by Kiese Laymon
The morning you were scheduled to leave, we took a picture on one of the lawns at Vassar. I didn’t want to take the picture because I felt so fat. I wore a stained red shirt and jeans I wished were looser. You threw on your shades, and I cocked my head back. That red, white, green, blue, and brown picture was the last picture we’d ever take together.
Before I dropped you off at the train station, you took me to the furniture store and bought me a two-thousand-dollar living room set that I begged you not to buy. Then you asked about my father again and congratulated me on my body. “It took a lot of work to get a strong, fine body like that,” you said. “You’ve got the body your father had when I met him. Remember those tiny shorts he would wear?”
I didn’t want to talk to you about my father’s tiny shorts.
“Thanks,” I said instead. “I guess.”
“You love your students so much, Kie. That’s something I think you got from me. I’m glad y’all have each other. It makes me worry about you less up here.”
“I don’t think I love my students in healthy ways,” I told you. “I don’t think I know how.”
• • •
Four days later, you called and asked me to send twenty-five hundred dollars for a medicine your state insurance didn’t cover. I didn’t even ask what it was for. I just wired the money, and waited for the now twenty-five-hundred-dollar leather living room set I didn’t want to be delivered in the first place.
I spent the next few months in my classroom, in office hours, writing, exercising, taking care of students, and sending you more money. I’d gone from teaching three courses at Vassar to teaching six to being offered a job there on the tenure track. A month after I was put on the tenure track, you left to do more work in Cuba. I was the only one in the family who knew you’d gone. You didn’t want Grandmama to worry. You called me as soon as you made it back. Instead of telling me about your trip, you told me the fireplace in the house was decaying and the house needed a new foundation as soon as possible. You said squirrels infested the house and you could hear them running through the kitchen at night.
“Ain’t nothing in that kitchen for them to eat,” I told you, “unless they eating spoiled buttermilk and old Bisquick.”
“The man is in there fixing the fireplace now,” you said, “but I don’t have enough money to pay him. Can you wire a thousand dollars, Kie? I need five hundred for the fireplace and five hundred for a new furnace.”
“Can I speak to him?”
“What did you say? You’re breaking up.”
“Can I speak to the person fixing the place?” I asked you. “Maybe I can get him to lower his price.”
The phone went dead.
I called you back. There was no answer.
I called Grandmama and asked her if you could stay with her until the fireplace got fixed, since squirrels were running through the house.
“What kind of squirrels and thangs you talking about, Kie?”
“I heard there were squirrels all in the house because the chimney cracked.”
“Naw,” Grandmama said, “I was over to Jackson yesterday and I ain’t see no squirrels. The air wasn’t working and the plumbing was broken, but wasn’t no squirrels and thangs running around. What in the world is you talking about?”
“That’s what I’m asking you,” I said. “How can the plumbing and air be broken when I sent her money for that a few weeks ago?”
“Kie.” Grandmama held the pause. “Kie, listen to me. That house is crumbling around her and something in this milk ain’t clean. You hear me? Somebody stole my checkbook, my credit cards, the little money I had in my closet, too. I wasn’t gonna say nothing about it, but this is getting ridiculous.”
“What are you talking about? Who is somebody?”
“I’m talking about don’t let somebody play you for no fool. God give you five senses for a reason.”
I closed my flip phone and sat on the tacky leather couch. Since working at Vassar, I gave you tens of thousands of dollars for mortgages, engines, groceries, and doctor bills. Sometimes I contacted the places you owed and paid them directly. I never asked myself how someone who made twice as much as I made could be broke the second week into every month. I didn’t care. You’d taken care of me for half of my life, and I wanted, as much as I could, to take care of you. But I wasn’t rich. And I just wanted to know where my money was going if it wasn’t going where you said it was.
You called me back from the grocery store and told me to wire the money immediately. I told you that something felt strange and I didn’t feel right wiring money without talking to the person I was supposedly paying. I’d just given you the fourteen thousand dollars I had in savings for a down payment on an SUV you said would make you feel safer, and if I was going to send you another thousand, I just needed to know we were getting the best deal we could get.
You hung up in my face again.
I called you back, but you still wouldn’t answer. I told your voice mail I could send more money but I needed to know what I was sending money for. I didn’t tell your voice mail Grandmama said somebody stole her money. I didn’t tell your voice mail I was starving myself, or that I was in the midst of confusing teaching with parenting and befriending and loving. “Please call me back,” I said.
I put on my shoes, took off my shirt, and told my body I was going to run twenty miles that night. My body did not want to run twenty miles that night because it played three hours of ball and ran six miles earlier. My body wanted water. It wanted its first good night’s sleep in five years. It wanted more than a thousand calories. I ignored what my body wanted because nothing my body wanted would get me beneath 160 pounds.
Twenty-three miles later, I limped in the house drenched in sweat, buzzing from endorphins. I stepped heavy on the scale and watched the number get smaller and smaller.
290.
275.
250.
225.
205.
190.
183.
175.
165.
159.3.
