Welcome to My Breakdown

by Benilde Little

  My parents-in-law, Joan and Clifford Virgin.

  After thinking, reading, and consulting with his urologist in New Jersey and the cancer surgeon at Sloan-Kettering, Cliff decided the best option for treatment for him was active surveillance, even though getting the prostate biopsied every other year is invasive and very uncomfortable. His local doctor agreed with his choice, although he said most people can’t handle the uncertainty of cancer in their body and want to just take it out. “But most people aren’t like you,” he said. Cliff’s decision, which for me at the time was nerve-wracking (I wanted him to have it taken out), was the right one. Four years after the initial diagnosis, they haven’t been able to find any cancer in Cliff’s body. The doctors won’t actually say the words “cancer-free,” but so far there has been no visible sign of cancer anywhere. Grace.

  My longtime yoga teacher, Susan, had organized a yoga trip to Mexico. A poster featuring women doing downward-facing dog on a beach in Los Cabos hung in the elevator that led to the yoga studio. I’d noted the dates of the trip and mentally decided I couldn’t go. They would be there on my mother’s birthday. It was several weeks before it dawned on me that I wouldn’t be busy with my mom, celebrating her birthday, because she was gone. I was available to take the trip, but could I? I was still groping around on the dark floor of a cave of grief, and besides, we couldn’t afford it.

  “You can’t afford not go,” Susan said. “I’ll do whatever to help you.” Although the deadline had passed, she got me a room at a discounted rate, and I got myself packed and on the plane. I was armed with the thick Jonathan Franzen novel Freedom that I’d wanted to read but hadn’t been able to concentrate on. In my room at the Westin, I finished it sooner than I’d expected and found myself with time to read a second book. On my iPad, I toured the suggested readings on Amazon. The yellow and lavender cover of The Help kept popping up on the screen. I’d sworn I wouldn’t read it because I didn’t want to hear from another White woman rhapsodizing about her Black maid, with the maid merely being an angelic prop and not a fully realized character. But then, I thought, how could I criticize something that I hadn’t read? So I read the sample chapter. I was pulled in by the story. The writer did get the dialect right and captured some of the women’s inherent dignity and determination. Reading about the main Black character, Abiline, I kept thinking about my mother and the girl she was when she had worked as a nanny and a maid. Reading this book confirmed for me how clever these women had to be to survive, to push past the daily assaults on their humanity.

  The next day was February 11, Mom’s birthday. I sat out on the terrace of my hotel room, looking over the Sea of Cortez. I was glad to be sealed away from the other tourists at the resort, as I held up my vegetable juice in a solitary toast to Mom. She would’ve loved it here; she loved to travel anywhere, even Utah to see the Salt Lake Temple. I smiled as I recalled one of my favorite memories of my mother.

  With my girls in Sag Harbor: (from left) Wendy, me, Joni, Eleanore.

  For five years, Cliff and I had rented a house for the month of August in Sag Harbor, where we met. We’d rent in either Azurest or Sag Harbor Hills, which I called the colony. We’d usually invite my mom for a weekend to spend time with the kids and us. My mother, who’d passed on to me her love of the beach, would happily come, always agonizing about what to pack. I’d assure her the bay beach was small and private, that it wasn’t fancy; it was just family and friends. After my mom would put her bathing suit on, she would pull out two small disc-shaped jars and begin dotingly applying the contents to her legs. It was leg makeup.

  One day, Cliff and I were outside of our bungalow when we ran into Chester Redhead, a noted Harlem dentist. We got to talking and doing “Negro Geography” and it turned out that Cliff’s father and Dr. Redhead had gone to City College together. Cliff pulled out his cell phone and called his dad so the two men could speak. After that, Dr. Redhead invited us over for a drink. My mother, Cliff, Baldwin, and I strolled to his house, which was just a few feet from where we were renting. Inside it was a world away: beautiful Black art, Persian rugs, and lovely mahogany everywhere, including the glass cabinet. The place was not babyproofed and Baldwin was only two, so after one drink, I took her home, leaving Cliff and my mother to talk and have more drinks. When they got back hours later, Baldwin and I were chilling on the rattan couch.

  My mother had clearly passed her two-drink vodka-and-cranberry-juice limit. I went to her bedroom to help her out of her bathing suit.

  I asked her if they’d had a good time. She was beaming.

  “Oh, yeah. That’s some house. It’s somethin.’ ”

  “Yeah, it’s really nice.”

  “And facing the water like that . . . umph.”

  My mother’s voice sounded funny, and I looked at her. She was crying.

  “What’s the matter? Why’re you crying?”

  Unlike me, Clara rarely cried.

  “Neal,” she said, now in full sob. “I never thought I’d see Black people living like that!” Seeing that place and the others lined up beside it, Black Enterprise magnate Earl Graves’s place on one side, the late attorney Johnnie Cochran’s on the other, had filled her with pride. It said to her, we had overcome.

  Now, sitting on a terrace in Mexico and looking out at the Sea of Cortez on her birthday, I was happy I had been able to share that with her.

  She had given me so much.

