Welcome to My Breakdown

by Benilde Little

  The night before, we’d gone to the Crossroads Theatre in New Brunswick for opening night. Cliff was the president of the board. He loved the theater as much as my mother had; I liked that about him. He also loved giving them money, and having people look at him as the man who could make things happen. The play, Fly, about the Tuskegee Airmen, was a moving, historically important work. But I found myself sinking into a dark mood and I had a vague idea why. I knew Trey Ellis, the co-playwright, from twenty-five years ago when we were both young, aspiring writers hanging out with other creative types like Nelson George and Warrington and Reggie Hudlin, who, like Trey, had gone on to have major creative careers. A bunch of us would hang around Trey’s large, inherited Upper West Side apartment, broke but cute, with big ambitions. This was before Trey’s novel Platitudes, or Nelson’s big book, The Death of Rhythm & Blues, or the Hudlins’ breakout movie, House Party, and way before my novel Good Hair.

  After the play, I was talking with Trey as we walked out of the theater. Ford started pushing me and demanding that I hold his shirt and jacket, which he had removed because he said it was hot and he was thirsty. I was angry and embarrassed that his behavior was taking me away from a desperately wanted writers’ talk with Trey. I still wasn’t really working on anything, so I didn’t have anything specific to talk about, but that didn’t matter. I wanted to talk to someone who had known me from another time and in another context. Ford probably sensed that I was morphing into that other person, my writer self, and he didn’t like it. Did he react in that uncharacteristic way because he sensed something was different about me, something he hadn’t seen and therefore didn’t like? I’ll never know the answer; I only know the feeling I had at that moment. I was frustrated that I couldn’t have a conversation, but it was more than that. I felt like something had been taken away from me or that I’d given away too much.

  It was then that I started saying, “I don’t do wife very well.” I can’t smile and say thank you when people congratulate me for something Cliff has done. Instead, I say, “For what?” I mean, why congratulate me? When people persist or try to explain, I say, “Oh yeah, well, it’s his passion.” Translation: he has interests and so do I.

  But I didn’t say this to Trey that night. Instead, I mumbled something and walked away. I just wanted to leave but knew we had to stay a little longer. Cliff is highly verbal, is quick on his feet, and loves to hobnob. He needed to stay to schmooze the state arts person and the bank manager, the kinds of people who held the fate of the theater in their hands. I don’t like the part of him that enjoys being seen as a big man. It always makes me uncomfortable, but what I’ve learned in being married this long is there will always be things about your spouse that you’re not going to like, some of them fairly central to who they are. I’m moody and I’m prickly and usually too psychologically probing—things Cliff dislikes about me but rarely mentions. He just accepts those parts of me.

  I slept on the way home, because I was tired, but also because I didn’t want to be snippy with Cliff. He didn’t deserve that. He was a good man with a good heart, and he loved me and he loved the kids and he just wanted us to be happy and have a good life, and for me to say it was great. I couldn’t say that, so I slept.

  The next day I ran two miles. It was either that or stay home and yell at my kids and my husband. That afternoon I also had an acupuncture appointment. It was my fifth session, and I left there feeling tremendous—light, not angry, depressed, or anxious, none of that. The problem was I couldn’t seem to make it last more than three, maybe four days.

  I’ve had periods in my married life when felt I was wrong, as if I didn’t fit, didn’t match any group, said the wrong things in the wrong way, felt too deeply about everything. But whenever I was ready to throw in the towel, convinced that Cliff didn’t get me, we’d have a conversation about something or he’d say some random thing, and it would be so on the head of a pin, I’d realize that he does get me. Instead of jumping in and instructing me when I’m talking about being supersensitive, he just listens. And I get him, too. He is filled with anxieties just like my mom, and like her, he thinks he’s hiding them. I’ve learned that the way to deal with him when he’s anxious—like my mother scrubbing, scrubbing—is to simply hug him. His shoulders come down from around his ears and his body falls into mine.

