We're Going to Need More Wine - Gabrielle Union Page 0,26
felt humiliated on my mother’s behalf, but on the outside, I showed the passive politeness of a fellow boarder in this house.
I CALLED RECENTLY AND I ASKED HER ABOUT THOSE TICKETS.
“You know, what I want you to know more than anything,” she said, “is that everything you remember is what you remember.”
After a long pause, she sighed. “The tickets,” she said. “I just thought . . . perhaps.”
The word hung in the miles between us. I myself say “maybe” when I don’t want something to happen. I reserve “perhaps” for when I get asked about things I hope for.
“Those weren’t the first tickets to something that I would have liked to go to, nor the last,” she said. “I was ready, in case he, on this day, thought to take me. But I was also prepared for him not to take me.”
“When did you know he was cheating?”
“I didn’t,” she said.
“Mom,” I said.
“We never had the conversation once in our entire marriage,” she said. “I wasn’t looking for it. I loved my house. I loved the swimming pool. I loved my life with you girls. I loved having money in the bank. I loved having the creature comforts that we worked so hard for. My feeling about him was ‘I’m happy, and as long as you don’t disrupt that, I don’t care what you do.’”
Everything you remember is what you remember.
My mother told me that on Sunday nights Dad was always out late. So she began to go out herself, something I don’t remember at all. I only recall Mom waiting at home for Dad. She would leave after Tracy and I were in bed. I was probably sneaking out the same nights.
“There were a lot of live jazz places that your dad didn’t go to,” she said. “One of my good friends from work, her husband was in a band, and I would meet up with her.”
Her girlfriends considered her bait to draw men in. “A blond black woman, I don’t care if you’re rail thin or four hundred pounds, you’re gonna get a lot of attention,” my mother told me. “And I always got a lot of attention.” She never acted on it, she said, but relished the idea that she was pulling them in for the team.
“Most of the time I wouldn’t run into any of your dad’s friends,” she said. “And most of the time it wouldn’t get back to him. But sometimes it did, and that was okay, too.”
He knew more than she realized. Our longtime neighbors who lived across the street, a Filipino family, socialized with Dad and the other woman. Turns out the wife was always spying on my mom. “I saw Theresa leave last night,” she would narc to my dad. “Where did she go?” My dad was always Mr. Neighborly, acting like the mayor of our street, and my mom was more interested in reading a book inside than chatting in the driveway. Other couples also became complicit as they began to double-date with my father and my mother’s stand-in. I guess she just seemed like a better fit for their friend Cully. They wanted Mom out.
I watched Dad try to make the ride bumpier for Mom. I could tell he hoped he could buck her off, but she was not going.
“He always was a great provider,” she told me. “He made sure we had a really nice home and that my children were well taken care of.”
It was, she said, a lesson from an epic fight she had had with her own mother. As a teenager, Mom worked in a hospital as a cleaner. My grandmother happened to be there one day and Mom complained about how much she hated the job.
“Shut up,” my grandmother told her. “Shut your mouth and get your check. When you find a different job, then you leave. But otherwise, keep your head down, shut your mouth, and get that check.”
Mom paused. “We had a good life.”
THE NIGHT MY DAD FINALLY GOT HIS WISH, HE WAS HOME FROM WORK before Mom. I was visiting from UCLA. Tracy was at the house and Dad said something cruel to us girls, who knows what, and we both started crying. He left and my mother came home to the chaos of daughters in tears. Tracy screamed that Dad was mean. Mom calmed us down and eventually, we went to bed.
My mother stood alone in the kitchen. My father had left her a note saying that he wouldn’t be