Bitch Is the New Black (15 page)

She even went so far as to provide a visual aid, her mouth open and head thrown back to one side in mimed rapture and her arms thrown above that ridiculous scene, stopped short by an imagined wall of sin. Eyes. Wide. Shut. We could've just ignored her, as was our usual coping method, but it was dangerously past midnight, when boredom and ridicule become obvious bedfellows.

“With who?” someone asked, while the others feigned disinterest.

“A boy from my neighborhood,” Darienne answered neatly, excited to be part of the conversation but still skeptical of whether she was in in.

“Your boyfriend?” someone else asked, without sounding too interested…or disgusted.

“Something like that.” She was getting coy.

“Was iiit…good?”

The cross-examination continued until we veered off into really dangerous territory—early '90s R&B. Hypnotized by Darienne's
tall tale of the phantom booty call, we forgot how much we hated her long enough to let her eavesdrop. Listening to us reminisce on the real love we had back in the summah, summah, summah time of our youth, we thought maybe she'd learn a thing or two about how we do it. As luck would have it, SWV's jam “Weak” was everybody's favorite. Adaoha, studying, ignored us. Kia, the silent but deadly type, let another one rip from far enough away that it seemed innocent. “Remember the Butterfly?” she asked, talking to us but looking at Darienne. We surrounded her like professionals.

“Hell, yeah,” I said, skywriting the familiar figure eight with my kneecaps—a dance move that took me three PE's to learn in middle school.

“Thanks, Debbie Allen. It's like this,” sang Adrienne, mimicking me and mocking what we all knew Darienne could never do. These were the pelvises of cool kids. Kids who knew when to wipe their noses and put lotion on. Kids who watched
Video Soul
after school and copied what they saw in the mirror. Darienne, deflated from the big-chested video vixen that she was just a few minutes before, decided to audition herself back in.

“IIIIIIIIIII geee-iiitttt sooo, weak in the knees….” she belted, trying and failing to execute the infinite motion of knees and hips that was the Butterfly. On “weak” she dipped as low as her wasted five-foot-long legs would allow and then tried thrusting her allegedly experienced pelvis forward. She was more moth than butterfly—specifically one buzzed off too many granny panties.

Naturally, we begged her to do it again and again and again. And she obliged, each time singing a lot more off-key and gyrating a lot more like a rusty washing machine. Someone grabbed her knees (a rare moment of physical contact that would only be repeated under extreme duress) and tried to manipulate them into a spectacle worthy of
Solid Gold
while the rest of us stared
greedily, storing the mental image like a squirrel does nuts—this being before digital cameras. And like a twice-deported illegal on an inner tube, Darienne kept coming back for more. Already a citizen, I felt sorry for her only in the most intangible of ways. We were sisters, right? Therefore this was all in good fun under the purview of…sibling rivalry, if you will. If you won't, then we were just bullies with lip gloss, ready to smack down on anything with less shine.

“Okay, one more time. Seriously, I think you've almost got it.”

“IIIII geeee-iittttt, sooooooooo…”

That song would've been on repeat all night if it wasn't for Adaoha scratching up the record with a pointed “Darienne.” The three of us froze in place like how you do in musical chairs, Darienne sitting back down in front of the computer. The only seat left; I guess she won. Adaoha, who we thought had been busy cramming, eyed the three of us with something worse than contempt, breaking whatever spell had been cast. Turning Darienne back into a bumpkin and us, her evil stepsisters. Mood. Killed. We sat down on the floor reluctantly, unwilling to admit our defeat or our crime. Nobody asked her.

The story would get mangled over time like a bad game of telephone. We teased her about what a misguided compassionate she once was. How she'd still be stuck living in Plimpton with the lesbians of Barnard wearing Old Navy cargo pants if we hadn't saved her from being too good. “Adaoha was such a dork before we rescued her,” we'd say.

When we put on our white dresses, we became sisters. Made Adaoha cool. Made her part of the black girls' club we'd joined ourselves so many years before. The four of us (Darienne would dump us in a semester) sealed together like Mormon wives. Because eventually everyone joined the club, grabbed a mask, and walked around like their feet and the ground didn't mix. Playing
at being grown is what we were doing. Maybe Adaoha knew the truth. Maybe she was the only one not playing. Maybe she got winded.

