Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be

by Nichole Perkins

  I didn’t find a husband at Dillard, but I found one of the best friends and best people I know. K and I would always catch eyes in class as we looked around, wondering if anyone else noticed the foolishness going on, like the guy who clearly never read assignments and thought he could bluff his way through class. But nope. It would just be us two. It only seemed natural that we would band together. During one of our critical theory classes, a student was talking too much in an effort to distract from her lack of preparedness. She was arguing for the wrong reading of whatever text we were studying, and when Dr. M, who was not fooled by the student’s trick, quietly tried to correct her, the student barreled on: “I’m a deconstructionist. I love deconstruction!” K and I looked at each other and had to look away as we smothered our laughter. To this day, every now and then, when we get together in person, one of us will burst out, “I love deconstruction!”

  K is from Northern California. Her mom had gone to Howard and named her after a word she learned in a Swahili class. K met her husband at Dillard, and now they have a son. Legacy.

  K had a plan and followed it. She is the pride of Black women Gen-Xers: HBCU graduate, grad school with a PhD, marriage, child, a challenging but fulfilling job that has allowed her to advance and travel. She did not let herself be distracted. I’m so proud of her. She did all the things expected of her with success. We are the roads diverging in a yellow wood. I know she doesn’t understand how I walk through life, seemingly with no plan, just a lot of hope, but I feel like our friendship epitomizes what I was looking for when I went to an HBCU. I wanted to connect with people unlike myself and see how I could learn and grow.

  We don’t talk as much as we used to, and that’s my fault. I don’t want to bore or disappoint her with the routine of my life. Sometimes, people think that because I’m single and child-free, I’m having countless wild adventures. Honestly, it’s me, a book, and my depression most nights—if I’m not engaging in hookups or “situationships” K shakes her head at. Her life is so full that I want to give her space and not make her feel like I’m another obligation on her to-do list. I do miss her. I miss that connection of catching each other’s eyes when something off-the-wall happens. For one of our first friend dates, we went to a feminist exhibit that featured artwork made of sanitary napkins and tampons. As we exited the building, there were clotheslines displaying panty liners covered in various art, like landscapes or nude figures. Outside, we looked at each other with wide eyes and said, “Well. Okay.”

  Because of K, I went on my first international trip. I kept passing up opportunities to travel abroad because I was afraid DJ would miss me too much and I couldn’t stand to be apart from him, but when he had the chance to travel to Aruba for a couple of weeks, he was on the first thing smoking. So after K and I graduated, we went to Cancún to celebrate. I had to scrimp and save, and barely managed to get all the money together, and I felt embarrassed by having to work out a payment plan with the travel agent. This was in 1999, before 9/11, so I was able to travel without a passport. All I needed was my birth certificate. I tried to downplay the significance of the trip, saying it didn’t really feel all that international since Mexico is part of North America, but inside I was thrilled. The ocean was shaded a turquoise I’d only ever seen in my grandmother’s rings. The men yelled “Morena!” and “Chulo!” at us everywhere we went. We took a day trip by boat to a neighboring island (which is how I discovered I get seasick).

  And I got my first tattoo in Cancún with K. We wanted to commemorate the trip and our friendship, so we found a tattoo parlor that didn’t seem too sketchy. K’s second major was Spanish, and I knew a few phrases. I’d taken French throughout high school and college, and my brain does this weird thing: When I hear Spanish and can understand it, I respond in French. So we were in the parlor with the handsome tattoo artist who smiled at us in flirty condescension. He and K discussed prices, and when he tried to include me in the conversation, I replied in French. He then tried to speak to me in French, but I was too nervous to do it smoothly.

  The tattoo place was a single room, every inch of the walls crowded in art. There were no windows, at least none that I could see while we flipped through books and looked at posters to pick our designs. K chose a small sunflower for her left ankle. I chose two hearts overlapping each other—one red, one black—on my right ankle. The tattoo was quick and relatively painless for me. I talked throughout the procedure, but K was quiet, her mouth pressed together like her lips had been sewn into a seam to keep from exclaiming in pain.

  She never got another one, but she inspired my second tattoo. After DJ and I broke up, I emailed her a comic I’d come across that showed a Lovers’ Leap. The man was looking over the cliff, screaming, “I changed my mind!” She sent me back an e-card with a purple butterfly and the caption “I hope you learned to fly.” And now that purple butterfly is on my waist.

  * * *

  I try to go back to Dillard and New Orleans as often as I can. I’m a crappy alum, because I don’t donate as much as I should, but my student loans are still a menace to my life, so I think that balances out somehow. There are a lot of things I love about Dillard and my time there, but I’m most grateful that it opened me up to the power of friendships with women. When K got married, I was a bridesmaid and I read a poem I’d written for the occasion. She gave me the honor of choosing her child’s middle name. When my first collection of poetry was published, she invited me to be a writer-in-residence at the university where she taught, and had her students read my book. I sat in the classroom and listened to college students explicate my work, which had been a secret dream of mine ever since I sat in classrooms at Dillard and watched language unfold in our discussions. When I got back to my hotel room after visiting K’s students, I cried, because I was so overwhelmed with how much her friendship means to me, even if I don’t show it through more frequent phone calls. Maybe I’ll write her a letter on one of my overnight maxi pads, explaining it all, one day.

