Take Her Man Page 10

  The gum I was chewing fell on my desk. Tamia’s sexual exploits always sounded like a damn porno movie. I was about to ask her if I could call Alex myself. I was on the market.

  “Then he turned me around and we started doing it doggy style. I nearly pushed the damn bookshelf over, so I had to hold my ankles.”

  “Damn,” I said. Was there really this much fun to be had at the library?

  “That’s when he said it,” Tamia whispered.

  “What. What did he say?”

  “He was stroking me—and I mean stroking me good, like better than I’d ever expect from a damn white boy.” I let out a little laugh and covered my mouth. “And then he said, ‘I knew this black pussy would feel good.’”

  “What?” I said a little louder than I should have.

  “Exactly, Troy.”

  “What did he say? Say that shit again.”

  “His white ass said, ‘I knew this black pussy would feel good.’”

  I turned to look at Alex, my mouth still hanging wide open. I turned and looked back at Tamia.

  “What?”

  “I know. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “Hell, I can’t believe it now,” I said. I really couldn’t.

  “I mean, I felt like a damn slave girl. Like Halle Berry in Queen. Like he was out at the old slave quarters or something.”

  “Getting some of that black-girl juice.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t know, Mia,” I said, running through the situation in my mind. While Alex’s comment was a little out of place, in another place and time…and with someone else…it would’ve been a turn-on for me. “To be honest, I used to call Julian all kinds of black shit in bed.” I laughed. “He called me names too. I loved it.” I grinned slyly. “Nothing wrong with a little Roots bedroom action. I am not afraid to help my man make it to freedom.”

  “Now that’s just wrong and nasty,” Tamia said, laughing. “For real, though. I’ll admit that I’ve been called ‘caramel’ and ‘chocolate’ in bed before, but always by brothers. It just felt different coming from a white man.”

  “I’m saying, Tamia, I just think maybe you’re being a bit unfair. Alex should be able to appreciate your body, your blackness, just as much as any black man. Hell, he should appreciate it more. Just imagine how that poor white boy felt looking at that big black ass in front of him?” We both laughed. “He must’ve felt like he was at Disney World. It’s a wonder he didn’t climax in the middle of the first stroke.”

  “I know, Troy. I guess I just wanted Alex to want me for my mind is all,” Tamia said, still laughing. “Like I didn’t want to feel as if he was just seeing me to experience the whole ‘sex with a black girl’ thing.”

  “Tamia, who gets the best grades in this class?” I asked.

  “Me,” Tamia replied.

  “And who did Alex choose as a study partner last month because she was ‘so brilliant’?”

  “Me.”

  “And you’re still wondering if he sees your mind? The two of us have known Alex for almost two years that we’ve been in the program together. You two are friends.” I paused. “I’m just saying, make sure you’re not making this about Alex’s color complex, when it’s really about your own insecurities.”

  “I know…I know.” Tamia picked up her bag and put her flash cards back inside. “I just can’t seem to put it out of my mind.” When she went to put the bag back down it fell to the side and a little red pill bottle with the words “Stay Up” written across the front fell to the floor.

  “‘Stay Up’?” I read, bending over to pick up the bottle. “What’s this?”

  “Give me those.” Tamia took the bottle from me and stashed it back in the bag.

  “You know that shit is bad for you, Tamia,” I said, looking at her. Our senior year I caught Tamia following four No-Dozes with two scoops of freshly ground coffee (no water) to stay awake to study for a midterm. While it certainly was not odd for any of us to take something to stay up, I noticed that it had become a nightly routine for Tamia and it was really bad for her since her mother had died of a heart condition. Tamia never had symptoms of her own, but her doctor told her it was a possibility and that she should avoid stimulants that affected her heart.

  That night Tasha and I cornered Tamia in her dorm room for a 3T Intervention. We didn’t want things to get worse for her. We certainly had problems of our own, as neither of us were quite as focused during the semester as Tamia, but as her girlfriends we decided that we couldn’t sit by and watch her risk her life. We sat up with her for hours, comforting her as she cried and explained that she couldn’t take all the pressure her father was putting on her to be number one in the class (she was number two). She’d promised she would talk to him about it and stop taking the pills right after midterms.

