An American Marriage(24)

Roy, we’re getting older. Every week or so I pluck one or two gray hairs from my head. It’s a little early for dye, but still. Obviously, we are not elderly, but we’re not teenagers either. Maybe that’s what you saw—time getting away.

Am I seeing someone else? You say you aren’t asking that, but you asked it anyway if only to say you weren’t asking. Your ring is on my finger. That’s what I will say.

Celestial

Dear Celestial,

Olive is sick. On Sunday, Big Roy came to visit without her. As soon as I saw him sitting on that little bitty chair, looking like a bear sitting on a mushroom, I could tell that there was news and it was bad. He says she has lung cancer, although she hasn’t touched a cigarette in twenty-three years.

I want you to go and see about her. I know it’s been a long time since I have been able to do for you in return. I feel like I’m running up a tab, just like with Morehouse and my student loans. At one point I estimated how much it cost me per day, then per hour, then per minute. I know you aren’t keeping a scorecard, but I am. I need you to come see me. I need you to put money on my books. I need you to keep your Uncle Banks on his toes. I need you to remind me of the man I once was so I don’t forget and become another nigger in here. I feel like I need and need and need and it’s wearing a hole in the fabric. I’m not crazy, I can see it. I know you don’t come around like you used to. I know what true feeling looks like, but I know what obligation looks like, too. What’s in your face, that’s all duty.

This that I am asking you, I know it’s a lot. I know the drive is far and I know that you and my mother have never been friends. But please look in on her and tell me what my daddy won’t.

Roy

Dear Roy,

This is the letter I promised that I would never send. Before I go any further, I want to tell you that I am sorry. I want to tell you that even typing these words is killing me. I won’t say that this will hurt me more than it hurts you because I know how much you’re hurting every day and no matter what is happening to me, it will never compare. I understood that I’m not in the same agony as you are, but I’m in pain and I cannot continue to live this way.

I can’t go on being your wife. In some ways I feel like I never even got to try my hand at that role. We were only married a year and a half before lightning struck, counting off the time in months like you do with a baby. I have done my best to be married without actually being a wife for three years now.

You’re going to think that this is about another man, but this is about the two of us, about our delicate cord that has been shredded by your incarceration. At your mother’s funeral, your father showed what the connection is between husband and wife. If he could have, he would have gone into the grave instead of her. But they lived under one roof for more than thirty years. In some ways they grew together and grew up together, and had she not died, they would have grown old together. That’s what a marriage is. What we have here isn’t a marriage. A marriage is more than your heart, it’s your life. And we are not sharing ours.

I blame it on time, not on you or me. If we put a penny in a jar for each day we have been married, and we took a penny away every day we’ve been apart, the jar would have been depleted a long time ago. I’ve been trying to find ways to add more pennies, but our visits in that busy room at that sad table send me home with empty hands. I know this and you do, too. The last three times I have visited, we said almost nothing to each other. You can’t bear to hear about my days and I can’t bear to hear about yours.

I’m not abandoning you. I will never abandon you. My uncle will continue to file appeals. I’ll continue to keep your commissary up to date and I’ll visit you every month. I can come as your friend, as your ally, as your sister. You’re a part of my family, Roy, and you will always be. But I can’t be your wife.

Love (and I mean it),

Celestial

Dear Georgia,

What do you want me to say? Am I supposed to say that I’m okay with us just being friends? Maybe it’s me, but I made a different interpretation of “till death do us part.” Because the last I checked, I wasn’t dead yet. But you do what you have to do. Be an empowered woman or whatever they taught you in college. Leave a brother when he’s down. I never thought you would be this kind of person. There are women around here who have been coming to see their men for decades, riding buses that leave Baton Rouge at 5 a.m. Walter has women he never even met in person and they come to see him, and when they get here, they do more than talk. Some women bunk in their cars in the parking lot so they can be in the visiting room as soon as it opens. Before she died, my mother was here every week. What is it that makes you think that you’re so much better than all of them?

Don’t come here talking about you’re here to be my friend. I don’t need friends.





ROH


Dear Roy,

I didn’t expect you to receive my very honest letter with confetti and a ticker-tape parade, but I did at least expect you to take a moment to consider my perspective. Are you really comparing me with the women who crowd the crack-of-dawn bus to prison? I know them, too. I’ve met them myself. They organize their whole lives around coming to Parson; besides working, it’s all they do. Every week they are strip-searched. More than once, I’ve had to let some guard put her hand in my panties just so I can sit across the table from you. This is what you want for me? This is what you want for my life? Is this the way you love me?