Something Like Beautiful

by asha bandele

  And you too, you have to see what the mirror shows you: a woman who, despite what she knows, what she’s been privileged to experience, dumbs herself down, sets her own self up for so much of the hurt she lives. A woman who is not living the theory she believes.

  You slam down the phone and pour another glass of wine. Drink it fast, pour another. Go to the bathroom. Smoke a cigarette out of the window. You cry a little, but not enough to get it all out. And it does cross your mind that it’s crazy how you’ve gone from a relationship in which you were listened to, honored, respected, and loved, to this, to this, this entanglement that seesaws between high romance and abuse. The romance took you in, the romance you first felt with him, the dinners, the fine wines, the clubs, the walks through the thick sexiness that New York City nights can offer a couple. Yes, the romance took you in, but how is it that abuse is keeping you there?

  You let these and other difficult questions go. You head back to the couch, turn on the TV.

  The phone rings again. You are embarrassed that you hope it’s him calling back, him calling to apologize, calling to make all things right with the world. At least all things right within the world the two of you inhabit. And while this has never happened once in all the times the two of you fought, for some bizarre reason, you still hold out hope. But hope for what?

  This is the truth.

  He was always content to let it all go, not look back. It was you who has spent the relationship running behind him. You check the caller ID. No surprise, it’s not him. It’s your girlfriend. You pause before taking it. She’s always so angry. Even when she’s laughing, joking around, she’s using her words like weapons. You take the call but wonder why. Why the mean lover, why the mean friend? When did your life take such a shift that suddenly the people who are closest to you are also the people who are mean as shit?

  That was never your story, never your life.

  Is this some form of self-flagellation for leaving Rashid?

  And if it is, why now, why beat yourself now when you’re a mother, now when it’s all the more important that those in your circle are loving and supportive, not demeaning and hurtful?

  Their hurtfulness has a reach far beyond you. It can reach your daughter. You are painfully aware of this even as it occurs to you that despite the harshness of the people around you, maybe they’re around you because somehow you think that their presence is better than being alone in the world. Better than not being seen at all.

  You pick up the telephone, pour another drink. The wine is in your brain now. You feel warm all over and lie down on the couch as you begin the call. Your eyes are heavy, your thoughts are not. This is the state you have been wanting to achieve. To be here and to not be here at the very same time. It occurs to you that maybe you’re trying to wish yourself into being some kind of pod person. But you dismiss the thought, enjoy the wine weaving through your brain.

  You chat about nothing with your girlfriend and you breathe a sigh of relief when she has another call to take. You think: we made it through the conversation with no conflict or hurt feelings. Thank God, because you just couldn’t take another fight tonight. But still the fear of it has kind of fucked with your high and you get off the phone and curse the path you’ve allowed your life to take.

  You can feel the depression taking over your body. It starts as a threat that becomes a judgment that becomes a sentence that becomes a noose that morphs into a body bag that is slowly being zipped up over your face.

  This is stupid, you think. It’s ridiculous, it’s selfish, it’s wrong-headed and indulgent. What the hell do you have to be depressed about?

  You with the incredible and enchanted girl.

  You who gets paid to travel far and wide to beautiful places where “they don’t speak English and don’t even want to.”

  You who enters rarefied spaces.

  You who have known great love.

  You have no right to this nonsense, this sadness.

  Pour a drink. Pour another. Stumble to bed. Look at the girl asleep and beautiful. Let the tears that spring to your eyes fall on your pillow. She is an entire universe to you and you think you are failing her. You think you are a failure. An image of Rashid flashes before you and then you pass out. Pass out cold.

  Now it’s just past four and you’re awake again. When was the last time you slept a whole night through? Maybe it’s better. Who can sleep when there’s so much work that has to be done?

  You worry your editor won’t like the story she asked you to crash in. You didn’t really even want to take the assignment but you need the money. You’ll turn in the story in just a few hours, pray your editor isn’t a bitch about it. You need the money. You have no idea how you’ll pay all the bills. Money is so tight. Money is always so tight. Embarrassed you’re going to have to ask your ex for a loan. Embarrassed because you keep winding up here, hand out and begging. What kind of mother have you turned out to be?

  Chapter 9

  the new normal

  Depression is a slow-moving illness. It takes hold but not all at once. It moves in on different parts of you, taking a piece at a time, and then what was a single day of feeling bad becomes a month, a month becomes a year. And a year, well after a year like this, the year becomes your new normal. At some point, it no longer seems strange to wake up each day and wonder how you will get through the first hour, the second. In the beginning it was wine every night and cigarettes that were my morphine.

  Eventually it was sleep. I could barely get out of bed, see friends. Weekends would roll in and I would summon what felt like the heavens, every god, to make a life for Nisa. I did sleepovers and trips to museums, Coney Island, the beach with my daughter and all her friends. My neighbors called my home, still call my home, Camp asha. “All the kids want to be with you,” I heard over and over. And I suppose that had, in flashes, some truth, but it wasn’t my big truth. Depression was. A huge abiding sense that I would never again have a life defined by love, by peace. That’s where that thing takes you, how it leaves you, and in the end I was unable to do anything but the very basics to make a life work. I went into what I can only describe as hiding. In my room, under my covers, rising only to make breakfast or dinner. Rising when I could not avoid doing otherwise.

