Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be Read online

  Conversations over Lunch

  “Nicki!” my mother yelled from the living room, even though my bedroom was directly next to it.

  “Yes?” I yelled right back.

  “C is on the phone!”

  “Which C?”

  “Come and get this damn phone!”

  When I answered the phone, it was my aunt C, my father’s older sister, with her deep but somehow lilting voice. She wanted to know if I’d like to go to the bookstore with her and maybe do some shopping, and we made arrangements for the next weekend. I was eleven or twelve, and back then, malls were still home to my favorite places, bookstores, especially the malls in white neighborhoods.

  This was also around the time my mom finally kicked my dad out. My father had been arrested while driving Mama’s car, the only working car we had, and it was impounded. That was the last straw. He said he’d been pulled over for running a yellow light, and maybe that was true, but what was definitely real and true was the fact that the police found drugs on him. Getting the car impounded had a direct influence on Mama’s ability to get to work and, therefore, her finances, always tightly budgeted, and so she refused to deal with his sloppy irresponsibility anymore.

  For a long time, I resented that she’d waited until a car was the victim of my father’s mistreatment before she ended their relationship. He’d been such a terrible husband and father. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized Mama thought a bad father was better than no father at all, because that’s what she had experienced. She never knew who her father was, never had that relationship, but as many of us grow to learn: a raggedy piece of something is rarely better than the healthy whole.

  * * *

  My aunt C realized I needed a little escape from all the tension of my parents’ divorce. My parents had put me in the middle of their issues. I’m my father’s firstborn, his parents’ first granddaughter. My father couldn’t have the relationship he’d expected with my brother, so he paid more attention to me. My mother frequently sneered at me about favoritism and fairness, because it was obvious I was my father’s favorite. When my parents split, my father stalked my mom. When my brother and I visited him, he’d only ask questions about Mama—who she was seeing, was she going out at night, that kind of thing. He wasn’t really concerned about us as his children, just as informants. Mama resented me because…I don’t know. No, I do know, but it’s hard to say your mother was jealous of you.

  My father was never mean to me. He’d lie and steal from me, but he always showed me affection and never threw me across the room in a paranoid, drunken rage. Not that Mama wanted me to be on the receiving end of said treatment; she was always very protective of us children in that way and defended us. She once told me she was so happy to be pregnant with me because she thought it meant my father would start to act right. Yet when I came along, it didn’t stop. I wasn’t the cure. And it always bothered me that my father didn’t love any of us enough to stop drinking and doing drugs and abusing her. This has led to a lifetime of worry that I’ll never be enough for the good parts of love.

  I think C understood more than I knew at the time. She’s the oldest of my grandparents’ four children. I later discovered that Gran’mama had been pregnant with her before she and Gran’daddy were married, and Gran’daddy resented his shotgun wedding. He was cold to C as a child, ignoring her attempts at affection, and distant to my grandmother, blaming her for forcing them to marry. I don’t have details, but I can imagine C wanted to offer me something she didn’t have—a chance to get away from it all.

  * * *

  C is the aunt who lives in the deep suburbs, close enough to be near family but far enough that there are no surprise visits. For as long as I can remember, she has been the Unbothered Auntie. She sees the family drama and will roll her eyes, let out a disgusted “ooh,” and then go home to her peace. She drives with both feet, because driving makes her nervous, and she needs both feet ready to press the brake in case shit gets real. She is very fair-skinned and curvy in the way that’s hidden by her cardigans and tennis shoes but makes country men extra polite. She always has her hair in a short but stylish cut, low and curly, the favorite of Black women who are tired of doing their hair but still want to look good. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in makeup. Her whole vibe has always said, “This suits me, and if it doesn’t suit you, that’s fine—I can go home.” I love her.

  C started picking me up every month or so. She’d take me to the fancy malls, Green Hills near Vanderbilt and CoolSprings Galleria in Franklin. The first time she took me to Davis-Kidd Booksellers, an indie specific to Tennessee, in Green Hills, I think my eyes fell out of my head. I’d been in bookstores and libraries before, obviously, but this was different somehow. The store itself seemed huge. People were everywhere. There was a café inside, and even though I have never liked coffee, there’s something so welcoming about knowing you can be in a bookstore long enough to sit and have a hot drink.

