[2017] What We Lose Read online

  On the first day of our first-year orientation, the administration crammed our entire class into an auditorium, and when they asked if we had any questions, Devonne stood and recited a spoken-word poem, which she would later tell me she revised from one she had performed at slams in high school.

  You don’t see me when you pass me in the hallways,

  Not the real me,

  I’m just a black girl to you, with

  Tough nails and

  Tough voice.

  I’m here.

  There was a stunned silence, and then enthusiastic applause. My stomach lurched when she strode into my Africana Studies class the following Monday. I hung around after class, waiting for her to finish her conversation with the professor about Marcus Garvey. (He was a world-class bigot. I won’t celebrate him, she said as our professor beamed at her.)

  “I think you’re right about Garvey,” I said as she walked toward me. She smiled.

  “Oh yeah?” she said. “Walk with me.”

  I told her that where I’d come from, my views and my skin made me a lonely little island. I told her I felt so happy to meet someone like her.

  She just nodded along. “You know how many people told me that this week?” We stopped at a forked path on the college green. “I’m headed to the library. I’ll catch you later.”

  I was sure that was the last conversation I would have with her, but the next day, I heard someone call my name from across the cafeteria. Devonne came bounding toward me, her dreads bouncing in the air, feet slightly splayed in her loafers.

  She dropped a small paperback of C.L.R. James’s Minty Alley on my tray.

  “I brought this for you.” She smiled, out of breath. “Where are you sitting?”

  Our friendship burned fast and bright from there. Each day we would find each other in the library and spend hours in the stacks reading side by side. We took cigarette breaks together and marveled at the broody boys who kept us company outside, speculating on the love lives of the ones who offered us their lighters.

  “I bet he’s great in bed,” Devonne would say, or, “SDS: Small Dick Syndrome. Did you see the way he fixed his hair constantly? Insecure.”

  “You’re terrible,” I’d reply, snickering.

  At some point she noticed that they showed me more attention. One offered me a cigarette and not her; another spoke to us both, but kept his eyes on me.

  “I didn’t think you were interested,” I’d say.

  “Of course I’m not interested,” she’d say.

  Our friendship ended in the same place it started: in Africana Studies class. We all did oral presentations: Devonne spoke on Marcus Garvey, advancing her thesis that he should be treated in the same way as Hitler and Mussolini. It was bold but with noticeable gaps in thinking. I did a short presentation on Toni Cade Bambara, including an analysis of her role as the editor of notable anthologies of women’s writing. After class, the professor approached me.

  “Nice work,” he said.

  I looked around for Devonne, but she had already left. She wasn’t in the hallway, or outside in the parking lot, where we normally had a cigarette after class. She wasn’t in the library that day either.

  When I saw her the next week, she told me that she’d slept with one of the boys we’d met outside the library who had looked at me. Though she’d feigned disinterest at first, she’d actually slept with him several times. She said she was in love.

  “What a jerk,” I exclaimed.

  Devonne stared at me, as if she was trying to decode something inside me.

  “Yeah,” she said slowly. She flicked her cigarette and turned briskly without her normal air kiss or sarcastic comment, and, for all intents and purposes, she was gone.

  My first love was Dean, a philosophy student who played guitar with a band from the local art school on the weekends. He was half Spanish, with pouty pink lips and freckles, impossibly. We met at a concert downtown, and at the end of the night he stroked my face and asked me out for coffee the next week. We went, and halfway into my coffee, I felt myself sinking into the vinyl booth. I knew that whatever happened after this point would be irrevocably different. Before long I was spending whole weekends at his apartment downtown, mornings fucking on his dirty red sheets, afternoons sleepily plodding through our reading assignments. He gave me Sartre and Proust and the Velvet Underground and Bobby “Blue” Bland. He taught me how to blow smoke rings from his Marlboro Reds.

  Early on I felt I had nothing to offer Dean except my body. He was a full person and I knew that I wasn’t yet, that I was still growing, that he and our relationship were shunting me into being. I made myself available to him all the time, and it wasn’t long before he’d used me all up, grown bored, decided he needed more.

  I grew restless. I could barely focus in class, so I spent most of the day catching up on lessons, and then I stayed up through the night completing my assignments. I saw Dean at the library, smoking his Marlboros on the steps. At first he nodded hello to me with a manner that could be mistaken as warm, but the enthusiasm of those acknowledgments waned as the months went by, and eventually he didn’t acknowledge me at all. He just let his eyes flit over me like I was a piece of stone in the library wall or some other student he hadn’t known, like he hadn’t once breathed, I could love you, you know, on my neck.

  Then one day there was a girl—a thin girl whom I’d seen studying in the visual arts library. She had papery skin and a severe brown bob that framed cheekbones like snow-capped hills. She wore vintage dresses that I never could have squeezed into and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. She looked designed to attract men like Dean, and it sunk in when I saw them together on the steps of the library that this was who he should be with, not me. It was never me.

  I had no reference point for heartbreak. My insides felt emptied out, and there was no need for food, no need for sleep. At first I couldn’t work—couldn’t even focus enough to read a chapter without dissolving into tears. Later, work was all I could do to keep the swirling thoughts from coming in, the images of her in my spot on his bed, her eating oatmeal across from him at his kitchen table.

