Brothers (and Me)

by Donna Britt

  “I’m so sorry, Mom!” he said, blanching. “I just wanted to see a black woman naked!”

  I almost smiled. This is what you get with boys, I thought. How would my daughter have surprised me at age twelve? Giving birth to a girl would have taught me different lessons. It might have filled the emptiness I’d had since I’d yearned for a sister in childhood, and redressed a hurt as old as my betrayal in fifth grade by girls I’d thought of as friends. My daughter could have resurrected the joy I’d briefly felt at Helen Newberry, the joy of giving to women, whose need and validation and appreciation of me were so unlike those of the men I’d offered myself to. By now, I knew I was a caring and thoughtful mother. Hell, I was good at it. Was it my fate, my blessing, my curse, to always give the best I could offer… to men?

  Resigned, I thought perhaps it was. Until one of the men to whom I’d given the most put everything in a whole new light.

  Holes in the Heart

  Darrell, Skye, and Hamani, 1997.

  We all have our secrets: the hatreds we conceal, the loves we’d die before confessing, the particular way we touch ourselves for pleasure. Even minor secrets can be hard to admit: A decade passed before my son Darrell confessed to the trick he and his pal Jacob used in grade school to get out of class. Pulling blades of saw grass from clumps behind the school, each boy drew a spiny strand sharply across his palm, creating a wound much like a paper-cut: bloody enough to ensure an hour’s freedom from class, but not so alarming that parents had to be alerted.

  Some secrets’ pleasures make their sting worthwhile. Other secrets just sting.

  In 2002, I uncovered a secret whose holy-shit unbelievability was belied by the innocuous words that introduced it: two years.

  In the months following my miscarriage in 1994, there was nothing secret about my despondency. Kevin penetrated it enough to convince me we should to put an end to equity-free home rentals and buy a house. Driving through unfamiliar neighborhoods, I felt myself come back to life as my real estate agent, Felicia, shuttled me from house to house. I’d started writing my column from home, so I was interested in a dwelling with a decent-sized office. Otherwise, we were searching for Kev’s dream home: something new, low maintenance, and on a manageable piece of land.

  So of course when Felicia showed me an old, high-maintenance house cresting two rolling acres, I fell in love. The fifty-year-old Cape Cod that Felicia called a “mini-estate” sat atop a leafy hill; its nooks and stonework were reminiscent of Mom-Mommy’s Media home. Kevin needed convincing. But two months later, we moved into our half-century-old “new” home in time for Kevin’s birthday. Though exhausted, we celebrated well into the night.

  Weeks later, I knew I was pregnant. This time, I was hideously nauseous, looked like hell, and smelled like a bakery at dawn. But I was in enough denial that when a staffer from the amniocentesis center informed me I was again having a boy, I blurted one word: “Shit!”

  It was my first and last unwelcoming response to Skye, my youngest—and most imaginative, independent, and determined—child. After the loving pregnancy I had envisioned, Skye appeared, impressing visitors with his gorgeousness, calm, and skin so ivory he was barely distinguishable from the hospital’s white infants, causing my editor Jo-Ann to blurt, “What fun is that? I see white babies all the time!” Skye’s skin deepened to gold, but his calmness remained. Just one thing excited him: animals. Though it’s rare for four-month-olds to sit up, the purplicious sight of Barney, PBS’s dinosaur megastar, caused Skye nearly to levitate.

  By age six, Skye was obsessed with everything critter-related, from plastic tyrannosaurs to the safari book he was describing to his pediatrician during a routine visit when she placed a stethoscope over his chest. “Mmmm, he has a murmur,” Dr. Virgo said, almost to herself. I wasn’t concerned. Heart murmurs, I’d read, aren’t uncommon. People live long, healthy lives with them.

  So I was stunned when the pediatric cardiologist Dr. Virgo referred us to informed us that Skye had an “atrial septal defect,” a hole in the heart, requiring open-heart surgery. Symptoms could take years to develop, she said, but would progressively worsen. If you don’t take care of this, another cardiologist said, the defect could eventually become life-threatening.

