Bitch Is the New Black by Helena Andrews Page B

“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 werelonger. 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