His First Wife

by Grace Octavia

  But that didn’t stop me from feeling what I was feeling. When Jamison would walk into the house, my head would be full of questions. Not necessarily about whether he’d seen Coreen, but about how many times he’d walked into the house in the past after having been with her and wrapped his arms around me, and slept in my bed with her still on him. The thoughts stung me and, to be honest, I was simply afraid to really open that can of worms. So instead I’d roll my eyes when he walked into the room. Turn my back when he was getting ready for bed (he’d had sense enough to take up residence in one of the guest bedrooms). And mostly pretend he wasn’t around.

  But little, helpless babies who can do nothing when they are first born grow every day, and with each day, Tyrian seemed to want and demand more from us. He needed us on the spot, together. Or he’d cry and cry. Isabella couldn’t calm him, Aunt Luchie couldn’t calm him, and he hated my mother; but whenever Jamison and I would sit together and play kissing games with his hands, our son with the piercing eyes would sit quietly and soon drift off to sleep. It seemed Tyrian had another plan for his parents, and while we were trying hard to live with each other by living apart, Tyrian wasn’t having it. “He’s been here before,” Aunt Luchie said once as Jamison and I were forced to sit on the couch in Tyrian’s view. “He’s got an old soul. You can see it in those brown eyes.”

  Tyrian just laid back in his carrier, his eyes half-focused on the two of us and if one even seemed to shift to move, he’d break out into his little pleading cry—even if he was asleep.

  Our son was making our six-bedroom house quite small, and avoiding one another was becoming difficult.

  When Jamison came in from a meeting he’d had with a new landscaper, I was sitting on the couch in the den, watching Tyrian nurse as I enjoyed doing seemingly every minute of my life. While my mother was strongly against breast-feeding, claiming it was completely crass to do in public, everyone at the hospital kept saying it was “best for the baby,” so I decided to give it a shot, for the first month or so anyway. Plus, one of the nurses let me in on a little secret, that the baby weight went faster when you breast-fed. This news came just as I was on the fence about the whole thing. But while I couldn’t decide, I was desperate to lose weight, so breast-feeding it was. This was no easy task, especially at four in the morning when both Tyrian and I wanted to sleep, but Aunt Luchie, who’d been staying with us to help out, insisted that I feed him on the clock, sleep or not.

  “You two okay?” Jamison asked, poking his head into the den to ask his usual stupid question for the day. It was amazing how nearly everything that came out of his mouth sounded asinine to me now. Of course we were okay. We were sitting in the den, quietly. What did he think was going on?

  “We’re fine,” I responded flatly and smiled at Tyrian, who stopped sucking when he heard his father’s voice. “Your mother called about an hour ago. Right after you left.” Isabella told me that the witch had called. I wasn’t answering the house phone.

  “I know; she called my cell phone. I went over there to see her.”

  I just shook my head. This was extra information I hadn’t wanted nor asked for. He knew we weren’t communicating like that. I didn’t care about his comings and goings. He didn’t seem to want to tell me where he was going when he was on his way to see Coreen, so why should I care now?

  “She wanted to talk about Thanksgiving, next week,” Jamison added, introducing a conversation without my participation. In fact, he walked past me and sat on the other side of the couch.

  “Okay,” I said, moving Tyrian from my breast and to my shoulder to pat his back.

  “She thinks we should have it here . . . the dinner.”

  This simple announcement would’ve been accepted in any other household, but at this time and in this place it sounded like the announcement of an execution, a machine gun firing into a crowd. Tyrian punctuated his father’s words with a resounding belch. I felt his little body shake on my chest, and while I wanted to strike out at Jamison, I knew I couldn’t. I simply closed my eyes and prayed for patience. Jamison knew damn well that I hated having Thanksgiving with his mother. Those kinds of relationships just weren’t suited for holidays. Jamison and I had spent six of the first ten years of our marriage at my uncle’s house in Augusta with my mother and the other four times we were apart, as he’d gone to be with his family. This was also how we did Christmas, Easter, and any other holiday when black people felt a need to gather around the table. I couldn’t stand his mother and I wasn’t about to start pretending now. Not in my own house. I married the man, not the mother, and I was in no mood to put on a show. Not even with my son in the room.

