You Got Anything Stronger?

by Gabrielle Union

  He plays basketball and I go to a preseason game. I am in the stands, thinking about something poetic Marcus had said that day—“Forever my lady, it’s like a dream”—when a girl attempts to pass me and does her best to bang into my knees. She comes by again, and this time I see her coming so I exaggerate pulling in my legs. She goes so out of her way to smack my legs that she almost falls on my lap.

  “What?” I say.

  She scowls at me.

  At about 2 A.M. that night the phone in my dorm room rings. I turn on the lamp between my bed and Karen’s. “Hello?”

  “Meet me at the fountain,” a girl’s voice hisses. “I’mma whoop your ass.”

  Now, I had a girl in high school who liked to call and threaten to kill me over a boy. So, I think this might be her.

  “Queeshaun? Are you kiddi—”

  “What? This is Dawn. Oh, shit.” She pauses, then hangs up.

  I turn to Karen, who looks terrified. “Do you know a Dawn?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Homicidal Dawn? No?”

  “No.” She laughs. We turn the light back off, but neither of us can sleep.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she says.

  “I’m up,” I say.

  “When we moved in . . . why did you leave a picture on your bed?”

  “Oh,” I say. “Um, in case you were racist. If you switched rooms, my parents didn’t want me to see you be racist.”

  “Wow,” she says.

  I don’t say anything, and I wonder what she must be thinking. Finally, she says it:

  “My parents just thought you were vain.”

  We roar with laughter.

  * * *

  Marcus certainly knows a Dawn, though only in the past tense. They dated through his freshman year, but he insists it was nothing.

  It was certainly something to her. Through November, she calls me in the middle of the night. Always the same lines, a request to meet me at some university landmark to kick my ass. She could have done a campus tour. She continues to call me even after I have friend-zoned Marcus when his Jodeci plagiarism comes to light and kills the mood.

  Karen is good-natured about the after-midnight calls, but she is good-natured about everything. She seems to love it here. And I . . . don’t. I love being a Cornhusker, and I love Nebraska, but I am homesick. Not for home, but for experience. All of my friends who stayed in California are having so much fun together. I’m having fun, but not that kind of fun.

  They send me mix tapes, and I play them alone in my room. I know I am missing out on something. I am all alone, not in a car with them singing to the radio with the windows down after a night at the teen clubs. Back home, I had access to all of the Bay Area and its diversity, which there is a near complete lack of here in Lincoln. I am not imagining this. In a couple of years, the university will begin publishing statistics on undergrad enrollment by race. They will count 373 Black students and 16,122 white students that year. And for the most part, the only Blackness I see here is tied up in being an athlete. I’ve already dated two of them. In the first semester, no less. There was one rule!

  Just before I go home for Thanksgiving, the temperature in Lincoln dips to the teens. When I get to California, it’s in the sixties and feels like summer. My girlfriends hug me and we have epic nights out. I am in the back of a car that weekend, buzzed. I practically volunteered for the middle seat—the “sitting bitch” spot reserved for newcomers—because I am so happy to be squished between my friends. On the freeway we sing Paula Abdul’s “Rush Rush” at the top of our lungs.

  When I return to school I work out a plan to leave the University of Nebraska. I will enroll at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo, California, for the second semester of my freshman year, then transfer into the UC system. Work-study would help me take care of my in-state tuition. It doesn’t occur to me until much later that this is one of the first times in my life I’ve ever wanted to be happy more than I wanted to be right. I decide, if any high school girl ever asks me for advice on freshman year, I will tell her this: “Fuck whoever you want, and follow your joy.”

  I count the days until winter break. My roommate Karen helps me pack up, and soon my side of our room is completely bare. My cousin Jay comes to drive me to the airport in Omaha and we pack everything in his truck. When I come back to the room for one last goodbye, Karen and I hug. We have done this a dozen times today, but we do it again anyway. We promise to keep in touch, and we do.

