Welcome to My Breakdown

by Benilde Little

  “You sure you looked everywhere?”

  “Mom, I emptied out everything. My roommates helped me look. It’s not here.”

  I kept texting her to see if she’d found the shoe. I was thinking about how I could get a new pair to her—go to Sports Authority and then drive back to Princeton? “You would do that?” she asked. I could call a store in Princeton, pay for the shoes over the phone, and have her go pick them up. I told her these options to calm her down. One more phone call and I asked if she’d looked in all the pockets of the duffel bag. She said yes.

  “Did you look in the side pocket?”

  “Yes,” with attitude.

  “Did you look in the front pocket?”

  “The front pocket?” She laughed. “I didn’t know there was a front pocket.”

  She unzipped it and, voilà, the other shoe.

  More laughing.

  “Oh, God, I hate myself,” she said. “I’m sorry, Mommy.”

  “It’s okay.”

  I hung up, climbed onto the couch, and flicked on the TV. I watched Bill Maher’s film Religulous until I fell asleep.

  26

  My Insides Don’t Always Match My Outside

  I HAD to admit that, with my eldest applying to colleges, I was having a problem aging. I hadn’t thought I was the kind of person who would. I’d always had older friends, always wanted to be older, but now that there was a physical component to it, I didn’t like it one bit.

  It started out as groin pain. I was working out all the time back then, so I figured I’d pulled something. Not sure what to do about it, I waited and then went to a physical therapist, who suggested the Hospital for Special Surgery. The surgeon told me I didn’t have much cartilage in my left hip and would need a replacement. I was only fifty-three. He said, “I’ve told thirty-three-year-olds this news.” I was still not ready to hear it. I began seeing a chiropractor who was able to manage the pain, and I’d do the hip stretches he instructed me to do.

  Two years later, after my good hip became so inflamed that I could barely walk, I went to a different surgeon at HSS. Same thing, no cartilage. This time I scheduled the surgery. Then I canceled. Months later, I scheduled it again, but my gut was not letting me relax with this decision, even though I was hearing all the great things about what happened afterward. When the surgeon’s administrative assistant called to book the preoperation appointment, I was astonished that between the CAT scan, more X-rays, and the postsurgery hip class, I’d be there for more than eight hours. Postsurgery you’re up and out right after, but the reality is you’re not really healed for eight to twelve weeks. All I could see was the darkness coming back. Being forced to stay on one floor for a week would make me crazy. The surgery had been scheduled, my insurance had been cleared, but something inside me couldn’t do it.

  Then all of a sudden, my hip stopped hurting. After a week of no pain, I began to think about what I’d done differently, and the only thing I could point to was that I’d begun taking antioxidants. Reading up on them, I learned they help with inflammation. I decided to seriously start back with my hip stretches and to begin a meditation and chanting practice.

  I slowly became conscious of the fact that I had turned against a current that was moving in a direction I didn’t want to go. I had taken control and it felt really good.

  However, my looks were now taking up too much headspace. On the one hand, I didn’t believe in Botox and fillers and breast jobs, although looking at my formerly perky boobs that were now in tight with my upper ribs and my face that was getting jowly, I felt I could probably benefit from a little sculpt. I was sick to death of my dry hair that needed to be colored every six weeks, which made it even drier. My mother had cared about how she looked but didn’t seem to stress about her appearance. She got her hair shampooed and hot-combed every other week by the same woman, Olivia, at the same salon, the same Friday appointment for twenty-five years. She wore sensible classic clothes, like shifts and shirtwaist dresses, pants, turtlenecks, with no big swings in trends (save for that damn green polyester jumpsuit).

  Obsessing about my hair had been ongoing for as long as I could remember. I’d made peace with the fact that I liked to change my hair. I liked it natural, and sometimes I could wear it blown out straight. I could wear extensions or not, a wig or not. I used to beat myself up about it. Like how could a serious woman spend time on her looks? I wanted to appear as if I didn’t spend any time at all putting myself together, like a Frenchwoman. I had real jewelry—diamonds and watches and high-end designer stuff—but I enjoyed wearing my fake jewelry, too. I wore them with the same “whatever” attitude, but I often questioned why I even needed all those accessories. What was I lacking? What was I trying to say? What void was I trying to fill?

