Bitch Is the New Black Read online

  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.

  Blowing out the candles on my birthday cake,

  my birthday cake, my birthday caa-ake.

  Blowing out the candles on my birthday cake,

  I’m another year old to-day.

  Blowing out the candles on my birthday cake,

  my birthday cake, my birthday day caa-ake.

  Blowing out the candles on my birthday cake,

  and when I do a wish I’ll maa-aake.

  Blowing out the candles on my birthday cake,

  I’m another year old to-day.

  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 fo
urth-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.

  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 r
oar 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.