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I DON’T MEAN TO BE A BOTHER, BABY. You know I don’t. But when are you gonna refill that shot glass? I mean, if you’re going to go through the trouble of putting whisky on your altar for me, at least keep the cup full. My cup doesn’t runneth over. Not even this itty bitty shot glass. At least let my tiny cup runneth over and not sit empty for your-months1 at a time, with a dirty brown grit at the bottom.
Does Love exist?
Is fat meat greasy? Cuz ain’t no way I could’ve fallen so hard, so fast, so far, by myself.
Rewind that.
I didn’t fall in love. Like Toni Morrison said, I rose in it. If only for one night. I levitated for that brother with the high-top fade, tired eyes, and pretty smile. That first night, we worked it out, strangers on the club floor. Some Bobby Brown, some Chubb Rock, a little Jody Watley, the chaos and black steel of Public Enemy, and then Miss Jackson (cuz I’m nasty and he is too). We grinded, we Reeboked, and we Cabbage Patched until sweat plastered my hair to my face, plastered his shirt to his back. When he pulled me close and murmured, “Can you stand the rain, ma?” in my ear, I didn’t even mind his wet cheek on mine. My panties went damp, too. It was a wrap. You know how it is. And then back to life, back to reality. Lights up. You ain’t gotta go home, but you got to get the hell outta here.
Where shall we worship?
In his car, in the park, in his room when his mama was at work, on the stoop, always, always, in the shadows.
Despite his absence and his negligence, or perhaps because of them, my earliest memory is of my father. We are at the house where I live with my mother and my grandmother. This is the only time I remember him being inside our house in the eighteen years I lived there. In this memory, I’m a toddler, not yet potty trained. I know this because my mother has called my father to come and force me to sit on the potty.
My father arrives, and he is angry and threatens to spank me. I don’t want him to spank me or to be angry with me. I want him to love me. Somehow, I already understand that his love is tenuous. So I sit on the potty. When he begins to leave, I notice that wrestling (the fake kind) is on TV. I recall seeing my father, grandfather, and uncles watching wrestling during the occasional weekends I spend at my grandparents’ house, the house where my father lives with his parents and siblings — or rather, the place where he gets his mail and changes his clothes once or twice a week. Because I know my father likes wrestling, I try to point out that wrestling is on the TV: to get in his good graces, to put the whole potty thing behind us. But either I don’t have the words to tell him, or he’s ignoring me. I am not yet toilet-trained, but already I’m trying to figure out how to make my father stay.
There’s a joke I used to tell about the time my then-fiancé, Mike, gave me crabs. Brought me crabs is more specific, but the clarification ruins the joke. He brought me a dozen live blue crabs in hopes of relieving my stress in the midst of grad-school finals. Mike knew that seafood is my favorite food, that crab is my favorite seafood, and that some of my fondest memories of growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, were of crab boils with family and friends. Whenever he visited me in Jacksonville, we’d sit in the backyard for hours with my mother, my grandmother, and whoever else was invited, eating dozens of crabs, corn on the cob, and potatoes. On that spring afternoon in Stamford, he bought the crabs to give me a taste of home, a thousand miles away. Mike and I met at Yale, both first-generation college students.
On my eighteenth birthday, we went on our first date. I can’t say that we were still going strong five years later, but we were still going. Engaged to be married that summer of ’94. Then, after twelve years of marriage—for reasons we would sort out, separately, in therapy—we divorced. Suffice it to say, we were incompatible, too young, too wounded.
There’s a joke I used to tell about the time my then-fiancé, Mike, gave me crabs. Brought me crabs is more specific, but the clarification ruins the joke. He brought me a dozen live blue crabs in hopes of relieving my stress in the midst of grad-school finals. Mike knew that seafood is my favorite food, that crab is my favorite seafood, and that some of my fondest memories of growing up in Jacksonville, Florida,
were of crab boils with family and friends. Whenever he visited me in Jacksonville, we’d sit in the backyard for hours with my mother, my grandmother, and whoever else was invited, eating dozens of crabs, corn on the cob, and potatoes. On that spring afternoon in Stamford, he bought the crabs to give me a taste of home, a thousand miles away. Mike and I met at Yale, both first-generation college students.
On my eighteenth birthday, we went on our first date. I can’t say that we were still going strong five years later, but we were still going. Engaged to be married that summer of ’94. Then, after twelve years of marriage—for reasons we would sort out, separately, in therapy—we divorced. Suffice it to say, we were incompatible, too young, too wounded.
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