  19

  Lawrence

  AS PAINFUL as it had been, my mother’s declining health and finally her death left me with an unexpected gift: my oldest brother Lawrence. My mother got pregnant with my brother Larry when she was sixteen years old, and she’d married his father.

  I used to like to dig through my mother’s things, her papers, jewelry, underwear, and her quilted box filled with crème lambskin, lavender suede, and black cotton gloves. One evening while she was making dinner, I was in her bedroom on the floor, going through her bottom dresser drawer. She used to have a large black leather clutch bag with all kinds of official-looking papers tucked inside. I came across a divorce decree. I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. I read the words and didn’t understand them, but there was something in the weight of the paper, the seal, the ink, that told me this was important. I got up from the floor with the paper in my hand and went to my mother, who was in the kitchen stirring a pot on the stove.

  I held it out to her.

  “Mommy, what does this mean?”

  She looked down at what I was holding and looked sort of amused.

  “That’s from Mommy’s divorce.”

  Divorce. I only barely knew the word. What I knew more strongly was how it made me feel. Like something illicit, like the four-thirty movies I liked to watch after school, the ones that starred Susan Hayward—Back Street and I Want to Live!

  “How are you divorced?”

  “I was married before, to Larry’s father. We didn’t get along, so we got a divorce.” She said it just like that, measured, matter-of-fact. I decided if it wasn’t a big dark secret to her, it wasn’t to me. What struck me as much as her response was how she’d let me just go through her things; it was as if there were no secrets between us, or at least it seemed that she didn’t want there to be.

  I didn’t really know Larry when I was growing up. Eighteen years was too much of an age difference, and whenever he did come around, Marc and Duane acted like he was a superhero and dominated his time. I do remember one Christmas, I believe I was thirteen and in the eighth grade, he bought me several dresses and a coat. I, a picky, style-conscious girl even then, hated all of it, and told my mom. Somehow, he said okay, ignoring my brattiness, and we went to the store together and picked out something that I liked. I don’t remember what happened after that. The rest of the memory has evaporated.

  Over the years I didn’t see him much, and he didn’t come to my wedding. When I asked my mom why he wasn’t coming, she said it was because he had to work. I thought that was strange, tha
t he wouldn’t take the day off, but I left it alone. I’m sure there was more to his decision. Years went by and I didn’t see Larry until I’d been married for a few years and invited him to the surprise party I gave for my mother when she turned seventy. It was the first time I really felt that he was my brother, not just my mother’s son. When my parents decided to finally sell their house in Newark, they moved to a community in Rahway that Larry had told them about, a place near his house.

  “I guess he wants to be near his mom, after all this time,” my mother said to me, couched as a joke.

  Before my parents moved from their house in Newark, I had spent two years off and on looking for adult living places for them closer to Montclair. My mother would reject them as too expensive or “for old people” (this was when she was eighty). I think it brought her some kind of peace and closure to be near Larry. I got to know him better during this time, too. I’d see him when I’d visit my parents. He dropped by their place a lot, usually bringing something, a TV, an answering machine, outdoor chairs for them to sit out on their terrace. I also saw how close he and my dad were. Theirs was a loving relationship that my brother Marc says has always been there. “Daddy used to take Larry to work with him when he drove that delivery truck,” Marc told me. “He wanted Larry to come and live with us, but Mommy said no.” Neither of us knew the entire story. Larry later told me that Daddy always introduced him as his son. “Matthew was always a good man,” he said.

  I got closer to Larry when Mom got sick. We were both at the apartment the time I’d found her, when it appeared that she’d had a stroke. He and I had waited outside the radiology department while they did the CAT scan at the hospital. We made small talk. I was wracked with worry, and it was clear that he was, too. It made me love him. When I got her to come and stay with us weeks before she died, it was Larry and Daddy who brought her. She was in a wheelchair and using an oxygen tank, insisting that she didn’t need any of it. Larry would come often to sit with her, and one week he even helped to pay the nurse I’d hired. I didn’t ask him for money, and he didn’t make a big deal over giving it to me. He simply wrote out a check and handed it to me. Until then, Cliff and I were the only ones paying. During the planning and leading up to the funeral, and after, I talked to him on the phone often; he was feeling that deep cut like I was.

  Two of my brothers spoke at the funeral. Larry and I sat mute. My brother Duane, whose voice broke at one point, said the gift we could give to our mother was to love one another as she had loved each of us. I have tried to stay connected with my brothers, but it’s hard when the mother dies. With my dad having dementia, there can be lots of resentment over who is doing more caretaking.

  The year after my mother died, I called Larry on his birthday, August 7, exactly one month after mine. I’d only just learned when his birthday fell. Larry and I chatted about the kids, his health, taxes, and a possible move out of the state or at least the county where he lived. After we hung up, I flashed on what Duane had said at the funeral. I felt warm inside, like Mom had approved. Larry told me a month later that my birthday phone call was the best he’d ever had.

  Mom and I used to talk about her life after she had left Larry’s father, which was shortly after they married. She told me that he’d hit her twice, and that was twice too many times. She packed up her baby son and moved back to her mother’s house even though it was already crowded with family. While I knew that his paternal grandparents had raised Larry, I was never clear about why.