  “It’s no biggie,” Tamia said now, putting her bag back down. “I know what you’re thinking, and don’t worry about it.”

  “Just promise me you’ll stop taking them, Tamia,” I said. “Do you promise?” I wanted her to say yes and hand me the bottle, but she wasn’t a little girl and we weren’t in college anymore, so I had to tread lightly.

  “Troy, please. I have it under control. Maybe you should stop worrying about me and worry about yourself.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that maybe you need to be more focused on school,” she snapped. “You’re just getting by, as usual.”

  I sat back in my seat and looked at Tamia. While her words hurt, it was more out of the element of timing than ignorance of her opinion. We’d had the same argument before about my grades. I’d always been a solid B+ student. I excelled just enough to get my professors’ attention in most of my classes. Learning came easily to me and I didn’t have to put much effort into my studies to excel. I studied enough to get enough A’s to keep my G.P.A. above 3.7. I was perfectly okay with that. I liked being social and enjoying life. Tamia was the opposite. While she was no stranger to partying with me and Tasha, she took her studies very seriously. She spent most of her nights locked up in the library learning like it was going out of style. Whenever I pointed out that she needed a break, she usually snarled at me and pointed out my own academic shortcomings. Often I listened to her and promised to spend more nights nestled up to books, but most times I told her I’d be waiting for her by the bar when she would be done. Sometimes I thought she resented me for this. I mean, while I put in a little less effort than her, we did both get degrees from the same school and we were both attending the same top tier law school. She was at the top of the class, but I wasn’t far behind. The good old B+ was still paying off.

  “That was uncalled for,” I said, as the professor walked in. “Don’t try to turn this around.”

  “Look,” she whispered, “I have it under control. Just let me handle it.”

  “Okay, everyone, close those books and put the notes away,” Professor Banks said, standing in the front of the room.

  “Are you serious?” I asked, still looking at Tamia.

  “Just leave it alone, T—”

  “Ladies, can I please have your attention?” I looked up to find Professor Banks looking at me and Tamia.

  “Sorry,” Tamia and I said together.

  “Great.” Professor Banks turned and walked toward her podium. “Now we can begin, since we’re all focused.” I traded another stressed look with Tamia and put away my notes. I still wanted to talk to Tamia, but Professor Banks wasn’t exactly the kind of professor you wanted to mess with. She was the only black female law professor at NYU. She was known throughout the school as one of the hardest professors to have. Tamia and I had specifically signed up for her class. We thought she’d make a great mentor even if we had to struggle to pass her class.

  On the first day, she’d said, “Five of you will drop my class by next week and five more will drop out of law school because of me, but those of you who make it will be the top attorneys in this country. You won’t
lose a case, because you survived me. You decide which group you’ll be in, because I really don’t care.” From that day on, Tamia and I sat in the front of the class and studied our asses off.

  “Now, let’s see who knows the law and who doesn’t. Tamia Dinkins, stand up and brief me on every case you read last night,” Professor Banks said. Tamia stood up without flinching and starting discussing each case, near verbatim (her line name when we pledged). Something told me—and every other person in the class (including the woman at the front of the room)—that Tamia would be in the last group Professor Banks had spoken of on the first day of class. She was going to be a good attorney. It was her destiny and Tamia was fighting, even against herself, to claim it.

  Super Friends: The 3T Intervention

  It’s not always easy to tell a friend the truth about a bad habit. From advising her to practice safer sex to snatching her credit card when she’s about to buy the third Prada bag she can’t afford, it seems that opening an unwelcome can of worms will either lead to your best bud pulling out the old defensive armor or, worse, cutting you off completely. With this in mind, it appears that taking a bullet or turning a deaf ear are better options. But, as the old saying predicts, just as surely as there will be some good times, there will be some bad times. The best gal pals must be prepared for both—to get their hands dirty in the name of good old-fashioned, soul-saving sisterhood. So stand your ground and remember that sometimes girlfriends are the only people willing and able to tell the truth—and provide help along the way. Should you find yourself in a situation where telling the truth may make the difference between prosperity and plague, you may need to put on your “Super-Save-A-Friend” cape and have an intervention.

