“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.
FROM: Helena Andrews
TO: Abortion Monkey
SUBJECT: Re: Re: Mighty Joe Young
Darin,
It is clear that you have very serious mental/anger management issues that need to be resolved in order to become a functioning member of society. I have forwarded the following e-mail along with your previous message to the New York City Police Department, which has both a Domestic Incident Report and previous warrant for your arrest already on file. I truly hope someday you learn to be a sane human being, instead of a violent and obsessive loon.
I signed my full name at the bottom and created a file folder entitled “Psycho Darin” for all Abortion Monkey’s e-mails. Unable to delete them or look at them every ten minutes when checking my in-box, I told myself I was saving them for when I turned up missing.
It’d been more than three years since the e-mails stopped when the calls started.
“Hello?”
Nothing but static, not even heavy breathing of the pervert variety.
“Heeell-looo-ooo?” I knew someone was on the other end of that line, and despite evidence to the contrary, I wanted that person to admit it to me and to him-or herself.
“HELLO!” I’d yell after waiting another five minutes or more for whomever to say whatever it was he obviously needed to say at two o’clock in the morning.
The number was always “unknown,” tricking me every time into picking up, thinking someone extremely classified was calling to whisk me away to the private island where all the awesome people live unencumbered by random phone calls in the night. “Number Unknown” would ring ten times in a row and then not at all for weeks. I knew it was Darin and wanted to be proved wrong.
“Hello?”
Silence.
“Darin, I know this is you, you effin’ psychotic shit bag. Get a fucking life or eat a dick, either way stop calling me, you retarded monkey. How’d you even get this goddamned number? Are you STILL thinking about me every waking minute of your pathetic shit-stained life? I’m serious. Kick rocks!” A boulder-size lump had been forming in my throat the entire time I was talking, but I managed to get through the speech I’d saved up.
Silence.
“Ohmigod, listen, you fa—”
“Nineteen-oh-two Ninth Street Northwest,” he was cackling. Hadn’t heard his voice in years, but I knew. “Nineteen-oh-two Ninth Street Northwest. Nineteen-oh-two Ninth Street Northwest. Nineteen-oh-two Ninth Street Northwest. Nineteen-oh-two Ninth Street Nor—”
That boulder in my throat passed like a kidney stone, and I hung up before it got worse. How the hell did he know my address in Washington? I karate-chopped the front curtains and peered out at the empty street for a ninja second. There was no Darin standing on the sidewalk with a cell phone in one hand and a sickle in the other. I was safe—for now. This time, though, I called my mother.
First, she apologized for entertaining the possibility of Darin and me being friends so many years ago. “I’m so sorry I didn’t listen to you from the beginning, little brown-eyed girl,” she said in one sigh, a faraway lilt in her voice.
“I know, Ma.” I figured she was somewhere back in the ’60s in a house where a violent man ruled absolutely and her “in case of emergency” task was to grab her younger sister, leap out a window, and head down the street to her grandmother’s, the safe house. “I know,” I said again.
Turns out it was all MySpace’s fault. I’d written a blog about ex-boyfriends, not naming names, of course, but Darin must have read the part about “crazy-psycho-stalker-jerk face” and recognized his. Naturally, this was reason enough for him to begin a campaign against me. Frances, who’d gotten all this information from Darin’s mom, was upset with me.
“Why are you writing about Darin anyway? You need to set all your stuff on these sites to private, Lena. You never know who’s reading it.”
“Fine,” I said.
“I’m serious,” she said.
What I didn’t tell her was that I wasn’t the only person on Abortion Monkey’s phone list. My “boyfriend” at the time, a Muslim podiatrist named Abdul, was shocked to hear the whole Darin story, which had been abridged over Duccini’s and Netflix.
“So yeah, I’m staying off MySpace for a while, laying low like I did something.”
“You know what? Now that you mention it, I think I did get a call from dude not too long ago,” said Abdul without alarm, as if getting a call from a mental patient was normal.
“Umm, what?”
“Yeah. I thought it was weird. Some guy called me. He was like, ‘Hello, this is—’”
“Darin? Did he say his name was Darin?”
“I can’t remember what he said his name was. But he was like, ‘Yeah, hello, this is such and such, and I just wanna let you know that Helena Andrews has the best pussy in the world.’ Then he hung up.”
If I hadn’t already fainted once that year, I would have blacked out from sheer exhaustion like the celebrities do. I didn’t know whether to take it as a compliment or curse. I was doing it, sure, but what I really wanted was to find it (love, longevity, the meaning of life), and here I was wasting time with a podiatrist on depression meds who’d told me no less than three times that “this wasn’t a relationship.” What this was, only he knew, and he wasn’t telling.
Darin, on the other hand, was an oversharer. The best pussy in the world? Try the pussy of least resistance.
Ten
WALK LIKE A WOMAN
It has been suggested more than once that I have some type of problem.
“If you’re consciously choosing to do something to the obvious exclusion of your own personal safety, then something’s clearly wrong. You need to go to meetings where people sit on folding chairs. Take a friggin’ cab!” commanded a concerned friend through my cell phone as I strolled down a dodgy D.C. street, the sun setting on my back. Me not giving a damn about maybe getting mugged for the third time or fainting for the second.
That’s my issue: I walk too much.
