Welcome to My Breakdown

by Benilde Little

  I told him that maybe this was a good time to check in with the doctor to talk to him about grief and depression, but my dad grunted and let me know that he didn’t care what I had to say. He wasn’t going to go back and that was that.

  My father moving in with us hadn’t been the plan, but it became the only option. After Mom died, my brother had, surprisingly, relocated to New Jersey after thirty-plus years in Jacksonville, Florida, to look after Dad. My brother was a great help when he was here, taking my dad to the doctor, being his companion. Daddy was so lonesome without Mom. They’d been married for almost sixty years, and I frankly thought he’d die soon after her. Marc would help keep him active in the adult community where they lived. Without being pushed, Daddy wouldn’t participate in anything in the building. The first year Marc was with him, Daddy seemed fine, but by the second year Marc began to notice things, like Daddy’s obsession with the mail, especially lottery swindles. When he sent five thousand dollars to a scam lottery out of Australia, via Jamaica, we knew he was losing it. He’d even called me one day saying he had “great news. I’m going to get four million dollars.”

  My heart ached. He sounded so happy; I didn’t have it in me to tell him that the whole thing had been a con. Then he started getting up on a Thursday night and putting on a suit. He’d come out of his bedroom fully dressed, and Marc would ask him where he was going. Daddy would think it was Sunday morning and he was going to church. Marc even thought once that Daddy had been in the hallway of his floor dressed in his underwear. It became clear that our father couldn’t be left alone when Daddy stayed with me for a month while Marc went back to visit Jacksonville. We saw just how far he’d deteriorated in his dementia. My brother had initially planned to come back and stay in New Jersey to help out with Dad’s care, but ultimately he decided to move back to Florida. My dad still talked about the four million dollars that he thought he’d won. Sometimes he thought it was coming; other times he said that they lied to him and were keeping the money.

  Most of the time he lived with us he never said my name. Sometimes, he referred to me as his daughter, sometimes I was the young lady. Only once or twice he asked me who I was and how we were related, but those times were enough. They were like sucker punches.

  After a year, I moved him into an assisted living facility and he was put on an Alzheimer’s drug, Namenda. He knew my name after that and even introduced me as “my daughter, my baby.”

  My exercise routine was no longer working as a mood-lifter. I felt myself being progressively sucked down into a hole in the ground. I tried everything to fight it, but I didn’t have the strength. I knew that I should be happy. I had such a good life. But. It was almost as if the more stuff we acquired (and I had to take care of)—the bigger house, the gorgeous yard and garden, the architecturally designed basement—the unhappier and more disconnected from myself I became. I know this now, but didn’t then.

  Cliff kept saying, “You need to write, you’ll feel better. Just go upstairs and write, ‘I hate my husband, I hate my husband, I hate my husband.’ ”

  He is a riot and very funny, but right then he was deadly serious. He knew that I needed to get back into a creative routine. I felt like I couldn’t.

  The next morning after I dropped Baldwin and Ford off at school, I met up with Carmen. She and I walked with Charlie until our legs hurt and we found a bench. Carmen was an acupuncture practitioner and was deeply interested in wellness and holistic living. She listened to me go on and on about my malaise, the deep sadness that I couldn’t seem to shake, the anger and resentment I couldn’t quite understand. I’d been walking around with this image in my head of the writer I was, who was cool and successful despite the banalities that made up life in the suburbs. I was clearly no longer that person, but I had no idea who I had become.

  Carmen said calmly, “Stop resisting. You have to let go of what you used to be; don’t fight it. Just be. You are in a different place now. Just let what is be.”

  I listened; it had never occurred to me not to resist. I came from a long line of fighting women. I reflected on my warrior mother, my busy, strong, always moving mother who, while she never said it, led me to believe that my sensitivity, my “feeling too much, thinking too much,” was a bad thing. As much as she loved me, and as deeply as I felt her love for me, she was never a cuddly, emotional kind of mom, and I always felt that my sensitivity was a disappointment for her. Once when I was a child, she was putting me to bed and leaned over to kiss me, and I pulled her down onto my chest and said, “Do you love me?” She’d never said it; no one in my house had ever said it. I’m sure I alarmed her. She said yes. Fortunately, she lived long enough to open herself up and become very affectionate. She began saying “I love you” all the time, and then so did my father and my brothers.

