by Alli Frank
FROM: Josephine Bordelon—[email protected]
DATE: September 24, 2018
CC:
BCC:
SUBJECT: RE: Introduction to our son, Harrison Rutherford Lawton
TO: Meredith Lawton
Dear Meredith,
Thank you so much for applying your son, Harrison, to Fairchild Country Day School. We look forward to seeing your family at the first tour.
Warm regards,
Josie Bordelon
DIRECTOR OF ADMISSIONS
FAIRCHILD COUNTRY DAY SCHOOL
Send.
“Good job playing nice, Mama. Now, come oooooon, we gotta go. I’m begging you, don’t make me late,” Etta stresses, stuffing her headphones in her dance bag, her booty in my face. I know that booty and those endless legs. That was my body eighteen years and twenty pounds ago, strutting down the runway in Tokyo in nothing but a thong, pasties, and an open Jean Paul Gaultier kimono with Japanese characters hand painted on the back. If I had known then what I would know a few short weeks later when I couldn’t button my jeans, the characters on that kimono should have read baby on board.
“Mama, just send me to ballet in a Lyft. You know how you are the minute admissions opens up—it’s like a car crash, you can’t stop rubbernecking, or, for you, reading e-mail.” Etta huffs at me, a side effect of being artsy and a teenager. I toss her the car keys only because she’s not entirely wrong; I do completely lose myself during admissions season.
“I don’t have my license yet.” Etta says as she deftly snatches my keys out of the air.
“What are all those classes I’ve been paying for the last three months?”
“Driver’s Ed. And it doesn’t end until next month. Then I take my driving test.”
“Well, I’m not paying for a Lyft when I have a perfectly good car, and I still have the handicap placard from when I sprained my ankle, so drive carefully and park for free. Just don’t get caught and text me when you get there.” I’m not sweating Etta driving, but I still want to know she’s arrived in one piece.
“You’re a terrible parent,” Etta reprimands, turning to head out of my office. For an on-time ride she’s willing to turn a blind eye to the law and drive, but I know she won’t use the parking placard; that’s playing outside her moral boundaries.
“Nope, I’m just black-to-basics.”
* * *
• • •
I start working on kindergarten tour and visit dates for the school year, even as I repeatedly check for a text from Etta. My phone finally pings, stopping me from wondering if I should call the San Francisco County missing persons hotline.
Of course she made it.
I turn back to my computer. Even after thirteen years of kindergarten tours and visits I still find myself eager to show off Fairchild to potential families. The ohhhs and ahhhs from moms, dads, and grandparents remind me of how lucky I felt when I was a student at Fairchild.
It’s quite possible I peaked before the turn of the century. At least according to the Fairchild Country Day yearbook and my head of school, Dr. Pearson. During my years as a student he had loved to trot me out to big donors to show that Fairchild was doing its part to not only accept but also to successfully educate a diverse student body. We both wanted to prove that I was not just a product of affirmative action, as many in the Fairchild community in the eighties and nineties wanted to believe. I had, in fact, earned and retained an honest seat in the school, sealed with a spot on the honor roll every semester. Making honor roll should have been all the proof I needed to show I belonged, but while diversity efforts of private schools were all the rage in the nineties, every day I still had to go above and beyond any other student to prove being a member of the graduating class was no fluke.
With an audience seated in a living room with floor-to-ceiling views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay, Dr. Pearson would loudly rattle the phlegm in his throat. It would take three or four additional wet coughs to get the attention of the moneyed alumni sipping Napa Valley Chardonnay and chatting about whether Danielle Steel’s new book was based on a fellow Pacific Heights neighbor.
“Allow me to introduce you to Josephine Bordelon.” Light applause would follow, and I would join Dr. Pearson at the front of the room. “In our committed diversity efforts, Fairchild gets triple points for Miss Bordelon: She is African American (obviously); is being raised by her aunt Viv, our beloved school cook [lots of knowing nods and ohhhs and ahhhs at the mention of Aunt Viv]; and has been on scholarship since kindergarten. And I have to say [insert stiff chuckle by Dr. Pearson], Josie does more than her fair share to earn her keep and represent Fairchild well. She’s an honor’s scholar, a track and field phenom, and a breathtaking beauty. If only all our diversity efforts could be this successful, right?”
