuts the ribbon, christening the newly built bridge that joins the white part of town to the black part.

I thought my life might change after that. I thought I might be invited to more sleepovers with Barbies and less Bible studies. I thought someone might pick me first for something. Anything.

Not so much. But I did score points for getting us out of reading hour, which I'd personally hated since Mrs. Paul read the word “nigger” out loud. Sure, I told her it was fine, but I didn't think she'd actually do it:

Then the main character goes, “S-see what they called us.” Then Mrs. Paul with all her ancient oratory skills goes, (
evil redneck old teacher voice
) “That's what you are” (
normal nonracist voice
) “she said coldly” (
racist voice
) “Now go sit down.”

Sixty-six tiny eyeballs stuck to the back of my head for the rest of the hour.

Thankfully, they couldn't actually see in there. Otherwise they'd know the secrets I was too afraid to say out loud, even when I was alone. To my limited knowledge, none of my friends knew that Frances was a gay. I carried around
our
status as lesbians—her by choice, me by association—like a bedazzled scarlet
A
. Someone might notice while Frances helped the normal mothers pass out Rice Krispies Treats or when she bared her unshaven legs at one of my Little League games.

One time, a girl I knew from Awanas, LeAnne, had to go for one week with a King James Bible handcuffed to her arm with tight string. She'd been bad or something. It hung from her wrist ball-and-chain-style for a few days before Frances made her cut it off. LeAnne cried. “If your dad has a problem with it, tell him to call me.” Those were the days that I never wished her different.

Then there were the times when I danced with a towel on my head. My other favorite Cosby episodes were any with Cliff and Clair dancing. The lights had been dimmed in their mansion, and both were wearing silk pajamas. Someone would put a record on the player they kept on the desk near the front door in the living room, and jazz would come purring out. The ideal '80s ebony egalitarians. I learned the steps in our one-room apartment with the shared bathroom down the hall.

The cheek to cheek, feet to feet. When I was alone, which was increasingly always, I'd carefully fix a white towel along my hairline and practice. Bath towels were best because they were
longer. You could twist them counterclockwise at the nape of your neck and flip the bottom half over your left shoulder, seductively—very Diana Ross in
Mahogany
. Anyway, this is what I did when Wendy and “the girls” were having secret sleepovers they forgot to tell me about on Friday but had no problem remembering the details of by Monday—two-step with a towel on my head and a teddy bear in my arms.

Black romance was my imaginary friend. Our members-only club was me, Rudy, Clair, and Cliff—if we felt like letting boys in that day. Frances, though perfect to me by biology, wasn't allowed.

It didn't matter that this was before her presence at everything—recitals, rehearsals, camps, and competitions—was more embarrassing than endearing. I loved it when she popped up in my school world with a boxed cake or bag of Valentine's candy.
This is my mother, people. See, someone thinks this much of me.
I rarely wished for a father then. Or that she shaved her pits.

But on Thursdays, no matter where I was—surrounded by little lilies of the valley or snuggled into Frances's mommy belly—the oddity of my existence on earth was so acute that I'd get a prickling in my fingers and go into a waking trance I called “the sticks.” I never tried to explain “the sticks” to Frances, because I hardly understood them myself, and was certain they'd make me sound nuts. It happened in one of two places: the toilet or the couch. I'd be sitting there minding my own business or taking care of some business, and “the sticks” would come to get me. Time stopped, images would blur Siamese, and then a gazillion invisible little toothpicks would stab at my body while my mind pulled me in as many directions. I could've sat there for hours, contemplating things far beyond my maturity level (even now). Topics A through Z included the meaning of life, why people called me black when I was clearly brown, my grand
mother's hatred, the sensation of swallowing spit, sounding out the word
lame
. Then I'd blink, and it'd all be over. Back to pooping or loafing around.

When the theme music for
The Cosby Show
came on, “the sticks” would try to take me over, but I'd force them out through my fingers. I had to pay attention and study this life I planned on living someday. Yeah, I longed for us to be the Huxtables, but I would've settled for living next door to them. I wanted to fit in on that block “over town” somewhere in the life we'd floated away from. No wonder Clair became my secret crush. And because my biological father and I were in a no-titles relationship, I clung to Cliff just as hard. These TV people were real. It was my life on a faraway island that was fake.

When our black-and-white TV went off, I was by myself again.

