It’s my fall decorating time. I’m on the lawn putting up the bales of hay, scarecrow, pumpkins, cornucopia and my favorite, the witch on her broom who smashes into the tree. I like to do Halloween and Thanksgiving all together—especially now. I just want to get through these things. It’s a hot mid-October and I’m wearing a light sweater over my nightgown, which is stuffed into my jeans, the baby monitor clipped to my back pocket. I’ve stopped bothering with dressing and showering has taken a backseat, as well. I think that I’m functioning just fine, all things considered. Jay sends checks regularly and pays the bills just like he did before, but otherwise there’s been no contact. I think he’s just too ashamed to face me, to talk to me. I would be. I’m on the lawn noticing, again, how pretty our neighborhood is—nannies and moms stroll by with their little companions, Volvo wagons and assorted SUVs and mini-vans are dropping off, I hear doors slam, kids’ laughter, yelling to one another or a thank-you to Mrs. So-and-so. I suddenly feel strange, as if something has shaken loose inside me. I feel my insides getting mashed together and my face hot. For a second I thought it was some kind of fever flush, then my head began pounding and I felt water flooding my mouth; vomit emitted out of me like the slime machine Malcolm once got for Christmas. The force of it practically knocked me to the ground and then the tears started. I’d cried since Jay left—burning mad tears after seeing him in the paper with his new girlfriend; I cried into the kitchen sink, my back to the boys as they pressed me about their father’s whereabouts and when he’d be coming back to live with us, but real, from the gut, what’s-happening-how-could-he-do-this-kind-of-thing crying just hadn’t happened. Until now, in the orange glow of this anomalous prewinter afternoon, out in the open for everyone who cared to look. I couldn’t stop myself. I stayed on my knees, on the lawn, spit-up smell in my nostrils and I just cried, cried like Ivy does when we can’t find her passie, that helpless, I’m-miserable, I-can’t-take-it-anymore cry. I cried till my headache went away and came back again. I howled like a trapped dog. I didn’t care if Paige or any other neighbor heard me. I cried until the dampness from my irrigated lawn that crept under my jeans made my knees feel stiff, and my hands were rough from handling straw. I went inside the house rubbing my hands, feeling like if I didn’t get in the car and get away from here I’d pull off my skin and that of the next person I saw. I stood in my kitchen and tried to do what I’ve always done: organize the rest of my day, the week, mentally checking off kid activities and carpool responsibilities. I tried to remember who was doing today’s pickup and I couldn’t remember what day it was. My mind had gone blank, shut down like a computer during a power surge. Nothing was there and I couldn’t recall it with all my effort. I sat down and tried to calm myself by breathing deeply. All I wanted to do was get out of my world, which used to feel like a hermetically sealed box—boring but secure. The box had been punctured, upturned, and I’d been crushed inside. The life I’d chosen, I thought at the time, so carefully tailored to fit, no longer does. My husband is gone and is spending all his time with her, buying nice presents for her, rubbing lotion on her feet. I called my dad and told him that I needed to get away for a while, a few days maybe even weeks. The kids hated being at my parents’ house because my mother’s behavior was so erratic. It scared them. I couldn’t think about that now. I was crying but trying in vain to keep him from hearing me.
“Ina, are you okay, baby?”
I couldn’t stop sniffling.
“No,” I said, sounding like I was six and had just fallen off my new two-wheeler.
“I’m comin’ over there.”
“No, Daddy. I’m leaving. Ivy’ll be at Paige’s. Just pick up the boys and get Ivy later . . .”
“Okay. Okay. You take your phone with you. I’ll check on you in about an hour, okay?”
“Okay.”
I just wanted to get off the phone and get outta the house.
I went into Ivy’s room where she was taking a nap and took her right to Paige’s. I didn’t even go through all the motions of reminding her of their schedules. By now she knew them as well as I did and I couldn’t think of half the shit anyway. None of it seemed very important right about now.
“My dad’ll pick her up later. He’s getting the boys.”
“Ina, I know this has to be hell,” Paige said, in her straightforward Indiana-bred way. “You can always count on me.”
I was so grateful that she never made me feel like I had to tell her all about it. She wasn’t one for gossip over coffee, even though she knew everybody’s business. People told her things because they knew she was discreet. She could intuit when someone needed to talk, and when, like now, couldn’t.