  Norman Mailer once said that Ronald Reagan was “as shallow as spit on a rock.” That’s what I thought of people who were obsessed with their appearance, and yet, if I were honest, I was overly concerned with how I appeared, too. It was an inner skirmish, one that I finally decided was okay. I’d read an interview with a conceptual and installation artist named Karen Kimmel. Her picture showed a woman with straight long hair, dressed in traditional-looking, Brooks Brothers–type clothes. The reporter said, “You don’t look like a conceptual artist.”

  “I don’t look eccentric enough?” she said. “That’s funny, since I’m attracted to eccentric things, but my visual veneer doesn’t reflect my internal attractions.”

  I often feel the same way.

  I read that interview on the day after my birthday. I was sitting at my vanity, where my jewelry was, and found a ring that I hadn’t worn in a while. It was a big dome shape, covered in shimmery pavé cubic zircona. I’d bought it during my mad-shopping-binge phase. It was way too much for daytime, way too much period, but I liked to wear it sometimes. When I did, though, I took myself through mental changes about what it meant—or looked like—when I wore it. Just as I was walking around my bedroom wearing it, Ford came up to get me to help him get online. His tutor was with him. I typed his password on her computer, forgetting I was wearing this big dome. I became self-conscious, imagining his tutor looking at it and judging me. She probably wasn’t, but I realized that I was constantly monitoring my inner and outer self, hyperaware.

  While I was waiting to get my hair done at Hair Rules, a natural hair-care place in the city, I ran across another quote that resonated. This one was in an article about the actress Naomi Watts. “I was so afraid of judgment that I had diluted myself into an intense ball of nothingness and neediness,” Watts had said. “I was so desperate to please everyone: You want funny? I’ll be really funny! You want sexy? I’d be sexier than you could ever imagine.” Wow.

  I liked clothes, I liked reading fashion magazines, liked to dress nice, and that meant quirky combinations. I tried to be age-appropriate hip, and right then that translated to skinny jeans, a fitted tee, and blazer, chunky-heeled boots, good jewelry, and a good leather bag. I had furs and some expensive handbags, but often I didn’t want to wear them. Sometimes I felt like two people. My writer self thought that the person who thought too much about appearance was shallow. But there was the other side of me that sometimes wanted to look fly.

  There were days when I looked like I just rolled out of bed, and there were days when I made an effort to look decent and like I took a shower. It depended on how I felt, and it was all me, and it was all fine. I was mostly free to wear what I wanted and appear how I wanted without worrying about what others were thinking about me—except when I had to meet with the kids’ teachers; for them, I knew I had to pull it in a little. I admired the way Baldwin rocked whatever she wanted, whenever. She thought nothing of stomping around in high-heeled boots and what my mom would call a dressy dress.

  I remember when I was on a book tour with my third novel, Acting Out, a reporter from the Chicago Tribune came to my hotel room at the Ritz-Carlton to interview me. After pictures were snapped by the photographer she’d brought along, we
settled in for a talk. I had been excited to meet her because she had written a glowing review of my book for the New York Times. It was my first (and only) New York Times review, the publishing world’s gold standard. The reporter was an aggressively unadorned White woman with a short haircut, dressed in a rock band T-shirt and cargo pants. I felt uncomfortable during our meeting, and at first I couldn’t figure out why. After three books and five book tours, I was generally used to being interviewed. Finally, when she made a comment about my appearance being polished, I realized that she had expected someone different from me, perhaps that I would be a similarly unadorned woman.

