“Fuck you,” Lisa said.
“Fuck you,” Kelly said and stormed out of Starbucks.
Up until Kelly walked out, we all thought the two of them were just joking. I told the one who was left that this was just a bad day for them both; things would calm down, blah, blah, blah. Now Lisa was furiously typing into her BlackBerry. They were texting “Fuck you” back and forth. I sighed and sat there, too tired to move, but wanting to.
I’d often fantasized that lesbian couples didn’t behave like this.
Whenever I spent time with my friend Linda and her partner, Jana, and their gay couple friends, I was always envious of how peaceful they all seemed. It made sense to me that there would be more harmony among women, given that they shared the same feminine sensibility. Rethinking that Starbucks dialogue, I was reminded that I owed Linda a call. I always felt better after talking with her. She was calm and sensible and understood me. We became best friends when we were the “baby” senior editors at Essence.
I laughed till my sides hurt as she told me about her latest book project and her subject, who wanted Linda to be her mother, her therapist, and her maid. “She actually had me waking her up to go to church and waiting in her house for three hours until she came back,” Linda told me. Linda had a daughter and a son, and while we always talked about our kids, our conversations veered all over the place. That day we reviewed an article in the Times about the women in Obama’s cabinet. The White women were all married, half of a power couple. Linda pointed out that only one Black one, Susan Rice, was married and she had married her White college sweetheart. The other Black women were all single or divorced. Even Valerie Jarrett, who had been called Obama’s secret weapon. She was fabulous: smart, attractive, spoke several languages, had a great fashion sense, a daughter at Harvard Law School. She’d been divorced for decades.
I knew I was one of the lucky ones who had a husband, a Black man, who was well employed, took care of his family, and was loving and generous. But despite all this I still felt unhappy. I could only talk about this to a very small number of Black women. Linda was one of them. I was very careful whom I let see behind my pleasant demeanor. In retrospect, this hiding who I was inside wasn’t only the fallout of having been bullied. I had also been sexually abused as a child, something I hadn’t told anyone until I was thirty, the first time I was in therapy. Once I told my therapist, Dr. Chisholm, I told everyone with whom I was close, so Linda knew about the abuse. The next day she sent me an updated copy of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. She also sent me Leslie Bennett’s contemporary version, The Feminine Mistake, a book critiquing a woman’s decision to give up her career in order to stay home and raise children. I confess that both of them sat mostly unread on a counter in the butler’s pantry.
During this period, I was still seeing McCurtis. I went into the city for a three-hour session with him that yielded lots of insights. I felt like he was on his triple-A game, maybe because he was getting ready to move to Sierra Leone to work in the refugee camps for a year. We talked about the sexual abuse by a family member that I’d experienced when I was ten. While there was no penetration, I came to understand that it was still abuse and that it changes who you are. I had eventually written a letter to my abuser letting him know I forgave him. Not for him, as Dr. Chisholm, my therapist at the time, had explained, but for me. McCurtis offered me an additional insight: After that incident, everything had started changing for me. The bullying got more intense and by the fifth grade, some kids were also kissing and fondling. By sixth grade I knew about a few who were even going all the way.
I wasn’t doing any of it. I’d had a “play” boyfriend, Chris, pretty much since third grade. He’d walk me home and we’d talk on the phone; one Christmas he gave me three little bottles of toilet water. In sixth grade he started bugging me about going all the way. I thought it was absurd that he was even asking me. I was still secretly playing with Barbies. No one in my neighborhood was still playing with dolls at twelve years old. A new girl named Karen* came to our school, and she liked Chris. Rumor had it that she was willing to go all the way with him. He gave me an ultimatum: either I did it or he was going to break up with me. I didn’t budge from thinking it absurd to have sex at twelve, so we broke up, and he went with Karen.
