Bitch Is the New Black Page 8

  Inhaling the shadowy line of space under the bedroom door, clawing at its frame like a junkie jonesing for his next Helena fix, Miles wants in. Cooper, his hands up over his head, is maxing and relaxing on the sateen sheets I bought from Filene’s after watching L.A. Confidential. He’s mysteriously without his Army of One smedium, revealing a bare chest with 7:00 a.m. shadow.

  My usual early-morning MO is to throw a pillow at the door and grunt until Miles’s whining gets too high-pitched to ignore. Not so today.

  Dogs are either really annoying alarm clocks that you can’t throw against the wall or the greatest get-out-of-bed-because-this-man-is-going-to-laze-about-your-house-all-day excuse ever invented. Sorry, I have to take him out now. Mood. Killed.

  In truth, this was sort of the reason why I wired a woman in Arkansas a small fortune in the first place. Miles would become my furry Freud. Screw socializing: couldn’t I just sit on my Ikea couch and complain my way into a relationship? Miles, unable to tell my ego from a chew toy, would never judge. FWIW, dude, please invest in some actual therapy. I hate Gina. She knows I don’t have insurance. Also, the pound—what desperate pet adoption agencies have renamed the animal shelter—doesn’t take any, which is probably a good thing. So instead of springing Spot from Alpo Alcatraz, I Googled “black pug puppy” and clicked “submit payment.”

  Getting a “dawg” had been a recurring dream of mine since sleeping in my first “it’s just me” apartment—as in Soooo, where are your roommates tonight? Nope, it’s just me. Ma’am, if you get a second pound of tilapia, you save thirteen and a half cents. Nope, it’s just me. You’ll probably need two people to put this bed together, so…NOPE. It’s. Just. Me. Yet when I told my mother my plan to get a dog and she cooed, “Awww, are you lonely, little girl?” I was caught unawares. Lonely? I’m single, not psycho. Since loneliness is an early warning sign of schizophrenia, I decided to go for the preventive medicine. And since cats, being the harbingers of a slow friendless death, are out, my only options were dog or date.

  I got Miles the next day.

  After less than a month, he was already barking for his dinner. Actually it was more like a whimper, but to me it sounded just as sweet. Especially when I needed a good made-up reason to run out on the good black man chillaxing to my right. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Or maybe I just didn’t care. Eight in the morning is no time for psychoanalysis. Jumping out of the wrong side of bed, I threw on my (new) dog-walking outfit—sweatpants I stole from Gina, a PHS hoodie, and fake Uggs. Cooper was muttering something about the Federal Reserve when I slipped out the door.

  “She stay walking that dog,” said the kid who worked on the front porch across the street. He was talking to me without talking to me. Ignoring me out loud like I usually ignore him out on the streets. His tail going off like a rudder, the dog vroomed over the asphalt. Parallel-parked his nose between the kid’s boots and breathed in deep.

  Six

  A BRIDGE TO NOWHERE

  In the end, it was her hair that did it. Siren-songed me with its “bohemian” accent. Kind of a mix between Freddie’s from A Different World (before the last season, when she discovers a comb) and that black girl’s in The Craft. Brown with blond streaks that went every which-a-way. Unruly. Made my first suit—H&M with the pockets still sewn shut—look like it was trying too hard. Brown-noser. I sat with my back arched, feet crossed right over left at the ankles. She levitated for a moment above her chair, using its arms and her triceps to suspend herself in midair like a gymnast before sticking her landing on the seat Indian style. Barefoot. I could work for this woman.

  Turns out, even sociopaths sometimes go shoeless.

  “Oh, my God, Helena, go get the new Elle Décor.”

  “Jeanne?”

  It’d been two years, three temp jobs, and four quarters of grad school since I’d heard her voice, but I knew it right away, just like I knew exactly why she was calling. Or more specifically, whom she was calling about. We had a Super Glued bond, Jeanne and me. The stuff survivor’s guilt and horror-flick romances are made of. Suffering together through something so horrendous, the two of us had nothing left to do but fall for each other and be secretly ashamed. For less than six months, we had both worked for a Manhattan interior designer with manic hair and personality to match.

