Something Like Beautiful

by asha bandele

  There was a time when I was in my twenties and even early thirties when I noticed myself, when I noticed where I was frayed and I sought to restitch those places, patch up. And to myself and to the world, my immediate world, the job I did to recast myself as a healthy whole woman was very convincing, even to me, especially to me. I looked in the mirror and reflected back a person who had shed vices, food, cigarettes, drugs. They had been replaced by love and a belief in a certain tomorrow with Rashid. There are witnesses who could tell you so.

  Which is why it made no sense, why it sent me reeling the way it sent me reeling, when, as a mother, all I had put together so carefully started coming unwound, not unwound so much as chipped, broken off, small sections at first and then larger ones and then larger ones. Let me explain better.

  I knew when I was pregnant I did not own my body. As a woman with a history of sexual abuse, not owning my body, not being in absolute control of it, should have been an unthinkable request for anyone to make of me. Except for my child, my baby. Not only with no hesitation, but with extreme pleasure, I allowed Nisa, even from the time before I knew she was Nisa, to direct the course, the details of my days. In fact, I reveled in it.

  No longer did I push through exhaustion, nor show up in places out of obligation. I did what Nisa, communicating to me through every organ, through my bowels, my emotions, said for me to do.

  A vegetarian for years, and more recently, pretty much a vegan, when I became pregnant, I ate roast beef at least twice at her demand, reintroduced chicken and fish as staples in my diet, lost my taste for sugar, and most bizarre of all, craved pears, a fruit I have held in particular disdain since I was a child. But my baby issued out these summonses on my lifestyle, my food choices, and without question I followed them and even enjoyed her dictates. I loved being pregnant. I trusted her orders.

  And when my girl was born and I was the sole arbiter of the quality of her nourishment, we continued at this level of relationship, me quickly learning not to eat cabbage, hot sauce, and an array of other foods.

  (After my less-than-successful start the night after she was born, when I chose pizza with fresh garlic and sun-dried tomatoes and Nisa cried for what seemed like eight hours straight from what I had transferred into my breast milk, I quickly went back to Cream of Wheat and built out from there—though slowly. Very slowly.)

  In none of that time, not during the pregnancy, not during the near year I breast-fed, did I ever miss the parts of myself/my body/my life that I had handed over to Nisa. Perhaps I should have. Perhaps I should have been slightly more like girlfriends of mine who clamored to get back to owning their breasts, their diets.

  A childhood of being trained how to give myself over to the whims of perverts, when I gave myself over for all the right reasons, I realized, albeit five years on, that I had little experience in taking myself back.

  When people close to me asked, how after the good love that was Rashid, how could I fall in love with another man who could see me broken, hospitalized, I thought about the me as the baby who was given away moments after she was born and I thought about the child who was treated as a woman and I thought about the woman who, fifteen, eighteen years on, rushed to put all that behind her, but I hadn’t. I hadn’t. So that was how. Now I tell family and friends, just like that, and then I say I’m working hard, slowly, deliberately now to finish the work I began so long ago. But it doesn’t happen overnight, despite all the meditation and prayers. It takes a very, very long time. Maybe it takes a lifetime.

  Chapter 8

  the essence of a life in a day

  It’s just past four and you are awake again. When was the last time you slept a whole night through? Maybe it’s better, there’s so much work you still have to do. You worry your editor won’t like the story she asked you to crash in. You didn’t really even want to take the assignment but you need the money. You’ll turn in the story in just a few hours, pray your editor isn’t a bitch about it. You need the money. You have no idea how you’ll pay all the bills. Last month was flush. This month it’s crazy. Nothing ever feels stable. Not money, not you. You, embarrassed you’re going to have to ask your ex for a loan.

