“I have gained a lot of weight. You know I have.” Chelsea scolded me with her eyes.
“Chelsea, you’re thin. You’ve always been thin and you know that. You probably need to gain a bit of weight,” I assured her.
“I don’t know about that,” she said. “So, when was the last time you saw him? It’s hard to forget someone you were so in love with.”
“I know. I can’t help but remember some of the good times, ya know? Now that it’s all over - it’s when you can see it in his eyes - that’s a killer. He once said to me ‘The second I see in your eyes that you no longer love me, is the second I will always regret and remember.’ I think I saw it in his eyes first. He wanted it that way. And I keep remembering that look he gave me when I realized he was just in it for the sex, and in fact he no longer cared about me at all. I felt so dirty. Anyway, this isn’t about me. This is about you and your man. I don’t want to talk about someone who should no longer exist in my mind.”
I tried to get back on track. I was sick of being hurt by men, fathers, stepfathers, and I was tired of being the victim. I wanted to be done with it. There had been too many, too much hurt, too much pity, and I vowed to move on.
“Our fathers weren’t exactly there for us.” Chelsea read my mind. “I find it extremely hard to trust Victor, and I think most of it has to do with how my father was with us. Your father was even worse than mine.”
“I just don’t get how our fathers didn’t want to be a part of such amazing women’s lives?”
“Tell me about it. That’s life, eh?”
After my mom divorced my father six months after I was born (it was a clear-cut case of infidelity on his part), she left Florida and went back to Maryland to live with her mother. We saw my father about once a year from then on, for two weeks in the summer. I couldn’t wait to be with my Daddy; those summers meant I was one step closer to fulfilling my dream of having a father in my life. Unfortunately, we didn’t actually see him much at all. If it wasn’t his work commitments, it was his obsession with golf or movies and he made sure he wasn’t around.
I never hated him for how he was, I couldn’t. He would’ve preferred never to have been a father at all. But for me, any amount of time I had with him was too precious and rare; I wasn’t willing to sacrifice those moments with him by being angry. When I was with him, I tried to believe that parents all do the best that they can.
However, I can’t help but think that he just didn’t do the best he could, and I was angry when I was away from him. There were times when he had the chance to step up to the plate. God knows I gave him plenty. And, it was truly heartbreaking if I spent any amount of time considering why he didn’t plan those few weeks a year with his daughters a bit better. It was only two weeks, for Christ’s sake.
In quiet moments, this is simply my father. He is how he is and I will always love him, no matter what. He is one of the most charismatic, well-rounded, and intelligent men I have ever met. For this, he will always keep me intrigued and attached. In other times, I am not as rational, and I want nothing more than to expel him from my life.
“The other side of it is that I only had to deal with my father. You had two other stepfathers who broke your heart,” Chelsea reminded me.
“Oh, whatever,” I dismissed it. “Everyone has a sad story, don’t they?”
But it wasn’t whatever. There were two stepfathers. It took a long time for me to accept either stepfather into my life. Eventually, I did, but like most relationships, those didn’t work out either, and my sister, my mom and I picked up the pieces together.
My mother’s boyfriends. Barry the mechanic was the one that hurt the most.
A few years after my mom’s third divorce (first divorce was man before we were born, second was our father, third was a Jewish guy named Jerry), she met a rich mechanic named Barry. Barry was married, but they had an affair. He was the most kind-mannered, gentle man I had ever met.
He came from a world where you worked hard to get what you want, and never boasted about your skills or possessions. His hands were dyed black from the engines he worked on day in and day out, and he embodied the old-fashioned tall, dark and handsome. He had seventeen old cars and nine motorcycles in his garage in the countryside, and would let me ride with him. It scared the shit out of my ten year old self, but the safety he embodied allowed him to be the first man I trusted, and so I clung onto his back while he steered me through the windy, country roads. I still have the scar on my leg from where the motorcycle engine’s exhaust pipe burnt me. My first, but not my only scar…the first of two lifelong scars.