  “Whyyyyy…” I needed to hear Jeanne to bitch-slap me back to the time when we triple-fact-checked fax cover sheets and examined e-mails as if they were trace evidence against us. Back to the forty hours a week when we traded in the four elite years we’d spent being somebody for the chance to say we worked for a somebody. In some sick iteration of occupational sadomasochism, I needed her to say it…saaay iiit. My mouth was starting to water. Tears swarmed, and my teeth clenched. The fingernails on my free hand stabbed the lifeline there—the reading was off the charts. I was burning calories standing still.

  “I’ve said too much already,” giggled Jeanne, losing the battle to suppress more. “Just go buy it” (hee) “and turn to page 149” (hee hee).

  And that was that. She hung up, and I clapped my phone closed. The nearest Borders was a three-minute power walk toward the White House. I ran like a wacko with something important to tell the president. There wasn’t any time! I didn’t ask about Jeanne’s postapocalyptic life, and she didn’t give a crap about mine.

  She was the only person on the planet who knew I’d been humiliated by lack of printer ink. And I’m pretty sure I alone knew she’d spontaneously combusted over a discarded bucket of popcorn—the special holiday kind with four separate thingies for powdered cheese, red/green caramel, regular caramel, and just regular. There was a time when Jeanne knew me better than anybody. Now only her voice was familiar. Had she made it? Done what she said she would all those times we sat staring at our Mac screens, IMing each other about how much we hated one-third of our lives?

  Really, this was about revenge, an emotion that most closely translates to “closure” in grown-up speak. I had a boyfriend who was so about to propose, a lead on a job with the New York friggin’ Times, and in less than a month I’d have my master’s degree—but Jeanne’s voice took me back to the apartment in Harlem where we popped our “assistant to” cherries. When I showed up for my interview, it was Jeanne who answered the door, who said she was excited to be learning from a “successful black businesswoman,” who told me this would be a great place to start. In our Ivy League remix of Cinderella, answering the phone by the second ring would someday transform us into CEOs. Glass ceilings were involved! She would be our fairy godmother. When the dust settled, we devolved into dum-dums every time someone forgot to turn the answering machine on. Whatever, it made sense to us then—the whole pay-your-dues thing.

  And anyway, who the hell still uses answering machines? Emotionally detached (and, we guessed, sexually frustrated) interior designers who send e-mails like this:

  “A properly working copier/fax/printer is essential to the basic administrative function of our office, and I expect everyone in the office to take the initiative to alert me if there is a problem or if we need to order new print cartridges. I do not expect you to wait until AFTER I’ve asked you to print a document for me before anything is done about it or anyone decides to mention it. Thanks.”

  It was the “Thanks” that got us.

  She threw a temper tantrum when Jeanne and I “failed” (not forgot) to turn the machine on before escaping for lunch one day. We’d been warned. First, neither one of us had used a damned answering machine since living with our parents. Understandably, the thing was hidden away like Boo Radley. Both mesmerizing and terrifying, it was shoved way back on the bottom shelf of the one desk facing away from the front door. Nobody had to know we stocked our high-profile office with supplies from the Goodwill on 135th Street. Second, it was always so damn hard to tell whether the red light for “on” was, in fact, on. We wasted the first fifteen minutes of every lunch break quizzing each other.

  “Do you think it’s on?”


  “I dunno. Do you think it’s on?”

  “I dunno. Do you?”

  “Fucking A.”

  Then one of the four of us (yes, it takes four assistants to screw up an office) would martyr herself, volunteering to plant a cupped hand over the power indicator to see if it was blinking red or if the sun was trying to get us fired—again. Of course, the light wasn’t on because we’d each already pushed the button two, maybe twenty, times and didn’t have the superhuman powers necessary for time travel, which would’ve helped in figuring out whether the thing had been on in the first fucking place. After debating the issue for however long, we’d just declare the machine on and break out for lunch, gulping down spinach and avocado salads in the hopes we’d make it back before She did.