  Excuse me? I wanted to ask. Skye couldn’t have seemed healthier. For months I put off the operation, praying, meditating, visualizing his healing. How could an invisible, symptomless “defect” threaten my lively little boy? But Kevin pressed forward, dragging me along until we found ourselves in a Johns Hopkins Medical Center waiting room, swathed in vomit green scrubs. With us was a balding cardiac surgeon whose soothing manner was at odds with the forms he presented to us describing our understanding that Skye could die during this operation. Eyes wide with disbelief, we signed.

  Holding Skye on my lap, I watched him grow groggy after nurses administered his initial sedation. Gathering his son’s limp body into his arms, Kevin cradled Skye for a long moment. Then he stood to surrender him to the medical team. Looking straight at the surgeon, he said, “I need you to have a great day today. The best day of your life.” The doctor nodded as nurses wheeled Skye away.

  Later, sitting in a waiting room surrounded by loved ones, I read Bible verses and assorted spiritual texts. Closing my eyes, I breathed, and was filled with so much pure, buoyant love that my heart, the sunlit room, the sedated child whose sternum was being cracked open down the hall, all fused into one overwhelming sense of okayness. For long stretches of Skye’s four-hour operation, I wore the bemused half smile of one seriously submerged in Spirit, as calm as a mom could be under the circumstances.

  In such states of perfect clarity, everything seems illuminated: The terror in your husband’s hand as it grips yours. Friends’ and relatives’ forced cheer. The tension radiating from other tiny patients’ parents. But when all you feel is love, some things are impossible even to suspect. Should I have noticed when my husband slipped away to phone a woman I’d never met? Updating her on our son’s condition, on the status of their off-and-on union?

  The hole in my son’s heart was successfully repaired. A larger fissure would soon appear in my own.

  How long is two years?

  Far more, and less, than 730 days. It’s the forever it took for the windswept cavern in my gut to begin filling after Darrell’s death. It’s the age at which my sons—once helpless, immobile baby-lumps—became talking, running individuals. A 2006 study says it’s the time it takes for the body chemistries of two lovers to shift from producing hormones that spark white-hot lust to creating oxytocin, the “cuddle hormone” common in established couples. It’s an interminable number of minutes, hours, and days for anyone keeping an explosive secret.

  In December 2003, “two years” swept away everything I thought I knew about my husband and me. We were facing each other in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, hotel room. Kevin was propped on one elbow on the bed, his expression unreadable in the moonlight. We’d traveled to New England so I could address a gathering of journalists; afterward, we’d bantered with colleagues like we had a hundred times before.

  Except this time, I knew my husband—my perfect black man—was seeing someone else.

  I’d suspected something for weeks, mostly because Kevin couldn’t fake an ardor he no longer felt. Though he participated in every family event, he seemed half-there where I was concerned.

  Yet for months, I was clueless. Returning home from out-of-town trips, I’d find a pleasant but unengaged mate who exuded none of the sizzle that had linked us for more than a decade. Each time I asked if there was anything he wanted to tell me, he said, “No.” When I added, “If there is, it would be better to tell me,” he insisted there was nothing to reveal.

  Believing an untruthful spouse means doubting yourself. It means speculating about whether the coolness that has crept between you was inevitable, whether it’s natural for the passion that united you to downgrade from a boil to a simmer to a remembered glow. It’s asking if you’re cra
zy, feeling the ground roil beneath you when everyone swears it’s solid. Countless confident women have been shaken by their mates’ insistence there was something wrong with them for daring to suspect them. One such wife brought a camera to the hotel where her husband was trysting with his mistress. Pretending to be room service, she burst in when he cracked open the door, snapping pictures as the guilty couple leapt into their clothes. Photos were the only proof, she explained, that would prevent him from later denying what her eyes had seen.

  Kevin’s natural discretion and concern about the consequences had made him extremely careful not to be found out. But finally, a name was whispered to me of a woman I’d never met. I kept the name to myself, even on the day before the Cambridge trip when I sat my husband down, clasped his hand, and said please, please tell me: Something’s going on. Just give me that.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  In our hotel room, Kevin had kissed me and dozed off. Beside him, I sat tensed, like a runner poised to hear the pistol shot that would release her. Incapable of sleeping another night next to a body whose inhabitant’s attention had wandered away, I shook him awake and said the name. “Tell me about her.”