  In our interview I talked about materialism being rampant in our culture and particularly among the characters I wrote about. I observed that things are sometimes used to boost self-esteem (this was a year before Kanye West brilliantly wrote about this same subject in “All Falls Down”), but the point in the novel is that the characters struggle with this very thing. I was then and still am now interested in the navigation of presentation and selfhood. The reporter didn’t get that. I felt as if she had judged me and decided I wasn’t being honest, with my nice clothes and makeup.

  I looked up the story she wrote and found this quote to be illuminating in terms of the problem she seemed to have with me: “Little’s anti-consumer stance is hard to reconcile with the lip-lickingly plush world in which she has set all her novels . . . . Little describes a tight-knit group of black urban professionals who enjoy a level of affluence that’s hard for most people, let alone most African-Americans, to imagine . . . Breitling watches and Kelly bags.”

  I still struggle almost daily with reconciling the inner sense of myself with my outward appearance, and the judgments others make of me because of it. Clara would have told me to get over it—or maybe she would have encouraged me to revel in their delusions about me. I remember when I came home from the hospital after having Baldwin, my mom came over to help for the first few days. She wore her white nurse’s uniform and white nurse’s shoes. A neighbor came over to see the baby and bring a gift. My mom answered the door wearing the uniform. She didn’t introduce herself as my mother, just told the woman that I was napping. Later I asked my mother about the uniform, and she laughed and said she wanted the neighbors to think that I had a baby nurse. I guess she thought I wasn’t presenting myself as fancy enough.

  Of course, we all have opinions about how others present themselves, whether we voice them or not. Case in point: A writer whose book I had blurbed declared in a story online that she was looking for “White ambassadors” to help her publicize her novel. It was tongue-in-cheek, I think, but it made me feel queasy. “I love White people,” she had written. “My husband is white (actually from Spain but to look at him one would think just a white guy).” She went on to say that in order for her book to “shine,” she needed White people to “spread the word,” both for reasons of numbers and to break out of the ghetto of African American lit in bookstores.

  On one level, I understood where she was coming from. No one wanted to be relegated to the segregated section. However, I have to say, having blurbed her book with the idea of helping a fellow author, I was offended at what she posited as her editor’s advice to “get a White author/friend to blurb the novel and we’ll put in on the front.”

  So my blurb gets put on the back of the bus because I’m Black?

  Not a good move. A successful Black novelist wrote a comment on the site and asked, “What are you saying to the thousands (millions?) of Black women who bought your last book, who spread the word, came out to your signings—that they’re not enough? Thanks, but can you make some room in the front of the bus for my White friends?”

  The writer talked about having to have the awkward conversation about race. I don’t share the opinion or experience that it’s awkward to talk with close friends who are White about race. My girlfriends, Black, White, Asian, are just my friends. They, without me even asking, will pass the word about my books. My pal Mary Anne (who’s very posh and very British) keeps my books on the nightstand of her guest rooms. She’s done so without me ever thinking to ask and has gotten me many international readers as a result. She also threw me a fabulous book party. All writers have a hard time getting attention. I’ve been fortunate to have been published and pushed to a general audience, but also to have a place in AA fiction. I think it’s great to be in both. I’ve been on the gold coast (front tables) in major chain bookstores—front window displays, all of it—because my publisher believed in the book. We know we don’t live in a country where meritocracy is always the way to success, and I’m not implying that the cream always rises to the top, but I am saying, do the work, push the work, establish real friendships, and then let it go. It demeans the process to do anything else.

  Aware that I was silently judging a fellow writer in ways that had been painful for me to be judged, I went and found this writer’s memoir on my bookshelf and read the opening pages. In the first paragraph, she wrote that she was in third grade in 1980. I graduated college in 1981. My God, she’s a child, I thought. Well, thirty-eight isn’t exactly a child, but it’s fourteen years younger than me. It’s a different generation—is it “X” or “Y”? Anyway, I began to soften toward her. She didn’t grow up in the shadow of the Black Power era, when we freely discussed race and believed that there was something wonderful about being Black. She’d had her own unique experience, just as I’d had mine.