  “Here?” I said finally, my eyes still closed, my mind still in prayer. “We’ve never had any holidays here.”

  “Why not? We have the space. A formal and informal living room, two dens, a media room, kitchen, six bedrooms, it’s the perfect place to have a big family Thanksgiving like I used to have when I was young,” he said. “We can invite people from both sides of the family. So everyone can come see Tyrian. A lot of people haven’t seen him yet.”

  “He’s only two weeks old.”

  “He’ll be three weeks then, past the time when the doctor said we can start letting people come over.”

  “Tyrian, where are you?” I heard Aunt Luchie calling from the kitchen. She’d taken to calling his name throughout the house whenever she was on her way to him. “Don’t hide from your Aunt Luchie.”

  Jamison and I sat frozen, our eyes averted as if we didn’t want anyone to know we’d been speaking.

  Aunt Luchie appeared in the living room, fully dressed in an overcoat.

  “There you are,” she said to Tyrian’s back. “Hiding in here with Mommy and Daddy.”

  She came over to me and gently took him from my arms.

  “Off for our first official walk,” she said, obviously trying her best to ignore the tension in the air.

  “Oh, no, he’s not ready yet. He could catch a cold,” I said, getting up from the couch.

  “Child, sit down,” Aunt Luchie said so forcefully I had to sit down. “It’s a beautiful day outside and this child has four snowsuits. He’s no more likely to catch a cold than any of us if I wrap him up right. Plus, it’s time he got some real air. And that you two had some quiet time.”

  “But I was just about to—”

  “To do what?” she cut me off. I dared not say anything. Aunt Luchie was usually smiles and hugs, but when she put her foot down, that was it. I was angry, but not crazy. The last thing I wanted in my house was an angry old black woman. Her eyes went from me to Jamison, just begging us to say something.

  “It’s settled then,” she said. “We’ll be back in fifteen minutes or so. After that, I’m sure he’ll be exhausted; I’ll take him right upstairs for a nap.”

  When she left the room, I got up and went into the kitchen to fix myself a sandwich.

  Pulling the ingredients from the refrigerator, I saw that Jamison had moved himself from the den to the kitchen too. He was sitting at the kitchen table looking just as stupid as he had in the den.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  “Talk?” There was a mix of sarcasm and comedy in my voice. I didn’t know why though. It just was. I didn’t want to talk to Jamison, but really inside I did. I hated him, but I still loved him. I wanted him to stop talking to me, but really I missed talking to him. I missed him. How could I feel all those things at once? But that didn’t stop me from having an attitude. I was still mad, and wanting to talk or not, the attitude was staying.

  “We can’t go on like this, not speaking,” he said. “It’s driving me crazy.”

  “Look, I don’t want to have Thanksgivings here. And that’s it.” I spread the mayonnaise on the bread in quick jerking strokes, nearly slicing it in two.

  “Not that, about everything. We never spoke about it. About what happened.”

  “Hum,” I said, putting two extra slices of cheese on the bread.


  “Look, just come over here and sit down,” he raised his voice. “I need to get this out.”

  “Oh, now you want me to sit down so you can get stuff out?” I slammed the sandwich down on the counter. “Okay then, if that’s what this is about. You want me to sit and listen?” I walked over to the table and sat next to him. “What do you have to say?”

  “Kerry, come on, can’t we just be adults about this?”