More than one audience member would dab a tear from the corner of their eye. Poor people of color who triumph among the privileged always make white folks cry. It’s fund-raising 101—a recipe, I learned quickly, guaranteed to work:
Take one youth
Add at least half black or Latino or Native American or Asian (minus Chinese or Japanese)
Stir in a tale of struggle and perseverance
Bake the sob story for at least ten minutes
Et voilà! Tears and money flow.
If a donor went to four leadership functions in one year, they would see me twice. It was either Diego Rolando, swarthy Bolivian and future professional soccer stud, or me. The two other graduating students of color were either busted, shy, or on academic probation. By the nineties, working alongside or befriending a gay person may have become the norm in San Francisco thanks to Harvey Milk, but diversity efforts in private schools were still being hotly debated behind closed doors (We don’t want to water down the rigor and reputation of our school, do we? How many of these people are we talking about? Can they really keep up with the academics? I guess it’s okay as long as they don’t take my Jameson’s spot). What the board of trustees didn’t realize was that this was a fair trade. The school got a killer face to rest their diversity laurels on, and I got a first-class education and entrée into the world Aunt Viv wanted for me. And maybe, in my sadder moments, I imagined this was why my mother handed me off to a sister she barely knew.
While today the occasional bitch session with girlfriends about being used as part of a dog and pony show to raise money rears its ugly head, at the time I simply loved to be loved by the Fairchild community. My aunt Viv always told me, “Do what you gotta do, to get where you wanna get.” She was strident in her determination that I use the strength of my mind to get ahead; never choosing to dishonor my body or my soul. And I wanted to get myself to New York City. Granted, at seventeen, I had no idea why. I guess I felt like I had never quite belonged anywhere, and New York seemed like the perfect place for people who felt like they were from nowhere but wanted to find somewhere to call their own.
So the story goes, my people are Creole, the result of a lonely French dude gettin’ it on with a spicy young house girl. Unknown to the horny Frenchman, in Louisiana sleeping with black women was a bit of a social faux pas, so he hopped the next ship back to the homeland, but not without planting his Brie cheese in my great- great-grandmother.
“I had already helped raise my siblings, no reason to stay in New Orleans, where I would probably end up raising somebody else’s children for a living,” Aunt Viv would say when I asked why she left Louisiana for California the day after she graduated from high school. “Really the only thing in Louisiana is swamp, sweat, and sadness, and that’s God’s truth. But I didn’t want it to be my truth. I was the oldest of six kids, I wanted my own life.” When Hurricane Katrina hit, Aunt Viv muttered this same mantra for months, “See, I told you—just swamp, sweat, and sadness down there. You bettah be happy your mama dropped you off on my doorstep when she did.”
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sp; I was a baby in a basket, a modern-day female Moses floating down the Mississippi River. Only I was four and my riverboat was a Greyhound bus from New Orleans to San Francisco. My mama told me we were going on a trip to visit her oldest sister, Vivian, whom I’d never met, but by the time I was four the stories of Aunt Viv had reached epic proportions in my people’s part of New Orleans. She was nearing thirty and had escaped booze, boys, and babies. In the promised land of California, she slept alone in her own bed, lived alone in her own apartment, and worked in a castle. She also never returned home to the Ninth Ward, not even for Christmas or Mardi Gras.
When Dr. Pearson used to say I was a breathtaking beauty, he had never met my mother, or at least what a four-year-old mind wants to remember of her mother. Her body could stop a Fat Tuesday celebration and her hair made Diana Ross’s wigs look limp, but what I remember most was how she could lose herself in music. That woman was twenty years ahead of the twerking curve and her body defied what most thought was anatomically possible. She would sashay down a street, holding my hand; her booty swaying to a constant beat that drummed in her head. I gathered, even at the young age of four, that it was her booty that paid our bills. So at twenty-two, when my mother had saved up her dancing tips for a full year (“stripping” was not yet in my young vocabulary), we headed west to pay Aunt Viv a visit.
