by Maryam Diaab
“He doesn’t know anything about this. Hell, I don’t know anything about this—” And then it all hit me at once.
The red lacy panties stuffed between the couch cushions. The crystal vase in pieces on the bathroom floor.
Crying. Screaming. Finally, the assistant-principal relocation pool with openings several states away.
I sat down at one of the long lunch tables and held my head in my hands.
“Well, I guess you’ll have some explaining to do when you get home,” Monique said, patting me on the shoulder before lumbering her wide frame across the room.
“Ms. Brooks, I’m confused as to why this seems to be such a shock to you,” Mr. Cochran said, concern in his voice. “Last year you seemed quite determined to move up the career ladder and to relocate, so I just naturally assumed that this news would make you happy.” He gathered his notes off the center table and walked over to me slowly. “I know that Nashville may not be your ideal city, but it really is a wonderful place to live.”
He stood about five feet six inches, but pretended that he was larger than life. He had a smile on his plump, pink face, but I saw confusion in his blue eyes. “Mr. Cochran, please don’t get me wrong. I am flattered and really appreciate that the board selected me for the position, but when I applied last year, things in my life were different. Now—” I took a deep breath to calm my pounding heart. “I’m getting married in six months and—” Another deep breath. Relax, girl. “This just isn’t coming at a good time. I have a lot of things going on in my life right now, and for me to pick up and move five hundred miles to Tennessee, of all places, is impossible.”
“I’m sure it’s not that serious, Yvette. This is the opportunity of a lifetime. Do you know how many people applied for this same position? The board received résumés from at least ten of our own faculty members, not to mention over two hundred from across the country. You would be crazy to pass this up.”
“Mr. Cochran, my fiancé can’t even wash his own socks, let alone run an entire household while I’m gone.” That was a lie; Terrence was perfectly capable of cooking, cleaning and taking care of himself while I was gone. What I really wanted to say was that my fiancé was a cheating dog who couldn’t be trusted to piss on his own, but I thought providing Mr. Cochran with that little tidbit may have been unprofessional. I hoped Mr. Cochran would understand that, while I would have given my right arm for the job, I didn’t think it would be a good idea to give up Terrence or abandon all the relationship rebuilding we had done in the past few months.
“Yvette, I don’t want this difference of opinion to get in the way of our professional relationship, but I know you. You want this. There is nothing you would like more than seeing an administrative title after your name. I’m sure your fiancé would understand if you simply explained what a wonderful opportunity this is. I’ve known many professional couples who have made long-distance marriages work. It can be done, Yvette. Take some time to think about what you would be giving up. Sleep on it and let me know tomorrow.”
“Making a decision by tomorrow doesn’t give me a big window. When does this position begin?” I stood up and walked with Mr. Cochran to the door with what I was sure was desperation on my face.
“You would assume the position of assistant principal in a week’s time. Mrs. Kelper, the former AP, didn’t give notice when she resigned, so they need someone right away. They have offered to pay all moving expenses and have a two-bedroom, two-bathroom courtesy apartment that’s ready and waiting. All you have to do is give the word.”
“This is a lot to digest in such a short time,” I responded, still unconvinced.
“Yes, it is. But I can guarantee that if you decide to accept this position, you will not be sorry. It pays nearly twenty-five thousand dollars a year above your current salary, and relocating to Nashville will change your life in ways you never expected.”
“Mr. Cochran,” I said, looking directly into his watery blue eyes, “to be completely honest with you, that is exactly what I’m afraid of.”
Yvette
2
Before leaving this earth, my grandmother passed down many pieces of advice. The one that I kept closest to my heart, however, was to never judge a book by its cover. Those words of wisdom explained my relationship with Terrence perfectly. Everyone I knew thought that we were the gold standard of black relationships, with Terrence being the successful doctor and me the focused and driven thirty-four-year-old woman on the fast tack in educational administration. The Huxtables.
Terrence and I had been together nearly twelve years, including a two-year engagement. In the beginning, I, too, thought we were the perfect couple, but as time passed, things began to get rocky. Trust issues, work issues and inattentiveness plagued us from year seven on. Our relationship could be best described as a roller-coaster ride—exciting highs, chilling lows, spins, flips, turns and near-disasters. But Terrence and I never failed to come out in one piece, always opting to get back on and ride again, year after year. Just eleven months ago, however, it seemed the ride was finally over: I learned that Terrence had been unfaithful.
In the months leading up to my discovery, I had been completely oblivious to any significant change in our relationship. Well, maybe not entirely oblivious, but definitely unconcerned. Work, my grandmother’s illness, my mother’s recovery and wedding plans all intersected to keep me clueless about what was going on at home. All the signs were there, and my first mistake was choosing to ignore the red flags: whispered conversations and late nights ‘working’. After a couple of months of the lies, Terrence became cold and unfeeling toward me; all his free time was spent out with ‘the boys’ and most nights I found myself falling asleep long before he would slip discreetly into bed.
