His First Wife (4 page)

“Hell, yeah,” she said, swinging her fists at some invisible foe in the room. I was getting her all riled up. I guessed we were bonding. I wondered how she might fit in at the next book club meeting. “Yoooo, rich lady beat her husband's ass,” she yelled down the hall.

“Word?” someone said who sounded like Pepper, the woman who was speaking to McKenzie before. “Why she do that?”

“Caught that fool in bed with some ho!” someone else said. I got up and walked to the bars. Had the woman seen me? Was she there?

“I would've beat that clown's ass too. Him and the trick and then the cops for trying to stop me,” someone said. They started laughing again and I laughed too. The thought of my turning crazy on everyone was a picture I'd love to send to my mother in the mail. Let her hang that in the den with the pictures of me at my debutante ball.

“You go, lady!” someone said.

“That's right, rich lady. Fuck men!”

“Tired of them doing us wrong. That's why I'm in here in the first place. My man don't know how to act either. Got me out in these streets. I'm too old to be in these streets. My pussy 'bout to retire!”

We all started laughing and McKenzie patted me on the back.

“Shit, we all in here because of some negro in some kind of way,” she said. “That's how it starts.”

I caught myself nodding my head like I knew anything about what she was saying. Besides my current situation, the only time I even knew anyone who'd gone to jail, it was a girl in my first-year dorm at Spelman who was arrested for allowing her boyfriend to hide drugs in her room. Apparently, while she'd never handled or distributed the drugs, they put her in jail and threw the key into Lake Lanier.

“Well, I'm off the streets when I get out this time,” Pepper said. “Don't make no sense. I don't even know who got my babies. Think my mama got them, but she tired of my shit. I got to get myself together. For them anyway. I don't want them to go through what I done been through. They need better.”

“How you gone give them better?” someone asked. “You like the rest of us in here. No education. Ain't got shit. Yo' man don't act right. And the government ain't doing shit either.”

“That's why you in the streets anyway,” someone else said.

“It don't matter,” Pepper said. “I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I am. And that's all.” Her voice cracked and she was silent.

Her words must've been a rude taste of reality for everyone, because they all stopped laughing and I watched as one by one they turned and stepped away from the discussion in the hall.

“Go on and use the bathroom, if you have to. Ain't nobody looking at you,” McKenzie said, walking back to the bench. “I know when I was pregnant, I was going every ten minutes. I don't know how you lasted that long.”

 

 

After I went to the bathroom, I laid down on the only cot in the room and took a nap. I was exhausted, and while I was sure at least ten people had died on that cot, I wasn't feeling particularly choosey about anything after using the way-too-public toilet. McKenzie tried to wake me up when someone came down the hall giving out breakfast, but I decided I'd wait for my mother. If the jail food was anything like the accommodations, I wanted no part of it. I told her she could have my share.

Later, a male guard came down the hall, calling my name. He explained that someone had posted my bail and that I was free to go. While I'd made an odd, new friend in McKenzie, I was happy to hear my name and wasted no time getting to my feet. She was a decent woman once you got to know her, but I was no inmate. As I walked out of the cell, we exchanged nods. “Rich lady,” she said, “I'll see you next time you get locked up.”

I smiled uneasily and walked behind the guard down the hall. I peeked into each of the cells to see the faces of the women I'd come to know for a few hours. They looked a little less unfriendly on my way out. Some waved. Some smiled. Others shook their heads, making it clear they'd wished the guard had called their names instead of mine. But, no, it was time for me to go, and I wasn't missing my chance to bust out of the big house—even if it was in my mother's Mercedes.

A
year after I graduated from Spelman (with full honors—just as my mother and her mother did), I went through some hard times. It was what my mother called a small depression, but really it seemed to me as if my world was dissolving into sand. While everything was near picture perfect with Jamison and me, my career just wasn't taking off in the way I'd planned. Before I even enrolled at Spelman, my mother and I had sat down at the dining room table where all important decisions were made and put together a schedule for my career on a rose-colored piece of stationery with butterflies playing tag at the top. I was only sixteen and knew little of what to put beneath the butterflies' flapping wings, but the first thing my mother wrote down was
Doctor
. I shrugged my shoulders in the way that she hated and sat back in my seat. I didn't know the first thing about what it meant to be a doctor and had little interest in science in school. “It would be great for you, all of the girls are doing it now,” my mother said. “Now, when I was at Spelman, we didn't even have the courses to prepare us to go into medicine, and no one wanted to be a doctor anyway; that was for our husbands,” my mother said. “But not now. I hear lots of girls are doing it, just taking classes at Morehouse and heading off to medical school. It's a good thing really. Times have changed. Men like women of substance. Women who help people. Don't you want to help people, Kerry?” Helping people was exactly what I'd wanted to do. Since I was six years old, I'd been recording the names of each girl who had won Miss America in my diary. I'd trace their goals and try my best to align my own with theirs. I admired how strong and secure in their lives they appeared. Especially Vanessa Williams—when she won that year, I was sitting in the living room with my mother and thinking she didn't look anything like me, but she was beautiful and everything my mother said a black woman should be. But they were all beautiful and smart and kind and it seemed that everyone liked them. And what seemed to be consistent in all of these women's stories when they described their goals was that they wanted to help “mankind” or “serve those less fortunate.” This was what I wanted out of life. To be beautiful, liked, and to help people. To be like Miss America. So, that afternoon at the dining room table when my mother said being a doctor would get me closer to doing just that, I signed up willingly. She smiled her happy smile, and even the butterflies seemed to flicker their wings and float off the page.

