This Is Just My Face

by Gabourey Sidibe

  My fear of boys, however, did nothing to stop me from being completely boy crazy. I was always desperate to grab the attention of some boy, usually the kid with the worst grades and the most behavioral problems. Any boy who’d curse out the teacher, throw a chair, get suspended, and then still show up to school at three o’clock smoking a cigarette to meet up with his boys—be still my slow-beating heart. But even when one of those kinds of boys asked me out or told me to meet him in the basement, I’d pretend I hadn’t heard and I’d never show up. I only talked a pretty good game. I was flirty, I made goo-goo eyes and giggled, but I couldn’t handle anything more.

  I certainly wasn’t going to let anyone know I thought I was good enough to be someone’s girlfriend. Why? So that everyone could tell me that I wasn’t? If I admitted to myself that I liked some dude, I’d immediately figure he was out of my league; and even though I was fun and cute and essentially a good person, in my mind the guy would be way cuter. After all, if I said, “Yes, I’ll go out with you” to some guy, all he’d have to say was “EWW! Hell, no! I was joking.” Everyone would laugh, and furthermore, they’d know that I liked that boy. That I could have those kinds of feelings. Love feelings.

  “Love feelings”? What am I? A robot from a future where love has been outlawed? What the hell is wrong with me? Why can’t I communicate intelligently about love? I’m a human being. I’m comfortable talking about pain. I’m comfortable talking about self-love. But the concept of romantic love feels weird and kind of foreign in my brain. I guess I’m figuring out that I wasn’t just afraid of relationships as a child but that I’m still afraid of them as an adult.

  I’m still pretty boy crazy. My mom tells me to call them “men,” but that seems too grown-up a word, and frankly, I’m not there yet. But to clarify, when I say “boys,” I definitely mean age twenty-five or older. The boys I like now are less likely to throw a chair. They’re producers, writers, directors, and sound engineers. They’re artists. They have grown-up jobs and lives. They’re kind of dorky and know a lot about specific subjects like film, the Civil War, Renaissance art, Africa, or how batteries work. See? I’ve grown up some! The boys I like now are my friends. We hang out and go to dinner or get drinks. We’ll be at dinner, and I’ll look at my friend and realize that this guy’s a legit catch. He’s handsome, nice, smart, polite, funny . . . I KNOW THE PERFECT GIRL TO SET HIM UP WITH. And then that’s what I’ll do. I’ll set my friend up with a girlfriend of mine who I think can appreciate a guy like him. I’ll give the perfect guy away. I swear I’m not even conscious of what I’m doing when I’m doing it. It’s like I think to myself, This guy’s a keeper but not for you. Still, you shouldn’t let him go to waste! I guess I still think the guy is out of my league.

  Honestly, let’s talk leagues for a second. I swear, nothing has pushed my life off track like becoming an actress. Before that, I had my league perfectly figured out. I was going to marry a cabdriver, because my league included cabbies, sanitation workers, security guards, and maybe grocery-store managers. Now that I’m a Hollywood actress, my league is all messed up! I don’t have to date only cabbies anymore, but I’m pretty sure I can’t date the Liam Hemsworths and Michael B. Jordans, either. Maybe I can date a high school teacher or something? I don’t know.

  On one of my ask-Mom-personal-questions days, I called her and grilled her about the day she became Mrs. Sidibe.

  “Is this gonna get me arrested?” she asked.

  “I think there are probably statutes of limitation on immigration fraud from thirty-seven years ago. I think you’re good. You’re in the clear.”

  “Check before you publish this! I don’t want to go to prison.”

  “Mom, y’all stayed married for like ten years, and you have two adult children now. I don’t think it’s fraud anymore.”

  “CHECK!”

  “Okay, I’ll check,” I lied. She crazy. “Do you remember what you were wearing?”

  “Nope.” We both laughed.

  “Did you have rings?”

  “Nope.”

  “What’d you do after you got married?”

  “He went back to his apartment and I went back to mine.”

  That’s it. That’s the tradition I have to follow. No flowers, no toasts. No party even. Mom didn’t tell her parents about the marriage until nearly a year later when she was about to go to Africa with Dad. She introduced him to her parents so they could see he was a nice man.