  When and How to Intervene

  1. Target the Problem—It’s not enough to simply tell your friend you think she drinks too much when you go out on Friday nights. Be prepared to explain exactly what you mean so she doesn’t take your words as a simple well-intentioned warning. If the problem is drinking, back up your declaration with facts and details. Tell her exactly how much she drinks and recall exact instances where her drinking made you feel uncomfortable or afraid.

  2. Get Support—Most often, women have already discussed a budding situation long before the problem has spiraled out of control. This is okay as long as it doesn’t stop with gossiping that never reaches the ears of the person who needs to hear it most. Discuss your friend’s bad behavior only with friends closest to her and those who are directly affected by her actions. (Remember: Trust is key to any intervention. If your friend thinks you’re out blabbing her business all over town, she won’t open up and things might get worse.) Should you find a trusted witness, use her to confirm your speculations and provide your intervention with a much-needed third opinion. This will stop your friend from chalking your findings up to one person’s opinion. Be careful not to include too many people. This may make your friend feel as if she’s being ganged up on and she may resent you for discussing her actions so publicly.

  3. Confront Your Friend—Where and when you perform your intervention is very important. Be sure your friend has lots of time to sit and discuss your concerns, so she doesn’t have any excuses to rush off. Never confront your friend in public or in a place that makes her feel uncomfortable. It should be somewhere where all parties can feel free to express themselves and get loud if necessary.

  4. Be A Rock—Be ready for whatever will come your way. Never assume anything about anyone—not even your best friend. You may think you know her inside and out and that all she’ll do when you tell her she needs to dump her cheating man is recoil and kick you out of her house. But the reverse might happen. She may kick and scream, open up to you about what’s “really going on,” and ask you to help her throw his stuff out on the curb. Be prepared for all of the above. Cry about it. Laugh about it. Hug about it. Fight about it. Be her rock and let her know you’re not going anywhere.

  5. Follow Up—Following your intervention, it’s probably a good idea to allow time to pass before you bring the topic up again. If she promised to get her credit together, don’t be a nag and insist she show you her credit score the next day. Allow some time to go by and then ask if any progress has been made. If you have already noticed a change in her behavior, mention it. If she admits that she still has done nothing, make some small suggestions if she asks.

  6. Get Additional Help if Needed—If you have a friend that you believe is truly abusing her body and putting herself at risk, there may come a time when you needed to seek more help. Don’t sit by and watch her eat herself toward diabetes. Make an appointment with a nutritionist and drag sister-girl there, kicking and screaming if you have to. She may be angry with you for a while, but if she’s a good friend, she’ll know that it was all done out of love.

  Step Two: Change, Change, Change

  If there was one thing, any thing, you would change about yourself, what would it be?

  This is the question I asked myself over and over again during the days leading up to Nana Rue’s reception. Between dodging nosy phone calls from my mother, who wanted me to come stay at home while I was “mourning” my breakup (Dad cracked under the pressure), and fighting not to pick up the phone and call Julian, I tried to think of how I might change myself in order to meet step two of the plan.

  Somewhere in there, I decided that I didn’t like the idea of “changing” myself for any reason. I knew I was in serious need of a new look, as I’d been wearing my hair in the Diana Ross, free brown curls look since birth and I could stand to lose the ten pounds I’d put on since I started law school, but to “change” myself meant something was wrong with me in the first place. I just didn’t agree with that.

  While I was far from conceited, I’d given up trying to impress other people with how I looked when one of my college sweethearts—a campus revolutionary with long dreadlocks—announced that he could no longer date me because my skin was too light and my hair was too straight. After getting burnt for sitting on a tanning bed for too long, trying to be his African queen, I decided that I was okay with me. Little titties, wide thighs, round tummy, light skin, and “good” hair—it was all me, it was all good and good to me.