  He stared at me for what felt like ten minutes before saying, “Okay.” Yes, he was seeing her. It was a relief, he said, to admit it.

  When I asked if he loved her, he responded, “What’s love?”

  What’s love? For the first time, I knew I was in oh-my-God trouble. Nothing, I felt, could be worse… until I asked how long this had been going on. When Kevin said, “Two years, on and off,” my gasp was a thunderclap. It wasn’t possible. Not from the man whose integrity was among my life’s building blocks. He couldn’t have deceived and misled me, wrapped his generous heart around someone else for two years.

  The man in my bed had done that. So I asked him, “Who are you?”

  He stared at me. I stared back, two years looping around my brain. The room tilted.

  Seated by a stranger in that hushed, still space, I waited: For the room to right itself. To be consumed by enough deafening what the fuck rage to hurl books, overturn lamps, scream like someone being ripped into a thousand splintering pieces. Yet my shock was so paralyzing, I couldn’t have toppled a matchstick.

  Somehow I rose. Making my way to the bathroom, I slid inside and shut the door. Lowering myself into the dry white tub, I squeezed my hand over my mouth so Kevin wouldn’t hear my hot, wet disbelief. Silently I sobbed until “two years” was replaced by a certainty:

  My marriage is over.

  Crouched in the tub with my dead marriage, I asked myself the customary questions: Had I been blind? Is this what giving your complete trust to a man gets you?

  Was I warned?

  I remembered a fierce argument a few years earlier. We’d been tearing into each other over a long-divisive subject: my desire to be courted the way women in books and movies are wooed. Fictional guys find a thousand creative ways to demonstrate true love: Impulsively gathered wildflowers. Boom boxes held aloft in the rain. Banjos and balloons outside Macy’s.

  Kevin was actually adept at loving gestures. His romantic greeting cards featured messages of soaring poetry; he remembered birthdays and anniversaries with gifts so thoughtful—tiny metal hearts in a bejeweled box, diamond earrings, surprise trips to B & Bs—that I felt enfolded in his love. I just wanted more of that feeling between special occasions.

  I knew I’d married a real guy, not a movie character. That it was my rare luck to have a husband who hardly ever asked me to be more. But he’d married a woman who couldn’t overhear his vaguest complaint about needing sweat socks—or a warm hoodie or a nicer trench coat—without supplying what he hadn’t really requested. I bought tickets to hear his favorite jazz musicians, foraged stores for the perfect wineglasses (I barely drank), and offered full-body massages when he was stressed. When Kevin got his first book contract, I surprised him by clearing our junk-strewn basement and buying furniture for a home office. He never asked for these things, sometimes even said, “You don’t have to do so much.” But I couldn’t stop supplying the gifts I longed to receive.

  I was, it seemed, addicted to giving—and to getting back. My compulsion wasn’t healthy, but where’s the 12-step program for over-giving? Kevin seldom refused my gifts. Yet they came at a cost.

  Giving as relentlessly as I did without receiving in kind left me empty in places I expected my perfect husband to fill. So I did what ravenous wives often do: Warned my mate of the risk in ignoring my emptiness. What if another man tried to fill it? At times I grew stingy, withholding my smile, my warmth, my affection. Hoping to sharpen his desire, I pushed him away further.

  My simmering dissatisfaction became as unbearable to Kevin as my hollowness was to me. Resentment bled into every part of our relationship. During one of my soliloquies about how much sexier things would be if he acknowledged me more, Kevin exploded. Between me, bills, needy kids, a leaking roof, college tuitions, job obligations, and the pressure he felt to be everything to everyone, he wanted “something—just one thing—to be easy!”

  The word resounded like a slap. “Easy” haunted and enticed me, too. I knew what it promised: More fun. Less stress. Time to think, read books, make love… slowly. Like me, Kevin wanted a break. And I recognized: Of all the words I’d heard used to describe me, “easy” wasn’t among them. I understood.