  Mom has told me before that she grew to care for my dad. But now I wanted it straight.

  “Had you fallen in love with Dad?”

  “No.”

  Long pause. Not because I was surprised, but because I could relate. I don’t think I’ve ever been in love.

  “Did you dream of what your wedding would be like as a kid?” I asked.

  “No. Not really. My mother told me I’d never get married cuz I was fat. I was a little big girl, and you know, men didn’t really like that then.” (As if they love that shit today.) “So I didn’t want to get married because I was told I’d never get married anyway. So I said, ‘That’s okay.’ I had a voice. I was fine. I didn’t dream about a wedding and a big gown . . . walking down the aisle.”

  There. There’s my family tradition. Maybe if she had known that love and marriage weren’t any less an option for her than anyone else, my mom could’ve taught that to me. But she didn’t, because she wasn’t taught that, and now neither of us know it. In a slight variation of what her mother told her—that no man would marry her until she lost weight—Mom told me that I would have to settle for a man I didn’t love if I didn’t lose weight. But I’ve already been through a marriage of settlement. Hers. I’d rather not do it again.

  When I was twenty-four years old, I came close. Toward the end of that summer, I met a cabdriver while leaving work one night down at the phone-hoe factory. He drove me home, and then he didn’t charge me but instead asked for my phone number. A free ride? Swoon. I suppose I gave it to him. He wasn’t remarkably handsome, he had an accent I couldn’t place, and if I’m remembering correctly, his name was Malik. He shared that name with both my father and one of my brothers, so I knew he was Muslim. He was a Yellow Cab driver just like Dad. Was he my type? I don’t fucking know! But he texted to ask me out and I was bored, so I said yes. He said he’d pick me up. I hadn’t gotten a good look at him when he drove me home so I wouldn’t have been able to pick him out in a lineup of two people, and what’s worse, he was in a cab. All the cars on my street were cabs! After much confusion, I figured out which driver of which cab was my date, and we went to some diner on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that I found to be grown-up and fancy. I was young and unfancy then. We talked over dinner and got to know each other. He was from Egypt. He was absolutely Muslim. He tried his best to be a good man. He wanted to get married. Just like the psychic said. I rolled my eyes through the part about getting married. While this guy was nice, he wasn’t particularly interesting, and if I’d gone to the bathroom and come back to a completely different man sitting at our table, I wouldn’t have noticed. I assumed that even though he’d brought up marriage he didn’t mean me. How could he? We’d just met. Surely he was speaking generally, not specifically.

  At the end of the night, he drove me home, and while we were still in his cab, he turned to me, and said, “I want to marry you.” Swoon? I wasn’t surprised or even caught off guard. I was annoyed. “You need a green card?” I asked. He seemed surprised. Idiot. Do you even know how smart I am and how big a cliché you are? “Yes,” he admitted, as if no one else would have cracked the code of an immigrant asking a woman to marry him on the first date. “How did you know?” he asked, as if I were a psychic. “That’s how my parents got married,” I answered. “No, thank you. I gotta go.” Then I got out of the cab and went to bed. The next day he texted me saying that he hadn’t meant to offend me and that he really did like me. While I wasn’t offended, I told him to cut the bullshit and said I wasn’t interested in marriage fr
aud. But then he kept texting me. All day long. Then he asked if I wanted a ride home . . . the things I’ve done for a ride home. So we’re in his cab again, and he starts to plead his case. He at first was coming at me in a romantic way as if I would believe that we were in love and that we should get married as soon as possible. When he saw that I wasn’t falling for it, he decided to approach me as if we were going into business together. He explained that we wouldn’t have to be married for that long. Two or four years. That I could move in with him in Queens and that he could pay me. Pay me? Swoon! That’s when I really started to consider it. I took a few days to weigh my options. I even made a pros and cons list. I still lived with Mom and Ahmed in a two-bedroom apartment. Even with my job as a phone sex monitor, I wasn’t making enough money to live on my own yet. I didn’t know how or if I could ever move out. It felt like I was doomed to live at home forever and that poor Mom was also doomed to sleep in the living room forever because of it. I just had to leave. Maybe immigration fraud and a green-card marriage was my ticket. I thought maybe I’d move to Queens and have the cabdriver pay my way through school. By the time I was finished with school and placed firmly in whatever career I’d end up with, I’d be done with marriage. The idea of marriage was scary, but a sham marriage was just a sham! It wasn’t forever. The only hiccup would be if I fell for the guy while we were married. Then I’d end up pregnant. But then I’d have a baby and that wouldn’t be so bad because that’s what was expected of me. I was a woman after all. Maybe this was just what my life would be. Unhappily married to an African cabdriver named Malik so that he could stay in this country. It was exactly what Mom had done. But Mom had gotten something out of it. She had a life. And she had proved her mother wrong! I was no better than Mom. Who was I to think that starting my life this way wouldn’t be enough?