  So changing myself for a man or otherwise just sounded silly and archaic. But on the other hand, I had to admit that being left for another woman was a serious chip to my ego. I mean, I knew it was pointless, but I couldn’t help but compare myself to Miata—my tan skin to her smooth, dark cocoa complexion; my wild, curly Afro to her long, permed, jet-black hair. I’d sized up the chick within the few minutes I stood next to her in the park, and from what I could see, she basically was my opposite as far as beauty was concerned. Her eyes were deep and strong, her body was curvaceous and solid. Me? Nowadays, my eyes looked blank and dull and my body was one Cold Stone Creamery ice cream away Celebrity Fit Club. I didn’t want to change, but I also didn’t want part of the reason I lost my man to be a big bootie and long hair, which probably was not even hers.

  So I decided that I, the future Mrs. Troy Helene James, needed an “update.” Yes, I’d “update” the things about myself I found to be terribly outdated. From the comfortable jeans with matching baby T-shirts I’d grown to love as I walked the streets of the Village, to the hair that had grown from Mariah Magnificent to Mangy Mess, I would update my old look to something more sexy, sleek, and sensuous. Miata may have been what most brothers considered fine, but I was about to be Fabulous with a capital F.

  But what? What was my new look going to be? After scouring stacks of fashion magazines and battling it out with Tamia and Tasha over cappuccinos, I was clueless. I didn’t want the choppy pixie cut Halle Berry had made famous, and Tasha’s punk look—complete with spikes and chains—just wasn’t me. I wanted to be classy and sassy, elegant and intelligent. And there was only one person I knew who could achieve all that in a New York minute—my mother’s mother, Grandma Lucy.

  “Somebody get my grandbaby a glass of champagne. We’re cele
brating,” said Grandma Lucy—who’d told me to stop calling her Grandma when I was three—when I walked in the door of her favorite salon, Bei Capelli, in midtown Manhattan. She was wearing huge Jackie O–style Gucci glasses and a white silk Hermès scarf wrapped around her head. Grandma Lucy, like her kind did in the old days, still avoided the sun for fear of getting “too dark.” Grandma Lucy’s skin was the color of cultured pearls and her hair was as fine as a porcelain doll’s. Though she now accepted her past and had even gone so far as to reconnect with our lost family down in Atlanta, my mother said it was an old habit she’d probably never grow out of. Even ten minutes in the summer sun, which would brush her smooth vanilla skin bronze, was too much for her. “I need to see my veins,” she’d say, applying sunblock on a thirty-minute rotation.

  “She’s just a victim. A victim of what people had to do in order to survive in those days,” my mother once said, defending Grandma Lucy on a rare occasion. “She’s doing what my great-grandmother taught my grandmother and my grandmother taught her.”

  “Lucy, you promised not to get out of control with this.” I smiled and kissed her on the forehead. She was a quite a rare jewel—the complete opposite of Nana Rue and her pro-black ideas and Talented Tenth ideologies (the two were like fighting cats whenever they were forced to be in a room together), but I learned to love my Grandma Lucy just the same. “I’m just trying to update my look a bit.”

  “Oh, darling,” she purred, holding her immaculately white and perpetually puffy bichon frise, Ms. Pearl, in her arms. Grandma Lucy had had Ms. Pearl for as long as I could remember. She went everywhere with Grandma Lucy—the French Riviera, the Florida Keys, skiing. In fact, Ms. Pearl had been present at nearly every significant moment in my life. She was like a family member, sitting pleasantly beside me in most of my baby pictures, like a cousin. Really, it was amazing that the old dog was still alive. Ms. Pearl was blind in one eye, had no teeth, and couldn’t hear a thing, and Grandma Lucy loved her. She propped that old dog up on her lap like she was the cutest thing in the Big Apple.