But then I met Greg. He was a fine, bowlegged bad boy, a year older and many years faster. All the girls wanted Greg, but he started noticing me, flirting. One day after school when everybody had gone home for the day, he and I were alone outside the building. “Come here,” he said, and took my hand, pulling me to him. He was leaning on a brick school wall. He pulled me into a hug and put his mouth on mine. Chris and I had close-mouthed kissed before, but Greg stuck his tongue against my lips, pushing it, trying to pry open my mouth. I gagged and pulled away. I had no idea what he was doing. He laughed at me, and I felt like the stupid child I was. We started talking on the phone, and he would walk me home from school. We were now a couple, and I felt like I’d won the lottery—the finest, most popular boy, an upperclassman, liked me. After about a month, he started pressuring me to have sex. He had already done it with a few girls. This time, unlike with Chris, I convinced myself that it wasn’t absurd. My desire for him to be my boyfriend overrode any good sense.
After weeks of him trying to talk me into it, promising his enduring love, playing the Temptations song “Just My Imagination” over the phone, I said okay. On the agreed-upon day, we met after school. I had no idea where we were going. We walked two blocks from school, holding hands, stopping in front of a house with an open side door that led to the basement. He walked me down the stairs, carefully holding my hand like I was made of crystal. We were in someone’s dirty basement, a filthy mattress on the floor. We kissed a little and he leaned me onto the mattress. He was on top of me and he unzipped his pants. As he lay on top of me, he pulled down my pants and then my panties. He felt around for my vagina; his fingers felt large and scary. He held his penis and pressed it on my vagina, then attempted to insert it. It didn’t get past my labia. It hurt—being pinned on the nasty mattress with him greedily fumbling against me. I felt nauseous and grimy. After a few tries with no success and me complaining that it hurt, he stopped. He got off me, sat up, zipped up his pants, and stood. Looking down at me, he said, “Get up.”
He walked me home, only this time we weren’t holding hands, and he wasn’t even walking next to me, but several feet ahead. When we got to my house, my dad was getting out of his Buick Skylark station wagon, just coming home from work. He smiled as he always did, and waved when he saw me. I waved, but I was so ashamed. I literally felt shame wash over me like I was a cartoon character changing color from green to blue, starting at the head and running down to the feet. I knew that what I had done with Greg was wrong, but I’d honestly felt helpless to stop it. I was crazy about him, but right at that moment, the possibility of my dad knowing what I’d done was far worse than losing the popular boy. I have no way of knowing if my dad sensed what had happened that day, and up until this moment in McCurtis’s office, I’d never allowed myself to consider it.
McCurtis observed that that feeling of shame was a bit of wisdom that I could tap into, because that’s what happens when you go for the dopamine high—the shame comes after. He told me that I was both blessed and cursed with the unusual ability to amplify feelings into images. “You must be aware when you feel the need for the high, for the dopamine, that you cannot give in to it,” he told me. “The waves of shame will follow.” And then he added, “Cliff provides oxytocin, which is comfort and a safe place to heal. That’s what Cliff has given you. A safe place to heal.”
17
The Clock Has No Meaning
AND THEN my mom got sick again. This time it looked terminal, and I found myself on the edge, toes curled over a canyon.
Mom had been in a continuous loop of hospital stays: in for three, four days, out for two weeks, back again, a dozen times, maybe more. She’d also had three stints in reh
ab. In February 2008, when Joni and I brought her cupcakes on her eighty-third birthday to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Rahway and told her to make a wish on the candle, she’d said, “I don’t ever want to go to the hospital again.”
The hospital where she had stayed the October before had admitted her after she’d been delirious for a few days because of a lack of oxygen. The delirium continued at the hospital. Her physician, Dr. Kang, was from Korea, and he had a very heavy accent. He told me that my mother had heart failure in addition to stage-four lung disease. “Her lungs like Swiss cheese,” he said. “She very sick lady.” I asked him to repeat himself, not quite able to take it in.
The next day, Baldwin and I drove the fifteen miles to the hospital to see my mom. I was thinking that this could be the last time. The Bill Withers song “Lean on Me” came on the car radio, and we both started singing along.
