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 myself 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 “F*ck 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.
Every story involved the Nubian Sisters, the eighth-grade black girls club in which I had the most peripheral of memberships. Gina had full privileges, while I mainly stood on the sidelines, lying about getting my period and getting tongue. The real oral exam was knowing all the words to Too $hort’s “I’m a Player.” I listened to 92.3 The Beat with blind people ears until I was ready to whisper the lyrics in the hallway when teachers weren’t around. “See, I made up my mind when I was seventeen. I ain’t wit no marriage and weddin’ ring. I be a playa fo’ life.” The clique’s unofficial bard, a girl named Monique, changed up some of the lyrics to fit our current circumstances. Instead of “I used to f*ck young ass hoes / I used to be broke and didn’t have no clothes,” we sang, “I used to get the young ass sperm / Used to be broke and had a messed-up perm.” Just turned thirteen, and already jaded.
Our real anthem ushered in the opening credits of Living Single, a new show starring Queen Latifah as a man-loving magazine editor. Really, it was our fight song—“Ooooo, in a ’90s kinda woo-oorld I’m glad I’ve got my girls!” At the time, this didn’t seem depressing.
Living Single was the new reality we little brown-eyed girls had to look forward to. A bunch of grown-ass women living together—in f*cking Brooklyn. Monique dubbed herself Regine, the calculating fashion vixen. Gina was Khadijah, the sporty career woman. Marissa was Max, the man-eating lawyer. They said I could be Synclaire, the ditzy virgin. Pretty much everyone was having some version of sex but me—on screen and in life. I still thought I was more like Max—smart, driven, and possibly gay since, you know, she was so smart and driven. Plus, she had short hair—extra gay.
On the way home, Vernell and I would listen to The Beat’s promos for the show, which was new and ’90s. She loved this one line they played on repeat. It was Max talking about what women should do with men—“Snip. Snip.” To drive the point home she scissored the air in front of my eyes with her fingers. A would-be peace sign turned into a scalpel.
Vernell was the one who taught me how to use a tampon in our bathroom before I needed to learn. Said it was important to know, “just in case.” She was the one who told me that I should probably try sex before I got married, because “you never know.” She was the one who convinced me to wear gigantor neon green Cross Colours. Said it looked cool. She was the one from New York. We moved to Los Angeles two years after the riots to be close to her. Almost ten years younger than Frances, she was the one I thought knew everything.
Spending quality time in the Nissan with Vernell also meant time spent listening to her criticize my mother for not raising me right or me for being such a snob.
“So now that you go to a new school, you’re too good to hang out with Shonda?” There was contention in her voice. Shonda, the long-legged girl who lived across the street, liked to five-finger troll dolls and let boys do the same to her. After I got into Pilgrim, she was the one who thought she was too cool for my school. I was the one in a pleated plaid skirt with no one to talk to. Vernell knew none of this.
I sat on my side of the car in silence.
“Your mother is not a people person,” she explained as we rolled over Olympic Boulevard, watching the magical palm trees of Beverly Hills turn into mangy ones. A poor man’s palm tree is just as tall but lacks the grace. Instead of swaying, the palm trees on our block slumped, the branches made heavy by dirt, not fluttering with fairy dust. “I can get along with just about anybody, but not your mom. Oh, no, not Frances. She doesn’t know how to talk to people, you know?”
Having not yet learned the definition of rhetorical, I saw my continued silence as cowardice. Vernell was first on my Chinese hit list.
A .99 Cent Store dry-erase board saved my life. I’d never given the thing much thought before using it to slash manic slaps of marker onto our Frigidaire. Prior to it becoming the major outlet of my innermost angst, the three of us used it for grocery lists and homework reminders. Some girls cut, chuck, or f*ck. I transcribed.
The grown-ups were in the living room arguing during the commercials, trading insults to a sound track about sunglasses. Frances, we need to talk about this. My name is Geek I put ’em on as a shocker. Do whatever you want, Vernell, leave me out of it. Man, I love these Blublockers. I hate you. Everything is clear. Keep your voice down. They block out the sun. Why? Helena knows what a bitch you are. Oh yeah, I gotta get me some.
Escaping the dissonance meant walking through the kitchen and past the shiny plastic slab that would become my Rosetta stone.
