she had met on the Internet. The one she had gone to Mexico with, the one she was planning to meet in Berlin next month. He was nothing like me and yet very much the same, as most men she had bedded. He was also married and willing to risk everything for a few moments of something she could never really put her finger on. All her life she had this “it” that had brought her nothing but complications and predicaments. The cocaine, expensive clothes, decadent foods had all started as a rite of passage; she deserved these things. Then they turned into a need, and she needed to have these things. The men were the vehicles to get these things. I was different though, not as reckless, more grounded. She thought of me as the type to settle down with in a suburban town with a nice white picket fence. She found me out of place in New York—a wanderer looking for something he should never want. I was doing her a courtesy to end things. She was not the type you should want. She sat on the edge of the sofa, rocking herself back and forth.
Thinking, thinking, thinking.
She hadn’t expected it, but as she rocked back and forth, back and forth, she realized, through a flight of the imagination, that she had never really known me. That was supposed to be the beauty of these things; no strings attached, no one got hurt. Wasn’t that what she had told me when I told her that I loved her? Wasn’t that the excuse to dissolve the eight-month affair? What had she expected anyway? She had met me on the Internet. Weren’t those her words and not mine? And now she would never really know what the affair meant to me and how much I needed her in my life.
With every second that passed, the vibrating phone in her purse became increasingly irritating. It disturbed her thinking, which was already muddled from the rapid chain of events of the day and the rancid stink permeating throughout the house. She should have walked out the door, gotten some fresh air outside, but she didn’t want to move from the couch.
She was not someone who I had sent an email to. My love for her was an “illusion,” as she had very eloquently told me when I pronounced my feelings for her. She had just been a diversion; she realized this upon entering the cabin and finding me dead. She couldn’t understand what drove me to this because she never really knew me to begin with. This moment of realization came as the police knocked on the door of the cabin. She was paralyzed to move, sitting for longer than necessary, but eventually she opened the door and let them in.
JEREMY
When you’re from the south people expect you to have a certain “twang” when you talk—a distinctive dialect distinguishing your upbringing and locality. I never possessed such a “twang,” my father made sure of it.
“It’s too cliched”, he would tell my mother, “makes them assume you’re a nigger.”
My mother horrified by the word would gasp—eyes wide and mouth open.
“Don’t use words like that, Arun. That word is filthy.”
“No,” he would say “it’s a description. A label but it no more applies to a race of people than the word trailer trash.”
She would gasp again, this time covering her ears with her hands shaking her head in disagreement.
“It’s filthy, like calling a woman a bitch.”
When she would say this he would smile and respond, “I agree bitch is a filthy word.”
I was always sitting next to her at the dinner table, silent from the adult nature of the conversation but taking in every word.
My father was aware—a realist. He went to school in the south and loved the south but he was also alert to the fact that the good ole boys were still alive and well, maybe not wearing sheets but less obvious means of oppression. He had experienced it, it grew within him instigated him to succeed but untraditionally—he was nontraditional in his thinking. This way of thinking made him a threat and an enemy to many—those that thought it was too much for a black man to think so much of himself. Nevertheless, my father never knew the south as a place who denied slaves their freedoms; it was a land of opportunity for him.
The kind of oppression that my father was more closely connected to—the kind he fought against was not based on skin color but “class-ism”—a prejudice based on social status and income bracket. My mother never understood this; she was from the lowest of classes imaginable. She was used to indifferent glances from the children who frequented the town of her birth from June until August, when school was out and the island was on fire. These seasonal dwellers moved throughout the island oblivious that life existed apart from and without them, like the town packed up and displayed a closed for business sign throughout the winter months. Months, that her father would pitilessly search for odd jobs to keep the lights on and some food available for his two beautiful fair skinned daughters. Daughters, that he hoped would one day figure out how to hop on the back of one of those grand SUV’s leaving town for the summer and never come back—leaving behind that pseudo oceanfront paradise.
I only visited the beach a few times in my life, mostly when my father would initiate the chance to watch the waves crash as a tourist and not as a local. He would walk my mother and me to the shoreline, looking back at our oceanfront hotel and say “this is how it looks to everyone else.” These comments were intended for my mother rather than me, so she would smile but the look of fear and shame, and longing remained in her eyes—throughout dinner—throughout the ride home.
My aunt never took us to the beach. I never made it back to the beach until many years later when a beautiful woman (how cliched) asked me to accompany her on a deeply arousing skinny dipping trip.
During this trip, she asked me, “Why are you afraid of the ocean?”
I said, “Because I can’t swim.”
She said, “But we aren’t even that far out, there is no need to swim.”
I did not have a reply for her. I did not really know why I was afraid of the ocean but whenever I thought of it, I could imagine my mother’s eyes wide like saucers—fear erupting like a volcano of memories. The beach always gave me an unsettled feeling, like I did not really belong there. These are the same feelings that came bottled up on the shelf and sold for .99 cents throughout my entire life. I purchased that bottle often, if not daily, for the rest of my life.
I was not born of extravagant means or of extraordinary occurrence. Life began rather calmly for me on a cold November night in Charlotte, NC. My father serenely drove my mother, who had announced that her water broke just minutes before, to Charlotte General Hospital. She was quickly checked in and insisted on natural childbirth. Five hours later, I was born. Lillie, my mother, thought I was a child of God because of the brevity of her birth pangs. She imagined me as a future leader of the church, a saved man. She imagined me much like my father, a strong Christian. I turned out to be neither.
Arun, my father, was the pastor of a small non-denominational church (part Christian, part “Arun”) in Charlotte. His congregation of 35, along with a smattering of relatives my parents still kept in contact with, gathered in the lobby of Charlotte General’s maternity ward waiting for the news of my birth. Relatives told me later that my father walked through the double doors of the waiting area—his head tilted downward and his eyes fixated on the glassy white marble floor. Everyone stared at him, afraid to ask if the birth was a success. His facial movements were ambivalent, but his demeanor solemn. He paused for effect before smiling a broad smile, clasping his hands together high above his head in delayed applause and shouted, “It’s a boy. Jeremy Rose.” It was a fitting beginning.
I have scattered memories of my mother and father, deposits of places and times that we shared—vestiges of my father’s voice and my mother’s smile—in my head. Warm thoughts dance throughout my mind of our southern style home with ivy growing up the brick walls that held our lives together. Music often accompanied these memories—Jazz—Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis with starts and stops of Frank Sinatra and Lena Horne. I remember the stops more than the starts.
On my tenth birthday, my parents died in a tragic car accident. They were driving on the interstate from Washington DC back to Charlotte. My father, the guest speaker at a religious seminar,