emptier apartment, I flipped open my laptop and deleted Dexter from Facebook, MySpace, AIM, and my Outlook address book. I needed to do something real. But really, he was just another ephemeral disappeared-into-the-Internet ether. Nothing. It was 4:00 a.m., and I wore down my living room floor pacing back and forth, making guttural sounds—grunting like a damn maniac because I couldn’t cry. I wouldn’t cry—not after only five weeks. So instead I lay on my bed, hissed at the ceiling through clenched teeth like a woman in labor, and waited for sleep to come.

Then he caaaaalled, and we taaaalked, and he beeeegged, and I liiiiiistened.

Yes, I am totally familiar with how ridiculously pathetic I am. How fucked I am in this entire situation. How like Lisa I am right now. She’d been in outer space. Outer freaking space! I assume she knew she was better than dirty Depends (I mean, there are rest stops). And yet this woman, this woman who was like us in so many ways, was willing to abandon life on the moon for a man with whom she shared “more than a working relationship but less than a romantic relationship.” Does success drive you totally insane? Or do men?

Six months and one Lisa later, I still didn’t know for sure. This is why I can’t answer Dex’s whining IMs. This is why I have to get over him. This is why I’ve been super-strong and full of resolve for the past two weeks. This is why when I saw him walking up the stairs of yet another club just last night, my stomach flipped, my eyes went all watery, and I almost choked on a shard of ice. This is why when he came over to our pack with a shit-eating grin on his face and embraced one of my friends and then tried to give me the one-armed homie hug, I gave him the thumbs-up. This is why, when I saw him later the same night, this time standing by himself at the bar looking all lonely and irresistible like DVF at Filene’s, I had to say hello. This is why we ended up talking all night. This is also why I woke up to him the next morning and have to start all over again with the whole ignoring thing.

This is why I never win.

Two

GETTING MY HAIR UNDID

Know how I found out my family thought my mother was a crack-addicted sex fiend who dabbled in the international child slave ring and planned to sell her only daughter to the highest bidder? Over the phone and under a hair dryer.

“Whaaaa?”

“I never told you this?” Umm, no.

See, Frances does this. We’ll be talking about something FCC-approved for mothers and daughters, like, say, vaginal itch, and she’ll bust in like the emergency broadcasting system with a “What kind of birth control do you use?” or an “I’ve been celibate for almost a decade” or an “Oh, so you two are just fuck buddies then.” Beeeeeeep goes the filial flat line. Dead. She’s got mommy Tourette’s.

Even better than talking, she’ll actually do things that are totally unkeeping for a woman her age or sexual orientation. In a perfect world, I’d be blissfully oblivious to these random acts of kinkiness, but for the persistent photo evidence. It’s as if she’s leaving me Kodak crumbs, snapshot SOSes. Like the time I found a picture of her with Treach. Yes, that Treach, one half of the Grammy-winning rap duo Naughty by Nature, who famously asked, “Ya down with O.P.P.?”

“What. The hell. Is this?” I say, ripping the four-by-six from her fridge and eyeing it up close. Oh, it’s Treach, all right. I pinch a triangle of the edge and dangle it in her direction.

“Oh yeah, he’s a performer,” she says, actually using the word performer, which proves just how wrong it is for her to be in this picture.

“Jesus, woman!” I feign a proper degree of daughterly disgust, when really I’m proud of how utterly ridiculous she is. How totally unacceptable her whole life is. She’s in this picture cheesing like someone told her to, holding a glass of champagne, and wearing Treach’s arm for a shawl. This lady is old enough to be wearing shawls. According to her version of the night in question, the two of them—my mommy and the hip-hop star—just happened to be in the same club celebrating the release of a porno Treach was in—she claims ignorance here—and Frances, being Frances, finagled her way into VIP