It wasn’t his fault he hurt me when he left us, but I don’t think I ever truly got over it. You usually don’t with your first love.
That relationship was never going to go anywhere - him already being a devoted husband to another woman, but at the age of ten, I didn’t realize this. A year into their romance, he turned up at my mom’s house - that he helped pay for - with a rose in one hand, a card in another and a trembling bottom lip. I was sitting on the front porch swing thinking how much my mother would appreciate that rose.
Instead of going inside, he came straight for me, and so, famously being the man of few words, said “I’m sorry” - and with a kiss on the cheek and a tear in his eye, he was gone.
I’d looked around confused and startled - thinking someone was watching and playing a joke. I opened the card, and out fell a $50 note. In the card, he had written a message in his tiny, cursive handwriting that didn’t want to be noticed. It said, “I’m sorry I have to say goodbye. You will always be in my heart, beautiful girl.” I dropped it and ran down the street thinking I could catch him. I was wrong. He was gone.
He had two other children and a wife to tend to. It would never have worked. A rose will never represent beauty when the thorns are the only part you can focus on.
A year later she met Tim. He was not rich. He was not charming. He was a police officer. And I was a teenager. None of these things went hand in hand. I refused to speak to him for the first two years of their marriage. Three months after they met, he promised her he would help her out financially and they got married on our front lawn with the reception at McDonald’s. It was his fourth marriage as well as hers, so best to spare the frivolities.
He moved into the house that Barry the mechanic had built. But, Tim grew on me, as eventually they all did. He became my soccer coach, my guardian, my protector. I learned to love him after all. But the increasing tension between him and my mother throughout the years and the ensuing drinking and shouting, wore me down just as quickly.
On my 18th birthday, I flew to college in the city furthest away from Baltimore and everything at home - Los Angeles. And it was here I made my new home and tried to reconcile my opinion of my childhood. It wasn’t a bad childhood. It wasn’t. I just wished my mother had believed in herself more. It made me determined to make it on my own, without the help of a man. I would never marry, I often told myself.
“Yeah, everyone has a story,” Chelsea said. She took a sip of her wine.
“They do, but let’s hear yours. Four months of catching up to do. So you love Victor, you were saying?” I wanted to refocus on what was happening in Chelsea’s life. My broken male past would have to wait for another time. After all, this was quality time alone with her that I might not get again for a long time.
“Yes, sorry. We don’t have to talk about him. I do love him…he just infuriates me sometimes. I’m always feeling guilty for this or for that, but I love him,” Chelsea said.
“I’m sure you do love him, Chelsea. I mean, you married him for a reason, right?” I didn’t know what else to say. She looked so delicate right now, and I felt if I said anything in the slightest bit against Victor, that she would break. I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. We still had a week left to get to the bottom of this, and I had to let it come out organically.
“I just hope he doesn’t get too mad about the whole thing.” Chelsea’s finge
rtip circled the rim of the wine glass. “I mean, I gave him over a month’s notice to come out here, but he was still giving me all these guilt trips about leaving him.” She stopped her finger circling the glass and pondered something.
“While you were at work today,” she continued, “he called me three times to tell me he couldn’t believe I had left him like that, and kept texting me stupid questions like where his button down shirt was with the green trim. I hate that shirt….” She paused and again cocked her head to the side, and looked up at the ceiling of my apartment. I followed her gaze, and noticed the dead spider that had been there since last Easter. Must get a broom up there one day.
“Apparently, he’s going out tonight with the boys, and was thinking about flying to Miami this weekend.”
“Miami? Why would he go to Miami?” I asked. “I thought he just went away?”
“He did. I know he’s doing it to try to make me jealous. But why does he have to do that? This is the first time I’ve ever gone on a vacation since we’ve been together, even with all his vacations without me. Why can’t he just let me have my fun?” She was venting, and I was so glad.