  We never did.

  Our final warning came one day in the “office” (the third bedroom in her rent-controlled apartment on Seventh Avenue). We’d been giddy because She was on her way to Midtown, which meant at least three hours of non-nail-biting “work” could be done. Our hopes were immediately dashed when instead of walking out the door without saying good-bye as usual, She walked into the office/bedroom with tears in her eyes. They refused to fall to her cheeks, professional that She was, but for once we weren’t fooled. They were there—mucking up her huge brown eyes. The same ones that had convinced me months before that I’d be better off here. That working in a prewar building in Harlem, the same one where Spike Lee shot a few scenes of Jungle Fever, was the right thing to do. If the on button was that clear, we wouldn’t be in this situation.

  “One of you forgot to turn on the answering machine…again,” She hissed from the doorway, not looking at anyone, so really everyone.

  Blank, scared-shitless stares.

  “I obviously don’t know who did it,” She said, still gazing up at the ceiling as if Jesus H. Christ was going to help with the interrogating, “but if it happens one more time, someone’s going to have to go. I’m not sure who. I guess you guys can just decide amongst yourselves or something.”

  Was She just being the crazy we’d come to know and loathe, or was She actually this upset about a bootleg answering machine? Once, She brought me into her office (the second bedroom) to tell me that She dreamed about fabric samples at night and understood that the rest of us weren’t as committed: after all, it was her name after the @ of our e-mail addys. I walked out thinking how lazy I was and didn’t IM Jeanne for more than an hour. Then I did something wrong, and She wrote back, “I’ve explained several times that you have to send correspondence/ attachments to my other e-mail account. Thanks.” If I couldn’t make it with her, then with who?

  Only once did I get something right. Looking at the Post-it that proved it kept me sane: from going postal, if you will. It was stuck to the invoice to end all invoices. I spent all morning on it. The extra spaces between each letter of her name (added for aesthetics) were symmetrical. The design fee was hiked up to ridiculous, and the whole thing was typed in the passive voice, a tone so impersonal She could have written it herself. The invoice was placed back in my in-box with a two-by-two diploma attached—“Great Job!” Jeanne took a Polaroid as a joke. I laughed when everybody else did, then tacked it to the bulletin board above my computer. Congratulatory punctuation validated my existence. Maybe we should have checked the machine one more time.

  After explaining why someone needed firing, She left us there with our empty mouths open. We didn’t defend ourselves or each other. The front door slamming echoed back to us, the ending bell. Still we waited—me, Jeanne, Valentina (who actually was an idiot), and Laura (who just acted like one). Minutes passed before anyone said anything, before anyone breathed.

  “Do you think she’s serious?” whined Valentina, whom I mentally nominated to be thrown to the She wolf.

  “Ummm, no. She’s just tryna drive us insane,” answered Jeanne.

  “Mission a-fucking-ccomplished.” This was me, obviously.

  “God, I gotta get out of here,” sighed Laura, who lost it one day when I left a sweaty glass on the antique desk in the living room. It left what I thought was an unnoticeable water mark. Laura hid it under a stack of papers whenever She came around.

  That was our life from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.—a constant roller coaster of wondering whether we’d do something stupid enough to get canned or so stupid we thought we deserved it. Like the day I took a retard pill and said I had nothing to do after She asked why I was so chatty with Jeanne. Backpedaling, I explained that usually my “list” was finished before the end of day, thus leaving plenty of time to giggle about bestiality Web sites with Jeanne (don’t judge). I thought this explanation made me look efficient and task-oriented. It’s not like I copped to the countless cups of peach tea I drank in order to have something to do in the bathroom for five minutes every hour. Despite its growing necessity, I never put peeing on my list.

  The “list” arrived in our in-boxes each morning in response to a bullet-pointed e-mail we sent at the end of each day with the subject line “update.” In it were punchy action verbs that justified our presence in her home:

  UPDATE MAY 30, 2002

  Called Savafieh at 12:55 p.m. and the rug should arrive by 4 p.m. on July 9th

  Received Farrow & Ball samples via FedEx and placed them in your box

  Made reservations at Ouest for three at 8:30 p.m.

