Bitch Is the New Black Read online

  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.

  I learned all this at the hair salon.

  “And do you know Barbara and them never apologized?” Even with singed ears, I could hear the disappointment in her voice.

  Three

  THE BEATITUDES OF ST. CLAIR

  It was in Catalina at the house on Whittley Avenue that I got the courage to ask her.

  I was in sixth grade by then, with a head streaked blond by the summer and a soul that belonged to The Cosby Show. A bottle of Sun-In might’ve solved things—bleaching out the black and coveri
ng up the gay—but I wanted something more permanent for us.

  Every Thursday at eight, I had an impossible choice—pedal up Country Club Road to hear parents-cum-preachers talk about how blessed we were to be saved so early, or have a night in with Cliff and Clair. Eternal damnation had never been so prime-time.

  For almost two years I’d been going to Awana Club meetings with all the other kids who needed Jesus, memorizing Precious Moments Bible verses for a chance to win plastic crap with “Sparky points.” “Awanas” is for parents who think Girl Scouts are the devil and juice boxes save. We met once a week at the K–12 and got brainwashed into believing. Every meeting began with the Awana official battle hymn, which goes, “Hail Awa-nas, marching for the youth (hey!) / Hail Awa-nas, holding forth the truth (hey!) / Buil-ding lives on the word of God / (falsetto) Ahwaaah-nuuuh, stands.”

  Everybody went. Frances figured the cost of me being a double outcast (black and heathen) was more than that of her having to reeducate me in the sanity of our own home on Friday morning. Really, she just didn’t understand the awesome power of plastic crap. Plus, I was one of the fifteen kids that went to the exclusively cultish Avalon Christian Academy, where I’d been convinced more than once that yes, I was, in fact, a bastard (no offense, just officially) but also mercifully redeemable. So looking back, it’s understandable that one day I would point her attention to Leviticus, chapter 18, verse 20: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”

  No one had showed me this particular passage beforehand in an effort to sneakily gauge our wickedness. Frances’s status was like the sixth finger that gets yanked off otherwise perfect babies: people see the small but noticeable bump on your pinkie, but no one says, “Hey, you’re technically mutated.” Everyone knew. Once, before bedtime at my new best friend Melissa’s, her mother nailed an addendum onto the Lord’s Prayer that Frances would “find a man, oh please Lord.” The real miracle was that I succeeded in keeping my head down, looking devout without suffering church giggles. I found Leviticus on my own. I’d been reading the Bible before bedtime, inducing nightmares that involved sulfur, hot pokers, pillars of salt, and/or the violent gouging of eyes. If hell had a mascot, I figured it’d be me—illegitimate aberration that I was. If heaven had an album out, the theme song to The Cosby Show would be its title track.

  In the Huxtables I found a family so different from mine. They were huge and permanent. The Andrewses were just two and in constant motion like a tongue. The TV family life looked a lot like how hers did in photo albums. I wanted to be a child like Frances was a child. She had seven brothers and sisters. I had none. She had both father and mother. I had just the one Frances. She’d fallen in love with my dad, Billy, in high school and had his kid ten years later, which was long after she admitted to herself that she loved women.

  To hear her tell it, Frances’s girlhood was something supernatural. Her stories were stuffed with penny candies, backyard circuses, crossed eyes, fear of canned fish, and matching Easter dresses. I wanted to be her sister, not her daughter. That was impossible, sure, but you get the picture. I wanted picturesque.

  Without knowing, she regifted me all of that in Catalina. I stayed out until ten at night because nobody there would steal me. Everyone knew to whom I belonged. We never locked our doors. It was a 1950s sitcom with ’90s commercial breaks. When KFC debuted the new barbecue honey wings, we stood in line on Main Street. Yes, Main Street. Because the streets are so small, most people drive around in golf carts. The fancy ones sat four. We had one jail, run by the sheriff, who was also the mayor. Summer Saturdays were spent entirely at the beach. We’d race to a floating platform less than a quarter mile from the shore called “the float,” lie on top of it for ten minutes, swim back, and then repeat. When a doctor looked at my pee for a routine checkup, there was sand in it. Tommy, a retired policeman with a buzz cut who still wore his uniform, waited for me by the post office every morning just to say “hi” as I walked to school. He’d make the seaweed green mass that used to be a tattoo of a hula girl dance if I begged. There was one movie theater in the old casino, and it played one movie a week. Frances and I saw Fried Green Tomatoes there with an old white guy I think she was on a date with. Afterward she said that Idgie and Ruth were really “lovers.” She wanted everything to be gay.