  Maybe Carmen was on to something. I flirted with giving nonresistance a try, but not even two weeks later I was back to resistance and anger. I had decided that I didn’t want to stay in this marriage, and that it was my mind-numbing suburban existence that was causing me all this angst. I needed to escape all this conventionality that I had forced on myself for the sake of being with Cliff. I’d been refusing to acknowledge that this was not the life I wanted anymore. I’d been so afraid to say it out loud. I’d tried anything and everything to get my head clear, to get happy, to pick up my mood, talk myself into staying. I realized I wasn’t afraid of being alone; I actually relished the idea of quiet time, to be in my head, to read my stacks of unread books. But leaving my marriage would also mean splitting up the time my children spent with Cliff and me, and I didn’t want that.

  On a day when my lingering grief and midlife malaise were especially intense, I had to drive Baldwin twenty miles for a lacrosse tournament. She picked up on my bad mood and tried to talk me out of it. I told her that I wasn’t mad at her, but that so much of this part of mothering just felt like too much. Of course, the real problem was that I had stopped doing my thing—my writing, meeting with my circle of writer women, activities that would stimulate me and elevate my mood. I must have said something to the effect that I didn’t think I could tap back into the artistic side of myself while still living in the suburbs. Baldwin listened to what I had to say, then announced, “If you divorce Daddy, I’ll never speak to you again.” I told her that I was not going to divorce Daddy, that I was just frustrated at not being able to figure out how to fix what was bothering me.

  But Baldwin’s statement rocked me. Reflecting on our exchange later, I realized I’d always considered her mine alone, my girl, my daughter, in much the same way that my mother felt about me. Without thinking about it consciously, I’d assumed I was the favored parent, especially since I thought that Cliff was sometimes too hard on Baldwin. Obviously, she had a different take. Just the night before, Cliff had taken away her iPhone and her laptop—hell for a teenage girl. He had been raging at her about not working hard enough on homework, doing it on her bed instead of at her desk, talking too much on the phone. She had been freaking out, yelling back at him—she could be rough with him, too. Listening from another room, my mother-bear instinct was strong. What does Cliff even know about teenage girls? I fumed inwardly. So what if she wants to do her work on her bed?

  They were screaming so much and so loudly that I actually thought I would call the police. I’d gone to the basement to remove myself from the ruckus, knowing it would end, as always, with Cliff trying to explain his position to me. I settled down to watch the giant-screen TV with the controls one needed a PhD to operate. The TV got all staticky just as Cliff appeared in the basement and sat down next to me on the sectional that I’d been living on for the past weeks, watching old episodes of Sex and the City. I’d watched them so often I knew dialogue by heart. I also watched Oprah and The Dog Whisperer. And I watched The Real Housewives of New York and Atlanta, trying to figure out why. I watched it all so I didn’t have to think or feel. I watched and I cried.

  “I know you’re just down here pushing butt
ons,” Cliff said.

  He’d pushed one of my buttons. I was so angry I was burning inside.

  “Stop it right now,” I growled.

  It would be some time before I understood that much of Cliff’s behavior during that time was his response to losing his Dad. He didn’t cry or take to his bed as I had, but he was also wounded deeply. And he was also frightened and confused about what was happening to me.

  Before I got married, I’d promised I wouldn’t have a relationship like my parents’. My mother often growled at my dad.

  I am back in the kitchen of the frame house where I grew up. The cabinets are redone in a dark wood veneer, the counter and backsplash are bright yellow Formica; the fridge, also in yellow but paler, is built into what used to be the pantry. My mother knocked out the door and wall by herself and got Milton, our backyard neighbor and jack-of-all-trades, to frame it out. The wallpaper is a brown floral print that she hung herself, and the linoleum tile is beige and brown.