We lost her to the wind in March. We lost her to these intangibles about strength versus weakness and perfection versus reality. We lost her because we never took the time to think about any of that shit before the call came: our good friend—our sister—had slit her wrist, taken a bottle of pills, tried to drown herself, and finally taken a leap of faith off a building. We lost her.

In these types of situations, old people on TV always say something like “She looks good.” She did not look good. She looked dead, with pink nail polish. I wanted to touch her hand but decided against it. I couldn't remember the last time I'd touched Adaoha. The last time I hugged her. Adrienne kept saying it would be okay. My throat was too sore to tell her to shut up. Kia let me lay my head on her lap, her pregnant belly taking up most of it.

Whatever happened next was all snow and static. Unwatchable.

There was a slide show at the repast, French for force-feeding your sorrow with baked chicken and nonalcoholic iced tea. Through the awesome power of PowerPoint, her life flashed before our eyes like we were the ones dying. Microsoft was never so macabre.

The last slide was stolen from her Facebook page. Adaoha took the time to change her profile picture before she left. Thoughtful. In it, she looked small. The camera is too far away, making her shoulders seem shy, her face sweet and childish. She is none of these things anymore. Was none of those things. I want never to see this picture again but am too superstitious to remove her from “friends.” While contemplating this, Adrienne leans over to tell me that Paul, one of Adaoha's two ex-boyfriends and an asshole, told one of us that he alone knew “the real
Adaoha.” I tell Adrienne I will deliver a roundhouse kick to his face. This is a funeral, not a who-knew-Adaoha-best dance-off. And if it were, we'd win. Obviously.

“I'm telling you, it's harder out here for us than it ever was for our mothers,” I said out loud to no one in particular, the three of us stretched across my bed in our Sunday black. We stared up at the ceiling with our shoes off, watching the water stains as if they were clouds and wondering if we could have saved her somehow.

“Is it really, though?” asked Evelyn, another one of
us
, from the doorway. She was getting married in August.

“I think that shit makes sense,” said Kia, from her side. Twenty-seven and pregnant with her third child (on the ride back to New York, she'd call to ask me to be the godmother), she looked doubly pathetic in funeral clothes. “When there's so many ways to go, it's easier to get lost, I guess. I don't know…”

What did we know? Like true Ivy League grads nothing worth a good goddamn. A bunch of cocktail-party chatter about the accomplishments of a woman we clearly never saw or would see again. She'd just bought a condo with granite countertops and West Elm furniture. She'd sold a tract of affordable houses out in Baltimore. She'd just gotten back from a trip to Brazil, where she shook her ass with the best of 'em. She'd joined Match.com and went on a date with a short African guy. She'd gone to a
bruja
once who told her marriage was in her future. She'd told me that Dex and I would work out someday. She'd broken my heart. What
did
we know?

 

Weeks after the funeral, Adaoha's mother asked her friends in Washington to stop by her new/old condo and help clear things
out. She was twenty-seven when she died, so this probably wouldn't take long. Her mom also wanted us to take some things with us, mementos or something.

On the twenty-minute metro ride there, Adrienne and I sat in silence. I shut my eyes once we pulled into the PG Plaza station. She asked me if I was okay about a zillion times.
Yes, yes, I'm fine.
I'd been sleeping with the lamp next to my bed turned on, a red scarf draped over it. The dark simply wouldn't do. I was as far from fine as any one person could get.

Her mom had pizza and chicken wings waiting. I grabbed a slice and went about the business of gathering up her Delta things in the black tote bag that was exactly like the one I had, but with Adaoha's name on it. I could joke with all her high school friends, but whenever Adrienne walked in with an old photo or a funny story from college, I'd leave the room or start inspecting my pepperoni. It was easy to act like we were throwing a surprise party and that Adaoha'd walk through the door shouting, “Loooosers,” any minute. But I was stingy with my real grief. After we finished, I couldn't look inside the bag or in Adrienne's eyes.

 

“Because life gets you fucked up, and you need some clarity from an uninvolved party.” Gina was preaching therapy again. I was kind of sorry I brought it up.

When Adrienne called a few days later—we were all on this “check-in” thing now—I answered with a gruff, “Whaddayawan?”