In the end, I just wanted to make sure she knew that we were most likely going to hell, that she was
aware
of the decision she'd made for the both of us. I was concerned. After convincing myself that she most desperately needed my help, I marched into the living room.

“Have you seen this?” I said, much more softly than originally planned. In my head it was more of a booming accusation, but in real life it came out like a question, cowering over in the corner somewhere.

I did manage to shove my open King James onto her lap. Too scared to actually read the text aloud, despite being an excellent out-loud reader, I pointed to the page and waited.

She said Grandmommy had shown her that same page years ago. She never said the word
gay
,
lesbian
,
vagina
,
homo
, or
dyke
. There was no script, no prepared lines. I was perfectly normal, she said, and so was she. She didn't say anything about us going to hell or heaven, though. I figured we were there already.

Epiphanies over Ethiopian are probably worth the indigestion.

When it occurred to me—with a mouth too full of
injera
to object—that Britanya knew me better than I knew myself and also wanted to
know
me in the biblical sense, I did what any self-hiding heterosexual woman would: practiced willful ignorance until the problem went away and life returned to nonchalance.

“You're just so…robotic,” observed Britanya, disrupting the funnels of smoke shooting out her nose as if it were an exhaust pipe. Totally disgusting. Kind of sexy.

“Pffft! What the hell are you talking about?” It had to be the spicy lamb stuff that was making me sweat. Or possibly the cancer fumes. This chick didn't even know me like that. Give or take, we'd shared six bitch sessions in the copy room, five non-work-related phone calls, four field trips to U Street, three blind
dates with dudes, two sex talks, and one sleepover. And all that was after I found out she was a little bit lesbian via some innocent MySpace snooping induced by work boredom. There was a blog post on “Writer Chick's” page about how she'd been heartbroken by a “her.” Current mood? Sad face.

Clearly I was next on her hit list. “Umm, she wants your body, dude,” Gina agreed. In spite of or because of this, I let Britanya pick the restaurant.

“I mean,” she started in her best I've-looked-at-anotherwoman's-vag'-up-close-and-saw-the-meaning-of-life voice, “you talk about all this shit that obviously affected you like it didn't affect you, like it's nothing.” Now she was gesticulating—you know, that thing people do to supersize their emotion, when they make their hands like cups, hunch their backs over, and push the air in front of their heart in your direction. It's like they're offering it to you or something. Whatever, it's weird and hard to explain, but that's what she was doing, and that's what was freaking me out. Because this could only mean one of two things: (1) she was having a bad reaction to the
wot
, or (2) she'd gotten me so down pat that in her mind only heavy petting could follow.

 

We were the black ones, both working as Hebrew slaves in the Washington bureau of the
New York Times
. All during my interview I was made to feel more comfortable by the consistently random mentioning of her first name. “You should probably get Britanya's take on Washington…,” and “Britanya went to college too…,” and “Come to think of it, Britanya also breathes oxygen….” I sweah foh Gawd somebody was about to yell,
See! We've got another one! And her name's super black!
When we did finally meet, I was disappointed, suddenly realizing that I was
just as big of a name-racist as everyone else. Bree-TEHN-yuh was a sorority girl with a southern accent and a love for the spoken word, not some high school dropout who, through a series of ups and downs and the help of Oprah's Angel Network, finally made good.

She was one of those people who denounce Facebook for being so “high school,” but then decide to announce a hiatus from said juvenile distraction in a blog, then a status update, an away message, and finally a mass e-mail. So despite her being anti-everything, it didn't take much digging to find out Britanya lived for a year with a woman that was more than a roommate. By now, though, she was into men, specifically this one dude named Rasheed, Raj for short, who she said wrote MySpace blogs that spoke to her. Introducing a virus to their computer love was a girl named Kim, aka Ms. Apple Bottom Baltimore (seriously), who wanted an “experience” with Britanya. They'd “made out” once, Britanya dumped her, and then Kim friended Raj on MySpace, which, of course, induced a titty attack in Britanya that only subsided after she kicked Raj out of her apartment the morning after they did it for the first time. She told me she loved him. The whole thing lasted like two months.

Despite her occasional penchant for the p-word, I figured she knew I didn't get down like that, and if I did, it wouldn't be with someone who wore peasant skirts in 2006. I could've been her straight wife if she hadn't been so smoky, drunk, and right that night at Dukem's Fine Ethiopian Cuisine.