  A week later, I got an unexpected lesson in just how fortunate I was to be with Cliff. I was in the produce section at our local A&P supermarket, where I’d run into our neighbor Marcellus. We were chatting about what we were each going to make for dinner and the state of Black America and the country in general. He’s an economics professor from West Philly who has great stories, three Ivy League degrees, and a great mind. I’d just come from the pool. I had on one of those cheap, long strapless dresses with the elastic smocking. My wet hair was in a knot on top of my head, my skin was dry, and I was barefaced. I was talking to Marcellus when I saw him from behind and recognized the head—my ex-boyfriend Bruce. Fuck, I thought, and for a second I figured I could just keep talking to Marcellus and he wouldn’t see me, but mysteriously he turned around, almost as if he felt my eyes on the back of his head. A big smile crept across his face and he came walking toward us.

  “Hey.” He leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. He was grinning as if we were friends running into each other at a garden party.

  I introduced Marcellus to him.

  “So if I’m seeing you in the A&P, you probably live here,” I said.

  “Yeah, we just moved in today.”

  I was as cold to him as a dairy aisle. After a very few minutes of small talk, he went on his way. Marcellus looked at me.

  “What was that about? I’ve never seen you like that—you were like ice.”

  I was furious. I didn’t understand quite why at the time, but it was like I’d released in that moment all that I’d held on to for decades. I’d put Bruce on a pedestal and allowed myself to believe that I wasn’t good enough for him, and that ultimately the person he’d choose would be better than me.

  I told Marcellus a little about the background:

  Bruce had called me out of the blue to tell me that he and his wife were thinking about moving to Montclair.

  It had been five years since we’d last spoken. After I’d heard that at age forty-five he was getting married, I had tracked him down through the last email address I had for him. I’d written: “I hear you’re getting married. Congratulations. You have to tell me everything . . .”

  He called me right away.

  At the point at which I’d run into him in the A&P, we’d been broken up twenty years. The three years we were together, off and on, were some of the most intense, exhilarating, miserable years of my romantic life. When it was good, it was grand, but when it was bad, it was hell, and it would shift from one extreme to the other in minutes. We were in touch intermittently over the years, mostly in the first years after I got married, when he was trying to convince me to leave my husband for him. When we were together, he hadn’t ever said, “I love you.” He had never wanted to meet my parents or for me to meet his, even after I’d practically begged to do so. Yet after I’d gotten married, he insisted I had been the love of his life.

  The first time we broke up, he’d moved from New York to Boston. I had tried to move on with my life, eventually settling into a stable relationship with a nice, low-key guy I’d known at Howard. A year later, Bruce got in touch with me. We met for lunch, and he poured his heart out, saying he wanted me back. Just like Carrie with Mr. Big in Sex and the City, I went running back to him, dumping the nice Howard guy in the process. Bruce was an immigrant with an immense drive that led him to become very successful in his career. His manner could sometimes be high-handed, and while I hated that aspect of him, to me he was sexy and handsome. Deep down, I had felt that I was not enough for him. I was too emotional (or right-brained, as he used to say). I hadn’t traveled the world as he had. I hadn’t gone to “an Ivy.” I just wasn’t accomplished
enough. He would tell me decades later that, in fact, he had felt insecure and unsophisticated compared to me.

  I finally broke up with him when I realized that he was dancing around making a real commitment to me. I figured that he wanted someone who had multiple degrees, spoke at least three languages, and looked like a model. This was why when I heard he’d was actually getting married I just had to know who this spectacularly accomplished woman was. I envisioned a combination Valerie Jarrett and Condoleezza Rice, with Halle Berry looks. I even wanted to meet her, so that I could give him and her props. My opinion about what he’d been looking for would have been validated—but he married his administrative assistant, who was eighteen years his junior. No Ivy or any degree, no fluency in the Romance languages, no world traveler.

  When I asked him what she was like, he said, “Really beautiful.”

  A year earlier, when he’d called me out of the blue to pick my brain about Montclair, I was not happy and told him so. I didn’t want him to move to my town.

  “I really want the diversity. I don’t want my kids to grow up like I did, being the only Black kid.”

  “I get that, but there are other towns.”

  “But the schools are good.”