“Terrence, I think we need to talk,” I told him two days before my grandmother’s surgery. I’d found the panties several days before but couldn’t bring myself to show them to him, deciding instead to put the evidence into a Zip-loc bag, CSI style, and stuff it into an empty shoebox at the back of my closet. I wasn’t ready to let go yet. I guess I wanted to wait for more signs, more proof that he had stepped out on me. I quickly got it that same afternoon when he hurried past me smelling like some cheap-ass drugstore perfume counter.
I stood in the middle of our massive bathroom, gingerly dangling the pair of red panties between two fingers. The empty zip-loc bag lay at my feet. I waited, holding back the tears that threatened to break down my defenses.
“Can’t you just wait until after I finish showering?” he asked, scrubbing his cream-colored body furiously behind the transparent shower curtain.
“Don’t want me to smell her?” I sneered. I watched his reaction closely, my eyes intent, focused-like a lion stalking its pray. He paused warily. Gotcha, bitch.
My grandmother—the only real parent I’d ever known—was battling cancer, and Terrence was less than supportive. I was fed up with his bullshit, and it was confrontation time. There was no backing out; enough was enough.
“Smell who? What are you talking about?” he asked, sounding nervous. He squirted more soap onto his washcloth and scrubbed even harder, his butter-pecan skin beginning to turn a rosy shade of pink.
“I’m talking about the way you practically sprinted past me reeking of some other woman’s cheap-ass perfume. Not to mention the fact that I found these,” I stomped closer to him, snatching back the shower curtain so forcefully the entire rod fell to the floor in a heap. With an anger and hatred that I had never felt, I threw the panties, hitting Terrence square in the face. “Now don’t lie to me, Terrence; I know something is going on. How long have you been seeing her?”
Terrence removed the underwear from his face and looked at me before sitting down on the small shower bench. “Alaina and I have been seeing each other for about three months,” Terrence admitted, obviously realizing that there was no sense in lying, especially with the evidence clogging up the shower drain.
With Terrence’s admission, my
heart felt as if it had been ripped in two, but still I refused to cry. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. “Okay,” I began, not quite sure where I was supposed to go from there, “do you love her?” The words flew from my mouth; each word a dagger that I hoped would pierce Terrence in the heart.
“No, no. There is no love between Alaina and me, just sex.”
“Oh?” I laughed bitterly, my eyes wild in the mirror. “Just sex! Well, isn’t that comforting? Where did you meet her?” This must be the calm before the storm.
“At work. She’s one of the nurses in the labor and delivery unit,” he admitted hesitantly, hanging his head low in shame. He was disgusting. I screamed at the top of my lungs, took the heavy ceramic vase filled with fresh flowers from the bathroom counter and hurled it into the shower. It slammed into Terrence’s shoulder; a bright-red bruise immediately appeared on his pale skin. The vase hit the shower floor and broke into a thousand little pieces, as if mimicking my own broken heart.
I hurried into the kitchen and grabbed the biggest, sharpest knife I could find. Then I calmly asked him to get out of the shower, out of the apartment, out of my life. The next day, I marched directly into Mr. Cochran’s office and asked to be placed in the administration-relocation pool. “Anywhere,” I told him. “I don’t care where you send me. I just need to leave.”
After that, Terrence kept calling, and often stopping by the apartment, banging on the door and begging for forgiveness. Despite his persistence, I refused to speak with him for a month and a half; door locks and cellphone numbers were changed. I avoided him at all costs. Back then, Terrence Hall was worse than the plague. Terrence Hall was like a slow, painful death. Returning to him would have been like committing suicide, and I wasn’t ready to die.
As much as I loathed him for willfully destroying our relationship, slowly but surely nights were becoming lonely, and there’s only so much HBO’s Real Sex a person can watch without wanting some of her own.
“I don’t know if I can take him back,” I told my grandmother one morning after spending another night alone, watching The Notebook and sobbing uncontrollably into my pillow.
“Yvette, men make mistakes,” Carrie Dupree told me, brushing the hair from my face. “Their flesh is weak.”
My grandmother was old school and thought that it was a man’s inalienable right to cheat on his woman. “Terrence taking up with another woman does not mean that he doesn’t love you.”
I could remember looking at Carrie as if she’d lost her mind. “You’re right. It means that he doesn’t respect me.”
“You need to forgive that man and get on with those wedding plans so that I can have a great-grandbaby before I leave this world.” My grandmother had a way of throwing a guilt trip unlike anyone I had ever known.
Spurred by my grandmother’s plea and the constant throbbing between my legs, I called Terrence, having to dial three times before actually pushing send. “If you want to have any chance of moving back in, then there are some things you will have to agree to,” I told him, still unsure if taking him back was the right thing to do.
“I’ll do anything, Yvette. You just don’t know how painful this time has been for me.”
“Oh, I don’t know how painful this has been for you?” I had laughed bitterly into the phone.
“I just meant that I truly regret what I’ve done to our relationship,” he said. The sound of his sobs filled my ears and tugged at my heart.
“Well, I really regret what you’ve done to our relationship as well, and if you want what we had to continue, then I need you to find a position at another hospital. And we have to get into some kind of relationship counseling.” I hated that I was willing to take him back, hated that I was so weak and predictable, but I felt as if I had no choice. Terrence was pretty much all I knew, and if I didn’t have him, what did I have?
