My Best White Friend: Cinderella revisited

My best white friend is giving me advice on how to get myself up like a trophy-wife-in-waiting. We are obliged to attend a gala fund-raiser for an organization on whose board we both sit. I’m not a wife of any sort at all, and she says she knows why: I’m prickly as all getout, I dress down instead of up, and my hair is “a complete disaster.” My best white friend, who is already a trophy wife of considerable social and philanthropic standing, is pressing me to borrow one of her Real Designer gowns and a couple of those heavy gold bracelets that are definitely not something you can buy on the street.

I tell her she’s missing the point. Cinderella wasn’t an over-thirty black professional with an attitude. What sort of Master of the Universe is going to go for that?

“You’re not a racist, are you?” she asks.

“How could I be?” I reply, with wounded indignation. “What, being the American Dream personified and all.”

“Then let’s get busy and make you up,” she says soothingly, breaking out the little pots of powder, paint, and polish.

From the first exfoliant to the last of the cucumber rinse, we fight about my man troubles. From powder base through lip varnish, we fight about hers.

You see, part of the problem is that white knights just don’t play the same part in my mythical landscape of desire. If poor Cinderella had been black, it would have been a whole different story. I tell my best white friend the kind of stories my mother raised me on: about slave girls who worked their fingers to the bone for their evil half sisters, the “legitimate” daughters of their mutual father, the master of the manse, the owner of them all; about scullery maids whose oil-and-ashes complexions would not wash clean even after multiple waves of the wand. These were the ones who harbored impossible dreams of love for lost mates who had been sold down rivers of tears to oblivion. These were the ones who became runaways.

“Just think about it,” I say. “The human drama is compact enough so that when my mother was little she knew women who had been slaves, including a couple of runaways. Cinderellas who had burned their masters’ beds and then fled for their lives. It doesn’t take too much, even across the ages, to read between those lines. Women who invented their own endings, even when they didn’t get to live happily or very long thereafter.”

My best white friend says, “Get a grip. It’s just a party.”

I’ve called my best white friend my best white friend ever since she started calling me her best black friend. I am her only black friend, as far as I know, a circumstance for which she blames “the class thing.” At her end of the social ladder, I am my only black friend—a circumstance for which I blame “the race thing.”

“People should stop putting so much emphasis on color—it doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or blue or green,” she says from beneath an avocado mask.

Lucky for you, I think, even as my own pores are expanding or contracting—I forget which—beneath a cool neon-green sheath.

In fact, I have been looking forward to the makeover. M.B.W.F. has a masseuse and a manicurist and colors in her palette like Apres Sun and Burnt Straw, which she swears will match my skin tones more or less.

“Why don’t they just call it Racial Envy?” I ask, holding up a tube of Deep Copper Kiss.

“Now, now, we’re all sisters under the makeup,” she says cheerfully.

“When ever will we be sisters without?” I grumble.

I’ve come this far because she’s convinced me that my usual slapdash routine is the equivalent of being “unmade”; and being unmade, she underscores, is a most exclamatory form of unsophistication. “Even Strom Thurmond wears a little...