I remember thinking that for such a huge adventure we were traveling light with only one bag between us, and my mama let me fill most of it up with my favorite things. But it didn’t matter; I had Mama to myself, and a rare pack of multi-fruit flavored Life Savers that had to last me to the famous Golden Gate Bridge. Only who was on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge didn’t know we were coming or that I was about to completely upend her life forever.
TWO
We haven’t even made it through the first full week of school and Lola’s already letting me know the struggle is real in first grade. Her text reads:
LOLA
Jesus, one of my kids pooped his pants today. Holla back. Lo
3:26 P.M.
“Shit, Lola,” I say when my best friend picks up on the first ring.
“Literally.”
Lola teaches at Fairchild’s rival school, San Francisco Children’s Academy. She has three boys under eight at home, a husband who is pretty much her fourth child but with a paycheck, two dogs, a misplaced chinchilla, and a couple of fish I refer to as “water roaches” because they were supposed to live three weeks when Lola got them at a white elephant party and three years later they refuse to die. Her house smells like a YMCA locker room, and she’s slowly working her way through an eight-year EdD program at night. With all that she still manages to text me every day to exchange the daily highs and lows within five minutes of kicking her last student out the classroom door.
“How’s the new dad pool looking over there?” Lola asks, eager for some crosstown gossip. We’re only a few days into the school year and I have yet to look past the overconfident moms of last year’s admissions cycle who are now walking their kids into school unsure if they actually want to let their babies go.
“Haven’t even had time to notice. Too busy getting ready for admissions tours. The season officially opened yesterday.”
“Seriously? Did your vagina die this summer?”
Lola only has two topics she likes to talk about: her beloved students and my relationship status. Lola and I met at a Zumba class twelve years ago, back when she had time to exercise and Aunt Viv claimed I needed to find a hobby. We met just before class started. We were not so subtly looking each other up and down, sniffing out who was the better dressed, the better dancer, the better looking. It’s what black people do when they walk into a room. They find the other brothers and sisters and do a quick assessment to see if the competition is going to raise their net worth or take them down. I was wearing a shabby cotton Forty-Niners T-shirt two sizes too big to Lola’s Nike scuba-tight lime-green tank top. I’m sure she thought I was the albatross and she had this one on lockdown, but I knew I had her on the dance moves so we more or less broke even as the two women in the room representing black sistas (although most folks barely count Lola as black; she looks like cream with just a drop of coffee).
Ten minutes in we were huffing and puffing, rolling our eyes at each other because misery loves company. Twenty minutes in we were across the street at the neighborhood Mexican cantina holding margaritas and waiting for our chips and guac to arrive.
The first margarita was spent on the general information of Lola’s life. Lola was from Toronto, loved her family, but hated hockey and the cold. She moved to the Bay Area right after college, and her first job was as the assistant to a twenty-seven-year-old founder of the next “big” tech start-up during dot-com boom 1.0. She worked seventy hours a week, snorted cocaine on Wednesday nights to get through the rest of the week (which she sometimes still wishes she could do with three kids at home and eighteen in her classroom), and went to Stinson Beach on weekends with girlfriends. But then the founder spent too much time ogling Lola’s DDs and not enough on the company’s bottom line and it went belly up after two years and junior CEO skipped town. With worthless stock options and a distaste for entrepreneurs, Lola decided on a career where her lady bits were the least of her qualifications. She went back to San Francisco State to get her master’s in teaching. A year later she was a first-grade teacher at San Francisco Children’s Academy, had traded in cocaine for kombucha, and was head over heels in love with a Puerto Rican professional kite surfer.
I remember Lola looking at me when she finished her light and airy tale assuming she was about to hear something fairly similar. In my first few years back in San Francisco, I hadn’t yet found a good man to roll around with at night or a perfect girlfriend to kick it with during the day. Lola seemed like lifelong friend potential, but I didn’t want to waste my time on someone who couldn’t handle the baggage I was carrying. I decided to let the freak flag fly and share my whole story, starting with being dumped on Aunt Viv’s doorstep at four and ending with my return back to Aunt Viv’s with my own four-year-old daughter in tow.