  But I wanted more. I did. The desire for more was small at first, a cut below a whisper lost someplace inside me but I heard it, amplified as it became by my daughter’s opposite way of engaging the world. Two years or more had passed and then one morning I looked at Nisa, the child who is so different than me, the child who knows her history, her roots, the child who never stays sad, who said to me once about a mean kid in her class, “I don’t hold grudges, Mommy. I don’t like to be angry and I don’t like to be sad. You don’t like being sad, do you?” her child logic outweighing my grown-up convictions.

  I looked at her and saw for the first time in far too long what the universe has given me. This girl, this child who was not one in a million, but one of two point four million, to be exact. That’s the number, that’s how many of our babies are out here, trying to figure out how to navigate the world, while one of their parents, sometimes both of their parents, are incarcerated in this nation that locks up more people than any other on the planet. My daughter, not one in a million. My daughter, one of two point four million. And despite that reality, the faraway Daddy, the sad Mommy, she refuses to allow what she doesn’t have to overwhelm what she does. She has always been loved and safe and warm. She has always been loved. She has always loved herself.

  I sat up that day. Literally shook myself awake. “Come on, baby,” I said that Friday morning. “We’re playing hooky today.

  From work, from school. We’re just going to have fun.” And we did. Movies, manicures, pizza for dinner. We had fun that day, and that day that was a beginning.

  I DON’T HAVE MIRRORS all over my house. Mirrors are too hard now. There are none in my bedroom, no full-length looking glasses as there were in the days of my far more vai
n, or perhaps confident, twenties. There is one on the blue-and-white dresser that matches the little loft bed in Nisa’s room. But that one is hers and I almost never use it. And then out from my bedroom painted orange and down the hallway painted lavender, there on the left is the bathroom sponged in forest green with marble floors to match. Inside there and halfway up the wall on one side of the room is a mirror that runs from nearly the door to the window. It was here when I moved in, though I’ve always said that had I been given the choice I wouldn’t have put it up myself. Whatever the reason I first proclaimed that, now I know why. Now when I look at myself in that long, you-can’t-avoid-it mirror, I see a face that is at once familiar and not, but still, I know it’s me. This was not always the case and there came a morning when I knew it.

  When I realized I had come undone—and that alone takes a moment—but when I realized I had come undone, my inclination was to stand in front of that mirror I hate and seek out myself. Where was that girl, that woman I once knew so well, the one who had shed all vice except for, of course, the need to not have any vice? Where was the woman who laughed? I would stare at the face that was in flashes a stranger’s face and try to figure out where my own brand of crazy started, and it felt as though there was no beginning, only the possibility of an end and if I was going to get to an end, I had to tell the truth.

  I had to have it make sense in my own head before it could make sense out loud. The terrible tangle of thoughts that wrapped around my brain, they were like drunken rants, disconnected, logic tossed aside, in pieces on the ground, sort of like me. This is to say, I had to stop lying. I had to take apart the story I had created and told others, but mostly I had to take apart what I had told myself.

  I’d told myself, and later I told lovers, that I could leave my husband, my husband who in so many ways was real only to me anyway, my husband who existed for others only in Polaroid pictures or in the pages of a book. I told myself that I could leave that man, that marriage, and leave unscathed. I was not unscathed. No one gets out of a marriage, a good one, a bad one, unscathed.

  I told myself I could not be undone by pain, me a hard-ass girl living in central Brooklyn. Not a place for the faint of heart, people from around here used to say. Besides, didn’t I live a charmed life? Didn’t I write celebrity stories, travel stories, books? I mean, yeah, I would say when I was pushed, of course it’s sad about the marriage, really it is, but look on the bright side. There is so much good that’s going on for me. I’m allowed to be grateful. Ask anyone spiritual: just be grateful. I want to be spiritual, recognize the gifts. Forget my silly little, probably patriarchal dream of an intact family, a house, a dog. I told myself that.

  I told myself if I cried I was setting a bad example for my daughter. Others told me the very same thing. Told me never to be a victim, Black women are not victims and we are not weak. Tossed aside is Michelle Wallace’s brilliant feminist tome about why Black women have always been, but should never have been, asked to be superwomen. In the post-welfare-reform days of the alpha mom, I was clear that being a victim, showing any weakness, was punishable by complete isolation and total loss of respect.

  I was a mother, a single mother, a single Black mother. I was part of a tradition of women who do not bend and who do not break. This is what I said, this is how I now defined myself. As someone with no room for error.

  And though in moments I did wonder if we really were all so strong, if nothing could break us. Where did I fit in among those Black mothers I see in the street, the ones who are screaming at their kids to shut up, shut up, shut the fuck up? In moments I wondered that maybe some of us who appear to have the charmed lives, the VIP thing going on, are not so far removed from the mothers who are losing it out there on the street.