  C wanted to know what kind of books I liked, and when I asked where the romance section was, she didn’t roll her eyes or sigh. She led me there while making recommendations of authors she liked. Butterflies probably erupted from my head. We separated for a bit while she went to find her own selections, and when we reconnected, I had a stack of expensive hardbacks and the goofiest smile on my face. She went through my stack and said gently, “Let’s find paperback versions of these,” and we did. As I put back books we couldn’t find, she replaced them with others she thought I might like. During a time when it felt like no one paid attention to me except to make me feel bad or tell me I was a reminder of someone who hurt them, here was someone opening new worlds to me.

  * * *

  Shopping with C was a lesson in retail etiquette. If a salesclerk was rude, she’d let out this very disgusted, very southern-lady high-pitched “ooh!” that means “I can’t believe anyone on this earth has such terrible manners! I hope never to see you again!” When you make this sound, you have to pull one shoulder into your body, as if to say you must hurry away from this person before their rudeness becomes contagious, and also make your eyes go big in disbelief. She always did it as the person was walking away but still close enough to hear it, and we usually had no further problems. That “ooh!” is meant to make them think about how they were raised. I still use it.

  After we finished shopping, we’d grab lunch. I’d try to be conscious of money and say the mall food was fine, but we’d almost always end up at a nice restaurant. I’d tell her about school, and then we’d talk about movies and books. My house was always filled with pop culture. Someone’s television or music was always going. Mama kept subscriptions to all the Black magazines, but it was with C that the discussions got real deep. C and I talked about camera angles and color schemes, allusions, metaphors, and symbolism. These conversations over lunch planted the seeds that would grow into my culture criticism career.

  My sister and I watched Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor every time it aired on AMC, back when AMC ran old movies with no commercials. We got a VHS copy of the movie so we could watch it whenever we wanted. We laughed at the accents and quoted unintentionally funny moments to each other, like when Big Mama was trying to make sense of Big Daddy’s medical diagnosis and asked, “Well, what’s wrong here?” For my sister and me, the film was a source of amusement and Paul Newman thirst, but when I watched it alone, I saw things between the lines, so I asked C about them. Was Newman’s character, Brick, supposed to be gay? Was he in love with Skipper, his football teammate who’d died by suicide? C gave me Tennessee Williams’s backstory and Hollywood gossip about Elizabeth Taylor, and we talked about the importance of lies and fertility in southern culture.

  “Well, you know, Nicki,” she started off, shifting in her chair at whatever casual dining restaurant we were at. She looked around to see if anyone was listening to us. “People like to keep their secrets.”

  I nodded my head, chewing on a Caesar salad with too
much mayonnaise in the dressing. I didn’t want to appear too eager, but I had a feeling she was thinking about her own secrets or something in our family.

  “Families always want a lot of babies, especially boys, to carry on the name, and for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, it was also about money. Maggie hadn’t had any kids yet, so everyone thought something was wrong with her. Women have to have a lot of babies to be worth anything.”

  We both let that last sentence sit on the table between the salt and pepper shakers. C had only one child. Mama had told me she’d had a difficult pregnancy and birth, but no details beyond that. Her sister, my other aunt, who passed away when I was in college, had been trying to get pregnant for a while and was also having “difficulties.” This was the first time that I worried about my own fertility.

  “So in this movie, Nicki…” C picked up her critique, voice a little louder than she’d intended. She cleared her throat and resumed her previous quiet tone. “Maggie has to prove her worth to the family, especially since she didn’t come from wealth, like Brick did. Basically, everybody has a past, and if they can’t lie about it, they have to cover it up with something like marrying for money and status.”

  That made sense. Mama was always telling me I had to marry a rich man.

  “Right,” I said, “and everyone was hiding something, like they were all lying to Big Daddy about his cancer.” It was important to me that C knew I was following along. I wanted her to be proud of me.