  “If Dawn calls,” I say, “tell her the bitch moved.”

  “I will,” she says.

  “Wait. Let me.” I dial Dawn’s name from the campus directory, and I’m disappointed when she doesn’t pick up. When her answering machine begins recording, I start in on a Salt-N-Pepa song that’s a perfect goodbye:

  “I’ll take your man whenever I feel like it,” I sing. “This ain’t a threat or a bet, it’s a damn promise.” Before I hang up, I add a final “Bitch.”

  I run out to Jay’s truck. Later, Karen will say that I had barely been gone five minutes before Dawn came flying into the dorm. “No one knows who let her in,” Karen will tell me. “But she even searched under your bed. ‘Where is that bitch? Where is that bitch?’”

  Dawn misses her chance, for I am on my way to the airport in Jay’s truck. There is a bag at my feet I don’t recognize.

  “Oh,” says Jay, “my mom wanted you to have these.”

  I reach in and pull out a giant tin of Aunt Katie’s cookies. All for me. I open it to take a bite, then another, humming Salt-N-Pepa to myself.

  8

  The Audacity of Aging (with Hope)

  I’m in love with my husband. I say that not to brag, but to explain why, on an afternoon when we have the house to ourselves, I find myself on the couch with him, laughing at an inside joke we have shared too many times to still be funny. And yet it is. Playing around, I go to straddle him. I’m the whimsical woman in the jeans commercial, the cool girl from Instagram. She’s fresh! She’s fun!

  Krick-crack-ke-crick-crack.

  Every bone in my left ankle cracks, not in pain, just in an exhale of effort. Old joints and stiff tendons rubbing against each other to create an unexpected fart of age.

  We both freeze in a pose that one second ago appeared playful and now looks like a pharmaceutical ad.

  “Damn,” Dwyane says quietly, trying to sound deadpan and mournful. “I thought we’d have more time.”

  This is his recurring joke: the idea that we are outrunning my age, the nine-year gap between us that can feel like the literal time bomb built into our marriage. Sometimes the joke is funny, and sometimes it’s fucking not. This day he gets away with it because the moment truly is so absurd. Less so when we are intimate and I catch a full-body cramp. A veteran player like me has gotta keep a banana and some Gatorade handy.

  I get why he thinks the joke is funny, because I have always used humor myself to deflect any insecurities about our age difference. If I don’t acknowledge it quickly in a public forum, there is a legion of people waiting to beat me to the punch. Check any recent magazine article about “Older Women, Younger Men”—we are usually the stand-by Black celeb couple. They run a Mona Lisa smile photo of me smirking next to Dwyane with a button saying “10 years apart!” For the record, we are technically only ten years apart for two and a half months out of the year, but a decade sounds like a wider chasm than nine years. Especially for an older actress, whose age is measured by the media in dog years.

  So, I joke about my back pain during our dual workouts, doing “a bit” where I walk slow and press my palms against my lower back. I always think it hides the fact that I actually have to do this, because my back really did start to hurt in my mid-thirties, around the time we started dating. I must have pulled something, I thought at thirty-five. The backaches never left, but neither did Dwyane.

  At the time, not only did I need to get to know this twenty-six-year-old guy, I was getting to know my body as it bega
n to change, always surprising me with some new development. Early in our relationship, I was at his place, lying with my head across his legs, looking up at him. Millie Jackson was singing on the stereo, then Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You” came on. It was that early honeymoon period, where you are weighing the pros and cons of forever versus a fun time.

  I could get used to this face, I thought, as Minnie did her la-la-la-la-las. Then I saw his gaze move down my face to my chin.

  “Oh,” he said. “You’ve got a little eyelash . . .”

  He went to blow it off my chin, and I felt a light breeze on my face as a quizzical look crossed his.

  In that split second, I thought, That’s no eyelash. This guy was about to huff and puff and he was not gonna move the hair on my chinny-chin-chin.