“You can’t let him get to you,” I said. I poured some more Charles Shaw Shiraz (a.k.a. “two buck chuck” - the finest of Californian wines) into both of our glasses. “Like you said, he’s doing this to get under your skin. This is your time to enjoy LA, to get away from Baltimore, your work and him. I mean, I know you don’t want to get away from him - ” I had to be careful what words I chose. “But sometimes everyone needs a break. You deserve this. You’ve been working your ass off ever since you graduated from college, which, by the way, I was never happy that you decided to stay on the east coast.”
“Whoa. Hold on a minute. You were the one who had to travel 3,000 miles away. I just drove thirty minutes to DC, and that was that,” she said.
“I know. I guess I always figured we would have been near each other for college. I mean, even when you went to boarding school in Ohio, we saw each other at least once a month. God, do you remember me driving through that horrendous storm to go with you to that school dance? My poor little Honda Civic hatchback had to endure so much. It nearly drowned.”
“I still can’t believe you drove eight hours in that. You were a crazy woman,” she said and laughed.
“You and Zayna were the crazy women. Always sneaking out, smoking weed, listening to Bone Thugs. I never understood the Bone Thugs ‘N Harmony obsession,” I said. During those years, we had both met our new best friends – for me it was Sam and for her it was Zayna.
“Yeah, well, Bone Thugs didn’t come between you and me, don’t you worry.” Our newfound confidantes didn’t impact our sisterly bond. We loved our new respective best friends, but they could never have the history that we shared.
“I think it’s sad our mothers don’t really talk anymore,” she said.
When Chelsea and I met, we were six years old, waiting for the big yellow school bus with our sisters. It was our first day of first grade. I had my hair in a high ponytail fountain with my bangs curled under, and was wearing a white turtleneck shirt under a red and black plaid dress that Grandma Cruz had made for my older sister, Ariel. Black patent leather shoes with white frilly socks completed the outfit.
Chelsea’s hair hadn’t quite grown into the long curls that she had now, and was combed straight into a bob with two pieces pinned up perfectly. She was wearing a navy blue pleated skirt with a button down freshly pressed white collared shirt. She could have been straight out of a catalogue. Her older sister Leah was a bit more rebellious; she went for jeans and a t-shirt.
Chelsea was a good girl, in fact, the best girl I had ever met; she did everything her mother asked of her, never wanting to get her clothes messed up, and always working on her homework. I, on the other hand, was the opposite. I wasn’t a bad kid, but I had an opinion about everything, I tested my boundaries at every chance, and never did homework until the morning of. She was sensitive and pink and I was a tomboy and thick-skinned.
Once we realized we lived across the street from each other, all four of us were inseparable. Leah and Ariel, Chelsea and me, and our two mothers. Two years later when we got the devastating news that we would be moving three hours north to New Jersey, we were inconsolable.
This was it. No more dance routines, no more New Year’s Eve performances, no more running across the street to play with my best friend, no more sleepovers or early morning Chinese jump rope, no more weekends spent baking cakes or riding bikes. Just a new school with new, strange kids who didn’t particularly like new, out-of-state students coming in.
When we moved back to Baltimore two years later, her mom found a house across the street from us again – Willow Avenue. Both of our mothers had divorced their husbands since the last time we lived across from each other. My mom became single again once she realized she needed love to make a marriage work, and her mom became single once she realized she couldn’t stay married to an alcoholic.
Ariel and Leah became even closer as rebellious teens, Chelsea and I as dorky pre-teens and our mothers as single, hot, forty year old moms. We were a strong group of women who relied on our counterparts for laughter and consolation. Since then, both of our mothers have changed.
“I guess our moms are at different points in their lives,” I said.
“Yeah, my mom has become so conservative in her old age,” she said. “And, well, your mom -”
“Has become the most extreme liberal you could imagine?” I finished her sentence. “You could definitely say that. I guess we all change when we are in a relationship, don’t we?” I tried not to laden that sentence with too much innuendo. As soon as Victor came into the picture, Chelsea cut herself off from everyone she loved. She moved to the suburbs, bought a Toyota, and started a retirement plan. She began to drink herself heavily into oblivion on the weekends to mask her unhappiness - I’m worried about her. Vegas will be interesting.
