on the other hand, couldn’t be saner. “We don’t even know how to talk about ’em,” she continued, wearing a $148 dress from White House/Black Market. Rayetta could get that dress.
I bought a J. Crew dress that looked like something she’d wear—sheath, cobalt blue, understated. Once, I was in a car packed mostly with women when the one guy, a friend of mine, almost got killed. “Michelle isn’t even all that cute,” he said. “She got a really high booty.” By some miracle he made it out in one piece. But the truth is, she isn’t the most beautiful woman in the world. Her butt does sit up kind of high. She’s a “dark, black, woman,” as Whoopi put it that day on The View, slapping the back of her hands together to slam home the meaning of each of those adjectives.
I don’t think Michelle minds being our new muse. I think she gets it. We little brown girls—drunk off The Cosby Show, sobered up by life, and a little suicidal—we need her.
These days the word hope is unsuitable for civilized conversation, having been ridden hard and put away so wet on the campaign trail. But despite being the vocabulary equivalent of a slutbag, there’s no better word to describe Michelle’s spot in our run-down hearts.
Gina’s even got a new pickup line to be used during our inauguration-weekend festivities: “I have a master’s degree. Fuck me.”
Eight
“PERFECT GIRL” AND OTHER CURSE WORDS
He meant it as an insult.
Maybe if he called me a “stuck-up bitch whose sadistic obsession with a mythological black male would inevitably leave her childless,” maybe then I could’ve slapped him like a monochromatic movie star before slinking off to the boudoir to be “ahvown.”
Instead he called me “perfect girl,” and I was forced to snuggle up to the rented space between his bicep and his pits, breathing in the stink of another relationship gone bad. Perfect girl? I gave us another month. Two, tops.
First you have to know that Dex already had a growing urban harem of “girls.” There was “hotel girl,” “club girl,” “seven-month school girl,” “London girl,” “law school girl,” and a girl whose secret identity I knew but whom I refused to refer to as anything other than “Prom Shoes.” Actually, I knew the etymology of each one, because so far, I’d been losing at a little game I play called “Super Cool,” in which I pretend to be the super coolest girl in the history of the universe, so cool, in fact, that it’s totally cool for us to chat about all your other so-called relationships because “it’s cool, my baby,” and we both know that in the end you’ll choose me, the coolest. Despite sucking at sports, I keep at it.
The toughest part of my favorite pastime is making sure the other player never catches on to how I really feel. Keeping secret that one more word about Prom Shoes’ (the only one of Dex’s girls who I’d seen in real life, in silvery rhinestoned peep toes) complete lack of moral authority as evidenced in her choice of footwear might send me to the other team, Red Rover style—sweaty, pissed, and eventually submissive.
Even with all that pent-up obsession, when the time came for my comic book christening I used my amazing super powers to keep my mouth shut. It happened like the Fortune Cookie game where the future always tastes better “in bed.” We were lying on one, stretching out my Jersey sheets with 3:00 a.m. predictions of what might come next for us. For me, it was a life made painless by the proximity of another human being. For Dex, it was probably another blow job, the possibility of which brought him to his next point.
“Wanna know what our code word for you is?” he whispered to the ceiling that night as I lay naked by his side, trying to make a permanent impression of my 34Bs on his chest—a physiological proof of purchase. Staring down at his other head, I was immediately grateful he couldn’t see me smiling like a dismembering serial killer. Our? He talked about me with his friends? Code word? I was worthy of synecdoche?! Some lucky part of me (bitchy, baby-hungry, black?) was going to be the immortal epithet to my issues with men. If I’d paid more attention to Mrs. Paul’s sixth-grade lecture on word choice, I’d know whether to be anxious or eager.
“Whaaaaaaaat?” I sighed, hoping to sound appropriately apathetic and not like the possessed