At first it looked like fine art, all impressionist and stuff. Mimicking the moves of a painter like how people do when they conduct pretend orchestras, I used the marker like a brush, flicking quick and dirty strokes on the message board in neat Koranic lines. Subconscious calligraphy. It looked Arabic, alien, oriental, hieroglyphic. My hand was possessed. Ignorant of whatever it was I was writing, I just “wrote.”
One night, after a particularly edifying ride in the Nissan (seems Vernell wanted a baby—the old-fashioned way, with the penis and the sex and etc.), I tried to get Frances to go to her, comfort her, shut her up, with an especially pleading “Mom…” She actually said it was “grown folks’ business”—and I was shut down by a cliché.
Then the dry-erase board started doing the talking for me. Each bundle of madness represented a tiny character in my pretend alphabet. The scene was bloody, all thick black ink and serial killer-y. When it was over, I snapped the cap back on my new weapon and admired the damage I’d done. Just wait until they see this shit. When I was done I felt normal again, righted. I practiced my daily hieroglyphics for weeks, figuring madness on my part might preclude a melee on theirs. It did not.
Screams are as scarce as the monsters they allegedly shield us from. Barring East European Michael Jackson extremists, nobody screams in everyday life. It’s not something that’s done outside of amphitheaters and horror films. So when one hears an earsplitting screech not too far in the distance, it’s a singular moment. A moment that marks you for good, like a leftover fake Chinese character on a dry-erase board.
“Well, at least I’m not raising a daughter with no feelings!” I heard Vernell shriek, placing as much emphasis on the word feelings as one can when speaking in Soprano. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, too scared to go to the door but brave enough not to take this lying down. It was an insult, obviously, but I was far from offended.
I had plenty of f*cking emotions. I just keep ’em between me and the fridge.
“Don’t you dare talk about my daughter,” Frances growled in a register so low I thought at first she might be joking. Like they were rehearsing lines or something for The Exorcist meets Freddy. It sounded like my mother was talking not through her teeth but against them, trying to grind them down or shatter them with her snarling. I figured she didn’t need my help.
Then there was the drum roll of so many dictionaries falling to the floor, and that sound gradually evolved into the rumbling of an earthquake, and a crack like thunder, and then a sort of silence. Digging my fingers into my comforter, I strained to hear something comforting, something familiar like more yelling, more insults, more “f*ck this.” Nothing. The dangerous kind of quiet.
They were rolling around the living room in their panties when I ran in, punching each other in the back and scratching at each other’s arms, I think. All I could see was a revolving brown ball of lesbian. Two women trying desperately to shove the truth into the other through any means necessary. How or why they were half naked I don’t know. The whole scene would have seemed smutty to an equally naked eye if it weren’t so ridiculous. Two grown women, on the wrong side of thirty-five and 205 pounds, wrestling like professional amateurs. I didn’t know what to do besides watch.
Vernell stood up and started beating my mother from above, pushing her fists into her shoulders and the top of her head. Frances, who’d I’d never seen so weak, was shielding her head and surrendering simultaneously.
“Go ahead, beat me. Beat me,” she was whimpering in a voice I’d never heard and never wanted to hear again. Vernell obliged, and Frances sank even lower to the floor. She had no neck, no shoulders, no head, and no arms. The woman who was once so much bigger than me didn’t just become smaller in my eyes; she practically disappeared, leaving a puppy or some other defenseless thing in her place.
“Don’t you. Hit. My mother,” I managed to force out with a voice half high-pitched and half baritone. I didn’t plan to say that. I had planned on just screaming or something, maybe throwing a glass against the wall to get them both to stop and realize how very foolish they looked. But I never planned to defend. I also never called Frances “mother” unless my friends were around. Formality seemed necessary.
I repeated it. Louder this time.
“DON’T YOU DARE HIT MY MOTHER!” I stepped into the ring they’d built—scattered couch cushions and broken picture frames were the ropes—and karate-chopped the air between them. Hopefully cutting off any loose ends. I hadn’t meant for it to come out that ballsy. She was still my sort-of stepmother. But I was serious, and I’d surprised all three of us. Vernell, already standing, backed herself into the wall behind us and put her hands to her face, either to check to see if she was bleeding or to see if she was, in fact, all there. If this was really happening.
