by asha bandele
I told him about what happened with the molestations and I didn’t worry when he didn’t seem too turned around by it. I didn’t want to compare him to Rashid, who had so much pathos for me, offered so much support. Amir was different and that was okay. It was okay, I told myself this, that he seemed to relegate my past to the past, because, after all, wasn’t that where it belonged? Even if his past was right there in the anger that crouched right behind his beautiful brown eyes, that had nothing to do with me. I was moving on. And my job was to help him do the same so we could walk together into a perfect tomorrow.
And you know, it wasn’t as though I never noticed the anger that pulsed in him. It was that, first, the anger wasn’t all there was to see, and second, I never took that anger as something that would be directed toward me, his partner. The snide remarks he would make, the mean little jokes he would slip in about everything from the way I talked or laughed to the way I cooked, who takes these things seriously? Who takes them seriously when the whole package includes something you never had before: a lover who was present and daily and who you were politically and emotionally and physically in tune with?
Amir was the first man I ever experienced full-blown, adult romance with. My first marriage was not a romantic affair to be sure, and besides, I was a teenager, literally, when I became engaged, barely a woman, twenty-one, when I married. And of course with Rashid, well, with Rashid there was the prison. But here I was, thirty-three years old with a new baby and, like it or not, a new life. And now I was in places with this pretty man whom I could be with whenever we wanted, whenever I wanted. I could make love to him whenever, wherever. So surely I need not focus on a few misplaced and poor jabs. This is what I told myself, what I told friends, one in particular who just kept repeating, “There’s just something about him that makes me uncomfortable.” She, like most others, never heard his sarcasm. They would just meet him and feel chilled, tell me he simply seemed “off.”
“He’s shy,” I would say, defending my man, “and hard to get to know,” I continued, dismissing her concern, preferring instead the approval of strangers, waiters and others who would meet us in our fancy places and love “a young, beautiful Black couple who was making it happen.” Amir and I were told that, again and again. And in the dark, sexy places, the places blurred by wine and both real and imagined romance, I believed.
I believed it especially as my work as an author and journalist seemed to take its own shape and I continually found myself in elite places, places of celebrity and star shine. Viewed through the lens of my own life, it seemed everything was spiraling up. After the hard mean drop, with my baby on my back, I was headed back up a mountain. But that was the lens that I looked through. For Amir the lens opened onto quite another landscape. His own career was struggling. Much of it wasn’t his fault. The nuances of the economy—and he being most junior in the firms he joined—saw him laid off more than once. That was hard. The effort to find other jobs though—that seemed impossible. Months and months went by without work or callbacks. Or money. And I should have realized. As much as women are often defined by others and our own selves by what we look like, men are judged by status and money. But the removal of both is, for many, the removal of their whole humanity. I didn’t see things quite that way then. I just wanted, as any woman in love would want, to help. I had connections, knew people who knew people. Reluctantly at first, and then finally, he accepted. He accepted after I convinced him that by helping him I wasn’t also challenging his manhood.
“Of course you don’t need me to make things right for you,” I argued one afternoon. “But if I can help, why shouldn’t I?”
“You act like I can’t do this on my own,” he responded, his voice thick with anger.
“That’s not true,” I said, in what became a back and forth until at last agreement. We had been dating for under a year. And his reaction was my first glimpse of the full space of the anger that resided in his heart. Because it wasn’t only that he expressed resentment at my offer of help. He also took that chance to go on a tangent that would characterize the rest of our relationship. Why were things okay for me but rough for him? Inevitably, unbelievably, in language I could not retain it was so mean, he began to insinuate that I was where I was because I was fucking my way into assignments, because I was a slut.
Worse than the indignity of the name-calling was that it was he, not I, who was not monogamous! He saw that as the whole part of the “not making a commitment” thing, justified by the fact that I’d only recently separated from Rashid. Whatever hearing I gave that the first month or second, as time stacked up and the romance stacked up it seemed less and less a legitimate excuse. But he insisted and I wasn’t ready to lose someone again. So yes, he kept sleeping with a bunch of other women all the while calling me a slut.
And I accepted it. I accepted it because I thought if I loved openly and with the whole of my heart I could change him. Our good times were, after all, so very good. It had to work out! When Amir accused me of lying about my commitment to him, instead of walking—or running—away, I just defended myself, did everything to prove it wasn’t true. Everything to prove I was a good girl. A girl—not like the baby I once was—a baby worth keeping.
IN THE EARLY SUMMER of 2001, I was able to maneuver a meeting between Amir and one of the most famous and respected men in finance. It was a coup. In a downtown office, the two men talked for an hour and a half while I wandered in and out of cheap stores in lower Manhattan, the ones that sell dresses for ten dollars a pop. When finally my cell phone rang and it was Amir saying he was leaving the building and I needed to come back around the corner and meet him, I nearly floated there. An hour and a half? Who has meetings that long? I was certain something would happen and that a new picture-framed life, a life that had been shunted by the prisons, was coming into focus. We glided through the rest of the day, picked up Nisa, went out to dinner, toasted our future, made love through the night, made love the next morning. For much of the rest of the summer, we lived like this: squinting down the road to see where hope was waiting.
