The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart (4 page)

And you know how black people are. Estelle acted like it was the most natural thing in the world, but when she came back to the back where my cousin Josie is one of the cooks, they all just fell out laughing. She said: He’s Jewish, you know. Like that explained everything. But it was funny enough to the rest of us without throwing that part in. I mean, how many white men do any of us see slamming into a chitlin joint in the middle of the night. He don’t eat them himself, of course, said Estelle. But his wife’s pregnant, and it’s chitlins that she has a craving for. And she nearly split her sides, laughing
.

I stood near the door, where there’s glass, and got a real good look at him. What struck me about him, to tell the truth, is that
he looked happy. In fact, he was probably the happiest-looking person I’ve ever seen. You could just sort of feel it rolling off of him. And when he’d paid for the plate of chitlins, all nicely wrapped up and everything, he kind of waved at us back in the kitchen—where I didn’t think he could even see us—and left. And we felt like maybe we wasn’t such dogs, after all, for loving our collard greens, chitlins and hog maws, and our cole slaw and potato salad
.

There is a languor I associate with being in love, and having satisfying sex. A dreamy look in the eye, a looseness in the joints. A dazed expression, even in the face of danger. And danger that summer was everywhere. Violence, everywhere. Pain and suffering, everywhere. Heroism too, everywhere. Knowing this, we stayed in bed a lot, doing our part to make it all real at the most basic level: making love to each other, we worshiped the miracle of what was possible.

The first time, though, was awkward. And why not? We made love in Carolyn’s apartment, where I stayed, sleeping on a fold-up cot in her small living room. I think it was bad because she was in her room asleep. Or was she? It is hard now to imagine that we were so desperate that we might have done this. Invaded her space in this way. Our only excuse, perhaps, is that in such a violent, racially polarized city we had nowhere else to go. Going with you to your room so shortly after meeting would have felt brazen, presumptuous. You also had a roommate. I was shocked by the intense heat of your body, by the profusion of hair on your chest, your wide shoulders and gentle
hands. Even though the sex was off, our breathing together was not, and it was the perfect harmony of our breaths that I fell asleep, after you left, thinking about.

It wasn’t long before we were trying to explain to each other what it was we did. You were taking depositions from dispossessed sharecroppers who’d opposed their bosses and been thrown off the land. I was doing freelance movement work, but really I was writing a novel that required a closer look at the South. You read the writing I had done so far, in a notebook I carried with me everywhere, and became my champion, instantly. Your work, defending and empowering black people who might have been my parents, my family, endeared you to me, effortlessly. We were a couple: black and white to the people who saw us pass by on the street, but already Sweetheart and Darling to ourselves.

It really did seem at times as if our love made us bulletproof, or perhaps invisible. When we walked down the street together the bullets that were the glances of the racist onlookers seemed turned back and sent hurtling off into outer space. The days passed in a blur of hard work, constant awareness of violence, and unutterable tenderness between ourselves. At the end of the long afternoons listening to the sorrows of your clients, we crept close to the cranky air conditioner in your room—just by the bed—and read poetry to each other. Yeats, Walt Whitman, cummings. We spent the humid evenings learning to give pleasure to each other. Soon, our shaky start in Carolyn’s living room was forgotten. One day we made love during a rousing afternoon thunderstorm. Torrents of rain cascaded down the streets; the air was blue with it. Lightning streaked our bodies
with silver. Nature supports what
is
, we felt, as our bodies moved passionately together. We were a part of it, no questions asked. When I left for New York, you promised to join me, later, at the end of summer. Your last year of law school was coming up; I was going back to the cheap, cockroach-infested apartment and typewriter-on-the-kitchen-table life of the beginning writer.