  What kind of mother have you turned out to be? Close your eyes. Tell yourself to shut up and sleep for at least another hour. Tell yourself you cannot keep going without proper sleep. Pull the covers around you tightly, turn over on your side. Feel a push of heat between your legs. It’s not sex you miss so much. You are not celibate. You miss being touched by someone who deeply loves you, and you know it. Love without question. Push the thoughts away. They will only make you angry. Think instead about your sister who still lives on the other side of the country. It’s been a little while since the two of you have spoken. You miss her and tell yourself you’ll call her later today.

  Turn over to look at the girl cuddled up in a tight tiny ball right there beside you. Watch her breathe and feel yourself fall in love once again. A wave of joy spills over you. Stare at the girl, kiss her head, close your eyes. You really want one more hour of sleep. You have a long day ahead of you. Try to relax, you tell yourself this, but telling yourself this only makes you more uptight. Turn on the TV, some mindless bullshit ridiculous TV. Lie there but don’t listen. Just think about your day.

  What has to be done, how many different hats worn? Wish you could cry, pray for release, it doesn’t come, they don’t come, not one tear to say, Mommy, Mommy, anybody, anybody, I’m hurting, please help. Please. Instead you just wish, but wish without doing. Wish without the work it takes to make a wish come alive. But still you do it. Wish there was someone you could talk to right now. Then soon as you wish that, you tell yourself you’re glad there’s no one with you right now. You’re sure you’d only sound like a whining, sniveling, ungrateful bitch. Hate the way you’ve become. Hate yourself so, so much.

  Alarm goes off, you stare at it incredulous. How did two hours pass, how did you lose the time? Where did it go, what thoughts captured you so? You can’t remember which ones made the hours speed like seconds. And this would feel shocking, you’d dwell on it and dwell on it if wasn’t for the fact that you have to wake the girl. Nudge her gently, whisper her name, say it’s time to rise. She opens her eyes slowly and lets them drift toward your face. She looks like she’s sleepy but then suddenly breaks into a mile wide smile and begins to giggle.

  You knew this was coming. This is how she wakes nearly every single day. She is smiling and giggling and grabbing at you, wanting to cuddle, wanting to be close. You lie with her for a moment and now she’s asking what we’re doing today, what have you planned that’s fun and exciting?

  It’s a school day, you remind her softly, no big adventures until the weekend comes. A tiny temper tantrum follows: I don’t wanna go to school. I want to be just with you. You remind her of her friends. You remind her how much she loves to learn new things. You remind her that this weekend the two of you will be going to the Bronx Zoo on Saturday and a birthday party on Sunday.

  There’s much to look forward to, which briefly she accepts and then falls back on not wanting to go to school. You go back and forth with her and then put an end to it. There’s too much to be done, no time for this debate. You tell her enough is enough. You sound like your mother and this makes you smile. Maybe you do, after all, come from somewhere. Maybe that means you’re really headed somewhere. You raise your voice, Mommy-firmness is perfect: Nisa, let’s go. She’s mad at you now, but there’s no time this morning to indulge that either. Besides, by the time you’re outside and walking to catch a cab, she’s already back to laughter and incessant talking. You marvel at her, wish you had her recuperative skills. What a gift you think, both the skills, but more, the girl.

  Arrive at her pre-K, a small independently run Black school in central Brooklyn. You love what she learns here, the way she can talk about Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman despite the fact that she’s not yet four. You could do without the few teachers here who wrap their faces in bitte
rness and walk out into the world, walk into the school, frown at small children.

  But much as you want to dislike those sisters, in so many ways, you are exactly like them. Your act is just better. You say good morning to one of those teachers. She grumbles back at you, but so what? Nisa’s bounded toward the center of the schoolhouse, the play space where the children gather each morning before venturing off into their separate classrooms. She’s already in the midst of dress-up with her four best friends, Zakiya, Justine, Aanisah, and Ciara.

  You walk over to say good-bye to your daughter. She jumps on you and so do her friends. You’re on your knees hugging four little girls.

  The best part of your day is about to end and it isn’t nine in the morning yet.