“I'm just saying,” Britanya said again. “You talk and talk and talk and talk about all this heavy shit that I know affected you in some kind of way like the shit doesn't matter. It does. You
have
feelings.”

I fell silent and then did what came naturally to me: totally removed myself from the situation, like how they do in gangs.
Gave her a few umm-hmms, paid half the bill, walked her to the metro, and never spoke to her again.

There was only one other time when my voice got lost on its way somewhere important. I was newly pubescent and tired of hearing shushed arguments from my mom and her current “mate” Vernell's bedroom. To remedy this, I wrote fake Chinese, or maybe they were forgotten hieroglyphics, on a refrigerator dry-erase board every day until they got so creeped out the three of us had a “talk” about all the things I wanted to say but couldn't. This made sense to them. “Fine” became my secret “Fuck you.” They left after an hour of assurances, feeling good about their parenting skills and my apparent sanity.

Then the blood day happened, I turned thirteen, and my voice changed.

We were back living in Los Angeles, and I was on scholarship at a prep school. Vernell would pick me up most days. Without my having to ask, she never got out of the car. In order to avoid any “my mom's here” confusion—seeing as how I had two—by 3:20 p.m., I'd already staked out a spot on the outside lunch table nearest the pickup zone, on the lookout for a gray '92 Nissan. Already at the gate by the time she came to a rolling stop, I'd run to the car, yank open the door, and dive in the front passenger's seat like a bank robber with a bad feeling about this. “Drive!” I wanted to shout, taking a triumphant glance backward at the dust-covered cops we'd left behind. Instead, I leaned the seat back as far as it could go and told her about my day.

Every story involved the Nubian Sisters, the eighth-grade black girls club in which I had the most peripheral of memberships. Gina had full privileges, while I mainly stood on the sidelines, lying about getting my period and getting tongue. The real oral exam was knowing all the words to Too $hort's “I'm a Player.” I listened to 92.3 The Beat with blind people ears until I
was ready to whisper the lyrics in the hallway when teachers weren't around. “See, I made up my mind when I was seventeen. I ain't wit no marriage and weddin' ring. I be a playa fo' life.” The clique's unofficial bard, a girl named Monique, changed up some of the lyrics to fit our current circumstances. Instead of “I used to fuck young ass hoes / I used to be broke and didn't have no clothes,” we sang, “I used to get the young ass sperm / Used to be broke and had a messed-up perm.” Just turned thirteen, and already jaded.

Our real anthem ushered in the opening credits of
Living Single
, a new show starring Queen Latifah as a man-loving magazine editor. Really, it was our fight song—“Ooooo, in a '90s kinda woo-oorld I'm glad I've got my girls!” At the time, this didn't seem depressing.

Living Single
was the new reality we little brown-eyed girls had to look forward to. A bunch of grown-ass women living together—in fucking Brooklyn. Monique dubbed herself Regine, the calculating fashion vixen. Gina was Khadijah, the sporty career woman. Marissa was Max, the man-eating lawyer. They said I could be Synclaire, the ditzy virgin. Pretty much everyone was having some version of sex but me—on screen and in life. I still thought I was more like Max—smart, driven, and possibly gay since, you know, she was so smart and driven. Plus, she had short hair—extra gay.

On the way home, Vernell and I would listen to The Beat's promos for the show, which was new and '90s. She loved this one line they played on repeat. It was Max talking about what women should do with men—“Snip. Snip.” To drive the point home she scissored the air in front of my eyes with her fingers. A would-be peace sign turned into a scalpel.

Vernell was the one who taught me how to use a tampon in our bathroom before I needed to learn. Said it was important to
know, “just in case.” She was the one who told me that I should probably try sex before I got married, because “you never know.” She was the one who convinced me to wear gigantor neon green Cross Colours. Said it looked cool. She was the one from New York. We moved to Los Angeles two years after the riots to be close to her. Almost ten years younger than Frances, she was the one I thought knew everything.

Spending quality time in the Nissan with Vernell also meant time spent listening to her criticize my mother for not raising me right or me for being such a snob.

“So now that you go to a new school, you're too good to hang out with Shonda?” There was contention in her voice. Shonda, the long-legged girl who lived across the street, liked to five-finger troll dolls and let boys do the same to her. After I got into Pilgrim,
she
was the one who thought she was too cool for my school. I was the one in a pleated plaid skirt with no one to talk to. Vernell knew none of this.

