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 covering 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 a*shole, 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.
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 bathroom 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.