Pulling my mother from the floor, I put one arm over her shoulder and used the other hand to grip her powerless bicep. Not sure if I was doing it right, I led her naked, limp body to the bathroom, crossing the kitchen and my dry-erase board on the way. Vernell followed us, spitting on my mother’s back before I slammed the door in her face. So far being a teenager sucked.
I sat Frances on the toilet like you’d do a child in training and thought of her tin can.
When I was a little kid, I discovered my mother’s secrets under her bed, sealed away in a large canister-type thing decorated with nude pictures of women wearing 1970s Afros. In it were love letters she’d written to white girls and journals I think she was writing to me. She talked about “having good romps” with a lady in Argentina and dreams she’d had of a child named “Hellenea.”
I found letters from my father in there. They were the only things I had of his, and I imagined the sound of his voice reading them aloud, like in the movies. In my head it was throaty and scratchy—a real man’s. In one he said he loved and missed her. In another he said he hoped she hadn’t been “taking too many showers with white girls.” After that, I knew she was more than just wonderfully different. She was “gay.” An invisible man delivered one of the most important headlines of my life.
Well, not entirely invisible. There was a picture of him in there too. He wore a black ’fro, flip-flops, and a sailor’s uniform. He had long legs and light skin. This was him.
I imagined he was on the moon, and if I hoped for him enough, thought of him enough, prayed for him enough, he’d come back down. I didn’t need saving, but I needed something. Every night for years I repeated the same line to baby Jesus or grown-up Jesus—whomever was listening: “Dear Lord, please let our paths cross someday.” We didn’t even have to talk or even know who the other one was. I just wanted him to see me.
If he could see us in the bathroom—Frances on the toilet wiping up angry tears, and me running hot water over a washcloth—he’d have to be proud.
There was blood on her back. Not in copious amounts or anything 911-worthy, but there was blood. Enough to usher me into puberty without any cramps of my own. Regardless of what I’d told the Nubes at school, I hadn’t gotten my period yet, but this, my official blood day, would do. I dabbed it away while she sat alone on the toilet. This used to be the best seat in the house, from which I watched Vernell pluck her eyebrows, apply her lipstick, and correctly insert a tampon. That day it became the headquarters of my adulthood.
See, I know a little something about lovers’ quarrels and feelings and a whole bunch of other shit. Heavy shit? Yes, my shit is, in fact, heavy. But it’s mine! Britanya, Miss “I’ve put my tongue in places the sun don’t shine,” couldn’t have it, didn’t deserve it, and wouldn’t be able to wash it down with her awaze tibs.
According to my view of the world, the two of us had an appropriate work-friend/actual-friend balance. The only other time we’d hung out for real for real was at the row house next door to mine. I was cool with my neighbors, who liked foreign wine and African drums. Britanya came with. We got super drunk and stumbled back to my bat cave. It was late and the trains had already stopped running. Britanya would have to sleep in a faded “CU Cheer” T-shirt on a mattress of pillows in my bedroom. She could have just slept on the couch, but she didn’t.
In the morning I tiptoed out to the bathroom, careful not to step on her head. I didn’t make her breakfast or anything. She didn’t say she’d call me. But it was obvious things had changed. We were now work best friends with an infinitesimal dash of sexual tension. With that came the foreseeable bout of verbal diarrhea that wearers of peasant skirts inevitably suffer from. She got comfortable. Then we got Ethiopian.
Obviously I wasn’t going to respond in kind. Telling intimate details about my private life to a work wife I was trying to separate from? Um, no. So as to whet her appetite but not her lady parts, I told her that my mom was a lesbian, that my grandmother kidnapped me when I was a kid in order to save us from a life of Spanish crack whoredom, that Frances had been in a crazy abusive relationship when I was in middle school but that we got out of it by escaping to my dead grandfather’s house in Compton, and that I commuted two hours a day from there to get to a private school downtown, where I was a super genius who eventually got into the Ivy League, therefore setting in motion my evil plot to set the world ablaze.
“You’re just so robotic,” Britanya said.
“What do you even mean by that? You hardly know me.”
“You say stuff like it’s nothing. Like you don’t even care.” She sounded concerned, but also curious.
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you.” I was being honest.
Then we split the bill, and I walked her to the metro station. The next day I translated our heart-to-heart into IM chatter—“then she’s all ure so robotic…gtfoh.” “Dude, she just wants your body. She doesn’t even know you like that. Ignore.” And I did.