“Hello,” she said, ignoring my bitchy welcome. “I'm alive, in case you were wondering! Some best friend you are. You're supposed to be checking on my sanity.” It was already summertime, and she was studying for the bar.

“Ummmm…”

“Which I'm COMPLETELY losing, by the way!”

“I have my own damn sanity to worry about. Thanks.” I thought this might get her to hang up.

“What's wrong with you? What's wrong with your sanity?”

“Nothing's wrong with me.” How could I tell her what I didn't know?

“Oh, so you're just being stanky.”

Silence.

“Well—” She sighed. “I see you woke up on the wrong side of the bed…just saying hello.”

“Dude, I'm working on a story that's due. I'm trying to keep my job, so I have a fucking career. And I hate everyone! Jesus. Can I live?” Maybe she'd leave me alone now.

“Like I said, just saying hello. You can go back to your dry v-wedgie now.”

Everybody's got a thing. Kia talks to strangers. Adrienne's from Hah-lum! I'm a nomad. Adaoha? She had a dry v-wedgie.

If it sounds uncomfortable, that's because it's supposed to. We had no clue what a dry one actually felt like but imagined it involved vaginal friction equal to corduroy-on-corduroy action. If this sounds pornographic, it's not supposed to. The dry v-wedgie is more like an aphorism.
A v-wedgie stings for but a moment, a dry v-wedgie for a lifetime
. Basically, it's about spinsterhood. The first warning sign of that apocalypse. It was a joke, and Adaoha, our good friend and sister, had the misfortune of being its butt.

It started like this. We were two years out of college and at another one of Kia's baby showers. One little girl in attendance was wearing a pink corduroy jumpsuit that was too constrictive. In an effort to escape, she kept yanking it toward her chest as if it were a tearaway, the force of which created what can only be described as baby camel toe. No one saw but me. I tried to get
her to stop violently exposing the outline of her little vah jay jay, but she was insistent, outlining the tiny V shape with each pull. “Okay, that's enough,” I said gently, bending down to lift her little hands out of the pockets of her one-piece.

“She has a v-wedgie!” shouted some six-year-old in eyeshot.

“Excuse you?”

“A V-WED-GIE”—exasperated now, she was shouting like how you do with someone who doesn't speak the same language as you—“it's when—”

“Umm…I know what a v-wedgie is, little girl.” I had no idea what a v-wedgie was, and neither should a first-grader. I shooed both of them—the v-wedgee and the v-wedger—into the next room for more fruit punch and innocence.

A few weeks later, we were having an alcohol-fueled debate on men—why we wanted 'em, where to find 'em, how to keep 'em. Adaoha, twenty-three, was a virgin then, or something close. It was my opinion that as soon as some dude got past her bra, all moral authority would go the way of the underwire. She ignored this and instead ticked off her list of requirements for happily-ever-after in old-school MASH style. Remember? Mansion, House, Apartment, Shack. Adaoha wanted a man with a degree, a six-figure salary, perfect teeth, a good family, a healthy 401K, and who would be ready to get married after a year of dating (and perhaps not doing it).

“What if you meet some gorgeous garbage collector or a street sweeper whose penis is like ten inches long?” I asked.

“Nope!”

“Boooooo. Just wait until some dude licks your titties. It's gonna be Reynolds for you, honey—a wrap, done, finito.” At least that's how it was for me. All my onward-Christian-soldier brainwashing in Awanas came out in the wash once Gary Johnson convinced me to just let him “put the head in.”

“I'm friggin' serious,” Adaoha said. “I'm not going to settle for some ole bullshit.” She beat back our barrage of explanations (the ones we'd been telling ourselves): there weren't that many college-educated black men on the market in the first place, and those who
were
on the auction block wanted white women or ghetto girls or men, not bourgie broads. A good black man wasn't just clandestine, he was near Jurassic. We were twenty-three and jaded.

But Adaoha wasn't—then. She'd skipped born-again trips to health services (“Please, God, if I'm okay this time then…”) and reality checks before dawn (“Soooo, you're not staying over?”). I couldn't let her get away with being the me before I got grown and a prescription for Ortho. I wanted her down in the dumps with the rest of us. Back in the black girls' club.