I somehow got back to my house, went upstairs and threw a few pairs of underwear, nightgowns, jeans and sweaters into a leather duffel. I even threw in my favorite jersey dress. I didn’t know where I was going; I just knew I had to get away from here. As I packed some gifts from Jay, I now see they were guilt-ridden pacifiers: the bulging emerald ring suspended by pavé diamonds; a citron-colored cashmere shawl; a strand of South Sea pearls. I’d wear the stuff when I was having lunch with my PTA cohorts. They’d oh and ah and tell me how lucky I was, how much Jay loved me. I needed to hear that because I didn’t trust what I knew: that these presents were more about him than me. He needed for people to see how much money he had. He needed to have a wife who would wear a $20,000 necklace to the supermarket.
I headed to the highway, somewhere away from New York, away from my invisibility, away from my counterfeit life. I drove to the New Jersey Turnpike; past Ikea, past signs for Great Adventure, past exits for Philadelphia. I didn’t stop until I got to a rest stop directly in front of the Delaware Memorial Bridge. I got out. It was getting late. Malcolm would be getting panicky and Dad would have to talk him through it and he’d do the same for Marcus.
I rinsed my face with cold water and tried to dry it with one of those brown paper towels; paper pulp stuck to my face and I looked like I had some form of chicken pox. I rinsed again and let my skin air dry. I got back in the SUV, and continued south on 95. Two hours later I pulled into a gas station on New York Avenue and asked the Arab attendant if he had a telephone. I smiled sweetly as I explained that I’d left my phone at home. He softened and pointed inside, to his office, his private phone. I called Information. He had a common name, it wouldn’t be easy. I was prepared to call all twenty numbers under that name. At the ninth, I got him. The noise from the TV in the background was loud. He answered curtly, something like “What up?” or “Speak,” or something rude. I said his name with a question mark. He paused and stammered and muted the TV that had been blasting in the background.
“Where are you?” he said urgently.
“I’m here.”
He let out a blast of air, as if he’d been holding his breath for all these years, the ones that stood between us, the ones that we had sleepwalked through. I’ll be right there, he told me. I hung up the phone and held onto the receiver, relieved and scared. I got back into my SUV, punched the buttons on the radio, moving from one black station to another—there were many in Chocolate City; the Quiet Storm with Regina Belle belting out “Come to Me”; the Commodores singing about the sister with the “brick house” body on one of the new oldies stations; Puffy and crew remixing it on the number one black Top 40 station; Jay-Z on the all-rap station. Finally I turned it off, looked at the clock knowing that Ivy would’ve been fussy and hungry, hoping Dad had let Paige and Ingracia keep her. They would manage to fix something that Ivy would smack her lips for in hearty approval.
When I heard the aggressive-sounding engine, I just knew the slightly beat-up, faded blue vintage BMW was his. I knew it was David’s car before it lurched into the gas station—it was just the right statement of genteel poverty he needed to make, a pose he was most comfortable with, that he’d vehemently worn in this headquarters of status symbols. He’d come right away, but the wait had felt like years as I sat in my ultrastatus-conferring vehicle. Suddenly, what the white Range Rover said about the life I’d chosen embarrassed me. I knew David tallied it all up and disapproved.
I followed his car to an out of the way café in Adams Morgan. Once we’d parked in a lot, we awkwardly greeted each other with a butt-away hug and dry kiss. Inside the restaurant, I followed him and the hostess—who said she recognized him from his picture on his column—to a private table. After two glasses of wine and some talk about who was doing what from school, he reached across the table and put his hand over mine. We were looking deeply at each other before I had to turn away from the heat of his stare. It had always been powerful. We kept the conversation light, but I’m sure my presence was saying everything I wouldn’t, or more accurately couldn’t, say. His job was going well. He’d been promoted several times before getting his own weekly column. His bosses were pressing him to go into management, become an editor, but he wasn’t interested. He was seeing several women, none of them important enough to talk about, nothing like . . . well, you know, he said before trailing off.
“So where you staying?” he asked as he neatly folded the receipt for our drinks, my salad and mushroom puffs and slipped it into his wallet.
I had expected to stay with him, but figured I could always hook up with Leelah.
“I don’t want to intrude on your life,” I blurted without anything resembling finesse. “I think Leelah lives in Adams Morgan.”
“She does, but you can stay with me. It’s no big deal. I got a house now, plenty of space.”
He smiled at me as we both remembered the wee walkup on U Street that he used to call home. We had made love all over the cracked plaster walls, the rickety aluminum kitchen table and the futon that we’d pull onto the fire escape when it got too hot to sleep inside. Being together, we could reminisce about who we were back then. I was a broke Howard student rich in love and excited about learning, about life, about finding myself; and he was a lowly teaching assistant in the esteemed political science department there, a graduate student, searching for the big answers, too.
“Thanks,” I said, filled with gratitude for the second time today.