  There was always dinner cooking. She’d start around lunchtime and would have dinner on the table at five. My dad or I would clean up the dishes, and she would go to sleep for four hours. She’d jump up at ten fifteen, warm up her leftover black coffee that she’d percolated that morning, sip some, pour the rest into a Mason jar to take with her, dress in her uniform, support hose, white shoes, and be out the door in fifteen minutes to arrive at St. Michael’s by 11 p.m. How did she do that every day for thirty-two years?

  I’m remembering the afternoon my father came back from the A&P, where my mother had sent him to buy a bottle of Heinz ketchup. It was one of the rare times we ran out of something and needed to go to the supermarket midweek. Clara was a scrupulous homemaker: food shopping was done on Fridays and she never went without her lists and her special coupon billfold. She’d hit three different markets: A&P, ShopRite, and Foodtown, often with me in tow. I loved going to the supermarket with her. Foodtown’s got McIntosh forty-nine cents a pound; A&P got rump roast for eighty-nine cents. Paper towels are on sale at ShopRite. She’d buy enough to pack the pantry and the fridge.

  That day, Daddy bought the right brand but the wrong size, too small. I can still see him standing in the hallway, pulling the ketchup from the brown paper bag. When she saw the size, she exploded, ripped into him as if she’d caught him bed with another woman. I must have been nine or ten. After she stopped yelling, I heard myself verbalize what I’d always thought.

  “Why do you have to talk to him like that?”

  I don’t remember what she said or if she, my brothers, or my dad said anything. I don’t know if my comment even made her think. I hated when she was so harsh with my dad. To me he was only sweet, loving, and patient. He was the dad who’d always drive my friends and me to the mall and wait in the car for three, four, five hours reading his newspaper or listening to a ballgame on the radio. He never complained about taking us or about waiting for us. The only thing he’d say when we got back to the car was: “You girls have a nice time?”

  “Yes, Mr. Little,” my girlfriends would say in unison.

  I’d scoot into the passenger seat, lean over, kiss him on the cheek, and say, “Thanks, Daddy.” His warm smile would be breaking across his face; a peck was enough for him.

  When I got older, early high school, my mother attempted an explanation of why she spoke to Daddy the way she did. She said that when Marc and Duane were little babies, twenty months apart, she’d found the life insurance policy Daddy had taken out in the event something happened to him. Daddy had put his brother Curtis as the beneficiary on the policy.

  “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” my mother said, the pain still fresh on her face. “That that man would do that, would leave me with two little boys to take care of. I could never get over that.”

  It was a discovery that cut her to her core, and every few years, I’d hear the story again. She’d had him change the policy as soon as she saw it, but she couldn’t seem to ever let it go. Was that really the thing that stood between them? Was that the only thing in the way of her being kinder to him? She’s gone now and I’ll never know. I never thought to point out that Daddy, being the old-school chauvinist he was, probably thought Uncle Curtis should administer the money, that Mom wouldn’t be able to handle such things. I knew that thought wouldn’t ever have occurred to her, and it might have made her angry in a different way if it had.

  I watched her when she was sick and weak and dying, just being annoyed by his presence. I felt so sad for her, for him. It was hard to imagine that she had held a grudge for almost six decades. The one time she ever voiced an appreciation of my dad was when she was about eighty. There was some conflict between her and her remaining siblings about the family house, and they’d had to see a judge about taxes or something.

  “Matthew dropped me off at the courthouse, walked me inside so I could sit down,” she told me later. “And then he went to find a parking space. I shouldn’t even have been there. I’d just got outta the hospital again and to have to be bothered with that mess over that house they let just get all broke down. I wanted to just sell that mess and be done with it. While I was just sittin’ there, waitin’, I realized how Matthew has always been there for me, right by my side.”

  She’d repeated this same thing to my brother down in Jacksonville. We were both so shocked. Marc had even called me just so we could talk about it, neither of us trusting our own ears. We had an hour-long conversation about that one comment. Maybe she had appreciated Daddy all along. What I know now having had my own long-term marriage is that no one knows what goes on between spouses, not even people living in the same house. Often not even the couple.

