My favorite cousins would come from the Bronx and boy, did we play! We were a creative and mischievous bunch. Sometimes we would hang out the second-story window and drop water-balloon bombs on folks passing underneath. Then we’d duck down out of sight and shake in muffled hysterics. And of course, I loved anything that involved performance. My favorite was reenacting “Mrs. Wiggins” sketches from The Carol Burnett Show. Unsurprisingly, I insisted on playing the lead role. I had her signature walk down pat. I stuffed my little booty with a pillow, sticking it way out, acting like I had on a tight pencil skirt. I pranced about on my tippy-toes (maybe this is why I still walk on my toes), taking tiny steps. I’d smack imaginary gum and pretend to file my nails, and speak in the ditsy, nasally voice I had down to perfection. I specialized in character voices very early.
“Oh, Mrs. Uh-Whiggins!” one of my cousins would say in a silly, skewed Swedish accent. I’d snap into character and we’d launch into a full-on improvisation. What I loved most was all the rambunctious laughing with my cousins. I loved the sound of my laughter as a small part in the chorus of other kids who were kinda like me.
Inside the house with my cousins I may have felt a part of something, but outside with kids in the neighborhood was a different story. It’s always a different story with me. Even though my cousins didn’t live on this mostly Black and Hispanic block in Queens, they were known because our grandpa was “that guy” in the neighborhood. When we were outside playing, they’d introduce me to the other kids as their cousin, and some kid would invariably say, “She’s not your cousin. She’s white.”
“Yes, she is our cousin!” they would snap right back. Who my mother was, who my father was, to whom I belonged, was always in question. But hanging out with my cousins wasn’t as heavy. I was part of a group. I was part of them, and they defended me. Yes, she is. It was that simple. And it was so important. My Black cousins were the only cousins I knew when I was a little girl. Because my mother’s side of the family, the white side, had disowned her, I had no way of having a real relationship with any of them as a child.
My cousins were well put together because their mothers were very well put together. One auntie in particular was younger, juicy, and just gorgeous. She looked ready to twirl down the Soul Train line on TV. Her makeup was consistently impeccable, lips glossed up like glass. She wore funky-chic ensembles, and her hair was always in some superb slick, snatched-back style, so she could feature face. She was giving you trendy, sexy, and coordinated at all times, almost as fab as Thelma on Good Times (but a little bit thicker). This foxy auntie sold makeup at the department store counter—now that was fabulous to me. Once, she gave my favorite girl cousin and me a faux facial evaluation. As she was examining our little faces, she told Cee Cee, “Your lips are good.” Then she turned to me with a puzzled look and paused. I was wondering, and worrying, What’s wrong with my face? Me?
“Mariah, your lips aren’t full enough,” she said with a sigh.
I didn’t know what they weren’t full enough for, but I fully accepted her analysis as fact. A few years later, I was about twelve years old and hanging out with a white girlfriend at a department store on Long Island, where they were offering free makeup demos at one of the counters. My friend, by local standards, was a beauty: big blue eyes, a thin nose, and very thin lips. I, no doubt, had on some haphazard ensemble, and who knows what the hair was doing that day. Clearly looking our age, we sat down to have our faces done. Maybe the saleslady thought we had money to buy some makeup, or she was bored, or she simply took pity on us. Whatever the case, she began the process.
As my auntie had done, she studied the contours and angles of both of our faces and reported to me, “Your lips are too full on top.” Wait, I thought. I knew I had a thin upper lip—but not as thin as my white friend, whose lip size was the “standard” at the time. I wanted to say, “Actually, I really want my lips to be bigger”—which I did, ever since the day of my auntie’s evaluation—but I held my tongue. Thus I was given two polar opposite professional opinions about my lips as a girl; they were too full for a white beauty standard and not full enough for a Black one. Who was I to believe? It was like my complexes had complexes. And there was no one to tell me, “Mariah, you are good.” Period.
And now here we are in a world where white and Black women are filling up their butts and lips like water balloons. I guess I should’ve had my lips injected ages ago, but it’s too late. The whole world knows what my real lips look like, so why bother? Why would I do that now, when I can just accentuate them with lip liner, dahling?
But I digress. That day at Grandpa and Nana Ruby’s house when I was seven, the time had come for my cousins’ main event. My aunties had decided it was time to put me together. Some of them were gathered upstairs in Nana Ruby’s bedroom,