I think I am handling it all very well. Preparing to see you again, to actually engage in meaningful talk, after so many years. Our Child has arranged for us to meet with her and her therapist in a brownstone in Upper Manhattan. Because it is the beginning of summer and already quite warm, I am wearing a long, thin cotton dress and a light jacket. Something about the dress feels strange, and I do not realize what it is until I get out of the taxi at the therapist’s door. I have put it on backward. You have arrived early and are sitting in the therapist’s reception room. We say hello, and embrace briefly. I duck into the toilet and swiftly rearrange my dress. When I come out you and Our Child and the therapist are seated, chatting.

For years Our Child has been the only visible, public evidence of our years together. She sits tall and poised. Twenty-five, and used to making her own way in the world. Her only obstacle, she feels, is a certain ignorance about who her parents really are. I ask that the seating be rearranged so that you are seated between us. You are compliant, and as you move across me to take your seat I look at you. You are heavier, your hair is thinning. I sense both weariness and wariness. I believe this is the first time you’ve set foot in a psychiatrist’s office. Your brown eyes smile,
and I can now see that it is your eyes that smile in situations like this—that you feel threatened by but are determined to endure—not you. I sense an unsmiling you carefully concealed behind your face. The same unsmiling you who smiled when the racists called you “Jew lawyer,” and reminded you they’d already lynched two “outside agitator Jews from New York” shortly before you arrived to work in Mississippi. In your stylish, rumpled suit and sensible tie, you look like the successful corporate lawyer and devoted nuclear family head in Westchester County that you now are.

It is difficult to believe we were once married to each other. Or that when we were, you would occasionally play poker all night, sleep much of the day, and get to the office just as most offices were closing, at five o’clock. Or that, routinely, you would go to work around noon and stay at the office until late at night. Sometimes I would visit you there, and we’d have a picnic on your desk around midnight. And work together, snuggle and kiss well into morning. Like Our Child, who inherited this trait from you, so that getting her out of bed before noon is a chore, you are a night person. Or you were a night person. Apparently now you are not. You get up, according to Our Child, at the crack of dawn, catch a train and come into Manhattan at an hour you and I would have been still cuddled up together in bed, oblivious of the time. I remember how shocked I was, when she told me this. You, shaved and dressed, on a moving train, headed for New York City, before ten in the morning? Maybe even before nine? My heart ached for you.

The therapist wants to know what it is we want from the two-hour session Our Child has arranged for. I wonder this myself. In my case, it is some kind of closure. My mind flashes on
the last brief conversation we had after receiving verification of our divorce. We’d left the federal building in which severance had occurred—whether in Brooklyn or Manhattan, I no longer recalled—and stood, after ten years of marriage, suddenly free, legally, of each other. And, because we were now legally free of each other, I was feeling very close. The humor with which I was able to see so much of our life together, suddenly returned. I smiled at you, gave a sigh of relief and said: “Well, that’s over. Let’s go somewhere and have a cup of tea.” But your face reflected none of my lightheartedness. You were morose. “No thank you,” you said. “I have to get back to the office.” It was a response emblematic of our problem. My face fell. However, still determined to prove to myself at least that divorce need not mean the end of simple civility, I stuck out my hand. You reluctantly, it seemed to me, took it. We shook hands woodenly, like a couple of strangers, and you turned and disappeared down the street. And I must have said, to the emotions crowding around my chest: Get away from me.

Our Child is speaking. What she wants, she says, is to better understand something that has always puzzled her. She has been the go-between all these years. Eighteen, or so. What she has noticed about each of us when we speak of the other is a kind of wistfulness. We seem to her bemused, often. Puzzled, frequently. Not quite sure ourselves what happened to us. The moment she describes us in this way, I see that it is the truth, and I feel an enormous wave of pity for us, her parents. What did happen to us? It seems now a question well worth considering.

You are sitting, still smiling, your legs crossed. The therapist is looking from you to me. What did happen? she asks. You are
silent, waiting, as if you’d also like to know. Two hours will go quickly, I know. I decide to take the plunge.