If you were to hear him tell it, it was me who screwed it all up that August. Here’s what went down: I asked him if he’d ever written a thank-you note to my mentor, the one who’d set up the meeting.
“Why would I do that,” Amir growled, six weeks—perhaps a lifetime—of fury shooting forward at me. “I didn’t get a damn job!”
“I know,” I countered, trying to calm him down, “but she couldn’t guarantee you a job. She did everything she said she would. She made the calls and set up the meeting. And you got the meeting. The thank-you note is for that.”
“You’re such an ass-kisser. No wonder everyone loves you.”
He said this.
And that was it. We were off and fighting. We’d been in his car driving out of the city for the day, a late summer retreat. But before we’d made it out of Brooklyn, he was turning the car around and he was speeding back toward my apartment, and then I was home, stomping up the stairs and through my front door. For the rest of the afternoon, in between crying jags, I called him, alternately cursing him and then asking, Why would you treat someone who loves you like this? He told me to stop. Said if I didn’t, he would make me.
“Make me then, motherfucker,” I said, all Brooklyn-girl defiance in my voice.
And he did. He came over that night. Nisa was asleep. When my doorbell rang and I knew it was Amir, I assumed we would argue but then we would make up. I assumed we would fall into bed together, proclaim our love once more, make it all better. I mean, isn’t that how it goes? Isn’t that what it is between people who love each other? And wasn’t that our pattern? So no, no I didn’t think about the names he’d called me for months, for years, accusing me of the very behaviors he was engaging in.
And yes, we’d even had some troubling physical encounters. The worst of them though had confused me about, more than clarified, the rage he held. We would play-fight, wrestle—but the way lovers do
—as foreplay. During those “games,” he dragged me down my hallway by my hair—versions of this happened twice, maybe three or four times. Years on, they all become one long nasty incident. But he used to drag me down the hallway and slam my head into the wall and laugh, but I didn’t. I said for him to stop. I said he was playing too roughly. It took a long time, after everything was said and done, to see those interactions as something far uglier than playing too roughly. But back then, labeling them as I did, as play, meant I had no reason to tell him to go. No reason to go through yet one more loss. He said he loved my daughter. He said he loved me. And I clung to that even when my hairstylist or manicurist would stare at the chunks of hair I was suddenly missing, the broken nails, and at least once, scratches down my face. I don’t remember anymore how I responded when they looked at me one day and gasped, “What happened?!” I remember only that I said to myself again and again, We were just playing.
Anyway, that’s how we got to that hot August night, and how I could let him in without being prepared for all that would happen, even after he had threatened me.
I wasn’t prepared when he grabbed me and rushed me down to the floor of my living room, my foot catching and twisting under the base of my sofa on the way. It snapped apart, my foot did, but I didn’t know. I was in shock. It hurt but I thought it was a sprain. I didn’t find out until the next day when two friends took me to the hospital. It was a compound fracture; my entire foot was shattered. A month later when the swelling went down enough for surgeons to rebuild my foot, the chief of podiatric surgery asked me if they could take pictures for a book he was working on. He said he had never seen damage so complete. And then I went under and woke up eight hours later in a cast I wore for the next two months.
And Amir did apologize, finally, although he was just as quick to remind me it was my calls that made him do it, and that he never meant to hurt me like that. I wanted to believe him, but eventually his words felt like the harsh grip of his hands, the ones that put me on the floor that night, the ones that held me there, his hands tight over my mouth, telling me I was going to learn to watch what I say.
People always think domestic violence is a no-brainer. One slap and you’re out. That’s not how it works in real life, I don’t care what your politics are. When you fall in love with someone or when you believe you’re in love with someone, you don’t just get out because getting out makes sense. What seems to make more sense is that if you get your act together, you can make everything beautiful again. Because once things were beautiful. You are an addict reaching back to reclaim that first great high, love, with all its opening up of pleasure receptors in the brain, just as dysfunctional as a person who’s struggling with drugs or alcohol. So yes, we tried to work things out after the terrible August night. But finally I learned that there are places you cannot make it back from, not with everything you started with anyway.
Still there are times, there were times when I’d ask, Where was my king, my beautiful Black man who talked about babies with me? In the very start of our relationship, before he’d invested himself in making cutting remarks toward me, before the job trouble started. Where was that man, the one who said he would protect me, bleed for me?
Because despite the way he came to see my career as a thriving thing, a thing in opposition to him, the truth is that I had a terrible boss, a mean woman who seemed to make it her business to hurt people. I wasn’t singled out. I was just one of many, and when I would come home hurt or angry, it was his arms that held me. When I worried about bills, about any of the normal downward shifts that impose upon a life, it was him, swashbuckling across my insecurities. When we started, not a day passed when Amir wouldn’t whisper, “You are an incredible woman, asha.” No man in my life had made me feel valid in quite that way. Not in real life where I could come home to it every day. Amir was Superman to me. In the beginning.