I sat on my side of the car in silence.

“Your mother is not a people person,” she explained as we rolled over Olympic Boulevard, watching the magical palm trees of Beverly Hills turn into mangy ones. A poor man's palm tree is just as tall but lacks the grace. Instead of swaying, the palm trees on our block slumped, the branches made heavy by dirt, not fluttering with fairy dust. “I can get along with just about anybody, but not your mom. Oh, no, not Frances. She doesn't know how to talk to people, you know?”

Having not yet learned the definition of
rhetorical
, I saw my continued silence as cowardice. Vernell was first on my Chinese hit list.

A .99 Cent Store dry-erase board saved my life. I'd never given the thing much thought before using it to slash manic slaps of marker onto our Frigidaire. Prior to it becoming the major
outlet of my innermost angst, the three of us used it for grocery lists and homework reminders. Some girls cut, chuck, or fuck. I transcribed.

The grown-ups were in the living room arguing during the commercials, trading insults to a sound track about sunglasses. Frances, we need to talk about this.
My name is Geek I put 'em on as a shocker.
Do whatever you want, Vernell, leave me out of it.
Man, I love these Blublockers
. I hate you.
Everything is clear.
Keep your voice down.
They block out the sun.
Why? Helena knows what a bitch you are.
Oh yeah, I gotta get me some.

Escaping the dissonance meant walking through the kitchen and past the shiny plastic slab that would become my Rosetta stone.

At first it looked like fine art, all impressionist and stuff. Mimicking the moves of a painter like how people do when they conduct pretend orchestras, I used the marker like a brush, flicking quick and dirty strokes on the message board in neat Koranic lines. Subconscious calligraphy. It looked Arabic, alien, oriental, hieroglyphic. My hand was possessed. Ignorant of whatever it was I was writing, I just “wrote.”

One night, after a particularly edifying ride in the Nissan (seems Vernell wanted a baby—the old-fashioned way, with the penis and the sex and etc.), I tried to get Frances to go to her, comfort her, shut her up, with an especially pleading “Mom…” She actually said it was “grown folks' business”—and I was shut down by a cliché.

Then the dry-erase board started doing the talking for me. Each bundle of madness represented a tiny character in my pretend alphabet. The scene was bloody, all thick black ink and serial killer-y. When it was over, I snapped the cap back on my new weapon and admired the damage I'd done.
Just wait until they see this shit.
When I was done I felt normal again, righted. I
practiced my daily hieroglyphics for weeks, figuring madness on my part might preclude a melee on theirs. It did not.

Screams are as scarce as the monsters they allegedly shield us from. Barring East European Michael Jackson extremists, nobody screams in everyday life. It's not something that's done outside of amphitheaters and horror films. So when one hears an earsplitting screech not too far in the distance, it's a singular moment. A moment that marks you for good, like a leftover fake Chinese character on a dry-erase board.

“Well, at least I'm not raising a daughter with no feelings!” I heard Vernell shriek, placing as much emphasis on the word
feelings
as one can when speaking in Soprano. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, too scared to go to the door but brave enough not to take this lying down. It was an insult, obviously, but I was far from offended.

I had plenty of fucking emotions. I just keep 'em between me and the fridge.

“Don't you dare talk about my daughter,” Frances growled in a register so low I thought at first she might be joking. Like they were rehearsing lines or something for
The Exorcist meets Freddy
. It sounded like my mother was talking not through her teeth but against them, trying to grind them down or shatter them with her snarling. I figured she didn't need my help.

Then there was the drum roll of so many dictionaries falling to the floor, and that sound gradually evolved into the rumbling of an earthquake, and a crack like thunder, and then a sort of silence. Digging my fingers into my comforter, I strained to hear something comforting, something familiar like more yelling, more insults, more “fuck this.” Nothing. The dangerous kind of quiet.

They were rolling around the living room in their panties when I ran in, punching each other in the back and scratching at
each other's arms, I think. All I could see was a revolving brown ball of lesbian. Two women trying desperately to shove the truth into the other through any means necessary. How or why they were half naked I don't know. The whole scene would have seemed smutty to an equally naked eye if it weren't so ridiculous. Two grown women, on the wrong side of thirty-five and 205 pounds, wrestling like professional amateurs. I didn't know what to do besides watch.