  My other best friend was a beautiful blonde with brown freckles named Wendy. Full disclosure: she was my best friend. I’m not entirely positive I was hers. The sterling-silver-plated “Best Friends” heart necklaces were $16.95 including tax in some plastic crap catalog. What you did was break it along a prefabricated jagged line. One girl wore “st ends,” and her soul mate took “Be Fri.” Everybody wanted the “Be Fri” half, since it was an unintentional complete sentence. We were big into grammar. And like every other girl in Mrs. Paul’s sixth-grade class, I wanted Wendy to wear my “st end.” We fought over syntax.

  “Well, you can’t be ‘Be Fri’ because you’d be a burned fry,” she said in front of everybody who was anybody. I laughed before admitting that she was right. What was I thinking? We never got the necklaces. I worshipped her anyway.

  Wendy’s house was up a dirt road we called Monkey Hill. With the burned junk food incident behind us, we started hanging out a lot after posters for the annual Rotary Club talent show started showing up around school. Wendy, along with a tall sociopath named Shelly, wanted us to perform “Stop! In the Name of Love.” The three of us sang along to a cassette after school and practiced our repetitive hand motions, the self-defense move for “Stop!” and cork-screwing two fingers from head to shoulder for “think it oo-oo-vah.” The genius part was that Wendy wanted to wear “foundation,” you know, to look more like the Supremes. Awesome idea. I told Frances I needed to borrow some of her makeup. She asked me what for, and I told her. Wrong. Can you believe these fools wanted to perform in blackface? She talked to Wendy’s mom. I performed a solo “Wind Beneath My Wings” and won third place. I think people expected me to be good.

  The other would-be Supreme, Shelly, was two years older than me and a stalker. She wanted a monogamous thing that I wasn’t ready for. I slept over her house once, and Shelly convinced me that girls shouldn’t wear underwear to bed. I think she meant bras. Either way, she creeped me out. Immediately I started avoiding her and kept my panties on. She knocked on our door one day and I wrapped myself up in a curtain like a cocoon, or if she decided to murder me that day, a winding sheet. Shelly saw me peeking out to see if she’d bought it. No such luck. I was about to duck back in, but I’d already been spotted. Staring straight at me, her eyes burning, she shouted, “That is so rude!” from our front steps, whipping around on her jellies and trotting back up the hill to her own house. She barely spoke to me the next day at lunch, even when everyone begged to trade after Frances dropped off my Tuesday pizza (we could never get it together at the beginning of the week, so I was “homeschooled” on Mondays and got two slices of pepperoni delivered for lunch on Tuesdays). Knowing I had a weak stomach, Shelly whispered aloud that the oregano was really dried-up boogers. I gave her both slices.

  This was also around the time she told me The Cosby Show was dumb because it “wasn’t really real.”

  “Oh, please. She’s only saying that because it’s a doctor and a lawyer and they’re both black,” explained Frances, slowly cementing my hatred. “Tell her she doesn’t have to watch. Nobody’s forcing her.” Smelly Shelly was an asshole, and Frances, my mother, was a hero.

  And so every Thursday night, I’d make the decision to either sing cult classics with the tiny racists of our town or lie on Frances’s lap, listening to “the best elevator music I ever heard.” It was always my choice. Frances never forced me in either direction.

  “I don’t feel like Awanas tonight,” I’d say while washing dishes, leaving a dirty cast-iron skillet on one side of the sink for her to wash because the deal was I didn’t have to do pots.

  “Okay, little brown-eyed girl,” she’d say, never
knowing how guilty I felt.

  In the beginning I was good—memorizing verses, earning new patches for the gray vest that “cubbies” wore, holding my praise arms way above my head, my eyes closed to “Lord I Lift Your Name on High.” The anointed saw a little black girl saved—eyes shut in a true exercise of faith—but the whole time I was daydreaming of Clair. Of being talented and beautiful and having strong men whose names you knew, whose names you shared. In fact, I wanted to be Rudy, to love Clair, and to be loved by Cliff. Before the opening credits were over, I’d call up Mel, shout, “I’m Rudy!” into the receiver, and hang up before she could object. We spent a lot of time dreaming up all the things we’d do when we became “business women.”

  That’s another big difference between the Huxtables and us: money. My favorite episode was the one where big sister Denise makes younger brother Theo a Gordon Gartrelle knockoff because Cliff won’t buy a designer shirt for a fifteen-year-old. Frances wouldn’t get me Jordache jeans, and I never understood why not. She had more jobs than fingers: waitressing in white shorts at Antonio’s, selling vacation condos at Hamilton Cove, founding the Catalina Youth Arts Exchange, bathing and changing an old lady who’d had a stroke, doing something at Parks and Rec, and starting her own landscaping business called Greenier Pastures (The “ier” was my idea because it stood for the greenest green possible). It was my babysitter who thought it necessary to inform me of our broke-ness, asking one day if I considered myself “high class, middle class, or low class.” After thinking for a minute, I hollered “Middle class” while lobbing my arms in a V shape like a cheerleader.