  “Adults? I’m sorry, I’m just remembering the other time I was supposed to meet you at this table to talk and you weren’t even here,” I said. “Do you remember that?” I paused. “No, don’t answer, maybe you can recall all the other times I tried to sit down to talk to you about what was going on and all you could say was that it was nothing and that I should stop being paranoid. Do you remember that?” I paused again. “No—don’t answer that either. Because maybe you can recall when I asked you to talk to me right in front of that bitch’s house and you couldn’t . . .” My voice cracked and just like that I was crying. “No, you wouldn’t talk to me then. Do you remember that?”

  “Stop it,” Jamison said, reaching over to grab my hand. “Just stop.” We sat in silence as I cried and tears gathered in the corners of his eyes.

  “I didn’t mean for none of this shit to happen,” he continued. “It just did.”

  “How, Jamison? How could something like that just happen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We were married. And happy. I mean, what would make you do that?”

  Jamison looked away.

  “We were happy, right?” I said.

  “I wasn’t unhappy,” he said. “But I wasn’t happy. I’m not going to say that’s what it was, because I’m a man and if I wasn’t happy with you, I know how to open my mouth and say it.”

  “Then what was it?” I wiped my tears and sat up in the seat.

  “Kerry, you’re my wife and I swear to God I don’t want another wife, but—” he said, “we just don’t seem to connect on a lot of things, and it bothers me so much that sometimes I don’t even want to talk to you.”

  “We don’t connect? On what?” I asked.

  “Come on, it’s not necessary to give an example,” he said.

  “Yes, it is. If you say we don’t connect, then tell me why.”

  “See you’re making everything I say an absolute and it’s not like that. We do connect. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be married. If we didn’t, I wouldn’t be in love with you,” he said. “But sometimes we don’t connect and our differences come up and it makes me feel like I’m alone. Like I’m married to someone who could not care less about how I feel.”

  “How you feel about what?”

  “The business—”

  “Oh, the business,” I said, cutting him off. “Here we go with that again.”

  “See, that’s exactly what I mean,” he said. “That brushing me off when you know how much I care about my business.”

  “Fine then, go ahead.”

  His elbow on the table, Jamison rested his forehead in the palm of his hand.

  “Look,” he started slowly, “I just know how you feel about it. That you don’t like it. What I do for a living.”

  “Jamison, please, I got over that years ago. You know that,” I said. We’d had that argument about ten million times after we’d gotten married and he made if obvious that Rake It Up was here to stay. Yes, I was mad that he never went to medical school, but this business was pulling in good money, and in the last five years he was making more money than he would’ve if he’d become a doctor.

  The front door opened and we heard Aunt Luchie come in with the baby. She was humming a song to him and we listened in silence as the hum faded as she carried Tyrian up to his bedroom.

  “You’re no more over the fact that I never went to medical school than my mother,” Jamison said. “You say you don’t care, but I can see it in your eyes. At least she says it.”

  “How can you tell me what I feel?” I raised my voice, but then lowered it again. “You don’t know that.”

  “No, I don’t know that, but I do know you. And I know in my heart that you wanted to be married to Jamison the doctor, not Jamison the man that owns a landscaping company. You can’t lie and say it’s not true. You didn’t even want to take my last name. Now, I was too young and excited about my company when we first got married to see how unhappy you were about Rake It Up, but your feelings have been growing more obvious over the years and it eats me up.”

  Of course I wanted Jamison to be a doctor. Everyone did. Jamison was the only one who was ever down with the Rake It Up plan. He knew that. He knew what I had riding on his going to med school. It was no secret.

  “‘A little company.’”

  “What?” I asked.

  “That’s what you said when the woman from Black Enterprise came over to interview me,” he said with tears rising in the corners of his eyes again. “She asked how you felt about all the attention the company was getting, and you said you were surprised that people cared so much about such ‘a little company.’” He paused and looked down at this feet. A tear fell to the floor. “That made me feel like shit. In my own house. In my own house I felt like shit. Like the money I’d made to pay for everything in here was nothing but some dirty money and it didn’t matter to you just because of how I made it. Because there was no M.D. after my name, it wasn’t worth as much as Damien’s money. It’s more, but it’s not the same, right? Because I don’t have the family name or the fucking title to validate me.”