We decided that a focus in biology with classes at Morehouse would be most appropriate for me to prepare for medical school—at a tier one, Ivy school, of course. I'd focus on trying to get into pediatrics. It was an area men would find “sweet,” my mother assured my sixteen-year-old ears. It would attract the attention of a wealthy and successful suitor looking to mate with a smart and successful, yet also caring, wife. A great career choice for a Spelman woman. I wasn't really thinking about marriage and suitors just yet, but I didn't want to take that smile off my mother's face, so I agreed and smiled, hoping it would all pan out.

Our plan worked just fine until the rejection letters from every Ivy I'd applied to started rolling in before graduation. Thin envelope after thinner envelope, I opened them all to find that I was either rejected or worse—wait-listed (which Mother said meant they thought someone was better than me). My adviser explained that while my application was no doubt stellar, the top schools may have felt I lacked personality or diversity. “They like round students,” she'd said, patting me on the shoulder with her awkwardly tiny hands. I was heartbroken and embarrassed. “I thought we agreed you'd apply to more than just the top five. What about those schools?” she'd asked. I just shook my head. I was Kerry Jackson. Black Barbie on campus. The perfect daughter at home. Miss Kerry America in my diary. I was supposed to get into any school I selected. I had the grades. I didn't think I needed a backup plan for anything. Apparently, I was wrong and I had a stack of tear-soaked envelopes to prove it.

When my mother got the news, she went into action. Swung her black, patent leather purse over her shoulder and dragged me around the city to all of her connections to see how she could change the result. But we eventually found ourselves with a specialist who'd gotten a bunch of kids into Ivy League medical schools. He assured her that her Southern connections would not get me into schools up North. She clutched her pearls and asked what we could do. “Reapply,” he said frankly. “Get her a little life experience, and do it again. She also needs to pull her MCAT scores up a bit if she wants to get into a top school.” My mother shot me a look of disdain and turned her back. They then agreed on a new plan with no rose-colored stationery and butterflies. To save face and the family name, I was to tell everyone at school (they were all expecting a Harvard-destined departure) that I was taking a year off to help take care of my father. I'd reapply to the same schools after I got a few months of experience doing community service and assisting a doctor in a medical office.

This plan worked with perfect precision, just as my mother had promised. One of her best friends got her husband to let me work at his office and I volunteered at my church, packing toiletries and Bibles to give away to the homeless. It felt good. I was making my own money (it wasn't a lot) and I honestly felt smarter, more experienced, and more mature than I did the year before. I was ready to be accepted and take the next step in my life. I was a grown woman and I could stand on my own two feet. I'd show them that in my statement of purpose. I'd have the grades, raise my MCAT scores, and have some life experience. While the MCAT scores didn't go up that much, I was still confident. In fact, I was so confident that once again, I only applied to the top five schools. Surely, they'd see me differently this time, surely they'd give me a chance to contribute to their schools all that I had to offer.... Surely, I was dead wrong.

It seemed like it took about a day for the schools to start rejecting me again. I wasn't exactly hurt when I got the first letter. It was a fluke. Some hate-filled receptionist had sent me the wrong letter by mistake.... But by the time I got the last letter, I was a wreck. No one even bothered to wait-list and then reject me this time. There were five no's and one sad me.

I showed up at a romantic dinner Jamison had been planning for months (anticipating an acceptance) with my eyes so swollen that one of my contacts popped out onto the table. I couldn't stop crying and Jamison, who'd already gotten his acceptance to Cornell Medical School but had decided to put it off to stay in Atlanta with me until I left for med school, was trying his best to cheer me up. “Are you sure being a doctor is what you want?” he asked uneasily. “I'm just saying, I believe in you, that you can do it, I really believe that, baby, but sometimes the universe has a way of showing us what we really want.” I wanted so badly to scream at him and tell him he'd had some nerve saying that. I was meant to be a doctor. It was my dream. It was written on the piece of stationery. I wanted to say all of this, but I was tired and kind of feeling like he was right. I wanted med school, but sometimes, late at night when I was lying silent in my old bedroom that my mother had turned into her gift-wrapping room when I left for college, I'd wonder how it was going to help me get closer to what I wanted to really do . . . whatever that was. I enjoyed being with the patients at the medical office, but the doctor seemed so tired all the time, worn out and stretched in so many directions. I wondered if I could do that. If I wanted to do that with my life.

“I don't know,” I said to Jamison that night. I just kept crying and shaking my head.

“Maybe that's someone else's dream,” he said, his eyes moving quickly from me to his plate.