I was the lightest I’d ever been since I was nine years old. I checked my messages, hoping you’d called me back. You had not. I took a shower and sat on my bed. When I went to get up and call you again, I could not stand. The blood in my left leg, from the top of my ass to the tip of my big toe, felt like it was boiling. I told myself if I drank water and just fell asleep on the floor, I would recover.
I woke up three hours later. I had not recovered. The tenses in my body were colliding.
The following day was the first day in 2,564 days I didn’t run at least six miles. I hopped myself over to my scale. I weighed 163 pounds. I tried to burn calories by hopping a mile on my right foot, but just holding my left leg off the ground was unbearable. I didn’t know how I could sweat enough to get me back below 160 if I could not walk. I kept calling you but you wouldn’t answer the phone.
I lay on the floor of that tiny apartment listening to tenses in my body. I couldn’t feel the toes on my left foot. My left hip socket felt like it was being eaten out by fire ants. That Thursday, the first day in eight years I did not push my body to exhaustion, my body knew what was going to happen, because it, and only it, knew what I’d made it do, and what I hoped it would forget. I sat on the floor knowing my body broke because I carried and created secrets that were way too heavy.
My body knew in three weeks I would still be unable to walk. It knew I would punish it for not being able to walk by eating cheese sticks and honey buns until I weighed 184 pounds. It knew at 184 pounds, I’d call it a fat piece of shit over and over again, and I would eventually take it to the doctor, hoping the doctor would fix it so I could run it into exhaustion again.
After taking all kinds of tests, it knew the doctor would tell me in addition to the herniated disks, the sciatica, the massive scar tissue in my left ankle and knee from fractures, sprains, and overuse, I had some abnormal cell growth that contributed to the deterioration of my hi
p socket. My body knew the doctor would give me a prescription and another appointment, suggest therapy, and say I needed surgery that would keep me off my legs for at least three to four months.
My body knew I would make appointments for the procedure and therapy, but skip them both. It knew I would gorge it for weeks until I was 206 pounds, and feel heavier at 206 than I felt at 319 pounds. At 206, it knew I would cancel everything I was supposed to show up to on campus except class. When I showed up, my colleagues and students would ask me if I was okay. My body would remember when I had 3 percent body fat, ran thirteen miles a day, ate vegan, had lots of visible veins, and fainted a lot. It would remember taking off my shirt and shoes in the weight room to weigh myself surrounded by thin women people secretly called anorexic and bulimic. It would remember never worrying about anyone calling me anorexic or bulimic though I was the first one at the gym at six in the morning and the last one to leave at ten. Like nearly everyone else at the gym, I wasn’t in the gym to be healthy, I was in the gym to feel in control of how fat I looked and felt.
My body knew that my weight, the exact number, became an emotional, psychological, and spiritual destination a long time ago. I knew, and worried, about how much I weighed and exactly how much money I had every day of my life since I was eleven years old. The weight reminded me of how much I’d eaten, how much I’d starved, how much I’d exercised, and how much I sat still yesterday. My body knew I was no more liberated or free when I was 159 pounds with 2 percent body fat than I was at 319 pounds with achy joints. I loved the rush of pushing my body beyond places it never wanted to go, but I was addicted to controlling the number on that scale. Controlling that number on the scale, more than writing a story or essay or feeling loved or making money or having sex, made me feel less gross, and most abundant. Losing weight helped me forget.
When I weighed over two hundred pounds again, I would not touch my body. I would not want anyone else to touch my body. I would not believe anyone who knew me when I was 159 could love me or want to touch me when I was over two hundred pounds. As the number continued to climb, I would teach and I would write and I would revise, and I would avoid you and Grandmama. I would continue to lie to the one person in the world who did everything she could to make sure I was healthy. I would learn fifteen years too late that asking for consent, granting consent, surviving sexual violence, being called a good dude, and never initiating sexual relationships did not incubate me from being emotionally abusive. Consent meant little to nothing if it was not fully informed. What, and to whom, were my partners consenting if I spent our entire relationship convincing them that a circle was not a circle but just a really relaxed square? I’d become good at losing weight and great at convincing women they didn’t see or know what they absolutely saw and knew. Lying there on that floor, I accepted that I’d actually never been honest in any relationship in my life, and I’d never been honest with myself about what carrying decades of lies did to other people’s hearts and heads.
I would stop talking to you because I did not know how to say no, and everything I said yes to was a lie. But you would not stop reaching out, particularly when you thought our bodies and our homes were in danger. When the levees broke and Katrina obliterated the coast of Mississippi, and President Bush neglected our folks because they were black, poor, and southern, you would tell your 209-pound child that our cousins made it out of New Orleans and they were sleeping in my bedroom. A few years later, we would meet a skinny, scared, scarred, brilliant black man who walked like you want me to walk, talked like you want me to talk, and wrote like you want me write. When he became president of the United States, you would tell your 235-pound child that the costs of any president loving black folks might be too much, but the violent white backlash to Obama’s victory will still be unlike anything we’d ever seen. We will pay the cost of his election now and later, I would hear you say over and over again.