For it won’t be long
Till I’m gonna need somebody to lean on
I felt my throat getting tight, but I kept on singing, tears rolling down my cheek to my lips. Baldwin looked at me and reached over and rubbed my hand, which was on the gearshift.
When we got to the hospital, Mom was sitting up, holding court with my dad; my cousins Bern, Barbara, and Denise; my nephew Kamal, his then wife, Eva, and baby, Lucia; and family friends Eric and Lori Rountree. All of them were standing and sitting around her bed, hanging on her every word. It appeared to be a miracle.
I told her what bad shape she’d been in the day before, and she eyed me suspiciously, but smiling.
“Really, Neal? I was wonderin’ why everybody kept making such a big deal over me today.”
Apparently the lung specialist had given her a heavy-duty steroid that had brought her back to life.
She was with us on Mother’s Day the next May. Every year I hosted a celebration for the mothers, which was always held at my house. Cliff was in charge of marinating the chicken wings in a hot Jamaican sauce that he got from his former Egyptian American intern, and cooking them on the grill. They were delicious and always a little burnt. My parents, Clara and Matthew, and my in-laws, Joan and Big Cliff, came. Big Cliff was actually only about five foot nine. I’d given him the nickname to distinguish between him and my husband. Cliff’s extended family called him Cliffy, which I could never bring myself to do. I adored my father-in-law and eventually Big Cliff was an affectionate sobriquet only I called him, although at some point, I think my mom adopted it, too.
Daddy and me, with a young neighbor in the background.
We passed the day sitting at a wrought-iron table under an olive-green umbrella, drinking red wine or margaritas on the patio. We talked about light things—how the kids were doing in school: Baldwin on the honor roll, Ford not happy about having left his womblike, fun preschool for “real school.” This year my brother Duane brought a new girlfriend. He’d already introduced her to Cliff and me the day before, and I could tell he was anxious for our mother to meet his new love. When they told my mother that they had met online, she said: “Where? What line?” My brother, his girlfriend, Cliff, and I laughed until our eyes streamed. My parents and Joan sat clear-eyed, having no idea about online dating sites. Only my father-in-law, an engineer who was building his own computer from scratch, was versed in the internet. He remained quiet.
My mom believed in also celebrating me on those days. She always bought me some kind of creative, thoughtful gift. Her last Mother’s Day gift to me was chair pads for my Adirondack chairs and an umbrella to cover them. She and my dad set it up one day when I wasn’t home. On my first Mother’s Day, I had become so upset at my mother-in-law for not giving me a card. I came from a big card-sending family. When Cliff attempted to explain to her that my feelings were hurt, she said, “What? She’s not my mother.”
My mother cackled when she heard.
“You know when I’m gone, you’re gonna need a mother.”
This was fifteen years before she died. I had no idea why she said this then. What did she know? I was silent. I couldn’t imagine a time when she wouldn’t be here.
“Do we have to talk about this?”
She cackled again.
“It’s gonna come, sweet face. I’m not gonna live forever.”
Of course, I knew that was true, but when it came to my mother I indulged in magical thinking, as if she had special powers and would somehow live forever, or at least until I didn’t need her anymore, which was the same thing as forever.
“Well, I’ll deal with it, then,” I told her, trying to keep it light.
The Tuesday before Thanksgiving 2008, we were in Mom’s small, eat-in kitchen. I had come to spend the day learning how to make her collards and her stuffing. I unloaded all the supplies—four bushels of greens, three large green peppers, four cans of College Inn chicken broth, Wesson oil (never Crisco), and Indian Head cornmeal.
“Good, good,” she said, examining the groceries I’d purchased per her exact instructions. My mother’s Thanksgiving spread was legendary—her stuffing, her greens, her yams, her cakes, pies, gravy. Everything she did, she did well. Growing up with that caused me to not try; the standard seemed too high.
“Get a knife, get two. Like steak knives.”
I obeyed and sat down on the pine and hunter-green spindle chair across from her at the matching wooden table.
“Get the big pot,” she said, pointing to the right-hand cabinet. Her weak lungs kept her seated.