I tell her about our courtship and early marriage. The sense we both had of finding, and bonding with, a miraculously compatible mate. The long years of trying to accommodate ourselves to a violent, and often boring, environment. The isolation. The racism. The sexism. The slow breakdown of my spirit after I’d finished this novel or that, this story or that, this poem or that, and looked about and found little to amuse, divert or sustain me. Of your retreat into the secluded quiet of your office, night after night. The loneliness. The old conflict resurfacing between loyalty to “other” and loyalty to myself.

It was the same struggle I’d faced with my mother, I said. I always understood her work was important. She had to be away from home in order for there to
be
a home. It was her earnings that meant food, clothes, a toothbrush. A roof over our heads. I dared not complain. And yet I missed her with every fiber of my being. I died each day she was away. Yet I could say nothing. It was the same in my marriage. Each day my husband went out, often in danger, to slay the dragons of racism and ignorance that proliferated in Mississippi. Many, many people depended on him. More than I did, I sometimes thought. How could I say I also needed him?

The therapist is a middle-aged refugee from Latvia. She has a thoughtful face and a faint accent. The language of her body says: This is a space in which it is safe to express. Her large Irish wolfhound lies in front of the tiled fireplace, asleep. What a difference
such a person, such an ear, would have made in our lives all those years ago, I think. And flash on the five-mile bike ride that had taken me for several weeks to the office of Dr. Hickerson, who casually prescribed Valium, and sent me numbly careening on my way. She did not care enough to suggest perhaps we were simply trying to do too much. That we were throwing our young lives against a system that had crushed lovers and idealists for centuries.

I sigh, into the quiet room. I think, I say, that Mississippi, living interracially, attempting to raise a child, attempting to have a normal life, wore us out. I think we were exhausted. In our tiredness we turned away from each other. Next to me on the couch, I feel you relax. Perhaps you anticipated blame.

But how can I blame you for being human? For wearing out. For running on empty eventually. Just as I did. Now you begin to talk. You mention how, in the final days in Mississippi, you became afraid to leave me alone in the house. That one day you locked the door behind you and I accused you of locking me in. That was the day, you say, you knew we had to leave. I don’t remember this particular day, but I certainly do recall the feeling of being incarcerated. Solitary confinement might be ideal for certain forms of mental creativity, but it is horrible for someone who craves a social world, whose spirit yearns for the refreshment of companionship. Between “projects,” my books, there were days that contained only a scream into the silence. I combated this by teaching at two of the local black colleges, for practically no money. I planted trees and flowers. I learned to shop in a way that took hours rather than minutes. I joined an
exercise club, to which my slim, bored neighbor Phyllis and I went each week. I quilted, I began making a rug. I actually did needlepoint. I talked to my mother on the phone.

Our Child does not remember any of the happiness that surrounded her arrival in our house. And yet, it is this happiness for which she yearns. It is the security of two doting parents, adoringly attentive, adoringly present, that is the quality of comfort she misses. She has become angry at us over the years because no matter what she has tried, this quality of being completely loved by both of us, together, has remained beyond her reach. I feel sad for her. I see the little girl running to the door at the sound of her father’s car, a huge brown and black Toronado that was always, because of its incongruous stylishness, comical for a civil rights lawyer. I see her father fly out from around the car, running to meet her wet and openhearted kisses, her widespread, chubby arms. I see him down on one knee, lifting her against his chest, his wide face transparent with love. I see myself standing, smiling, in the doorway. In his eagerness to embrace and kiss me as well, his thin lips are already stuck out. He is the only white person in the neighborhood at this hour of the day, but even if I think of this it is with amusement. The three of us collide in the doorway, laughing to think we have outwitted racism and racist laws one more time and lived to love another day.

On such an upbeat day I would have worked well, whether at typewriter, quilting or flower planting. Our Child and I would have played. She would have napped. I would have shopped, driven out for a walk around the reservoir, taught. But most important, you would have come home in time for dinner, and
would perhaps spend the evening at home, not, as was often the case, in the office, where one or another case of a black family being terrorized by whites would have called you, immediately after dinner, and compelled you to work on it through the night.