After being a lifer at Fairchild Country Day School, single-handedly responsible for bringing in one million plus in donor giving and earning the school multiple 800-meter records in track and field, New York University decided to take a chance on me. My dream to live in New York City came true. I earned an academic scholarship, but the only spending money I had was from Aunt Viv to buy a one-way plane ticket and snacks for the flight. Knowing he owed me big-time for helping him build a new gym, Dr. Pearson found me a job nannying the children of an über-successful Fairchild alumnus on New York’s Upper East Side.
Being the first woman in our family not to work as a domestic in the posh Garden Point neighborhood of New Orleans, Aunt Viv didn’t want me helping raise other people’s children. From the time I was fourteen, Aunt Viv warned me that if some nice-looking lady approaches me askin’, “Do you want a job?” I was to pop my hip out and let her know, in no uncertain terms, that “these hips weren’t for totin’ around nobody’s children but my own.” Aunt Viv wanted me to get a job in a campus library or in a coffee shop or anywhere that I was not reading bedtime stories to other people’s offspring. Thing is, I like kids, always have. In a cynical, cruel world their humor, unpredictability, and pure joy is contagious. And nannying on the UES of Manhattan paid way better than working in Bobst Library at NYU. Freshman year in college kicked off my career working with privileged kiddos as well as not telling Aunt Viv the truth.
One gorgeously warm afternoon the fall of my junior year, I decided to walk from Washington Square Park to 85th and Park Ave to gawk at the swag in the storefronts along the way. Passing through Midtown, even in a crowded sea of people, I felt like someone was following me. By the time I got to the edge of Central Park by the Plaza Hotel a voice was yelling after me, “Hey, tall black girl! Hey, tall black girl!” I put on my
best resting bitch face, cocked my hip and channeled Aunt Viv’s “I ain’t workin’ for you” body language, and turned around.
“Whew, I’ve been following you since Fortieth,” panted a middle-aged white lady in impossibly high-heeled boots and a black wrap, pushing her enormous sunglasses to the top of her head.
Resting bitch face did not change.
“Well, then . . .” she started, clearly discomforted by my body language.
“I’ll get right to it, I can see you are on your way somewhere important. I work for Ford Models, perhaps you’ve heard of us?”
“I have,” I answered, wondering if I truly looked as naïve as she seemed to think I did.
“Yes, well, my name’s Maisie Maxwell and I hate running in heels and I really hate sweating, but I did it for you because I think you’re stunning. Seriously, incredible. Have you modeled before?”
I shook my head no.
“I didn’t think so, you slouch when you walk. Anyhoo, you have to be almost six feet, legs for days, and your skin is magnificent. Here’s my card. Please, please call me. I would love for you to come in for a test shoot. I’ve been desperately looking for someone new. I’m so bored with the Christie Brinkleys and Brooke Shieldses. All-American is on its way out. I want a model with some piss and vinegar. Some homegrown attitude.” Maisie grabbed my hand and shoved her card into my palm.
“Thanks, I think.” I didn’t look at the card. Was piss and vinegar white talk for ghetto?
“Please do call me! I have two kids in private school and God do I need to find the next Naomi Campbell. Not that you have to be Naomi Campbell. Actually, please don’t be Naomi Campbell; rumor has it she’s a bitch of a diva on set. Be whoever you want to be, just please call and cross fingers, maybe you can be my rainmaker. With a mortgage, tuition, my husband’s dental school loans, and a witch of a mother-in-law, I need it.” Maisie tipped her sunglasses down, gave me a thumbs-up, and limped away in serious pain. I allowed myself to feel flattered that some white lady would run blocks in stiletto boots just to talk to me. But I was done making it rain for other people. If I was going to be Maisie’s rainmaker, I was damn well going to make sure it poured on me, too.