The Sisyphus Reincarnate (Part 1 of 2)
Kat drank mad puss piss. Bitter. Acrid. Renk. It coursed his veins like a potent multi-vitamin, energizing his insensitivities and making him every bit insufferable. He had no respect for feelings: What use did they have anyway? So battles raged on behalf of his children for summer camps, theme parks, outings, hairstyles — things that would make them happy, increase their social and cultural capital, ready them for a purposeful life.
“Wha dem need dat fa? [What do they need that for?] I never had that, and I turned out just fine.”
“Yes, but that was then. You were in a totally different country, a totally different culture.”
“Rubbish!” Yu always a buy ina society and dem kine a foolishness deh. Yu believe every ting. We ha fi a go out every time yu look roun. Yu waan go a Europe. You ha fi get flowas. (Tchuipe). Ridiculous! Di pickney dem need summer camp? Den di backyard no outside! Dem can run an play. That’s what I did. I played with my marbles and my friend, Michael, from across the street when I was in Jamaica aaaalll summer long. Mi never miss nutten.” [Rubbish! You are always buying into society’s foolishness. You believe everything. We have to go out regularly. You want to go to Europe. You want flowers. (Hiss teeth). Ridiculous! The children need summer camp? The backyard is outside. They can run and play. That’s what I did. I played with my marbles and my friend, Michael, from across the street all summer. I didn’t miss anything.]
We went on for a while. Then, I acquiesced. But “fucking fool” was more like it. It was useless, this concept of intellect and logic. Intellect could never outdo the pervasive renk he clutched onto like passing minutes before a prisoner’s execution. So the masked smiles prevailed, plastered across my face — unevenly at times- just in time for when he got home. Dinner was always ready: a creative fusion of Jamaican and soy, garnished with a sprig of intellectual discourse which garnered a strain of thanks. But on off days, the theme was clear:
“I can’t tell you I love you because you don’t do the things you’re supposed to do.”
“And what’s that?”
“You didn’t cook. And there’s no milk in the fridge.”
“Are you serious? I work and go to school. If there is no milk in the fridge, there’s a bodega right there at the corner. Can’t you grab some?”
Silence.
“So let me get this straight. If you told your children to clean their rooms and they did not, you stop loving them?????”
“Why are you bringing my children into this?”
“It’s called an analogy, Kat. I’m drawing an analogy for you to think carefully about what you are saying. You only love if we do what you say do?”
“We had an agreement.”
The expletives marched up and down again. Over time, they gave way to infiniteness. Infinite astoundments. Infinite WTFs. They were perennial, unceasing, relentless: when he interpreted visiting my sister in the summer time as “escaping his children” who were coming to visit for a month — a personally orchestrated two-week extension of their legally enforced two-week summer stint — then left them largely in my care; when he responded with a “Nobadi neva sen yu go a Flarida” [Nobody sent you to Florida] in response to my leaving to help my sister take care of her children post surgery; when he calmly announced, “I’m not here to make you happy,” after I had offered up a dream to decorate a future home. They were a constant assault on my conscience, my self-esteem, my soul — those WTFs. Yet it was not until one of his sisters aired an implied WTF by asking, “Isn’t she a doctor?” that the poignant acronym hit home.
That question wasn’t the only one that was asked. And she wasn’t the only one who was asking. A popular one was why did I stay so long? Well, the reasons are muddled, messy even. I was a student on a stipend, a career changer on a journey, a mother among minors, a splintered divorcée, an immigrant stalking stability, and a woman getting older. But maybe it was simply that the Kat I originally liked was an illusion of the man with the golden gun: charming, likable, confident, well-spoken. And he was good looking too — a cocktail blend of races, shaken not stirred. His nose and mocha complexion told the story of massa’s straying into slave quarters, but he wore his dreadlocks proudly to compensate for the “mongrelization,” as he later put it. They were not evenly sized, nor were they really neat. But he was averse to the salon experience. “Man a man” [Men should be men], he would say. So he washed them himself roughly once every three or so weeks, twisted them at the root with varying types of petroleum jelly that provided shine but no hold, and pulled them away from his face by tying the upper half in a big knot mid skull and letting the remainder just hang loose. That actually was his signature look and how he wore it most often though I preferred when he rolled it all in a big, neat, elegant bun at the back. He had an incredibly strong jawline as distinct as that of a braying jackass and his eyes were Asian looking, slanted. His lips, too, looked like they had been injected several times over with collagen and contoured like the lips of a carefully made-up Chinese female plucked straight from the Tang Dynasty, middle portion emphasized. He was lean and toned, about 6 feet tall, maybe 190 pounds. All of it added to his rugged appeal.