  “I know you, and you’re not going to be happy with public school and you’ll end up sending them to private school.”

  He fell back into a pattern of trying to charm me to change my position.

  “Look, I just don’t want you to live here. I don’t want to run into you while I’m out walking my dog or running to the supermarket or just living my life.”

  He told me that they were looking at other places too and that Montclair wasn’t his wife’s first choice. Obviously, that was before I ran into him in the A&P.

  “There are lots of other nice places with diversity. There’s South Orange/Maplewood, New Rochelle, there’s Englewood . . .”

  He wasn’t interested.

  I’d held the phone to my ear and looked at myself in the mirror and remembered the hot girl I’d been when I was with him. I didn’t realize that he thought me sophisticated, but he told me that the fact that I was seeing a therapist had seemed the ultimate in refinement and was threatening to him. Sheesh, I thought.

  Now, while I still looked good, I was a middle-aged woman, complete with dry hair and a muffin top in my oh-so-cute Citizens boot-cut jeans, with feet that hurt and required some kind of comfortable shoes (though never Merrells or Rockports or any of those “Mom” shoes, as Baldwin calls them).

  When I told Eleanore, my ride-or-die girlfriend of twenty-five years, about Bruce’s move to Montclair, she said, “Why do you care?” She’d had a front-row view of our past relationship, knew the play-by-play, but pointed out that it was long ago.

  I knew she was right but tried to answer her with the banal—it’s a small town, not the big city, where exes can cohabit peacefully, meaning they never, ever have to see each other. What I later realized was that I didn’t want to be reminded constantly of the callow girl that I was when I was with him. The one who didn’t know herself well enough to know that this person wasn’t right for her. Eleanore got that part.

  But here’s the good news: When I ran into him at the A&P, I realized at once that Cliff was infinitely better than he was, and not just better for me, but a finer human, a better man. Bruce’s wife had wanted to live in a New Jersey town where she wouldn’t have to use one of the tunnels to get into Manhattan. He’d told me that she had a phobia of tunnels. I figured then that because of that, they wouldn’t move here. When I reminded him of that conversation, he shrugged and said, “She’ll get over it.”

  24

  Plantation Luggage

  MONTCLAIR/UPPER MONTCLAIR is one town with two zip codes. It’s a leafy suburb on six square miles, twelve miles west of Manhattan. There are about thirty-eight thousand people, three supermarkets, a Whole Foods, four parks, one high school, one private school, three parochial schools, and a country club (although it’s technically just over the West Orange border). There are five public elementary and three middle schools, two movie theaters, three firehouses, eighteen public tennis courts, and forty-two houses of worship. Recently the non-millionaire residents have nicknamed it “the People’s Republic of Montclair” because of its high property taxes. The taxes are so high that Cliff and I were looking forward to downsizing.

  I cried during relaxation in yoga class when the teacher, in her spiritual reading to us, asked, “Who are you really?” And I thought, I’m Clara’s daughter. After class, I hurriedly rolled up my mat, put on my shoes and coat, and cried all the way to the parking lot. I went to Ford’s school, even though it was Friday, and I knew he had his standing playdate with his best friend, Ryan. I just wanted to see Ford. Ryan’s mom, Pam, was there, waiting for them to finish wrestling around on the grass in front of their school—so happy, so simple. I watched Ford and Ryan and a few of their friends while I chatted with Pam and some other moms. After Pam took the boys to her house, I was left with the realization that I had no one to pick up. Baldwin was getting a ride home from lacrosse practice. I walked across the street to the playground to say hey to Carmen, who I knew would be there with her two young ones. I stood there chatting with her for at least forty-five minutes. When I got back to my car I realized that I had left the car running with the passenger-side window down and my purse on the passenger seat.

  I went home, poured myself a glass of wine, and sat in the yard, trying to wrap my head around how I could’ve been so distracted as to leave the car running, with my purse on display. I was feeling slightly numb as I struggled to forgive myself.

  The next day I felt okay, then good. I realized I was actually feeling a little bit happy. I thought—I allowed myself to hope—maybe it’s lifting, but I wouldn’t allow myself to dwell on it too much, I didn’t want to jinx it.

