Welcome to My Breakdown

by Benilde Little

  The girl stepped back and looked Baldwin up and down.

  “My sista gave it to me.”

  “Um, well, can I see the label?”

  The girl said, “Hell no,” and turned to walk away.

  Baldwin followed the girl, tapped her on the shoulder, and said, “That’s my jacket.” The girl was now walking faster to get away from Baldwin, but she wouldn’t let it go.

  “We can do this nice or we can do it nasty,” Baldwin told her. “I’ve already reported it stolen to security, and there are cameras around.”

  The girl gave Baldwin a malevolent look, at this point probably not sure she wasn’t crazy. She rolled her eyes, took the jacket off, and handed it over.

  When Baldwin called me from school to tell me the story, I was incredulous.

  “You did what?”

  I called Cliff at work and told him. I was proud of the way she’d handled herself. Cliff was worried that there might be a crowd of girls waiting for her after school, something I hadn’t considered, something that would have happened at my school. I called her back and she assured me that everything was cool, that there was nothing like that to worry about. She was right. When she came home and retold me this story, I held my arms out and bowed as if reciting Dana Carvey’s famous SNL line, “I’m not worthy.” I knew, right then, that she was going be okay, better than okay. I knew we’d made the right choice in sending her to public school, because she was learning how to navigate the complicated reality of being Black in America. She understood what it meant to be able to code switch, to be bicultural.

  It’s often necessary to be schizophrenic in order to be healthy and Black. You have to be able to speak affluent suburbia, hood, and neutral. Baldwin knew the necessity of being able to roll with the many versions of Black girl, among them: the Black/White, the BAP, the Pookie. The Black/White girl is nonracially identified. She prefers rock, folk, and Maroon 5 to Trey Songz or Drake. The BAP (Black American Princess) prefers Cartier, private school, and Martha’s Vineyard. The Pookie might have a baby and lots of burgundy hair extensions. It’s been said that our children are born to us to be our teachers. While I’ve been various combinations of Black girl, at different points in my life, I learned my best lesson in code switching from my child. Baldwin showed me that the key is knowing the code, but not switching who you are.

  21

  A-1 Daughter

  MY MOTHER’S friend Amy Jones called me on my first Mother’s Day without my mom. Amy is at least twenty years younger than Mom but had been one of her dearest friends in the last decades of her life. They’d met while serving on Newark boards together—the Status of Women commission or the rent board. Amy was one of the many people who simply wanted nothing more than to bask in Mom’s specialness. It had been a hard week leading up to Mother’s Day. Walking into CVS, I’d avoided the card section but still ended up leaving the store without whatever I’d gone in there for. The whole month had been wrenching, especially the late realization that I didn’t have a gift to buy. I’d always stressed over whether to buy something practical or sentimental, unless Mom had use for another sweater or shawl and said so. When Amy called that morning, Cliff and the kids had made breakfast and brought it to me in bed, as they always did. They were lying across the bed as I sat propped up with pillows, eating but without an appetite.

  Amy said, “I just wanted to tell you that you were an A-1 daughter. I know this day is going to be hard for you, but I want you to know that your mother was so proud of you. She used to talk about you all the time. She loved you so much, and she loved your children. She never complained about you; the only thing she said was that you couldn’t cook a Thanksgiving meal.”

  By now I was crying, especially when I heard the bit about the Thanksgiving dinner. I couldn’t stop crying and smiling. It was classic Mom.

  I thanked Amy, who released me from the phone call before I had to go searching for an excuse to get off. Cliff and the kids left me alone, knowing I needed to cry—the kind of crying that had to be done in private.

  In early June, I had one of my worst days as a mother since my mom had died. It was a rainy, dark day that looked like nine at night at 8 a.m. Baldwin had gotten herself out of the house but called almost as soon as she got to school, asking me to pick her up after third period. She wasn’t feeling well but said nothing specific was wrong.

  “No, I’m not coming. Stay in school until the end of the day and I’ll pick you up.” I hung up and rolled over in my bed.