  Scandalous

  We call them “auntie songs” now, the old-school soul and R&B songs we used to sing with all the passion our elementary-school-aged bodies had in our bellies. We were too young to be singing those songs, but that’s what our mothers, aunties, older cousins, and play cousins used to listen to, with shining eyes and faraway expressions, holding sweating glasses of drinks off-limits to us. If our aunties weren’t listening to them as they sat in the kitchen, staring at memories we couldn’t see, the radio played them during every Quiet Storm, sometimes with dedications like, “From Denise to that special someone. She says you know who you are.” And then Vesta Williams would come on, singing “Congratulations” to the man who married someone else…Or the ultimate side-chick anthem, “As We Lay” by Shirley Murdock, who sings about everything that happens in those moments before your man has to go home to his wife.

  There have always been songs about cheating spouses and their lovers, but when women sang them, they tended to be from the point of view of the disappointed and hurt wife. The audience is supposed to take the wife’s side. Dolly Parton’s unforgettable “Jolene” begs the other woman not to take her man. As listeners, we empathize with Dolly’s narrator, a woman so in love she approaches the mistress with compliments and self-deprecation, so Jolene can let go of the man who speaks about her in his sleep. And then there’s Shirley Brown’s bluesy, confrontational “Woman to Woman,” where Shirley lets the other woman know she’s not letting her ruin her happy home.

  Songs like “Jolene” and “Woman to Woman” highlighted what a woman would do to keep her man, avoided laying any responsibility at the cheating man’s doorstep, and made the other woman a Villain with a capital V. But I was more interested in the auntie songs, ones like “As We Lay” or “Congratulations,” where we got to hear The Other Woman and realize maybe she’s not a bad person, maybe she’s actually a human being with emotions, too. Maybe the Other Woman is in love and deserves our empathy.

  We heard the older
women in our families playing these kinds of songs back-to-back, and we sang along, our little bodies swaying, until one day, we were adults, and the lyrics, the circumstances, made our bodies sway in too much understanding.

  * * *

  After I’d abandoned my first attempt at grad school, I returned to my alma mater in New Orleans to serve as a college advisor. It was a two-year commitment, and about three or four months before it was over, I met a man with a voice made for night. He was a lovely, nerdy thing with a shaved head, to show premature balding who was the boss. He wore colorful Puma tennis shoes and T-shirts with political figures like Che Guevara. He had a few years to go before he hit thirty, but he already had the look of a hip-hop professor in line at Whole Foods.

  He had freckles—a sprinkle of joy across his nose and cheeks. The few dots on his lips were clearly targets for my affection. And he was so skinny. I outweighed him by ten to fifteen pounds, but at the time, my weight was still shapely and neat. He would joke about his bird chest, but I didn’t care.

  I love skinny men. They tend to be overlooked, particularly in the post–D’Angelo “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” world at the time, but they have strength and stamina that I love to take advantage of, while everyone else swoons over gym rats with shrunken dicks and sperm that tastes like protein shakes. Don’t get me wrong. I love looking at certain types of hardbodies and have no problem lusting after the Sterling K. Browns and Jake Gyllenhaals of the world, but in real life, I’m passing them over and focusing on the slim ones. (Well, if Jake wants to say what’s up, I’d be down.)

  But this guy…his voice made me pause midstep. I’ll call him Bayard for now. My friend K had volunteered me to act as tour guide (read: chauffeur) while she and a cohort of eggheads were in town for a conference. At dinner, I laughed too often and too hard at anything Bayard said. He slid me a questioning glance after one giggle too many, and I tried to pull myself together, but it was too late. When we went to a club later that night, our bodies kept angling toward each other across the room. We ended up sitting next to each other, our mouths too close to the other’s ear, as we tried to talk over the music. We shared a careful dance to “Don’t Look Any Further” by Dennis Edwards before the DJ ruined the vibe with Khia’s “My Neck, My Back.” Around midnight, I’d dropped everyone else off, and he sat in the car with me until the sun reminded us our deodorants had been working for twenty-four hours.

  With a muted dandelion yellow streaming through the pink of dawn, I decided to shoot my shot.

  “Is there anyone back home waiting for your morning call?” I asked him. He took a long time to answer, which was answer enough.

  “Yeah, there is,” he finally said. He looked down at his hands, and I looked at them, too. Of course he was involved with someone. Why would anyone like him be single? He was smart, cute, dedicated to knowledge and education, with that voice made for the sweet spot behind my ear, and I’d met him at the wrong time.

  We decided to exchange emails, because that was safe. There was nothing wrong with having a pen pal, was there? Soon, we were exchanging pages of text. He’d call me at work and have me crying from laughter. And sometimes he’d call me at night, when that someone back home was out with her girls, and he’d talk to me with that voice saying what his words wouldn’t.

  When my work commitment had ended and it was time for me to leave, he returned to New Orleans. I don’t know what he told that someone back home, but he told me he loved me. I said it back to him. We kissed.

