Bitch Is the New Black Read Online Free PDF Page A

1950s sitcoms: Hey, Little Ricki, how’d ya like to go to Cuba?
    We moved allllll the time. And by all the time, I’m not using the suburban kid pejorative where moving maybe once or twice in one’s little lifetime is so soul-crushing and eventful that one grows up wanting to be established and home-owning. No, I mean we moved whenever she felt like it, and because everything she felt meant everything to me, moving became our secret game. Secret in that only I knew the rules, so technically every time I won.
    If I came home from school, and Frances said, “Guess what?” I didn’t immediately start searching the house for a new Cabbage Patch Kid. I knew the score. With this woman, a “guess what” wasn’t an invitation to imagine; it was a prerequisite for packing. In place of “Guess what? Ground chuck was 39 cents off today. Tacos!” I got “Guess what? The dollar is way up. Learn Spanish!”I wasn’t scarred by it or anything—at least not in the beginning. ’Cause see, I liked moving. Loved it, actually.
    Then came the trip to Spain that went terribly wrong, forever ruining our secret game.
    I don’t have a childhood home—but homes. There does not exist in the greater Los Angeles area any street whose name I recall, whose sidewalks I hear, whose air I can taste, but it’s okay, because I’ve got the flash cards. These quick-flipping images that, when sorted through, give me some idea of what being Frances’s “first and last” was like.
    There are two piles. The first has all the places I sort of remember—a brownish green yard and a black puppy that got away; another puppy found limp with his nose in a box of Abba-Zabas; a porcelain bathtub I pooped in while there was water in it; a pink corduroy jumper decorated in the front with throw-up because Frances left me with strangers without saying good-bye; a crumpling Victorian mansion filled with “special” people to whom she gave pills and to whom I gave orders; a red Porsche at night with the top down.
    The second pile has all the places I can see clearly. My favorite is the street with our white wooden house and the steepled church on the corner. Dressed up like a clown, I celebrated my fifth birthday in that backyard. Or I could’ve had on a grass skirt made out of discarded palm tree leaves or a thrift-shop trench coat cut up to look like Inspector Gadget’s—whatever, costume is every late October baby’s burden. In the kitchen there was a cot I slept on not because there wasn’t an extra bedroom, but because refrigerator noises were so scary that being close to them helped me fall asleep. Made sense then.
    My best friend was another little girl named Jocelyn, who lived three houses down. She had a beautiful older brother and a huge clubhouse/refrigerator box in her backyard.
    We shared everything, me and Jocelyn—an obsession with “doing it,” the lyrics to “Let’s Hear It for the Boys,” ingenious blueprints for the refrigerator box, and…urine. In some clairvoyant preparation for our futures in nightclub bathrooms, we always peed at the same time. Like, literally. Both our bony butts could fit on one toilet seat simultaneously. We tested this once as a joke or dare—I can’t remember which—and decided to stick with it. It was both economical and efficient. Mine on one side and hers on the other, our cheeks barely touching. I doubt anyone knew we were pee-pee partners or even cared. Still, we thought we were doing something nasty, something significant.
    As if on cue Frances announced our third move in a year right when me and Jocelyn had a good rhythm going, a pissy symphony if you will. This time it was to somewhere called Lancaster—a two-hour drive up north. She said Jocelyn could come visit if she wanted. I shrugged; synchronized urination wasn’t so complicated that it couldn’t be