Just as it had been in our house growing up, everything in this apartment in the retirement community my parents had moved to was arranged perfectly: her pot, pans, tops; there was no haphazard storage, like at my house in Montclair.
She picked up the greens. “First, you gotta cut the stems off. Some people leave them on, but that makes ’em tough.”
There was a precise method to this.
“Here, hold them like this,” she said, holding one leaf at a time and ushering the knife down the side of the stem on each side. We did this for each leaf. I have no idea how much time this took but know it was long.
Then she showed me how to roll up the leaves and to cut them in strips, making for the perfect-sized morsel to eat.
“Then you gotta clean them. You gotta soak ’em at least three times to get all the grit off.”
I didn’t bother pointing out that, these days, not coming directly from the field, the greens weren’t tinged with dirt. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference to her anyway.
We cut up the green pepper to add on top, put in the chicken broth, and finally the greens were ready to be put in a cauldron and cooked. It was a great day with my mother. I wish I had it on tape, but it’s forever in my mind for me to turn over, like a precious heirloom.
That year was the first time Big Cliff and Joan weren’t with us for Thanksgiving dinner. His prostate cancer had already metastasized to his bones and brain. He was too sick to ride in the car for the close to an hour it took from their home in Mount Vernon. Joan sent her fabulous homemade rolls, turnips, macaroni and cheese, and creamed onions for Cliff, as well as a chocolate mousse. The rest of the family was there: my parents; brother Duane; nephew Kamal, his wife and daughter; his mom, Wendy; her husband, Robert; Cliff’s aunt Miriam and cousin Em Sue.
At Christmas, Mom insisted that we drive to Westchester so she could see Big Cliff. We had to take both of our cars because we couldn’t all fit in one. Cliff drove my dad, and I drove my mom and the kids. As she sat next to me in the passenger seat, I could hear her breath rattling in her lungs. When we got to their house, she had to hoist herself up the ten stairs, gripping the wrought-iron railing as she went.
Joan was her usual buoyant self, although the long days and sleepless nights of caretaking were showing on her face. She’d cooked a full holiday meal and had set the table. Big Cliff sat in a wheelchair, a gauze patch taped over his left eye from a recent procedure. He couldn’t smile much, and we couldn’t hug him because it would hurt. He was exhausted, but I knew he was happy to
see us, and we were thrilled to be with him. I was so glad that my mom had insisted we make the drive. Maybe she had had a premonition. Big Cliff sat and had dinner with us at the table, able to stay up until before dessert. A month later, on January 23, 2009, he was gone.
Mom was in the hospital, again. This time I’d been the one who found her sitting in a La-Z-Boy chair in their apartment, barely able to speak. One side of her face drooped, as if she’d had a stroke. She was holding her right wrist with her left—it turned out to be broken. She recognized me but not Joni, who was visiting from LA. My father was at church but had left my aunt Marion, my mother’s sister, with her. Mom had complained that her hand was hurting. She’d apparently broken her wrist days earlier during one of the three times she’d fallen that week. My father hadn’t told me about the falls because he’d forgotten to. Neither of them knew she’d broken her wrist. This is when it became clear to me that my dad was no longer capable of taking care of her.
Mom, Daddy, and me on my thirtieth birthday, July 7, 1988, in my New York apartment.
About a decade earlier, my parents had sold the house in Newark where they’d lived for over forty years. My mother could no longer climb the stairs. They hadn’t wanted to move but felt they had no choice. She just didn’t have the heart or lung capacity to get from the basement to the second or third floor, where their living quarters were. At eighty-three, they were both unraveling, albeit in different ways. I used to say, when people would ask me how they were doing, that they were a good match because mentally she was sharp, and physically he was perfect; but he didn’t know how to cook, and she couldn’t stand long enough to do it. She also didn’t have an appetite and got annoyed at him for insisting that she eat and take her medicine. She said he was the cause of much of her stress; just his presence seemed to send her to an angry, frustrated place. This wasn’t new; it had just become clear enough for Ray Charles to see.
Welcome to My Breakdown Page 14