  I knew that she was tired because she had stayed up too late. I no longer had the strength to fight with her: Go to bed, get up, do your homework, eat something, eat your vegetables, pack your lunch, take your EpiPen, wear your bracelet (her MedicAlert bracelet stating that she had a nut allergy). I hated everything; I didn’t know how I was going to make it.

  The next morning I saw I’d gotten another sympathy card. I found it lying on the kitchen counter. It had been three months. I opened the envelope. The card was from the head of Ford’s nursery school. I cried just at the sight of Gingi Donohue’s name. I’d heard that she had just lost her ninety-plus-year-old mom. I knew what her grief felt like. I knew it didn’t matter how old they were. We each knew in our bones the specific pain of losing one so close, so vital to who you were. Since I’d lost my mother, I’d begun putting people into two categories: those who had lost mothers and those who hadn’t. Generally, the ones who hadn’t experienced the loss were the ones who didn’t call or send a card or come to the service. Some even called to complain about mundane problems and “forgot” that my mother had died.

  I put the card down and started making my pot of coffee. Cliff was standing in the kitchen, readying to leave for work, and he was taking Baldwin with him. She was taking forever to get dressed. I turned back to the coffee and began to cry again. The smell of the grounds reminded me of my mom, an inveterate coffee drinker.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever get over this,” I whispered.

  Cliff looked at me, knowingly.

  “It takes a long time.”

  I went outside to get the paper from the driveway. I was dressed in a robe and the beach cover-up I’d worn the day before when I took Ford to the pool. I’d slept in it. I’d developed a habit of sleeping in my clothes, of falling into a deep stupor without the routine of washing my face, brushing and flossing my teeth. I looked down the street at the young men who worked on the garbage trucks. I began to think about who they were. Most of them were Black; many had grown up right here in Montclair, had gone to high school right here alongside kids who went off to Brown and Williams and Princeton and Morehouse and Rutgers. I again flashed to my own high school: Number one from my high school had chosen to go to Howard, number two to Yale; some were doing okay, but too many were not. I’d gone to college because of my mother. I hadn’t become a teenage mother because of my mother. I had the kind of life I had because of my mother. I’d been no model high school student. She’d never given up on me. College had been the golden ticket in my mother’s eyes. Growing up, my brothers and I all understood that college wasn’t an if, simply a where.

  I heard the noise of the garbage truck churning smelly waste that people tossed out without a thought as to how the refuse disappeared. I thought about those city jobs, coveted among some people where I grew up, the ones who didn’t have parents who could advocate for them in school and who therefore ended up with few options. I could’ve been one of those kids if I hadn’t had Clara. People who knew me as an adult would be shocked to hear me say that, and might even debate that idea.

  “Not you, you’re so ambitious, you would’ve succeed on your own,” they’d argue. Maybe. It was hard for most people who didn’t know my mother to grasp the role she’d played. I would try to tell them what a force I’d had pushing me at every stage.

  The phone was ringing when I came back into the house. It was Jacquie, a fellow suburban wife who was also on a journey to figure out how to be happy, calling to invite me to So
uth Beach in two weeks, when school was out. She had two nights free in the just-opened Mondrian Hotel.

  “Do I wanna go?”

  I looked around my kitchen, the sink still filled with last night’s pots and pans, counters sticky, floor needing to be swept, and I knew I’d be willing to go anywhere right about now; an overnight to Dairy Queen alone would be a thrill.

  For three days we lounged in our all-white, smallish but oh-so-chic suite. We ate Thai rice with avocado and sushi at Nobu. We wandered around town, drooling over the home furnishings in Jonathan Adler, Roost, and Nest. We drank sweet cocktails and lounged by the pool. By the time I came home, everything was looking better. Much of my listlessness was gone.

