How Stella Got Her Groove Back (3 page)

So over these next two weeks I want to try to do some make-Stella-feel-good stuff. Which is why I’m planning to do some things I’ve been meaning to do but haven’t for one reason or another. Mostly because I’m always too busy. Always doing something. Work alone has been kicking my ass. It’s been said before, but I’m here to give new meaning to the phrase “I hate my job.”

I might actually call up a few old friends and sit in a chair and not roam around the house while I talk but give them my undivided attention, listen to what they have to say, what they’ve been going through, how they’ve been feeling. These are people I do care about but now they’re just on the B list. My life has gotten too busy. And it’s time for me to slow it down.

I will also cook. I used to cook all kinds of interesting and exotic meals, but after Walter left, if Quincy couldn’t identify it he didn’t even want to try it. A double Big Mac and supersize fries and a nine-piece Chicken McNugget with a medium Sprite and apple pie is his meal of choice. I miss cooking. I miss smelling new smells and stirring new sauces and being surprised by the taste of something different. I will cook. I will make it a habit. I will even make some of those low-fat meals from a few of the fifty or sixty cookbooks I’ve purchased over the years and have yet to ever open.

For the last two or three years I’ve been meaning to make a computerized printout of all my relatives’ and friends’ birthdays and even their kids’ and have it printed on a specially made calendar so that each day when I walk into my office all I have to do is look up and see whose birthday is coming up, and their card and maybe even a gift depending on their age and who they were would be a surprise and on time.

I’ll also plant some flowers in the front and back yards since I’ve been reading about the Zen of gardening and how gratifying it can be, and since it’s been awhile since I’ve had sex I’ll take whatever form pleasure comes in. At any rate, I’ve heard that this gardening stuff can relax you and even give you some of those endorphins like people get when they exercise.

This too is something I’d like to improve upon while my son is off to the Rockies with his how-did-I-ever-love-his-lifeless daddy. As it stands now, I am almost ashamed to tell people that I hired a personal trainer who comes to my house three days a week to make me pump and grind and sweat because the bottom line is that I’m lazy and have no willpower and have woken up too many mornings from dreams in which I worked out so strenuously and was truly too beautiful for a woman who’d just turned forty and I put stars like Cher and Tina Turner and Diana Ross to shame but it wasn’t until a year later after having a series of such dreams that I realized I had never broken a sweat let alone panted. It has taken me another year to get into the rhythm of working out and there are many mornings when I’d just as soon call in sick, but as a result of my desire to improve my health with the real motive being pure vanity I now am almost in shape although I still have my unfair share of cellulite, but it’s not as much as I used to have thank the Lord and I actually do have a number of muscles and my butt is higher and firmer than I ever recall it being but since I’d been paying the health club $105 a month for two years and had actually only been inside to give tours to visiting friends and relatives and inform them that whenever I had the time this is where I usually worked out though the truth was I’d only gone in there to sit in the steam room but since I now have two steam rooms—here and in my cabin at Lake Tahoe—there was really no need to waste my gas driving there so why bother, so last year I admitted to myself that I was bullshitting myself and since I have had a difficult time visualizing myself fat and slovenly and just plain old I decided—like they do in any twelve-step program—to turn myself over to a higher power. Her name is Krystal and she makes Cindy Crawford look like a zero and she only charges fifty dollars an hour. I used to use drugs that cost me more per minute. Which is one reason I could never run for public office. If anyone ever did a background check on me they’d be in for a big shock. But then again, they are always shocked at everybody else’s background when they’re running for public office, aren’t they? No one who has really lived should have a sterling background, in my opinion. My sister Angela is the only baby boomer I know who’s never tried any drugs at all. She’s missed out on a lot of good shit if you ask me.

But those were the good old days. Times have changed. Twenty years have passed. I am a grown-up. In every sense of the word. I have responsibilities. I am responsible. I am a good mother. I am raising a black male child by myself and trying to be a mother and father and do my very best so that he’ll grow up to be a strong proud and confident black man who knows his own worth and value and is not afraid to love and show his feelings and yet he’ll be strong as steel on the outside and as soft and sensuous as a cashmere sweater inside. I spend a lot of time being a mother.