We were all unhappy and confused in our early twenties. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to add a marriage to that mix. Her family didn’t accept him, and she felt betrayed by that. Like me, she was deeply concerned with what her mother thought about her decisions; it impacted her heavily, but this was her first time to prove that she was an adult, and she wouldn’t let others’ opinions change her mind this time.
Chelsea did love him. There was no question. I just wasn’t sure her love could save a marriage that didn’t have any trust.
“Is there any way you can get off early on Friday?” Chelsea said. “Zayna said she’s around all day Thursday and can show me around Beverly Hills, but Friday is a bit tough for her.” Chels flashed me that cunning smile that she only used when there was no chance of her backing down.
“I really don’t want to be alone all day long,” Chelsea finished.
“I just don’t want to push it. My boss has been really lenient so far, but she pays me really well, and I can’t afford to lose this job.” I gave her my excuse. It was a lame one, but it was the truth. The fact that it was Easter weekend wouldn’t help win the argument for an extra day off with my Jewish boss.
“Yeah, but how often is your bff in town with no husband and no responsibilities? I definitely understand if you can’t, I mean, I don’t want to be annoying.” She’s so good at not sounding pushy, but still getting her point across.
I knew she was right, and I felt so selfish for not having taken time off work before she got here, but what was I to do? The casting job I had two months before went belly up because of the writer’s strike in Hollywood. My job as a personal assistant to the devil incarnate paid me more, but I still had bills coming out of my ass. My studio apartment cost me $1,000 per month, my gas guzzler of a Ford Explorer cost me $75 a tank, college loans were being paid back, credit card bills, health insurance bills – not to mention drinks and dining expenses that are a must for every aspiring actress in Hollywood.
I had always promised myself I wouldn’t ge
t in this position, but then again, I had promised myself I would always live life to the fullest. Living life to the fullest took a toll on the bank account.
And did being a responsible adult necessarily mean that I had to give up any spontaneity or fun? Wasn’t that what having kids and getting married was for? I imagined myself on my deathbed and looking back over my life. Would I regret not going to work tomorrow or not jumping at the chance to spend an extra day with my best friend in need?
The answer came coursing through my veins like the sound of drums through an African village. Did I truly think I was alive as a 25 year old living in Hollywood, staying in every night in my dark studio apartment listening to my self-help tapes, going to bed by nine because I had to be at the gym by 6 am the next morning? Did I think it was an exciting thing to spend twelve hours a day working on cleaning out someone else’s garage, and not get thanked? Did I think it was healthy to not have gone on a date in a year (and no, ex-boyfriends stopping by unannounced looking for some poonany didn’t count)? This was not the time to be pragmatic. This was the time to live and let live.
“YESSS!! I’ll do it!!” I screamed in her face.
“Wow. That was a change in attitude.” She gently wiped my spit off her face. “I’d like the news, not the weather, demon woman. Damn, I thought your face was going to permanently stay in that position.”
“We’ll leave early Friday for Vegas, and I’ll see what I can do about Monday, but I can’t promise four days. Is that OK?”
“No, that’s perfect! And when you go to work tomorrow, I’ll burn the CDs for the road trip!” There was truly nothing like Chelsea’s mixed tapes. That perfect compilation of oldies meets goldies meets upbeat dance music made her the ultimate road trip DJ.
Sunday, 4 May, 2008
TIA fair lady, TIA,
Not Transient Ischaemic Attack (as was known in my previous job) but it’s a saying they have out here. TIA = This Is Africa.
Why? Well it’s because this is a brilliantly inefficient country. You order food it takes 2 hours, you take a bus that should take 2 hours, it takes 5, they drink warm beer, the electric fails at least twice a day, the water’s nearly always cold. I mean the list is endless but people just shrug their shoulders and say TIA - This Is Africa. I love it. People just get on with it and I’m slowly learning.
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