  “Mm-hmm, but if you ask me, Maggie should’ve left. Nobody wants to deal with all that mess,” she said, and laid her fork on her plate. It seemed to signal both the end of the discussion and whatever memory was playing inside her own head.

  * * *

  C may have been the Unbothered Auntie, but she was also very private. One time, she told me how much she loved dark-skinned men, and she made a different kind of “ooh!” sound then, the kind that comes with a full-body shudder of delight. It was the first time I’d heard her talk about men without sounding annoyed. She was divorced by the time we started our Saturday excursions, and every now and then she’d tell me about a man she was dating, but it was always after the relationship was over and he’d been acting a fool. Her patience was thin for foolishness. She’d reached a point in her life where you had to improve it or leave her alone.

  She taught me so much.

  Our Saturdays continued faithfully throughout my teen years and into my early twenties. I’d talk to her about my boyfriends, and she’d punctuate their bad behavior with the disgusted “ooh!” she saved for retail workers. More than once, she’d say, “I don’t know about him, Nicki,” and shake her head over her salad.

  Years later, I quit my first attempt at grad school and got a job at my college alma mater as a freshman advisor. The salary wasn’t much, but it was my first real job that wasn’t in customer service, and I was able to afford my first solo apartment. Still, I didn’t feel like an adult until the Saturday I went home for a visit and asked C if she wanted to go to the mall and have some lunch. She picked me up as usual, and I filled her in on my relationship with DJ (broken, awkward, but I was enjoying single life) as she drove at a reasonable pace in the right lane of the interstate all the way across town. When we got to the bookstore, we split up and I made sure to get in line and buy my own books. I wanted her to see I didn’t need her to buy everything for me anymore. I wanted her to be proud of me, Nicki the Adult. I wanted her to know that I enjoyed her company, that she wasn’t just Auntie Moneybags. We went to a restaurant and I picked up the check. She said, “Well, thank you, Nicki,” pleased as punch, the deep singsong of her voice making my name into a gold star.

  My Sister’s Bedroom

  Izzie was in her bed, on her belly but raised on her elbows, reading a book out loud. As I walked farther into the room, I saw she had a small rectangular frameless mirror between her face and the book. She was watching her mouth move as she read.

  “What are you doing?” I put every inch of disbelief and horror in my eight-year-old body as I could into the question.

  “Get out of my room,” she said in the same newscaster voice she was reading in. I got close to her and poked her in the arm. She always complained my skinny fingers hurt, so I was always poking her.

  “Mama! Come get Nicki!” my sister yelled, and I frowned.

  “You always telling on me,” I hissed back.

  “What is she doing?” Mama yelled from her own bedroom, in the back of the house.

  “She’s in my room!”

  “I’m in the kitchen!” I yelled. Izzie’s room was next to the kitchen. You had to walk through her room to get there. It didn’t afford her much privacy, and it gave me a reason to come bother her.

  Mama yelled again for me to come out, so I stuck my finger in Izzie’s arm one last time and stomped out.

  * * *

  Izzie always had her own room and was always kicking me out. When I was little little, if I had a nightmare, I’d sneak into her bed, which meant my brother would wake up and come get in the bed with both of us. She’d get so annoyed, she’d sit up all night, stewing in her irritation until she calmed down and could put us back in our own beds or wake Mama up to do so.

  On Saturday mornings, I’d sit on the edge of my sister’s bed and we’d watch old kung fu movies. We’d laugh until we cried at the characters who took five minutes to die because they were monologuing with unnaturally bright-red blood seeping from their mouths.

  Izzie’s room was covered in teen magazine pages and posters of every hot British group of the 1980s. If it was new wave, gothic punk, or any kind of pop alternative music, it was represented on her wall: Duran Duran, Gene Loves Jezebel, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure, the Smiths, the Human League, Bow Wow Wow, Missing Persons, Boy George, George Michael…My sister’s room was a shrine to MTV. My father said she was weird to like all those “sissy white boys,” but he never borrowed her cassettes like he did mine, without returning them. Papering her walls in white singers with their fashionably tacky makeup kept my parents from lingering.