  He had the most beautiful mouth—wide and full, with a quick dash of those freckles. He had a very dry wit and didn’t smile much when he was trying to be funny, but when I could get him to laugh, his mouth was a beacon of delight. He was a soft kisser, slow and careful. He always wanted to give me room to change the climate of the kiss. Of all the kissing I’d done to that point, I think he was one of the first to make me feel like if kissing were all we ever did, it would be enough.

  We’d decided to watch Love and Basketball, a movie we’d already seen in theaters but wouldn’t mind watching again. Or rather, a movie we wouldn’t mind watching as we kissed on my uncomfortable futon. Neither one of us actually liked the movie or its story of a young woman in love with a man who would prefer she give up her talent and hard-earned career in order to keep his ego from being bruised. If this had been any other kind of night, I would’ve ranted about making yourself small for a man, my still-tender heartbreak from DJ gassing me, but I didn’t want any more ghosts in the room with us.

  We moved to my bedroom. This was my first real apartment, and I had such cheap furniture. I had personally assembled the black metal canopy bed found in every hood furniture shop, which had to be the way somebody was laundering money, and it always felt like it would fall apart at any moment. I closed the bedroom door, and my cat, Pasha, cried and scratched at the rug, almost ruining the moment. My memory tells me I had candles lit, and that’s probably true. I do love me some candles. The light was soft and flickering as he positioned himself above me. Either he was shaking or I was. One of us commented on the shaking, but the memory is as hazy as the lighting in the room. For many months after this night, we would tell the story of it back to each other so much it feels like I’ve absorbed his memories on top of my own. I do remember the look on his face as he looked at my body and told me I was beautiful before I pulled him down for a kiss. I believed him.

  He was engaged to be married, he’d told me. I tried to act like I didn’t care, and for the most part, I didn’t. I definitely had some woman-to-woman guilt. How could I contribute to breaking another woman’s heart, especially after my own heartbreaking experiences with cheating exes? But Bayard and I started seeing each other when I was firmly in my ho phase, and I decided I couldn’t care more about his woman than he did. I also knew I wasn’t the first woman he’d cheated on her with. I refused to take responsibility for his decisions, but I had no problem benefiting from them.

  Shortly after that night, I moved to a new city near Washington, DC, and he visited again. It was a nothing trip for him. He lived on the East Coast. This time, his cover to see me was academic research. It was August 2002, and he was supposed to be in town for only the weekend, but my body decided otherwise, and not in a sexy way. My spleen spontaneously tore in three places, and internal bleeding landed me in the hospital. He called my mother and stayed with me the entire week, even after my family arrived. He cleaned up my apartment and made sure my cat had a fresh litter box.

  I’m not sure what excuse he gave for having to extend his stay, but it was probably paper-thin. Bayard finally went home and was married a few months later. He emailed me from the honeymoon, and several months after that, we made plans to meet up again. He left the hotel website up on his laptop, and his wife found a book I’d inscribed with something sneaky. All the little clues she’d been collecting and trying to ignore fell into place. She eventually reached out to me via email and AIM, instant messaging of old. The exact messages have been lost to time and anger, but the gist remains:

  What did he tell you about me?

  He didn’t talk much about you.

  Why not?

  You’d have to ask him.

  Why you?

  You’d have to ask him.

  Did you use protection?

  Yes.

  How did you meet?

  Through a friend at the _____ Conference.

  Why did you do it?

  I wanted to.

  Do you love him?

  I think so, yes.

  Do you want him?

  No. I’m not trying to take him from you.

  Were you good to him?

  You’d have to ask him.

  Was it the sex? Did you do something special?

  You’d have to ask him.

  I saw your pictures.

  Okay.

  Does he love you?

  Ask him.

  What is it about you?

  I don’t think it was about me. Not really.<
br />
  Why did he do it?

  Ask him.

  Was he good to you?

  Yes.

  Did he make you come?

  Yes.

  I ping-ponged between a strange loyalty to him, the need to defend myself, the desire to protect her, and the need to be catty. I wanted to tell her to leave, that he’d cheated before and that if it hadn’t been me, it would’ve been someone else—but I also wanted to tell her that her pussy was trash.

  Bayard’s wife reminded me of those petty girls in school who couldn’t understand why guys would be interested in me. I didn’t have the things I was supposed to in order to be attractive, but I did talk about sex a lot and it was clear that was the only thing they thought I had to offer. I let her have shots. I got in a few stingers, but I let her have whatever she needed to feel better. Even as I stood firm in my need to give myself priority and pleasure, I did feel like I had betrayed feminism and womanhood. In giving myself what I wanted, I’d hurt another woman. I felt guilty, but I would not allow myself to feel ashamed.

  Somehow it’s never the man’s fault when he cheats. We know he’s weak. We women have to be the strong ones and do everything we can to keep him happy at home, or if the chance to be the other woman arises, we have to refuse to give in to his advances, refuse to even tempt him. I resent having to be responsible for men’s actions. He knew the consequences of the decisions he made, and he made them anyway. I refused to be held accountable for his part in all of this, no matter how bad I felt in the moment.