  Then anger—at the fury contorting his face, at how he’d gotten me to feel his pain without empathizing with mine—swept it away. “Why should things be easy for you when nothing is for me?” I’d yelled, knowing it was futile. What gnawed at me seemed so slippery, so undefined, so female, he’d never understand. I remembered a recent revelation about an unlikely scourge:

  Lint.

  Lint is the blackfolk of household annoyances: People unwisely ignore it until it clogs their machine… or ignites a fire. Every week, millions of women and a few good men rout this gray plague from their dryers’ mesh traps. Unlike the action-packed, highly visible tasks that men prefer—snow shoveling, lawn mowing—lint removal aptly symbolizes “women’s work.” Tackled in basements without cheering witnesses, it just has to be done.

  My revelation had been inspired by a clot of Superlint, lodged deep in the downstairs washbasin. Wash load by wash load, this unholy alliance of dirt, loose threads, and sweater pillage had narrowed the path through which spent water flowed until the morning I found the sink stopped up. For five seconds, I regarded the sink-swamp with pure hatred. Then I inhaled—who else is going to do this?—and lowered my arm into the icy dankness. Feeling my way to the drain cover, I inserted a finger and extracted a slimy, burr-sized mass. Gross. Wiping it on a paper towel, I kept diving, extracting, wiping, as water drained out. Then, maneuvering tweezers into the cover, I withdrew the last loathsome remnants.

  Staring at my hideous slime collection, I felt the full futility of millions of women’s lives—and my own. Born at a time when we can do anything—drive buses, racecars, and election campaigns; conduct symphonies and national diplomacy; run schools, corporations, and governments; write soaring words and music—we’re still life’s lint pickers.

  It didn’t matter how talented or astute I was, how evocative my prose or trenchant my insights. The lioness’s share of my household’s soul-deadening chores fell to me. Like other women, I did them while juggling family schedules, schoolwork and meetings, preparing meals, laundering, grocery buying, supervising repairs, mailing birthday-holiday-sympathy cards, and a zillion other tasks about which we ask: Who else is going to do this?

  We do it—while trying to be available to our kids, sexy for our spouses, efficient at work, and this side of sane for ourselves. Not only does no one notice; griping about such “small” stuff makes us seem small. I was as smart and as gifted as my husband. Yet I’d come to see something as inconsequential as lint representing me.

  Why not? What I most yearned for from Kevin wasn’t tulip bouquets or romanti
c dinners, but to be seen—for the thousand tiny details I daily addressed for him, for my hourly sacrifices of time, talent, and self. For stuff like lint, that nobody gave a shit about.

  Now, burrowing deeper into the hotel tub, I contemplated how brutal life was about to become. I envisioned the separation, the accusations—the divorce—awaiting me and the man who’d wanted easy. I thought of his lover, who’d never had to bother Kevin with stuff as unsexy as unpaid bills, kids’ school problems, or his limited help around the house. She could be above such pettiness. Be easy.

  Once upon a time, I’d been easier. But two years as the wife of an addict and eight more as the single mom of small kids had drained me of simplicity. Doing it all had been unavoidable; by the time Kevin appeared, my pattern had hardened into cement. Plus, I’d liked showing him how capable I was, how well I pleased my kids, my bosses, and readers. Like many women, I was sending a message: imagine how well I’ll take care of you!

  But who would be taking care of me?

  I hadn’t asked because for years, I’d done it myself. Besides, Kevin loved me. He’d fill that role.

  Now I needed to know what role the stranger on the bed wanted to fill. Emerging from the bathroom, I felt my husband’s gaze on me more intently than I had in months. For ten years, we’d zoomed past each other, always there, always right under each other’s noses. Yet he’d stopped seeing me.

  Now he couldn’t look away.

  I did what journalists do: asked questions. Now that I knew the “who” of the story, I needed the what, when, where, and especially the why. Some spouses forbid their mates to speak of their lovers. Please. A woman I’d never met had willfully taken what was mine. She’d read my columns, knowing my assumptions about my kids’ security and husband’s devotion to be false. Finding out more about her would disempower this stranger who’d turned me into something I’d never thought possible: The victimized wife. The misguided wren with no idea her man “just isn’t into her.”