  The other thing that had my head spinning on the same day was Essence magazine choosing a White woman as fashion editor. After lots of talk, TV and web attention, opinions were divided even among former staffers. Some said it was a good thing or that it shouldn’t matter. To me it was just plain wrong. Imagine Hadassah, a magazine for Jewish women, hiring a Christian as their religion editor. What was up with us? Always extending our hand in “let’s be color-blind.” Yeah, I’m sure Anna Wintour is drinking her tea and saying to herself, yes, color doesn’t matter, when there is not one Black woman editor at Vogue. One of the very few ways a Black woman is going to be near the front row at fashion week is if she represents Essence.

  I began to grasp that my renewed engagement with what was going on in the world of publishing was a hopeful sign. It had been a year and a half now since my mother’s death. Sometimes a day or two would go by and I’d realize that I hadn’t cried. I was even starting to get back into an intermittent writing routine. But it was summer and my kids were home, along with our nephew Julien from Atlanta, who stayed with us for a few weeks each year. Summer was the worst time for writing because after the kids came back from camp, they were just hanging around the house. The good thing about Julien being here was that he would go for bike rides to the park and play basketball with Ford. But Baldwin was downstairs in front of the TV or the computer or both. Cliff kept calling me from work with suggestions for how to occupy them, but if I did any of what he suggested, then I wouldn’t be writing and then I’d be pissed off and take it out on him.

  I went downstairs to check on Baldwin. She was reading People Style Watch and watching Two Can Play That Game, which she’d seen at least three times before. I told her to read her book, going through her bookshelf and holding up Rebecca and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. For some unknown reason the school hadn’t given them a required reading list this year; so I made one up for her on the fly. She whined about my choices. We decided to compromise. She’d finish her Jodi Picoult.

  27

  Where I’ve Landed

  BALDWIN HAD a big sweet sixteen party. There were about forty kids, more tried to crash—ten or so in one pack. There were all kinds of girls and boys, straight, gay, White, Black, biracial, Latin, Asian, jocks, arty types, all that makes our town so special. However. The majority were Black kids. Baldwin said she felt bad for her White friends, some of whom were visibly uncomfortable. I told her that she shouldn’t ever take that on; sure, you want your guests to feel comfortable in your home, but when it comes to feeling out of sorts because most o
f the room doesn’t look like them, that is not on you.

  A woman I’m casual friends with is White and married to a Black man. They spent a weekend at a Boulé convention. Boulé is a fraternity of very successful Black men. My friend was one of maybe three or four Whites in a group of maybe three hundred Blacks. She said every White person should have that experience—to know what it feels like to be the only one. Many Black people encounter that situation almost daily, and we have to simply deal, act like we don’t notice, and proceed with our business. I’m hoping that the kids who felt uncomfortable will get something out of having been here, even if it’s just a little more sensitivity to what it’s like to be a “minority.”

  My kids have never been deterred by being the only or one of a few Blacks; although Ford is much more of an introvert, it’s his personality, I think, and not his race that oftentimes prevents him from seeking the spotlight. When Baldwin was in middle school, her acting class entered a countywide competition. (Ford would rather pull out his eyeballs than act.) She won second place in the monologue category. I had no idea she was interested in acting or even that she’d be participating. (Middle school is when they stop telling you anything, and the schools don’t send much home in the way of information, either. It’s the beginning of the parental lockout.) When I picked her up I was late, and she and her teacher Mr. Kitts were standing alone. He came up to the car and was bursting with excitement at how good Baldwin had been: “She had the judges crying! Whatever she does, acting has to be a part of her life.”

  Hmmm. I smiled and thanked him, apologized for being late, and we drove off. Baldwin held her trophy on her lap.

  “So, I didn’t know you were interested in acting? How come you never said anything about it?” She shrugged. She said she didn’t know it either until she took the class. “Is it something you want to pursue?” I asked, praying that the answer would be no, already imagining the waitressing, the one-bedroom apartment in the city shared with three other people, the rejection and heartbreak.