In the weeks and months after the deportation order and after the end of the marriage that had meant the world to me, but to no one else, he, this new man, stepped in and said I counted and made me feel as though there was a coming tomorrow that would erase the sad yesterday. He said things that bolstered and renewed me at the very time, the very hour when I was sure I didn’t matter much anymore, couldn’t be renewed.
Before we became a couple, I was sure, in the face of the prison, in the face of the law, that I didn’t matter. That I didn’t count and neither did my baby. After all, this is what the law says, in fact, not simply by implication: that Nisa and I did not count. In a sense, that’s what had been the enduring message in my head: You do not count. From a mother who took a pass on me to a prison system that would eventually do likewise to both me and my baby. We didn’t count. To a trained counselor or even a home-girl from around the way, these may all sound like excuses, but I know where my heart was when we began. Amir said both Nisa and I counted, and these words were oxygen to me.
So yes, I stayed after I should have left. I stayed almost a year trying to get it all back. But then one night I had a conversation with my mother, my real mother, the woman who raised me. And she talked to me about a night she remembered the first week my foot was broken. She said, remember before Nisa’s babysitter left for the evening, and she put the baby to sleep in her crib in her room, and when you were completely alone for about an hour, and Nisa began to cry.
That night Nisa began to cry and I could not figure out how to get up and get to her because if I used my crutches, how would I hold my baby? It took me I think thirty, maybe it was forty minutes, maybe it was less but I doubt it, to come up with an idea. I left the crutches alone and rolled off of my bed. Then I scooted on my ass across my room, down the hall, into Nisa’s room. My leg was raised the whole while because that’s what the doctors said I need to do in order to expedite healing, keep my leg raised one hundred percent of the time.
When I made it down the hall and then into Nisa’s room, I pulled myself up using the crib as leverage. Then, with my free hand I reached into the crib and scooped up my baby, my baby who had withered into hysterics, since I’d taken so long. I picked her up with my one arm and lowered myself back down onto the floor with the other. And then we scooted back to my room, her on my good leg, the other leg raised. And I held her and rocked her and eventually, eventually she calmed down, she fell back to sleep, and so did I and the night was over, and honestly, I forgot about it.
I wouldn’t be able to write about it now if weren’t for my mother. She didn’t forget about that night because it was she whom I called, panicked in the moment my baby had started crying and I couldn’t figure out what to do to help her. I called my mom. And then, months on, it was my mother again who showed up, this time assuming the role of my memory. She reminded me in painful detail about what happened, how I’d been left, how Nisa had been. That’s when I knew. What Nisa needed—including a strong, healthy mother—was always going to determine my final decision, even if it took me longer than I wanted it to for me to make that decision. Nisa was my choice.
Sometimes even now when Nisa feels as though it’s just too hard to be a big girl, sometimes when she is just too tired and the day has been too long, and all she wants is for Mommy to pick her up and hold her, I do it. I do it even as big as she is because I remember when it was otherwise.
And years after, now when I think about that time and that man and when I think about the woman I was and the baby Nisa was, I still cry. Not all the time, but some of the time. I cry for the position I allowed myself to be in and I cry for all I gave away, not just my marriage, but my own heart, my own spirit. I cry for what that time, those years, had taken from my daughter.
I cry for the women I know who are still being taken apart by anger and violence. I cry for the women, for the children who will not survive it, who will never be able to offer an accounting of a night, let alone a lifetime, and I even cry for him. I cry to know how he lived with all of that rage, that seemingly immeasurable rage, when I know if things had been different, if he
had had all he was supposed to have had, if his life had been honored in the way all of our lives deserve to be honored, then love would have been there inside of him, love would have been there instead and it would have crowded out the hate.
I cry for that lost possibility, not just in us but in and all around so many of us, the places where hate crowds out the love. But in my own life and at the end of that time, I had to not look at him and curse him nor curse the world. Instead I had to look at myself, at the woman I was, the woman I was not, and ask myself what I never wanted to ask myself, because who wants to realize that they’re not the person they think they’ve already become?
I would have to ask myself this question, and find the heart to answer it:
Had I ever really loved myself? Had I ever handed myself over to myself, whole and complete, willing and wanting, the way I have with lovers, wide open and without barrier?
Ever once had I whispered into my own ear the words I had whispered to my lovers: there is no place I will not touch if it will please you, there is no place I will not love you?
Had I ever made the sacrifices, the financial ones, the ones physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychological, for my own edification like the ones I had made for him or for him or for him or for him?
I know I can claim the five, maybe six years of therapy off and on, on and off, hundreds of self-help books and articles torn from magazines, read and reread. I know all the prayers, all the calls to goddesses and gods, the pilgrimages to the waters, the forests, the confessional conversations, the revelations, the poems, but had anything worked either its magic or science and moved me closer to the place where I could claim my own heart, my own desires, and my own needs?
Did I ever commit to myself the way I did to others, and if I didn’t, then why not? And if I didn’t, is that why I found myself in my thirties still trying to stand, years after I could have sworn I had taught myself to run?