  But . . . I couldn’t let that bitch be right. Not this time. Mom is always right. She’s right about many things, so it has been my lifelong crusade to make her wrong about me. I was forever swimming upstream. Throughout my life, she had been right about more things than I cared to remember, but she would lose this round. I refused to settle. Not just because she told me that I would have to and I wanted to prove her wrong, but also because this marriage would be EXACTLY what she’d done with Dad. Exactly. I was about to marry Dad! Something I had vowed to never do.

  Problem is, I still wanted the things on the pro list. Not all of it. Not the things other people wanted for me like marriage and children, but the things I wanted, like an education and to move out of Mom’s apartment so she could move into my bedroom. Independence. That’s what I wanted. I wasn’t sure how I would get it without marrying Malik. I didn’t know how other people got it so I googled “How to go back to college.” That’s how I found Mercy College. I kept opening up page after page until I figured out how to apply for financial aid on my own now that I was old enough to do so. I enrolled myself for the upcoming semester. I was on my way back to school on my own three years after losing my aid at City College. I wouldn’t need Malik to pay my way. I wouldn’t need anyone. I called him and let him know that I was going to begin classes soon and that, along with my work schedule, I wouldn’t have time to see him anymore. Also that I wouldn’t be marrying him but that I wished him luck anyway. He was annoyed. He accused me of wasting his time, but his whole situation had nothing to do with me. Two weeks later I was back at school and two weeks after that I was a movie star, so none of it mattered anyway. I had turned down a marriage proposal about a month before I got my first film role. Change was in the air like a cloud and it was finally raining on me.

  The idea of marriage remains very scary to me. A real marriage. One where you love each other. Where you have dreams of a future together with a home and children. Couple friends and game nights. Family vacations and studio portraits on the wall. One man for the rest of my life. That shit is scary. It’s scary because I don’t know what that looks like from the inside. My parents were only able to show me some of those things, but because they weren’t in love with each other, was what they did show me even real? I want to love a man who loves me, but I don’t really want to get any more involved than just that. I don’t want to meet his family or have him meet mine. I just can’t imagine melding my entire life with someone else’s for eternity. Can’t I just fall for a friendless orphan? Getting married is so fucking normal, and in the right case, a healthy way to grow. Normal? All of my instincts tell me to run the opposite direction.

  Is it a surprise then that I have a knack for dating guys who clearly aren’t interested in me? Guys I annoy. Who think I’m stupid and boring. Who think I’m mean and ugly. Who think they can do better than me but for some reason they aren’t. Guys I think would love me if I could somehow prove my worth to them, but who, other than that, I’m not particularly interested in, either. This way we’re both unhappy. It’s called being an adult! Actually, it’s called being stupid. Wasting my own time. I once had a three-year relationship with a guy who was mean to me all the time. He’d sit next to me, and I could feel his contempt wafting off him. Even his sighs sounded like he hated me.

  Meanwhile, I couldn’t wait for him to get the hell out of my apartment. He was young, stupid, and thought he was more attractive than he actually was. He lied about everything, and he was really a bad person. But there we were, both in this relationship, pretending to like each other. During this time, I was really close with another guy. We were mostly just friends. I’d ask him for advice all the time, basically doing that very girlie thing of asking a straight guy friend what to do about my relationship even though I knew the answers already. My friend knew that my boyfriend was an asshole, so he asked very seriously, “Do you think you deserve your life?”