  “That’s not it,” I said.

  “Yes, it is, and you know it. My own wife,” he said, “said my biggest dream was little.” His voice fell to a whisper. “But,” he paused and cleared his throat, “I told myself that it was just my Kerry being Kerry. The woman I loved was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, and I married her, so I’d have to deal with it. And it was easy to take like that. It was my cross to bear. But every time something like that would happen—you’d say you never wanted to come be with my family for the holidays, you acted like you didn’t want any of my family in the house I’ve already paid off, and telling me who I should know and how I should speak to them and make sure to mention who your wife is and what family she’s from like I’m some fucking nobody—and I just felt myself getting smaller and smaller and pulling away from you.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say anything to me about it?” I pleaded.

  “How am I supposed to say that to you? To say you make me feel like less of a man?”

  “Less?”

  “Kerry, if you don’t believe in me, in my dream, then how can I feel like a man for you? The only thing I can feel like is less,” he said. “And I didn’t even know that was how I was feeling. Not until . . .”

  “Until what?”

  “Until I met Coreen.”

  “So, she makes you feel like more of a man? That’s why you cheated on your wife? Because some tramp makes you feel like a man?” I heard myself screaming.

  “Again, it’s not that simple. You know me better than that,” Jamison said.

  “I thought I did.”

  “And I thought I knew you too, Kerry.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You’ve changed a lot over the years too,” he said. I stood up. I couldn’t take it anymore. He was just moving from one thing he hated about me to another. How was it that he was the one having an affair but this conversation was all about me? What about how he’d made me feel like less? How he’d changed?

  “I don’t want to hear this,” I said, walking past the sandwich on the counter. I’d lost my appetite.

  “Why not?” he asked, following behind me.

  “Because it’s not about me. This is about you, Jamison, not me.”

  “What happened to you going to med school?” he asked. I stopped. Right in the hallway between the front door and the kitchen, I stopped moving because I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “Exc
use me?” I asked turning to him.

  “I’m not the only one who didn’t go to med school in this house,” he said.

  “I changed because I didn’t go back to school?” This was news to me. Jamison never once brought up anything about me going to school. I’d been there when he started his business, and after I didn’t get into any schools the second time around I decided to help him with the business. Once it got off the ground and it was clear he didn’t need me, we bought the house and I put all of my energy into the house, into making sure my husband had a lovely home to come back to.

  “When we met, all you could do was talk about when you went to med school and how you were going to save the world,” he said. “That was never my dream. That was yours. I loved science and it paid for me to got to college, so being a doctor was a great option for me. It was what made me sound legit when I was trying to pledge and make friends on campus and date you, but that was never my dream.”

  I had thought of going to back to school a few times, but my feelings had been so hurt after the second round of rejections that I gave up on it. Jamison knew that.

  “Why did you give up on it, Kerry? Just because some people told you no? You know how many people told me no when I started my company? My own wife told me no. My own mother. But I kept fighting for my dream,” he said. His words hurt me. It was like I was being rejected all over again. “You ever think that maybe the reason you kept trying to tear down my dream was because you didn’t have your own anymore?” he said harshly.

  “I can’t do this,” I said, turning from him. “I just can’t talk about this anymore,” I blurted out and ran up the steps to my bedroom. I just wanted to be alone.

  INSTANT MESSENGER TRANSCRIPT

  DATE: 6/01/07

  TIME: 11:27 am

  Coreenissocute: There?

  Dablackannanicole: Yeah, I’m still here. I just had to put something in the fax machine. You OK?

  Coreenissocute: Hell no. This shit is crazy!!!!!!

  Dablackannanicole: I’m sorry to hear that. I know it has to hurt. We’ve all been down that road before. You know I’m here for you.