Yvette
3
That was one year, my grandmother’s funeral and many counseling sessions ago. After about six months discussing our feelings and working out our problems, I decided it was time to take my engagement ring out of the nightstand drawer and place it back on my finger. With the help of my best friend, Wendy, I slowly resumed planning the wedding, though this time I wasn’t so naïve. I decided to keep my ear to the ground and one eye on Terrence at all times.
Despite all our counseling sessions and his promises, I wasn’t completely over Terrence’s infidelity. I still found myself becoming angry at the pain he caused and often thought that marrying Terrence would be the worst mistake of my life. Sometimes I thought that I had allowed my grandmother to guilt-trip me into the mess my life had become; after all, her last dying wish was that I marry and be happy. Translated: marry Terrence and have lots of babies.
After Mr. Cochran’s announcement, I stood just outside the school’s cafeteria, where staff meetings were held, and was reminded of another saying my grandmother used frequently: Absence makes the heart grow fonder. She would whisper those words to me all those times when my mother would disappear for weeks at a time, barricading herself in some crack house, smoking her life away and destroying mine.
I leaned against the cafeteria door and closed my eyes, thinking about all that I’d been through with Terrence, and despite it all, I knew that he still didn’t appreciate me the way he should. Maybe an absence like Nashville would make Terrence’s heart grow fonder.
The minute I left the school grounds, I knew that I was going to accept the position. I had applied for that position for a reason, and the fact that I was chosen out of all the other applicants said something. This job in Nashville was meant for me.
The most compelling reason for my decision to up and leave, however, was the fact that I still wasn’t sure that marrying Terrence was the best decision for me. One thing that I’d learned in counseling was that I, in all my fabulousness, had some major insecurity issues. The fact that I once thought Terrence was the center of my universe made me want to gag. This was turning into the opportunity I needed to prove to myself and everyone else that I could live without him and be happy at the same time. I didn’t really want what Terrence and I had to end, but if what we had together could withstand me moving hundreds of miles away, then it could definitely withstand marriage. It may be just the thing to make him realize that my love was something special and I should be cherished.
All the way home I practiced the way I would drop the bomb. “Baby, guess what? I got promoted to assistant principal, but the school is really far away. No, sweetie, not on the east side of Detroit, on the east side of Nashville. Isn’t that funny?” It was pretty sad, but that was the best I could come up with.
Some of my other choices were A) finding him a position at a hospital in Nashville before I told him my news or B) coming home, cooking him a gourmet meal Martha Stewart would envy, and sucking him like a Hoover until he was too exhausted to argue. Neither of those options appealed to me much. I despised cooking and dick sucking was not on my list of favorites, either. In the end, I would still be moving and he would still be left in Detroit until we worked out another arrangement.
When I pulled into the parking garage and saw Terrence’s silver Mercedes, my heart began to race and my palms became sweaty.
“I love you and we can make this work,” I practiced, pretending that Terrence was standing right in front of me. “It will be good for us, make our relationship stronger. Nashville isn’t really that far way. An eight-hour drive or, better yet, an hour and a half by plane.” My heels clicked loudly as I crossed the concrete lot and made my way to the elevator. I wanted the ride up to the twenty-eighth floor to take forever. I needed to finalize my attack plan, but it seemed as if only a couple of seconds went by before I was standing in front of my apartment door. The sweet and sultry sounds of Sade drifted into the hall, and the distinctive aroma of shrimp gumbo filled my nostrils. Terrence must have had a good day at work, which was rare. As a doctor of maternal fetal medicine dealing exclusively with high-risk patie
nts, he was always complaining about the incompetence of some nurse, the laziness of a new resident or the way a desperate pregnant woman had faked contractions just to get admitted to the hospital. It was a wonder that I could ever get in anything about my day, and most times I didn’t.
Taking a deep breath and saying a short prayer, I turned my key and pushed the door open. Before I could step one foot inside, Terrence enfolded me in his arms, planted a kiss on my lips and said, “I made dinner.” He stood there in a Kiss the Cook apron and looked edible himself. Tall, creamy and handsome, Terrence stood six feet tall and spent his free time toning his slim body to perfection. His mustache and goatee were neatly trimmed and his wavy hair had been freshly cut. He was the late 1980s early 1990s pretty boy type.
“Thank you, baby. You just don’t know how tired I am. Work was hectic and I have some news.” I wanted to tell him immediately so that we could make some decisions. I was certain that he would try to talk me out of leaving, but my mind was made up. I was going. In fact, my bags were mentally packed already.
“I want to hear all about your day, but let me tell you about mine first,” Terrence said, taking my black suede schoolbag and setting it down in the corner. As usual, his plan was to monopolize the conversation.
“Okay, but my news is really impor—”
“Mine will just take a minute,” he said cutting me off mid-sentence. “Do you remember me telling you about the woman carrying the quads?” he asked excitedly.
“Vaguely.” I sat down at the granite-topped island in the kitchen. Terrence poured two glasses of red wine.
“Well, anyway, the mom went in for an emergency C-section this morning, and all babies are healthy and doing great. You know that was my first delivery of quads? Everyone was taking pictures and congratulating me.”
