Bitch Is the New Black (12 page)

 

Two days after graduation, we were on the floor of my first real apartment, leaning on old couch cushions Frances found somewhere on or around 125th Street in Harlem. She does these things, setting out on her own in the morning (“I'm just gonna go around the corner and see what's going on”) and coming back hours later with somebody's trash and no man's treasure. I heard her in the stairwell before opening the door to see what she'd brought back now.

“Jesus friggin' Christ, woman! That's out on the corner for a reason, you know,” I nagged, one hand on my hips and the other already reaching for my “new” toaster, futon frame, computer keyboard, or TV stand–slash–dinner tray–slash–“extra seating!” This time she was dragging three large sofa cushions in free clinic gray.

“Whaaa? You guys
need
this stuff,” she answered, pulling her prizes into the hallway. I remembered how much I used to love her finding me funny-shaped sticks and seashells on the beach as a child, making me believe the ocean built all these things only for me. She lifted from the earth like a klepto—a bone-white stone, a retired snakeskin—and placed everything in my tiny accomplice's hands. For me?
Yes, sweet the beat, for you.

The gray cushions would become our very own doctor's couch. With my new roommates gone and the thrill of graduation long gone, she started a serious talk about my so-called life, seeing as how the day before I burst into tears during the gospel song “I Feel Like Going On.” The woman sitting next to us on the church pew handed Frances tissues that she passed on to me
without a word. I hate church, and she knows it. She'd guilted me into going to the storefront chapel on the corner only because that Sunday had been Mother's Day. Funny.

Late the next day, we leaned on those old cushions, and I told her all about what I'd been up against. “There should be some kind of summer camp,” I said, “because this business of being tossed out on our asses into the real world is shitty.” Darin had just recently pushed me down a flight of stairs because he loved me and wanted to get back together. I didn't have a job with which to float my $550 share of the rent. The dark blue folder Dean Whomever handed me at the end of the graduation stage was empty because we owed Columbia more than a thousand bucks. And then there was the issue of the toddler that should have been cheering me on with the rest of the family.

“They told me to get rid of you, you know?” she whispered, sitting on the floor next to me, not looking at me. I was having growing pains, and she wanted to show me some of her own stretch marks, I guess. “But I didn't want to do that again.”

It was 1972, and Frances was a pregnant sophomore in college. The story sounded so familiar, I wanted to stop her before she got started.
Wait a minute; we've seen this one already. Do a quick channel check.
She was the exact same age I'd been. In the middle of our mother-daughter bonding session, I learned we almost weren't mother and daughter.

She'd been in and out of love with my father Billy since high school, as well as a few girls she'd met at Humboldt State. She told me she'd gotten pregnant at nineteen and waited until the last legal minute to end it. Billy, who was in the navy, wanted to get married. He had it all planned out, she said. Frances would move back to Los Angeles—in with his mother—and wait for him to come back from long tours on a boat filled with men. She thought this idea ridiculous.

“Wendy said, ‘Okay, Frances, if you're going to do this you have to do it now,'” she recalled my godmother telling her while her belly was getting bigger and she was still a teenager. The two drove up to San Francisco and got everything “handled.” All I could think about was the scene in
Dirty Dancing
when Penny gets a botched abortion that no one really talks about aside from Baby's dad calling whatever “doctor” Penny went to a “butcher.” I wonder whether Frances went to one of these dirty-wire-hanger-type places and whether whatever I did was any better.

My father was told after. So when Frances realized I was trying to exist in 1980, she wanted me—badly—and he was…blasé.

It might make other people feel, I don't know,
uncomfortable
to find out that they could have been aborted. That they could very well not be alive—conscious, in existence, present, or whatever right at this moment—as they think, process, and type. Not me. Well, not me, really. I was chosen. Cho-sen. Didn't that count for more? Or maybe I'd been waiting in the wings since 1972, made invisible by a magical blue pill.

She told me that my grandmother and aunts, the majority of whom had found themselves pregnant before their eighteenth birthdays, sat her down to explain ever so calmly that babies weren't in her future.

“You can't bring a child around all that,” my mother recalled them saying. All that, I'm guessing, meant freaky sex orgies—which most everyone can agree aren't childproof. I picture her mutinous then, defending her right to get knocked up just like everybody else. By then she was the only one of her seven siblings without a child and quickly approaching thirty (which is like forty when you adjust for inflation since 1980). I'm also guessing the grandchildren quota must have already been reached, or at least the grandchildren-from-lesbians-with-armpit-hair quota, which was obviously zero.

As a kid, I thought cameras and camcorders had not been invented before I turned five, because there does not exist any physical evidence of my being born. When I told her this, she laughed.
You didn't start the world, Raggedy Ann.

It's really because my mother pretty much did the whole thing by herself.

For my last twenty-seven birthdays, we've had only one constant tradition—she must tell me the story of my birth. When I was smaller than her, I'd climb into her bed during the dark part of the morning and spread myself across her stomach, staring at her hard until she opened her eyes. Then I'd yell, “Tell me about when I was born!” She'd pretend not to hear me, squinting in my direction, staring at me through her eyelashes. I'd flail about my arms and legs as if drowning in her mommy tummy. “Tell me, woman!”

“Okay, okay, sweet the beat. Don't you get tired of hearing this?” she'd ask, already knowing the answer. “Every year it's ‘Tell me about when I was born, tell me about when I was born.'” She sounded annoyed, but I knew she wasn't. Just the opposite. Who else would she tell her war stories to?

Frances was alone when her labor pains started. She took a cab to the hospital, where my grandmother worked as a nurse. “When I got there, everybody kept whispering, ‘Oh, that's Effie's daughter.' So she knew I was there,” my mother remembered in a sleepy voice. Then of course came all the horrible pushing and screaming. “My eyes turned blood red because I was holding my breath the whole time. The doctor kept yelling, ‘Which way do you want her to come out?'”