He played the Bond character well enough, turning up a thousand miles away in search of his Bond girl, intrigue ballooning inside his brain. We did restaurants and plays too, though infrequently, because he knew that that was my cup of tea, and even secretly tucked a sizable gift in my jacket pocket, discovered only because he was afraid that I would destroy it in the wash. The Bond theme played out perfectly because I was taken by his acute attention and generosity as all Bond girls usually are, enough to make that a small part of the reason I made my way back to NY.
But there were a few key differences. The real James Bond never asked his prospects to move in with him, promising to make “an honorable woman” out of any of them. Years later, Kat chuckled, admitting that he told me what I needed to hear to move things along. He was also quick to elevate similarity in denomination though he had recanted the minute he set foot on American soil at 14 years old, exchanging it for an afro-centric spiritual positioning with an alarming lack of lucidity. But he had maintained the dietary aspect of his former religion and was vegetarian and did not drink or smoke, which gave us an important common ground.
“God is like a rose…” he explained after we had been together for a few months.
“Uh huh.”
“And the rose petals are pink, and they flare open. And the origin is somewhere inside. And they take to the breeze in the infiniteness…”
WTF!!!!! My girlfriend couldn’t stop laughing. “He can’t explain what he believes because he doesn’t know what he believes” she insisted. Apparently, it wasn’t obnoxious enough though. For those initial months turned into years.
James Bond also did not have three children. Kat did — none of which was planned — although he did drive 45 minutes to get them in New Jersey every school and federal holiday and also every other Friday, returning them faithfully every Sunday evening. He bought every uniform, every book, and every pencil, and paid every expense. For the mother, Indira, did not work, refused to work, vehemently. She was an African-American female who dropped out of an ivy league university and declared her disinclination to work the minute the first baby was born. They added one every two years for a total of three: one girl and two boys. “Just a ‘friends with benefits’ relationship gone bad,” he summarized. Indira was also allergic to housework which did not sit well with a bona fide Caribbean male, so he gave her a “talking to” about children and structure and housekeeping and such, and she promptly responded with a flagrant attack on his life with a knife.
Now center stage, I inherited the full spectrum of disfunction that characterized the union. The children visited based on a pre-set schedule, but every visit gave insight into the chronically diseased intestines of their primary home. They moved every single year, packing and unpacking drama in cardboard boxes of varying sizes. Still, Kat expected that I could bear it all, would bear it all, a Sisyphus in the underworld of Brooklyn, NY. And I tried. I cooked a variety of meals when the children visited so they had choices and bought them clothes and shoes with the microscopic stipend I had dissected for responsibilities and festivities. And whenever I traveled to high-income family members in another state, I returned with a suitcase full of enviable couture — tags still attached — for their benefit. Often times too, I would delay analyzing complex research articles to wash and comb his daughter’s hair while he tended to other things. “Let’s do the bunny rabbit style today,” she would beam. And I would acquiesce though the whole process took at least three hours. Yet, quite often, her mother would undo every strand the instant the child got home. I also fought fiercely for a spiritual and social agenda for them. For both were an entire galaxy away from Kat’s priority list. Sometimes I won. But most often, I lost. Many years later, on one of my secret rendezvous with all the children, amidst reflections, his eldest belched: “If it doesn’t make money for him, it has no value. And that’s sad.”
I wasn’t always Mother Theresa, however. I didn’t like training and retraining children every two weeks. And I rarely joined them to watch one of their silly shows. Also, the month-old dirty laundry that accompanied their biweekly visits, stretching from the basement washroom to the throne room of God was enough to get my goat and all the herds of Esau and Jacob! I was anxious and withdrawn an awful lot of times and wasn’t the chirpiest or the most engaged. So not everything I did was of Wonder Woman status and well received. But I never stopped trying to push that intractable boulder up the hill and to fulfill my promise to be kind and fair, Hades or not. And Kat’s three words before he retired at night were “Life is good.”
But Kat alone shared that sentiment. The children …