  On a warm day, almost a year after Mom had been buried, Larry and I stood and talked in the cemetery parking lot. I asked him how he’d come to live with his grandparents.

  “One day my grandfather came to Grandma’s [my mother’s extended family’s house] and got me because I’d gotten sick with some kind of bronchitis and I wasn’t getting any better. He felt like nobody was really taking care of me over there. Mama was working a lot. He picked me up and took me to his house, and that’s where I stayed. It was fine because my grandparents were very loving.”

  Mom told me that once Larry went to live with his grandparents, she would take money to them for Larry every two weeks, when she got paid. “That man [her ex-husband] would chase me down the street, every single time, trying to catch me so he could beat me up,” she said. “I’d haul ass. He never could catch me.”

  Larry told me, “When Mama married Matthew, I’d go and visit. I was so happy when Marc was born. I had a brother. I would come and visit on the weekends and we’d play. When we were older, we would play in the playground across the street; they were on Rose Terrace at the time. Anytime a kid did something, if there was a fight, Mama always accused me of starting it and she’d beat me, whether I did it or not. One time Aunt Grace was babysitting us; she was always mad because she was only a teenager and just wanted to hang out. Grace told Mama that I’d called Marc a bastard. I hadn’t, but she didn’t believe me. I got the worst beating from her that I’ve gotten in my life. But I still never wanted to leave, to go back home. I was sad. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t live with them, with my brother.”

  Larry’s words made my heart hurt. I hugged him. I wanted to apologize for my mother, but what would that mean?

  I said it anyway. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”

  “No need,” he said.

  Still, I felt compelled to explain her. I told him that she was young and in pain and that it wasn’t him she was angry at; he just happened to be there; that she was angry at getting pregnant with him so young, at having to put all her dreams away in a drawer.

  “It’s okay,” Larry said. “I got a lot of love from my grandparents, and me and Mama, we had fun, too. It wasn’t all bad.”

  Still, I hurt for him.

  To Marc and Duane, Larry was someone they were proud to call “my big brother.” To me, Larry was a big, dark, and strange presence. Growing up, I didn’t understand his connection to our family, how was he my brothers’ brother and not mine, and if he was mine, too, why didn’t he live with us and why didn’t he look like us? It’s embarrassing to write this now, to admit it, but it’s the truth.

  Now that Mom’s gone, we don’t keep in touch like we did when she was sick and shortly after she passed, but I’ve gotten to know my big brother as man of his word, as a former marine; as someone whom I respect, and on whom I know I can always count.

  Mom working a mouton fur coat (right) in the 1940s; couple in photo unknown.

  20

  Code Switching

  ANOTHER WALLOWING day. How did this get to be my life? School drop-off, walk the dog, go to the gym, go home, think up dinner, make dinner, pick up one kid or meet his bus, serve snacks after school, help with homework, listen to stories of life in middle school—who’s smoking weed, who is a complete slut—have dinner when husband comes home, get some time alone while kids play with Dad, then either I put Ford to bed or Cliff does. I kiss them both good night, then watch TV with my husband till I fall asleep. Day ends. Repeat next day.

  None of it was enough to drown out the constant loop running in my brain: I’m going insane. I’m so sad all the time. If I don’t get some mental stimulation soon I’m gonna lose my mind. I have to find work, write another book, do something. I’m so tired of complaining. A book, maybe an article about women like me. I know there are hundreds, thousands. Of course, for Black women, these are Miss Ann problems ’cause most of us work ’cause we have to; I’m going to have to if the stock market doesn’t turn around soon, which it doesn’t look like it will, which means I should be looking for work now. Cliff’s commissions are down, and so is our income. I seriously can’t figure out what else to do. How did this get to be my life??

  There were of course a whole host of reasons why going back to work would be challenging—but that was exactly the muscle I needed to flex. I was not challenged. The biggest thing I faced daily was working out and keeping myself from sinking into a pit of depression so deep I might never pull out of it. The bl
ackness was always there, waiting to envelop me, waiting for me to show one bit of weakness, the tiniest crack, and then I’d be sunk.

  I decided to try an analyst who came highly recommended by a therapist friend. I got lost going to his office, which was right in my neighborhood, five minutes from my house. I couldn’t visualize in my mind where his house sat. I knew the street but couldn’t conceptualize the block. I drove back and forth along the street, passing his office several times. I called him twice from the car. I finally showed up, frazzled and frustrated by how difficult everything had become. He opened the door, and I saw deep-set, soulful eyes, disheveled hair, and a very wrinkled shirt. The fact that he was an analyst meant he had training beyond a PhD in psychology. He told me to call him by his first name, James.* I tried to make small talk, inquiring about his ethnic background and he shared that his family was of Greek extraction. He then asked about my background—family, husband, kids, the work I did. As he probed further, I told him about my mom’s death. His condolences seemed genuine, heartfelt. He asked questions about our relationship, and I managed to get through most of the session before my sobs became so intense that I could no longer talk. But I’d liked his face and the gentleness of his demeanor and decided to return.