  I came home for two days, and then the family was off to Anguilla for the wedding of the daughter of our friends Reggie and Stephanie, the latter of whom had once been my boss at Essence. I’d watched her daughter Anique grow up, so this wedding was special. The Caribbean setting, the deep fuchsia dresses the bridesmaids wore, and Anique, a gorgeous professional dancer in her beautiful bridal gown, were just what we all needed. We had a great family time, staying in the same beautiful villa where we’d stayed twice before. The first time I’d seen it had been when Cliff took me for my fiftieth. I stood in the foyer, looking at the galley kitchen and the sunken limestone-floor living room that led out to a wraparound patio and a private pool. I turned to Cliff and said, “Where’s the lobby?” I couldn’t believe this place was just for us.

  My travel had distracted me, but the distraction had proven to be just that. Before my tan had faded, the emotional blackness was back, stronger than before.

  It was Sunday. I’d felt so good all day. The way I’d love to feel every day. I kept trying to figure out what the exact ingredients were. I’d slept in a little, then gotten up and had my coffee while I read the paper in the family room as Ford watched cartoons. Maybe it was the carrot, cucumber, celery, apple, and ginger juice I’d had as breakfast. All day I was just in a good mood, actually felt optimistic. I was on the fence about staying on antidepressants, and today I felt strongly that I didn’t need them.

  That night I hadn’t been able to sleep. After hours of switching from side to side, I realized it was the allergy medicine I’d taken earlier. I rolled, turned on the light, and read the sticker on the bottle of Singulair, which said it can cause depressive moods and sleeplessness. “Write your way out of it,” my husband and some of my friends used to tell me, and I could on a good day.

  Why did I watch Revolutionary Road? Baldwin had begged me to, and I relented. It was depressing enough the first time I watched it. The one person in the movie who is insane is the only one who sees things as they really are: He asks the husband, the main character, Leonardo DiCaprio, “Why do you work at a job you hate?” And DiCaprio says, “So I can have a nice life.” The other guy says, “Oh, I know, the nicer the house the more you hate your job.” It’s a story, set in the 1950s, about a couple who, when they meet, are against the bourgeois suburban life. After they find themselves living that life, the wife convinces the husband that they should move to Paris. They begin packing and planning and telling all their very skeptical friends. Then the wife, Kate Winslet, gets pregnant. DiCaprio wants to stay in the States because of the baby. Winslet loses her mind and dies after trying to give herself an abortion.

  I know why this movie gets to me. I, too, find much of the bourgeois suburban lifestyle to be stifling. “Why did I let you make me watch this again?” I said to Baldwin, who loved the movie.

  “Mom, you just need to start writing again, then you’ll feel better,” she said. She was fourteen at the time and not yet a writer herself.

  The movie made me think maybe we should move back to the city. My longing for it had never really died. When I left it for the suburbs seventeen years ago, I hadn’t wanted to move. I used to tell people that the scuff marks from my shoes were still on the pavement in front of the Lincoln Tunnel entrance.

  “If you’re going to write full-time, you can do that anywhere,” Cliff had said. He was right of course, but I didn’t want to become a suburbanite. It just didn’t fit my self-image. I wore black all the time, loved to walk all over the city, dropping in at an art movie house in the middle of the afternoon, or sitting outside in a café and people watching. I loved leaving my apartment on a Saturday or Sunday without any plans and just wandering the streets of Manhattan, alone or with a friend, stumbling upon a street fair, being out all day, from having brunch at Popover Café, to going to the Village and hearing some jazz, to having dinner someplace good and cheap. These things felt fundamental to who I was; how would I duplicate this in the burbs?

  It was now six months after Mom had died. I lay awake on the third floor in the old au pair’s room. It’s a tiny room with blue and white toile wallpaper and eaves that I love. You can hear the rain in that room and feel as if you’re in a cozy cave in an Amazonian forest. I had gone there because Cliff was snoring again, loudly enough to hear from a floor away. It woke me up and pissed me off. There was a running list in my head of what I had to get done today and how was I going to get it all done? Not that it was so much—get a new printer cartridge, meet Carmen for lunch, register Ford for fall soccer, call my nutritionist to see if my order of green dirt had come in yet, return jeans that stretched out too much to the Gap, and return an overpriced cargo jacket to J.Crew.