  “Let me get it,” he said. In slow motion I saw him reach for my chin. I went to bat him away but he got to the hair before me. He pulled at it, and I felt an unmistakable tug on a firmly established root.

  “Oh my God,” he said in a gasp.

  I jumped up and raced to the bathroom as Minnie’s soprano whistle echoed through his place. There it was in the mirror, this long hair that I definitely had not seen planting its flag of age on my chin the night before. I opened his medicine cabinet, feverishly searching for a pair of tweezers in a bachelor pad bathroom that basically offered toothpaste and deodorant. “Pesky” did not begin to describe this hair. My eyes welled up in the mirror as I pulled it, suddenly feeling like Cicely Tyson dating Timothée Chalamet. Call me by your name, but loud into my good ear.

  What I didn’t realize at the time was that this was the start of the hormonal changes that all women face. Overnight I could grow a hair damn near an inch out of the middle of my forehead. Or my boob. I became obsessive about gray hairs, staying ever vigilant to dye them. As women, we are trained to see all these little signs of aging come up as a loss, each one a plank disappearing from the rope bridge falling apart behind us. If you dare look back at the young version of you standing back there on the other side—she’s the one absently waving, while devouring a Taco Bell Chalupa Supreme after another all-nighter—you risk not being able to do what almost every woman-focused ad and magazine commands you to: outrun age with every bit of energy you can muster.

  We are simply not allowed to age in this time of innovation. I saw an article about a new beauty regimen that will literally change the order of your DNA to make you appear more youthful. The writer began the article, “While nothing can be done about chronological age . . .” and I laughed. Time is a problem yet to be fixed. The writer cited a new study with promising results for “younger skin,” one that had been cited in a science journal called Aging Cell. I pictured a call from my publicist. “Guess who wants you for their December cover?! Aging Cell!”

  You wonder which a scientist would go for, given a choice: Rearranging DNA to help women live longer, or look younger longer? I know which one I’d buy stock in, at least. We can try all we want—literally change the genetic codes that make us who we are—but there is a saying in sports that Dwyane repeats: Father Time is undefeated. That Dwyane was a professional athlete actually helped balance the difference in our ages. He’d had a tremendous amount of life experience just having been a teen parent, and was already introspective due to the effects of growing up in extreme poverty with addicts as parents. That work on himself—not to mention worldwide fame and outsized wealth—fast-forwarded his life to a point that made it hard for him to relate to people his age. He gravitated to friendships with older guys . . . and then there was me, Grandma Moses. The stereotype is that dating a younger man makes a woman feel youthful. No, I felt matched. He’d been through so many lives by the time we got together that it felt like he was ready for some stability. And I was in that same place. We could learn from each other, and I held on to hope that someone so young could look at me as someone deserving of love and protection.

  But there are moments, right? The foot cracking, the unexpected hair. Or the times I hung out with his younger teammates and realized I was older than their parents. And, of course, the look I read on people’s faces when they realize that near-decade difference between me and Dwyane. The glance at him, and then back at my face for lines. There’s a taking of accounts before they leave me with the question: “What do you think you deserve for having the audacity to age?”

  Because when you go into any relationship, there is an agreement on terms. If someone behaves poorly and the relationship breaks up, there is a general consensus on what the injured party deserves. I’m not talking about money or damages, but compassion. Understanding. However, it seems to be a truth universally acknowledged that when an “older” woman is the injured party, she should have known better. That she signed some sort of waiver entering the relationship dispensing with any right to being blindsided or hurt when it doesn’t work out. Not if, but when.

  It’s the “What did you expect?” caveat, which roughly translates to, “Of course you knew, you old bitch, that at some point the gig was gonna be up.”

  Recently, a friend of mine was legitimately shocked to find out her younger husband was no longer in love with her after years together. They’d had kids together. He swore he was excited to be a young dad, and now he was abruptly bowing out. As she broke the news to our circle, you could hear her tempering her bewilderment and hurt until she just presented a sad resignation. This was just another plank falling away behind her as she aged.