  Then I went on Facebook and saw a notification from a writer I used to be friends with. He had made a career in film and TV. His Facebook update: Hanging at Sundance with Zoë Saldana.

  I got so jealous.

  I was still thinking about my boring suburban life as I was getting dressed to go to my son’s Saturday soccer game. I went downstairs, where my husband had made breakfast, and got Ford’s uniform together for his game. Ford was putting on his cleats, and I knelt down in front of him and, for the umpteenth time, tried to teach him to tie his laces. As I always did, I took my time showing him how to tie and loop. I was feeling calm, resigned perhaps.

  This time, for some reason, he moved his foot away from me and said, “Let me try it.”

  I stood up and watched him do as I had done. He tied it perfectly.

  A feeling washed over me that was whole and beautiful. Seeing his face, the look of accomplishment, of happiness, filled me with something I’ve never experienced outside of mothering.

  Later at the game, when Ford’s laces came undone, Cliff, his coach, knelt down to tie them while not taking his eyes off the game. Ford swatted Cliff’s hand away.

  “I can do it,” he said, and he did.

  I was watching from my seat in the bleachers a few feet away. He looked over at me, and our eyes locked. I put up my thumb up and beamed him a smile. His eyes brightened while he gave me a grin. It was a moment I know I’ll never forget.

  I did forget my Sundance envy.

  The next day, Sunday, was sunny with that first real springtime warmth where the air feels like cashmere on your face. My friend Hillary knew I’d been suffering—all my friends did. She and I took our little fluffy dogs out for a walk. We sat on a bench in Watchung Circle, and Hillary got us coffee and egg sandwiches. We’d been friends since her two boys and Baldwin were in nursery school at Montclair Cooperative School, a hippie little island of a school. We went through periods of not seeing each other much, but she was a constant, solid presence, someone I’d never had to pretend with, and she got the idea of deep sadness in the midst of a life that others envy. On this day—the third in a row—I actually
felt good. Again I thought, hoped, maybe the depression had lifted. Maybe it was gone for good, and I’d be myself again.

  Monday a hard, cool rain came down. Baldwin was late getting out of the house and forgot her lacrosse gear. Cliff was late coming downstairs to drive her to school. Ford had a hard time waking up and ate his breakfast slowly and complained about having a headache. I finally got him to school—late. Then I walked Charlie. I forgot to carry a bag to pick up his poop, so I scraped it up with a napkin and missed, and some of the poop got on my finger.

  I was behind schedule and would be late to my gym class. I could have still tried to make it, but my stomach felt queasy. I hadn’t eaten enough for breakfast, and I just didn’t feel like going. I was supposed to meet Susie at the Starbucks near the gym, but it was on the other side of town. The blackness that had vanished for a few days was edging its way back. I called Susie and tried to cancel. I wanted, needed, to get to my bed and pull the covers over my head. I told her the truth.

  She heard in my voice that this wasn’t just a bad moment on a rainy day. She insisted on coming over.

  “I won’t stay. I’ll bring you soup and a sandwich. You need to eat.”

  I was wrapped in a blanket, which I dragged to the door like Linus when Susie arrived. We went into the TV room and sat on the couch. She put the bag she was carrying on the coffee table and took out a container of butternut squash soup and a vegetable sandwich on focaccia from Raymond’s, which had some of the best food in town.

  “My sister suffers from severe depression,” she said. “I know some of what it’s like. I just wanted you to know that you’re not alone, that I think you’re great. You don’t have to do anything, be anything.” I was so grateful for her kindness and yet I wanted her to leave. I felt a great weight trying to hold a conversation. I just wanted to go to bed. In the days following, friends just kept appearing: Eleanore, Lynne, Andrea, Jeanine, Iqua. They would come over and just sit with me or take me out to the mall or on errands or out to lunch or for a low-key dinner. Lynne took me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art one afternoon just to walk around. They seemed to understand that I couldn’t do places that were scenes, where I’d run into people who required small talk.