  If her TV wasn’t on, then she was listening to music. I liked the stuff she listened to, mostly because she liked it, but Duran Duran was my favorite. Her favorite, too. I was singing along to one song for her, acting it out with all my heart, and I turned my head so quickly my glasses flew off my face. I can still see her expression appearing in slow motion as she realized what was happening. Her face went from “Oh no” to shocked amusement, and we both cried laughing at my silliness. We still crack up about it.

  My sister would sit at her vanity and put makeup on, the naked lightbulb in her lamp making me squint as I watched her. I asked a million questions: What was that? Why did she make that face to put that on? Why that color? She sighed through her explanations, but she let me stay. She went to three proms, and I watched her get ready each time, wondering if I’d ever be as pretty as she was. She had a gorgeous smile and dimples and smooth dark-brown skin. She knew how to style her own hair, and she could sing. She had pretty handwriting, almost exactly like Mama’s, and could draw a little bit. She performed in plays, even landing the role of Maria in The Sound of Music. She had talent she could show easily, talent people understood.

  I hated her high school boyfriend. When he was over, I couldn’t go in her room and dance silly or wiggle my butt at her. I couldn’t tease her for watching herself in the mirror or blasting sad white-boy songs. When he was over, I had to be on the lookout, instead of reading my book, and had to hear her clearly exaggerated love noises. She never told him to get out of her room.

  * * *

  Izzie’s husband died in his sleep. She woke up to the alarm on his sleep apnea machine going off. He was the love of her life, a former football player turned preacher from Detroit. They met on the bus. One day, I was answering his first call in the kitchen and telling him she wasn’t there as she hid in the hallway; then I blinked, and I was standing next to her in a red bridesmaid’s dress as she told him “I do.”<
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  When I came home for the funeral, I went to check her mail and saw that someone had stuffed a bag of dinner rolls into the mailbox. We had a good laugh at the well-intended deeds of those hoping to help the grieving. It felt good to make her smile. I felt useless otherwise. Izzie is the nice one between the two of us. She loves people and says hi to strangers, so even in her grief, she was consoling those around her. Oh, I helped with my nephew and did what I could when it came to running errands. The administrative tasks were easy. I can do acts of service with my eyes closed, but I had no idea how to be emotional support. We’d experienced death as a family before, but we all siloed off in our grief, kept our faces averted so no one could see, no one could try to help. What can anyone say to soothe the misery of losing a loved one so unexpectedly? So I picked my nephew up from school and cooked and tried my best to make Izzie laugh, because that’s how I love, through action and laughter, and I wanted to make sure she had love on all sides of her.

  After her husband died, she got rid of that mattress and moved her bed. Now his side of the bed always has clothes on it, or towels that need to be folded. When I visit her, I skip the den, the usual gathering place in her house, and I go to her room and touch all her lotions and DVDs until I annoy her so much she tells me to get out, just like when we were kids. But I never leave. Wherever my sister finds solace, I will find a way to be there, too.

  Prince’s Girl

  Late at night, WVOL The Mighty 1470 AM would play alternative Black music, like house, electronica, underground hip-hop, the music 92Q FM couldn’t or wouldn’t play to interrupt its mainstream soul and R&B flavor. We kept the big, fancy stereo system in the living room. The kind with the glass door you had to press softly in one corner to open. It had a turntable, a radio, two cassette decks, and eventually a five-disc CD player, with two speakers on either side of the console that were as tall as I was. Some nights, around 11 p.m. or as late as 1 a.m., I’d push a blank cassette into one of the decks and lightly place my index and middle fingers on the RECORD and PLAY buttons. You had to press them both at the same time in order to record anything. I’d sit there, cross-legged, my head leaning against the left speaker, waiting for the WVOL DJ—sometimes a college student, other times a man with the smirk of wisdom to his voice—to play certain Prince songs. One night, around the time I was eleven or twelve, I finally got as clean a recording as I could manage of “Girl,” at the time the nastiest, sexiest song I’d ever heard in my life.