I returned to her at 6:52 p.m. on October 28, 1980, three weeks late. She wanted a Libra—masculine, extroverted, and positive—so she started power walking in the hope that gravity would shake me awake and out. I missed the planetary alignment
by five days and became a Scorpio instead—introverted, feminine, and negative. But somehow she still managed to love me.

We went over all this on my new couch cushions like high school best friends catching up at a reunion, surprised by how much they still had in common after so long, and sad about all the stuff that had changed. Frances wanted to know why I hadn't called to tell her about me and Grant. I told her I was fine.

“And what were you doing having unprotected sex, Lena?” my mother asked, singing the two syllables of my nickname to the tune of disappointment. Then I remembered why I hadn't called.

 

I learned how to spell “sex” when I was six.

We were living with my mother's lover at the time, Mahasin, and her son Hamed, my “brother.” They dressed us in matching corduroy overall shorts; mine were red and Hamed's, blue. At night we pulled them off and rubbed our tiny little kid bodies together while our mothers slept.

“Wanna know how to spell it?” Hamed asked one day without being prompted.

“Yes!” Of course I wanted to know how to spell it.

“S-E-X,” he hissed slowly, leaning over to deliver the top-secret message directly into my ear, his lips brushing up against the tiny hairs on my lobe. Frances had informed us more than once that sex was a “grown-up game.” This was subsequent to her catching us in the back of her old Chevy pickup truck in our underwear. I was on top. Immediately afterward, they sat us down and said that what adults did was different from what kids could do. So no more hanky-panky, just GI Joes and Barbies from now on.

“They're just mad,” Hamed explained to me later, “because we do it the right way.”

There was a wrong way? I figured it had to do with the fact that the two of us were a boy and girl, and our mothers, of course, were two girls. But I can't remember seeing Frances and Mahasin so much as kiss, let alone do
it
or anything. They shared a room down the hall, true. And they took showers and baths together. But then again, so did Hamed and me. I'd seen him naked tons of times, which was fine, because we were related—sort of. There didn't seem to be any difference in rightness between what they did and what the two of us wanted to do all the time. We'd sneak behind trees, under beds, in closets, and around corners just to hug each other really, really tight.

Eventually Frances and I moved away like we always did, and I'd forget I ever had a brother to squeeze the life out of whenever I needed. What stayed with me was the power that came from knowing how to write “sex,” as well as the panic that I'd never be able to do it “the right way.”

When I was fourteen, Vernell told me I should definitely try sex before marriage. “What if you didn't like it?” she asked, halfway explaining what frigidity was.
Or what if you simply didn't like penises? You wouldn't buy a car without a test drive, right?
I found her advice totally idiotic and irresponsible. Who says that to a teenager who just a few days before thought her vaginal discharge was a side effect of having contracted AIDS, her immune system secreting white blood cells? I shifted butt cheeks in my seat and rolled down the window, watching my childhood fade into the background with each passing palm tree. That's probably why I was so dead set against “losing it” in high school. I was already an A student starring in
Arsenic and Old Lace
between half-time performances; my rebellion was no rebellion. If everybody's doing it, then what the hell did they need me for?

Flash-forward a few years to New York City, freshman year, a single in John Jay, and my misplaced virginity—my disobedience shriveled. His name was Gary. He wasn't my boyfriend or anything, and we weren't dating. He'd just show up at JJ 602 after midnight, and I'd let him in because I didn't have anything better to do. The condom broke the third time we did it, and afterward he grilled me about the last time I'd had my period. I agreed to get the morning-after pill the next day and did. A year later I fell for his best friend, a guy named Grant.

 

“And who was he?” Frances asked from the seat cushion next to mine.

“Just some guy,” I said, realizing just how nonchalant all this sounded.

“Well, you know, I talked to Darin,” she said, only alluding to his pushing me down some stairs.

“Jesus, woman, give it a rest. He's a fucking nut bag.”

“I told him, ‘You know, Darin, you can't be putting your hands on my daughter,' and he said, ‘I know, Ms. Andrews. I know.' And you know what, he's really sorry, Lena. He loves you. He really loves you, and you should have someone here, close, that cares about you.”

“Fine.” This didn't shock me. She was ditching me three thousand miles away from home and wanted to make sure I had a ride back if need be. Darin had weaseled his way back into her good graces with promises of looking out for me and “never doing anything like that again, I swear.”

“I'm serious,” she said in a tone reserved only for occasions like this one—the “I'm Leaving on a Jet Plane” moment.

“I know. We'll see.”

 

A week later, I let Darin take me out to a fried chicken dinner. If Frances was right and he really did love me, then he'd be fine with helping me screw in my new venetian blinds—nothing else. I told him this much, and he bowed down to the table as if to tell a secret. “That's not what your mom said,” he sang with an uptick to one side of his lip. Crooked.

Before she left, according to Darin, Frances told him that “the love stuff would come later,” and that he should just hang in there until I came back around. I didn't have the heart to tell him the truth—that my mother just wanted me to be settled, ignoring the fact that I'd be settling. Hippie dyke revolutionary Peace Corps truants still don't know shit about free love or independence. Ironic, huh?

It didn't take long for Darin to go back to the “dark side.” His. Words. In the time it took to put up my blinds, put together my futon, and then put to rest any hopes he had of our impending nuptials, he was back to threatening to kick my ass and explaining that he was only acting like this because we weren't together. One of my sorority sisters, Adrienne, offered up her dad and his steel bat. I said I was fine, grabbed my purse, and headed down to the precinct to spend lunch with the rest of the criminals and their victims, not sure anymore about which side I was on.