But guess who was back at the club, in line with shades on, the very next weekend?
• • •
There were plenty of examples of marriages that lasted in my immediate family, but no one was telling us to pull up a chair and get some firsthand instruction on how to make relationships work. And closer to home, in the rough-and-tumble neighborhood where Mark and I lived, single mothers struggled and made do, even and especially since the presence of fathers and father figures was in all too short supply. People went together, sure. That was human. But staying together? That was a whole different beast. Youth, inexperience, environment, and a lack of relationship role models made my union with Mark a recipe for disaster.
Still, I wanted him. And I tried my best to get that through his thick skull, even after he grabbed me and so enraged me that I got kicked out of the club. “I don’t understand why you want to break up. We’re going places,” I reasoned. “I love you. We can do this together. I won’t let you fall.”
By now Mark was seeing things differently and wasted not one second entertaining my “you and me against the world” fantasy. “Let me explain it to you like this,” he said. “You’re like an old favorite bag. When I don’t want to use it anymore, I put it away on a shelf.”
Now, I know a dis when I hear one, and I’ve never been one to hold back my tongue, but when I heard that I was rendered speechless. I admit, I didn’t know what, exactly, to make of what he was saying: Was it that he loved me, but he wasn’t ready to be with me? Was it that I was old faithful, the one he would always remember as “The One”? Was I the old bag that you used to love but now that it’s all old and raggedy, you keep it around for sentimental reasons, but as soon as you get your check, you head to the store in search of something new?
“Forget him,” my friend Pam said, seething, after I recounted Mark’s analogy. “You’re not an old-ass bag!” She was pissed. I was simply heartbroken.
• • •
It would be a good year before we got back together, and for a while in those months, our lives changed in immeasurable ways, with my trajectory rising as Mark’s remained stagnant. By then, in the summer of 1991, I’d moved out from my father’s basement and into my own apartment, I’d gotten myself another good job singing and performing on a cruise boat, and I’d finally gotten up the cash I needed to pay off my tuition at and get my transcript from North Carolina A&T and pay my way at Howard University, where I’d transferred in as a theater major. I had my act together.
Mark, however, was still struggling. In the time that he was busy breaking up with me, he’d managed to get not one, but two women pregnant, just months apart. His daughters came into this world with a father who was increasingly overwhelmed by all of his responsibilities.
Though I knew about all of this—the other women, the babies, the struggling, his increased despondence—I still wanted him back, and eventually he felt the same. It’s not just that he was charming, that he was beautiful, that he had swag and knew how to dress, or that he smelled good. It wasn’t that he’d made it clear that the old bag he’d tucked up on the shelf in the back of his closet was in fashion again. It was that I saw the good in him. So I forgave him, even though he wasn’t trying to call a thing a thing. I was too busy giving our relationship—indeed, us—my all to get hung up on the breakups or the titles. I even accepted and embraced his babies, hanging out with and helping care for them when they visited Mark. How could I be anything different under those circumstances? I was maternal in that way; I love babies. But even more, it wasn’t an option for me to reject my man’s children. How, after all, can you love a man and not his offspring? Plus, I’m a firm believer that when you agree to take somebody back, you open your arms not just to the relationship, but everything your significant other is bringing back with them. If I was going to love him fully, I was going to have to love his children.
Still, no matter the intentions, no matter the effort, we just couldn’t get our shit together. We were reckless and dramatic. Thank God we didn’t have social media and camera phones back then. We’d have definitely been all over Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram had someone caught that one Valentine’s Day when I was ringing Mark’s phone all afternoon and he didn’t answer. “Where the hell are you?” I sneered into the answering machine. “You can call me when you need the car and all that, but you can’t call me on Valentine’s Day?”
All I saw was bloodred as I sped over to his place in my Pulsar, and that bloodred in my eyes began to pulse when I looked up at his window and saw lights flickering. The television was on. I saw action—life going on up there. Then I saw his friend Jerry look out the window. Damn if I was going to stand down on that street and let him get away with ignoring my phone calls.
He lived in a building that required you get buzzed in, but I knew how to snatch the security entrance door just right and get through all of that. In a flash, I was up the stairs, banging on the door, demanding he let me in. “Open this door!” I yelled as I rained my pounding fist on his apartment door. “I saw Jerry looking out the window and I can hear the TV. Open up!”
Finally, Mark snatched open his door. Standing just behind him was one of the mothers of his children, coat on, their baby in a car seat, preparing to leave. The sight of them made my heart stop; I was crushed. There he was standing in his apartment with his little family, and there I was, standing on the outside of his home and his heart on Valentine’s Day. I was broken.
“Y’all having family day, bitch, and it’s Valentine’s? For real?” I yelled.
Now, being mature and rational with the hindsight of a grown-up, I can look back at that moment and acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, she was there for something other than a Valentine’s Day celebration. She could have been picking up some money for the baby, or maybe she’d dropped her child off for a visit with her father and was there, at that moment, to pick up her kid. Either of those scenarios would have made perfect sense. But there is no rational thinking when you’re immature, in love, and desperate to mend what’s irreparable. Rather than talk it out, we commenced to tussling. With all the commotion, neighbors were peeking out of doors and telling us to shut up and threatening to call the police. He was trying to get me to leave, but I was too busy pulling curses up from deep inside my chest—words I was using to cut him down to the white meat. We wrestled all the way to the elevator. Finally, a neighbor yelled down the hallway. “Look, they called the cops. Y’all better get out of here!”
I hopped in my car so fast, head spinning, clothes disheveled, head pounding. I’d had enough; right then, I decided it was over. I went home, played some Phyllis Hyman on my stereo, and drank my wine to get over his ass once and for all. Two hours later, he was back at my door, begging me to let him back in.
• • •
This is my one love story—all at once extraordinary and ordinary. It is the song that women sing every day, the lyrics melancholy but hopeful, sometimes angry, reflective. Always full of longing. I wanted Mark. He wanted me back. But the divide between us was too far to cross, and neither of us had the tools—communication skills, trust, focus, patience—to build that bridge to get one another. The truth is we were very much like the main characters in Baby Boy, the movie in which Jody, portrayed by Tyrese Gibson, and Yvette, my character, consistently struggled to overcome issues with infidelity, commitment, single parenting, and immaturity. But unlike in the movie, in which Jody gets himself together, gives up his immature ways, and commits to being with Yvette and their son, ours was not a happy Hollywood ending. The truth is, Mark wasn’t through breaking my heart, and to this day, I am still recovering. The hard truth is, I allowed it all.