  My parents grew into a very comfortable life in their middle age. After I left for college, they sold their house in the suburbs and bought a two-bedroom apartment in an upscale Philadelphia apartment complex designed by I. M. Pei in the 1960s. The three apartment towers overlook the Delaware River and decaying, bullet-ridden Camden, an aging beacon of the city’s relative wealth.

  They used the rest of the money from the sale to buy a vacation home outside Johannesburg and a VW Jetta that they kept in the garage. At least once a year, we flew to Johannesburg, and for at least two weeks, we stayed in the house, a modern stucco home with terra cotta tile on the roof. My father employed domestic workers to clean the windows and sweep the driveway while we were away, and to wash our laundry and mop the floors while we were there.

  The vacation house sat atop a hill full of other posh, neatly kept homes to the northwest of the city. Within a half hour we could drive to the dusty three-room house my mother grew up in, where my grandfather still lived. The vacation house’s huge picture windows looked off a cliff to the valley of Johannesburg below. From there, you could see the turquoise of the mansions that surrounded us, where my aunts and uncles lived, and, farther away, the red dirt and tin roofs of the townships clustered closely together. This was where my mother came from, and where my grandfather journeyed from to visit us, to spend a peaceful hour outside in his high socks and straw hat, sunning himself on the deck of our infinity pool.

  My lover is kind. He is not quick to anger. He is measured and good-natured. Like a child, but not lacking in experience or knowledge. In the circuit of my life, he is the ground. He balances me, allows me to flow at an even rate.

  He has red hair and he is not particularly broad or strong, like I had always imagined my one true love
would be. My lover is definitely skinny. Try as he might to eat every carbohydrate and piece of red meat in his path, he can never put on any weight.

  Yes, as much as I hate to admit it, I always imagined that I would have one true love, who in my later days would define me as much as my career or my personality. He would be a part of me, and we would come together and make another part. The picture wavered slightly over the years—at times I convinced myself that I would be okay alone, or with several partners; for some periods my husband was a wife. But it always came back to this picture: one partner, for the rest of my life.

  My mother told me that a man’s shoulders should be wider than yours, that he should be able to lift you easily. She didn’t like skinny men.

  Oftentimes I find myself, when we are fighting over the bills, or when he chews his food too loudly or laughs at the wrong time during a film, asking not whether I am happy, but whether my mother would approve of him.

  His last name is one syllable—strong, uncomplicated. It reminds me of steel or stone. His red hair is thick in the front and downy and blond on the back of his neck. His face is smooth, like a baby’s; he doesn’t grow much facial hair, only a dusting of blond on his upper lip and a spot underneath the lower. He says it caused him a lot of shame in high school and college in combination with his lanky frame. The other boys called him Twiggy. Now he works out in the yard, lifting logs above his head, and runs for miles “to clear his head.” No one in my family, going back to Africa in both directions, has ever run for any reason except self-preservation. He laughs at things like this and doesn’t ask too many questions. He is interested in my background, in love with my skin, but not too in love. There is a casualness bred from familiarity that makes me at ease around him, that drew me to him in the first place.

  When my lover and I fuck, we fuck with the fear of the world in us. We are fucking on the edge of a cliff. We are fucking death right in the ass, and death loves it. We are fucking our own deaths, and our mothers’ deaths, and the deaths of our friends and the deaths of our rights.

  One day, a sunny day at that, on one of my weekend trips to Portland, Oregon, we have sex for an entire day. We ignore the sun and stay in bed, and we eat and suck each other for twelve hours, and when we’re done we order in Thai food and eat in bed. We fall asleep with dirty dishes on the floor.

  At first I’m concerned about his landlady hearing us, but then I don’t care. I am doped out like the worst of the dope addicts. I want to do this every day for the rest of my life, and I don’t care if they find me ass-naked with my face in his lap when I’m dead.

  I want to touch it.

  I want

  I’m touching it

  Just there don’t stop

  Shit

  Right there

  Right thereRight there

  Right thererightthererightthere

  My parents were never openly affectionate with each other, or with me. I never saw them exchange more than a quick squeeze on the shoulders at the end of the day, a chaste peck on the cheek before the other left the house.

  I learned about sex in my liberal primary school, which ensured we were given healthy doses of sex ed starting in kindergarten. We were given permission slips to have our guardians sign, tacit acknowledgment for my parents that their duty was being farmed out successfully. At home, even the word “sex” was censored out of conversation. It was as if it didn’t exist in our house; sex was only a problem of the wild, tainted world outside.

  But then one night, while I was in junior high, I heard my parents making love. I heard my mother panting loudly and eventually screaming, and my father grunting, in rhythm. I pulled my blanket over my head, terrified, shivering. I lay there for the rest of the night, my heart pumping, exhilarated and unable to sleep.

  I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but when I looked back years later, after experimenting and then making those sounds on my own, I felt something different than fear. Familiarity; and perhaps some satisfaction that my parents were, despite their coldness, in love.