I am also a fancy-schmancy analyst for one of the world’s largest investment banking institutions and I make a shitload of money and my family is proud of me because I’m the only one who has actually made it to the top but all I know is that it is lonely as hell up here and I don’t particularly like it. At this point in my life, I’d settle for being in the middle. My job is dull and boring. I just always assumed that a person could have more than one talent, more than one skill, and you could display as many of them as you had available, but I’ve learned that this is not necessarily true. It is difficult to be taken seriously if you are an artist, but playing with numbers gets quite a bit of attention. I’ve also come to realize that the price I’m paying to get paid a lot is a little on the high side. It seems to me that once you get past the two-hundred-thousand-a-year mark you are constantly being appraised and as a result always trying to prove your worth. It wears you out and at the same time no matter what you do or how good you think you are at it, as long as someone ranks higher on that hierarchy than you it makes you expendable. It’s too hectic up here and the race is always on. It’s always rush hour but I haven’t figured out when to put on my blinker because it’s safe to change lanes and I’m also not sure which exit I should take to get off this track altogether.

I know there’s still room in my life for steel and suede for copper and leather for brass and wood for marble slate glass and material in general, but I just don’t know how when or where to put it back in. Mostly because I’m scared. I’ve always been good at making things that serve a purpose, that perform, that function, but art is so iffy and then there’s the mortgage and I’m not sure if I could recapture regain or pick up where I left off, if I’ll ever have the guts the chutzpah hell the balls to leave my job.

My divorce and starting all over has taken most of the bite out of me for right now and I don’t know exactly how long it’s going to take me to get my groove back on as the young kids say. All I know is this: Loss is hard. Starting over is hard. Which is why I’m just trying to get from one day to the next, why I’m on the straight and narrow, and it’s probably the reason why most of the time my life is not fun.

Right now I’m tired of thinking about how uneventful my life has been lately and I wish I knew what I could do to put the fizz back into it. How to resurrect myself. How to shoot some vitality into my heart, my mind, this house of soul I live in. I haven’t always been dead. I used to live a somewhat exciting life. I used to take chances. I used to do some crazy shit and didn’t give a damn because I wasn’t hurting anybody. Fifteen years ago my life was interesting because I didn’t know where I was going I just knew I was going somewhere. It was exciting because I hadn’t arrived anywhere yet. And the journey itself was exhilarating. The detours. The uncertainty. I used to change my mind about things right in the middle of doing the shit. Made mistakes and was woman enough to admit I made them but didn’t slay myself for it. It was usually some bullshit that was reversible anyway. Back then I did whatever I felt like doing that gave me pleasure. When did I stop? And why? After or during marriage? Motherhood? My so-called career?

I walk outside for a minute to think about this and when the dog runs up to me with his wet dog-smelling self I pat him on the head and go back into the house. My latte is cold and I step inside my office to pick out a book but out of the thousand or so I have it doesn’t seem as if any of them suit my mood. I don’t want to read anything too lighthearted or too deep either. I close the door and head back toward the family room because I’m not so sure that I really want to escape my own world. That I want to be engaged.

Part of my problem is that I’m always doing something and if I’m not then I’m looking for something to do. I decide to lie down and take a nap. To simply stop moving. For a change. So I sink into the thick cushions on the red love seat and I close my eyes but the leather is cold against my skin and I’m not exactly exhausted because I haven’t exactly exerted any real energy today except what it took to decide on what I was and wasn’t going to do.

Without even trying I find myself springing up and decide that I’ll watch a little television, something mindless, and it’s the one thing I rarely do except maybe by accident like the accident I’m causing right now. I don’t even know if I have HBO or Showtime and I’m hoping I do and even though my watch says it’s now twenty to one in the afternoon I don’t care if I tune in to the middle of a movie because I’m like an intelligent enough woman who should be able to figure out how something started but I guess all I really want is to hear some noise since Quincy’s not here making any or maybe I’m just so used to being distracted I need something to stop me from thinking so hard about my own mundane redundant predictable but good little life.