  You leave, walk past the teacher with the furrowed brow and apparently permanent frown, and you remind yourself that there’s nothing that says a teacher has to smile or be pleasant. Anyway, none of the other parents seem to mind and there’s nothing that can or even should, you suppose, mandate courtesy.

  Still you wish people were kinder to one another, kind as a way of being, not as a single act and the nit’s all back to frowns and pushing. You notice, as you’re having that thought while walking away from the school and down toward the train station, that the only people who are “friendly” or “pleasant” to you are the men leering vulgarly from doorways and storefronts.

  Arrive at work. Edit a story, write another. Take a break. Smoke a cigarette downstairs and hope nobody sees you. You feel so stupid, smoking cigarettes again. There’s an editorial meeting shortly. Time to present your ideas for interesting stories. Tell yourself to remember to keep your passion backed down. Your boss has used that word against you, passion as a curse, as something to be overcome.

  And while passion is the word she uses, crazy is the word she means. You can tell by the way she always stares at you when you speak, with that perplexed look on her face, her head cocked to the side. It’s the same way you see her look at her own daughter, whom she speaks of terribly, so you can only imagine what she thinks of you.

  But whatever. This is your work, the reason the bills get paid, why your daughter is insured. You do the meeting with the best possible energy you can possibly summon and then afterward, you turn in an article you’ve just written. Make no mistakes. At least not today. No room for error today or any day. Not now that you’re a mother. This is what you tell yourself and somehow really believe.

  Take a break. Laugh with friends. Talk about your boss, how all of you wonder why she’s still there. Agree to go for drinks this Friday coming, a much overdue girls’ night out.

  The day is over, you’re back on the train. Crowded, stinking, alternately speeding and sputtering toward your Brooklyn station. Close your eyes. Try to relax, which once again makes you more uptight. Think about Rashid. Feel your throat tighten up.

  Let him go, don’t think about him.

  Let him go, don’t think about him.

  Let him go, don’t think, don’t think don’t think.

  Push away the memories that are fighting for placement in the center of your brain. You flash to the feeling of lying in his arms, even if it was in a prison visiting room. Flash to the day Nisa was born, how you loved him then, how you had so much hope. Flash to what it feels like when he slides inside of you. Flash, go flush, cross your legs tightly, then Stop.

  You don’t want to remember. You don’t want to feel. You can end these crazy thoughts that do no one any good. Let the past be the past. Let the dead be with the dead. You tell yourself this over and over, but can’t quite convince yourself, knowing as you do that time is unknowable, that there’s no such thing as past, present, and future. There are no dividing lines in the fourth dimension. In the place where time lives and takes on shape and meaning to us, everything is in simultaneous existence.

  Which is, you wonder, why it seems to come back in waves, a single, terrible question that hangs over each day, no matter what, it sits there: Did we ever really love each other? Has my whole life been a lie, were we a lie? What was true, the honest and entire space of desire? Did we ever really meet the way I told people we’d meet, in the full presence of ourselves and at the edge of our own nightmares?

  Did we meet there despite our fears and did we take each other’s hand and then make a stealthy escape? Have I ever once been honest? Me the girl with no traceable past, no root, no source? Am I even capable of it?

  Wonder this every day. Each night on a crowded train.

  Wonder if you ever really had the courage to dare all of the mean real-world enforcers, the enemies of light, the dastardly, the villains, to come do their best? Did you say they could not break you? And was that the problem? Your arrogance about the love you thought you’d shored up, the strong woman you thought you’d invented. Is that why she’s gone and is this the penalty? These moments when you can not remember, even as the train alternately speeds and crawls to your Brooklyn neighborhood, where you will see your girl, your girl with the face like her father’s face. Beyond the love you have for that girl, you could almost be convinced, it doesn’t exist. Love or safety or warmth. Romantic folly, perhaps. But not that other thing, the one that sustains people, couples across decades.