  In the weeks after my mother died, my sex drive was merciless. I was stuck in my bedroom while family and friends circulated in the apartment’s outer rooms and hallways, barely able to leave my room, embarrassed for my eyes and nose that ran like faucets, my face blotched with red from wiping all the tears away. Aminah came and went, but there weren’t distractions of the magnitude I needed to keep me from suffering.

  I masturbated often, mostly at night, but sometimes in the day, while I could hear the voices of my parents’ friends muffled through my bedroom door. I cycled through relief, then shame and horror, desperate for the release and powerless to stop the urge. I longed for the touch of someone else, but all I had was my hand. During the day, I envisioned my mother watching over me, and that comforted me. But when the urge inevitably came, I fought to banish the thought of her while pitifully jerking myself off in my childhood bed.

  I work for a public health agency in Forest Hills, Queens a job that has systematically robbed me of my idealism since the day I started. With every day that goes by, every person who passes through our door, I banish further the possibility of anything ever truly changing for the better. I admitted this to my boss, an overweight middle-aged woman with dull red hair and three ex-husbands. She laughed at me. “So you’re finally getting it, huh?” she said, and walked away from me, cackling all the way down the hall.

  They sent me to a conference on HIV/AIDS pharmaceuticals in Oregon. I spent four boring days floating disinterestedly from presentation to presentation to hotel bar before I noticed Peter sitting across the table from me. He was attractive, with dark red hair and serious eyes, high cheekbones, and a slight curve to his shoulders that suggested muscles and experience. That night, after everyone had eaten dinner and retired to their rooms, he was sitting alone at a table in the bar, something dark and half-drunk in his glass. I asked to sit with him, tentatively. I was nervous that he would, for some reason, say no.

  When he pulled out the chair for me, I noticed that he was reading a book: a new biography of Malcolm X. I had just read a review of the book and tried to impress him with my knowledge. He looked at me, interested but nonchalant, and asked if I had read the other biography released this year. “No,” I had to admit, trying not to let my defeat show.

  He told me he was thirty-three, seven years older than me. I repeated the Elijah Muhammad teaching my father had told me, that the ideal age for a woman should be one half the man’s age, plus seven years. He smiled with one side of his mouth, and sat forward in his chair. I knew that I had him.

  He told me that he had left a PhD program in literature a year ago. Global health was his plan B. It wasn’t working out so well for him.

  “I’m bored to death,” he told me, dropping a heavy palm on the Malcolm X book. Instead of helping people in need he was managing a bunch of recent college grads. I admitted that I was bored too, and this time we both laughed.

  This was the first time I actually saw his face, actually saw him. I imagined him stroking my hair, what it would feel like to look at him across my pillow. We talked excitedly, with no breaks in the conversation. I forgot to order a drink, and before I knew it, the time was 3:00 a.m.

  We were assigned a site visit together on the other side of town. Afterward, he took me cruising through the streets of Portland. He showed me around downtown and Chinatown, and then took me to King, lined with hair salons and corner stores. He pointed out the shabby high school where his father worked as a principal. We ended up on the Columbia River near the entrance to the Hawthorne Bridge, and watched the expanse slowly lift into the air to allow a boat to pass underneath.

  He parked in a lot and we sat on the hood, our arms braced over our winter coats. My mind was six moves ahead; I thought of my hands moving through his hair, what his breath smelled like up close.

  He told me that he was moving the following week to
a larger apartment with his girlfriend. The words came out coldly, and he didn’t look at me afterward. We sat for a few more moments outside, and then I politely thanked him for the driving tour. We climbed back into his car and he drove me back to the hotel, where I barely slept that night, restless in my empty room. The next day, I got on a plane back to the East Coast, exhausted.

  Afterward, I thought of him often, remembering the warm, excited feeling I felt for those hours I sat in the passenger’s seat of his car. But I was angry that he had led me on, and I didn’t reach out to him.

  Eight months later, he e-mailed me, saying that he and his girlfriend had finally broken up. He invited me to Portland to stay with him for the weekend, saying he’d pay for the flight. I didn’t hesitate much, but I also didn’t tell anyone.

  One afternoon in my senior year of high school, I came home to what I thought was an empty house. I wrestled out of my backpack and jacket, propped my feet up on the couch, and laid my head down. As the day drifted away and I began to sleep, I heard a noise coming from upstairs. It was the familiar sound of a body shifting on a bed, the floorboards complaining underneath. Then a faint, muffled sniffle.

  Upstairs, my mother was curled up on her bed, her eyes red. She was still wearing her work outfit—gray blazer, pleated skirt. Her collared shirt was unbuttoned and her stockinged feet poked out from under the covers.

  She had been in pain for the past two weeks. That morning, she had gone to the doctor to find out the results of her tests and had stayed in bed since. The pain had started in her chin, an aching that came out of nowhere and spread to her spine. She had had difficulty getting out of bed the past few days.

  She told me how scared she was, and the tears kept coming and coming. I had to ask her to stop, to calm down, and surprisingly, she listened to me, if out of nothing else than desperation. “If they don’t know what it is, why should you worry?” I asked. She smiled at me, my naïve logic seeming to calm her. She laughed softly. I kissed her, and then excused myself to go downstairs and switched on the television.