At 314 pounds, I should have told you that I was sitting in a room in Main Building with a senior professor and two high-ranking administrators. I would come to the meeting with a contraption under my shirt that measures the irregularities of my heartbeat. The committee tasked with reviewing my tenure file first asked for an unredacted contract for my first book after the president told them not to ask for it. They then mistakingly sent my colleague, Flora Wadley, who had the same initials as a member of the committee—an e-mail insinuating I was lying about my graduation from grad school. Near the end of the meeting, this white senior professor on the committee affirmed their white liberal commitment to “African Americans” and said members of the committee believed I was a “fraud.”
I would tuck both hands underneath my buttocks as tears pooled in the gutters of both eyes. I would come into that meeting knowing the illest part of racial terror in this nation is that it’s sanctioned by sorry, overpaid white bodies that will never be racially terrorized, and maintained by a few desperate underpaid black and brown bodies that will. I would leave that meeting knowing that there are few things more shameful than being treated like a nigger by—and under the gaze of—intellectually and imaginatively average white Americans who are not, and will never have to be, half as good at their jobs as you are at yours.
Neither that day, nor the day I was stuck on the floor, hoping you’d answer the phone, would I have the will to imagine the night a detective from Poughkeepsie asks my 319-pound body to come by the precinct. I’d been to the police station in Poughkeepsie on four different occasions helping students, and seven other times to pay traffic violations. Two members of the tenure committee, and another senior professor, will receive anonymous racist, sexist, anti-Semitic letters threatening them for what they did to me. The professors will turn the letters over to the Poughkeepsie police, and a detective will call me into the station at ten o’clock Monday night.
I will walk into the interrogation room and watch the detective ask me if I knew who could have sent the threatening letters. I will explain, as best I can, that no one who had my best interest in heart would threaten folk on a disgraced tenure committee with anti-Semitic, racist, sexist language.
“I hear you,” he will say. “We have a suspect.”
“Who is it?”
“I’m looking at him,” he will say and ask me if I’d be willing to take a polygraph test.
“I’ll take that shit right now.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” I will suck my teeth. “Really.”
I will understand that I am a heavy black boy from Mississippi, which means that I am vulnerable. But unlike most heavy black boys from Mississippi, I have a solid check coming in every month for the rest of my life. I have “professor” associated with my name. I have a mother and father with almost powerful friends who could help defend me if I needed it. I will understand that I am vulnerable but I am not powerless. I am not powerless because, though we have no wealth, we have peculiar access to something resembling black power.
I will question what we had to give up to get this peculiar access to something resembling black power when the detective says, “I’m just doing my job.” He will ask me if I think he wants to be wasting my time with stupid professor beefs at Vassar College with all the drugs and violence in Dutchess County?
I will tell him there are a lot of drugs and violence at Vassar College, too.
The detective will walk out of the interrogation room, and I will sit there looking at the handcuffs on the table in front of me. I will wonder how coming up for tenure at Vassar College landed me in an interrogation room. All I will want to do is run.
Not to my apartment.
Not to a classroom.
Not to my office.
Not to deceitful sex.
Not to you.
The detective will come back into the room and tell me they plan on contacting me tomorrow about the polygraph test. Tomorrow will come and the detective will never call. When I call him, he will tell me they no longer need me to take the test. I will not know if
that meant they found who actually sent the letters or if they did not want to extend any more resources on threats made against the professors making the accusations, or if the detective was intentionally agitating me all along.
Either way, I am supposed to be happy because I am free, because I am not in handcuffs, because I have peculiar access to something resembling black power. I will know that I am not free precisely because I am happy that my wrists are free of handcuffs the month I earn tenure with distinction from Vassar College.
That Thursday, six years before I end up in an interrogation room for coming up for tenure, the first day in eight years I did not push my body to exhaustion, my body knew what was going to happen, because it, and only it, knew what I’d made it do and what I’d hoped it would forget.
• • •
I am sprawled out on the floor of my apartment, looking at the shiny brown leather couch. I call you again and hope you answer so I can tell you, for the first time in my life, that I need your help. I want to ask you if you remember the day you drove me to Grandmama’s house when I was twelve years old. Before picking me up to take me, I tried calling you at your office and I let the phone ring for twenty-three minutes. When you finally came, you drove me to Grandmama’s because you thought Grandmama could fix me. We were expecting my father’s child support payment but you told me it hadn’t come yet because the mail carrier might have stolen it.
When we pulled off on the Forest exit to the right of Interstate 20, we came to a stop sign. We made our way left onto Highway 35. Neither of us looked to our right at the tractor-trailer roaring toward the passenger side of the Nova. The truck driver pummeled the horn. You floored the brakes of the Nova, slung your right arm across my body even though you made me put on my seat belt before we left Jackson. Since you were not wearing your seat belt, your chest smashed into the steering wheel. I was four inches taller than you, and at least thirty pounds heavier than you at that point, but I didn’t try to secure you. I asked if you were okay before my body reached across your body to put on your seat belt. You told me you loved me as we headed down Old Morton Road to Grandmama’s house. I told you I loved you, too. We meant different things, but we meant I love you.