  At a catch-up dinner with our group, I could tell she was very aware of the “What did she expect?” talk, even among our circle.

  “Yo, I hear you,” she said after one too many veiled “Well . . .”s around the table. “I felt the same way. I asked him repeatedly when we got together, ‘Are you sure this is what you want? Because I have already experienced everything that we’re about to live together and I don’t ever want to feel like I’m robbing you of sharing a first time with someone.’”

  She took a sip of wine. “Of course, he was like ‘No, no, no . . .’” she said, doing a dead-on impersonation of husbands that only wives can do after waking next to them for years. “Cut to: ‘Hey, I don’t want to spend my youth just being a dad, watching you be underwhelmed because you’ve already experienced this shit.’” She paused. “Underwhelmed. I wasn’t underwhelmed. It was life.”

  There was a chorus of “that is so awful” at the table, but I knew many of those same people couldn’t help but think that she had signed on for this by choosing him. And maybe they thought I had, too. Someone looked at me, but quickly looked away when I turned my face to her.

  Our friend collected herself, seeming to remember her lines. “He said he was cool with a woman who was so much older. Raising a family. And at some point . . .” she said, putting her fingers on the stem of the wineglass, to move it just so. She exhaled. “He changed his mind. And that’s okay. It sucks, I love him . . . but I get it.”

  She was so convincing I almost believed her. She was honoring the contract. No matter what cruel fuckery that person got up to, she was bound by some arcane rule to offer him clemency. Yeah, he had ended things badly, but he gets off with time served because the perception is that the relationship was going to crash anyway. If she acted blindsided, which she truly was, she would be written off as hopelessly naïve. I wish she at least felt she had the option of being hurt and angry. Of believing that what he did more than just sucked.

  On the way home from dinner, I wondered why it was on her to “get it.” The French have a term, l’esprit de l’escalier—the wit of the staircase. It’s when you think of the perfect thing to say once you’ve left a dinner or party. I had that experience in the car, so I don’t know what you call it. L’esprit de l’Escalade, maybe. Except I wasn’t in an Escalade, but the right response did come to me. I can’t speak for her, but I can correct the way people speak to her and about her. And about me. A lot of these prophets and prophetesses of doom think they’re slick talking under their breath when s
omeone has the audacity to love someone a few years younger. You hear them singing under their breath, rehearsing the runs for their “Cell Block Tango” Chicago moment, belting out, “She had it coming! She had it coming!”

  Nobody has some punishment coming simply for falling in love with another adult. Even the person who changes their mind—as long as the younger person has acted with an appreciation for truth, transparency, and emotional accountability, go in peace. Everyone is free to move the way they need to, and if that’s apart, that’s fine. But I reject this idea that the younger person isn’t accountable for their actions because the older woman is expected to be Miss or Mrs. Congeniality.

  I reject that old contract and its “what did you expect?” clause. It was written by people who thought they had a right to calculate my love’s worth, and the rate of return on our investment in each other. So, I offer this new contract from the Law Office of Gabrielle Union—for us, by us, we women who have the audacity to age, and hope, and believe in love. The contract isn’t for you to sign, it’s for the friends and family in our lives who will act as witnesses to this love. (Note: if you are getting this secondhand—a dog-eared page on the book given to you, or a clip of audiobook on an Instastory—take a moment and ask if this is meant for you.)

  WITNESSETH AS FOLLOWS

  WHEREAS, you have been informed that I am in love, and the party is ________ years younger than me; and

  WHEREAS, you, my friend, are aware that each of the parties is an adult, we have a separate Agreement with an understanding of mutual trust. We will behave and act in the way we claim to feel; and

  WHEREAS, the parties in love understand that each of them has the right to change their mind, to grow at a different rate and speed than each other; and