I try three remotes before one works. And as soon as the TV comes on of course there’s a commercial and without looking up I hear this melodic baritone voice almost singing “Come to Jamaica” and I swear it seems as if he’s talking to me and when I look at the fifty-five-inch screen it is filled with turquoise water and hot white sand and a blazing yellow sun and then a bronzed white man in a flapping white cotton shirt and baggy white linen trousers strolls along the shore and a tanned white woman in a straw hat and sunglasses is stretched out on a chaise longue with a book resting across her chest and they are both holding tall frothy glasses filled with something melon-colored and I think I can smell the papaya juice the pineapple juice and coconut oil and that tropical breeze is whispering in my ear and when I look closer that white woman’s legs begin to turn brown and she is wearing my chartreuse bathing suit and my good straw hat and that’s my Swatch watch on her wrist and my Revo sunglasses and when I look closer at this woman who now looks like she could be my twin sister I realize it
is
me lying on that chaise on that beach and when that lilting voice once again says “Come to Jamaica,” I sit up then stand up and I say to that man, “Why the fuck not?”

“W
HO
’
RE YOU GOING
with?” Angela asks. She’s my younger sister by twenty-one months and she’s still about ten years older than me.

“Nobody.”

“You can’t be serious, Stella.”

“I’m very serious.”

I can hear her slurping up something. She’s always putting something into her big mouth and I guess it’s because she’s sort of pregnant with twins. “Hold it,” she says. “You mean to tell me you’re gonna go all the way to a foreign country by yourself?”

“Yes. What’s the big deal?”

“Who you gonna do stuff with and what if somebody realizes you’re alone and tries to take advantage of you and why do you have to go all the way to Jamaica?”

I knew I shouldn’t have told her first. The most outrageous thing Angela’s done in years is buy a BMW station wagon. Even though she and her corporate lawyering spouse are in the process of brewing two children they actually went out and bought a completely furnished five-bedroom model home in a semi-custom home subdivision which is surrounded by nothing but tract homes and Angela and Kennedy decided to be bold and had the outside repainted a pale gray instead of the other million different shades of gray like every other house in their neighborhood. My sister would be lost without her garage door opener her sprinkler system her trash compactor, and Kennedy’d be disoriented without the landscaper the handyman and I know for a fact that he does not know how to use everyday tools. And like a real fool, Angela cleans her own house since she’s in it all day. She likes the predictable. She is truly an all-American girl. But she doesn’t watch enough Oprah.

Apparently Angela didn’t hear a word Mama said when we were growing up. “Never let a man run the whole show. Never let him know if you’re holding the trump card. Never tell him how many men you slept with before him and never ever let him know how much money you got and keep some of your business to yourself cause he’ll hold it against you later long after you think he forgot.” You think she would’ve learned after going to the altar once before. But nope. She likes to repeat herself. The first husband (and I can’t even hardly remember his name but does it really matter?) caused her to bear a handsome buck whose name I do recall because he is my favorite (well, my only) nephew and he is away at college and well over six feet tall and the only black hockey player I’ve ever heard of. Evan is twenty. Last I heard he was also smart. He has told me to my face that he thinks Kennedy is a punk but he tries to get along with him because his mom loves the dude. Angela handed her entire soul over to Kennedy for safekeeping when she married him. He is only the second man she has ever slept with. He writes, produces and directs all three acts of their lives on a daily basis and she basically goes along with his program because I truly believe that Angela feels like she’s nothing without a man. Unfortunately in her case, it’s true. She needs guidance, direction from somebody, and boy does she get it from Kennedy. She doesn’t have to think about too much on her own because he takes a scientific mathematical approach toward life in that he’s got everything all figured out before the shit even happens. So basically Angela just connects the dots.