  That night, I met my novelist friend Laurie Albanese at the train to head to Cobble Hill in Brooklyn. We were meeting my writer crew, Christina and Pam. Pam had an assignment from More magazine to find the next hot cocktail, the Cosmo for a new generation. She’d invited us to go along to offer our opinions. Laurie and I planned to ride the train together from Montclair. Cliff, who drove me to the station, waited with me on a park bench until Laurie arrived. I was feeling happy to be going on an adventure but a little nervous because I had no idea what subway to take to Cobble Hill once we got into Manhattan. I felt inept for having to rely on Laurie, but in my depressive state, my mind was clouded and I couldn’t process any new information. We got to the place, known for having a most innovative bartender, and I greedily perused the list of unusual and yummy-looking cocktails and appetizers. We had booked a car service take us home so that we could drink until we had no memory of what we talked about other than which drinks we liked.

  I got up the next day a little before nine, groggy from not having had a solid night’s sleep. I got Ford off to baseball camp, and with a breakfast that wasn’t supplied by Dunkin’ Donuts. I dropped him off at Edgemont Park and sat in the car for a moment, surveying how I was feeling—a little more in control of what I have to do. I got home, opened the New York Times, and it said it was Wednesday, not Thursday as I’d thought. Now I was in panic mode. For at least a solid ten minutes, my head was spinning, heart beating fast, as I wondered about all the things I must have missed, all that I hadn’t done. It took a while longer for me to remember that I’d picked up another paper off the driveway this morning and that it was still in its blue plastic wrapper. It was simply that I hadn’t read yesterday’s paper. I was getting thrown like that way too often.

  22

  Waking Up

  ANOTHER NIGHT. I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep, my brain scanning. Ford was about to start sixth grade and I needed to get . . . I sat bolt upright at the thought that Ford was about to start middle school. I realized with a shock that I’d been home for his entire elementary school career. Six years. Had I been asleep for six years? How could this be?, I asked myself, surveying my brain for some kind of explanation. I was like a character in a novel or a romantic comedy who bumps her head and wakes up to find she has a completely different life.

  But I didn’t have the luxury of lamenting the six years I’d lost in the domestic dungeon. My father would be moving in with us soon—he had dementia—but first I had to move him out of his apartment. Duane got Goodwill to come and take most of the furniture. There was no time to figure out what I could give a
way to relatives or friends. Jessica, the caregiver I’d hired to help with Dad, was at the apartment helping me pack up. Duane and Larry helped some, but it was mostly on me. My friend Will was a godsend who offered his assistance and his truck. He and I, along with Mo, another dog-walking friend, moved a bed, a nightstand, and a lamp into a room in our house that had been an office/sports equipment storage space.

  My dad is a lovely man. He is tall and movie star handsome, Southern, and very polite. However, his emotions are muted, and I’ve often wondered if it’s because he was traumatized by his time on the USS Franklin.

  My dad had had nightmares throughout my childhood. He would wake up screaming at least once a week. When I was young, I would be asleep when the dreams came, but as I got older and was able to stay up later with my brothers on weekends, we’d hear him yelling, screaming. We never could make out the words. When my mother was home from work, and Daddy was having a dream, she would go into the bedroom and shake him awake, telling him that it was only a dream. Daddy would lie in bed for a little while and get up and go to the bathroom, his face stricken. He never mentioned his nightmares until decades later, after he retired and started going to reunions with his shipmates.

  He and my mother loved traveling to different parts of the country, every other year, for the ship reunions. Mom eventually got my dad to see a psychiatrist, or, as my dad called him, “my head doctor,” at the VA hospital. The dreams went away. I asked him recently what the doctor was like, if he liked him.

  “He’s nice, he’s real nice. He’s a young man, I guess in his forties. He just asks how I’m doing, now, especially since Mom is gone.”

  I was proud of him for going, but after my mother died, he eventually stopped.

  “Nothing really to talk about,” he said when I asked him why.