  Wrote responses for the Japanese article and placed them in your box for review

  Your mother called at 3:53 p.m. and she would like for you to call her back

  The trick was to write things down as soon as you did them, no matter how dumb it felt. Otherwise you might forget and then end up scrounging for bullet points at around 4:58 p.m. and have only four or five on there. Ten was ideal. We saved each of our “updates” in a desktop file labeled by the month and year. After She got our update, she’d e-mail us back the “list,” which laid out all our to-dos for the day and made it possible for the four of us to never have to speak to her directly. AOL was the Great Oz of our office.

  Adding to the office intrigue was “the box.” We each had one, and in it She placed the still-bleeding documents we’d offered up as sacrifice. This is how it went—send update, get list, write out some rando fax cover sheet from list, place in her box, e-mail her that cover sheet had been placed in her box, wait ten minutes, IM Jeanne about how stupid this is, get e-mail that revised sheet is back in your box, walk three feet to box, pick up sheet with red marker seeping through to the back, and start at go.

  It’s no surprise then that we became totally obsessed with her personal life. Someone that automatic couldn’t just switch it off at quitting time. What were her friends like? Could we have been friends if we didn’t know her secret identity? One of us heard She was dating a landscaper, and the rest immediately got busy imagining their life together. Right when I was Googling his name, She appeared at my shoulder, handing over her Palm for syncing. She never said anything about it, so obviously it was true. We figured they’d make great lawn-mowing babies. Also, She filed her family photos with the rest of the business stuff, which we thought was weird until her mom called and Jeanne picked up the phone. They chatted for a few seconds about how things were going. The old lady ended with what we thought was advice: “Remember, everything that glitters isn’t gold.” Now we’d found at least one piece of the puzzle, even after we each got this:

  “As you know, I always call in several times a day for my phone messages, even while I’m in production. Yesterday afternoon my mother called the office to let me know that she and my father had arrived safely home from their trip. Who spoke to her and why didn’t I get the message? I didn’t get this message when I called in at five or five thirty p.m., and it was not included in anyone’s updates.”

  Your mother hates you! Why do you care whether or not she made it back okay? And who even cares about stuff like that? This isn’t the 1800s. Cruise ships don’t get lost at sea. Plus, it wasn’t me who took the message.

&n
bsp; The filing cabinet became our own private rabbit hole—we’d jump in whenever we got bored with the tedium of message-taking and try to make sense out of a world of hot air. Legend had it that Jeanne once found a letter in an unmarked folder from a famous black actor She dated—briefly. Simply put, according to Jeanne, it was a Dear John letter in reverse. I felt sorry for her sometimes, wondering if all She really needed was someone to love. If a strong black woman just couldn’t catch a break. I was twenty-two, dating a West Point grad, and feeling authoritative in my head. She was thirty-seven, running out of time, and filing her dates. But sympathy was way too close to forgiveness. So I clung to that story like a threadbare security blanket, desperate for confirmation that the slights we felt were real.

  Take the morning routine, for instance. There are some people who live and die by the chipper morning salutation. Despite being raised every morning on Frances’s “You’ve got to ri-ise and shi-ine and give God the glory, glory,” I am not one of these people. And needless to say neither was She. But damn, can a sista get a “Hi”? Sometimes we got a half-eaten “Hello,” given grudgingly as She fumbled through whatever paper was in her hand at the time, and considered ourselves lucky. That’s why I decided that finishing my list early and trolling the Internets for crazy animal-loving freak shows was not only totally indicative of my commitment to hard work but also remuneration for her social retardness. She didn’t think so.

  “Yesterday you mentioned that you often have nothing to do (other than what I have given you on your list that day). I will assume that this means that you have completed everything for my upcoming NBC segment on bedding and pillows—research in terms of identifying new resources, trends, who will loan us things for the segment, etc. Please put all of this completed information in my box for me to review at the end of the day. Thanks.”