  And at times I wondered, Were we all one and the same kind of woman—the ones with the lips gone black from the pipe, stinking, messy, mad women, and the ones like me who have better cover? Were we the same? Did the difference really just come down to the quality of makeup we wear, the drug we choose? Did the difference just come down to the thirty-five-dollar tubes of Chanel lipstick, foundation mixed to exactly match your skin, and high-priced weaves you have to get real, real close to in order to notice that the whole shit is fake. But how often does anyone get really, really close? I wondered all those things and I wondered too, Was even I capable of getting close to myself?

  And in the brief seconds I had the courage to consider these ideas, it occurred to me that maybe the fake thing is also part of the tradition, the mythical legacy of bravely forging alone in the wilderness that is single parenting and despite it all, emerging triumphant. That too is fake. That too is a lie. But are lies our heritage? Is our heritage something made-up, something fraudulent?

  Because in the end, what is triumph? Where does the bar get set for Black girls and their babies? If we manage to have our children circumnavigate prison, does it make us winners? If we show up to church most Sundays even if we show up carrying two hundred extra pounds, diabetes, and heart disease? Are we winners then? If we shine as employee of the month, even if that shine is fueled by alcohol or drugs? What’s the goddamn bar of triumph for Black girls and their babies? But when I think about that, it feels like way too much, so I tell myself it’s all nonsense. I tell myself that these new thoughts, not my others, are the random drunken thoughts.

  The clear thoughts, the ones that make sense are the ones that come with the television commercials for the quick-get-your-life-back fixes. This drug or that, take it and you’re happy again, grinning or else running through a field made of green, unless, of course, you develop liver or heart or kidney disease. And if I can’t get the drug, white wine will do. White wine was the truth. It did make me feel better. It did, I swear.

  It took away everything that hurt. After a time, I couldn’t feel my heart. My emotions were turned down, I was turned down, disconnected from myself. I said this was a good thing and I called my anger, pain, and sorrow by other names and I used Band-Aids in the place of body casts, and I told myself and I told everyone who listened, I was fine, just fine. I told myself that in no way, shape, or form was I anything like those screaming, cursing mothers. And I was right.

  I did not scream or curse at my child. I would just say to her that I needed Mommy time and then I disappeared into one, two, four glasses of wine. I disappeared in that easy, kind of comfortable way that everyone can deal with because the bills are being paid and the deadlines are being met and the friends are being advised and the child is getting to school on time, looking cute and fresh in her brand-new clothes. I disappeared and no one noticed, and even I didn’t notice. I didn’t notice until just before that day in front of the mirror, the mirror in the bathroom down the hall from the bedroom. The mirror I never wanted.

  But before that morning in front of the mirror, there was a night. It was a night like one hundred nights before it, except there is something that inserts itself into my routine of wine and cigarettes. It is a small voice but it is a voice so clear. And there is no denying the truth of it. It touches me in a long-ago place, a time when my voice was that small and I was afraid to use it because I was afraid, because I am still afraid, at any minute I will be given back—so don’t speak, don’t make anyone angry, don’t get in the way. This small voice on this average night is not afraid to assert itself. That is the truth. And I cannot ignore it. That is the truth. That small voice asking a question that embodies the truth:

  Mommy.

  Mommy.

  Where are you?

  Are you here?

  Are you here and are you with me, Mommy?

  Mommy?

  Chapter 10

  dreams

  This is the hour I live for. This is the hour I live. I am here in the hushed dark and I am watching my daughter sleep. I am watching her deep, full breathing, her arms outstretched, her face wearing the look of peace and content. And her face, the one I can stare at and lose myself in, I lose myself in the smooth and round and
beauty of her face, buried and breathing now into my breast.

  The day has been long, it has felt impossible, it’s felt immeasurable, but it was not and we are here, survivors on an aching planet; both us and the planet, both of us, are still pulsing with life. And in this hour and in this moment, with work and school and plans and lists, and everything, everything that was to be done, actually done, we are here, and we are together and we are at peace.

  And peace is what I always feel when I am with her, with Nisa, the clown, the freely affectionate, the lover of strawberries, sushi, spaghetti, and ginger ale (though not in that order).

  Nisa, whose sense of joy and mischief could be marketed.

  Nisa, who is silly and bossy and demanding, although she does work very, very hard at sharing. She really, really tries.

  Nisa, my little Aries, my fire sign who spits fire, born as she was in the Year of the Dragon.

  Nisa, my team member, my cheerleader, my baby who said when she was three years old and I was feeling fat or ugly or probably both, “But you’re a beautiful African queen, Mommy.”

  Her, that girl. The one who, looking at my mostly bargain-store shoe collection one day, announced very definitively that she only liked the “Finolos” (apologies to Blahnik—but she was just four at the time).

  Nisa, who, on a seventy-five-degree September evening, threw on her fresh, newly handed-down shearling and when we suggested maybe it was a little warm outside for the coat, she looked at everyone as if they were crazy and replied, “But I have to work it!” which is when she broke into a walk that would have turned even Naomi Campbell’s head.

  Nisa, my self-defined abstract artist and singer in the tradition of Beyoncé, Nina Simone, Hannah Montana, and the Cheetah Girls, depending on the day, depending on her mood.