  I didn’t understand, so he clarified his question.

  “Okay, well, you know how you have a dream job starring in movies and TV shows, and people think you’re funny, and when we go to restaurants, the chefs always send over extra food because you’re kind of a celebrity, and you get to travel the world first-class for free? Do you think that you deserve that?”

  I considered the question very seriously, and after a moment, I answered, “No. Not really.”

  He smiled and took my hand in his, and said, “You keep your horrible boyfriend around because you feel like shit, and he’s the only one around who agrees with you. He validates the part of you that thinks you deserve bad things instead of good things. When you start believing that you deserve good things, you’ll dump him because he won’t fit anymore. But for now, he treats you like shit because that’s what you want.”

  It was like a punch in the face. A hard punch with a fist made of the truth. I did feel like shit a lot of the time. I felt unworthy of all the good things in my life, so keeping around a boyfriend who agreed with that felt . . . comforting. Really, he was a placeholder for a real boyfriend. If in his place there was a guy I was really attracted to and liked and respected, then I’d be forced to grow up and deal with all of the very real feelings and life choices that went along with loving someone in a romantic way. At the time, though, I wasn’t ready to be a grown-up in that way.

  Dating seems to conclude with something being wrong with me. I’m not sure the mental gymnastics are worth it. I mean, I guess sometimes you get a free dinner out of it, but I can buy my own dinners . . . I just don’t want to. In fact, I’m not done with dating just because I’m tired of it. It’s not even really my decision to stop. I’m being forced into retirement. I’m moving from New York City to LA, and dating in LA for a girl like me isn’t just hard. It’s impossible. This forced retirement is fine by me. I’m basically Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon. I’m too old for this shit.

  Here’s the thing about LA. I don’t really want to move there. I figured I’d live my entire life in New York City and then die there. (Morbid, I know, but, spoiler alert, I’m going to die one day. You, too. You first, though.) But in my thirties, it’s time for me to live comfortably with more space. Listen! I
saw Hamilton, too, okay?! I love the shit out of New York City! But I’m tired of hearing my upstairs neighbors have sex. It feels like a super-inconvenient threesome. LA will be fine. I could use the room. In New York City everyone is stacked on top of one another like sardines. More room will be nice and will make saying good-bye to dating worth it. I think. LA is filled with trees, sunlight, houses with pools in the backyards, and gorgeous people working on their respective careers by looking to date other gorgeous people who can boost their careers. LA can be pretty superficial. I know I’m generalizing, but it seems that when the LA dudes I meet are showing interest in a girl like me it’s usually for one reason.

  When I say “a girl like me,” I bet you think I’m just talking about being fat. How dare you fat-shame me!? You think I’m talking about being black? Racist! What makes you think I’m not talking about being smart? What? You don’t think a fat black girl can be smart or something? Fat-shaming racists like you make me sick! Just kidding. I’m sure you’re not a racist. I mean, you might be, but I can’t know that for sure. Did you vote for Trump? Let’s move on. When I say “a girl like me” I mean all of it, I guess. I am currently fat or plus-size. (I don’t have a problem with the word fat because I’m dead inside now, but I know a lot of plus-size people do.) I am and forever will be black. (Thank GAWD! No shade.) I’m also smart. Look at me writing this whole book by myself! Wheeeee! I’ve found all three of those facts about me to be both a turn-on and a turnoff at some point or another. With other factors, like feeling the need to make a joke out of nearly everything, being always on time, looking younger than I actually am while seeming older than I actually am, being lazy, working really hard anyway, having my own money, knowing almost every song ever, and liking to sing the nonexistent harmonies of rap songs, the list of idiosyncrasies that make up my personality is vast and polarizing. Good, bad, and ugly, they’re all me, and at some point, I’ve been asked out because of one or the other or dumped because of one or the other. But I guess we all have been. That’s how being a human being on a planet of other human beings works, right?