  Think only about anger. This is what you live in now. The woman who shoves you on the train. The nasty store clerk who snaps at everyone. The terrible calls and e-mails you still get, two were even death threats from people who hated the book you wrote about loving Nisa’s father. Think: I just want to be home. Want a cigarette, want a drink. Come on train. Hurry. Hurry.

  Feel guilty. You should be thinking about Nisa. Nisa who asked just the other day about her father, about your marriage, about her own beginnings. You tell her she was created from a defining love, one that transformed, one that had the courage to honor its own dreams. She believes you, but do you?

  You see pictures, letters, boxes and boxes and boxes of letters and cards, all detailing your old life. But you feel nothing, even with this record, you cannot find the place in your body, the place in your blood and in your brain that stores memory of this truth. Nisa deserves more. She deserves to know the arc of immeasurable romance that can exist in the world, in a life, so that she will be ready one day.

  This is what you think about most nights as you ride that overcrowded train home each night. You think about it until you put the key into the lock and know you have to shake it off, at least act as if you have. Walk through your front door, get charged at by the girl. No one ever looks as happy to see a person as she seems to be every night when you come through the door. You hold her, you embrace her, you kiss her and snuggle. But something is missing and you can sense it quite deeply. The meditation you did when you got off the train, the one where you chanted and chanted, Don’t feel anything, don’t feel a thing, has cruelly carried over into areas where you do want to feel, but now it’s too late.

  You are holding your girl, you are smiling at her, but somehow you know that you are not really there. You’re not really anywhere, truth be told. You start thinking again about how much you hate yourself. How this child with laughter for a heart, deserves better than you. You kiss Nisa and hug her and ask about her day. She rattles off a range of activities and observations and brand-new facts, none of which would make complete sense to any adult, but no matter. Her excitement translates and you love her for this, for her eyes and her heart, both so very wide open.

  She has eaten now, she’s bathed, and you bury your face in her tummy, fresh and clean as it is with that baby smell you love so much. You tuck your girl into bed and read her a story. She wants you to stay with her, to hold her through the night. You hold her for a moment and then you kiss her again. It’s Mommy Time, you say to her, and she must go to sleep. You walk out of the room, hear her whimper in the background.

  Pour a glass of wine, curl up on the couch. Call that mean boyfriend despite the rockiness of your relationship. The wine has made you loose. You want to flirt. And yes, okay
, you want to feel loved. He’s cold to you, says he couldn’t reach you last night, and why didn’t you call him all day long? You remind him that you’d said you had to report a story, file it right away. You’ve been swamped, you say earnestly, even if a bit defensively.

  You start thinking again about how much you hate yourself. He’s already broken your foot! Why argue? Why didn’t you just make that goddamn call? This is what you think, but you do not say. You fight back when he gets like this now. Anything to retain a sense of dignity.

  The argument descends into a full-blown screaming match with this boyfriend you claim, but who barely claims you. He says you are untrustworthy, you are a risk to the heart. You do not respond to this accusation anymore. You think your actions should speak for themselves, and besides, his constant refrain has gotten dull at this point. He accuses now, attacks, and instead of crying and defending, as you did for so long, you just think you hate him.

  Which of course is not true. How could it be true if you keep going back to him, keep going back to the place where it hurts so bad?

  Could it be really, really the case that any hate you feel is only ever about you?

  Even when you have the right to be legitimately angry with someone else—someone like him—is the truth of the matter that your anger at yourself is the real problem?

  You’re wondering this while he is still spewing nastily about how you’re a cheater. Despite your fear of his temper, you demand: How dare he speak to you like this when it’s known by all how much he’s out there fucking?

  There, you said it. The thing between you that was not supposed to be spoken. It’s the mirror before you both that no one wants to look upon. If he looks within, he is forced to see a man other than the one he wishes to present to the world—a man who lies, misrepresents, who manipulates, who hurts.