  23

  For Better or Worse

  IN THE very beginning of our marriage, when I’d taken the chance of quitting my job to write full-time, knowing that Cliff didn’t want me to, I had figured he’d leave me. I think he wanted to, but he didn’t. His mother told him to give my dream a chance. I loved her for that. We stayed together and we built a life, even with me kicking and screaming a lot of the way—by which I mean resisting. For Cliff, bickering is communicating. His mother was the same, but his parents were demonstrative and loving toward each other, too. I pretty much saw only bickering in my parents’ marriage, and I hadn’t wanted to duplicate that, yet I often did. I started to wonder if this might have been where my resistance to married life was coming from.

  By late September, I was so at the end of my patience with Cliff that I literally got down on my knees and begged for an answer as to whether I should stay in my marriage or leave. I got up and decided that I didn’t want to be with Cliff anymore. I was so tired of him just flipping off at every little thing that came up, and then later saying he was sorry and wanting to talk. I was over it. There was so much tension between us, our exchanges increasingly clipped and curt, punctuated by my poisonous silences that were charged with resentment.

  We had been invited to a wedding on Martha’s Vineyard, and the idea of being in a car with Cliff for over four hours, plus a forty-five-minute ferry ride, filled me with dread. We were staying at the Mansion House, a lovely B&B. The woman who checked us in was indifferent, even hostile. Even though I had booked months in advance, she gave us a tiny room with a barely working air conditioner. To make it more painful, she was Black. My bad mood worsened. We had to get changed to get to Tashmoo, where the dinner for out-of-town wedding guests was being held. The party was a fabulous yet low-key tented affair on the grounds of a spectacular house right on the bay’s edge. We drank champagne and ate lobster and fresh corn. My mood was lifting. Cliff and I avoided each other and talked to the several other people we knew who were also there from Montclair.

  The next day we had hours to fill before the wedding. I felt anxious and restless, like we were supposed to do something on the island, but it was misty and off-season, and there wasn’t a lot happening. We decided to take a drive. I couldn’t settle myself. Cliff was trying to understand, but I had no words to help him or mys
elf. Later, we tried to take a nap, but I couldn’t get comfortable in the warm room. I was relieved when we were finally picked up in a van with other guests to be driven up island, where the wedding would be held. We were among the last three couples to be picked up. The other two couples were slightly older than us; we knew them casually. The four of them, all WASPs, had clearly had a few by the time they got into the van. They were loudly teasing one another about having fishy breath from eating tuna, and I heard something too about passing gas. Their conversation was lively and free. They were like Cliff. I was not, and though I was put off by their behavior, they helped remind me of what had attracted me to Cliff. He says what he thinks and does what he says he’s going to do, and truly doesn’t care what people think about him.

  And he’d always been there for me.

  The marriage ceremony was perfection. It reminded me of ours. The entire wedding was held in one place: the vows were exchanged and the reception was set up in the garden. Ours had been at a flower-draped gazebo; theirs was under an arbor covered with lavender hydrangeas. At ours, cocktails were on the lawn and the reception was inside. The weather was gorgeous, the food excellent. They had a great band—I danced the entire night, exactly as I’d done at my own wedding. I remembered how happy I’d been at our wedding. I felt like I’d waited a long time to find Cliff, and that he had been worth the wait. At the time, I’d known that he was a perfect match for me. I felt happy and free. I was able to be all of who I was, knowing that my husband loved and accepted me completely.

  That was still true.

  At the end of the weekend, we drove home, happily singing along to the old R&B songs on satellite radio.

  It was Sunday. I went for a run and was able to keep from sinking into the depressive state that now marked most Sundays. Maybe this day of the week left me vulnerable because everyone was home; I felt like they were all looking to me to be like Julie, the cruise director on The Love Boat. I had hated Julie almost as much as I hated the show. Even at ten or twelve or however old I was when it was on, I knew it was stupid, vapid, filled with empty people trying to fill up their lives by getting on a boat and traveling somewhere away from their own pathetic lives, only to get out to sea and want nothing more than to return to those lives.