In the face of my driver’s license deficiency and an abhorrence for the close body contact prevalent on most metro systems, I’ve learned through pluck and circumstance to use the legs God gave me. People, I’ve walked across state lines—multiple times—without getting winded or wreathed. Never thinking twice about the damage being caused to the thinning skin above my smallest three toes until it was too late, I average five, maybe even six, miles a day without even trying. Pedometers are for pussies.
When I stop to think about it, which one tends to do a lot of on foot, like all my potentially damning idiosyncrasies the walking is a product of my childhood and therefore can easily be blamed on my mother. Forcing me to “go outside and play,” Frances inadvertently created a pedestrian. On Catalina, where I was an only child with tons of friends but fewer equals, spending time alone was habitual and safe. Why walk all the way across the street to ask if Melissa and Marcy could come out and play when there was an unguarded pomegranate tree just a forty-minute mile from here?
I’d march about for hours, my skinny grade-school gams working like a windup toy possessed, trying to get lost in a town the size of a liberal arts college campus and feeling secure in knowing that was impossible. We lived on an island. Nobody got lost, no matter how many times they went fishing drunk.
Besides, the more time I spent with myself, the more I liked it—or me, rather. Imaginary friends: who needs ’em? Plus, there was a lot of stuff on my mind, stuff I would’ve never known about if me, myself, and I hadn’t begun our long jaunts across the beach, our hikes up beer-bottled hills, and our parades downtown. Like the fact that Justin Ramirez could scarcely contain his passion for me, which is why he’d ignored me during The Pirates of Penzance rehearsal. And Amy Dugger’s dad hadn’t “forgotten” to pick me up for the camping trip on the Isthmus. And getting traded in the middle of the Little League season was not, as Frances would have me believe, the price of being too talented.
I’d come back inside by the time the would-be streetlights came on (on Catalina there was no use for them), feeling rather productive and not at all as if I’d spent five hours wandering aimlessly while conducting an existential conversation with myself. Frances would inevitably ask, “What you been up to, little brown-eyed girl?” And I’d answer truthfully, “Nothing much. Just walking.” The interview ended there, and we’d begin our Vaudeville dinner theater. Act 1, scene 1:
“Heeey, good looking. Whaaat-cha got cooking,” I’d sing, two-stepping my way through the narrow hallway that moonlit as our kitchen.
“Dooo you wanna shimmy with meee? I said, dooo you wanna shimmy with meee,” Frances chanted back.
“No time for dancing, I wanna eat! What’s for dinner, woman?”
She’d holler, “French-fried boogers and cocoa snot,” which was always quite good.
By the time we moved off the island and to Los Angeles, twelve-year-old me thought singing for my dinner was dumb. I was disappointed in my mother’s failure to provide two essentials: speech therapy and a student RTD pass. The city’s Rapid Transit District buses were strained with the residue of society, a near-impossible clog to shift through with the surfer girl accent I’d picked up. “Omigah, is this me, brah? Du-u-ude, did I just miss my thingy?” Because nobody cared or understood enough to answer, inevitably I’d get off way before or way after my stop, booking it five city blocks to make it to “advanced” math class at Mt. Vernon Middle School. Its mystique vanished with the stress of being lost for real, walking, like college-ruled paper and sensible tennis shoes, had been ruined by necessity. Nobody walks in Los Angeles.
Imagine then what a relief New York was. An entire city filled with the sort of people able to perform the difficult task of getting from one place to the other without a care but with purpose. Talking to themselves along the way. Since everybody was crazy, nobody was crazy. This was me, this was home. Some days on Columbia’s campus, there would be a sighting of this one Asian guy we called “crazy cell phone man.” You heard him before you saw him. He’d be trying to earn Contemporary Civ. participation points by shouting into his palm: “You call that man’s inhumanity to man? What could be more hu
man than suffering and pain? Who causes these things? Aliens?” If there was a cell phone somewhere in there, I never saw it. I followed him from behind once when we were going the same way down College Walk, noting the reactions of folks coming from the opposite direction. “…and if philosophers are to become kings, what then will kings become? Aliens?” Nobody gave him a second glance or even shared with me a knowing smirk—“this guy…” I kept straight after he turned toward the library, probably headed to the stacks to make sweet love to whoever was on the other side of that “phone,” or maybe just his palm.
That’s the thing that got me so turned on about walking in New York: nobody sees nothing. You could go miles down Amsterdam Avenue, surrounded on every side by papis looking for mamis, tourists looking for safety, worshippers looking for succor at St. John’s, and addicts looking for the cover of Morningside Park—but never you. Getting lost in thought was easy when nobody was looking—or so I thought. Apparently, it’s also easy to overlook everyone else. Word around campus was that Helena, that light-skinned pretty Delta, didn’t know how to speak to anybody. Those in the know knew I needed glasses.
After graduation, I got an internship at O, The Oprah Magazine that paid $5 and some change an hour. Our offices were on Fifty-third on the west side, and I lived on East 128th Street. Making minimum wage also meant choosing between a monthly metro card and regular sustenance. Seeing as how I’d never get ahead with a loud stomach—So, Helena, do you think you can fact-check October’s contributors’ page? GROWL!—I chose the latter. What’s a seventy-five-block trek twice a day between professionals?
In Washington three years later, I’d tell people this story as proof of payment for all these alleged “dues” people talk about. “Every fucking day, each way. One time in the rain with high-heeled boots and a two-dollar umbrella.”
Bitch Is the New Black Page 13