Heads of the Colored People(44)
When he broke up with me, Brian said, “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you’re too clingy. I like a girl who has her own thing going on.”
I could do so much better than him, so I told him to get to stepping. I felt justified by the slight wince in his brow.
I knew two weeks ago that this Todd was planning to leave me. I’m not one of those women who would pleasepleasebabydon’tgo. I am too valuable for all that. There’s this saying I say: “Hit them where it hurts.”
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The second Todd I met on the bus, and he’s a little crazy, so I’ll call him Jamal to protect my identity. And for full disclosure, I didn’t exactly need to ride the bus, because my car was fine by then, but I wanted to, occasionally, just to see who was on it. I sat in the front, near the handicap seats. I noticed his arms first, dark and ripped, contrasting against his green tank top. Then I noticed the walk. He had sort of limped onto the bus, and you could tell it wasn’t an injury sort of limp, but more like a stiff gait, like he dragged his legs behind him, like Igor upright. His legs seemed especially thin, even in the jeans, child’s limbs playing dress-up in a man’s pants. He wore oversize headphones and insisted on standing the entire ride, even when I motioned that he could take the empty seat next to me. I thought that maybe he liked forcing himself to stand to build his leg strength, but I learned later that he just wanted to show off his arms by keeping them flexed as he gripped the bus handle. He nodded his acknowledgment of me in between bobbing his head to a beat, and I tried not to stare at the too-big jeans or overcompensating arms. I imagined under those jeans a stump, prosthetics, skeletal, underdeveloped legs with burns so bad the skin had turned to bark that would flake off with rubbing. But Jamal’s legs were like nothing I’d ever seen before. Like Slim Jim jerky sticks on a wide torso, a GI Joe action figure ripped apart and scrunched onto Barbie’s pins.
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This Todd, not Brian, not Jamal, but the most recent Todd, the one I envision looking upward, also had overdeveloped arms, and when he was in a playful mood, he could lift me at least two inches off his lap with one hand.
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“This is becoming, like, a thing for you,” Chelsea said the night after she met Jamal.
“What is?”
“Don’t play. These guys.” She flicked her outdated side-swooped bangs away from her eye.
“It’s not a thing,” I said.
“At least they’ve been hot so far.”
“What else would they be?”
She rolled the eye I could see. “But it’s kinda weird, girl. You know it is, like it’s becoming your thing.”
Chelsea worked as a nurse and had improved her figure in the past two years, but she continued to date a string of fake thugs, all of them rehearsed just enough to seem ghetto but thoroughly unfrightening, all of them spending their questionable income on cell phones and sneakers instead of down payments for homes. “Who’s talking?” I said. “And it’s not a thing.”
“You’re not fooling anybody. If you’ve got a thing, you’ve got a thing. Just admit it. You always like to be the one in control.”
“That’s bull. Shut up,” I said.
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I BROKE UP with Jamal the day he looked like he was going to put his hands on me. We had argued at his place over his unwillingness to use his wheelchair all the time. “But don’t you feel self-conscious, always limping so slowly behind me?” I asked as gently as I could.
I can’t say for sure if he would have hit me, but I sensed his hand reaching for my neck. I could have taken a lesson from Wynonna Judd and pushed him and his wheelchair off the porch and said, “Come and git me, then, gimpy boy.” Or I could have done a Burning Bed kind of thing and burned his bed, or gone all Misery on him and hacked away until he had no working limbs to ever try to lay on me again. But instead, I ran to my car, broke up with him over the phone later that night, told him his marionette legs disgusted me, and blocked his number.
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This Todd was Chelsea’s “special friend” when we were in undergrad, and I don’t want to say she’s a gold digger, but he bought her a lot of nice handbags and shoes and took her to the Ivy, and drove a Beamer even after it was too small to accommodate his wheelchair, yet she didn’t call him her man. I’d known him before his tour in Afghanistan and never thought twice about him, although I regarded him as kind and not unattractive. He came back sullen and a little mouthy. He told Chelsea he wasn’t into material things anymore, that disability checks were earned, that he needed someone who could understand that, whatever it meant.
He looked so bronzed and stately that evening we double-dated for dinner, before he broke up with Chelsea, before Jamal broke up with me. I’m not talking FDR in his chair, but London Paralympics, golden man, erect. My own personal Jimmy Brooks, my own Lieutenant Dan. He wore jeans with the legs hemmed to cover the nubs of his knees, his body bulky, even with the missing parts.
I was wrong to imagine clean cuts, the skin on the stumps like French-polished walnut. It looked more like the thread of a baseball caked with clay and burnished dark, textured.
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I’m trying to put this together the best way I can. The thing is, if this Todd could have just gotten used to things, learned to see the world in a slightly different way, seen a counselor to help him deal with his condition, we’d have been fine. If he’d actually applied for those grad programs in disability studies, if he’d had more to do than think about our relationship, we would have made it.