“Whose?” I asked.

There were two things Jamison and I tried not to speak about in our relationship. The first was his mother. She hated me because Jamison put off medical school to stay in Atlanta with me. And the second was my mother. She hated Jamison because he wasn't from any Georgia name she could recognize. He'd gone to Morehouse, but it was on a full scholarship. And while he was clearly a smart man destined for success, this just wasn't enough for my mother. “Title entitles,” she'd always say, advising me to find a man whose last name carried weight in the traditional Georgia movers-and-shakers circle.

“Maybe you're so stuck on the doctor dream because of your mother,” Jamison added. I was speechless. Of course, I'd toyed with the idea of this before. My mother was somewhat of a control freak. She was a master manipulator and since my father got ill, I was her project. It could be overwhelming sometimes, but mostly it felt good. She was usually right about the advice she gave me and thus far my life had been perfect because of it. It was a lot of pressure, but the way people looked at me, the way I felt about myself, made it all worth it in the end. “We're the winning team,” she'd always say. “The best pearls of the dive.”

That night when Jamison and I got back to his place, he made me promise that I'd get some real help to work through all of the emotions I was feeling. I'd never been rejected before, and it had to be hard. If he couldn't help me, I needed to talk to someone (besides my mother) who could help me get things into perspective. While I wasn't exactly excited about what he was suggesting, I felt so down I was sure something was really wrong with me that I couldn't fix, and I wasn't about to ignore it. So, instead of telling my mother about the new set of rejections, the next morning I called a random number in the yellow pages and went to see a psychologist.

Like Jamison, my psychologist seemed to keep coming back to my mother whenever we started getting to the root of what he called my “obsession with perfection.”

“You carry too much weight,” he'd say, pushing back in his old, sweat-stained leather office chair. “No one can breathe under all that weight. Lighten the load.”

After three months of biweekly therapy sessions, Dr. Bellinger gave me the best advice I've ever received concerning my mother. His words would get me through the next eleven years as my mother continued to try to rule my life and allow her own to spin out of control.

“Stop letting her surprise you,” he had said. “Stop setting yourself up to be hurt by her disappointment and letdowns. Accept your mother for who she is and expect nothing from her other than what she commonly gives.”

It was like the
Daughterhood Bible
had finally been translated into my language. Something in me slowed down, while something else sped up. For the first time in my life, I was able to tune out my mother and tune in myself. While most of my thoughts sounded like hers, at least they were coming from my own mind. I could hear her, but I fought with everything I had not to let her drown me out.

 

 

I supposed I should've heard Dr. Bellinger's wise words in my ear when I was walking toward the waiting area of the jail. While I'd stopped seeing him years ago, “Stop letting her surprise you” might have come in handy when I expected my mother to be there on the one day of my life when I needed her most. I was about to give birth and had just gone to jail for hitting my husband in front of a home that belonged to the woman he was having an affair with. I wanted my mother to be there for me. Therefore, “Stop letting her surprise you” would've been the perfect phrase to have pinned to my brain when I walked into the waiting area and this was not the case. Sitting in a little, red, plastic chair was . . .

“Marcy?” I called, fruitlessly scanning the room for my mother. My heart sank in shame.

“Kerry!” She jumped up and ran toward me with her arms wide open, concern on her face. I was a bit perturbed that she wasn't my mother but also very happy to see my best friend. Marcy had the kind of “girl-next-door” beauty that was hard for most people to see. She had soft, delicate features like a baby. A little button nose, chubby cheeks, and perfect pouty lips. Her complexion was clear and her skin was the light brown of a perfectly toasted croissant.

“My mother . . . I thought she was coming,” I said, accepting Marcy's embrace with the little bit of arm space I had due to the baby.

“She called me at my job.”

“Your job?”

“She said she was on her way out of town and that she needed me to get you,” Marcy said. I was beginning to feel angry, but my body was so drained that I was just happy someone had come to get me.

“I'm sorry—” I started.

“No,” Marcy said, clasping my hand in hers to stop me. “This is not about that. You needed me and I'm here. You don't need to be any more upset than you already are, so let's let that go.” She took the small bag that held my belongings and led me to the car. She said Jamison called her too and said he'd be waiting at the house.

“He's there?” I asked, standing beside Marcy's car.

“Yes,” she said. “But you don't have to go there. You can come home with me. Whatever you want to do, I'm here.”

I sat back in the seat and covered my face with my hands. I didn't want to see Jamison. I wasn't ready. I started crying again and this time the tears were coming from a place of fear I hadn't yet felt. I was literally falling apart. Everything I knew to be true about the world and the life I was planning was about to topple over and I had not one unswollen leg to stand on. I wanted everything to disappear and to have my life back. If I couldn't have Jamison, then I didn't want his baby. And if I couldn't have my baby, I didn't want to live. It was too much and I couldn't keep pretending I was strong enough to make it. I was afraid of being a single mother. I didn't have whatever those women in jail had. I wasn't raised to be strong alone. I needed my husband. I wanted my husband.