Bitch Is the New Black Read online

  She sucked her teeth. “Really?”

  The shirt Denise makes Theo is hideola, of course, but anything looks good after thirty minutes. Between commercial breaks he grows to love it. I’m guessing the message was either “Don’t judge a book by its cover” or “Clothes don’t make the man.” My takeaway was, “Even rich kids have cheap parents.” And “Being an only child blows.” If I wanted a pair of Jordaches, I’d have to cobble them together from “there’s nothing wrong with these” garage-sale finds myself.

  My other favorite Cosby Show episode was the one when Cliff takes Rudy and her friends to a fancy restaurant, and everybody orders burgers. Frances and I used to have burgers and root beer floats at a regular place in our old Los Angeles life, memories of which were steadily being swallowed whole by seagulls. There’s another Rudy-centric episode that was written for me. In it, she’s been invited to a birthday party and wants to wear a purple plaid summer dress. It being winter in Brooklyn, Clair’s laid out something with long sleeves. There’s a fight, and Rudy’s sent to her room. Up there by herself, she tries to take her mind off having her life ruined—she does a quick waltz with Bobo the bear (boring), tries to read an oversize book in her rocking chair (no good), and then spots the dress hanging on her closet door (irresistible). Rudy presses it against her chest like an old lover and does one final spin in front of the mirror, probably hoping that things will turn around like magic. But then she remembers how much her life sucks and flings the dress in a trunk, locking it away until next summer. This entire depressing montage is underscored by Kermit the Frog’s “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” Try being brown in a sea of white surrounded by blue.

  The real-life person who played Rudy, Keshia Knight Pulliam, was the black Hayley Mills of the early nineties. She starred in a TV movie called Polly (Mills’s Pollyanna remixed). I waited weeks for this television event, even recorded it, making sure to stop the tape during the commercials. Mrs. Paul, my sixth-grade guru, had said I could show it in class that Friday, which was usually reserved for listening to her read. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is the only book I remember, which is funny considering how much I hated it. The story was about a black family trying to survive Jim Crow. Never heard of him. Once, before it was time for everyone to lay their heads on their desks and get hypnotized by the many voices of Mrs. Paul, she called me up to the front to show me something. I was both honored and horrified.

  “Helena, I’m going to point to a word and I want you to tell me what you think about it.” She was holding the open paperback in one hand and underlining the word “nigger” with the other. I stared at the page long enough to recognize my own nickname. Immediately the carefully prepared comeback for whenever I heard the word on the playground—“I may be stupid, but I ain’t a nigger, ain’t a nigger, ain’t a nigger…,” sung in a robot voice—came to mind.

  Without looking up from the page, I said I was fine with it. She said she could gloss over it somehow, but I told her again that I was okay.

  “Are you sure?” Mrs. Paul was somewhere between the ages of like forty-one and maybe seventy-three.

  “Umm-hmmm.” I made an about-face and walked back to my table, no. 12.

  “Whud she wan?” asked Bo, whose desk faced mine and whose face I dreamed of at night.

  “Nothing.”

  Polly was my revenge. Not against Mrs. Paul. She was a fantastic. She got breast cancer twice and still smoked in secret when we were at recess. There was a test she gave every year—the “pay attention” quiz. All you had to do to pass was ignore her. It had maybe ten questions, each one more random than the last:

  No. 2—: Lick your thumb and then smudge it next to the space provided.

  No. 4—: Switch chairs with the person to your left, wait four and one half seconds, then switch back.

  No. 7—: Stand on your chair and recite the 5 times table from 2 to 10, skipping every answer ending in 0.

  No. 10—: Shout out “I’m finished” after playing the piano on your desk. Choose any song you like.

  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:

  Little Man bit his lower lip, and I knew that he was not going to pick up the book. Rapidly, I turned to the inside cover of my own book and saw immediately what had made Little Man so furious. Stamped on the inside cover was a chart which read:

  CHRONOLOGICAL ISSUANCE: […] 12

  DATE OF ISSUANCE: September 1933

  CONDITION OF BOOK: Very Poor

  RACE OF STUDENT: nigra

  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 bat
hroom 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 grandmother’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.

  Four

  RIDING IN CARS WITH LESBIANS

  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 mys
elf 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.